David Strachan looked out of the window at the spire of the Catholic church. It stood tall and thin against the blue sky of the late autumn afternoon, seeming to soar even higher in the crispness of the cold, clear day. They said this Preston church had the second highest in the country, with only Salisbury Cathedral reaching higher towards heaven. The sun was setting over the Fylde coast, ten miles to the west, making the blue of the sky even deeper for the last hour of the day. Soon it would be dark, and Strachan could hardly wait for that to happen.
The manager of the textile warehouse was exceptionally long-winded, in David’s view. He was going to renew the contract for the computers and their servicing. That had been fairly clear from the outset, but this plump, middle-aged man with the glasses on the end of his nose and the fringe of grey hair around his balding pate was not going to be rushed. He had ordered tea to be brought up for his meeting with David. It was a courtesy the sales representative would normally have appreciated, but today he just wanted to have the business side of his day completed and be away to anticipate the wilder pleasures of the night.
Miss Whiplash had grown in erotic stature through his anticipation of the last few days, her allure more that of a voluptuous femme fatale than that of a buxom prostitute running a little to seed, which was the reality. He had gone over and over in his mind the things they would do together, the way he would threaten her, the way she would respond, imprisoning his limbs, watching him break the bonds and menace her anew in turn. They would lead each other on to wilder and wilder things. At this moment, it was very difficult for him to concentrate on the more mundane business of earning a living.
‘So when will the new models actually be available? And when do you propose to deliver and install our new system?’ The manager munched his digestive biscuit contentedly and looked at David Strachan over the top of his glasses.
‘The new PLCs will be on the market from the first of January. And we’ll have your new system up and running by the end of the month at the latest.’
‘If we decide that we need the refurbishment, of course.’ The manager smiled, applying the little turn of the screw that it was traditional for salesmen to suffer.
‘Of course. But I think you’d be foolish not to modernize, Mr Woolley. Especially at the rates we are now offering you.’
Surely the old bugger wasn’t going to back out now? Surely he was just going through the motions, trying ineffectively to make the representative suffer? David visualized this old buffer with Miss Whiplash. He’d be frightened to death! It gave him confidence to think of the man like that. David tried not to let his contempt come out in his tone as he said, ‘We’ve agreed on the savings that an efficient system is going to afford you.’
‘You’ve produced certain figures, I agree. Shown how we could make savings. Theoretically, that is. I always suspect figures. Lies, damn lies and statistics, you know.’ The manager smiled patronizingly.
Strachan hadn’t really the patience to begin to sell him the system all over again. He said, ‘You can take it from me, Mr Woolley, that what we are offering will make you a more effective unit. And you won’t beat us on price, either. I’m quite confident of that.’
‘More tea, Mr – er, Strachan, isn’t it?’ He filled up David’s cup without waiting for a reply. ‘Well, I’ll be perfectly honest, it seems to make sense to me. But I think I ought just to put it to our accountancy department, before we confirm the contract. Some smart young lads in there.’
That’s what you were supposed to be doing between our last meeting and this one, thought David. Checking it out with your accountancy boys and coming back to me with any questions they raised. He forced a smile and said, ‘I can assure you that they won’t find any flaws in the scenario I’ve put to you, Mr Woolley. The computations we worked out and which I discussed with you a fortnight ago were based on your latest sales figures.’ He wondered if he dare risk a threat. He drank a large mouthful of his unwanted, lukewarm tea and took the plunge. ‘I wouldn’t like to see you go backwards in the queue for our new models. Not after the relationship we’ve built up and the esteem in which I now hold your business.’
‘I wasn’t really questioning the deal we’d worked out. I was only trying to give the young Turks in the accountancy department their say, but I wouldn’t like to jeopardize the relationship we’ve built up between us over the years.’ David heard the welcome sound of an executive back-tracking. Woolley stood up and proffered his hand. ‘You can take it as read that what we’ve agreed between us will go ahead. Let’s shake on that now.’
In another ten minutes, David Strachan was out of the high Edwardian brick building and back in his car, scarcely feeling the cold of the November twilight. The sun had gone now, though the sky still showed red in the west. It was almost five o’clock. A few hours to kill yet before the excitements of the evening.
With an order under his belt, he would award himself a leisurely meal in a decent place, with three courses and an unhurried perusal of the morning paper he had been too preoccupied to read earlier. He turned the Vectra towards the coast and an excellent restaurant he knew in Lytham St Annes, moving deliberately in the opposite direction from Brunton, a man postponing a treat to make it all the sweeter when it came.
He would enjoy anticipating the drama, then relish even more the event itself. And the piece of rope lay clean and ready beneath his seat.
