Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  ‘Where did you meet these men?’

  ‘At the Roosters Club, mostly, by the football ground. It’s a big place inside, you know, and always busy. And the drinks are cheap. Cheap and cheerful, Hetty always said it was.’ Another sob racked her thin frame at the thought, but there were no tears.

  ‘Did you bring them here?’

  ‘Sometimes we did, yes. We knew not to come in if the other one was using the room. It didn’t take long.’

  ‘And where else?’

  ‘Sometimes the men had a place.’ So she was silly and inexperienced enough to break the first rule of prostitution, allowing herself to be led on to alien ground. ‘Sometimes it was the back of a car. Once or twice outside, these last few weeks.’

  With each new venue, she sounded a little more desperate, as she contemplated her actions for the first time from the outside. Hook wondered as he had often done before why men paid good money for these squalid, loveless encounters. ‘And did you ever use that building site off Mill Lane, where they’re going to put up new flats?’

  She looked up at him at last, divining in that moment where the girl who had slept in the bed next to hers for almost a year had met her death. Her dark eyes were round with fear in the thin, wet face. ‘Once. About a week ago.’

  ‘And did you tell Hetty about it?’

  She paused, wanting to deny it, knowing that the information might have been her friend’s death warrant. Almost in a whisper, she said, ‘Yes. We told each other everything, you see. It was a kind of protection.’

  But not for Harriet Brown. That thought hung between them for a moment. Then Hook said, ‘Who was Hetty with last night, Debbie?’

  It was the key question, but she could not answer it. ‘I don’t know. I had a boy myself you see, early on. He – he doesn’t pay me. I like him, you see, and I don’t think he knows ...’ She fumbled a little for words, then threw up her hands in a small, hopeless gesture. The tears began again, silently now.

  ‘You left Hetty in the Roosters Club?’

  ‘Yes. In a big group of people. She was always popular. She was so lively, you see.’

  It sounded like the epitaph for a good-time girl, the parallel to the parents’ sorrowful cry of ‘Where did we go wrong?’ which policemen heard so often after a tragedy. ‘We’ll need the names of everyone who was around her in that party when you left.’

  She nodded, thinking already who they were, the frown on her forehead like that of a dutiful schoolgirl beginning her homework.

  ‘And we’ll need the names of all the men you’ve met in the last few months, those hanging around in clubs or pubs, as well as those who’ve actually paid for your services.’

  She winced at the phrase, but he did not mind that; she was perhaps young enough still to be shocked out of her ways, to be protected from herself. He’d try to get one of the better social workers round here, when the CID had finished with her. She said apologetically, ‘I don’t know all their names.’

  He nodded. ‘Descriptions, then, where you don’t. We’ll have plenty of CID people around the Roosters in the next few days, so we can probably pin a name on most of them. And don’t leave anyone out, not even the boyfriend you didn’t charge last night.’

  ‘Oh, but he doesn’t –’

  ‘If he’s nothing to do with it, we need to eliminate him. If what you say is true, we can probably do that almost immediately. What we shall be doing with most of the men down there is eliminating them from the inquiry: that’s the way we work. So don’t leave anyone out, for any reason whatever. Understand?’

  She gave him twenty-three names, while the WDC removed the dead girl’s clothes, carrying fishnet tights and lurex skirts at arm’s length, as befitted the tools of a dubious trade.

  It took them almost an hour, and Hook lingered over his examination of the bathroom and the kitchen, hoping vainly to pick up some trace of the man who had dispatched the girl whose presence was still strong in these small rooms. Perhaps the murderer had even been here last night, or on some previous occasion.

  Debbie Cook had washed her face before they left. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward to use the cracked mirror on the dressing-table, wearing already a bright lipstick, putting blue eye-shadow across her eyelids; donning the uniform which might for a little while longer keep the world at bay.

  CHAPTER 5

  Charles Kemp was forty-eight and successful. No one called him Charles to his face any more, except his old teacher from primary school and three of the top people in his Masonic lodge.

  He paused for just a fraction beneath the big sign which said KEMP’S AUTOS before he passed beneath it and entered the showroom. It always pleased him, that sign; he doubted whether there was a wider or smarter one in the whole of Bristol. Sometimes he drove past at night just to see it illuminated, proclaiming to an uncaring world that Charlie Kemp, sometime eleven-plus failure, street fighter, soccer hooligan, had arrived now, and should be respected as Charles. Some people would have added crook and fraudster to that list, but not in his hearing.

  He was a powerful man, just under six feet tall, but broad-shouldered and weighing fourteen stones. That meant he was a little overweight now, but he was hard and strong still beneath the layer of fat that had come with prosperity, watchful and alert to anything which might threaten his well-being. A man who punched his weight, in more ways than one.

  He went between the rows of gleaming new cars, running his eyes appreciatively over the stainless steel and walnut, sniffing the strong, uncontaminated smell of new leather upholstery from the biggest of them, calling a greeting to the girl behind the desk at the end of the big hall. In the office at the rear of the building, two men waited for him who were even larger than he was.

