Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  The phrase and the more formal mode of address seemed to convince her that she had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps it was that she really wanted to talk and it was only her fear which was preventing her from doing so. She said in a voice which he could scarcely hear, ‘I got out of my depth. It was my own fault, really. I brought this upon myself.’

  It was a beginning, an invitation towards further questioning. Pickering said, ‘And how exactly did you get out of your depth? Your mother will be back very shortly, you know.’

  ‘You won’t tell her?’

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to. You’re an adult at nineteen, entitled by law to a certain privacy.’

  She glanced again at the door, listened to the reassuring sounds of kitchen activity. They seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet house: perhaps Mrs Pitt was assuring them that she was no eavesdropper. Jenny said with the ghost of a smile, ‘I was planning to break the law myself. That shocks you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not at all. You must remember that we spend our time talking to people who break the law. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. You learn never to be surprised.’

  ‘I was on the game, you know. Well, planning to be. I’d made a start.’

  Pickering tried to keep the excitement from leaping into his voice, to speak as if he had known it all along, as he said, ‘And it was in connection with this that you were attacked?’

  She nodded, the memory of the man who had forced his way into her flat and hit her suddenly setting the blood pulsing in her temples and freezing her tongue.

  Pickering saw her distress and prompted her. ‘You were told you needed protection if you were going on the streets. That you’d need to pay for that protection.’

  ‘Yes. A man warned me that prostitution in Brunton was controlled by him. That if I knew what was good for me, I’d pay a percentage of my earnings for his protection.’

  Johnson! But could they pin it on him, at the end of all this? Gordon Pickering kept calm and said as formally as he could, ‘Could you describe the circumstances of this warning?’

  Another glance at the solid, firmly closed door. Then she spoke urgently, as if she appreciated that time might be limited. ‘He pulled up beside me in a maroon car. A Jaguar, I think. Yes, I’m certain it was. Invited me to get in beside him. I thought – well, I thought—’

  ‘Thought he wanted to pay you for sex. It’s all right, Jenny. You’ve already told me that’s what you were about.’

  ‘Yes. Well, it turned out he didn’t want to buy. He was warning me that I needed to come into his organization, that I’d suffer if I tried to go it alone.’

  She described the man to him in answer to his simple urgent questioning. She remembered the build, the mouth, the small scars on his forehead and temple. It was Joe Johnson all right, though Pickering doubted whether they could make anything stick in the light of his inevitable denials and the absence of other witnesses. He made a note of where and when the warning had occurred, then said quietly, ‘But it wasn’t the man in the Jaguar who did this to you, was it?’

  She shook her head. ‘The man who did this came round to the flat this morning, when the two girls I share with were out. I thought at first it was just another warning. I lost my temper and told him to get out of the house. That was when he hit me. With the back of his hand. He didn’t give me any warning. The shock of it was almost worse than the pain.’ She began to weep quietly at the memory, like a road accident victim with delayed shock.

  One of Johnson’s heavies, sent round to back up his master’s message with a physical warning. Gordon had no idea which one, but he would dearly like to see justice done here. He said, ‘You say he did this with the back of his hand. With a single blow, was it?’

  ‘Yes. He kicked me a few times when I was on the floor, but I think he only hit me once with his hand.’

  ‘Could you stand up for a moment? Show me exactly how it happened?’

  She shuffled uncertainly to her feet, stood opposite the gangling young DC, cringed instinctively as he lifted his arm, even in slow motion. He raised the back of his hand to her cheek, touched it minimally, then stood reflectively for a moment, picturing the scene in the flat he had never seen.

  They were frozen in this bizarre tableau when the door opened and Mrs Pitt pushed in a serving wagon with plates of biscuits and cakes and a pot of tea. ‘Just trying to get a picture of the assault on your daughter,’ Pickering explained, blushing furiously as he dropped his loose-jointed arms back to his side.