DCI Peach looked at Detective Constable Pickering with practised repugnance. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything to do with the case, but it’s got to be checked out, so get your arse over to Bolton, lad, and do the checking.’
‘Yes, sir. Could you just tell me what the background is, please? Let me know exactly what it is I’m supposed to be checking?’
Peach regarded the fresh-faced eagerness above the gangling frame with distaste. Pickering was so much his physical opposite, so much the counter to his own stocky, muscled frame, the DC’s innocent features such a contrast to his own aggressive, experienced round face, that he felt bound to resent him. And at twenty-two, Pickering was a good sixteen years his junior: quite enough to warrant resentment in any man. Peach’s irritation was triggered on a bad day by the fact that Gordon Pickering looked both na?¨ve and gullible. The fact that the man within the lanky frame was neither gauche nor easily deceived was what had made Percy Peach select him for CID work. But there was no reason to remind him of that.
Peach looked at the note in front of him. ‘Some bright spark over in Bolton has been on to us about what looks like a straightforward domestic. Apparently a nineteen-year-old girl’s been badly knocked about by some bloke. But this keen young constable has spotted that it happened here in Brunton. And being as the girl’s not very different in age from our murder victim, he thought there might just be a connection. Especially as the girl’s keeping shtum about who did it, despite her mother’s best efforts to make her talk.’
‘Needs checking out, sir, as you say. Can I take DC McNair with me?’
‘No you cannot, lad. You need to keep your mind on the job, not on your trousers.’ DC Alison McNair was the latest addition to Brunton CID, a nubile blonde with a soft Scottish accent.
‘Worth a try, sir.’ Pickering was shrewd enough to have divined by now that Peach’s bark was much worse than his bite, when he was dealing with colleagues rather than villains.
Thirty miles away on the Fylde coast, Detective Inspector Boyd was more straightforward with his orders than Percy Peach. Perhaps in the Traffic Section of policing, routine was what was needed.
A Tuesday night at the end of November in Blackpool was not going to cause many traffic problems, with the Illuminations over for the year and the landladies shutting down the guest houses and flying to Tenerife and Lanzarote. Tom Boyd left his instructions for the night, had a solitary drink in the pub near the station, and was microwaving a solitary meal at home by six thirty.
The devil finds work for idle hands, they say. Perhaps it was some small, very personal devil working within Boyd which made idleness such a danger for him. He tried to watch television, but he could find nothing that engaged his attention. Almost before he knew what he was doing, he found himself outside again, sitting behind the wheel of his car. He sat there for quite some time before he made the inevitable move and started the engine.
The Chief Constable had been a lot more sympathetic than Tom Boyd had expected. He’d said he’d give his Inspector every support with character references, if he was contacted by the CID at Brunton. Well, he deserved that: he’d kept his nose clean and done his job impeccably for twenty years and more: he wouldn’t have made Inspector if he hadn’t, would he? Nevertheless, he found that the CC’s assurance of support had cheered him up.
He cruised past the road works on the A583, which he had been out to see earlier in the day, driving deliberately slowly, avoiding the M55 motorway, which would have whisked him eastwards, past Preston and towards danger. The east must be avoided. Inspector Boyd turned north, towards Lancaster and away from temptation. The Chief Constable certainly wouldn’t expect him to venture near Brunton again, after the warnings he’d had.
And he wouldn’t. Even from his own selfish point of view, he would be committing professional suicide if he was caught looking for women in that area again. And he had too much bitter experience of rebuttals to believe that he could pick up sex without paying for it. He’d have a quiet drink in a country pub, maybe exchange gossip with the locals if they were friendly, and then go back to his empty, soulless house and his solitary bed.
He found just the place when he turned off the main road and into the large village of Garstang. It was a friendly pub, with real ale, plenty of action around the dartboard, and locals ready to exchange conversation with him. He could spend a pleasant hour or two here, and then drive back to Blackpool as sedately as he had driven here.
But the images which he had put aside thrust themselves back into his mind. Katie Clegg, tall and lithe, dark-haired and sultry, waving the handcuffs in front of his eyes with that challenging, provocative smile, seemed to beckon to him like some modern siren. She was the right age for him, Katie, young enough to be highly desirable, old enough to offer him the experience he wanted.
He couldn’t think now why he’d ever bothered with the very young ones, who weren’t much more than kids. Katie Clegg was the one for him. He could almost feel her slim throat beneath his fingers, almost see the fear seeping into the wide brown eyes above the professional smile.
