Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  ‘No! We can’t agree to differ, this is far too important. You must see that your immortal soul is in danger. You are acting as an instrument of the Devil, and taking fallible men with you into perdition.’ His eyes were wild, and he lifted his hands suddenly towards her head.

  Too suddenly, for before she could move, he had his hands on the thin chiffon scarf she had donned as her only concession to the cold. She felt his fingers touch her cheeks, then run up and down her throat. They were surprisingly warm, when she had expected them to be icy. ‘Please leave me alone!’ she said, her voice breathy with the fear she could no longer control.

  ‘I cannot do that! You must see that I cannot do that. You are not only a sinner, but the occasion of sin in others. We men are but weak vessels at the best of times. We need protection from the wiles of Satan. The temptation must be removed from our paths if we are to survive.’

  His eyes glittered with conviction in the harsh white light of the street lamp. He was looking not at her but past her, as if he saw some demon that must be exorcized. Toyah Burgess felt his hands fastening upon the thin stuff of her chiffon scarf, felt it tightening about her throat, strove in vain to discover words which would bring him back to her.

  A car turned into the street, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away from the pair who stood frozen as statues beneath the street light. Toyah did not dare turn to watch it: its lights seemed to her to be advancing towards them with a dreadful slowness. She tore herself from beneath those awful hands, turned her back upon her challenger, moved as quickly as she dared away from him.

  Something told her not to try to run. In her tight skirt and high heels, she could never outdistance a pursuer. And somehow she knew that if she ran, she would be pursued. Her heart thumped in her chest, in her temples, in her ears, so that she could hear nothing else as she marched as quickly as her dress allowed down the street.

  But he was not following her. She was at the corner of the street before she risked looking back. He was still beneath the street light, motionless, staring down at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.

  Sixteen

  Peach rang Tucker on the internal telephone. ‘The forensic audiologist is here, sir. Shall I bring him up?’

  ‘Er—’

  ‘He’s a busy man, sir. Has to be away in quarter of an hour. But you said you wanted to see him.’

  ‘Did I? I’d really rather you dealt with—’

  ‘The voice expert, sir.’ Peach took pity on Tucker and himself. There was no time to be wasted this morning, even on making a fool of Tommy Bloody Tucker. ‘The man who’s going to give us an opinion on how genuine that Birmingham phone call was.’

  ‘Ah!’ With that single syllable of understanding, Peach could almost see the relief on his chief’s face from two storeys below him. ‘The man who’s analysed the tape of that phone call on Saturday night. Well, don’t keep him waiting there, bring him straight up here. And you’d better wait and hear what he has to say yourself, DCI Peach.’

  Silly sod’s switched into his assertive mode, thought Peach without rancour. He took his bearded visitor up the stairs and ushered him into the Chief Superintendent’s room.

  Tucker announced himself as the man in charge of ‘this most interesting case’ and outlined what he thought had happened so far in the investigation. Even with some notable omissions, this took some time, and the man with the beard and the expert knowledge eventually glanced at his watch. ‘I have to be at the University by ten o’clock,’ he explained apologetically.

  ‘Well, what is it you have to tell us?’ asked a ruffled Tucker.

  ‘Not a lot. In my opinion, the caller was a genuine Midlander. Almost certainly a man brought up in Birmingham or within ten miles of the city.’

  ‘Ah! You realize that this may mean that we have a serial killer on our hands? There have been two similar murders in the last year in the Birmingham area.’

  He spoke so aggressively that the bearded expert said, ‘I can only tell you that this voice was not a hoax, in the sense that the man was not in my view assuming an accent. What you make of that information is a police matter.’

  Tucker nodded sagely and stroked his chin, almost as if he wished for a moment that he too had a beard to give him extra gravitas. Then he stood up and donned the cloak of diplomacy he reserved for important members of the general public. ‘It is most gratifying when citizens recognize it as their duty to come forward to offer their expertise like this,’ he said unctuously.

