Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  She lived in a small nineteen thirties semi-detached house, pebble-dashed and drab, reaching the age when it needed a lot of maintenance. She was watching at the cheap wooden bay window for Johnson’s arrival, anxious to give him his money and have him gone. She didn’t want to be linked with a man like that by the ageing eyes which peered out from behind the curtains around her. She was the subject of quite enough local gossip already.

  Joe Johnson would not have registered as an intelligent man in any standard test. But he had that instinctive shrewdness in assessing situations which many successful criminals possess. He sensed the nervousness in Katie Clegg immediately and knew that she wanted to be rid of him. So he sat down uninvited in an armchair and determined to stay for a while.

  ‘Thought we should review your activities, young Katie,’ he said unpleasantly. ‘Assess your progress and set ourselves future targets.’

  He had thought to bewilder her, but Katie Clegg was not unfamiliar with business gobbledegook. She had been a personal assistant to a sales director before her life went wrong. She said without looking at the man in her chair, ‘I have done everything you asked of me.’

  ‘So you have, Katie, so you have. So far. And I’ve done everything to protect you. The law’s been kept off your back. No one has interfered with your patch. No other employer has threatened to take over your services.’

  He had hesitated fractionally over the word ‘employer’; Katie gave an involuntary, bitter smile. ‘And you’ve had no reason to complain about your takings from me.’

  Johnson grinned back at her. He liked a feisty woman. It made a change from the defeated demeanour of most of the women he used: like flattened grass, they were. A bit of spirit was all right in a woman. Especially when you held all the trump cards in your hand. He nodded at her. ‘You’re doing all right, Cleggy.’ He lifted the hundred and fifty pounds she had just given him upon the palm of his hand and nodded his satisfaction. ‘Might be time to think of a little expansion.’

  Kate’s face clouded. This was why she feared this man’s visits more than anything in her life; more even than police exposure and disgrace; far more than the men to whom she sold herself, who were mostly pathetic creatures. She said dully, ‘I’m doing all I want to do. All I can do. Four nights is enough and more than enough. I’ve two children to look after.’

  He smiled up at her, taking his time, taking care to drop his threat so that it would make maximum impact. ‘Two children who might end up in care if anyone chose to give the authorities the details of how you support them, Katie. Let’s not forget that.’

  She found herself holding on to the back of an upright chair for support as her head swam. Someone should kill this man: he was vermin. But no one would. Life didn’t work like that. She wanted to pick up a knife from the kitchen and fly at him, but she knew she could not do that. Those round-faced, innocent children in the new school uniforms she had bought for them would be lost without her to look out for them. ‘I’m only doing this as long as I have to, you know that.’

  He allowed himself a broad smile this time, looking up into the white, oval face, mocking her naivety. ‘You might have to do it a bit longer than you think, Kate. It might not be you who makes the decision about hanging up your knickers and suspenders.’

  ‘I’ll go whenever I can. I don’t intend living like this for a second longer than I have to!’ She spoke the words slowly and through clenched teeth, looking not at Johnson but through the window at the dank and dripping garden.

  He waited until she glanced down at him, as he knew that she eventually must. ‘All I’m saying is that you could earn yourself a little more, Katie Clegg. Maybe even keep the extra completely for yourself, as a generous bonus from a grateful employer. I might be prepared to take my extra commission in bed, from a looker like you.’

  She clenched the back of the chair with both hands, feeling sick as the full implications of his words sunk in. She said as carefully as she could, ‘I’m not available, Mr Johnson.’

  He laughed, then stood up unhurriedly. ‘Funny attitude for a tom to take, that. Just trying to put a little more cash in your pocket, young Katie. I’m sure you could use it.’

  ‘I can manage. Maybe I’ll get some maintenance, next month.’

  ‘And maybe you’ll see a herd of flying pigs. But I wouldn’t rely on it.’

