by J M Gregson
He saw what he wanted quickly enough. Blonde and buxom. He liked them buxom, liked a good handful of what you were paying for. She gave him a nice smile and looked keen for his custom. That was good enough for him, even if she looked older than he’d taken her for when he’d first seen her.
It was a meeting of like minds: he was eager for a woman, and Sally Aspin was eager for a customer. She was out early, knowing that some of the girls were wary after that girl had been killed on the game last week. Sally knew she couldn’t afford to be choosy, at her age, knew that she must bring in the punters or be banished from the streets by Joe Johnson.
‘Give you a good time, love!’ she assured David Strachan huskily as he looked over the goods.
‘You bet you will! And you won’t be disappointed either!’ He looked up and down the street, then clapped her hand on his rampant weapon.
Sally gripped the familiar object as it thrust against the familiar zip. ‘Let’s get moving, big boy!’ she hissed throatily into what seemed a pleasingly clean and odour-free ear. She wasn’t going to fluff lines as easily learned as this one.
He didn’t disappoint her. Not with the sex: Sally Aspin had long since learned to set her sights very low indeed on what happened under the sheets. But this man was a good customer, very nearly the ideal one. He paid her the money without argument before he started. He laid his clothes neatly across the chair she indicated to him, only prevented from folding them by the urgency of his desire. He didn’t demand anything kinky, though she would have done whatever he wanted, within reason.
He grasped her hard, even passionately, but not roughly enough to leave any serious bruises. He murmured gratifying things about her bum and her breasts. And he came quickly and efficiently when she commanded him to with a couple of four-letter words, without needing any of the blandishments she had sometimes to employ to ensure orgasm and full delivery.
And when she said three minutes later that it was time for him to go unless he wanted to pay double for all night, he rose obediently and went to wash himself in the tiny bathroom.
It was only when he was getting dressed that he said something odd. ‘One of you girls was killed last week, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes. Slip of a kid. Didn’t know what she was about. Didn’t recognize the danger signals, I expect.’
‘Nasty business. Meet a lot of violence, do you, Sally?’
She’d given him her name in the hope of further custom. Now she began to wish that she hadn’t. ‘Not a lot. There are some vicious buggers about everywhere, though, aren’t there, nowadays?’
‘There are indeed.’ He stroked her plump shoulder for a moment as she put on her bra, and she managed not to flinch away from the touch.
‘At least your hands are warm!’ she said and took his fingers between hers, passing her lips softly across them for a second. The punters were entitled to call the tune, but he’d had what he’d paid for now, and she was conscious that she wanted to change the subject of this conversation.
‘Never been one for violence myself,’ he said, his hand lingering for a moment on her wrist as he stood ridiculous with his trousers around his knees. ‘But I suppose a little bit of brutality has a certain attraction, when it’s combined with sex.’ He looked at her in the big mirror she had fixed to the wall beside the bed for those with a taste for such things, trying to will her into assent.
‘Want a bit of Miss Whiplash, do you, love?’ she said mockingly, handing him his jacket. He hadn’t given her his name, and you never asked for information: that was part of the code.
He grinned at her, but said nothing. He was at the door before he spoke again. Then he lifted his arms to her shoulders and said, ‘You’re a very desirable woman, Sally. And there’s plenty of you. I like that. Perhaps I’ll be back for a bit of Miss Whiplash. Might even bring Mr Whiplash along for the ride!’
He had vanished into the night before she could find any words of refusal.
Nine
Percy Peach for once did as Tucker suggested. He went and talked to one of the longest established flashers on his patch.
He didn’t for a moment think that Billy Bedford had killed Sarah Dunne, but he wanted information. And Billy Bedford was a voyeur as well as a flasher. He was out on the meaner streets of Brunton on most nights, looking for a bit of cheap entertainment to light up his hopelessly shabby life.
