Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  ‘I’ve told you before, you make me self-conscious, ogling me like that,’ she complained.

  ‘You should be conscious, not self-conscious,’ said Percy happily. ‘I’ve always thought women should be fully conscious of the pleasure they’re giving. It is better to give than to receive, they tell me. Never quite fathomed that idea myself, but I feel that I should report that you’re giving me a great deal of pleasure at the moment. Very civilized pleasure, of course!’ He allowed himself another moan, elongating it further than she would have thought possible without drawing a breath.

  ‘You’re no expert on civilization, Percy Peach!’

  ‘Much overrated, civilization is. Gandhi said he thought Western civilization would be rather a good idea!’

  ‘Not a good man for you to quote, Mahatma Gandhi. He believed in controlling his animal instincts where young women were concerned. And I seem to remember that he gave up sex at thirty-six.’

  ‘More fool Mahatma! It just shows that even great men can have daft ideas for some of the time. Hurry up into bed, will you, or my animal instincts may get the better of me!’

  Lucy whipped her bra off and deposited it over the back of the chair above the rest of her clothes, provoking a roar of delight from the bed and a shout of ‘Come and test my Bristol Rovers!’

  She paused for a moment in front of the mirror, studying her breasts, keeping her rounded derrie`re carefully just out of the range of those dangerous arms, enjoying the rare feeling of being in control of DCI Peach. ‘There’s no knowing where you could go, Percy Peach, if you concentrated on everything in life as intensely as you concentrate on knickers.’

  ‘Knickers are easy for concentration. They’re small, you see, and that helps. And of course their contents are totally delicious. Focus the mind beautifully, your drawers do, Lucy Blake!’

  Deciding that attack was the best and perhaps the only form of defence, she turned and leapt suddenly upon him in the bed.

  The tactic was successful, up to a point. He wasn’t as good at removing knickers as at fantasizing about them. At least the attempt stopped him talking for a while, thought Lucy: she eventually had to provide him with assistance, to prevent her expensive lingerie being damaged by his incompetence.

  Percy’s telescopic arm eventually emerged from beneath the sheets to turn off the light at the bedside switch. ‘It’s my Catholic breeding,’ he explained. ‘Even rude thoughts were only allowed in the dark.’

  He disappeared comprehensively beneath the bedclothes and a muffled ‘Bloody ’ell, Norah!’ was his only verbal outburst during the next few minutes.

  After a period of frenzied activity in which she lost all sense of time, Lucy said in tones of exhausted admiration, ‘It takes a lot to shut you up, Percy Peach!’

  ‘And a lot is what you’ve got, Lucy Blake.’ The reply came promptly through the warm darkness. And then, in drowsy but delighted recollection, ‘I never knew that something so rounded and soft could become so muscular when the occasion demanded it.’

  Lucy frowned a little, then decided not to ask him to be more specific. After all, Percy had probably intended it as a compliment.

  Thirteen

  David Strachan made a desultory attempt at Sunday morning sex with his wife. There was no answering caress when he rolled against the sinewy back and put his arm round her, so he desisted quickly. Sod her! She needn’t think that what she had to offer was so bloody marvellous. Unresponsive cow!

  He didn’t say any of these things, of course. Instead, he rolled on his back, stared at the grubby woodchip paper on the ceiling, and remembered the woman he had enjoyed in Brunton. He now thought of her as Miss Whiplash, and her ample curves represented a new excitement in his drab life. Miss Whiplash wouldn’t turn him down on a Sunday morning! Miss Whiplash understood what a man needed after a week in a taxing and demeaning job.

  He heard the heavy crash of the Sunday papers on the mat downstairs and eased himself out of bed. ‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea up, Eileen,’ he said, his animosity already subsumed in his dreams of the blonde woman in Brunton. That was how mature women should look! There was no reason why a few extra years should necessarily diminish a woman’s attractions. Eileen! He should have known what to expect of a woman with a name like that: the name had already been a generation out of date when he had met her in the supposedly permissive seventies.

