by J M Gregson
‘I never see you in your uniform now, our Lucy,’ said Agnes as they sat with their cups of tea after the meal. ‘Used to look very smart, you did, with the dark blue and that hat.’
Lucy grinned: she didn’t remember her mother saying that at the time. ‘I don’t wear the uniform now, Mum. Except on formal parades. I told you, that’s part of being in CID.’
‘And are all these murders and stabbings and rapes I read about part of CID too? You lead a dangerous life for a young girl, our Lucy.’
‘Not as dangerous as you think, Mum. Most of it’s routine and boring, petty burglaries and the like, but you don’t read about that.’ She thought about the stark, accusing face of that dead girl earlier in the day, the face she could never mention here.
‘I can’t imagine life being boring with Denis Charles Scott Peach.’ Agnes was the only woman who was determined to make use of Percy’s real forenames, because he was named after her favourite of all cricketers, Denis Compton. ‘I bet your Percy’s as quick on his feet in the job as he was when he batted in the Lancashire League. He gave up cricket far too early, you know.’
‘So you keep telling me, Mum. But everyone tells me he’s quite a good golfer now.’
‘Golf!’ Agnes managed to squeeze all her contempt into a single exclamation mark.
‘And he’s thirty-eight now.’
Lucy expected a comment on the difference in their ages, for she was ten years younger than Peach. But Percy had been an unexpected and total success with her mother when she had brought him here, so that, despite the golf, he could do no wrong in her eyes now. His cricket had helped, but so had a softer and more compassionate strain in Percy.
Lucy had not seen much of this side of her lover at work, where his hard-man image was so important to him and to others. He had hit Agnes Blake’s wavelength immediately and instinctively, and Lucy’s mother and the man she saw as a son-in-law had remained in perfect tune with each other ever since.
Agnes looked up now at the photograph of Percy, dapper in his cricket whites, which she kept beside the older one of her husband on the mantelpiece. ‘Time you were making an honest man of him, our Lucy. He won’t let you down, you know, our Percy.’
Lucy felt an absurd shaft of jealousy at that ‘our Percy’, that reminder that her mother now saw him as one of the family. She regarded him as solely hers, wasn’t sure that she wanted to share him, even with this loving mother who, she knew, was lonely for much of the time she was away. She said vaguely, ‘There are complications, Mum.’
‘Nothing you can’t sort out, I’m sure. He loves you, does Percy. I can see that from the way he looks at you.’
Lucy was disturbed by the mention of the word love: you didn’t talk about such things across the generations, not in Lancashire. The fact that Percy ‘wouldn’t let her down’ was the code for that; there was no need to go breaking the old taboos. She said, ‘I didn’t mean complications in our relationship. I’m talking about things in the job. We wouldn’t be allowed to work together, if we were married. We wouldn’t even be working together now, if the powers that be realized we had a serious relationship going.’
‘Relationship!’ Agnes visited the word with almost the degree of contempt that she had given to golf. ‘You should be thinking of getting married, our Lucy. Happen thinking of having bairns.’
Lucy smiled affectionately at the older woman. Emotion always brought out the Lancashire in her mother’s talk, the accent and the expressions she had striven to subdue. She’d be talking of them ‘living over t’ brush’ soon. What made it more difficult for her to argue was that there was a lot of truth in what the older woman said: Lucy felt her biological clock ticking steadily, saw her school contemporaries with growing broods, and was occasionally envious of them.
She said resolutely, ‘I enjoy my job in CID, Mum. I’m told I’m quite good at it. I don’t want to give it up. And I don’t want to give up working with Percy. We work well together.’
‘I’ll bet you do. Well, I can see the problem, when you’ve worked hard to get the job you want and don’t want to give it up.’
Daughters always see parents as old-fashioned, and there was a much greater age-gap between these two than was normal. But Agnes Blake was seen by her contemporaries in the village as dangerously progressive, with her views on women’s rights. Agnes had seen too much potential wasted in her own generation not to be conscious of her daughter’s hard-won position as Detective Sergeant in Brunton CID. She was very proud of her Lucy.
Agnes took a deep breath and plunged in boldly to the words she had thought about long and hard. ‘But you can’t have everything, Lucy Blake. You need to think of yourself at my age now, to consider where you want to be then. Do you want to be a lonely old woman with an impressive career behind you, or a woman with children and grandchildren to keep up your interest in the world?’
Lucy found herself wanting to get up and hug her mother. She didn’t, of course. You didn’t do that sort of thing in her family and they’d both have been embarrassed. So she said, ‘I’d like to be a woman with a good career behind me and also be a mother and grandmother. Surely it shouldn’t be impossible for a woman to have both those things?’
‘Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it might be. You’ll have to work it out for yourself. You’re the one who knows the situation.’
‘All right, Mum. I’ll think about it. I’m not quite as blinkered about the future as you may think.’ She knew her mother wanted grandchildren more than anything. But you couldn’t have kids just for that reason.
But long after she should have been asleep, she lay staring at the ceiling in the room where she had slept as a girl and wondered about these dilemmas which the modern career woman was supposed to shrug off so lightly.
