Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  She forced herself not to look round until the car was almost beside her, until she sensed the near wing of the Jaguar opposite her waist. Then she turned and stopped, throwing her right hip out to the edge of the pavement, hitching the skirt almost to her crotch, looking half over her shoulder at the driver, giving him the wide, excited smile she had practised in front of the mirror, licking the full lips in anticipation of pleasures to come.

  The electric window buzzed down beside her, within two feet of the hip she was proffering. A male voice from the darkness on the other side of the car said tersely, ‘Get in!’

  She hesitated, despite the number of times she had told herself that the successful temptress must never falter: if you showed any uncertainty, nervous clients would catch on to it and back off. She didn’t like the sound of that voice; didn’t like venturing into the warm cave of the car. Because this was someone else’s cave, not hers. You should keep control, whenever you could.

  Whenever you could: the phrase acknowledged that you weren’t always in a position to dictate what happened, that this was, whatever precautions you chose to take, an uncertain and dangerous business. She slid into the passenger seat beside the voice, finding the leather of her skirt moved easily over the answering leather of the seat, finding that the warm cave smelt of cigars and of that strange, indefinable scent of a man in pursuit of sexual pleasure.

  Was it testosterone? Could you smell that, or did you just sense that you could? Jenny Pitt took a breath and muttered what now sounded in her ears like a ritual phrase, ‘Fancy a good fuck, do you, my love?’

  She had practised that phrase too, in front of her mirror. All the experienced girls said the punters liked the good old four-letter words, that a ‘fuck’ or a ‘quim’ or a ‘cunt’ got them going, was a promise of high sexual jinks to come. And she’d put that ‘my love’ in herself, to make it more personal, trying to convince her clients that they weren’t just paying for any girl, but getting personal service.

  The voice beside her said, ‘You’re going to get yourself into trouble. Serious fucking trouble. Do you realize that, my girl?’

  She hadn’t looked directly at him: they didn’t always like the challenge of a full-frontal inspection. Now she regretted that: his anonymity made him more fearsome. The car had lit up briefly when she’d opened the door to get in, and she could have taken advantage of that sudden brief illumination. She said nervously, ‘I give good value. Blow jobs, bondage, all the usual stuff. Anything you want, within reason. And my prices are competitive.’

  She wondered if her voice gave away how nervous she felt. She wanted to fling open the wide door of the Jaguar and flee for her life along those damp flagstones she had a minute ago been so glad to leave. But she had a sudden knowledge that she would never even get out of the low seat of the car, that a restraining arm would be flung across her the moment she attempted her first move.

  As if he read her thoughts, the driver eased the car softly forward, and the glistening pavement slid away beside her. ‘Competitive are they, your prices? Well, we know why that is, don’t we?’

  ‘Why?’ She repeated the word stupidly, as if she were a wooden dummy, with the man beside her operating her jaws.

  ‘No overheads, that’s why.’

  ‘Overheads?’ He might have had his hand up to the back of her neck: the word came out as if she had not spoken it herself.

  ‘Overheads. You must accept certain overheads, when you go on the game, my pet.’

  She tried not to cringe at the word. ‘If you mean—’

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what I mean, shall I!’ The voice came like machine-gun fire out of the darkness. ‘If you’re not to be in danger on the streets, you need certain protection.’

  ‘Protection?’

  ‘You need it, and it doesn’t come cheap. But it’s well worth having. I’d go so far as to say that you can’t operate in this town, even in this part of Lancashire, without it.’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘You need to operate under an umbrella, to have the protection of a guardian angel, as you might say. It costs, but it makes life easier. Cuts down the opposition, you see.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Technically, you see, I’d have to see you as opposition, at the moment. And you wouldn’t like what happens to opposition. But I won’t go into that, I’ll let you use your imagination.’

  ‘But you can’t stop me! You can’t prevent people from sleeping with whomever they want to!’ Jenny wanted to laugh at herself for getting her grammar right: in that moment, she realized how close she was to hysteria. ‘If they want to charge money for it, that’s their choice!’

