Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  ‘Yes, sir, you did mention that.’ Peach banished his automaton’s expression in favour of one of his sunniest smiles. ‘Well, there’s no sign at the moment that this crime is down to a Mason, sir.’

  Tucker’s brow clouded. ‘Your prejudice against Freemasonry is neither amusing nor original, Peach. I’ve told you before, a Mason is most unlikely—’

  ‘Four times as likely to commit a serious crime as an ordinary member of the public, in the Brunton area, sir. You know my research.’

  ‘I couldn’t not know of it. You remind me of it at every opportunity.’

  ‘Most interesting little monograph, it should make, sir. When I’ve the time to write it up and table the statistics. I’ll give you full credit for help with the research, sir. Solidarity, as you say, is the secret of our success.’

  ‘How near are you to an arrest?’ Tucker jutted his jaw aggressively. Put the little sod in his place. Press the nose above that objectionable black moustache firmly against the grindstone.

  ‘Quite near, sir. I wouldn’t like to say how near. Mustn’t jump to conclusions too readily, as you reminded me earlier.’ He looked over his shoulder, as if to check that they were not overheard, then leant forward and spoke confidentially across the big desk. ‘We pulled in a Catholic priest last night!’

  The public relations man that was always just beneath the smooth surface of Thomas Bulstrode Tucker’s skin leapt out as suddenly as a rearing stallion. ‘A Catholic priest? This could tear the town apart.’

  ‘Been giving some of our ladies of the night a real good regular seeing-to over the last few months, apparently,’ said Percy gleefully.

  ‘Peach, for Heaven’s sake be cautious!’

  The DCI chuckled. ‘That’s rather good, sir. For Heaven’s sake! But we’ve no need to be careful, sir. The man’s confessed to paying for it and getting it, apparently. Of course, I’ve still to interrogate him. Going to do that as soon as I’ve finished here, sir.’

  ‘Then go carefully. When religion is involved, there’s no knowing what—’

  ‘Thought I’d take DS Blake in with me, sir. Get her to flash a bit of gusset, if he clams up on us.’

  Tucker blanched visibly: an interesting sight, Percy thought. ‘You’ll do no such thing, Peach. Handle this with kid gloves.’

  Peach looked disappointed. ‘Really, sir? I was thinking more in fishnet tights terms. Man’s shown where his weakness lies, so we might as well exploit it, I thought. But if you’d like to do the interview yourself, sir, I’m sure we’d all be delighted to—’

  ‘No, Peach! You know my policy on these things. Not to interfere. To show confidence in my staff. To maintain—’

  ‘Maintain an overview, sir. Yes, I understand. Just like to flash a bit of female thigh at a man, when he’s shown a fancy for it. But you’re the boss, sir, as always.’ He nodded dolefully.

  Anyone who had seen Peach in action would have known that the last thing he would have done was to use female lingerie in these circumstances. Anyone who knew Lucy Blake would have known how she would react to the very suggestion. But it was so long since Thomas Bulstrode Tucker had seen his staff working at the crime-face that he was easily deceived. He said weakly, ‘Is this Roman Catholic priest your only suspect?’

  ‘No, sir. We’ve still got our policeman in the frame.’ Peach grinned happily at the prospect of charging down another politically dangerous avenue.

  Tucker gave a sickly grin. ‘The Sergeant from Morecambe, was it?’

  ‘The Inspector from Blackpool, sir. Traffic Police. Name of Thomas Boyd. Stolid sort of chap to look at, sir. Wouldn’t have thought he had it in him, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

  ‘Go carefully, Peach. That’s an order. This is a sensitive area, when it involves a senior officer from another force. Haven’t you been able to eliminate him yet?’

  Peach shook his head vigorously and happily. ‘Far from it, sir. Inspector Boyd was spotted cruising the streets in our area on Tuesday night. Looking for a certain lady of the streets to offer a little violence, I reckon. He ran into one of our patrols and drove off without dropping his trousers. But he remains in the frame.’ He smiled and nodded his satisfaction with this happy situation.

  ‘Along with others.’ Tucker tried to speak firmly and assert himself.