Tom Boyd’s personal devil was active within him, fighting hard against the common sense and decorum which prevailed in the rest of his life, playing the trump card of lust at the key moment of the game. He forgot all about real ale and the conviviality of this pleasant place.
Tom Boyd turned the Vectra towards Brunton and quickened his speed.
Detective Constable Pickering was finding Mrs Pitt very difficult to deal with.
She was around fifty and she treated him as if he was a callow youth in need of her counsel. ‘This should never have happened to her, you know. She’s obviously got in with a bad crowd since she’s left home.’ Her brow darkened as she glanced again at her daughter’s face. ‘I’d just like to have five minutes on my own with the so-called boyfriend who did this, I can tell you!’
Gordon Pickering wondered how he could stem the tide and talk to the girl herself. Jenny Pitt didn’t help him much. She cast occasional helpless glances at her mother in full flow, then returned her gaze to the carpet, without even looking at the fresh-faced young DC.
She certainly looked in need of care and attention. Her left eye was completely closed, and the swollen flesh around it was green and yellow, darkening into purple on the eyelid. In another day or so, this whole area of her face would be blue-black – a ‘shiner’ in the terms of the pub brawlers who often ended up in police hands, but something which seemed much worse in the shocked white face of an inexperienced young woman.
Pickering wondered quite how inexperienced the girl was. She had obviously been anxious to get away from this over-protective home in semi-detached suburbia. But she had not just rented a room or a shared flat in her home town, as many girls anxious to break the domestic ties did. She had gone to another town altogether, and perhaps taken on a completely different way of life.
As if she read these thoughts, Mrs Pitt said, ‘She’d a job lined up for her at her father’s firm, but would she take it? Too proud for that. Wanted to stand on her own two feet, she said. Wanted to make her own way in the world. The real world. Well, this is what the real world is like, Jenny. This is what happens to girls who don’t heed the warnings they were given!’
She spoke harshly, unable to resist the triumphant vindication of her argument. Then her eyes came back to the distress in front of her and she put her arm round the shoulders of her unresisting daughter and drew her tightly against her. Jenny spoke for the first time since Pickering had arrived at the house. ‘I can’t talk with you here, Mum!’
‘Now come on, Jenny, you know we’ve never—’
‘It really would be better if I could speak to your daughter on her own, Mrs Pitt.’ Pickering looked into the concerned maternal face and tried hard to make use of his youthful appeal. ‘Not many of us find it easy to speak frankly in front of a close relative, you see. Not even when it’s someone so obviously concerned to be helpful as you.’
‘But I can’t just leave her to struggle through on her own.’
‘You can and you should, Mrs Pitt. Jenny’s an adult. She’s no need to have her mother present when we talk to her. And in any case, this isn’t a formal interview. No one’s suggesting Jenny’s done anything wrong. All we want to do is to get to the bottom of who’s done this to her. When we’ve done that, we can set about putting the person who harmed her behind bars.’
The older woman had been waiting to protest all through his speech, but the last words brought her up short. If he was trying to put the man her daughter wanted to protect into prison, this likeable young man was on her wavelength all right. She said, ‘All right. I’ll go and make us all a cup of tea, shall I?’
Thank God for the English addiction, thought Gordon Pickering. ‘That would be very helpful, Mrs Pitt. I’m sure we’d all welcome a cup of tea.’ Always give a parent something to do, or they’ll listen at the door: that was one of Percy Peach’s maxims.
The girl gave him a glance from her one good eye as soon as the door shut behind her mother. ‘I can’t talk. I can’t tell you who did this. I don’t know who did it and I couldn’t tell you if I did.’ The words came in a rush from the mouth which had remained closed for so long.
Gordon Pickering was three years older than this stricken girl, but he felt suddenly that the age-gap was much wider. He said gently, ‘Let’s just work it through, Jenny. You tell me what you know and I’ll fit it into whatever knowledge we already have. We know more than you’d think about what goes on in Brunton.’
She looked at him sharply, her fingers stealing up to the bruised cheek beneath the closed eye, her face wincing as she touched it. ‘The cheekbone isn’t broken, you know. I thought it was, at first. I’ll heal up OK, in a few days.’
‘Boyfriend, was it?’
‘No!’ She looked shocked at the thought.
Her vulnerability made Pickering more determined to get to the bottom of this. And beneath his compassion, the nerve which made him a CID man had begun to tingle. He was certain now that this was not a domestic, that it was linked to some more serious crime. There was even the faint possibility that it might have some tenuous connection with the Sarah Dunne murder, that he might not be here on a wild goose chase after all. He said, ‘We can be very discreet when discretion is needed, Jenny. No one in Brunton except my boss is even aware that I’m here talking to you. So let’s have the facts about this.’