  He put the kettle on and scanned quickly through the pages of the News of the World and the People. There didn’t seem to be anything very new about the murder of the girl in Brunton nine days ago. They said it was now clear that the girl had been a prostitute, but that had been obvious long ago. There couldn’t be any fresh news: they liked what they termed ‘call-girl killings’, these papers, and they’d certainly have fastened on any new details of the hunt.

  He knew he shouldn’t really go back to Brunton, not yet. But Miss Whiplash was awfully tempting; in the hothouse of his imagination, Sally Aspin’s curves grew more ample, her strutting more stately and arrogant, and her dominance more satisfying. And his own retributory violence became more extreme.

  And he knew he was due to make a call at a textiles warehouse in Preston on Tuesday. And Preston was only ten miles from Brunton . . .

  He heard the toilet flush upstairs as he poured the tea. Eileen was waiting expectantly in bed when he took the tray into the bedroom, lean, frumpish, her hair straggling untidily across her head, the sheets drawn up tight over her non-existent bosom. He forced himself to say cheerfully, ‘I brought the papers up for you, Eileen. If you want to have a bit of a lie-in, I’ll make some toast and you can have your breakfast in bed.’

  She looked at him steadily from watery eyes that were the colour of slate. Her mouth continued to droop disapprovingly at the corners. ‘Up to something, are you, David?’ she said. Then she turned her attention to the papers, not expecting any reply from him.

  Sometimes David thought he hated all women. The young ones were the worst: you caught them sniggering behind your back sometimes, in the office. And he was pretty sure that on occasions he glimpsed the same contempt among the receptionists and the secretaries at the firms he had to visit. He couldn’t see anything funny in the work he did, the things he had to say when he was trying to get orders. But they did.

  And always the young ones, the ones with smooth skins and bright eyes and curvy, supple figures seemed to be the worst. Sometimes David Strachan longed to show them who was really the boss.

  He made the toast and another pot of tea, moving very deliberately, because his thoughts were elsewhere. He ate his first piece of toast very slowly, his jaws masticating regularly as his mind dealt with other things.

  By the time he had drunk his tea, David Strachan’s mind was made up. He listened for a moment to his wife moving about in the bedroom above his head. He went out and looked at the grey sky above the drab grey lawn behind the house, sniffing the damp cold of late November. There was still no one about at this early Sunday hour.

  He went out to the garage and put the piece of rope into the boot of his car.

  Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was partnering the Captain of his golf club. The Captain was a pleasant chap, who thought it was part of his duties in his year as Captain to play with as wide a cross-section of his members as possible. Such altruism should be rewarded.

  Perhaps it is, in heaven. But on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-third of November, the Captain was very much on this earth. And his charity was to be very much unrewarded.

  On a mild afternoon beneath a pale yellow sun, Tucker’s first and greatest shock came as he walked around the side of the clubhouse to the first tee. Two figures detached themselves from the crowd on the practice putting green and came over to greet them by the side of the first tee: obviously the men who were to be their opponents in this four-ball match. The first of these was a lithe young man whose practice swings as he waited to tee off looked ominously smooth.

  The second was Percy Peach. He w
ore smart new maroon golfing trousers, a cap to cover his bald dome, and a smile which seemed to stretch from ear to ear across his round face. ‘Good afternoon, sir. It was nice for me to get into our team as a late reserve. Now it’s even nicer to find that the luck of the draw has paired me with my respected chief.’

  Tucker was quite certain that there was no luck of the draw in this situation, that Peach had engineered the pairings so that he should play against him. The Chief Superintendent licked his lips, introduced the Captain to Percy and his companion, and said, as affably as he could through clenched teeth, ‘You must call me Thomas on the golf course, just as I shall call you Percy.’

  ‘Excellent, Thomas. And may the best team win!’ Percy was all easy bonhomie, even as Tucker felt his muscles tensing up.

  It emerged that Percy’s fit young partner played off six handicap, whilst the Captain and Percy were both nine. Tucker had to admit to a handicap of twenty-four. He stared hard at the sky when he had done so, knowing that he had told Peach that he was ‘about twenty’, not willing to look into that face, which he knew would be so full of childish delight.

