Wages of Sin

by J M Gregson

  He shook his head miserably. ‘I went out for a meal in Preston. Well, just outside, really, down near the Ribble. A Little Chef place, it is. You get used to them, when you’re travelling. I’d been there before.’ He looked up at them with a sudden desperate hope. ‘They might remember me there, if you want to check it.’

  ‘I suppose they might. I know the place: it’s near Samlesbury, on the road to Brunton.’ Peach paused to let that information sink in. ‘What time were you there?’

  ‘I can’t be precise. But I suppose I went there at about half past seven. And I didn’t hurry my meal. I sat and read the paper. I think I had a second coffee: I usually do, when I’ve time to kill. I must have been there for an hour at least.’

  ‘So you left a restaurant about seven miles from Brunton at around half past eight on that evening. I have to tell you that our information from Forensic is that Sarah Dunne was killed some time between nine and eleven on that night.’

  David felt that he had just sprung a trap of his own making upon himself. He said dully, ‘Everything I’ve told you is true.’

  ‘I’m inclined to believe you, Mr Strachan. To be more precise, I’m ready to believe your account of what you say you did that night, up to the time of half past eight. What happened after you left the Little Chef?’

  ‘I drove back into Preston. Watched the telly in my room. Made myself a cup of tea with the kettle provided. Went to bed just after eleven o’clock.’ He produced the phrases like an automaton, giving the impression that he did not expect them to be believed.

  ‘You didn’t go for a drink in a pub?’

  ‘No. I’m not a big drinking man.’

  ‘Yet you were drinking last night. Half a bottle of wine, you told the station sergeant. Working yourself up for something, were you?’

  ‘No. Well, not for the kind of thing you’re getting at, no.’ He wanted to explain that he’d just clinched an important order in Preston, an order that might keep his job safe. That he’d been excited by the thought of high sexual jinks with Sally, with Miss Whiplash. But the words would not come, and they would surely have been the spur only for ridicule from this remorseless man who questioned him so quietly.

  ‘So you claim that you left the Little Chef at around eight thirty and went back to your bed and breakfast house, watched television, and went quietly to bed at just after eleven.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And can you provide us with the name of anyone who saw you between eight thirty and eleven on that night?’

  ‘No. But it’s what happened.’

  A long pause, during which Peach stared steadily into the mobile and increasingly desperate features of the wretched man on the other side of the small, square table. ‘Did you kill Sarah Dunne, Mr Strachan?’

  ‘No. I wasn’t even in Brunton that night.’

  Lucy Blake said softly, ‘Let’s move on to last night. What were you proposing to do when you picked up Miss Aspin?’

  For a moment, he didn’t even knew who she meant. Then he realized that Aspin must be the second name of the well-rounded Sally. Somehow, he’d expected something more exotic. ‘I was going to have sex with her. I paid her for it.’ He looked at the table. It seemed more difficult to talk about the details of it, to explain himself properly, to this attractive young woman.

  ‘Yes, Mr Strachan. You paid over the odds, in fact, according to Miss Aspin. Tell us why you did that, please.’

  ‘I – I thought she deserved it. I’d been with her before, you see, and I wanted to reward her properly.’ He looked hopefully into the young face, wondering how much she knew about the way these things went.

  She gave him a faint, mirthless smile. ‘You don’t strike me as the sentimental type, Mr Strachan. I can’t see you paying more than is needed to secure a woman for sex. You were paying in advance for extra services, weren’t you?’

  He glanced at Peach, silent now when he would have wanted him to be putting the questions, and found the near-black eyes in the round face studying him more intently than ever. David said in a voice they could barely hear. ‘Yes. I gave her ten pounds extra because I was anticipating a little extra fun. Fun we never had, thanks to the intervention of a couple of heavy policemen.’

  ‘And what kind of fun would it have been, Mr Strachan?’ The quiet but fiercely concentrated DS Blake was as implacable as her chief in the pursuit of the truth.

