Backlash (16 page)

‘Then enlighten me,' Paniatowski said humbly.

‘The reason Denise didn't tell me where she was going is that she didn't know herself.'

‘I see,' Paniatowski said.

Lucy was still smiling. ‘No, you don't. Not yet. Most of the punters who take a girl away on a trip with them don't like to be asked where they're going – they have to go through daily interrogations from their wives, and it's nice, once in a while, to be with someone who isn't always questioning them. Besides, it would spoil the surprise.'

‘The surprise?'

‘There's a part of every punter who takes a girl away which knows that what he's in fact doing is hiring a prostitute for sex. But there's another part of him which likes to pretend he's romancing a girl who's not only prettier than the battleaxe he's left at home, but also seems to have no interest in trying to emasculate him. Punters like him want the girls to be happy. They want them to be thrilled. That's why they normally take them to the seaside.'

‘And
are
the girls thrilled?'

‘Not usually. They're not buying into the same dream as the man they're with – but if they've got any sense, from a business point of view, they at least
pretend
to be over the moon.'

‘Tell me about the man,' Paniatowski said.

‘He says his name is John Smith. You'd be surprised how many of the punters are called John Smith. He's very vague about what he does for a living, but I suspect he's some kind of travelling salesman.'

‘When will they be back?'

‘Again, he didn't say, and she didn't ask.'

‘I'll want to know about it the moment they return to Whitebridge,' Paniatowski said.

‘You will,' Lucy promised.

‘Can I ask you a personal question?' Paniatowski said – knowing that she shouldn't.

‘Why not?' Lucy replied – though there was a caution in her words which belied their apparent casualness.

‘Are you a drug user?' Paniatowski said.

‘Ah, I see!' Lucy replied, shaking her head disappointedly.

‘See what?'

‘I'm a reasonably bright, reasonably intelligent girl, so there's no reason for me to be on the game unless I'm a slave to some narcotic. Is that about it?'

‘That's about it,' Paniatowski admitted guiltily.

‘Everything has to be black and white, doesn't it?' Lucy demanded. ‘You're as bad as the punters. In fact, you're worse – because you should know better.'

‘I made a mistake –
another
mistake – and I'm sorry,' Paniatowski said contritely. ‘I hope this won't affect our relationship.'

‘It won't,' Lucy said, ‘but only because I really do care about the other girls.' She stood up. ‘I'm sure you were about to offer me a cup of tea, but if you don't mind, I think I'll pass.'

‘Lucy . . .' Paniatowski said, almost pleadingly.

‘I'll be in touch,' Lucy said, and then she turned and walked towards the door.

Crane considered bacon sandwiches – dripping with fat – to be bad for the body but good for the soul, and he was enjoying his early morning ration of this soul food in the police canteen when DI Beresford sat down opposite him.

‘Morning, sir,' he said, between mouthfuls of gristle.

‘I'm glad I caught you, because there's been something of a personal nature I've meaning to ask you about,' Beresford said.

The inspector's tone was serious and his face was grave, and despite his best efforts, Crane found himself slipping into a mild panic.

‘A personal nature, you say?' he asked, to buy himself time.

‘That's right,' Beresford agreed.

Has he found out about my degree? Crane wondered. Is he about to ask me why I kept it secret for so long?

Because the fact was that once he'd got to know Beresford and Paniatowski – once he'd begun to trust them not to have the typical bobby's reaction to an ‘egghead' – he'd always meant to tell them about his qualifications, and had only been waiting until the right moment arrived.

But somehow, the moment never had.

‘What was it you wanted to ask, sir?' he said.

‘A friend of mine came to me for advice recently,' Beresford said woodenly, ‘and ever since I gave it, I've been a little concerned that it was the
right
advice.'

‘Oh yes?' Crane said, non-committally.

‘How many women have you slept with, Jack?'

‘I've never kept count, sir.'

‘Oh, come on, you must have!'

‘I haven't,' Crane insisted. ‘You see, when I first went up to uni—'

He stopped, suddenly, aware that he'd been on the point of revealing that he'd been to Oxford, and at a moment which – from the serious expression on Beresford's face – was very clearly
not
the right one.

He tried again. ‘When I started my first job, which was a couple of years before I joined the police, I had a workmate called Eddie who was always bragging about the number of women he'd slept with.'

Or rather, I had rooms on the same staircase as a third year Classics student called Simon Smythe, who bragged about the number of women he slept with, he amended mentally. Simon Smythe! Brilliant mind! Prize shit!

‘Go on,' Beresford said.

‘I soon decided that the reason he went to bed with a woman was not so much for the pleasure he got at the time, as it was for the pleasure it gave him when he could carve another notch on his bedpost once it was all over,' Crane continued. ‘It seemed to me that he was missing out on the main point of the whole process – and that was when I promised myself that when I finally starting sleeping with women, I wouldn't keep a tally.'

‘But if you
wanted
to add them up, you probably could,' Beresford persisted.

‘Probably,' Crane agreed.

‘Which suggests to me that it's more than ten.'

‘Oh yes, I think you could say it's definitely more than ten.'

A look came to Beresford's face which seemed very much like envy – though, of course, it couldn't possibly be that, Crane thought.

‘This friend of mine doesn't have our experience, and that's why he came to me for advice,' Beresford said, awkwardly. ‘You see, he's only ever slept with one woman – and even then, he's only done it once.'

‘How old is he?' Crane asked.

‘About my age,' Beresford said.

‘Then he's a real marvel!' Crane said. ‘They should put him in a cage, and charge people admission just to see him.'

‘The thing is, the woman who he slept with wanted him to hurt her, and he wondered if that was normal,' Beresford ploughed on relentlessly. ‘Now, of course, I told him that had never been my experience at all, but then I got to thinking that one person's experience isn't really enough to base advice on, and I'd better get a second opinion. And that's why I'm talking to you now, Jack. Have you ever come across a woman like that?'