Billy lived with his aged mother, a woman whom Percy had got to know over the years of her son’s shame, a woman for whom he had affection as well as pity. ‘He’s in trouble again, Mrs Bedford!’ said Percy, shaking his head sympathetically at the old lady in the rocking chair. He was conscious of Billy hovering with hands clasped at the edge of the room; it gratified Peach to see the anxiety which the man had exhibited from the moment he saw Peach in the doorway of the tiny terraced house stepped up another notch.
‘I never set foot outside the ’ouse! Me mum’ll tell you that!’ The wheedling denial came automatically from the thin lips.
Percy swung to look at him. ‘Too quick, Billy Bedford! I haven’t said which night I was interested in yet. Makes me feel you already know which night it was, that you’ve got something very nasty to hide, that does.’
Mrs Bedford said, ‘He’s not a bad lad, really, Mr Peach. He’s good to his old mum, in his own way, is Billy.’ She looked at the Chief Inspector appealingly, with her head on one side and her small bright eyes fixed on him like those of a hungry sparrow. It was a long time since Percy had seen someone with her arms and shoulders invisible beneath a thick blanket of woollen shawl. He wondered how many of those shawls she had gone through since she had worn her first one and clattered in her clogs to the mill, during and after Hitler’s war.
‘I’m glad to hear he’s good to his mum, Mrs Bedford. Because he’s got precious few other virtues. Where were you last Friday night, Billy?’ He rapped the question into the man’s face with a sudden switch.
Billy Bedford was a pathetic rather than a dangerous creature. Peach realized that he had rarely if ever seen him before in natural light. It didn’t improve the man. His cheap green shirt was grubby at the neck and had a button missing. The diamond patterns on his cardigan had long since faded and there were holes in the sleeves and food on the front of it. He ran a hand automatically through his thinning, greasy grey hair at every challenge which was offered to him.
But Bedford had endured many hours of police questioning, during dark nights on the streets and under the harsh artificial glare of police interview rooms. He forced the fear from his watery grey eyes, made them carefully blank, and said, ‘Can’t remember where I was last Friday, it’s almost a week ago. But I ain’t done nothing, Mr Peach, ’onest I ain’t.’
Peach could have terrified him into submission, easily enough. But he didn’t want a mother in her eighties to see her son at his most abject. He shook his head at Billy and turned back to the old lady. Without taking his eyes from her face he opened the briefcase at his side and drew forth a bottle of Guinness, producing with the action a delighted glint in those aged sparrow eyes. ‘Glass please, Billy,’ he said.
He poured the black stout with elaborate care into the dimpled tankard Billy brought from the scullery, tilting the glass expertly to avoid too frothy a head, setting it at length upon the table beside her. ‘Where was he, Mrs Bedford?’
‘He was out, I expect. He usually is, on a Friday, once he’s watched Coronation Street with his old mum.’ She took a long sip at the Guinness, without lowering the level very much; she was going to make it last, this black gold. Then, as if the magic draught had made her more acute, she wiped her withered top lip, leaned forward and said, ‘’Ere, it wasn’t Friday when that girl was killed, was it?’
‘We think it might have been, Mrs Bedford. Though we haven’t released the information to the press yet. So you’re ahead of the Evening Telegraph this time, aren’t you?’
She looked at the dishevelled copy of the evening paper beyond her tankard on the table and gi
ggled delightedly. Then her eyes narrowed. ‘But you’re not saying my Billy had anything to do with that, are you?’
‘My chief thinks he might have, I’m afraid.’ He registered the son’s alarm out of the corner of his eye with satisfaction. ‘But between you and me, Mrs Bedford, I don’t believe Billy has it in him to kill anybody. His best policy would be to come clean and give us all the help he can.’
She digested this for a moment. Then the sparrow’s head nodded as abruptly and repeatedly as if it was attacking a worm. ‘You ’ear what Mr Peach says, son. Better give ’im all the help you can, lad.’
‘I always do, Mum. Always try to ’elp the police. More than they ever do for me, that is!’
Peach grinned at him. ‘Very touching, Billy, I’m sure. Well, if you want to keep Chief Superintendent Tucker off your back, you’d better answer every question I ask you as honestly and completely as you can. I know that will be breaking the habit of a lifetime, but believe me and believe your mum, it will be much the best thing.’