  ‘Yes, sir. There’s Joe Johnson, for a start.’

  ‘Our local Napoleon of Crime.’ Tucker produced the phrase as if it were original. Then he went on more gloomily, ‘If Johnson’s involved, we won’t get him. He’s too big now, has too many influential friends. You know the problem: no one will give evidence against him. He’s got the local crime scene sewn up and everyone’s scared of him.’

  ‘True enough, sir. And he’s bigger than local, now. He’s got casinos and clubs in Cumbria, the north-east and the Midlands, as well as Lancashire. Some of them are no doubt legitimate businesses.’

  ‘We’re not going to get him then, are we? Let’s hope Joe Johnson has nothing to do with this murder.’

  ‘Let’s hope he has, sir! And that we can pin it on him!’ Peach spoke with unusual vehemence, his passion for taking villains for once outweighing his contempt for Tommy Bloody Tucker.

  Tucker shook his head. ‘You’ve got to be realistic, Peach. Of course, I’d like to catch the man myself, but now that he’s becoming almost respectable, the moment may have passed.’

  ‘He’ll be joining the Masons, if we leave it long enough,’ said Percy grimly.

  Tucker decided not to rise to this. ‘Have we any other possibilities?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Man by the name of David Strachan. Commercial traveller, sets up computer systems for firms and provides the necessary software. His firm’s in Birmingham, but the north-west is his area.’

  ‘That phone call on Saturday was from Birmingham. The one trying to tie our murder in with the Midlands murders. The one you said might be designed to throw us off the trail.’ Tucker came as near to excitement as he ever permitted himself to get.

  ‘Yes, sir. We’ve taken a recording of Strachan’s voice. The forensic audiologist is testing it against the tape of that call which came in on Saturday night.’ Peach looked at his watch and said with a proper sense of drama, ‘Perhaps at this very minute.’

  ‘I have a feeling this might be our man, Peach. You’ll tell me it’s early days, but you get a feeling for these things when you’ve been in this detection business as long as I have.’ He steepled his fingers and nodded sagely.

  Percy decided that his chief watched too much television. Not surprising, really: he’d bugger all else to do. He fed him another titbit. ‘Strachan patronized our local toms, sir. One in particular: mature blonde lady, name of Sally Aspin. Don’t suppose you know her, sir?’

  ‘Of course I don’t, Peach! I’m not in the habit of patronizing our local prostitutes, am I?’

  ‘No, sir, I suppose not. Bit of research, perhaps, I was thinking. Anyway, this chap Strachan likes a bit of rough play. Paid extra for it. Called the buxom Sally Miss Whiplash, I believe.’ He shook his head sadly at the frailty of mankind.

  ‘He sounds more and more like our man, you know. Is there anything else you can offer?’

  ‘Well, sir, he admitted when we interviewed him that he proposed to offer a little violence himself, when he was sufficiently excited. And he had a piece of rope in his pocket which he admitted he wanted to put round his partner’s neck at some stage in the exchange.’

  ‘This is a clincher, Peach! You mark my words, a clincher!’

  ‘You don’t think this could be a normal sexual practice, sir? I mean, my experience is very limited, but they tell me the combination of sex and violence excites some men. I wanted to consult you about this, sir. I thought perhaps that with your wider experience of connubial exchanges you could offer me some guidance as to the range of . . .’ He spread his arms slowly and helplessly, opening the curtains on the delicious vision of Bru¨nnhilde Barbara pursuing a sexually excited Tommy Bloody Tucker ar
ound the bedroom with a whip.

  ‘No! What on earth do you think I am, Peach?’

  Percy resisted temptation once again. ‘A man of rich and varied experience, sir, in private as well as public life.’

  ‘In sexual matters, Peach, I am a novice.’

  ‘You surprise me, sir. You’re sure this is not just the becoming modesty for which you are noted throughout the station?’

  ‘Indeed it is not, Peach. I have no idea how the mind of a man like this – this commercial representative—’

  ‘David Strachan, sir.’

  ‘Thank you. How the mind of a man like David Strachan works. But I’m pretty sure he’s our man.’