  The Captain said to Tucker, ‘You’ll be getting shots on fourteen holes, Tom, and on your own course as well!’

  ‘Looks as if the match will hinge on those shots,’ said Peach, shaking his head sadly. ‘I can’t see us being able to compete, but we’ll do our very best to give you some sort of game.’

  The blood pounded already in Tucker’s temples as he went to the first tee.

  It is not kind to dwell upon human suffering. Thomas Bulstrode Tucker spent an afternoon stretched upon the golfing rack, which is better not described in detail. Had the Captain not played valiantly, the match would have been all over after eleven or twelve holes.

  ‘I haven’t been as bad as this for ages,’ said Tucker desperately as he sliced the ball into the woods for the fifth time.

  So the bugger has played before, thought the Captain. He summoned a wan smile and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Tom. Everyone has bad days.’

  Meanwhile Percy and his taciturn young companion played briskly and competently, and went further and further ahead in the match. Peach had selected the most affable of his many smiles; it broadened each time he addressed Tucker, his sympathy ever more patronizing, his careful enunciation of the name Thomas becoming a caricature of urbane politeness.

  Matters came to a head on the fourteenth, when Tucker, aiming a savage and desperate mow at his ball on the tee, scythed it high and right. ‘Where did that one go?’ he said hopelessly.

  ‘It’s all right, Thomas, I’ve got it marked. It’s on very nearly the same line as my ball, I think.’

  The Captain and Peach’s partner had each hit their balls down the left, so Peach bustled cheerfully towards his ball on the other side of the fairway. Tucker, plodding hopelessly after him with his electric trolley, arrived to find his tormentor gazing glumly at a ball which was only just visible. ‘Do you think it might be plugged?’ he said.

  Tucker’s spirits rose. Here was a chance to get some of his own back, especially with the other two players well away to their left and out of earshot. In the rules of golf, if not in the playing of the game, he was an expert. He affected to study the ball. ‘It’s just lying well down in the grass, Percy. It’s certainly not plugged,’ he said truculently.

  ‘No.’ Percy looked at the ball and shook his head in sad agreement. ‘But under the winter rules, one is allowed to move it six inches on the fairway, surely?’

  For the first time in two and a half hours, Tucker began to enjoy himself. He stood behind the ball and looked towards the green, pretending to study the line left by the greenkeeper’s mowers. ‘I’m afraid this ball isn’t on the fairway, Percy. Look, you can see the line of the cut grass. This ball is a good foot off the shortly mown area.’ He tried hard to look sad, but that proved beyond him.

  Percy nodded his acceptance. Then his face brightened for the third and last time as he stooped nearer to the ball. ‘But look, aren’t these rabbit droppings around it, Thomas? No wonder the ball’s lying so badly – it’s in a rabbit scrape. This must be a hole made by a burrowing animal, which would allow a free drop.’

  Tucker crouched low over the ball. He knew what he was going to say, but he wanted it to make maximum impact. This loathsome little bouncing ball of golfing exuberance could be put in his place, at last. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t a rabbit scrape, Percy. A few droppings aren’t enough: I’ve studied the ball closely and there is no evidence that this indentation was made by a burrowing animal. I’m afraid there is no relief available.’

  Peach studied the ball sadly for a last few seconds. ‘I have to agree with you, I’m afraid, Thomas.’

  He stood sadly and silently three yards from the troublesome ball, making no attempt at movement. The other two players in this little drama were watching the pantomime of debate from the other side of the fairway, unable to hear a word but growing increasingly impatient.

  ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ said Tucker petulantly. ‘The ball may be in an impossible position, but the sooner you make some attempt to play it, the sooner we can all get on with the game.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t possibly play it, Thomas,’ said Percy happily.

  Tucker said heavily, ‘Then for God’s sake pick it up, and let’s get on with the game.’

  ‘I can’t do that either, Thomas. It’s not my ball, you see. Mine’s forty yards on, down there. This one’s yours.’