Bedford looked from one to the other, the idea of telling the truth filling his eyes with apprehension; he looked like a rabbit caught in the glare of a headlight. The stench of his breath swept into Peach’s face, but the DCI didn’t flinch: his eyes bored into the frightened features as though they would be taken apart if he didn’t get the truth. He repeated with soft menace, ‘Much the best thing, Billy.’
‘All right. I was out, like Mum says. But I didn’t see anything, honest I didn’t.’
‘Looking for a quick flash, were you, Billy? Bit cold for that, in November.’ Peach kept his eyes on the thin, wretched face, though he was aware of the old lady shaking her head sadly as she sipped her Guinness.
‘No. I’ve given all that up, Mr Peach.’ He took a big breath. Telling the truth to the police required a tremendous effort of his puny will. ‘I was just walking around. Trying to enjoy what I saw.’
‘And what did you see, Billy?’
The old lady looked at her son with distaste. ‘He watches the tarts, don’t he? Watches them flashing their legs to excite those who pay them. Always one for a free show, weren’t you, Billy?’
Peach wondered what childhood excesses she was recalling to this disaster of a son. Had he peeped through the bedroom keyhole at the performance of his long-dead father? He said hastily, ‘Watching the tarts on Friday, were you, Billy?’
‘I might have been. All right, I did, for a bit. They show their suspenders, you know, Mr Peach! Sometimes you even get a flash of their pants, if you’re in the right place and they have to lead the punters on a bit!’
He was trying to excite some deeply based male camaraderie, some moment of mutual recognition of the delights he cherished and carried with him to the musty privacy of his damp bedroom above them. Peach said, ‘On the edge of the park, were you, trying to get the best view you could?’
‘Yes. It’s locked up at night, but you can get underneath the big trees on the edge without being inside the park. The willows are best – they hang nearly down to the ground.’
‘And how much did you see of this young girl who was killed?’
‘Nothing, Mr Peach, honest! Nothing at all!’ Bedford was pathetically anxious to convince. For a man who concealed the truth as a habit, it was a difficult and rather pathetic performance.
‘Sure of that, Billy, are you? Now’s the time to speak, if you saw anything at all that might be suspicious. Accessory after the fact, you could be, if you concealed information. Wouldn’t like to see you in the dock for that, would we, Mrs Bedford?’
The old lady’s sharp sparrow eyes peered hard into her son’s fearful countenance. ‘He don’t know nothing, Mr Peach. More’s the pity. I want you to get the bugger who killed that girl, even if she was a tart.’
‘We will, Mrs Bedford. And sooner rather than later, if we get the help from the public that we need. Listen, Billy, you hear a lot of what’s going on around here. That’s why I’m here, if you want to know. You must have heard something that might be of use to us.’
Bedford’s thin lips set into a sullen, instinctive mask of non-cooperation. ‘Ain’t no grass!’ he said automatically.
‘Accessory after the fact,’ Peach reminded him.
Bedford fought a small battle in his confused and sordid mind. ‘I did ’ear something in the Coach and Horses last week. Might have nothing to do with this girl, though.’
‘Let’s have it, Billy.’
‘It might be nothing.’
‘Of course it might. And it might be important.’
‘Well, I ’eard someone saying as one or two young tarts who were putting it about had been warned off. Told they sold it through the firm or not at all, as you might say.’
‘One of the big pimps, was it?’
‘The biggest round ’ere.’ For a moment, Bedford was proud of the claim and the importance it gave him. Then fear submerged that tiny, unaccustomed pride. ‘You won’t tell him, will you, Mr Peach? Be more than my life’s worth, if it got out I’d been talking to you.’
Peach reflected that this man’s life wasn’t worth very much, but he didn’t say so in front of his old mother. ‘No one will know what you said, Billy. Some pimp’s gorillas were putting the word about, were they?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’ Billy was glad to have the detail voiced by the filth; somehow it made his own treachery less heinous if someone else provided most of the words. Then a crafty look belatedly replaced the fear in his face. ‘Anything in it for me, is there, if this information should be useful?’
