Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  Things worked perfectly well, so long as everyone understood that they were working for an autocrat.

  The man in front of Johnson on this Monday morning would never have dreamed of offering an opinion. He was a big man, with a powerful torso and massive forearms, but he stood in front of the desk in the boss’s office as an abject parody of subjection. He was a man whose trade was physical violence, but at this moment he might have been a puny child.

  Johnson looked at the man as if he was something he had just scraped off his shoe. He knew what he was going to do, but he enjoyed watching fear ooze like sweat from the hulk standing waiting upon his judgement. He took a cigar from the box in front of him, studied its band unhurriedly, smelt the Havana tobacco appreciatively whilst his shambling employee suffered. Then he sneered, ‘Enjoy your holiday, did you?’

  ‘It – it was good, yes. Not that there’s a lot to do at the seaside at this time of year. I went—’

  ‘Well, that’s good, then. Got you well away from me, too. Which was a good thing, because I wasn’t pleased with you. Not pleased at all.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, I didn’t think that—’

  ‘Exactly. You didn’t think. Not really a defence though, that, is it?’

  ‘No. I—’

  ‘I suppose you’d say I don’t pay you to think. Your talents, such as they are, lie in other directions. Well, you must be expecting to collect your cards today.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction from the mountain of muscle, but the man merely shifted his weight absurdly from foot to foot, like a small boy unable to stand still before a fearsome superior.

  Johnson curled his lip and went on, ‘Well, I’ve got good news for you. I’ve still got a job you can do, in one of my clubs.’

  The big face, battered as a pugilist’s but simple as a child’s, cracked from apprehension into a crooked smile. ‘Bouncer, is it, boss? I can do that. I’ve done it before. No one will get away with anything with me on the door. I can handle any of the roughs we get round here. No one gets past—’

  ‘Shut it, will you?’ Johnson was suddenly sick of the sight of this dullard with danger in his fists. The dolt seemed to take him back to his earliest days, when violence had been the only tool he employed to make his way, before the days of the clubs and the casinos and the upper-class brothels and the capital he now controlled and directed towards the extension of his empire. He’d rather have dispensed with a thug like this, but it was better to have him under his eye, still within the organization, rather than shooting his mouth off elsewhere about the things he’d seen and done.

  Johnson did not trouble to disguise the disgust he felt as he said, ‘It’s a last chance, this. Don’t be under any illusion about that. You go too far once more, and I won’t protect you again. Understood?’

  ‘Understood, boss.’

  Johnson looked at the blank surface of the door the man had shut behind him as he left. He thought of how far he had come, of how much more he now had at his disposal than men like that. But you couldn’t do without force: it was violence which instilled the fear which was still so necessary to most of his enterprises. He pressed a button on his desk and spoke into the intercom. ‘Send Shepherd in here, will you?’

  The man who slipped in and took the chair when it was indicated that he should sit was at first sight very unlike the ponderous bruiser who had just left. He was thin, for a start, and not much over average height. But there was a sinewy power about him, a steel which was more stealthy but just as uncompromising as that of the dull heavyweight who had been here before him. There was also a coldness about his slightly narrowed, watchful eyes which meant that you would not want him as an enemy.

  ‘Little job for you,’ said Johnson. ‘Won’t take you long, and you could do it in your sleep, but it’s one you might enjoy.’ He smiled at the thought.

  ‘What is it, Mr Johnson?’

  ‘A girl needs a little – well, a little discipline, shall we call it, Shepherd?’

  The thin lips gave him a mirthless smile, a sadist responding eagerly to the sadism in his chief. ‘I’ll enjoy that, Mr Johnson. Been stepping out of line, has she, this girl?’

  Johnson smiled back. This man was much more on his wavelength than the one he had just seen, though still subservient, of course. He liked that. ‘Young girl who’s been flashing her fanny about. Trying to make the most of her arsets, as you might say.’ He strung out the word and smiled at his simple joke, showing his staff that Joe Johnson liked a bit of humour, in the right context.

  The thin lips opposite him twisted into a soundless, sycophantic chuckle.