  They looked uncomfortable enough in their lightweight grey suits to be plain clothes policemen, but they were not. They were Kemp’s muscle, though it was not he but other people who called them that. They were on the payroll as part of his sales force, though they had never sold anything in their lives. They could be persuasive, but not with their tongues.

  He shut the door carefully behind him, inspected the surface of his desk as if he expected to find it ‘bugged’, and sat down carefully in the leather swivel chair behind it. The two men who had waited for him sat down only when he gestured towards the stainless steel upright chairs with their leather seats; they were positioned some way on the other side of the big desk. They could see only the upper part of Kemp’s body, whereas he could see the whole of theirs, including the feet which coiled awkwardly round the feet of their chairs. The sight seemed to give him satisfaction: he looked at the men’s shoes with a small smile for a moment before he spoke.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s all right, boss. You can have the site at the price you offered.’

  ‘Fifteen thousand?’ It was worth three times as much. Even from his position of strength, he would have offered thirty.

  ‘Yes. He was a bit reluctant, even after last week’s accident, but he saw the light of reason when we talked to him.’

  Kemp smiled: his secret smile, which was a mixture of satisfaction with his success and contempt for these instruments he had to use. It had no element of mirth in it.

  ‘Was the torched car still there?’

  ‘Yes. He’d had it pushed to the back of the site, but you could still see it. Spoiled the display, I thought.’

  The speaker smiled at this rare sally into irony, and his companion, who had said not a word so far, took this as the cue for a snigger. His features were not designed for sniggering, and it came out as a manic chuckle, like the exaggeration of a bad stage actor. He knew it did not sound right, and in an effort to cover his embarrassment he said, ‘We told him that, boss, and he turned quite pale. Wayne told him it was a shame it had had to happen to a nice bloke like him.’

  The said Wayne gave his companion a look which warned that there was no need for him to give a full account of their meeting with the ma
n who had owned the car sales site. He took the hint and folded his arms, setting his lips hard, as though determined to keep in check the tongue which seemed to arouse his employer’s distaste. His formidable forearms were tattooed with a variety of patriotic sentiments, but at the moment they were decently hidden beneath the cheap cloth of his suit, as Kemp had ordered they should be.

  ‘Fifteen k‘s good.’ Kemp would concede so much, even to them. Modern management techniques demanded that you gave successful staff a little encouragement, showed them the carrot as well as the stick; even gorillas like this. Kemp said, suddenly expansive, ‘There might be a little bonus in this for you lads, when it’s all gone through.’

  He picked up the internal phone on his desk, anxious to demonstrate even to creatures like this the power and decision he exercised. ‘Eileen, get on to Chris Baker at the solicitor’s and tell him the deal for that car sales site in the city’s going through. Fifteen thousand, tell him. And tell him to make sure the planning permission for the showroom hasn’t run out of time. Get him to get the contract round to Shaw’s legal people p.d.q.’

  He smiled patronizingly at the puzzled faces across his desk. ‘Pretty damn quick!’ he explained with a lofty wave of his hand over the phone after he had replaced the receiver. No harm in letting these minions know that he chased respectable professional men about as well as them. Almost respectable, anyway: Chris Baker knew how to cut a few corners, but legally.

  He addressed the man who had given his report sternly. ‘You didn’t offer Mr Shaw any physical violence?’

  ‘No, boss. We were very careful to do exactly what you said.’ His large face was pained that there should be even the suggestion that he had not followed his orders carefully.

  ‘And you didn’t even threaten him with any grief?’ This to the second man, whose broad forehead seemed abnormally short even beneath his close-cropped hair.

  ‘No, Mr Kemp. He didn’t need much persuasion. Maybe he remembered how we’d leant on him a little when you first offered to buy the place; maybe he’d seen the light when –’

  ‘That’s enough. I didn’t ask you that. I know nothing about that. As far as I’m concerned, this was a straightforward business deal. I made an offer and Davis Shaw accepted it. Get that into your heads, both of you. Memorize it. Repeat it in front of a mirror each night before you go to bed, if you need to. Just in case you’re ever asked about it.’

  They nodded dutifully, and he dismissed them, suddenly weary of the sight of them. They were caricatures. He realized that: assurances to himself like a lot of other things of the wealth and influence he now exercised. But Kemp never read a book, and rarely a newspaper; his images of power and its trappings were drawn from films and television, from fiction that was always a little out of date. He could have used less obvious hard men than these two, but their very appearance was an assurance to him that he had arrived, just as much as his forward position in the queue to be Master of his Lodge was a reassurance to him elsewhere.

  Alone in the office, he permitted himself a slow smile. He had added this latest colony to his motor empire very easily. And it had come ridiculously cheap. Success bred success, like they said. It really was easier after the first million.

  He walked over to the mahogany cabinet in the corner of the room and took out the whisky bottle and the cut-glass tumbler. He put a small measure in the bottom of the glass, savoured the fierce, bitter fire on his tongue. He would have liked a little water with it, but they said you had to drink good whisky neat, the ones who knew. He did not even much like it, in truth, but it was the way to celebrate a business triumph. He had seen it on the films.