Peach sat back a little from the foul breath and regarded his man with distaste. Then he said, ‘Yes, there is, Billy. Payment in advance, before we’ve even tested your information. Another small reward for the only woman who loves you.’ He reached down to his briefcase and produced the second bottle of Guinness he had kept for his departure. He placed it beside the empty one on the scarred table and said, ‘With my compliments, Mrs Bedford.’ The old lady raised her tankard towards him in a gesture of delighted acceptance.
Peach had never taken his eyes off the disappointed Bedford. He now said, ‘And which pimp would this be, Billy?’
Bedford looked automatically to right and left, in a Pavlovian reaction which suggested that even here there might be listening ears. Then he said in a low voice, ‘Joe Johnson, Mr Peach.’
The computers were ticking up a lot of information, a lot of cross-referenced files. There was a murder team of thirty-four working on the murder of Sarah Dunne in and around Brunton.
On the night of Thursday the twentieth of November, six days after Sarah had died, there was also another policeman in the area. This one was not only in plain clothes but very much off duty. He was not even stationed at Brunton. If he had been, he would have been seeking what he wanted many miles away from the old cotton town.
Inspector Boyd was from Blackpool, thirty miles to the west. All seaside towns are difficult to police, and Blackpool, as the largest holiday town in Britain, is the most difficult of all. The problem is a simple one of numbers, but the solution is not so simple. The winter population of Blackpool is under two hundred thousand. At the height of its summer season, the packed hotels and boarding houses of the town and its satellites house almost ten times that number.
A permanent police force to cope with that number would leave the town vastly and expensively over-policed during the winter months. Yet a winter-sized police service would invite anarchy in the summer. One of the solutions is to import police officers from the towns whence the visitors come, and this works very well with the big influxes, such as those who throng the town in what is known as the ‘Glasgow weeks’, when Scottish banknotes fill the tills of the shops and Scottish drunks fight the good fight outside the town’s multitude of pubs.
Whatever logic is employed by the planners, one of the results of the situation is that the Blackpool police work a lot of overtime in the summer and are correspondingly much freer in the winter.
T
om Boyd knew by now that for him too much freedom was not always a good thing. He was forty-eight, divorced, and without many hobbies to occupy him when the winds howled over the deserted Blackpool promenade in winter. He was too old now for the football he had enjoyed in his youth; he regarded golf as a game for fops and posers; he was not yet old enough to immerse himself in indoor bowls. He wasn’t a great reader, and he was so busy with his job in Traffic Control in the summer that he had lost the habit of watching television.
Inspector Boyd was divorced, with a daughter who lived in East Anglia whom he saw twice a year. He was lonely: he admitted that to himself now, though he had denied it for years. But only to himself: you didn’t want to be classed as a sad loner when you went into a police station where most people seemed quite suddenly to be much younger than you.
It was all right in summer. You could work up to twelve hours a day, snatch a meal in the canteen, and enjoy a quick pint afterwards. If you wanted it, there was usually sex on your day off, if you weren’t too choosy. Some of the women who visited the town in these enlightened days considered it part of their holiday to put it about a bit, and Tom knew where to go to pick them up.
He had enjoyed a threesome in his flat with a couple of married women from Yorkshire which had taught him quite a lot. They’d only been on a day trip on a coach, those two, but they’d made the most of their day! They’d only just caught their coach home and Inspector Boyd had been sore for a week afterwards.
But in the winter, it was different. Tom Boyd had accepted philosophically that he would have to pay to get what he wanted, if he wanted it regularly and with no strings attached. He didn’t mind that. But you didn’t go paying for it with the local toms in Blackpool. In the crude but universally accepted police parlance, you didn’t shit upon your own doorstep.
The crude expression was quite good enough for Tom Boyd. He had some fairly crude sexual demands to make, and it was better to pay for them than to suffer the rejection which came your way from ordinary encounters.
