Stranglehold (3 page)

The hands on the clock in the hall showed 3.17 as Lambert crept past it. He went into the kitchen to make himself a drink, then decided against it as exhaustion wrapped itself about him, crushing him like a great bear.

He did not put the light on in the bedroom: Christine was a light sleeper, and he did not want to disturb her now. That was for his own sake as well as hers; he was too tired even for her sympathy. He left on the light on the landing while he removed his clothes with deliberation and draped them over the chair.

There was enough light through the open door for him to see his wife's head on the pillow. She breathed deeply and quietly. A lock of hair fell becomingly over her left eye, making her look quite young; her hair had no hint of grey, but the oblique light edged it with a silver which made it look as though it were cut from marble. She lay on her back, peaceful, quiet, untroubled by the things he had had to witness. In this half-light he could detect no lines on her forehead; the years seemed to have fallen away from her.

Her position reminded him inevitably of that other woman, whose life had been ended tonight. She had lain as tidily as this; and even more quietly. Creeping between the sheets beside his wife, Lambert thought again of the unknown hands which had composed those dead limbs into that parody of the good religious death.

A murderer who chose to mock them. The kind of damaged mind which was most difficult to detect because it killed without clear motive. His last image as he lost consciousness was of the hands which had arranged that body for him to contemplate. Hands which had killed twice, and would kill again, unless they were arrested.

Lambert had five hours of dreamless sleep. It was enough to refresh him, as it had always been. He had few words for his wife at the breakfast table, but that was not significant: he had never been an early-morning talker.

‘What time did you get in?' Christine looked at him surreptitiously as she set two slices of toast at his left elbow; she knew that if he saw her assessing the state of his health openly, it would annoy him. Men liked to be pampered once they had decided they were ill, but until then they liked to pretend they were creatures of iron. Or this one did: having had only daughters to contend with, she was never sure whether the schoolboy remained in all men as strongly as it did in her husband.

‘Around three, I suppose. I tried not to wake you.' He thought of her unconscious innocence and stillness as he had undressed. She looked altogether more brisk and experienced this morning; despite himself, he found his thoughts returning to that other woman, who had been despatched from life so abruptly when she was still so young.

Christine looked at her watch. ‘I must be off. I've got my slow readers first thing, and I want to make sure the right books are there in the classroom for them.'

He nodded, smearing vegetable-fat margarine across his toast with the grimace of ritual distaste he still thought appropriate to it. ‘There was another one killed last night.'

Trust him to leave the interesting bit until she had no time to discuss it. ‘Another girl?'

‘Yes. Not much more than a girl, anyway.' Not for the first time, he wondered what experiences qualified a girl to become a woman; certainly it was not merely a question of age.

‘Where?' She found herself hoping it was not anywhere where she moved, that it was miles away, in another county. Her world should not contain such things.

‘Out on the edge of the town. Towards Gloucester.'

Too close, then. She felt immediately threatened, and wondered if that small, unpleasant thrill of physical danger was a selfish emotion. Her second thought was maternal, and almost as automatic as her first: she was glad for once that her daughters were married and away from here. Sleepv Oldford seemed suddenly a dangerous place for voting women.

She grabbed her briefcase, swept up her car keys from their place above the radiator. ‘Where exactly, John?'

"Off Mill Lane. On the road out towards Ditton Farm. They're building a new block of flats there, though God knows when.' He had to force out the little snippets of information. For years, he had said nothing in this house about the work which had once almost divided them. Now he made himself say a little, but that little did not come easily.

‘Near the Football Club?'

‘That's right.' He should have thought of that immediately Oldford FC was a flourishing non-league outfit; as the new housing had spread around the town in the 'eighties, so had the ‘gates' and the prosperity of the soccer team increased. There was talk among the optimistic about eventual league status for the club.