  A hand gloved in black leather took her wrist in a grip of steel. ‘Don’t be silly, pet! I took you for more intelligent than that. If you want to sell it in this town, you sell it under my umbrella. Anyone who doesn’t gets what’s coming to them. And believe me, it isn’t nice.’

  ‘I believe you. You mean what happened to that girl last week. That girl who was throttled. Sarah Dunne.’ The name came leaping to her lips, when she hadn’t even thought she knew it.

  ‘I couldn’t possibly comment, pet. But thank goodness you’ve got the message. I’d hate to see that pretty young face get damaged.’

  ‘How much does it cost, this protection?’

  ‘Fifty per cent, to start with. Maybe a little less than that, if you’re a good girl and increase your turnover. If you’ll pardon the expression!’ A coarse laugh burst from the darkness into her right ear. ‘On your way, and think about it. We’ll be in contact: we know where you live. And don’t let me find you flashing it around here again, until you’ve joined our happy band.’

  Jenny Pitt wanted to argue, but she knew no words were going to come. And she wanted more than anything else to be away from this car, away from the streets, back in the close and claustrophobic warmth of her own small room. She caught a glimpse of squat, cruel features as she tumbled from the car and half-ran, half-stumbled away from it on her pathetic, ridiculous high heels.

  The driver watched her disappear with the slowly broadening smile of a sadist. Shapely little arse, he thought, in the right hands. And the right hands would be his, before the year was out. He could have got somebody else to warn the girl off, but there were advantages in this hands-on management!

  Joe Johnson pressed his foot softly on the accelerator and felt the power of the Jaguar thrust the seat against his back as he drove away.

  Fourteen

  The man certainly looked like a murderer, thought Lucy Blake. Then she pulled herself up short. Murderers came in all shapes and sizes, and often in the most unlikely guises. It was unprofessional to decide that anyone ‘looked like a murderer’; CID sergeants shouldn’t even think like that.

  Well then, he looked guilty. That was surely fair enough. He was in his late twenties, with a growth of black stubble around his chin and his cheeks which was undoubtably not due to fashion. He had straight black hair, lank because it needed a wash. His eyes were rimmed with red, as though he had not slept well for many nights. He might have been good-looking in better times, but he looked as if those times were a long way behind him.

  His clothes had been of good quality when new, but they were shabby with age and neglect now. His shirt had a button missing at its frayed neck. His black leather jacket was scarred, with one of the pockets half torn away.

  And at ten thirty on this Monday morning, in the airless confines of the interview room, on the other side of the small square of table beneath the pitiless overhead light, he smelt. The man had that stale, unwashed, defeated odour which is familiar to all policemen.

  He was nervous. He did not know what to do with his hands. He put them on the edge of the table in front of him, then down by his sides, then on to his thighs under the table. If they’d given him a chair with arms, he would have gripped them and kept his hands still that way. Now he was trying to avoid rubbing them together, to avoid giving these people
that outward sign of his inner anxiety. He glanced sharply at the faces of Peach and Blake as they came into the small room with its scratched green walls, then dropped his gaze to the floor and kept it there.

  Peach studied him with distaste for a moment before he said, ‘You are Nigel Rogan?’

  The man nodded, glanced briefly up into the Chief Inspector’s dark eyes, and dropped his gaze again. ‘You don’t look like a Nigel to me,’ said Peach inconsequentially. ‘More a Fred or a Bert, I’d have said. Someone with dirty fingernails and a taste for the squalid. Still, perhaps you were more charming as a child.’ He looked as if that didn’t seem to him a very likely thing. ‘Do you want a brief?’

  ‘No. I don’t need one. I shouldn’t be here.’ The defiance of the words was undermined by the dull hopelessness of the delivery.

  Peach reached over and set the cassette turning in the recorder, announced the names of the principals in this little drama, and allowed himself a theatrical sigh. ‘Mr Rogan, you are here to answer questions concerning the murder of Sarah Dunne on the night of Friday the fourteenth of November last.’

