David Strachan made a desultory attempt at Sunday morning sex with his wife. There was no answering caress when he rolled against the sinewy back and put his arm round her, so he desisted quickly. Sod her! She needn’t think that what she had to offer was so bloody marvellous. Unresponsive cow!
He didn’t say any of these things, of course. Instead, he rolled on his back, stared at the grubby woodchip paper on the ceiling, and remembered the woman he had enjoyed in Brunton. He now thought of her as Miss Whiplash, and her ample curves represented a new excitement in his drab life. Miss Whiplash wouldn’t turn him down on a Sunday morning! Miss Whiplash understood what a man needed after a week in a taxing and demeaning job.
He heard the heavy crash of the Sunday papers on the mat downstairs and eased himself out of bed. ‘I’ll bring you a cup of tea up, Eileen,’ he said, his animosity already subsumed in his dreams of the blonde woman in Brunton. That was how mature women should look! There was no reason why a few extra years should necessarily diminish a woman’s attractions. Eileen! He should have known what to expect of a woman with a name like that: the name had already been a generation out of date when he had met her in the supposedly permissive seventies.
He put the kettle on and scanned quickly through the pages of the News of the World and the People. There didn’t seem to be anything very new about the murder of the girl in Brunton nine days ago. They said it was now clear that the girl had been a prostitute, but that had been obvious long ago. There couldn’t be any fresh news: they liked what they termed ‘call-girl killings’, these papers, and they’d certainly have fastened on any new details of the hunt.
He knew he shouldn’t really go back to Brunton, not yet. But Miss Whiplash was awfully tempting; in the hothouse of his imagination, Sally Aspin’s curves grew more ample, her strutting more stately and arrogant, and her dominance more satisfying. And his own retributory violence became more extreme.
And he knew he was due to make a call at a textiles warehouse in Preston on Tuesday. And Preston was only ten miles from Brunton . . .
He heard the toilet flush upstairs as he poured the tea. Eileen was waiting expectantly in bed when he took the tray into the bedroom, lean, frumpish, her hair straggling untidily across her head, the sheets drawn up tight over her non-existent bosom. He forced himself to say cheerfully, ‘I brought the papers up for you, Eileen. If you want to have a bit of a lie-in, I’ll make some toast and you can have your breakfast in bed.’
She looked at him steadily from watery eyes that were the colour of slate. Her mouth continued to droop disapprovingly at the corners. ‘Up to something, are you, David?’ she said. Then she turned her attention to the papers, not expecting any reply from him.
Sometimes David thought he hated all women. The young ones were the worst: you caught them sniggering behind your back sometimes, in the office. And he was pretty sure that on occasions he glimpsed the same contempt among the receptionists and the secretaries at the firms he had to visit. He couldn’t see anything funny in the work he did, the things he had to say when he was trying to get orders. But they did.
And always the young ones, the ones with smooth skins and bright eyes and curvy, supple figures seemed to be the worst. Sometimes David Strachan longed to show them who was really the boss.
He made the toast and another pot of tea, moving very deliberately, because his thoughts were elsewhere. He ate his first piece of toast very slowly, his jaws masticating regularly as his mind dealt with other things.
By the time he had drunk his tea, David Strachan’s mind was made up. He listened for a moment to his wife moving about in the bedroom above his head. He went out and looked at the grey sky above the drab grey lawn behind the house, sniffing the damp cold of late November. There was still no one about at this early Sunday hour.
He went out to the garage and put the piece of rope into the boot of his car.
Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was partnering the Captain of his golf club. The Captain was a pleasant chap, who thought it was part of his duties in his year as Captain to play with as wide a cross-section of his members as possible. Such altruism should be rewarded.
Perhaps it is, in heaven. But on the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-third of November, the Captain was very much on this earth. And his charity was to be very much unrewarded.
On a mild afternoon beneath a pale yellow sun, Tucker’s first and greatest shock came as he walked around the side of the clubhouse to the first tee. Two figures detached themselves from the crowd on the practice putting green and came over to greet them by the side of the first tee: obviously the men who were to be their opponents in this four-ball match. The first of these was a lithe young man whose practice swings as he waited to tee off looked ominously smooth.
The second was Percy Peach. He wore smart new maroon golfing trousers, a cap to cover his bald dome, and a smile which seemed to stretch from ear to ear across his round face. ‘Good afternoon, sir. It was nice for me to get into our team as a late reserve. Now it’s even nicer to find that the luck of the draw has paired me with my respected chief.’
Tucker was quite certain that there was no luck of the draw in this situation, that Peach had engineered the pairings so that he should play against him. The Chief Superintendent licked his lips, introduced the Captain to Percy and his companion, and said, as affably as he could through clenched teeth, ‘You must call me Thomas on the golf course, just as I shall call you Percy.’