  He acceded to the invitation to tea and a home-made scone, though it was now after seven in the evening. His mind was working furiously on what might be made of this when Peach and the rest of the team got busy upon it. He stood up as soon as he could. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. A female officer will be round in the morning to take photographs of your face and any bruising on your legs, Miss Pitt.’ He turned to the mother. ‘It will be best if your daughter remains here with you for a while, Mrs Pitt. We’ll let you know the outcome of our enquiries.’

  He left mother and daughter with their arms round each other’s waists on the doorstep of the solid semi-detached house.

  David Strachan felt good with a leisurely meal and half a bottle of wine inside him. He drove slowly through the streets, not at all worried when at first he could not find the woman he wanted. He was quite sure that he would find her sooner or later. He felt destiny hanging about his shoulders tonight.

  Sure enough, he spotted Sally Aspin when he circled the block for the second time. She was wearing a cheap imitation fur coat, short enough to show the slit in her skirt, walking securely on the high heels with skill practised over many years, waggling her ample curves appealingly as she heard the car cruising behind her.

  He drew up beside her and threw the car door open in invitation. ‘It’s me again, Sally! Mr Whiplash!’ He laughed uproariously, surprising himself with the loudness of his own voice in his excitement.

  She hesitated for a moment, then slid her bottom on to the seat beside him and put her hand on his arm, as if she could control his exuberance with her touch. ‘Nice to see you again, big boy!’ she said automatically. She didn’t know how often she had used the phrase in her thirty-eight years, but it seemed to work as well as ever.

  He said, ‘Your place or mine, sweetheart?’ and laughed loudly again. ‘It had better be yours, I think!’

  ‘Mine it is,’ she said, as cheerfully as she could. She was finding this more difficult than she had thought it would be, now that it was upon her. She couldn’t think she’d ever betrayed a customer before.

  He drove the car to the house where she operated, needing only minimal instructions, since he remembered most of the way from his last visit. When he had switched off the engine, he turned to her, kissed her, caressed her neck, squeezed her arms, stroked a thigh, fondled a bountiful breast. In other circumstances, she might have welcomed it, from a regular customer. Sally didn’t get much in the way of foreplay these days. It was wham, bang and thank you ma’am, most of the time, and they often forgot the thanks. But you couldn’t grumble, so long as you got their money.

  ‘We’ll get a little more violent later, sweetheart,’ he murmured into her ear.

  She took that as the end of the preliminaries and slid her knees away from him and out of the car. ‘You lock the car up,’ she said. ‘I’ll go ahead and open the door.’ She did not look back, in case he had any other ideas.

  That meant that she did not see him get the short length of rope out from under the driving seat. It fitted easily into the pocket of his coat.

  He was glad of the oblong of orange light in the doorway of the house to guide him up the shadowed path of the garden. He had the money ready, waved it expansively at her with a grin, and put it in the fruit bowl on the sideboard, as if he had been here many times before. ‘There’s ten quid extra for you to strut your stuff, Miss Whiplash!’ he said with an excited giggle. With the benefit of his fantasies over the last few days
and half a bottle of red wine, he had convinced himself that this buxom lady looked forward to the violence and the threat of physical damage as much as he did.

  He undressed quickly, not bothering to fold his clothes, not noticing her movement behind him as she reached up the wall unobtrusively and pressed the button the police had installed after they had been round to warn her of the dangers.

  She felt like a traitor immediately. This man hadn’t done anything really dangerous last time, after all. Only said he fancied something a bit more violent, and called her Miss Whiplash. That wasn’t so unusual: she had met a lot worse than that in her many years on the game. But the deed was done now. There was no turning back.

  He wanted her to get the whip out, muttered to her that Catherine the Great used to beat her men on the bottom before she did it with them. She giggled a little at this unexpected piece of erudition from him; they watched each other self-consciously in the mirror on the wall by her bed.

  She had put on black stockings and suspenders, and now she pretended to look for the whip in the drawer, though in truth she knew very well where it was. She had left the door unlocked, and found now that she could not concentrate on the business of arousing the man in the way he wanted, because she was waiting for the sounds of the police arrival.

