Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  He was glad, though, that he did not have to deal with Chris Rushton’s bureaucratic fussiness as they waited for news. The inspector would have disapproved of the deployment of Sergeant Ruth David at the Roosters, for sure, and reiterated his disquiet about it at every opportunity. Lambert was glad that for the moment Rushton knew nothing of it. He had looked so white and drawn after the media conference in the morning that Lambert had insisted he take the rest of the weekend off.

  He wondered now whether Rushton had gone in pursuit of the wife who had left him or whether he was sitting in white-faced misery at home. He could not see that very serious young man – people of thirty were definitely young to him now – drowning his troubles in drink, or finding any other sort of escapism effective for very long.

  Lambert went moodily across to his room in the CID section and tried to catch up on some of the paperwork connected with lesser cases which had been piling up on his desk during the week. His concentration was not good, and he was glad when he heard the voice of Don Haworth, who had come in to do a blood test on a drunken driver. The man’s passenger would be charged in due course with being drunk and disorderly; they could still hear his noisy protests echoing up from the distant cells.

  ‘Any news of the Strangler?’ said Haworth. The police surgeon was slotting his equipment carefully back into its box; perhaps he only asked for form’s sake, knowing how the case was dominating the thinking of the station. It was good to have someone around who had other concerns than the Strangler. Lambert was grateful anew for the lively interest shown in the case by a doctor who must have a busy practice to attend to during the day. For a moment, he almost told him about Ruth David, then checked himself. Many of his senior officers had been kept in ignorance: he must not tell someone who in strict terms was outside the team.

  ‘We’ve nothing new as yet. Perhaps the officers who are out there tonight will come up with something. Sooner or later, someone close to our man will say something significant, whether wittingly or not.’ He put forward the thought without much confidence. It had happened with serial killers in the past, but he had no great confidence that it was about to happen this time. He was uncomfortably aware that there had sometimes been seven or eight killings before some chance remark set in train the kind of successful pursuit he had just mentioned.

  ‘It must be difficult for your men, listening to the talk in pubs and so on. Trying to sift the one per cent that might be useful from the ninety-nine per cent which is dross.’

  Lambert grinned. ‘That’s the argument for police procedures. If you go through the same routine each time, you build up a kind of expertise, I suppose.’ He said it without a lot of conviction. John Lambert had never been a great one for routine procedures. Yet sometimes, following instinct, he was more thorough than even the book suggested. He had Bert Hook out now, going round the relations of the dead victims, tactfully covering ground that had already been covered, trying to unearth the one significant fact which might have been overlooked until now.

  Don Haworth said, ‘I find it fascinating, you know, all the details of police work: you’ve probably noticed. Perhaps I’m still a schoolboy at heart.’ He laughed, and Lambert wondered whether someone had accused him of that recently. ‘Well, I must get on my way. I shall be glad to get to bed tonight, and I expect you will too. I hope you have good news soon.’

  He went breezily out to his car and left Lambert to take up again the nervous business of waiting to see if the Strangler would attempt anything that night. The Superintendent turned to go back to the Murder Room, though he was aware that if anything dramatic had turned up Johnson would have let him know immediately.

  As he went across the station yard, a white patrol car swung in between the big gates. He looked automatically at the back seat, where any arrested man would be held. A white, square, face stared back at him apprehensively in the split second when the light which illuminated the yard fell upon the window. By the time the patrol men had extricated their prize from the car, Lambert was waiting beside it.

  Standing with his arms thrusting from the T-shirt that was a little too tight, with the handcuffs at his wrist gleaming in the shadows of the car, Darren Pickering looked a pathetic rather than a menacing figure. His head hung down, and his shoulders were hunched, as though he was ashamed of his height and bulk. The truculence he had tried to maintain when he was interviewed in the preceding days had dropped away. There was not even a pretence now at aggression in his bearing. The reaction of the girl to his advances had seen to that. He was still in shock from her screaming.

  The driver of the police car answered Lambert’s unspoken query. ‘He was running away from a girl when we stopped him, sir. He’s told us that already. Doesn’t know her name, he says. But obviously his attentions were not welcome.’ The constable, who was even younger than Pickering and full of the excitement of this arrest, held up his hand to the light, lifting Pickering’s with it where it was handcuffed at the wrist. The blood from the scratches on the back of the hand was still drying. Four crimson ribbons showed where the panic-stricken girl’s nails had dug deep.

  ‘And how did you come by those?’ said Lambert.

  Pickering’s face was set sullen as a child’s who knows he has done wrong but will not admit it. He said, ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. I want a lawyer.’

  Lambert looked down to where blood ran from the other hand as Pickering tried to conceal it. ‘You may need more than a lawyer,’ he said. He turned to the patrol car officers. ‘Put him safe in a cell for the moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll be down to see you presently, Mr Pickering. In the meantime, I advise you to consider your position.’

  He turned abruptly and walked away. He would get nothing out of Pickering immediately; it would do him no harm to sweat in a cell for a little while he checked on what was happening elsewhere. He was still more worried than he dared to reveal about the way they were using Ruth David.