‘Excellent, Thomas. And may the best team win!’ Percy was all easy bonhomie, even as Tucker felt his muscles tensing up.
It emerged that Percy’s fit young partner played off six handicap, whilst the Captain and Percy were both nine. Tucker had to admit to a handicap of twenty-four. He stared hard at the sky when he had done so, knowing that he had told Peach that he was ‘about twenty’, not willing to look into that face, which he knew would be so full of childish delight.
The Captain said to Tucker, ‘You’ll be getting shots on fourteen holes, Tom, and on your own course as well!’
‘Looks as if the match will hinge on those shots,’ said Peach, shaking his head sadly. ‘I can’t see us being able to compete, but we’ll do our very best to give you some sort of game.’
The blood pounded already in Tucker’s temples as he went to the first tee.
It is not kind to dwell upon human suffering. Thomas Bulstrode Tucker spent an afternoon stretched upon the golfing rack, which is better not described in detail. Had the Captain not played valiantly, the match would have been all over after eleven or twelve holes.
‘I haven’t been as bad as this for ages,’ said Tucker desperately as he sliced the ball into the woods for the fifth time.
So the bugger has played before, thought the Captain. He summoned a wan smile and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Tom. Everyone has bad days.’
Meanwhile Percy and his taciturn young companion played briskly and competently, and went further and further ahead in the match. Peach had selected the most affable of his many smiles; it broadened each time he addressed Tucker, his sympathy ever more patronizing, his careful enunciation of the name Thomas becoming a caricature of urbane politeness.
Matters came to a head on the fourteenth, when Tucker, aiming a savage and desperate mow at his ball on the tee, scythed it high and right. ‘Where did that one go?’ he said hopelessly.
‘It’s all right, Thomas, I’ve got it marked. It’s on very nearly the same line as my ball, I think.’
The Captain and Peach’s partner had each hit their balls down the left, so Peach bustled cheerfully towards his ball on the other side of the fairway. Tucker, plodding hopelessly after him with his electric trolley, arrived to find his tormentor gazing glumly at a ball which was only just visible. ‘Do you think it might be plugged?’ he said.
Tucker’s spirits rose. Here was a chance to get some of his own back, especially with the other two players well away to their left and out of earshot. In the rules of golf, if not in the playing of the game, he was an expert. He affected to study the ball. ‘It’s just lying well down in the grass, Percy. It’s certainly not plugged,’ he said truculently.
‘No.’ Percy looked at the ball and shook his head in sad agreement. ‘But under the winter rules, one is allowed to move it six inches on the fairway, surely?’
For the first time in two and a half hours, Tucker began to enjoy himself. He stood behind the ball and looked towards the green, pretending to study the line left by the greenkeeper’s mowers. ‘I’m afraid this ball isn’t on the fairway, Percy. Look, you can see the line of the cut grass. This ball is a good foot off the shortly mown area.’ He tried hard to look sad, but that proved beyond him.
Percy nodded his acceptance. Then his face brightened for the third and last time as he stooped nearer to the ball. ‘But look, aren’t these rabbit droppings around it, Thomas? No wonder the ball’s lying so badly – it’s in a rabbit scrape. This must be a hole made by a burrowing animal, which would allow a free drop.’
Tucker crouched low over the ball. He knew what he was going to say, but he wanted it to make maximum impact. This loathsome little bouncing ball of golfing exuberance could be put in his place, at last. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t a rabbit scrape, Percy. A few droppings aren’t enough: I’ve studied the ball closely and there is no evidence that this indentation was made by a burrowing animal. I’m afraid there is no relief available.’
Peach studied the ball sadly for a last few seconds. ‘I have to agree with you, I’m afraid, Thomas.’
He stood sadly and silently three yards from the troublesome ball, making no attempt at movement. The other two players in this little drama were watching the pantomime of debate from the other side of the fairway, unable to hear a word but growing increasingly impatient.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ said Tucker petulantly. ‘The ball may be in an impossible position, but the sooner you make some attempt to play it, the sooner we can all get on with the game.’
‘Oh, I can’t possibly play it, Thomas,’ said Percy happily.
Tucker said heavily, ‘Then for God’s sake pick it up, and let’s get on with the game.’
‘I can’t do that either, Thomas. It’s not my ball, you see. Mine’s forty yards on, down there. This one’s yours.’
Tucker spluttered. Peach found it a most appealing sound. Eventually, his chief hacked at the ball and moved it about two feet, amidst a hail of flying soil. Tucker was not normally a man given to invective, but he now hurled a horrible oath at the inoffensive ball and the gods of golf.
