Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  Darren Pickering did not react, unless his long pull at his lager could be called a reaction. He looked round the club. This early on a Wednesday evening, it was still not half full. ‘Not much action here. Let’s go down the town.’ He drained his glass and stood up, straightening his powerful limbs ostentatiously beneath the jeans and the overstretched shirt.

  Dexter glanced at his expensive watch, then lounged back, straightening his long legs beside the table and studying his feet. ‘No. Let’s give it another half-hour and see what turns up.’

  Pickering said obstinately, ‘I’m going anyway,’ turned upon his companion, and walked out. He had suddenly realized that he wanted to be on his own. He felt good as he emerged into the cooler air of the car park. For once, he had made this decision, not Dexter.

  Neither of them had seen Charlie Kemp watching their separation from the small glass observation panel above them.

  Amy Coleford did not go to the Roosters that Wednesday night. Some of the lurid imaginings of her neighbour about the two girls who had died in the last three weeks had stayed obstinately in her mind, long after she had thought she had shrugged them away.

  She went into Oldford, hoping secretly to pick up the kindly middle-aged man who had been content merely to fondle her for half an hour two nights earlier. Easy money, that, she told herself; if the silly fool was prepared to pay her thirty pounds for a quick grope, she was certainly prepared to take his money. She was working hard at creating around herself the porcelain-hard glazing of bright indifference she saw in the more experienced practitioners of her trade. Emotions, she knew, must be kept for home: this was business. But she was not finding the distinction easy. A small part of her still wondered about the lives her clients went back to when they left her.

  Oldford was quiet. Any experienced street-walker would have told her that it was too small a town to have many good pitches, that a Wednesday evening in summer when dusk was scarcely departed was not a good time. She should have given her phone number to those customers who were affluent and harmless, and waited at home for them to ring for her services. Then, with an eager client on the other end of the line, she could have announced her list of charges for the various services she was prepared to offer. With youth on her side, it would have been easy to build up a list of regular and harmless clients.

  But Amy Coleford was new to the game and knew none of this. Without the dubious benefit of a pimp to organize her work, or advice from an older practitioner of the ancient profession, she was learning the hard way. She would learn the ropes in time – if she was allowed that time.

  She tried a road which led off the town’s main street and down to a shabby inn at the bottom of a gentle slope. There were shops down both sides of the road, most of them with flats above. It was darker here, with only a strip of sky visible between the tops of the three-storey buildings. Men did not like to conduct the first negotiations in a place that was too well-lit.

  But she had not been there five minutes when a harsh female voice from a doorway behind her said, ‘And what the hell do you think you’re doing, you little cow?’

  It was an older woman, unmistakably looking for trade in her short black leather skirt. Her peroxided hair bounced with fury as she warned off the young rival, her lined face raw with anger beneath the mask of make-up. Amy had never heard such a vicious string of obscenities before, not even from Harry in their rows before he had left her. It shook her: for the first time in months she felt the need of the mother who was dead.

  She walked up and down the High Street for a few minutes, trying to recover the composure the woman had battered away. Then a police car pulled up alongside her. ‘What are you doing, love?’ the non-driving policeman asked her. He knew well enough: they had been watching her for five minutes.

  ‘I – I’m waiting for a friend. I – I don’t think she’s going to come,’ she said. The man’s brown, humorous eyes, shadowed by his black and white hat, seemed to see right through her.

  ‘Get home, love, while you can. And don’t let us see you touting for custom here again, or we’ll have to take you in.’ They watched her walk a hundred yards, looking back twice over her shoulder to see if they were still watching her. Then the car eased quietly forward and stopped again at her elbow. ‘Do you want a lift home, love?’

  She was tempted. Then something told her she must not let the police know her address. They were the enemy, weren’t they? ‘No, thanks, I’ll walk. I haven’t far to go,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘Suit yourself then, love, but take care. You know about these killings we’ve been having. You stay home at nights there’s a good girl.’ He was not from anywhere round Oldford; his Yorkshire accent seemed to her immensely reassuring, so that she did not want to leave the security it suggested. He was older than she had thought at first. She had a sudden fantasy of him as a client, putting his arms round her protectively when they had finished, wanting to forbid her ever to sell herself again. She might even accept. The police car was gone before she had dismissed the notion.

  She had thought she might call in at the Roosters club after all; she could see the lights of it, no more than two hundred yards away at one point and seeming nearer in the summer darkness. But she was more shaken and depressed than she would admit by the memory of that raddled woman in the town centre. Was this what she must come to in due course? The future stretched blankly away in front of her, impenetrable and ominous.

  For once, she would cut her losses and go home. It would mean paying Mrs Price needlessly for her baby-sitting, but she had done well enough in her short career to be able to afford that. She began to think of reasons she could give for her early return, cheering herself up with the thought of her children’s sleeping faces.

  She did not hear the car which had been following her when it stopped. She heard its driver’s door shut quietly a moment later, but she apprehended no particular danger from that.