  Two hours later, he turned the big, blood-red Mercedes into the car park of the Roosters Social Club. The sign here was not as big as the one over his showroom, but then it made no mention of his name. In theory, he was the humble servant of Oldford Football Club, who could be replaced by a democratic vote of its board. He smiled indulgently at the thought; money talked in football, more than anywhere else. That was one of the clichés he thought he had invented, and he produced it whenever he was short of a sporting thought for the media.

  He turned the car carefully into the rectangle on the tarmac which was marked CHAIRMAN, then walked slowly across the half-acre of floor in the main room of the club. There was a bar along the entire length of the wall at one end of this huge room, where eight staff served hundreds of customers on Fridays and Saturdays. A huge red fibreglass cockerel strutted across the wall above the bar. Its comb and the letters which spelt out the legend ‘Up the Roosters!’ could be lit up with neon lighting in the evenings.

  At the other end of the room was a wide dais, with microphones and the standard electronic equipment to support the specialist gadgetry brought by the bands and groups who played here from time to time. On other nights the space was occupied by the singers and comedians who came to this flourishing centre through their bookings on the club circuit.

  The rest of the space was occupied by round tables and chairs covered with red plastic upholstery. There were lights high above them which could be switched to a variety of colours, and speakers every few yards along the long walls to relay the efforts of the entertainers or the piped music.

  The team played in red and white, and they were the colours which dominated the room. The place was vulgar and noisy, at times even raucous. It was also vibrant and successful. It was Charlie Kemp who had developed it – in his football persona, he was Charlie. He allowed the press to call him that: it was the appropriate name for a man of the people, controlling the people’s game and giving it back to them.

  He had got the idea for this place from the working men’s clubs of the North-East, which he had visited in the earlier days of his career. The beer here was dearer, of course: the profits supported the growth of the football club, though Charlie pretended at every opportunity that most of that derived from his personal beneficence. But the drinks at the Roosters were still carefully cheaper than in the pubs of Oldford. That brought people in, and people gave the place life.

  Charlie Kemp liked crowds, especially when they were somewhat in awe of him, as they were at the football club. Crowds were good for business, and they offered all kinds of possibilities to a resourceful entrepreneur. Staffing, for instance: he had recruited the two men he had just used in Bristol here, watching their performance as weekend bouncers for a little while first.

  And crowds could become customers. You could sell all kinds of things to crowds, provided you could get the supply. Some of them could be very profitable indeed.

  There were other exciting possibilities, too. Girls came here, in a compelling variety of shapes and sizes. With the lights low and the music turned high in the evenings, the place had an excitement and a glamour which disguised its tawdriness from them. After a few drinks, with the presence of fit young men around them – Kemp encouraged the players to mingle here, except on the nights before matches – girls, even women, found this a place of heady excitement.

  And Charlie, though officially without an interest in the Roosters Social Club, controlled all this. Everyone understood that. And especially the women, whose judgement was not generally clouded by the latest successes or failures on the football field. Power was the great aphrodisiac; Charles Kemp had heard that, and stored it away. He took care to make his power apparent as he moved among the crowded tables of the Roosters.

  Many of the girls liked his bluff, no-nonsense style, and he was good at spotting the ones who did. He knew very little about women, but in the heady, artificial world of the Roosters at night, a world where sweat and cheap scent seemed equally at home, neither they nor he were aware of that fact. Charlie thought he could ‘spot a goer’, and some of the girls were flattered enough by the attentions of the man the sports pages called ‘Mr Oldford’ to foster that impression for him.

  Charles Kemp had an overweight, unexciting wife at home. They had separate rooms, and he ventured into hers less and less freq
uently. He thought that in his own way he was fond of her still, but he never investigated those feelings, not being of a reflective nature. She was wheeled out, bejewelled and expensively coiffured, on the occasions when it was necessary to show such a partner. She did not let him down at Ladies’ Nights at the Lodge, or at the charity balls where they danced carefully at arm’s length and conversed with the respectable burghers of the town. She was one of his badges of respectability.

  In the little private suite at the Roosters to which he kept the key, Charlie Kemp indulged in urgent and violent couplings of a different kind. They sometimes frightened the girls involved, and they revealed to him a part of his own nature which he had thought safely suppressed. But these girls were there to be used: didn’t they come to him of their own free will? Besides, they got money, and sometimes employment: Kemp’s extensive range of enterprises could often provide that.

  Indeed, he had been preparing in the last few months to offer lucrative employment to a selection of the girls he watched in the Roosters. There was money in sex, if it was properly organized. Even some of the punters who came here were prepared to pay for it. Not as many as in Bristol or Birmingham, but enough.

  The town was growing, and the oldest trade would grow with it. It was one of Kemp’s principles that one should be in on the ground floor with new developments. A little of the organization he was good at would pay rich dividends to himself as well as to the girls.

  And he could always indulge his darker side with them. That would be a bonus.

  Kemp went into the hospitality suite on the first floor of the building; it had a door at one end which opened straight into the directors’ box in the main stand, but that was kept locked, except on match days. Behind a small door on the opposite wall of the room, the Secretary of Oldford FC had his office. He was an employee of the football club, not Kemp’s; the man was clear enough about that, but as with other things around the club, the distinction was blurred in other people’s minds.