Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  Ruth David only spoke to Lambert on the phone, so that she did not notice that he was even more uneasy on the Sunday night than he had been on the Saturday. She listened patiently while he repeated the instructions she had heard several times before. He was like a nervous mother telling her child to be wary of a busy road, she thought.

  It annoyed her: did the man not realize she was jumpy enough, without the old-hen anxieties of her superiors? Sooner or later, the Strangler was bound to strike, if they went on with this deception. That was a thought that had excited her when she was persuading the top brass to use her in the scheme. Now that it was in progress, she felt fearful rather than excited.

  Last night it had felt like amateur dramatics when she had put on the black tights and the garish make-up, as though there would be two hours of make-believe and giggling congratulations at the end of the evening. But tonight did not feel like a second night of the same play.

  She had a new rose-pink silk blouse which exactly matched her make-up; she tried to give herself a smile by wondering how she might enter the details of it on her expenses claim. With the tight black skirt and the red shoes, it seemed to give the right impression of availability and brassy sex. She studied herself in the mirror, shook her ash-blonde hair free, and murmured ‘Come on, Raunchy Ruth!’ at the reflection she saw. The smile she so wanted to see would not come. Perhaps it would be all right when she was on stage: it always had been in the past.

  And it was, in the sense that the part seemed to take her over. The Roosters was busier that night, even though there was no live music. She managed to sit at a table in the centre of the floor, where she could create her effects without having to strain too hard. Without being upstaged by anyone, she thought grimly.

  She noticed that there was a bigger cross-section of society in the place tonight, a better representation of the various groups of supporters a football club attracts. Don Haworth, the club doctor and police surgeon, was sitting with a couple of members of the board at a table at the end of the room furthest from the bar. They looked at her curiously; perhaps they had seen her in here before, but not in this persona. And of course they would not know that she was in the police, since she had never worked in Oldford before. Haworth smiled at her, then turned to speak to a woman who was the theatre sister at Oldford Hospital. Ruth preferred not to contemplate what tonight’s impersonation might be doing to her reputation.

  Ben Dexter came and sat on her table. He did not speak to her directly, but began to include her in the talk of his group, as if in due course he hoped to strike up a more personal conversation. She was glad to see Paul Williams keeping a surreptitious eye on developments from the next table. There was no sign of Darren Pickering. She had found herself hoping that Lambert would say that they had charged him when he rang, so that she need not attempt again to spring the trap on their anonymous psychopath.

  She was studying her surroundings and displaying her legs when a waiter in his maroon trousers and white shirt appeared at her side and put a large gin and tonic on the table at her elbow. Someone had done his research: that was the drink she had sipped last night, though she had made sure that most of it was tonic. When she looked her puzzlement, the waiter said impassively, ‘With the Chairman’s compliments, miss.’ It was impossible to tell from his expression whether this was a service he had performed many times before.

  Ruth picked the glass up, eyed it curiously, rolled it in her hands for a moment, and then sipped it. That was the reaction her part seemed to demand, though she wished she had been prepared for this bit of stage business. There was much more gin than tonic in this glass. She turned her head slowly, wondering if it was really the football club Chairman had favoured her with this early salvo at her dubious virtue.

  She had to raise her eyes before she saw the source of it. From the small landing outside the hospitality suite he used as his own, Charlie Kemp watched until she noticed him, then slowly raised his own glass in salutation and smiled. In his dark suit, he looked curiously like a figure from a vintage Hollywood movie she had seen at the university cinema club. She could almost hear him saying, ‘Here’s looking at you, doll!’

  She would have been amazed to learn that Kemp had taken the gesture from exactly such a film, as he took most of what he thought of as his social poise. He gave her his Edward G. Robinson smile and went back into the panelled room behind him.

  Sergeant Ruth David did not have time to ponder on what he might be planning there. Vic Knowles, busy acknowledging the greetings appropriate to the new manager of Oldford FC, detached himself from a group of admirers and came across to talk to her. He was dressed informally but well, if a little too flashily for her taste. The red and white of his expensive sweatshirt might be in the team colours, but the silver bracelet on his left wrist was a little over the top. For the first time that evening, she managed a little inward smile, at her own expense. She was hardly the one to be criticizing anyone for dressing to attract attention.

  She looked round the animated scene, and decided that she was attracting plenty of interest; perhaps the news of her conduct in here last night had spread. In truth, she underestimated her looks in that judgement. She was a striking woman, with strong features and the ash-blonde hair that made men’s heads turn easily enough. Her willowy, athletic figure had brought plenty of excitement to the young bloods of the Roosters even before she had decided to accentuate her obvious charms. The difference now was that she was declaring herself more available. Perhaps even generally available, to those who could afford it.

  When someone offered her the opportunity with a comment about money, she laughed loudly and said, ‘Well, a girl’s got to make a living somehow. And believe me, it ain’t easy in these hard times.’ The giggle with which she topped this off was itself a come-on. She sounded to herself like a parody of the real thing, a send-up of a vapid goodtime girl, but that would hardly matter in this assembly. The important thing was to be noticed.