  Peach decided not to draw attention to any contradiction here. ‘He’s given us a DNA sample, sir. It’s being compared by Forensic with samples taken from the body of Sarah Dunne.’

  ‘Good. If there’s a match, I shall charge the man myself.’

  Peach went back down the stairs hoping that that sad creature David Strachan was not guilty of murder. With Tommy Bloody Tucker gunning for him, there must be a very good chance that he was innocent.

  Twenty-One

  John Devoy presented a wretched figure to the succession of officers who checked on him in his cell at twenty-minute intervals. He sat with his face in his hands on the edge of the bunk, seeming not to alter his position over several hours. When he was eventually taken up to an interview room, he moved like an automaton, heeding the constable’s commands but never looking up at him.

  Peach took Lucy Blake in with him to question the man, but his attitude was very different from the one he had suggested to Tucker only minutes earlier. He studied the priest for a moment before he said, ‘You will understand that we need to record this exchange, Father Devoy. Do you wish to have legal representation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It might be advisable.’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. A lawyer would advise caution, and I don’t want to be cautious. I’m finished.’

  ‘That sounds very like despair. Isn’t that still the worst sin of all, for someone like you?’

  Devoy lifted his eyes from the desk, seemed to take note of them for the first time. He glanced at Lucy Blake curiously, as if he had not realized until this moment that she was in the small, square room, then returned his attention to the man who had spoken to him. ‘You are of the faith?’

  Peach smiled, recognizing an expression he had not heard for many years. ‘No, I have lost it. I was brought up a Catholic. But I don’t attend church any more.’

  ‘But you remember that Despair is the ultimate sin, and remind me of it. There is a kind of charity in that, Chief Inspector, and I thank you for it. But it is difficult for me to see any hope at the moment.’ He surprised himself with a weak smile. ‘There. We have touched on Faith, Hope and Charity already. Perhaps redemption is still possible, for you at least.’

  Having secured the attention of a man who had seemed atrophied by his guilt, Peach hardened towards his more normal interviewing mode. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble, Father Devoy.’

  ‘A hell of a lot, you might say. That might be the appropriate term, in my case.’

  ‘We deal with this world, Father, not with some hypothetical other world. And you were brought in here because of threatening behaviour.’

  ‘And for consorting with a known prostitute.’

  ‘No. That is not an offence, in itself.’

  The priest was so steeped in the idea of sin, so sunk in his own guilt, that he seemed not to understand this. Eventually he shook his head and said. ‘I have given way to lust and spent my seed with harlots. As a minister of the church, I could scarcely have done worse.’

  ‘Perhaps. We in the police service see worse crimes than lust, every day, Father Devoy. But we are not here to debate theology. No doubt that aspect of your conduct will be pursued in other places and by other people. DS Blake and I are pursuing an inquiry into the worst crime of all. Murder.’

  Devoy nodded. ‘The primal and worst sin. Cain and Abel.’ He looked up suddenly. ‘But what have I to do with murder?’

  ‘That’s what we’re here to establish. You threatened violence against Miss Toyah Burgess.’

  His face was blank for a moment before recognition dawned. ‘Is that the girl I was with when your men arrested me?’

  ‘Yes. Were you planning to harm her?’

  ‘I was planning to have sex with her. I had the price she charges for her body in the pocket of my anorak.’

  ‘We know that. The money was taken from you by the custody sergeant last night. If you are released from custody, it will be returned to you.’ Peach spoke as if he were instructing not a man in his forties but an adolescent in his first brush with the law. He reminded himself again that the strange man on the other side of the square table might be a killer.

  He had to do that, because this man of the cloth, who felt himself drowning in his sin, carried a kind of wild innocence about him. The first murderer Peach had ever seen, when he was still a young policeman on the beat, had been clothed in this same air of detachment from the world, even after he had put twenty-three stab wounds into the body of the bully who had tormented him.

  John Devoy said, as if speaking through a medium, ‘That fifty pounds wasn’t my own money. It belongs to the parish.’

  ‘It can go back to the parish, then. That’s theft avoided,’ said Peach acerbically. ‘I’m not interested in the money, or in what you intended to do with Toyah Burgess in the sack, Father Devoy. I’m interested in the threats of violence which you offered to her.’