  He was between her thighs when they entered the house, telling her to treat him roughly, chuckling with sexual excitement. There were only two of them, but they burst in like a posse, yelling to him not to move, telling him that he was under arrest, warning him that it might prejudice his defence if he withheld information which he might later use in his defence.

  It was noisy but swift. David Strachan stood abject and bewildered, shamed in his nakedness, watching his arousal dying swiftly before his horrified eyes. Sally Aspin wanted to apologize to him, to tell him that it was nothing personal, that toms had been told to turn in all customers who wanted violent sex, as a precaution in the period following the murder of one of their kind.

  But Sally said nothing. It was only after the bewildered man had been led away that she realized that he had left her sixty pounds and received nothing.

  Eighteen

  ‘Think I’ll get one of those corner baths put into my place,’ said Percy Peach ruminatively. ‘There’d be room for two of us in one of those.’

  ‘Wouldn’t suit your lifestyle,’ said Lucy Blake. ‘We’d both be late for work if you had a bath like that, and that would really set the tongues wagging. I prefer my nice modern shower, where I can shut the door on you!’ She felt a little more in control of her man when they were in her neat modern flat than in the icy bedroom of his fifties house.

  ‘Too small for two, that little square box is,’ said Percy regretfully. ‘I can’t get in there with you without leaving something sticking out, and you’re lethal with that sliding door.’

  ‘It’s cosy and warm and reliable,’ said Lucy primly, measuring the distance between Percy and the shower with an experienced eye.

  ‘Just like me!’ said Percy eagerly. ‘Prove it to you again, if you like!’

  ‘Boasting again. And I shan’t call your bluff, in view of the danger to your ageing bones!’ She dropped her bathrobe to the ground and leapt quickly into shower, ignoring the moan with which he greeted her sudden nudity.

  Percy lay back on the pillows and enjoyed the vision of the gradually pinkening curves amidst the steam of the two-foot square glass box. Like Rubens through a filter lens, that was. He was glad that she hadn’t called his bluff and come back to bed, though he would never have admitted it. It had been quite a night; he reviewed what he could remember of its rapidly evolving pleasures.

  Lucy took care to cover most of herself with towel before she emerged. She wasn’t going to dress in front of him. That would lead to more erotic grunting and possibly to delays they could ill afford: they were already at the last minute. ‘I’ll get you some toast, if you make yourself respectable.’ She threw on her dressing gown and hurried away to the kitchen.

  DS Blake, demure in plain clothes, left first in her bulbous little blue Corsa. DCI Peach, immaculate in a grey suit, drove his Mondeo away a discreet five minutes later. The retired man in the adjoining flat gave him a curious glance as he shut the door of Lucy’s flat. Envy, thought a happy but not entirely objective Percy Peach. He gave the man a sly wink from an otherwise immobile face.

  It wouldn’t do to beat his chest and yell his joy out loud.

  Peach took DC Pickering with him in search of the man who had assaulted Jenny Pitt. It was by way of reward for the young man’s perceptive gathering of the evidence in Bolton. Of course, he did not tell him that.

  At eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning, a seedy night club is seen at its worst. There was a scent of stale drink in the main rooms and, through the open door of the gents’, the odour of vomit permeated even through the strong disinfectant which was being liberally spread around the floor.

  ‘We’re not at home to pigs!’ The big man stood just inside the doorway of the club, with his huge hands held awkwardly away from his sides on arms that were a little too long; he looked like an unfriendly gorilla.

  ‘Surprising, that, when you live in a pigsty.’ Peach, warming to the chase, was past the man’s ritual hostility and peering into the dark and seemingly empty regions behind him.

  He strode past the long and now deserted bar, across a small dance floor and the poles where lap dancers pranced during the evenings, noting how shabby the décor looked in even the modicum of daylight afforded to it by the double doors which lay open behind him. He kicked open the door at the back of this main room, and was rewarded by the spectacle of a man hastily removing his feet from the desk inside.

  ‘Nice of you to show such respect for the arm of the law!’ Peach said pleasantly, as the man half-rose and then slumped back into his chair.