  She looked around at the animated array of male faces around her, steeling herself to ignore the resentful looks from the females. She wondered for a moment whether any of those myriad eyes which were intermittently upon her belonged to the Strangler.

  Then she banished such conjecture; in the circumstances in which she was operating, which demanded all her concentration, it was a dangerous indulgence. In any case, the Strangler might not be here at all. There appeared to be a connection with the Roosters, but that might be no more than that the murderer had waited for his victims outside the club, following them from there until he found a suitable place to strike them down.

  Back in the Murder Room at Oldford CID, Lambert experienced the familiar helplessness of waiting and wondering. He was glad that DI Rushton was still not present, for he had already caught himself snapping irritably at Johnson when the Sergeant had made an innocent query. Rushton’s punctilious attention to detail, his need to occupy himself with paperwork as the crisis approached, would have needled him tonight.

  The situation was made worse by the fact that only he and the Chief Constable were aware of the suggestion Lambert had made that morning about the identity of their killer. The concealment of information from the rest of his team was unique as far as John Lambert was concerned, and it made him uneasy with himself as well as the situation.

  At ten o’clock, George Harding came into the room himself. There was a hasty fastening of buttons among the uniformed men, a tightening of ties pulled slack by the plain-clothes officers who wore them. He took Lambert outside for a moment, leaving a rustle of excitement and speculation in the room behind him. The Chief Constable in at ten o’clock on a Sunday night? Things must be moving! Each man and woman nervously checked the parts assigned to them in the night’s business. It would never do to make a mistake with the Chief Constable breathing down your neck.

  It was purely a conditioned police reflex to the sudden presence of top brass. With a serial killer about and three girls already dead, attention was not
going to wander. Most of the men in the Murder Room that Sunday night now knew that one of their own number, Ruth David, was at the centre of the night’s efforts. Certainly not one of them was going to give less than a hundred per cent to the job.

  George Harding found himself actually enjoying the excitement of an investigation. Contrary to popular police mythology, some chief and deputy chief constables did miss direct involvement with the arrest of criminals. Harding was copper enough still to scent the successful conclusion of a serious crime investigation.

  He envied Lambert the air of excited anticipation which hung about the station, understood tonight why the Superintendent clung to his direct involvement in the investigations he headed. He understood also why Lambert now fretted at the enforced inaction, why he found waiting for things to happen the most difficult task of all.

  Harding said impulsively to Lambert, ‘Go out on the route she’s to take yourself, if you like, John. Choose your own point, but don’t upset the system.’ It was the first time he had used his Superintendent’s first name. Perhaps it was a sign of the trust he now accorded him.

  He tried to thrust aside the idea that if Lambert’s preposterous idea should turn out to be just that, it would do no harm if it was the Superintendent who was close to it when it was exposed, while his Chief Constable was safely distanced. He could not be sure of course, but he did not think that that had been his first consideration.

  When it was time to leave the Roosters, Ruth David found it difficult to do so on her own. Both Ben Dexter and Vic Knowles had made bids to accompany her during the last hour at the club, and there were other offers as the glasses were collected and the disco player was disconnected.

  She took advantage of some noisy exchanges in the gents’ cloakroom to pass quickly from the brightly lit foyer of the club into the summer darkness outside, slipping quietly through the door before her departure could be noted, or her own resolution weaken.

  It was dry tonight, with only a light breeze, but the sliver of moon was too low in the sky yet to offer much illumination, especially as the early part of her route was between narrow streets of tall houses. She walked casually, with one arm resting on her shoulder-bag and the other swinging lightly at her side. The sounds of noisy departures from the Roosters gradually receded into the darkness behind her.

  When there were gaps in the houses on her left, she could see an orange glow on the horizon, the aura of the lights from some larger town: Cheltenham, she fancied, but her geography had always been patchy, and her sense of direction not that which might reasonably be expected of a police officer. Telling herself this, she realized that she was trying to divert herself from the business in hand.

  That was not a good idea. The Strangler merited her most intense concentration.

  They had varied the route a little from last night, making it even more lonely, taking her through a redevelopment area, where terraces of empty houses were presently to be demolished. The same team of unseen officers was overseeing her progress, losing a second night of their weekend to the demands of the scheme. Normally the team would have been changed, but Lambert, mindful of the thought that the killer could possibly be a policeman, had wanted to keep the knowledge of this attempt to as few people as possible.

  What Ruth David had not appreciated was that in this area there was virtually no street lighting. There must have been two hundred yards between the single lamp which shone outside the small pub which still functioned after the loss of its clientele and the brighter, newer lamp which blazed where the muted orange behind the curtains showed that the houses were occupied.

  This, if anywhere, was surely Strangler territory. It was not as dangerous as it looked: Ruth knew that there were officers sited in at least two of the empty houses as she passed between them. The sound of her footsteps echoed eerily back to her from the dark brick walls as her high heels rang over the old flagstones. She tried to whistle as she sauntered jauntily past the house where she thought there were friends, but could produce no sound from her dry lips.