  ‘Don’t know why. I didn’t even know the girl.’ With his eyes on the floor and his automatic, unthinking denial, he looked like a scruffy schoolboy brought before the headmaster after a prank gone wrong, hopelessly denying what he and everyone else knew was true.

  ‘You knew her, Mr Rogan. In every sense of the word, including the biblical one.’

  The red-rimmed eyes lifted up again at that, and for a brief moment fear flashed into the grey pupils. ‘I didn’t know that girl. Didn’t kill her. That’s the truth, so I’ll go on repeating it.’ He glanced automatically at the silently turning wheels of the recorder.

  ‘You may well do just that, Mr Rogan. You may repeat it in court, for all we care. If the evidence against you is strong enough, it won’t matter a jot.’ Peach smiled his satisfaction at that thought. He’d never been quite sure what a jot was, but it usually seemed to impress villains.

  It was the mention of court which seemed to stir Rogan from the apathy of despair. He looked hard at Peach, apprehension stirring him into life. ‘You haven’t got any evidence against me.’

  Peach studied him, as hard and unashamedly as if he were a slide under a microscope. ‘You’ll have to do a lot better than this, Mr Rogan. We have the dead girl’s clothing. Forensic can learn a lot from that, you know. We also have the DNA sample you were kind enough to volunteer to us last night.’

  ‘I didn’t even know the girl.’

  Peach shook his head sadly. Lucy Blake said, ‘Where were you on the night of Friday the fourteenth of November, Mr Rogan?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not just like that. It’s a long time ago.’

  ‘Nine days. Not so very long, is it?’

  He seemed to come to a decision. ‘All right. I was in Brunton. But I didn’t murder anyone.’

  ‘What were you doing on that night, Nigel?’

  He looked into the DS’s green-blue eyes, so much brighter than his own lustreless ones, and seemed to come to a decision. ‘I picked up a girl that night. It’s nothing to be proud of, is it? That’s why I didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Can you give us her name?’

  ‘No. It – it wasn’t that kind of pick-up. I – well, I made an arrangement with her.’

  ‘You made an arrangement to pay her for sex, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He glanced at Peach. ‘She was only young. She made the first move – offered herself, like. She was the first one to speak. I think she said I didn’t come from round here.’

  Peach took up the questioning again, more quietly than he had spoken originally. ‘Where did this sparkling exchange take place?’

  ‘In the Fox and Pheasant.’

  It was one of the town’s seedier pubs, in one of the districts where the rows of small terraced houses had lived on long after the mills they had been built to serve had closed down. It could hardly have had a less appropriate name, being as far from green fields as any of the town’s hostelries. It was the kind of place where women of the streets often went looking for trade.

  It was also within three hundred yards of the spot where Sarah Dunne’s body had been found.

  Peach said, ‘They’d remember you, would they, in the Fox and Pheasant? Be able to confirm this part of your story at least?’

  ‘They might. I think I only had one drink. The girl was anxious to get on with it, you see.’

  Peach leaned back, as if to get a fuller view of a man he might want to remember. ‘Describe her to us, Mr Rogan.’

  Panic flashed into the watery-grey, red-rimmed eyes. ‘I can’t remember much about her.’

  ‘Try. In your own interests, as well as ours.’

  ‘She was young. Slim. Wearing a short skirt.’

  ‘Brilliant. That’s really going to help us to identify her!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d be questioned about it like this, did I? When you’re paying for it, you want to get on with it, you don’t—’

  ‘Colour of eyes?’

  ‘I – I don’t remember. Blue, I think, but I’m not certain.’

  ‘Colour of hair?’

  The thin, sharp features contorted into a frown. ‘Not blonde. But not a brunette either.’

  Lucy Blake leaned forward. ‘Like mine, was it, Nigel?’