  A chuckle that never made it into sound would have disconcerted some people, but not Joe Johnson. He said, ‘I’ve no objection to women putting tasty quims on the market, as you know, but it has to be under our umbrella. This silly tart’s trying to work just for herself.’

  ‘Not a wise thing to do, that, Mr Johnson. Not in this neck of the woods.’

  ‘Not wise at all, as you say. She’s only nineteen, and she needs to be protected from herself. I had a word with her myself last night: explained the necessity for her to have protection. I think that message needs reinforcing. I told her we’d be in touch. She needs looking after, so I thought I’d send out the good Shepherd to have a word with her. To invite her to join our flock.’

  It was a joke he had made before, but Shepherd laughed dutifully again at his inappropriate name. ‘I’ll see she gets the message, Mr Johnson,’ he said.

  The birthday tea was a tradition. In the midst of a murder investigation, Lucy Blake had thought it would need to be abandoned or postponed. It was Percy Peach who insisted that tradition should be honoured.

  ‘Your mum will be looking forward to it. We must fit it in, even if we only spend a couple of hours with her,’ he said decisively. ‘And besides all that, she makes the best scones I’ve ever tasted!’

  The lights in the little stone cottage looked unnaturally bright in the early winter darkness as they drove into the quiet lane with its row of cottages in the lee of the fell. Far away from any street lights here, they could appreciate the grandeur of a sapphire sky and myriad stars. To the west, there were no major rises in the land as it stretched away over the plush northern suburbs of Preston to the invisible coast at Blackpool; to the north was the long, low mound of Longridge Fell; to the east a slim bright crescent of a new moon illuminated the great mound of Pendle Hill.

  It seemed a long way from the narrow streets and sordid murder they had left behind them.

  There was a coal fire burning cheerfully in the low-ceilinged sitting room and Percy warmed his hands at it as he said, ‘Getting pretty parky out there, Mrs Blake. Be a frost before morning.’

  ‘Not before time,’ said Agnes Blake. ‘The geraniums and the dahlias have been flowering on, but tonight will see the last of them.’ She spoke without regret. You lived with the rhythms of the seasons in the country: it was time for winter to bite and make itself felt.

  Percy tucked into his scones and Agnes watched him admiringly. She was one of the last representatives of a generation of Lancashire women who liked to see men eat and loved it when they appreciated their food. She was sixty-nine today, a child born into the nineteen thirties depression, who seemed to have had some of the lessons of that hard era bred into her bones. She behaved as if the man of the house was still the only breadwinner, the centre of the family who had to be kept healthy and vigorous if the ship was not to founder. She knew she was out of date, was even prepared to laugh at herself. But kept up the pretence before her working daughter as a kind of rebuke to her career aspirations.

  Agnes was disgusted with some petty local vandalism, and Percy retailed the details of how years ago he and a fellow DC had trapped some young hooligan graffiti artists in Brunton by posing as bill-posters.

  ‘You’d make a lovely parent, Percy Peach,’ Agnes decided through her laughter. ‘You’d give your kids some discipline – that’s what they need. It’s the parents we sho
uld be fining for all this damage.’

  Percy read the warning signs, but he had just taken in the last mouthful of his scone. When he nodded and reached a tentative hand towards the sponge cake, Agnes followed up smartly with, ‘Ever thought of having children, Percy? I expect you must have.’

  Percy ignored Lucy’s warning look. ‘Can’t say I have, Mrs Blake. Never thought I’d make a very good dad.’ He shook his head without resentment.

  ‘Oh, but you would! An extremely good dad. I’ve some experience, you know, and I can spot a good dad when I see one.’ She glanced at the photograph of her dead husband which stood beside that of Percy on the mantelpiece. ‘And you’d be able to teach the lad cricket. You’d enjoy that, Percy.’

  He stifled a smile. ‘No knowing it would be a lad, is there, Mrs Blake?’

  ‘That’s true. And you’d want lads, I know. Wouldn’t wish girls on anyone. Wilful creatures, girls are.’ She sniffed her derision, falling into her now familiar humorous partnership with Peach.