  It looked as if tonight’s journey was going to be even quieter than Saturday’s. The only person who had been anywhere near her was an elderly man walking a small dog on a lead, and he had turned away at her approach and moved down a street which ran at right-angles to hers. There was no sign of even an approach such as that fumbling, amiable drunk had made last night. She would welcome that harmless presence now.

  She was acting on behalf of all women. If this plan succeeded and the Strangler was caught, the women of Oldford, of the whole region, would be safer as they walked the streets of the places where they lived. That grandiose purpose did not seem to raise her spirits on these dark streets as it had when she had first enthused about the scheme.

  She reached the end of the area that was earmarked for redevelopment, began to move again among houses which had lights. Behind those upstairs windows, people were going peacefully to bed. Perhaps a few of them were making love. Legitimately. She glanced up as she went along, counting the lights on each block as she passed, ticking off the doors as once she had ticked off the days to a family holiday at the seaside.

  There was one patch of darkness on her left, a dark cave on another road that had been included now on her slightly extended route. As she came up with it, she saw the agent’s board advertising the development of luxury flats, and realized with a little frisson of apprehension that this must be the place where Hetty Brown, the second of the victims, had been killed.

  It was perhaps because she was looking to her left that the man got close to her before she saw him. He came from the right, out of the shadows of the trees at the ends of the long front gardens there. There were lights behind him, but they only made his features more obscure, confining his visibility to no more than a silhouette against the distant amber light from the bay window of a detached house. He held up his right hand as he came, in a gesture that was meant to be reassuring, and he called a greeting in a voice which she recognized.

  It was an educated voice. The confident voice of a professional man, who was used to dealing with the public and having their unquestioning respect. A voice which threw her off her guard, for the split second which could have been fatal.

  He did not stop talking as he came right up to her. It was only when he raised both hands at once that she saw that he was wearing some sort of mask over the lower part of his face. And the hands which came at her throat glistened with plastic. Transparent plastic.

  She knew the rules of combat. She should not have allowed the hands to get to her throat, but once they were there, you did not try to drag them away: that would be a contest of strengths, and a man would be stronger. Especially a madman, as she knew now this must surely be.

  She tried to thrust her right foot round behind his left heel, so that she might throw him backwards, might crash his head on the flagstone, might smash it until there was no life there. She was reduced in the moment when those cold plastic hands fell upon her throat to a vicious fighting animal, wanting not merely to survive but to kill her adversary.

  Her ploy did not work. She had always feared these high heels, but they had been a necessary part of her costume for the role. Now, as they scratched ineffectively to get a grip on the stone, they were going to kill her.

  The Strangler, as they had all said, was swift and efficient. She felt his thumbs pressing into her throat like a tightening vice. Vagal inhibition, they called it: it was quick, and the pain was short. With all her remaining strength, she drove her knee up into the man’s groin, trying to make it even sharper as she felt it drive accurately into his genitals.

  She heard him gasp, felt him jack-knife almost double with the pain. But he kept his grip upon her throat, bearing her backward into the hedge, moving her towards the spot where he had laid out Hetty Brown like a mediaeval effigy, beginning to shake her like a rag doll. He was glad it was a Sunday night, as he watched the dying eyes. He would lay her out, he decided in this her last moment, exactl
y as he had laid out that other girl who offered her favours too easily. In exactly the same spot. The symmetry of it pleased him.

  He never even heard the running feet. As the blood pounded in his ears and the blood-lust in his brain, he heard neither the shouts nor the whistles. He saw Ruth David rising gingerly from the hedge, heard her reassuring her colleagues that she was all right, without understanding the deception that had been practised upon him.

  His arms were pinioned firmly behind him as Lambert uttered the words of the caution, so that it had to be police fingers which undid the straps and removed the green cotton which covered his face below the blazing eyes. They put him in the back of the patrol car with the thin plastic of the surgical gloves still upon his hands.

  Dr Donald Haworth would be the first police surgeon to be convicted of multiple murder.

  CHAPTER 21

  Rushton looked better when he came in on Monday morning. He had still not got his wife back home, but he had rested and looked more like his normal efficient self. But he was resentful that the case should have reached its climax without him.

  He stared dully at his computer. He was glad the Strangler had been caught. Of course he was. But it was almost a personal affront that they should have caught the man without his presence. Without even the assistance of the complex system of cross-referencing of which he had been so proud. He had not even made a file on Don Haworth, though he had carefully recorded much of the medical information the doctor had fed them so cunningly.

  Detective-Inspector Christopher Rushton looked sourly at the modern technology he had used so proudly and decided that on this occasion it had been a dead loss.

  When he said as much, Lambert said generously, ‘Not entirely, Chris. It helped to eliminate a lot of people from the search, and it concentrated our minds on the common factors in the killings.’ In truth, he felt a little guilty that he had insisted on Rushton’s absence over the weekend; he was so much a natural hunter of criminals himself that he understood the feelings of the younger man perfectly. He said by way of apology, ‘You did look pretty seedy at our meeting on Saturday morning, you know.’