No, but he thought he finally knew who the ‘friend' was, Crane told himself, amazed that this strong, confident inspector – who he hoped to be like, some day – should have led such a sheltered life.

‘I haven't come across one myself,' he said cautiously, ‘but I believe it's quite common. If I was you, I'd tell my friend not to worry. If his girlfriend likes to be hurt – and he doesn't mind hurting her – then there's no reason on earth why they can't carry on just as they have been.'

‘And what if my friend
doesn't
like to hurt her?' Beresford asked. ‘What if all he wants to do is cuddle her and caress her and protect her from all harm?'

‘Then I'm afraid the relationship is going nowhere fast, and the best thing he could do would be to break it off now,' Crane said.

‘I think you're right,' Beresford replied heavily.

Lucy waited until she'd calmed down a little before finding a phone box and dialling a number she knew by heart.

Even so, when the person she was calling answered, she blurted out the first thing that came into her head, which was, ‘I think she's on to me!'

‘That would be DCI Paniatowski we're talking about, would it?' the man on the other end of the line asked calmly.

‘Yes.'

‘If you remember, I told you right from the start that there was a real danger in going to her.'

‘I didn't have any choice in the matter.'

‘There's always a choice.'

‘You weren't here. You didn't see how insistent Marie was that I did something. If I'd turned her down, I wouldn't have been the “me” she thought she knew.'

‘Let's go back a few steps,' the man suggested, still trying to calm her down. ‘What exactly did DCI Paniatowski say to make you think that she was on to you?'

‘She asked me if I used drugs.'

‘Ah!' the man said pensively. ‘And what did you say in response?'

‘I pretended to be angry that she was being so simplistic – that she was looking for an easy answer to explain why the girls were on the street.'

‘Clever,' the man said appreciatively. ‘Very clever – especially since you were thinking on the hoof.'

He chuckled.

‘What's so funny?' Lucy demanded.

‘You said you “pretended” to be angry, but if I know you – and I do – at least a part of that anger wasn't pretence at all.'

‘You're right, it wasn't,' Lucy admitted. ‘So what do I do?'

‘Nothing,' the man said.

‘
Nothing?
'

‘If you change your ways – if you suddenly become more like Paniatowski's picture of how a prostitute should be – it will seem very suspicious indeed to her. Far better to go on as you are – enigmatic and unfathomable.'

‘I think something might really have happened to Grace,' Lucy said. ‘I honestly do.'

‘And possibly it has,' the man agreed. ‘“Something happening” is, as we've discussed before, an occupational hazard.'

‘How can you be so calm?' Lucy asked.

‘One of us has to be,' the man replied, with an edge of rebuke in his voice. ‘You should be grateful that I'm not losing my head, as you obviously appear to be losing yours.'

‘I am grateful,' Lucy said. ‘I depend on you. You know that.'

The man chuckled again. ‘Of course you depend on me,' he agreed. ‘I'm your pimp, aren't I? And what's the point in having a pimp if you can't depend on him?'

The motto that Nathan Jones had suggested for the Whitebridge Over-Sixties Ramblers Association had been, ‘Not one foot in the grave, but two feet on the ground'.

But though he got his way over most things concerning the association – like having the bus pick them up at an impossibly early hour of the morning – he had not prevailed on this occasion, and had been disgusted when most of the members had opted for the amazingly trite, ‘Ramble with the Ramblers'.

The bus – ‘Which was much too early,
whatever
Nathan says,' complained Ethel Hodge – had left them in the middle of the moors at around nine o'clock.

There had been no indications that snow was on its way in Whitebridge, but out on the moors there had been a light – unseasonal – fall, and a carpet of glistening whiteness was spread out before them.

‘Behold, ladies and gentlemen – the true wonder of nature,' Nathan Jones said expansively.

‘Huh, he's even claimin' credit for fixin' the weather for us now,' Ethel Hodge muttered.

It was nearly an hour before they reached the isolated low stone pub which rejoiced in the name of ‘The Top o' the Moors', and by then what snow there had been on the pub's roof had all-but gone, and what there had been in the car park had already turned to slush.

Nathan Jones herded the walkers on to the car park, and formed them into a half-circle.

‘I don't hear him claimin' any credit for this mess underfoot,' Ethel Hodge grumbled. ‘It'll take me a good half-hour to clean these boots, once I get home.'

Nathan Jones inspected the gathering with the critical eye of a regimental sergeant major.

‘Now remember,' he said, in the booming voice which had stood him in good stead when he'd been a mill foreman, ‘the pub isn't open, so there's no point in knocking on the door and asking if you can have a bottle of lemonade.'

‘He treats us like we were gaga,' Ethel Hodge complained to her friend Doris Fielding, as they stood at the edge of the group. ‘But if you want my opinion,
he's
the one who's not quite right in the head.'

‘However,' Nathan Jones continued, ‘the landlord has kindly agreed to let us use his outside toilets. But I needn't remind you that this is something of a courtesy on his part . . .'

‘If you needn't remind us, why are you reminding us?' Ethel called out loudly.

‘. . . and I would ask you to leave them as you find them,' Jones continued, ignoring the interruption.

‘Pity he said that,' Ethel told Doris. ‘I was rather hopin' to take the toilet bowl home with me.'

‘Now as far as I know, there's only one stall in the ladies' toilets, so I suggest that we work on the principle of age before beauty – which means that we should probably let Ethel go first,' Jones concluded.

‘Bastard!' Ethel said under her breath.

But she was glad that – in an effort to score a point – Nathan had put her first in line, because she was fairly bursting to go to the lavvy.