  He took his leave of her on that. Little pep talk would keep her up to scratch. And he wasn’t joking: he wouldn’t mind an hour or two in the sack with the delectable and feisty Katie Clegg.

  It was the uniformed police, pursuing the dull but necessary routine of house-to-house enquiries, who came up with a possible identification for the dead girl.

  The information shot quickly up to the top-storey office of Chief Superintendent Tucker and straight down again to the desk of DCI Peach. The information was dodgy, and it would need an identification of the body to confirm it, but the age and the initial description of the girl who had gone missing were right.

  She was from Lancashire, but not from Brunton. She came from a village on the other side of Bolton: about twenty miles away. The next of kin seemed to be the parents. There had been no report of a missing person from them. If this was their daughter, someone would have to break the news to them that she was dead.

  Joe Johnson’s third call was on a nineteen-year-old.

  Toyah Burgess was more nervous than either of the others. Or perhaps, having seen so much less of life, she was merely less skilled in concealing her feelings. She was only nineteen, but already an experienced prostitute.

  She had the money ready in an envelope on the window sill by the door for him. A hundred and fifty pounds. It was a lot for what he offered her. But she was in no position to resist; it had taken a couple of sharp warnings from Johnson’s heavies to make that situation clear to her.

  The glint of a knife blade near her face beneath the street light; a huge fist raised for a moment above her small head with its golden hair. No blow struck: they were under strict instructions not to damage the goods which were on sale. And once they started, they didn’t always know where to stop, these men: they were not employed for their restraint.

  Joe Johnson counted the money slowly. He knew it would be right; these women had more sense than to try to cheat him. But he enjoyed watching the tension build in the young face beside him. She hadn’t invited him into her living room, so he looked round the hall. ‘Nice carpet. New, isn’t it? I must be paying you too much!’ He laughed at his witticism.

  He didn’t pay her at all, she thought. He took money from her: took much more than his due of what she earned by lying on her back for men. And lying in other positions and doing other things too. He didn’t know the half of it, this man, with his smooth suits and his scars and his blank, frightening eyes. She said, ‘The carpet didn’t cost much in the sale. And we shared the cost.’

  ‘Very nice, that, being able to share. Nicer still, if you could up your takings a little. As I’m sure you could, an attractive young beauty like you!’ He smiled into the wide, frightened blue eyes, ran his gaze approvingly over the bleached blonde hair, dropping his scrutiny first to her breasts and then to the triangle where her legs met her stomach beneath the cheap cotton dress.

  ‘I’m taking all I can, Mr Johnson. I can’t charge them any more.’

  ‘You could get more customers, though, with a little effort. Make a killing while you can, girl, is my advice. Looks don’t last for ever. Been talking to one old slag this morning that I’ll have to put out to grass before long. So don’t you keep sitting on a fortune – get it out and use it, I say!’ He laughed out loud at the coarseness of the thought, keeping his eyes still on the triangle of her assets.

  Toyah Burgess was young, despite her experience on the game. She was still green enough to think she could ask for concessions from Joe Johnson. She took a deep breath and embarked on the words she had planned before he came. ‘As a matter of fact, I was going to ask you if you would conside
r cutting the rate I have to pay you, Mr Johnson. The percentage of what I take seems an awful lot to pay, for what I get out of it.’

  Johnson’s smile died very slowly, as if he could scarcely believe what he was hearing. It was replaced by something very different; when Toyah recalled his face in the small hours of the night, as she did several times in the days which followed this meeting, it seemed to have the terrifying savagery of an ogre.

  He transferred his eyes back up to the young, fearful, heart-shaped face. ‘Think you’re not getting value for money, do you, my dear? Pity, that. I keep the competition away from your patch, young Toyah. Even a youngster like you would have to work a lot harder for her money if there were other tarts flashing their fannies around the street! You’d soon find your dainty little quim wasn’t in such demand if you had to put it on the counter and let the punters choose, I can tell you!’