She looked as if she wanted to speak, then shook her head hopelessly and glanced at the door. ‘I can’t speak to you. I really don’t know who it was who did this. And my mother and dad would kill me, if they knew what I’d been doing in Brunton.’
Perhaps she didn’t realize it, but her words were almost an invitation to press her further about that secret life. He heard the distant clatter of crockery in the kitchen at the back of the big old house and said quietly, ‘We need to know about that, Miss Pitt. This is a criminal assault.’
The phrase and the more formal mode of address seemed to convince her that she had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps it was that she really wanted to talk and it was only her fear which was preventing her from doing so. She said in a voice which he could scarcely hear, ‘I got out of my depth. It was my own fault, really. I brought this upon myself.’
It was a beginning, an invitation towards further questioning. Pickering said, ‘And how exactly did you get out of your depth? Your mother will be back very shortly, you know.’
‘You won’t tell her?’
‘Not if you don’t want me to. You’re an adult at nineteen, entitled by law to a certain privacy.’
She glanced again at the door, listened to the reassuring sounds of kitchen activity. They seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet house: perhaps Mrs Pitt was assuring them that she was no eavesdropper. Jenny said with the ghost of a smile, ‘I was planning to break the law myself. That shocks you, doesn’t it?’
‘Not at all. You must remember that we spend our time talking to people who break the law. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. You learn never to be surprised.’
‘I was on the game, you know. Well, planning to be. I’d made a start.’
Pickering tried to keep the excitement from leaping into his voice, to speak as if he had known it all along, as he said, ‘And it was in connection with this that you were attacked?’
She nodded, the memory of the man who had forced his way into her flat and hit her suddenly setting the blood pulsing in her temples and freezing her tongue.
Pickering saw her distress and prompted her. ‘You were told you needed protection if you were going on the streets. That you’d need to pay for that protection.’
‘Yes. A man warned me that prostitution in Brunton was controlled by him. That if I knew what was good for me, I’d pay a percentage of my earnings for his protection.’
Johnson! But could they pin it on him, at the end of all this? Gordon Pickering kept calm and said as formally as he could, ‘Could you describe the circumstances of this warning?’
Another glance at the solid, firmly closed door. Then she spoke urgently, as if she appreciated that time might be limited. ‘He pulled up beside me in a maroon car. A Jaguar, I think. Yes, I’m certain it was. Invited me to get in beside him. I thought – well, I thought—’
‘Thought he wanted to pay you for sex. It’s all right, Jenny. You’ve already told me that’s what you were about.’
‘Yes. Well, it turned out he didn’t want to buy. He was warning me that I needed to come into his organization, that I’d suffer if I tried to go it alone.’
She described the man to him in answer to his simple urgent questioning. She remembered the build, the mouth, the small scars on his forehead and temple. It was Joe Johnson all right, though Pickering doubted whether they could make anything stick in the light of his inevitable denials and the absence of other witnesses. He made a note of where and when the warning had occurred, then said quietly, ‘But it wasn’t the man in the Jaguar who did this to you, was it?’
She shook her head. ‘The man who did this came round to the flat this morning, when the two girls I share with were out. I thought at first it was just another warning. I lost my temper and told him to get out of the house. That was when he hit me. With the back of his hand. He didn’t give me any warning. The shock of it was almost worse than the pain.’ She began to weep quietly at the memory, like a road accident victim with delayed shock.
One of Johnson’s heavies, sent round to back up his master’s message with a physical warning. Gordon had no idea which one, but he would dearly like to see justice done here. He said, ‘You say he did this with the back of his hand. With a single blow, was it?’
‘Yes. He kicked me a few times when I was on the floor, but I think he only hit me once with his hand.’
‘Could you stand up for a moment? Show me exactly how it happened?’
She shuffled uncertainly to her feet, stood opposite the gangling young DC, cringed instinctively as he lifted his arm, even in slow motion. He raised the back of his hand to her cheek, touched it minimally, then stood reflectively for a moment, picturing the scene in the flat he had never seen.
They were frozen in this bizarre tableau when the door opened and Mrs Pitt pushed in a serving wagon with plates of biscuits and cakes and a pot of tea. ‘Just trying to get a picture of the assault on your daughter,’ Pickering explained, blushing furiously as he dropped his loose-jointed arms back to his side.