‘Bad luck, Thomas!’ said the voice of his tormentor behind him. When they eventually rejoined the other members of the match, Peach explained to the Captain, ‘It was an impossible lie. I thought your partner was entitled to relief without penalty, but he sportingly refused to take it.’
The Captain muttered an unprintable phrase about his partner and stalked on to the green. A moment later, the partnership had lost five and four.
Thomas Bulstrode Tucker’s discomfort was made complete in the speeches after the meal which followed the match. To a company grown jovial with ale and whisky, the Captain recounted in detail the incident of the ball on the fourteenth. Tucker had to force a sickly smile and keep it fixed upon his countenance for fully four minutes, right through the howls of laughter which greeted the denouement of the story.
Percy Peach’s smile and hilarity were much more genuine.
There was no danger of frost. But it was now a dismal evening; a thin mist hung over the town and the long street glistened with moisture as far as she could see it. The mist made the girl nervous, conjuring up pictures of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes, and then, much worse, of Jack the Ripper.
Not much chance of that sort of thing in twenty-first century Brunton, she told herself, wishing she had not made herself so familiar with the details of the Ripper’s crimes and the things he had practised upon the bodies of those long-dead women. Then a more relevant horror began to gnaw at her mind; she could not dismiss the thought that a girl not much younger than her had died a few streets from here nine days earlier.
A girl who, it now seemed, had been trying to do just what she was doing now. She’d read that in the paper today.
It wasn’t her first time, but Jenny Pitt wasn’t yet experienced enough to know the best times to sell her body. Sunday was a quiet night for tarts in Brunton, much quieter than Friday or Saturday. And she was out on the wet pavements too early: the typical patron needed to be primed with drink before he mustered the urge to spend his money on a woman of the streets.
Jenny hadn’t realized it would be as cold as this. You couldn’t walk briskly, when you were looking for this sort of trade; the last thing you wanted was to look as if you were actually going somewhere. Saunter like Mae West or Marilyn, the old hands had told her, it still works. Wiggle your bottom in a tight skirt – it might be obvious, but it still gets the men reaching for their money.
She’d seen pictures of Monroe, blonde and pouting, threatening a wiggle with every movement, but Mae West was just a name to this nineteen-year-old. She wondered as she strove to suppress her shivers whether either of these vamps had ever operated on a cold wet street in November, in a town tight with its money and drawing its curtains against the onset of winter.
She checked to make sure that the street was still deserted, then flapped her arms vigorously across her chest, trying to beat some warmth back into her slim young frame. You couldn’t wear a proper winter coat, and these leather skirts, tight round your bum and slit well up the thigh, might be all right when you were indoors with central heating, but they were bloody cold when you were out on the bleak and deserted streets of industrial Lancashire.
Jenny Pitt was beginning to despair when she heard the car turn the corner behind her. Its powerful engine made very little noise; had she not been listening hard, she would scarcely have registered it. But it did not accelerate once it was on the straight stretch behind her, as she would have anticipated. Its engine note was no more than a tiny, persistent hum, moving slowly closer to her.
She resisted the temptation to look round. Not yet, she told herself. You must be like a fisherman luring trout; any sudden movement might scare your prey away. For the first time, with the fear of the unknown creeping cold and uninvited into her brain, she began to wonder who was the victim and who was the predator in this strange exchange.
Jenny moved to the very edge of the pavement, hitching her short coat a little beneath her elbows to reveal the full rounded contours of her bottom beneath the tightly stretched leather, taking a slightly longer stride to let the slit in her skirt ride higher still up her shapely thigh. Wiggle your bum now, girl, give it all you’ve got: there might not be another desperate lecher driving around tonight.
She forced herself not to look round until the car was almost beside her, until she sensed the near wing of the Jaguar opposite her waist. Then she turned and stopped, throwing her right hip out to the edge of the pavement, hitching the skirt almost to her crotch, looking half over her shoulder at the driver, giving him the wide, excited smile she had practised in front of the mirror, licking the full lips in anticipation of pleasures to come.
The electric window buzzed down beside her, within two feet of the hip she was proffering. A male voice from the darkness on the other side of the car said tersely, ‘Get in!’
She hesitated, despite the number of times she had told herself that the successful temptress must never falter: if you showed any uncertainty, nervous clients would catch on to it and back off. She didn’t like the sound of that voice; didn’t like venturing into the warm cave of the car. Because this was someone else’s cave, not hers. You should keep control, whenever you could.