  He was getting really annoyed now, his voice surging upwards on the rising tide of his anger. Toyah thought he was going to hit her unless she could do something to stem that tide. She said despairingly, ‘All right, all right! I was only asking if you could see your way to a little reduction. If you can’t do that, we’ll go on as we are! Sorry I asked, honestly I am!’

  He stilled his breathing, controlled the excitement which had risen in him with her distress. Then he growled at her, ‘I hope you do, Toyah Burgess. Because I’d hate anything to happen to you!’

  ‘Happen to me?’ She echoed his words stupidly, her fear making her speak when she should have been meekly silent. She knew a lot about men and their sexual demands now, but still very little about the rest of life.

  ‘Yes, dear, happen to you, that’s what I said.’ He reached out, following her as she flinched away, and took her small chin into the iron grip he had fastened upon the fleshier jowls of Sally Aspin an hour earlier. ‘Because it’s me who provides you with protection, you know. Protection against the people who prey on people like you. Peddling your pussy might be an easy way of making money, but it can be a dangerous one. Not everyone in the game is as kind and considerate as Joe Johnson, you see. Look what happened to that girl the other night. The one who was dumped in that shed on Dover Street. That Sarah Dunne. I’d hate anything like that to happen to you, Toyah Burgess.’

  Toyah wondered how Joe Johnson knew the name of the dead girl.

  He held her chin for a moment longer, her pain increasing as his grasp tightened still more. Then he released her, studied the marks his hand had left on her flesh for a moment, nodded twice at her to emphasize his message, picked up the envelope with his cash, and was gone without a further word.

  Six

  The girl was very nervous. She looked up and down the street before hustling them quickly inside the Victorian house.

  They had been fine residences, when they were built, this row, high and proud against the meaner brick of the terraces built behind them for the mill workers. They had retained a gradually eroding grandeur until after Hitler’s war, when they had been divided into flats and gone rapidly downhill. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, as they moved past their century of life, the flats had been subdivided again, until most of them were little more than bed-sits. The standard of tenant had declined correspondingly, until the inhabitants were a heterogeneous collection of people, their only common feature being that they did not stay here for very long.

  This old-young girl had dark, straight hair and eyes which seemed to have seen much more than the smooth face around them. She took them into a high room, where the ceiling was scarcely visible above a light fitting which hung a good five feet below it. The wallpaper was probably over thirty years old, its fading seventies colours dating from the time when a larger, more gracious room had been divided. The joins where the sheets of thick wallpaper met had been picked apart, low down above the deep skirting board, by some long-departed infant hand.

  Lucy Blake took in the crack in the pane of the sash window, the cobwebs building in its upper corners, and tried not to contrast this room with the neat order of her own bright modern flat. She smiled encouragement into the anxious young face and said, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Blake and this is Detective Constable Pickering. And you’re Karen Jones.’

  The girl scarcely acknowledged her words. ‘There was no need for you to come here. I said everything I had to say to that lad in uniform. Get me into trouble, you will.’

  ‘Trouble with whom, Karen?’

  The girl shook her head. She was not out of her teens yet, possibly even younger than she looked. ‘People like me can’t afford to be seen talking to the police. I don’t want to go the same way as Sarah.’

  ‘And why should you do that, Karen?’

  A shake of the head, agitating the dark, straight hair. It was a refusal to co-operate, not a denial of knowledge. ‘You shouldn’t have come. You’re wasting your time and mine.’

  Lucy wondered how she could get this brittle girl to relax. She sat down on the battered sofa, felt Pickering follow her lead, held her peace until Karen Jones reluctantly sat down on an upright chair. Then she said, ‘No one will know that you have helped us. The uniformed officers called at every residence in this street. We get together a big team and they ask questions of everyone in the area. It’s routine procedure, after a murder.’

  The girl started at the introduction of the word, in the way people once reacted to the mention of cancer. She considered Blake’s argument, then nodded very sharply, two or three times. ‘That’s all right, then. But that doesn’t apply to you, does it? You’re not calling at every house in the street.’

