by J M Gregson
It was the young woman from Granada who eventually fed him the question he wanted. ‘What sort of progress, Chief Superintendent Tucker?’
‘We have narrowed the field, Sally. Eliminated some fifty or sixty suspects from the original field of our inquiry.’ That sounded quite impressive, and they surely couldn’t check it out.
‘Have you anyone in custody at the moment?’
‘No one has yet been charged with the murder of Sarah Dunne. A man has been helping us with our enquiries. A man who was with the young lady on the night she died.’ He tried to look like a man who could tell them a lot more, if only the system had allowed him to do so. He knew that Peach felt that Nigel Rogan hadn’t killed the girl, but he himself was not so convinced.
Houldsworth looked at the smoking end of his cigarette as he said, ‘But he hasn’t been charged, so he didn’t do it.’
Tucker refused to be ruffled by the old reprobate. He smiled patronizingly. ‘If only CID work was as straightforward as you seem to think, Mr Houldsworth. I am happy to say that in this country we still need evidence before we throw a man into jail and charge him with murder. Whatever we think about a man’s guilt, we have to provide the Crown Prosecution Service with the proper evidence, acquired in the proper manner, before they will take on a case.’
‘You think you’ve got your man, though, do you? It’s simply a matter of tying up the evidence before he’s charged?’ This was a large, overweight man from The Times, heavy with experience and expense-account lunches.
Tucker recognized him and smiled a sophisticated smile. ‘You’re too old a hand to expect to catch me that way, George. If the evidence is watertight, he’ll be charged. Meanwhile, every lead is being followed. We don’t believe in closing our minds, at Brunton CID.’
‘What sort of leads, Chief Superintendent Tucker?’
It was good to hear his full title rolling off the tongue of an experienced man like this. Perhaps that thought made Tucker a little incautious. He said, ‘As a matter of fact, we now have reason to believe that Sarah Dunne’s death may be one of a chain of murders, which began in the Midlands. The modus operandi is almost exactly the same as that practised on two women murdered in the Birmingham area in the last year.’
He had them now. There was nothing they liked more than a serial killer, especially if he spread his crimes across a wide geographical area. Headlines and pictures of the scenes of the crimes, together with their sexual connotation, could send a collective frisson of fear through the nation. Always good for circulation, fear and sex.
He felt a little trepidation at the interest he had aroused, but there was too much of the ham in him not to exploit it. He told them about the phone call, purporting to be from the murderer, which had come into the station on Saturday night. There were the inevitable suggestions that it might be a hoax call.
Tucker leaned forward to add sincerity to his manner. ‘All I am prepared to tell you – indeed, all that I can reveal at this stage – is that our forensic audiologist has listened to the tape of this conversation and reported his findings to me this morning.’ He paused theatrically, revelling in the expectant, upturned faces below the platform where he sat. ‘The expert was convinced that the voice was perfectly genuine, that the strong Birmingham accent was not being assumed to deceive us.’
There was no mistaking the buzz of interest in the room now. Two people tried to raise the idea that the voice might be a perfectly genuine Birmingham accent, and the speaker still a hoaxer, but Tucker retreated into a gnomic impassivity, folding his arms and smiling the smile which said he could tell them so much more if only protocol allowed it. His audience was not interested in pursuing him further, since the serial killer was much the most attractive journalistic possibility.
Tucker came away satisfied with the impression he had made. It was only half an hour later, when the adrenaline was leaking away, that he wondered what kind of hare he might have set running.
Toyah Burgess was very nervous outside Brunton Police Station. She walked up and down for several minutes in front of the brash new modern building, pretending to look at the displays in shop windows, telling herself that this was the thing she had to do, that she should not turn away now, when she had brought herself to the brink of revelation.
It was Lucy Blake who decided things for her. Detective Sergeant Blake noticed and recognized the young prostitute as she was turning her car into the police station car park. Something about the girl’s demeanour convinced her that she was trying to pluck up the courage to enter the station, and Lucy went quietly back into the street when she had parked her car.
Toyah Burgess was staring unseeingly at hi-fi stacks and DVD players when the voice behind her said, ‘Can’t expect much trade outside the police station at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, surely?’
She started as if struck, then said, ‘It’s once a tom always a tom, isn’t it, with you pigs? A girl can’t even walk round the town on a sunny afternoon without you thinking she’s on the game!’
But there was no real venom in her words. Lucy Blake had taken her in to the nick in the past – a fair cop – and she had paid the usual fine before going back out on to the streets to sell herself again. But there had been no real malice in either the arrest or the subsequent charge. They had been two women on opposite sides of a barrier they both understood, divided by the law but in a curious way united by their jobs and their gender.
Each of them knew that Toyah was breaking the law by soliciting, and that the law had occasionally to be upheld by an arrest and a fine, but each of them behaved as if she was merely observing the rules of an elaborate game. Lucy had a secret, unspoken sympathy for girls like Toyah, and Toyah had a grudging respect for DS Blake and the way she did her job.
She was glad that Lucy Blake had spoken to her here. In her own mind, it had resolved her doubts and taken away the need for courage. She would now be dragged along in the wake of the older woman’s energy.