  Strachan glanced miserably from one to the other. ‘I was hoping for extra services. That’s what you just called it, isn’t it?’

  ‘You tell me, Mr Strachan. What kind of extra services?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really know how to put it. Not just straight sex, you see. A bit of – well, aggression, I suppose you’d call it. I asked her to get the whip out, knock me about a bit. Nothing too vicious, you understand, but—’

  ‘And what were you proposing to do to her, Mr Strachan? How was Miss Aspin going to suffer at your hands for her extra payment?’

  ‘Well, I can’t really be precise. I was calling her Miss Whiplash, you see. Bit of a joke. Hoping she’d strut about a bit and invite me to discipline her. I think that’s what they call it.’

  ‘Is that so? And what would this “discipline” have involved for Miss Aspin? Going to knock her about a bit, were you? Going to knock her about a lot, perhaps. Was she going to go the way that Sarah Dunne had gone?’

  ‘No!’ He screamed the word, wanting to make her stop, wanting to convince them that he couldn’t have done it.

  The two didn’t even flinch at his shout, didn’t make even that slight concession to the threat of hysteria. They listened to his frantic monosyllable echoing round the windowless cube of the interview room. Then Peach said quietly, ‘Then why did you have a length of rope in your pocket?’

  There was a long interval, at the end of which Peach said quietly into the recorder, ‘For the purposes of the tape, Mr Strachan is shaking his head.’

  David said nothing for another few seconds. When he spoke, his voice was hollow with despair. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t have the rope. Of course I had it. I got it out from under the seat of the car and took it into the house with me.’

  ‘So what were you proposing to do with it in the house?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not exactly. We were going to play-act a bit. Or that is what I hoped we were going to do. I thought she’d strut about with the whip, smack me once or twice with it, and then I’d – well, discipline her, like I said. Pretend to slap her. Show her the rope.’

  Peach studied the man as dispassionately as ever in his anguish. ‘You were going to put that rope round her neck, weren’t you?’

  He wanted to deny it, but he hadn’t the energy left to fight them. ‘Yes. I suppose so. I wasn’t going to hurt her, though. Not really. I just thought that if all went well with the rest of it and we got excited, I’d put the piece of rope round her neck, threaten her a little, even tighten it gently, and then finish off by coming inside her with a big orgasm.’ He stared at the scratched surface of the table.

  ‘And you think you wouldn’t have hurt her, wouldn’t even have alarmed her, with a performance like that?’

  He could hear the disbelief in Peach’s voice, but he was too exhausted, too beaten down by the two of them, to fight back. He said miserably, ‘It turns me on, that sort of thing. It would have got me excited. I wouldn’t have hurt her.’

  ‘You know how Sarah Dunne was killed.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Peach gave him a faint, disbelieving smile. ‘She was killed with a ligature round her throat, Mr Strachan. She died in a few seconds. Someone pulled something tight round her neck from behind. Something very similar to your four-feet piece of rope.’

  ‘It wasn’t me. And I wouldn’t have killed Sally. I only wanted a bit of fun that I couldn’t get at home.’

  ‘A bit of fun like that can quickly get out of hand. Is that what happened with Sarah Dunne?’

  ‘No. I didn
’t even know the girl.’

  Peach regarded him steadily, waiting for long seconds, until David Strachan could not forbear to lift his hunted eyes from the table and look at him.

  ‘I think you should get yourself a brief, Mr Strachan. We shall be asking for a DNA sample, when you’ve had a little time in your cell.’

  Twenty

  Father John Devoy took the familiar dark-blue anorak from its peg in the caretaker’s room behind the youth club. He had given up speculating now about the original owner. The garment had become the costume for that other persona which took him over when he ventured out at night on to the narrow streets of the old part of Brunton, the section of the town where vice hid its head in the shadows.