  Back in the Murder Room, he looked round to check they were not overheard before he said to Jack Johnson, ‘Any news yet?’

  The Sergeant knew the source of his anxiety immediately. ‘She’s left the Roosters. A few minutes ago. She’ll be on the route we agreed by now. The first man’s just radioed in to say she’s left his patch. Nothing abnormal to report.’

  ‘Let’s hope they know what they’re doing.’ That was just a symptom of Lambert’s nervousness. The men who were stationed along the streets of Oldford were trained, experienced officers who knew their jobs.

  But they could not radio in until she was well away from them, with no sign of assault or pursuit, so as not to give away any sign that this was a trap to their adversary. That gave a delayed, unreal feeling to her progress to those in the Murder Room. Lambert, following the route they had agreed on a street map at the end of the room, felt like a general who has sent out his troops to do battle and remained well behind the lines himself.

  For Sergeant Ruth David, policewoman-turned-harlot at the front of the action, it was a strange journey. She knew that she was being watched by friends, but she saw none of them, as their expertise in this macabre game dictated that she should not. But their invisibility meant that she had to assert her reason at the expense of her senses, for those senses told her that she was alone in a dangerous world.

  She could see no human presence in the lights which shone and reflected on the wet tarmac. But the shadows thrown by the lamps, advancing and retreating as she moved past each standard, would have suggested to a receptive mind that there were creatures abroad in the dark recesses of the buildings. Her steps echoed with unnatural loudness in the prevailing silence. Lambert and she had chosen a route with little traffic, and the noise of the occasional car in adjacent streets seemed as it ebbed away only to leave the stillness here more profound and threatening.

  She swung her shoulder-bag and sauntered forward resolutely on her high heels, trying not to think of that one pair of baleful eyes which might be following, waiting, preparing to stri
ke. She had to force herself to move like a streetwalker, when she wanted to hurry. Prostitutes would never tout for trade in this deserted place, but she must keep up the part if she was to preserve the deception. It was important, she knew, that she did that, for the psychopathic mind does not take kindly to the idea of being duped.

  She thought back to her boisterous, attention-grabbing departure from the Roosters, and wished that she was surrounded again by all those people and all that light and noise. She had been a popular figure by the end of the evening, though she had needed to work hard in the few breathless phrases she had permitted herself to keep up her tarty image. In those last few minutes at the club, she had refused several offers from would-be escorts to see her home.

  Now, on her lonely journey along the deserted streets of the agreed route, she had to remind herself for the fourth time that she had volunteered herself for this, that she had in fact leapt at the chance of a central role in the hunt for the Strangler.

  If it was successful, it would further her career. But she knew that it had been the excitement, the wish to be involved at the centre of this hunt, that had really motivated her. That grizzled old bugger Lambert had understood that, had told her he knew it when he had delivered her final briefing, after they had agreed the route. His last words for her, perhaps in compensation for the way he had opposed the scheme earlier, had been that her lust for the hunt made her a better copper. She fancied that that might be his highest professional compliment.

  It seemed to take her a long time to make the lonely journey. Once a drunk lurched up to her, offering maudling, beer-soaked compliments to her beauty, trying to put a clumsy arm round her shoulders. It took all her self-control to avoid doing him serious injury: her first instinct was to strike before a man who might be the Strangler got near her throat. Instead, she moved smartly aside, recoiling from the warm stink of stale beer which wafted across her face.

  The man, surprised by the sudden absence of the support he had relied on, stumbled and fell, rolling with one arm in the gutter and a sudden obscenity on the lips which had been mumbling about her attractions. She turned back when she was twenty yards on and saw him, rubber-limbed with drink, struggling on all fours and chuckling at the difficulty he was having in regaining equilibrium.

  She smiled to herself at the alarm she had felt, but she was surprised how her fingers trembled; she had to grip the strap of her shoulder bag firmly to stop them. She forced herself to saunter rather than hurry past the deserted house where Julie Salmon, the first of the murdered girls, had been discovered, reminding herself that she was overseen by invisible, friendly eyes. She could see the raw new boarding across the door of the house through the darkness, as she tried not to think of the body which had lain undiscovered within the place for two days.

  Another man approached her on the last section of her journey. He seemed to advance for minutes on end down the long, straight road where they met. But when he was thirty yards from her, he crossed the street and passed her safely on the other side, his head turned ostentatiously away. Probably he had not wished to alarm her; perhaps, she thought with a grim smile, he had feared that he would be accosted by a prostitute looking for trade. She wiggled her hips with jaunty determination.

  Nevertheless, she was glad to arrive at the house they had specified, where she was to sleep for the night: if the Strangler was observing her, it would give the game away immediately if she went back to the station. She looked up and down the street behind her before going up the two steps to the door; this moment could be the one of maximum vulnerability for a woman surprised. But there was certainly no one within thirty yards of her. She had a nightmare moment when she could not turn her key in the lock, but then it worked and the door opened.

  Inside, there were warmth, and friendly faces, and a hot drink and congratulations. She realized a few minutes later that the policewoman who had received her felt a sense of anti-climax, which she tried hard to share. Instead, she felt only relief.