  ‘I didn’t. Chief Inspector Peach asked me for an expert opinion. I’ve been paid for my services. The voice on the tape is that of a man who’s spent most or all of his life in Birmingham; he’s probably between twenty and forty-five, though I couldn’t be positive about that if I was under oath in court. And now, unless you’ve any further questions, I must be on my way.’

  The forensic audiologist had already formed an accurate opinion of Tommy Bloody Tucker’s talents. Peach smiled at him appreciatively as he showed him out. When he returned, Tucker was drumming his fingers on his desk. ‘I’ll get in touch with our colleagues in the Birmingham CID. Tell them the man they haven’t caught there is spreading his net wider. Ask them to check carefully on all the lorry drivers and commercial travellers they’ve interviewed in connection with those two murders down there.’ His nose was lifted higher than usual, as if he had caught the scent of the quarry and the hunt was on.

  Peach had already taken all this information from the national computer system in the CID section. ‘The MO is similar, sir, but not exactly the same. And this one is a long way from those other killings. I wouldn’t at this stage be sure—’

  ‘When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’ll have developed a nose for these things.’ Tucker lifted the angle of his own proboscis five degrees higher, so that it pointed at the corner of the ceiling. He pressed the button on the intercom and spoke to the station’s Press Officer. ‘The press briefing you were organizing for two o’clock. Make it a full media conference, will you? And I’ll take it myself.’ He permitted himself a slow smile, then looked at Peach with sharp distaste, as if he was surprised to find him still in the room. ‘Was there anything else, Peach. Because as you can see—’

  ‘Pants, sir.’

  ‘Pants?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Knickers, if you prefer it.’

  ‘Look, Peach, if you’re trying to be gratuitously—’

  ‘We haven’t found them, sir.’

  Tucker came reluctantly back to earth, his nose making a cautious return to the horizontal plane. He said heavily, ‘Are you bothering me with the theft of underwear when we have much weightier matters to deal with?’

  ‘Sarah Dunne’s knickers, sir. They weren’t found with the body. And they weren’t in Nigel Rogan’s car.’

  ‘Nigel Rogan?’

  ‘The man who picked her up in the Fox and Pheasant on the night she died, sir. The man who paid her to have sex with him, in the back of his car. The man whose twenty-five pounds was found in the pocket of her coat. The man you wanted to charge with the murder of Sarah Dunne yesterday.’

  ‘Ah, that Rogan.’ Tucker spoke as if he saw hundreds of Rogans stretching away into the distance, like the vision of future kings afforded to Macbeth by the witches. He sighed with infinite patience and said vacantly, ‘So the girl’s knickers weren’t in his car.’

  ‘No, sir. He said she snatched them up as she left him, if you remember.’

  Tucker looked puzzled. ‘And now you tell me the garments are not in his car. I can’t really see how this makes him guilty.’

  It’s like leading a five-year-old along, thought Peach. ‘It doesn’t, sir. In so far as it does anything, it supports his story. But the girl’s pants haven’t turned up. It’s possible they were taken away by some person who killed her after she’d left Nigel Rogan. Taken away as a trophy, perhaps. Or dropped in the street and removed by some other person totally unconnected with the crime, of course.’ His d
oleful face suggested that this was the most likely and least helpful possibility; the policeman’s lot was not a happy one.

  Tucker moved back into masterful mode. He said incisively, ‘Has this Rogan got a Birmingham accent?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then I think we can rule him out. You were a little hasty in jumping to the conclusion that he was our man.’

  ‘I don’t think that I—’

  ‘We have a real clue at last, Peach. Our killer is clearly not a local one, so you needn’t waste my time with any more details of Lancashire suspects.’

  ‘I see, sir. Personally, I have to say that I’m not convinced that our murder is definitely linked with the Midland stranglings. I’d need more—’

  ‘Leave the overview to me, Peach, there’s a good fellow. You get on with the day-to-day work and let me handle the strategy.’

  Peach got out before his chief could move into his Field Marshal Montgomery mode. He’d be talking about hitting the criminal fraternity for six if he got any encouragement.

  Tommy Bloody Tucker was in danger of going off at half-cock again, his DCI reckoned. Which in his case, strangely enough, usually produced an awful lot of cock.