  The anorak was too big for him, but usually he felt something comforting in its looseness about his shoulders. Tonight it seemed more than usually large, seemed to hang about him ‘like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief’. The phrase came springing back at him from childhood. Probably from Macbeth, he thought. That memory must have been stored away in his subconscious, when he had thought it long gone. What other effects was that subconscious having upon him? He saw the priest who operated by day now as another and totally different person. He felt his world collapsing around him, like Macbeth’s Scotland when the wood of Dunsinane began to move upon him.

  He took a more circuitous route than usual towards the street he knew he was destined to tread, as if he hoped that even now there might be some intervention from the angels to save him from his sin. But no divine intercession, no sudden shaft of saving grace, no voice thundering in Damascene command from the dark clouds above him, interrupted Father Devoy’s journey into the dark night of his soul.

  The old cotton town of Brunton, with its deserted mills presiding like ruined monasteries over the drab industrial landscape, was not the place for miracles or for angels.

  John Devoy flicked up the hood on the anorak over his head and sank his hands deep into its pockets, as though its voluminous folds could save him from his fate. But his hand felt the fifty pounds in notes that he had taken from the parish funds earlier in the day; even his sense of touch reminded him of how deep he had trodden into evil.

  He would spend his fifty pounds and his lust on the woman he had spoken to on Monday night, the one he had tried to warn about leading men into sin. And after he had lain with her, after she had sold her body to him for money, he would warn her again about the wretchedness of her life, about the danger she presented, with her soft curves and her whore’s smile and her readiness to sell the sweetest intimacies of herself to vulnerable men.

  And if she ignored his warnings as she had last night, he wouldn’t let it go. Men were weak vessels, who must be protected from the occasions of sin, especially when those occasions presented themselves in this delectable, irresistible form. That other girl had died, almost two weeks ago; this one should take heed of that, if she was to avoid the same divine retribution.

  The woman was on the usual street. He felt that he had known all along that she would be there, blonde and beguiling, in her appointed place. Tonight had an air of inevitability about it. Something, but he was not yet sure what, was coming to a conclusion.

  Usually he had lurked in the shadows, waiting for his moment, and had then declared himself with an urgency which stemmed from his need for secrecy. But tonight he strolled quite openly along the street, meeting the smiling strumpet head-on, walking without hesitation towards the instrument of the Devil.

  They spoke the dialogue as if playing out a pre-determined scene, his own lines rising effortlessly to his lips for his part in this strange drama. Toyah Burgess had been half-expecting him. She flashed him a wide glimpse of her white teeth through the darkness and said, ‘You again. I hope you mean business and not preaching tonight!’

  John Devoy scarcely registered that word from his other calling, the one he left behind in the presbytery. He said urgently, ‘I want you! Want you badly! And I’ve got the money.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear! That’s what keeps the wheels of the world turning, for a simple girl like me.’

  She thrust her arm through his, urged him along over the uneven stone flags, which glistened with wetness even on this moonless night.

  He felt his lust rising immediately at her touch, even though it was only her fingers on his forearm through the thick padding of the anorak. He let his hand steal up to her breast, muttered again into her ear, ‘I’ve got the money.’

  ‘All in good time, big boy!’ Toyah said automatically. She was wondering if this was what the touch of a murderer felt like, these familiar, unremarkable, questing fingers. She removed his hand from her breast and put it back on her forearm, placing her other hand on top of it and walking along in step, as if they were any normal, affectionate couple. Now that the moment had come, she did not feel afraid, for she knew she had protection, knew she was doing no more than playing out a minor but essential scene in what might eventually prove to be a great drama.

  John Devoy found in his tension that his hearing seemed more acute. He listened to the sound of their footsteps on the pavement, moving in harmony, landing together in a silence which seemed more than usually profound. Far off, over the tops of many buildings, he heard the faint sound of a bus pulling away from the town’s centre. His lines in the play seemed to have dried up now. He said uncertainly, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this and neither should you. If you won’t promise to give up selling yourself like this, I’ll have to—’

  The men came from behind him, strong, unyielding, and certain of what they had to do. He heard a shrill yelp of pain as his wrist was forced up hard between his shoulderblades. It took him a second to realize that the sound had come from him.