  ‘Really? Well it’s interesting you find it so, with all your experience, Mrs Blake. I certainly find women difficult to work with. You never know quite where you are with them. Unpredictable, at the best of times, they are.’

  ‘That’s modern women for you, Percy. It was different in my time. Women knew their place, then.’

  Lucy decided it was time to intervene. She knew from experience that the pair could go on in this vein indefinitely. She said desperately, ‘He probably wouldn’t make a good dad at all, Mother. You should see your precious Percy with some of the young people we have to deal with. Nearly bites their heads off, he does. Frightens them to death.’

  Agnes Blake smiled with satisfaction. ‘That’s what I mean, our Lucy. Discipline! I expect it’s just what they need. If Percy puts them back on the straight and narrow, they’ll be grateful to him in the years ahead.’

  Percy Peach beamed with satisfaction at the thought of the tattooed yobbos who would be saved by his firmness. ‘Social worker in disguise, I am, Mrs B. Cruel only to be kind, that’s me. I only wish I had people around me who were as intelligent as you, able to take the long-term view and see that I’m really a bright angel in heavy disguise!’

  Even the smiling Mrs Blake was taken aback for a moment by this unlikely image, and Lucy took advantage of this to say contemptuously, ‘Some angel! More like a Japanese warlord he is, the way he lays into them. You haven’t seen him at work, Mum! Reduces burly young thugs to tears, he does. Well, nearly to tears, anyway.’

  The two faces on the other side of the table beamed at her in delighted unison at this evidence of huge talent, and she sensed that she was never going to win this argument. Percy winked at her and bit into her mother’s fruit cake. There was a moment of contented silence from the duo before Agnes Blake switched effortlessly into the minor key and said plaintively, ‘Anyway, we’ll never know how good a father he’d make if he’s never given the chance, will we, Percy?’

  Lucy thought that the question would shatter his air of content, but he said with scarcely a pause, ‘That’s quite right, Mrs B. You hit the nail on the head with your usual precision. If a man’s never been tested, it’s not fair to judge him, is it? At the moment, I have to do the best I can to be an unofficial father to the shattered young humanity that passes through my world.’ He cast his eyes contentedly at the ceiling and assumed the most seraphic of his many smiles.

  Lucy couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing at the absurdity of the thought and said, ‘Bloody hell, Percy!’

  ‘Language, our Lucy!’ said Agnes Blake primly.

  Two of the people in the room were enjoying her birthday tea very much indeed.

  Only a single, shadeless, sixty-watt bulb lit up the deserted caretaker’s room at the end of the church youth club. Father Devoy pulled on the dark-blue anorak he always wore for these nocturnal expeditions.

  He pulled the hood up over his head as he went out into the night. Though it was the coldest night of the winter so far, this was for concealment, not warmth. The sky was clearer than he would have wished, much clearer. The stars seemed to give almost as much light as the dim street lighting in the narrow side streets of the town, and the sliver of moon seemed unnaturally bright. There was not a cloud to be seen; he had never prowled the streets before on a night as clear as this.

  A prowler: that is what he was now. Or what this other side of the priest who operated by day was. He tried to hurt himself with that word ‘prowler’, to lacerate the man who took over when he went out on to the streets of Brunton like this. But it was too late for that now: there was no hurt from the word: it was merely an accurate description. John Devoy moved forward with no more than a grim tightening of the mouth.

  He was not sure what he was going to do, why he had ventured out so soon after his last night of sin. Impulse had driven him, an impulse that was so strong that he had scarcely attempted to resist it. Was it going to be always like this now, then? Had he lost the will to fight the Devil? Would he have no control over his actions as this lust moved into the very blood of his body, coursing obscenely through his veins, preparing to tighten like a vice-like grip upon his very soul?

  John Devoy stood for a moment in the darkness of the doorway of a closed corner shop, hearing the faint sound of Asian music from the back of the building, wondering for a moment how his life might have differed if he had been born into that other and very different culture. But then the blood pounded anew in his temples, driving out that speculation, pounding away all rational thought, until his only release was in physical movement.