  He looked at her rich chestnut hair as if there must be some hidden trap in the invitation. ‘Not – not quite like that. Not as long as yours. And not as shiny. And without that reddish tinge. Light brown, I’d have said, this girl’s hair was. And straight and shortish, I think. That’s as near as I can get.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘She had some kind of short coat or jacket above her skirt, I think. And – and I don’t think she’d done much of it before.’

  ‘Much of what, Nigel?’

  ‘Prostitution. Whoring. Whatever you like to call it.’

  ‘And what was it that made you think that?’

  Again that intense concentration. If the man was acting, he was very good at it, and the rest of his bearing and appearance didn’t suggest he had the resources for acting. ‘I don’t quite know. She was very young, as I say, but it was more than that. It was something in the way she went about it. For a start, after she’d spoken, she sort of waited for me to make the next move, instead of making the running. And she seemed almost grateful when I asked her to name her price – they’re usually only too anxious to tell you what it will cost, to set out the terms of the transaction.’

  They caught a flash of searing self-contempt in the last phrase, a little of the world he had left to become the parody of the man he used to be. He seemed for a moment to be immersed in his own thoughts, so that Lucy Blake had to prompt him with, ‘And was there anything else to make you think this girl was new to the game, Nigel?’

  He shrugged hopelessly. ‘Her conduct generally, I suppose. She didn’t – well, didn’t control things the way these women usually do. She seemed almost as though she was going to back off when we left the pub. I had to take her hand and lead her along.’ He struggled with himself for a moment, then said quickly, ‘We were going to her place, but when I suggested a quicky in my car at half price, she accepted immediately – seemed almost relieved.’

  ‘And how much was half price?’

  ‘Twenty-five. She’d asked for fifty. That shows she was new to it, doesn’t it, accepting half like that?’ He was pathetically anxious to convince them now, pathetically anxious to put his head into the trap he had set up for himself. ‘They don’t usually cut their prices in half, once they’ve agreed a fee, do they?’

  ‘No, they don’t, Nigel, that’s right. So you went to your car. And sex took place there, did it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Perhaps this was the moment when he realized for the first time the implications of convincing them of his story. ‘I gave her the twenty-five pounds and sex took place.’ He repeated the phrase woodenly, as if it had some mys
tical power of its own.

  ‘On the back seat of your car?’

  ‘Yes. Do the details matter?’

  ‘They may do, Nigel. We shall probably need to examine your car, in due course.’

  The fear was back in the face which a moment ago had been anxious only to convince them of the authenticity of his story. ‘Why would you want to do that? I told you, I didn’t kill anyone on that night.’

  Peach took over again, his voice harsh and hostile after Blake’s softer tones. ‘So you did, Mr Rogan. But we may need a lot of convincing about that. Where did this exchange take place?’

  ‘I don’t know the name of the street where I was parked. It was only about two hundred yards from the pub, I should think.’ He brightened a little as a thought occurred to him. ‘There were some lock-up garages, away from any houses. I’d parked in the shadows beside them.’

  ‘So tell me again how much you paid this girl.’

  ‘Twenty-five pounds. I told you, she’d asked for fifty at first, but that was taking me back to her room. We were on our way there when I suggested a quicky in the back of my car for twenty-five.’

  ‘And she accepted? Just like that?’

  ‘Yes. She didn’t argue. I was a bit surprised at that. I told you, that’s what made me think that she was quite new to—’

  ‘How did you pay her? Can you remember the denominations of the notes you gave to her?’

  Rogan thought hard, as if he could win himself some credit for accuracy here. ‘A twenty and a five, I think. Yes, I’m sure it was, because I remember taking new notes out of my—’

  ‘And what happened after you’d had your bit of fun on the back seat of your car?’

  ‘I – I was anxious to get away, as far as I can remember. I told her I had to be off. She didn’t argue; she just snatched up her pants from the floor and left and I drove away. But before she went, she leant across and kissed me on the forehead.’ His hand rose to his forehead at the sudden memory of it. ‘That was another thing that made me think she must be new to the game.’