Lucy said, ‘You were thinking of coming in to see us, weren’t you, Toyah? Trying to pluck up the courage to set foot in a police station.’
Toyah Burgess smiled ruefully. She was only nineteen, and Lucy thought how pretty the young-old face was when the strain left it. ‘I’ve never gone into a nick before of my own accord. I’ve always been slung in the back of a cop car and driven in under arrest.’
‘So now let’s see you make use of your rights as a citizen.’ Lucy took her firmly by the elbow and guided her steadily through the big doors and into the station. ‘This lady’s with me,’ she said to the station sergeant at the front desk, forestalling any disparaging remarks to the girl at her side.
Lucy Blake hesitated before the door of an interview room, then took her charge into the less formal confines of the CID section. ‘What is it you want to speak to us about, Toyah?’ she asked.
‘How’d you know I’d anything to say to you?’ said Toyah, in genuine puzzlement. ‘Just because you found me on the road outside—’
‘Just a hunch. I played a hunch, kid!’ Lucy did her version of a thick Chicago accent and won a reluctant smile from the girl standing next to her. ‘What’s it about, anyway?’
‘Probably nothing, really.’ Toyah Burgess found her confidence draining away in these surroundings, despite her friendly companion. ‘It’s just – well, I thought I should tell someone about it. I felt at the time that it might just have some connection with the killing of that girl, but now I think it’s probably nothing at all.’
It was part of the unwritten contract between prostitute and clients that you preserved their anonymity, kept quiet about any odd sexual demands. Toyah was finding it difficult to break that taboo, and both the women understood it. Lucy said quietly, ‘None of this need go any further, if it isn’t connected with the Sarah Dunne murder. If it is, we need to hear everything you can tell us. You might be the next one, Toyah, if we don’t.’
Before the girl could argue, she took her again by the elbow an
d propelled her through the open door of DCI Peach’s office. ‘Ms Toyah Burgess, sir, with some information she thinks might be relevant to the Dunne inquiry.’
Peach looked the new arrival quickly up and down, recognized her as one of the newer tarts on his patch, but took his cue from his DS and decided that this was not a time for bullying. ‘Sit down, please, I won’t be a moment,’ he said, and shut the door of the room behind him as he left. He came back a minute later with three mugs of tea on a tray. ‘Just get you some sugar. Me and DS Blake are sweet enough,’ he said, and disappeared again.
‘They told me he was a bugger,’ said Toyah Burgess in wonderment.
Lucy Blake grinned. ‘He can be. But he has other sides to him.’
‘Like a many-faceted jewel,’ said Toyah, who had read a lot of romantic fiction for one of her tender years.
Lucy thought it was the first time she had heard anyone from the other side of the law describe Percy as a jewel. Just as well her mother wasn’t around to hear it. She was glad to talk about anything but the reason why the girl was here, for the moment. If Toyah could become just a little more at ease in this strange environment, she would find it easier to talk.
Peach came back in and shut the door. He sipped his tea meditatively for a moment, abandoning his normal briskness. Then he said, ‘Bet it wasn’t easy for you to come in here. But you did the right thing.’
‘DS Blake found me outside and brought me in. I don’t know whether I’d have plucked up the courage to come in here on my own.’ Toyah spoke it as if it were an excuse, and Peach understood perfectly the feeling she had that she was betraying her caste by coming in here of her own accord.
He said quietly, ‘Murder changes the rules, Miss Burgess. No one should hold back information when there’s a murder investigation in progress. Do you think you’re in danger, despite the dubious protection you enjoy from Joe Johnson and his heavies?’
He knew about that, then. Knew about Johnson and the way he controlled the drugs and prostitution in the town. She found that curiously reassuring: perhaps the town was not as securely in the hands of criminals as she had thought. And she had liked the way he called her ‘Miss Burgess’, as if she had never been pulled in for selling it on the streets. But young as she was, she knew better than to say anything Joe Johnson might trace back to her. ‘It’s probably nothing. I expect you’ll think when you hear it that I’m just a silly girl, panicking over nothing.’
‘If I had ten pounds for every time I’ve heard that phrase, “It’s probably nothing”, I’d be a rich man. Sometimes it’s been true. More often than you’d think, it’s been the prelude to some valuable piece of evidence.’
‘It’s nothing to do with Mr Johnson.’
‘I thought it wouldn’t be,’ said Peach dryly.
‘It’s just – well, one of my clients behaved rather oddly. And with a girl even younger than me having been strangled, I wondered . . .’
‘Wondered if you’d be the next. And didn’t fancy it. A sensible enough thought. And you were even more sensible to bring it here.’
‘I don’t want anything to be done if it proves that I’m just overreacting. It doesn’t – well, it—’
‘It doesn’t do for a tom to take the money and then make revelations about the way a customer behaved. No, I understand that, love. But the customers must also understand that when there’s been a murder, they are going to be of interest to us. Business been poor in the last ten days, has it?
It was the first use of the sudden switch which was one of his ploys, and it disconcerted Toyah Burgess. ‘It has, yes. Clients were very thin upon the ground last week. I tried to tell—’ She stopped suddenly, realizing she had almost said more than she should.