  Tucker spluttered. Peach found it a most appealing sound. Eventually, his chief hacked at the ball and moved it about two feet, amidst a hail of flying soil. Tucker was not normally a man given to invective, but he now hurled a horrible oath at the inoffensive ball and the gods of golf.

  ‘Bad luck, Thomas!’ said the voice of his tormentor behind him. When they eventually rejoined the other members of the match, Peach explained to the Captain, ‘It was an impossible lie. I thought your partner was entitled to relief without penalty, but he sportingly refused to take it.’

  The Captain muttered an unprintable phrase about his partner and stalked on to the green. A moment later, the partnership had lost five and four.

  Thomas Bulstrode Tucker’s discomfort was made complete in the speeches after the meal which followed the match. To a company grown jovial with ale and whisky, the Captain recounted in detail the incident of the ball on the fourteenth. Tucker had to force a sickly smile and keep it fixed upon his countenance for fully four minutes, right through the howls of laughter which greeted the denouement of the story.

  Percy Peach’s smile and hilarity were much more genuine.

  There was no danger of frost. But it was now a dismal evening; a thin mist hung over the town and the long street glistened with moisture as far as she could see it. The mist made the girl nervous, conjuring up pictures of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes, and then, much worse, of Jack the Ripper.

  Not much chance of that sort of thing in twenty-first century Brunton, she told herself, wishing she had not made herself so familiar with the details of the Ripper’s crimes and the things he had practised upon the bodies of those long-dead women. Then a more relevant horror began to gnaw at her mind; she could not dismiss the thought that a girl not much younger than her had died a few streets from here nine days earlier.

  A girl who, it now seemed, had been trying to do just what she was doing now. She’d read that in the paper today.

  It wasn’t her first time, but Jenny Pitt wasn’t yet experienced enough to know the best times to sell her body. Sunday was a quiet night for tarts in Brunton, much quieter than Friday or Saturday. And she was out on the wet pavements too early: the typical patron needed to be primed with drink before he mustered the urge to spend his money on a woman of the streets.

  Jenny hadn’t realized it would be as cold as this. You couldn’t walk briskly, when you were looking for this sort of trade; the last thing you wanted was to look as if you were actually going somewhere. Saun
ter like Mae West or Marilyn, the old hands had told her, it still works. Wiggle your bottom in a tight skirt – it might be obvious, but it still gets the men reaching for their money.

  She’d seen pictures of Monroe, blonde and pouting, threatening a wiggle with every movement, but Mae West was just a name to this nineteen-year-old. She wondered as she strove to suppress her shivers whether either of these vamps had ever operated on a cold wet street in November, in a town tight with its money and drawing its curtains against the onset of winter.

  She checked to make sure that the street was still deserted, then flapped her arms vigorously across her chest, trying to beat some warmth back into her slim young frame. You couldn’t wear a proper winter coat, and these leather skirts, tight round your bum and slit well up the thigh, might be all right when you were indoors with central heating, but they were bloody cold when you were out on the bleak and deserted streets of industrial Lancashire.

  Jenny Pitt was beginning to despair when she heard the car turn the corner behind her. Its powerful engine made very little noise; had she not been listening hard, she would scarcely have registered it. But it did not accelerate once it was on the straight stretch behind her, as she would have anticipated. Its engine note was no more than a tiny, persistent hum, moving slowly closer to her.

  She resisted the temptation to look round. Not yet, she told herself. You must be like a fisherman luring trout; any sudden movement might scare your prey away. For the first time, with the fear of the unknown creeping cold and uninvited into her brain, she began to wonder who was the victim and who was the predator in this strange exchange.

  Jenny moved to the very edge of the pavement, hitching her short coat a little beneath her elbows to reveal the full rounded contours of her bottom beneath the tightly stretched leather, taking a slightly longer stride to let the slit in her skirt ride higher still up her shapely thigh. Wiggle your bum now, girl, give it all you’ve got: there might not be another desperate lecher driving around tonight.