  You don’t expect danger at eleven o’clock in the morning. When you are nineteen, you think chains on doors are for old ladies and people who are scared by all the stuff in the papers about the increase in violent crime.

  It wasn’t that she was unconscious of the danger. When Joe Johnson had made her get into his car and threatened her on Sunday night, Jenny Pitt had been thoroughly unnerved. Subsequent enquiries among her acquaintances had only confirmed that Johnson’s threats were not to be taken lightly. She had locked her doors at night and made sure she was not alone on the streets or in the pubs and clubs of Brunton.

  Yet when you were enjoying a late breakfast on a bright Tuesday morning, with the sun streaming in through the windows as if it were spring, not late autumn, you were somehow unprepared for violence.

  She did not open the front door of the small terraced house very wide, and she kept her small foot against the back of it as she said, ‘Yes?’

  But the gap was wide enough. The man threw his shoulder against the door without responding to her question and was inside the house.

  He was a slim man, but surprisingly powerful, and with a steely strength in his arms. Some absurd rhyme of her father’s came back to her, which said that people who were strong in the arm were weak in the head. It was not a helpful thought to her at that moment. And this man’s thin, wolfish features looked not unintelligent but cruel.

  Jenny Pitt was suddenly very frightened indeed.

  She tried to put all the outrage she felt into her voice as she said, ‘You’ve no right to burst in here like this!’ But the high, strained note of her voice sounded in her ears like the feeble bleating of a helpless lamb.

  The man smiled unpleasantly at her. His teeth were uneven, with the front ones large and pointed. In another context, they might have made him look comic. But there was nothing remotely comic about this alien presence in the small, low-ceilinged living room. The teeth merely made the malevolent face look more wolfish and sinister. He said, ‘I hear you’ve been a naughty girl, Jenny Pitt.’

  He knew her name. She’d never seen him before, she was sure of that, but he knew her name. She said, ‘I don’t want you in my house. Leave now, please, or I’ll call the police.’

  He gave her that evil, lopsided grin again. ‘I don’t think you’ll do that, Jenny. It would be most unwise.’

  He was enjoying her fear and her vulnerability, and that made both of them worse. His sallow skin was pitted with small indentations all over his narrow face, and he had not shaved this morning.

  She said, ‘I can’t think why you should have come here. I’ve no idea why you’ve forced your way into my house, or how you know my name, but—’

  ‘Lot of things you don’t know, young Jenny Pitt. And quite a lot of things I do. Know you’re on the game, for a start. Or trying to be. Without taking the necessary precautions.’

  ‘Precautions?’ She had an absurd vision of condoms.

  ‘Precautions, my dear. Lucrative game, prostitution, but dangerous. You need protection, young Jenny Pitt. You need people like me on your side, if you’re not to come to serious harm.’

  ‘If you’re trying to—’

  ‘Very serious harm. Look what happened to that silly Sarah Dunne girl week before last. She was trying to put it about without the necessary protection, and some bugger topped her. She was a very silly girl.’

  ‘You’re saying you killed her? Just because—’

  ‘Saying nothing of the sort, Jenny Pitt. Get yourself into serious trouble, if you go about saying things like that. We don’t know who killed her. Neither do the police, who you seem to think might be interested in a foolish little tart like you. But in my opinion, if she’d had protection, Sarah Dunne would be alive today.’ He swept her with that confident ogre’s grin again, enjoying her fear, fancying now that he could smell the terror upon her.

  ‘You work for that man who took me into his Jaguar the other night, don’t you?’ She tried to sound contemptuous, but she could feel her palms cold and clammy in the warm room.

  Ray Shepherd grinned down at her. ‘That would be telling, my dear, wouldn’t it?’ He looked round the featureless living room, with its conventional prints on the wall and yesterday’s newspapers still on the sofa. ‘Pity for you that your friends are out and you’re in the house alone. But that gave us the chance for a private talk, see, Jenny Pitt. A chance to make sure there are no misunderstandings between us. A chance for you to see sense.’ His voice hissed on the sibilants, scattering her shirt with tiny globules of spit. His tone hardened into an unmistakable threat on the last phrase.