  His steps took him to where he felt he had always been heading. There was an inevitability about this, a feeling that something outside himself had brought him here, was leading him onwards, would release him only when he had finished what he must do tonight. He was becoming calmer with his movement. It was a cold calm, which seemed to make his body more than naturally strong.

  And then he sighted the girl.

  She was exactly where he had thought she would be. His sense of fulfilling a destiny, of acting at the behest of some agency outside himself, grew as he glimpsed her. He had always known she would be there, despite the coldness of the night. Evil did not yield to climate.

  He was in no hurry, now that he was here. His limbs felt suddenly light, as if he was floating on water, letting the current buoy him up and take him where it would. One of the street lamps was broken, and he stood in the shadows beneath its standard for a moment, watching the girl move uncertainly along the kerb, seventy yards ahead of him. Uncertainly. Was there hope still, even for a whore, if she was uncertain in what she did, if the Devil did not have her yet securely in his goatish grasp?

  John Devoy moved smoothly forward, as if on wheels powered by some unseen force.

  He was almost upon her before she turned, flashing her thigh through the slit in her skirt. ‘Looking for a bit of fun, love?’

  The same words she had used to him on Friday. Was that only three tortured nights ago? She reached for his hand, tried to draw it beneath her skirt, to press it throbbing against the warmth of her hidden, private, exotically scented parts.

  And for a moment he almost let her. Then he snatched his hand back before she could control it, as if her touch had been red-hot. ‘I haven’t the money. Not tonight!’ he gasped hoarsely.

  Toyah Burgess was disturbed at the desperate note in his voice. She thought she might have seen him before, but she couldn’t be certain of that; he had the light behind him, and the hood of his anorak over his head. She could see nothing of his face, and that made him infinitely more sinister. She said uncertainly, ‘You’ll get value for money, love. That’s what counts, isn’t it?’

  The same words again! Exactly the same! How many other men had heard those words in the last three nights as the whore practised her trade? The words she had used for him, the words he had thought at the time were individual. He said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this. I’ve come to save you from
yourself.’

  Toyah Burgess was suddenly afraid. They still hadn’t caught the man who’d killed that girl ten days ago, not half a mile from here. She said, ‘Look, mister, I’m a working girl. If you haven’t got the money for it, get on your way and leave me to earn a living.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I’m here to save your immortal soul. To save the souls of the deluded men who go with you.’

  A religious nutter. That was all she needed, with the cold biting into her bones and a murderer lurking in the town. Toyah said, ‘Look, mate, not everyone shares your beliefs, do they? Some men want a good time, and I’m one of the girls who can give them a good time. Simple as that, you see. You’re wasting valuable working time for me, so if you don’t want the goods, will you please piss off!’

  So young, and so far gone in sin! John Devoy flicked the hood of the anorak back, saw her shy away for an instant as if he had struck her, and was riven with pity for the sinner. He spoke urgently. ‘You must listen to me! There is still time for you. The Lord is merciful, but you must heed His message.’

  Toyah Burgess was suddenly annoyed with him. ‘I’m not doing anyone any harm. I’m bringing pleasure to people. Helping lonely men to get their ends away is a social service. You can’t see it, mate, but it’s probably preventing rape and violence, if you only knew it.’

  ‘The wages of sin is death. I’m here to give you that message. To prevent you spending the glories of your body where they should not be spent. To prevent you from spreading your corruption among others.’

  She backed away from him as his voice rose, and he moved forward after her, so that the light of the street lamp fell harsh and full upon his face. Toyah knew the man now. He had been with her on Friday night, had spent himself within her, violently, urgently, with a desperate release.

  She saw the grey hairs at his temples, silver in the white light of the lamp. Yet his face in its vehemence still looked youthful, almost boyish. She was unnerved by this strange mixture of the biblical and the juvenile, wanted to look up and down the street to see if any relieving presence might be at hand. Yet something prevented her from taking her eyes from this man’s face. She was aware how feeble her own voice sounded against his ringing conviction as she said, ‘Look, let’s just agree to differ, shall we? You go your way, and I’ll—’