Whilst Lucy Blake wrestled with her problems in the darkened room beneath the eaves of the cottage to which she had been brought as a baby, another man was wide awake, in an urban house.
He had not even thought about going to bed yet. He had not slept well, since Friday night. He found increasingly that he did not want to face that dimly lit, claustrophobic room up the stairs. He sat beneath a powerful light in a large, comfortable armchair, with a television set flickering its unwatched pictures in the corner of the room.
He was thinking about the same bleak stretch of ground, the same cold, dank shed and the same white, dead face which had stayed so obstinately in Lucy Blake’s mind.
But not in the same way.
He’d been watching the news whenever he could since Friday night, but there’d been nothing for two days. Been a good idea, dumping her in that shed. He’d looked around the area before Friday, and thought that place might be useful. Some people would be surprised that he was capable of planning like that.
He couldn’t understand why he did not feel more cheerful. Most murderers were caught within the first week: he was sure he’d heard that somewhere. Well, it was three days since this one, already, and the police hadn’t even got started.
Well, perhaps he should say only just got started. There’d been the announcement he was waiting for on Radio Lancashire tonight, followed by a snippet on the local part of the television news at ten o’clock. Some kids had found a body in Brunton, they said. Police were treating it as a suspicious death. There was no more than that.
This must be his girl’s body. He was almost relieved to hear it: he wasn’t good at waiting, and he had become quite impatient when there was no news report over the weekend. It was quite exciting to have it out at last: he would be able to lie in bed tonight and think of all those expensive policemen baffled by one man. Him.
Because they were baffled. They hadn’t mentioned anyone helping them with their enquiries. And they wouldn’t, in the days to come. Or if they did, it certainly wouldn’t be him. There’d be more details, as time crawled by. They hadn’t even said how long they thought she’d been dead yet. He could tell them exactly when she’d died, right to the minute, if he chose. But he wou
ldn’t, of course.
He couldn’t see that the world wouldn’t be any the worse for what he’d done. The streets were rid of another trollop. Another bitch who took money for it, from men who couldn’t get it any other way. He repeated the phrases he had used on himself through every night since Friday.
There were a lot of them about, nowadays, flaunting their breasts and their legs and their crotches at men they could lead astray. Taking money for it. Hitching up their skirts and taking down their knickers to make money! You couldn’t get more guilty than that, could you? Women like that deserved everything that came to them! The world was well rid of women like that.
He found he had got quite excited about it. Sexually excited; he had an erection, which he couldn’t use. Well, not really use. He fell again to thinking about his last view of that white, dead face, so mobile during its last brief struggle for life, so still and cold in death as he had carried her into that shed. It seemed important to him that he should recall every fall of her hair, every detail of the unlined features.
Five
Joe Johnson looked like a criminal, to most people who came across him.
The police know that criminals come in all shapes and sizes, that the biggest villains often look the most innocent and straightforward people: that is part of their equipment. But the public have some fairly straightforward ideas about what they usually call a ‘jailbird’. Such a man – female criminals are much less sharply etched in the public mind – usually has flat features, short, straight hair, minor scars about his visage, and narrow eyes.
Joe Johnson had all of these. He also had unusual irises in those eyes. They were grey, but the remarkable thing about them was that they seemed completely dead. Watchful, even sharply observant, but dead to all emotion. It was not just that they concealed his feelings; with a little practice, most people can do that, though the writers of fiction do not acknowledge it. It was rather that these eyes gave the impression that no emotions at all took place behind them. It was very unnerving to the people who received most attention from those grey eyes.
And on this Tuesday morning, several people found themselves under that intense scrutiny. When he was making a tour of his business interests, Johnson didn’t spare his employees. They were left in no doubt of what he required.
Among other things, Joe Johnson was a successful pimp. Living off immoral earnings, the law called it, but the law was usually stumbling along well behind Joe Johnson. You needed witnesses to bring a court case. But the people who might have put Johnson behind bars were not willing to testify in court about the things he did. He had people who made sure of that. Fear was a powerful weapon, the best of all tools for men who made their money as Johnson did.
He was bigger than this now: he didn’t need to go round collecting his money. Most of the time, he sent one of his minions out to do that. But he liked to keep himself in touch; hands-on management, they called it. Besides, he enjoyed frightening the women who worked for him.
There was quite a lot of money due to him after the weekend’s activities. Sally Aspin had the notes ready for him. ‘Ninety-four pounds,’ she said, trying to keep the nervousness out of her voice.
‘It’s not enough.’
‘It’s right, Mr Johnson. It’s half of what I took, honest it is.’
He looked at her steadily, letting the distaste creep slowly into the flat features. ‘Then you’re not taking enough, are you? Simple as that.’
She was thirty-eight, looking five years older in the morning light. She had the blonde hair and buxom figure that men usually found attractive. But she was running to seed a little now. Her heavy breasts were sagging somewhat, even in the best, expensive bra she kept for her work on the streets. He was surprised to see no dark at the roots of the hair; perhaps the flaxen shade was natural to her, after all. But the hair had lost the lustre it had shown in her heyday, and the conventionally pretty face was looking heavy-featured now, with the suspicion of a double chin, and deepening lines around the eyes and the mouth.