  Then Toyah Burgess was saying, ‘There’s no need to hurt him! Please don’t hurt him more than you need to!’ The concern in her voice must be for him, he thought. He could scarcely believe it possible, such was the depth of his self-loathing.

  Then one of the men was shouting the words of arrest into his ear, warning him that he did not have to say anything but if he withheld information which he later intended to use in court, it could prejudice his defence.

  They loaded him carefully into the police car which now drew up alongside them, watching him carefully for any sign of aggression, any attempt to elude their hands.

  Father Devoy attempted neither resistance nor escape. His distress was submerged in an overwhelming tide of relief.

  On the following morning, Thursday the twenty-seventh of November, DCI Peach climbed the stairs to Chief Superintendent Tucker’s penthouse office with a lightened heart. He could see the end of this one, now. But he would put money on the fact that Tommy Bloody Tucker hadn’t a clue about it.

  Tucker didn’t look pleased to see him. ‘I have a busy schedule today,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘Just keeping you briefed on the Sarah Dunne case, sir. As per your orders.’

  ‘I see. Well, it appears the murderer probably won’t be found on our patch, Peach. In view of the connection now established with the murders of those two prostitutes in the Midlands.’

  ‘No connection, sir.’ Percy gave just a hint of his satisfaction in delivering that information. Silly old sod hadn’t listened to his radio or read his newspapers, as usual. Probably Bru¨nnhilde Barbara only allowed him Wogan and Radio 2 in the mornings.

  ‘I think you’ll find there is, Peach. That phone call last Saturday night was authenticated as coming from Birmingham and—’

  ‘Man’s been arrested, sir. In Walsall. He’s confessed to killing the two toms in Birmingham. But he wasn’t anywhere near Lancashire on the night Sarah Dunne was killed. I’ve spoken to the CID Superintendent in Walsall. The man they have in custody was on a works outing in Walsall that night. With seventy-three witnesses, apparently.’

  Tucker stared hard into the impassive round face on the other side of the desk, then took a deep breath. ‘I was never really convinced about this theory of a ser
ial killer, you know. You jump to conclusions rather too readily, if I may say so, Percy. Without weighing all the evidence. I feel now that I shouldn’t really have allowed you to sell me this one.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ Percy fixed his gaze on his favourite spot six inches above Tucker’s head and resolved not to allow himself the release of anger.

  ‘I shan’t make it public that you were mistaken about this, of course.’

  ‘That’s good to hear, sir.’

  ‘Solidarity, that’s the key to good management and a cohesive CID unit. I’m here to carry the can.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Paid for it, in fact. So we’ll say no more about this particular wild goose chase.’

  He’ll have convinced himself in seconds that the serial killer really was my notion, thought Peach, making a mental note to get a videotape of Tucker’s media briefing on the previous Tuesday. He said, ‘That phone call trying to link our murder with the pair in the Midlands may still be relevant, sir.’

  ‘Relevant?’ Tucker spoke the word as if it were part of an obscure foreign tongue.

  ‘Yes, sir. Someone made the phone call, even though it wasn’t the Walsall killer. Someone with a genuine Birmingham accent, according to our forensic audiologist. And possibly, just possibly, someone wanting to throw us off the scent. To divert us from our local suspects towards the false trail in the Midlands.’

  Tucker frowned as he digested this difficult idea. ‘I suppose that is possible. But probably over-subtle. I think you’ll find in due course that this was no more than a straightforward hoax caller.’

  ‘That is possible, of course, sir.’

  ‘Not only possible, but overwhelmingly the most likely explanation. You get a lot of hoax calls, when a murder goes undetected for any length of time, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Peach noted with renewed irritation his chief’s capacity to move from the outrageous to the blindin’ bleedin’ obvious.

  ‘Anyway, you’d better get on with bringing me up to date on this case. I’ve a busy schedule today, you know.’