  Suddenly, Jenny was full of a fierce rage: the rage of a nineteen-year-old who has never been seriously threatened before in her young life. ‘Go to hell, whoever you are! And get out of my house, or—’

  ‘Or what, Jenny Pitt? Just what will you do to me?’ Shepherd stood between her and the phone, less than three feet from her face, tall and threatening, laughing outright at her helplessness.

  ‘I’ll go to the police. You’ll have to leave here some time, and I’ll tell them just what you’ve—’

  It was the back of his hand which hit her, on the top of her cheek, just below her left eye. It was so swift, so utterly without warning, that she had a moment of incomprehension before the white flash of pain went through her face and into her brain. She found herself on the floor at his feet, tasting the salt blood in her mouth, wondering if her cheekbone was broken, feeling the eye already beginning to close. She drew her knees up instinctively against her breast in a foetal folding, wondering where he might hit her next, how far this beating which had burst upon her from nowhere was going to go.

  The voice from above her said harshly, ‘You won’t be on the streets for a few nights now, Jenny Pitt. Which will mean that you’ve already lost in earnings what would have bought you weeks of protection. Silly girl, aren’t you?’ He put his foot against the trousered thigh and rolled it over, savouring the whimper of terror as the girl threw her hands across her already damaged face. He kicked each of the trousered thighs with great deliberation, feeling the spurt of sadistic pleasure within him as if it had been a drug.’When you do try putting it about again, you’ll make sure you have protection, won’t you, Jenny Pitt?’

  She muttered, ‘Go away! Get out of my house!’

  She was blubbering now, and Shepherd enjoyed the squelch of blood and snot and tears behind her small fingers, so inadequate to protect what had a moment ago been such an attractive young face. ‘Do you know what, Jenny Pitt? I’m going to do just that, now. Go away, and leave you to think things over. Because I think you’ve learned your lesson. Learned that you need protection before you try to sell your arse upon the streets! One of our representatives will be back later in the week to discuss terms. Might ev
en be me, if you’re lucky!’

  Shepherd allowed himself a last chuckle, gave a departing kick to the rounded backside, and slammed the front door behind him as he left.

  Chief Superintendent Tucker felt a welcome buzz of excitement as he came into the crowded room. He nodded confidently at the audience whilst he projected urbanity, polish, security.

  The girl from Granada Television began by asking him if there was anything to report on the Sarah Dunne killing. Tucker gave her his slight, man-in-control smile, the one that combined a becoming modesty with easy competence. He said, ‘You know me pretty well by now, I think. I wouldn’t have brought you here if there was nothing to report. I don’t believe in wasting your time and mine in just going through the motions of public relations.’

  ‘You’ve made an arrest then, Mr Tucker?’ The question came from the back of the room, where Alf Houldsworth, the one-eyed veteran reporter from the local evening paper had stretched out his legs and lit a hand-rolled cigarette.

  ‘Well, no, we haven’t done that, Mr Houldsworth. Miracles take a little longer.’ Tucker chuckled at the cliché. He got one or two dutiful sniggers from the rows of faces in front of him, but his attempt at humour fell rather flat.

  The reporter from the Sun said with his pen poised over his notebook, ‘Do we take it that you consider the possibility of an arrest in a murder case so rare as to constitute a miracle?’ and got many more appreciative sniggers than Thomas Bulstrode Tucker had drawn.

  Tucker said quickly, ‘That wasn’t what I meant at all. It was – well, it was a figure of speech, that’s all.’

  The Sun man mouthed ‘figure of speech’ as he wrote the words down laboriously in longhand. Tucker watched his pen with an awful fascination. He was aware that he must offer the meeting something quickly or lose the sympathy of the assembled journos. He said, ‘We have made considerable progress. I am about to brief you on that, if you will allow me the chance to do so.’ He looked accusingly from Alf Houldsworth to the Sun man, but journalists develop hard shells early in life, and he made no impression.