  ‘I was doing no such thing! Thought for a minute you were Mr Johnson,’ the man protested. He reached out his left hand towards the phone, then thought better of it and folded his arms. You didn’t need to phone the boss, just because the filth were here. Let them know who’s in charge, behave as though you’d nothing to hide, and they couldn’t pin a thing on you, the boss said.

  And the boss should know: he was doing very well out of it. Ray Shepherd tried to give himself confidence by thinking how much more successful and well-heeled Joe Johnson was than the stocky little man in the smart grey suit who had just burst into his office.

  Peach looked round the office, with its prints of dancers in erotic poses, its photograph of the club as a cinema in the fifties, its big empty desk in front of the leather chair presently occupied by Shepherd. He fastened his eyes on this central figure with genuine contempt. ‘You’ve been beating up women again, Ray. We don’t like that. Don’t like it at all.’

  Shepherd leaned back in the boss’s chair and leered up at him, his thin face full of craft and composure. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m sure, DCI Peach.’

  He enjoyed getting the rank right, showing the bouncy little pig that they were up to date on his promotion. The fuzz couldn’t pin anything on him, he was sure. Just keep grinning and denying and watch the filth become frustrated. That was the tactic. Joe Johnson had built his empire upon it. And Joe Johnson controlled vice in this town; Joe Johnson now had clubs and casinos in other parts of the north-west and in the Midlands; Joe Johnson lived in a house a Chief Constable could never aspire to; Joe Johnson was a multi-millionaire and the police were plods; Joe Johnson ran this town and would protect his staff. Hold on to that, Ray Shepherd, and annoy them with your smiling.

  Peach smiled back at him and said, ‘Keep talking big, Shepherd. Do it in court, if you like. The judge won’t be favourably impressed.’

  He seemed very confident, though he couldn’t possibly have any evidence, could he? Like all bullies, Ray Shepherd was shaken when anyone threatened him. He said, ‘I told you, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’

 
Peach nodded at Gordon Pickering, who said, ‘Young lady by the name of Jenny Pitt. Pretty girl. Or she was until you called in and tried to knock her head off yesterday morning.’

  ‘Never heard of the girl. You try to prove otherwise.’

  Peach smiled at him, like a tiger taking its time over a large and succulent goat. ‘We will, Mr Shepherd. Shouldn’t have let yourself be seen going into that house, should you?’ There were in fact no witnesses to the visit, other than Jenny Pitt herself, but he knew how to undermine men like this. Shepherd was a cut above the ignorant muscle men that Johnson had used on the way up, but Peach saw apprehension in his thin, watchful face, and exulted in it. This wasn’t a formal interview, with the man cautioned and the tape running at the station.

  ‘Wouldn’t give much for your chances in an ID parade, with your looks – distinctive, I’d say they are, Ray, being a charitable sort of chap. No, when we add an identification to Jenny Pitt’s evidence, I wouldn’t give much for your chances.’

  Shepherd would never have made an actor. His unease was tangible. A wiry arm lifted towards his face, then fell back to his side. His tongue flicked over the prominent front teeth to moisten the thin lips. ‘She wouldn’t give evidence. She wouldn’t dare.’

  He realized immediately that he had made a mistake. Peach underlined it by his delighted beam, then let the silence stretch for a moment to emphasize his satisfaction. ‘Shows a surprising knowledge of this girl he’s never met, wouldn’t you say, DC Pickering?’

  ‘Amazing, sir. At least it would be amazing, if we didn’t know perfectly well that he beat her up yesterday morning.’

  Shepherd flashed a look of hatred at the fresh-faced young detective. ‘She won’t talk anyway. And that’ll be the end of it,’ he said sullenly. Assurance was ebbing away from him by the second. He inched a hand towards the phone, wishing desperately that he could get the advice of Joe Johnson, then dropped his hand back again to his side.

  Peach grinned when he saw the movement. ‘You’re on your own here, Ray Shepherd. Just the same as Jenny Pitt was when you beat her up. That’s the trouble with people like Joe Johnson. They drop you like shit off a red-hot shovel when you’re going down for a long stretch.’