He acceded to the invitation to tea and a home-made scone, though it was now after seven in the evening. His mind was working furiously on what might be made of this when Peach and the rest of the team got busy upon it. He stood up as soon as he could. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. A female officer will be round in the morning to take photographs of your face and any bruising on your legs, Miss Pitt.’ He turned to the mother. ‘It will be best if your daughter remains here with you for a while, Mrs Pitt. We’ll let you know the outcome of our enquiries.’
He left mother and daughter with their arms round each other’s waists on the doorstep of the solid semi-detached house.
David Strachan felt good with a leisurely meal and half a bottle of wine inside him. He drove slowly through the streets, not at all worried when at first he could not find the woman he wanted. He was quite sure that he would find her sooner or later. He felt destiny hanging about his shoulders tonight.
Sure enough, he spotted Sally Aspin when he circled the block for the second time. She was wearing a cheap imitation fur coat, short enough to show the slit in her skirt, walking securely on the high heels with skill practised over many years, waggling her ample curves appealingly as she heard the car cruising behind her.
He drew up beside her and threw the car door open in invitation. ‘It’s me again, Sally! Mr Whiplash!’ He laughed uproariously, surprising himself with the loudness of his own voice in his excitement.
She hesitated for a moment, then slid her bottom on to the seat beside him and put her hand on his arm, as if she could control his exuberance with her touch. ‘Nice to see you again, big boy!’ she said automatically. She didn’t know how often she had used the phrase in her thirty-eight years, but it seemed to work as well as ever.
He said, ‘Your place or mine, sweetheart?’ and laughed loudly again. ‘It had better be yours, I think!’
‘Mine it is,’ she said, as cheerfully as she could. She was finding this more difficult than she had thought it would be, now that it was upon her. She couldn’t think she’d ever betrayed a customer before.
He drove the car to the house where she operated, needing only minimal instructions, since he remembered most of the way from his last visit. When he had switched off the engine, he turned to her, kissed her, caressed her neck, squeezed her arms, stroked a thigh, fondled a bountiful breast. In other circumstances, she might have welcomed it, from a regular customer. Sally didn’t get much in the way of foreplay these days. It was wham, bang and thank you ma’am, most of the time, and they often forgot the thanks. But you couldn’t grumble, so long as you got their money.
‘We’ll get a little more violent later, sweetheart,’ he murmured into her ear.
She took that as the end of the preliminaries and slid her knees away from him and out of the car. ‘You lock the car up,’ she said. ‘I’ll go ahead and open the door.’ She did not look back, in case he had any other ideas.
That meant that she did not see him get the short length of rope out from under the driving seat. It fitted easily into the pocket of his coat.
He was glad of the oblong of orange light in the doorway of the house to guide him up the shadowed path of the garden. He had the money ready, waved it expansively at her with a grin, and put it in the fruit bowl on the sideboard, as if he had been here many times before. ‘There’s ten quid extra for you to strut your stuff, Miss Whiplash!’ he said with an excited giggle. With the benefit of his fantasies over the last few days and half a bottle of red wine, he had convinced himself that this buxom lady looked forward to the violence and the threat of physical damage as much as he did.
He undressed quickly, not bothering to fold his clothes, not noticing her movement behind him as she reached up the wall unobtrusively and pressed the button the police had installed after they had been round to warn her of the dangers.
She felt like a traitor immediately. This man hadn’t done anything really dangerous last time, after all. Only said he fancied something a bit more violent, and called her Miss Whiplash. That wasn’t so unusual: she had met a lot worse than that in her many years on the game. But the deed was done now. There was no turning back.
He wanted her to get the whip out, muttered to her that Catherine the Great used to beat her men on the bottom before she did it with them. She giggled a little at this unexpected piece of erudition from him; they watched each other self-consciously in the mirror on the wall by her bed.
She had put on black stockings and suspenders, and now she pretended to look for the whip in the drawer, though in truth she knew very well where it was. She had left the door unlocked, and found now that she could not concentrate on the business of arousing the man in the way he wanted, because she was waiting for the sounds of the police arrival.
He was between her thighs when they entered the house, telling her to treat him roughly, chuckling with sexual excitement. There were only two of them, but they burst in like a posse, yelling to him not to move, telling him that he was under arrest, warning him that it might prejudice his defence if he withheld information which he might later use in his defence.
It was noisy but swift. David Strachan stood abject and bewildered, shamed in his nakedness, watching his arousal dying swiftly before his horrified eyes. Sally Aspin wanted to apologize to him, to tell him that it was nothing personal, that toms had been told to turn in all customers who wanted violent sex, as a precaution in the period following the murder of one of their kind.
But Sally said nothing. It was only after the bewildered man had been led away that she realized that he had left her sixty pounds and received nothing.