Whenever you could: the phrase acknowledged that you weren’t always in a position to dictate what happened, that this was, whatever precautions you chose to take, an uncertain and dangerous business. She slid into the passenger seat beside the voice, finding the leather of her skirt moved easily over the answering leather of the seat, finding that the warm cave smelt of cigars and of that strange, indefinable scent of a man in pursuit of sexual pleasure.
Was it testosterone? Could you smell that, or did you just sense that you could? Jenny Pitt took a breath and muttered what now sounded in her ears like a ritual phrase, ‘Fancy a good fuck, do you, my love?’
She had practised that phrase too, in front of her mirror. All the experienced girls said the punters liked the good old four-letter words, that a ‘fuck’ or a ‘quim’ or a ‘cunt’ got them going, was a promise of high sexual jinks to come. And she’d put that ‘my love’ in herself, to make it more personal, trying to convince her clients that they weren’t just paying for any girl, but getting personal service.
The voice beside her said, ‘You’re going to get yourself into trouble. Serious fucking trouble. Do you realize that, my girl?’
She hadn’t looked directly at him: they didn’t always like the challenge of a full-frontal inspection. Now she regretted that: his anonymity made him more fearsome. The car had lit up briefly when she’d opened the door to get in, and she could have taken advantage of that sudden brief illumination. She said nervously, ‘I give good value. Blow jobs, bondage, all the usual stuff. Anything you want, within reason. And my prices are competitive.’
She wondered if her voice gave away how nervous she felt. She wanted to fling open the wide door of the Jaguar and flee for her life along those damp flagstones she had a minute ago been so glad to leave. But she had a sudden knowledge that she would never even get out of the low seat of the car, that a restraining arm would be flung across her the moment she attempted her first move.
As if he read her thoughts, the driver eased the car softly forward, and the glistening pavement slid away beside her. ‘Competitive are they, your prices? Well, we know why that is, don’t we?’
‘Why?’ She repeated the word stupidly, as if she were a wooden dummy, with the man beside her operating her jaws.
‘No overheads, that’s why.’
‘Overheads?’ He might have had his hand up to the back of her neck: the word came out as if she had not spoken it herself.
‘Overheads. You must accept certain overheads, when you go on the game, my pet.’
She tried not to cringe at the word. ‘If you mean—’
‘I’ll tell you exactly what I mean, shall I!’ The voice came like machine-gun fire out of the darkness. ‘If you’re not to be in danger on the streets, you need certain protection.’
‘Protection?’
‘You need it, and it doesn’t come cheap. But it’s well worth having. I’d go so far as to say that you can’t operate in this town, even in this part of Lancashire, without it.’
‘I don’t know—’
‘You need to operate under an umbrella, to have the protection of a guardian angel, as you might say. It costs, but it makes life easier. Cuts down the opposition, you see.’
‘How much?’
‘Technically, you see, I’d have to see you as opposition, at the moment. And you wouldn’t like what happens to opposition. But I won’t go into that, I’ll let you use your imagination.’
‘But you can’t stop me! You can’t prevent people from sleeping with whomever they want to!’ Jenny wanted to laugh at herself for getting her grammar right: in that moment, she realized how close she was to hysteria. ‘If they want to charge money for it, that’s their choice!’
A hand gloved in black leather took her wrist in a grip of steel. ‘Don’t be silly, pet! I took you for more intelligent than that. If you want to sell it in this town, you sell it under my umbrella. Anyone who doesn’t gets what’s coming to them. And believe me, it isn’t nice.’
‘I believe you. You mean what happened to that girl last week. That girl who was throttled. Sarah Dunne.’ The name came leaping to her lips, when she hadn’t even thought she knew it.
‘I couldn’t possibly comment, pet. But thank goodness you’ve got the message. I’d hate to see that pretty young face get damaged.’
‘How much does it cost, this protection?’
‘Fifty per cent, to start with. Maybe a little less than that, if you’re a good girl and increase your turnover. If you’ll pardon the expression!’ A coarse laugh burst from the darkness into her right ear. ‘On your way, and think about it. We’ll be in contact: we know where you live. And don’t let me find you flashing it around here again, until you’ve joined our happy band.’
Jenny Pitt wanted to argue, but she knew no words were going to come. And she wanted more than anything else to be away from this car, away from the streets, back in the close and claustrophobic warmth of her own small room. She caught a glimpse of squat, cruel features as she tumbled from the car and half-ran, half-stumbled away from it on her pathetic, ridiculous high heels.
The driver watched her disappear with the slowly broadening smile of a sadist. Shapely little arse, he thought, in the right hands. And the right hands would be his, before the year was out. He could have got somebody else to warn the girl off, but there were advantages in this hands-on management!
Joe Johnson pressed his foot softly on the accelerator and felt the power of the Jaguar thrust the seat against his back as he drove away.