  ‘She was using her body as—’

  ‘Last night wasn’t the first time you had accosted her, was it?’

  ‘I’ve been with prostitutes before, if that is what you mean. It was my own money then, but whenever I could—’

  ‘We’re not interested in the sex, Father Devoy. Please try to understand that. Why do you think our officers were waiting to arrest you last night?’

  ‘I – I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it. I’m a priest who was consorting with harlots. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘That isn’t why you were brought here under arrest. That isn’t why we’re interviewing you now. Two weeks ago tomorrow, a young girl acting as a prostitute was murdered very near to where you were arrested last night.’

  ‘Sarah Dunne, yes. She was a Roman Catholic. But she came from Bolton or greater Manchester, I think. She wasn’t buried here.’

  ‘She hasn’t been buried anywhere, yet. Her body hasn’t been released. It is still part of the evidence in a murder case.’ Peach heard the irritation creeping into his voice. He nodded to Lucy Blake.

  She said softly, ‘You’d seen Toyah Burgess before, hadn’t you, Father? And you’d spoken to her, as recently as Monday night.’

  Devoy looked at her as if he had not expected her to speak. ‘Yes. How do you know that?’

  ‘And what did you say to her on that evening? Did you ask her to have sex with you?’

  ‘No.’ It was suddenly important to John Devoy that this woman understood that. The Blessed Virgin loomed large in his culture, and if beautiful young women were not to be objects of lust, then they must be respected figures of authority. ‘I went to warn her that she must leave the path of evil. That if she persisted upon it, she would go to Hell herself and take vulnerable men with her.’

  The phrases which had been familiar to Percy Peach as echoes of his childhood were alien to Lucy Blake. This strange, disturbed man seemed to her in need of psychiatric help, seemed to be divorced from the real world. He might be pathetic, but was he also very dangerous? She said gently, ‘So you didn’t suggest on Monday night that she had sex with you?’

  ‘No. I took no money with me on Monday. I went out into the world of Satan to try to rescue one of his victims before it was too late.’ He put his head on one side like a bird, appeared to weigh his words and his motives, and then nodded his head sharply two or thr
ee times.

  The sudden, odd, uncoordinated movements of his body convinced her that he was very near to breaking point. She said, ‘You threatened Miss Burgess on Monday night, didn’t you?’

  He stared at her with wide bright eyes, then nodded sharply again, as if digesting a new idea. ‘You could call it a threat, I suppose. I told her that the wages of sin are death. There is surely no greater threat than the fires of Hell.’

  It was a long time since Lucy had heard anyone talk about the fires of Hell. She said, ‘You offered her a more personal threat, didn’t you, Father Devoy?’

  ‘I told her she was spending the glories of her body where they should not be spent. That she was spreading her own corruption amongst others. Amongst—’

  ‘You laid hands upon her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Amongst fallible men. I told her she was taking fallible men with her into perdition.’ He spoke as if he had not even heard her interruption.

  ‘Did you lay hands upon her, Father Devoy?’

  Perhaps it was the repetition of his title that brought him back to the reality of the claustrophobic little room and the two persistent questioners. ‘I may have done. I wanted to convince her that she was the occasion of sin in others. Men are weak vessels, at the best of times. We are not proof against the temptations of women like her.’

  ‘She had a scarf around her neck. Did you get hold of it?’

  ‘Temptation must be removed from our paths, if we are to survive and attain the Kingdom of Heaven.’

  Peach, noting his companion’s increasing confusion with the man’s language, took over the interrogation again. ‘Answer the question, please. Did you or did you not lay hands on Miss Burgess?’

  ‘She represented a dangerous occasion of sin. If she were removed from the streets, a dangerous occasion of sin would be removed from the paths of men. She was acting as an instrument of the Devil.’

  Peach regarded him sardonically. ‘If I remember the Church’s teaching about dangerous occasions of sin, Father Devoy, it was that they should be avoided. You were hardly avoiding such occasions when you pursued known prostitutes and paid them for their favours.’