  It was only when she heard the footsteps, a good two minutes later, that she felt the first thrill of fear. She looked back; at the outskirts of the town, the lights were poor and widely spaced. She saw only the silhouette of a figure, intensely black against the yellow light behind him. He looked larger like that, and taller still when he raised his right arm above his head in a single, restraining gesture.

  He might be the customer she had given up hope of attracting, and for a moment she thought of turning towards him with the welcoming smile she had practised in front of her mirror. But he had not called out, and his silence was suddenly significant to her.

  She began to run, cursing now the high heels she had thought such essential footwear when she went out.

  He loped behind her, his footsteps less noisy now that he ran than when he had walked. She wondered if it was really so, or whether her own haste and the wind that rushed past her ears was shutting out other sounds. She could not be more than three hundred yards from home now, but half of it was down a lane with nothing but a straggling hawthorn hedge on one side and a single house, set well back from the road, on the other.

  She thought of turning into the driveway of that house, but there were high rhododendrons which shut out the sky for thirty yards beyond the gates, and she could not face the possibility of being overtaken in that darkness. She tried to increase her speed as she passed the gates: they seemed to swim past her in slow motion, as if someone was replaying the scene to study her futile flight at his leisure.

  She wondered why the man had not overtaken her yet. He was no more than ten yards behind her, and he must surely be capable of arresting her stuttering progress now whenever he wished. Then came the worst moment of her horror, as she realized that he was merely biding his time, playing with her like a cat with a mouse. He would attack when she was at the least illuminated part of her route.

  She wanted to turn and scream at him, to hurl defiance and abuse, to kick and scratch, perhaps even to put him to flight by the fury of her resistance. But the legs which so obstinately refuse
d to flee any faster also would not let her stop. With her lungs bursting, she flung herself on towards the light which marked the first house of her road and possible safety.

  She was at the darkest point when the hand fell over her mouth, gagging her, preventing her from flinging forth the wild screams which might still save her if there was anyone to hear them. She tasted the smooth glove in her mouth, tried unavailingly to close her teeth and bite it.

  Then she heard the man laugh, hoarsely, excitedly. He was trying to twist her to face him. Suddenly, illogicallv she knew that he wanted to see her face as she died. She must not turn round, or let him turn her. She kicked out wildly with her heels, tore fiercely at the strong forearm that pressed so tight across her neck, refusing all the while to see the face of the man who was going to kill her.

  It could have been only a matter of time. She was making no forward progress, and he was immeasurably the stronger of the two. But her struggling saved her, by the single extra minute it bought for her.

  A car turned the corner at the end of the lane, by the lamp which she had been trying to reach, and came slowly towards them. Her assailant was aware of it before she was; it was not until he released her that she registered that the vehicle was there.

  Suddenly, he was gone, half walking and half running back along the way they had come. Amy staggered forward, knowing she should stop the vehicle and secure her salvation, unable in her extremity to utter a sound from the throat which had a moment ago been crushed. She lurched unevenly towards home, expecting the vehicle to stop as it drew level with her.

  She realized afterwards that she had assumed that it was the police car she had seen in the town centre: all she could see were the two orbs of light from the headlamps. Perhaps, from the speed with which he had released her, her attacker had thought the same. In fact, the car moved slowly past her, and she did not think to raise her arms in distress until she knew she must be outside the vision of the driver. It was an old blue saloon, its exhaust blowing a little from a hole: it moved on down the lane behind her without even checking its pace.

  But it had saved her. The man who had followed her had disappeared rapidly before it. She hastened on, into her own road and towards the sanctuary of her house, looking fearfully behind her but seeing no more of the man who had followed her. He must be back at his car now. She could still taste the plastic of his glove in her mouth.

  There was only a forty-watt reading lamp switched on in the lounge: Mrs Price, concentrating on her television film had no need of more. She did not notice how white and shaken young Amy was. And she was anxious to get away, so that she could catch the end of the film on her own set next door. Her haste made her miss the only real bit of melodrama that had fleetingly entered her drab life.

  Amy found that Harry had left a little of his whisky behind him. There were about two inches in the bottom of a bottle under the sink, where she had hidden it from him months ago. She poured it into a tumbler and drank it like medicine, laughing a little hysterically as she saw her face screwed up in the mirror.

  She was careful not to breathe on the children as she checked their sleeping forms before she crept into bed.

  The whisky worked quickly: she did not realize that there were about six measures in the glass she had poured. Her last thought before she fell asleep was that there was no point in reporting the assault to the police. She had not seen the man, and she did not want the police asking about how she managed to support her children on her own. She had far better keep quiet.

  It was the last and most serious of the foolish decisions she took that day.

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘It’s our Ladies’ Night in two weeks,’ Charles Kemp reminded his wife. ‘You’ve got the date in your diary, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s been there for months.’ Diana Kemp looked in her dressing-table mirror and made a minor adjustment to her right eyebrow, studying her husband surreptitiously as he moved about the room behind her. He was running more obviously to fat now. He had always been a powerfully built man, seeming stocky despite being nearly six feet tall, but in their early days he had been hard and muscular. Now she could see his belly drooping a little above the belt of his trousers.