‘Tried to tell Mr Johnson about it, did you? I’ve no doubt he didn’t take kindly to a drop in his takings. I expect he treated it as a feeble excuse, even when he knew it must be true. He’s that kind of man, Joe Johnson.’
It was so accurate a summary that he might have been there. Toyah said nervously, ‘I just thought you should know about one of my clients, that’s all.’ She took a long pull at her sweet tea, as if it could bolster her in this unaccustomed frankness with the police.
Lucy Blake mirrored the movement with an unhurried drinking of her own tea, as if the sisterhood could tackle this together. She said, ‘When did this man visit you, Toyah?’
‘Last Friday night. That was the first time.’
‘And what was unusual about him?’
‘He was just – well, odd. You learn not to take much notice of that: lots of the people who pay us for sex are oddballs. So long as they pay their money and don’t damage you, you learn not to be shocked and not to complain.’
‘But this man was odd in a different, more disturbing, way, or you wouldn’t be here now, would you?’
Toyah shook her head. She still couldn’t believe that she was here, sitting in a DCI’s office, talking to him and a DS about what she did. ‘There was a gentleness about this man – almost an innocence, when we first spoke to each other on the street. He – he reminded me of my first real boyfriend, when I was only fourteen.’ She looked up quickly to see if they were laughing at her, a tom talking like this, but their faces were grave and attentive. ‘I took him back to my room. He turned his back on me whilst I undressed. Not many of them do that. They regard the stripping as part of what they pay for, and it often gets them really turned on.’
Lucy nodded, anxious to keep the girl talking now that she had begun. ‘Diffident, was he? But not impotent?’
‘No! He certainly wasn’t that. He was quite rough, once we got started.’
‘Too rough? Is that what frightened you?’
‘No. Nothing like that. He went at it pretty hard, once he’d got started, like as if he hadn’t had it for a long time. But that didn’t frighten me, not on Friday. He was just – well, odd, like I said. He was sort of – boyish, I suppose you’d call it.’
‘But he wasn’t a young man?’
‘No. I’m not much good at ages.’
‘Not many people of nineteen are. Would you say he was older than me? Older than DCI Peach?’
‘Older than you, certainly. I’m not sure about Mr Peach.’ She scarcely dared to look at him.
Lucy grinned at her; Peach was thirty-eight. ‘Everyone thinks bald people are older than they are. We’d like you to tell us anything you can recall about this man. He was white, I presume?’
‘Yes. And I’d say he was over forty. He had quite a young face, but he had a few grey hairs around his temples. He had a good head of hair, though, dark brown I think. And blue eyes.’
‘Height?’
She shrugged helplessly. ‘He was just a little taller than I am, and I’m five foot six. About average, I suppose.’
‘Clothes?’
‘He had a navy-blue anorak. I can’t remember anything else about his clothing.’
‘But he stood out because he behaved oddly.’
‘Yes. When we’d finished, he scarcely looked at me again. I made a few jokey remarks, but he might not even have heard them, for all the notice he took. He went off into the darkness without looking back or saying goodbye. It was odd and abrupt. He was quite tender with me at the start, but by the time we parted I felt there was something dangerous about him.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, there was the way he paid.’ She felt more treacherous about saying this than about revealing sexual details of a man’s conduct, but she pressed on. ‘I’d told him on the street it was fifty quid, and he brought it out of his trouser pocket as soon as we got into my room. A ten, seven fives, and the last five in one pound coins. It was almost as if he’d been saving up for it.’
There was a pause whilst the three of them wondered about the implications of this. Then Peach said, ‘You said this was the first time you’d seen the man. You’ve seen him again since then?’
‘Yes. Last night. That’s really what brought me in here
today. I wouldn’t have come over what happened on Friday night.’ She spoke as though she were still trying to mitigate the sin of speaking to the fuzz.
‘So tell us what happened last night. For a start, did he pay you in the same way again?’
‘He didn’t offer to pay me at all. I don’t think he had the money. He said he hadn’t, and I believed him.’
‘So did you send him packing?’
‘No. I didn’t realize he was the same man at first. He had the hood of his anorak up and his back to the light. I couldn’t see his face. I suppose that made him more frightening, but it was his manner, really. He was sort of desperate.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said I shouldn’t be living like this, that he’d come to save me from myself.’
‘A religious nutter?’
She smiled, in spite of her nervousness. The very phrase she’d thought of herself, and coming from a policeman! ‘That’s what I thought. He said he’d come to save my soul. I told him to piss off and let me get on with earning my living!’
‘And did he go?’
‘No. He got more excited. Told me that the wages of sin is death and things like that. I said we’d have to agree to differ, but he wouldn’t take that.’
‘What did he do?’
He told me that I was acting as an instrument of the Devil. Said I was luring men with me to Hell and that he couldn’t allow that.’
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘He did more than that. He put his hands on my neck, ran them up and down my face.’ She shuddered suddenly at the remembrance of it. Her brow furrowed as she strove to dredge up the actual phrases that odd man had used. ‘He said men needed protecting from the wiles of Satan. They were only weak vessels and temptation must be removed from their paths.’