  ‘No. It’s our job to follow up anything which might be of interest. We study what the uniformed officers doing the house-to-house enquiries bring in. You were able to tell us who the dead girl was. We’re grateful for that.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was sure it was her. I just said I thought it might be.’

  Lucy went on as smoothly as if the girl had never spoken. ‘And naturally we want every scrap of information you can give us. Sarah isn’t here to help us herself, is she?’

  ‘No. She’s gone. So I can’t help her any more, can I?’

  Gordon Pickering said gently, ‘But I think you might want to help us catch whoever killed her like that, once you think about it.’

  He was a gangling, fresh-faced young man, not very much older than Karen Jones, and she appeared to give some thought to these first words from him. She said grudgingly, ‘I’d like to see that bastard put away, yes.’ Then, immediately defensive, ‘But I don’t know who did it, so I can’t help, can I?’ The Welshness she had striven to put behind her when she left the valleys came out suddenly and strongly in the inflection of the last phrase.

  Gordon Pickering was persistent as well as surprisingly perceptive: they were among the qualities which had secured him an early transfer from uniform to CID. He smiled into the anxious features and said, ‘Sometimes people can help us more than they realize, once we put together what they tell us with what comes in from other sources. And you really won’t be putting yourself in any danger by talking to us, Karen.’

  Lucy saw the girl responding to his youth and sincerity. It made her feel forty-eight instead of twenty-eight as Karen Jones’s face lightened and she said, ‘I hardly knew her, really. What is it you wanted to know?’

  ‘Anything you can tell us. We don’t even know for certain that Sarah is the dead girl yet.’

  Karen’s face was suddenly full of a childish terror. ‘You don’t want me to identify her? I don’t want to do that. I’ve never had to look at a dead body, see, and I don’t want to start with this one. Is she badly—’

  ‘We won’t be asking you for an identification, Karen,’ Lucy Blake intervened firmly. ‘We’ll need the next of kin to do that: probably one of the parents, when we find them. But you’ll understand that we don’t want to put any parents through that ordeal unless we’ve good reason to think this is their daughter.’

  Relief flooded into the girl’s face a
nd she became a woman again. She gave them a surprisingly precise description of the girl she had known as Sarah Dunne, answering DC Pickering’s questions quietly and watching him make a note of her answers. It made them increasingly certain that she was describing the woman whose remains had been dumped on the building site. She concluded with, ‘I told the uniformed constable, she came from somewhere over the other side of Bolton, I think, but I haven’t got any address. She never told me that.’

  Pickering closed his notebook and looked into the earnest young face. ‘And what was your connection with Sarah Dunne, Karen?’

  The face which had opened up during her description of the dead girl now shut as suddenly as a book. Karen Jones looked past Pickering instead of at him as she said, ‘We was just friends, wasn’t we? I told the constable earlier, I didn’t know her all that well.’

  ‘But you knew her well enough to give us a very good description. Even to remember some of the clothes she wore. That’s very helpful to us, Karen.’

  The girl didn’t respond. Her face set sullenly as she said, ‘That’s good then, isn’t it? But there’s nothing more I can tell you.’

  Lucy Blake said, ‘Oh, I think there is, Karen. Not much more, perhaps, but that little might be important. You say Sarah was your friend. So I’m sure you’d want us to find out who killed your friend and put him away for a long time.’

  They could see the struggle going on behind the old-young, too-revealing features. But her face set into a frown as she said, ‘I’d like you to get whoever killed her, yes. But I can’t help you. You’ve had everything I know.’

  ‘Not quite, Karen. Perhaps I should tell you that we know how your earn your living. How you pay the rent for this place.’ Lucy Blake looked round the room, with its tiny kitchen beyond a small arch, its door to the cramped bathroom built in hastily a decade ago, its high, grubby walls and dusty curtains. She let her gaze come to rest on the new wide-screen television and hi-fi stack, which gleamed incongruously in their shabby setting.