  Had there been love still between them, she could have been quite affectionate about this touch of physical weakness; as it was, she found she rejoiced to see it. She wondered how his other women reacted to it. Perhaps his money would blind them to it for a little while. But she was long past deceiving herself.

  ‘Need a new frock, will you?’ Kemp still spoke to his wife as his father had once treated his mother, so that dresses were still frocks to him. Party frocks, they used to call them, when he was a lad. And women could always be bribed to good behaviour by the offer of a new one, in those days.

  ‘I shan’t be going.’ Diana was pleased with the way she delivered this. It came out calm and clear, as she had intended. Modern women would have had no difficulty with the delivery, but she had been rehearsing it for four days. She could hear the pulse drumming in her head, even now, when the announcement was out.

  Charles said, ‘What do you mean, you won’t be going?’ It was like a line in a bad soap, one of those American things she had insisted on watching a year or two back, but he couldn’t think of any other reaction. He needed to think; already he was wondering what pressures he could apply to her when ordinary persuasion failed.

  ‘Just that I won’t. I don’t want to. You can go on your own.’ She picked up a nail file and began to smooth some invisible blemish on the nail of the index finger of her left hand. She did not normally spend much time on such things; now she found them quite useful. They saved her from looking at her husband, reinforced the air of indifference which she did not feel but so wanted to project.

  ‘But you’ve got to, Di,’ he said clumsily. ‘I can’t go to a Ladies’ Night on my own. Not when I’ve got a wife. Not when I’m to be the Master of the Lodge next year.’ He realized anew how important to him it was to be Master, how much he treasured that assurance of respectability.

  ‘That’s up to you. Sort it out as you think fit. Next time you play your dressing-up games with the other little boys.’

  She shocked herself with the words: she had never spoken like this before; had even, in the early days, enjoyed putting on her finery to go out with him to the occasional Masonic functions where women were permitted. But with the surprise that she should speak to him like this came also an exhilaration. Her part in this exchange was not proving as difficult as she had thought it would be in the days of her anticipation.

  He came over and stood behind her, placing a hand on each of her plump shoulders. It was a long time since he had done anything like that, and he felt her flesh stiffen under her dress. ‘Come on, old girl. Don’t go sulky on me. Is it the change giving you problems again? We’ll –’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Can’t you get it into your thick head that you can’t write everything off to the menopause?’ It was the first time he had heard her call it that. He had let her go her own way too much lately, he thought, been too confident that this section of his life would take care of itself while he got on with the rest. Perhaps the separate rooms hadn’t been such a good idea after all. His eyes fell upon a copy of Cosmopolitan on her bedside table. She had been filling her head with these silly ideas of independence.

  But she’d come round, if he gave her a little attention. She always had done. ‘Listen, why don’t you go and get your hair done, and we’ll talk about this later?’

  ‘I had it done yesterday. You just haven’t looked at me.’ She was triumphant in her grimness, not afraid to look at his face in the mirror now, enjoying his disconcerted reaction.

  ‘Sorry, old girl, I should have noticed. It’s just that I’ve been rather busy at work these days, with –’

  ‘It isn’t. And I’m not your “old girl”. Not your girl of any kind. I’m a woman, and one that’s fed up with you and your ways.’

  He tried
stroking her hair, another half-forgotten gesture from their youth. It was dry and hard now beneath his fingers, where once it had fallen soft and lustrous over the back of her neck. ‘I need you, Diane. These blokes sneer at me behind my back. You give me credibility.’

  It was so near to the truth that for a moment she weakened. It took her back to the old days, when the streetfighter making his way had needed both her support and the cloak of respectability provided by a wife who knew nothing of his more dubious dealings. He so seldom told her the truth now that his vulnerability almost won a concession from her.

  Then she thought of the last twelve months and hardened her resolve. ‘They won’t stop sneering at you because of me. They’re sorry for me, those who know anything about you, because they know the way you use me. Wheeling me out to be examined whenever you need to show a dutiful wife, ignoring me the rest of the time.’

  ‘It was your idea to have separate rooms.’ He felt himself being drawn into the argument he did not want, the one he could not win.

  ‘Only because I was sick of you coming home stinking of a different whore every night.’ She checked herself, feeling herself being persuaded into anger and resentment. She had intended to be cool as ice about this. She didn’t think he’d hit her, not any more, but she didn’t want the kind of row where they flung obscenities and accusations at each other. He was better at that than she was; she would fight this battle on her own ground.

  ‘You’ve always enjoyed our Masonic do’s,’ he said. He was not used to having to get his way simply with words. He was used to having weapons to make people do his business: muscle or money or knowledge which could be used to apply the necessary pressure. Without them here, he felt himself powerless to crush her stubborn opposition.