  She went into her bedroom, looked at the face of the exhausted whore in the mirror, and could scarcely believe that it was her own. She rubbed away that strumpet face with cold cream and tissues and flushed it down the lavatory. Then she removed the clothes she had adopted for the evening, put on a dressing-gown, and went down to the telephone in the hall to ring Lambert.

  He was low-key, professional, reassuring. He made no reference to her ordeal, and for that she was curiously grateful. It put it in context, made it seem once again a part of a job, not a decadent charade. The men along the streets had reported in as agreed once she had cleared their sections of the route. None of them had seen anyone following her who seemed likely to prove their man. They were checking out the men who had tried to walk her home from the Roosters, Paul Williams had been able to give them the names.

  Darren Pickering, one of their leading suspects, had apparently assaulted a girl in another part of the town. He was safely in the cells; Lambert was about to interview him with Bert Hook, who had just returned to the Murder Room after talking to the parents of the first murdered girl, Julie Salmon.

  This account of the search for the Strangler which was going on everywhere without her was strangely reassuring to Ruth David, the woman who had planned to trap him by her own daring ploy.

  As Lambert went through the door of Pickering’s cell, she was falling into an exhausted sleep, with the Superintendent’s last words ringing in her brain, ‘If we haven’t made an arrest, you go again tomorrow night.’

  CHAPTER 20

  On that Sunday morning Lambert did not get to sleep until almost three. At six, he was suddenly awake again, with an idea in his mind that was there even as he woke.

  He revolved it, pulled at it, tried everything he could think of to dispose of it. It was an appalling idea, but it would not go away. Each argument he marshalled against it turned upon him like a spiteful cat in a corner, spitting malevolently where he had hoped for reassurances. He told himself repeatedly that the idea was the product of a fevered, overworked brain. And each time some small new fact emerged from his recollection to support rather than destroy the outrageous notion.

  He lay beside the sleeping Christine, staring at the ceiling with dry, unblinking eyes. There was no proof. Even the circumstantial items which kept suggesting themselves in support of his astounding hypothesis were sparse. But cumulatively they were growing more convincing with each harrowing minute of speculation.

  ‘What time did you get in?’ said Christine. She had not taken long to divine that he was awake and thinking, as she always seemed to do. Before seven, she had made coffee for herself and tea for him in the small, neat kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know. It was almost three, I think.’ He and Bert Hook had spent an hour with Darren Pickering. It was Hook, by an intuitive mixture of bullying, common sense and cajoling, who had eventually got the man to talk. It was Hook who had been convinced when they had finished that Pickering had meant no harm to the girl, that he had been clumsy rather than dangerous. In view of Pickering’s proximity to the other killings, that took a lot of believing. Rushton had not been around last night, or there might well have been a real dust-up between Inspector and Sergeant.

  Lambert decided that he should make sure that Hook was present when the girl was interviewed today. That should settle the matter, one way or the other, with luck. He tried to speculate about Pickering, but he was aware that he was merely diverting himself from the notion which held sway in his mind and was not going to be denied.

  Christine cooked him the bacon and egg she now denied him on all but special occasions. Perhaps she too was trying to turn him aside from the thought which gnawed so persistently at him. She observed him surreptitiously from the door of the kitchen, concentrated, intense, abstracted from his surroundings. She had seen him often enough like this over the years; indeed, his single-mindedness had almost destroyed their marriage twenty years and more ago. There was one new element now in his appearance as he sat slig
htly hunched at the table, toying with the cutlery and staring at the wall on the other side of the breakfast-room. He was ageing now, more rapidly than she cared to admit to herself.

  She divined just how involved he was in this case and its climax when she found that he had gone out and left a rasher of bacon and a tomato untouched.

  The Chief Constable lived in a large house in a splendid garden, one of the last in the area to be built in genuine Cotswold stone. It had a stone wall at the end of its front garden, only four feet high, but soaring at the entrance into high pillars which supported wrought-iron gates.

  George Harding enjoyed his garden. It was his haven from the multifarious cares of his office. He was out there even before breakfast on a Sunday, examining a summer-flowering clematis which had a promising profusion of buds and trying to forget all about the Strangler for a few hours. His initial reaction when he saw Lambert’s old Vauxhall crunching cautiously over the gravel between his gates was one of irritation.

  Professionalism took over immediately. Lambert was not the man to arrive like this without reason. As the Superintendent levered his long frame rather stiffly from the driver’s seat, that opinion was confirmed by his grey-faced concern.

  They went inside to a small, comfortable study, lined with books and decorated with the well-polished scale replicas of the cups Harding had won in long-dead tennis triumphs. In that small, private room, where the two men were securely insulated from the world they had to deal with, Lambert told his Chief Constable of the notion that had burned in his brain from his first moment of consciousness on that Sunday morning.

  Harding found it at first as preposterous as he had. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as Lambert drip-fed him with a series of tiny supporting facts, he came round to the view that there might after all be something in it. He was not committed to agreement: caution had been too deeply built in as he rose up the slippery pole of office for that. But he agreed that the notion must be tested. Meantime, the idea must be kept strictly to the two of them.