He would dispense with her soon. She was getting very near her sell-by date, this poor man’s pin-up. In a year or so, perhaps, he would replace her with a younger model, and she would be banished from his patch. Meantime, there was a thousand or two more to be squeezed from her ageing body. He said, ‘You’ll have to work harder. Put your back into it. Use your assets.’ He laughed harshly at his own joke.
Sally Aspin wasn’t laughing. She’d made herself up carefully, knowing Johnson would be calling for his money this morning. Now she was willing herself not to cry, knowing the tears would ruin her eyeshadow, knowing from previous experience that Johnson saw tears only as a sign of weakness. She said, ‘It’s hard, coming into winter. They’re not as randy as they are when the weather’s warmer.’
‘Or you’re not as tasty as you once were. The other girls still bring in the money, Sal.’
She sought desperately for words which would convince him. It had been easier with her first pimp. He’d been small-time, less relentless. He’d knocked her about a bit, from time to time, but at least he’d been open to argument if she’d had a bad week. And he’d been willing to take payment in kind, had Steve. He’d have a roll in bed with her, knead her ample curves, and go away happy. She wouldn’t try paying that way with Johnson: not ever again.
Sally had never found out what had happened to Steve. He’d disappeared. This hard, brutal man had thrust his way into her house and told her that he’d bought out Steve’s patch, that she wouldn’t be seeing Steve any more and would be paying her dues to him in future. Steve, even with the odd back-hander across her belly or her face, seemed now to represent a lost Eden, when the money had come easy, the streets where she plied her trade had been protected, and they’d even had a few laughs.
Sally Aspin thrust out her pelvis and said with a foolhardy hint at jauntiness, ‘They haven’t the same money, most of them, not coming up to Christmas. But what they have, Sally will have out of them!’
‘Will she indeed?’ He smiled a mirthless smile and took her chin into his hand before she could shrink away from him, holding her face up towards the light. ‘You’ll need to convince me of that, you know. The wear and tear’s getting to you, girl! The wrinkles are beginning to show. The punters don’t like old meat. And there’s plenty of kids queuing up to put young meat on the counter for them.’
He was hurting her. She tried to pull her chin away from him, but he sank his thumb and his fingers harder into her cheeks as she tried to withdraw. The pressure distorted her words as she said, ‘There’s plenty of them want a – a more mature woman. They have more confidence with a woman who knows what’s what, some of them.’
It was true enough: some of the shy ones were happier with someone who showed them the ropes, led them on a little. Why then could she not make the argument more convincing, why did she quail before Joe Johnson’s harsh, pitiless grey eyes?
He gripped her face harder, digging his nails into the flesh where her chin met her neck for a last, sadistic second before he let her go. ‘Is that so? No accounting for tastes, is there? Must be perverts, to take someone like you, given the choice. You’d better get out there and find more of these perverts, then, hadn’t you? Up your takings for your Uncle Joe.’ He laughed at that thought, stringing his mirth out as he caught her shuddering despite herself.
Then he pocketed his money and went out to his Jaguar. He’d give the poor cow four more months. Perhaps five, if she was lucky. Take her through to the lighter nights, when there were more punters about and the work became easier, and then drop her for some kid. It would give him plenty of time to recruit a replacement.
Best part of the job, that was, recruiting.
The Scenes of Crime team discovered a few things during their detailed examination of the bleak site where the body had been found. The most important one was that the girl had not been killed there.
There were footprints around the puddles, in the damp cindery waste where a mi
ll had once stood. Too many footprints. Children played in the area, as Tommy Caton and Jamie Betts had done. More importantly, adults used it as a short cut, on their way to work or home from the pub. There was a multitude of footprints available, once you studied the ground closely. Some of them probably belonged to a murderer, but which ones?
It seemed likely that the girl had been dumped in the shed immediately after she had been killed, for the evidence of hypostasis suggested that she had not lain anywhere else but the shed. That meant that the footsteps which interested them were not going to be the most recent ones, but imprints which had been made at least two days and possibly longer ago than that. And it had rained over the weekend: not the torrential downpours which would eliminate all traces of where people had trodden, but three periods of steady, obfuscating drizzle.
Jack Chadwick, the SOC officer, brought in the forensic boys to take careful moulds of several shoe and Wellington boot prints from near the entrance to the rotting shed. The murderer’s might well be among them, but Chadwick had as yet no idea which ones they were.
The women Joe Johnson was visiting were very different in appearance, and came from very different backgrounds. The one thing they had in common was that they were alone in an uncaring, even hostile world. Joe preferred it like that. It made things much simpler, when people were alone.
Katie Clegg was twenty-seven. She had two children, plus an ex-husband who wasn’t keen on paying maintenance and wasn’t easy to track down. She was a willowy brunette, pretty enough to attract serious male attention. But most of the men veered away when they found she had two children in tow. And Katie was cautious about any lasting attachment: once bitten, twice shy, her friends said, and she was forced to agree with them.