The football club had a compact little ground, just a little nearer to the centre of the town than where the policemen had stood beside that slim young body last night. Beneath the permanent stand erected six years earlier, it had its own social club, the
Roosters,
which was the nickname of the team. Drinking there was confined to members, but membership was cheap, and the beer was cheaper than in the town's pubs.

As Oldford FC's success and support had grown, the social club had grown noisier and rougher. There were not too many houses near, but the noise was a continual source of complaint from what residents there were. Lately, there had been more serious disturbances: outbreaks of violence between small gangs, the occasional knife, even on one evening open confrontation between a gang of drunken louts and the police called in to control them.

He should have thought of the place last night was annoyed with himself now that it had been his wife's first thought, when he had overlooked it – Exhaustion made a man inefficient, as he told his subordinates on occasions: he should observe his own dictum. He forced himself to relax, watching his hand as it poured his tea. Rushton and the others would have thought of the
Roosters
dub immediately, even if he hadn't: he must learn to trust his team, just as he had had to learn to delegate.

There was no need to say anything else to his wife. Christine's Fiesta was away through the gates before he had finished castigating himself.

Three hours later he had more immediate problems. Cyril Burgess. MB. Ch.B. had that streak of sadism which seemed possessed by all pathologists, in Lambert's experience: he loved to test the stomachs of working policemen with the detail of his findings. Lambert did not find it an agreeable quality: Burgess had long since understood that, and decided that such squeamishness only added to his amusement.

He stood now by the corpse he had just investigated, threatening at any moment to twitch back the sheet and reveal his awful handiwork. ‘The stomach contents were interesting.' he said affably. ‘I can show you why, if you'd like to see them.'

Lambert shook his head; Burgess, who had known he would refuse, scarcely registered the gesture. ‘Who was she?' he said.

Lambert checked automatically on his notes, relieved to look anywhere away from that shape beneath the sheet on the stainless steel. ‘Harriet Brown. She would have been twenty-one next week. Unmarried.'

‘But not a virgin. Be unusual if she was, nowadays, at that age.'

‘She seems to have been on the game. Or starting on it, perhaps. The uniformed lads knew her, but she had no convictions.' It was the usual route into prostitution. Girls tried it for pin money, or because they were in debt, found it lucrative, and were drawn into it full-time. If they lasted, they usually ended up with pimps. Oldford, thankfully, had not yet many of those; organized prostitution was still seen as a city activity.

‘Local girl?'

‘We don't think so. Word has it that she came here from the Midlands or the North about a year ago. We should know more before the day's out.' He wondered about the girl's parents in some distant town, ignorant as yet of their daughter's death, and pictured some young WPC charged with the duty of breaking the news. Then there would be other relatives; grandparents, perhaps, with a girl of this age. The ripples of suffering spread outwards for weeks; he wondered uselessly if murders might sometimes be prevented if the killers had an overview of the consequences of their acts.

Burgess said, ‘I can give you semen samples for the DNA profile. Your victim had had intercourse not long before death.'

Lambert nodded, still picturing the distress of those faceless parents. ‘Julie Salmon, the first girl killed, had been raped as well.'

Burgess shook his head. ‘You misunderstand me, John. This girl wasn't raped. I said she'd had intercourse, that's all. There's no evidence on the corpse that the act was accompanied by any undue violence.'

Lambert castigated himself for the second time that day, this time for jumping to conclusions. He said woodenly, ‘How long before death?'

Burgess shrugged: he was not prepared to speculate as readily as his medical colleague Don Haworth had done. I should say in her last hour of life. Very probably in her last few minutes, but I couldn't be certain of that.'

‘Are there any tests you could do to be certain?'

‘No. Nothing that would provide evidence strong enough for a court of law. Is it important?'

‘It could be very important. If she is a girl who sold her favours, your semen sample could come from someone who was nowhere near her when she was killed.'

‘There were samples from Julie Salmon. It should be easy enough to compare the two. “Murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”' Burgess smiled benignly, pleased with his mildly improper suggestion. He had an addiction to the crime fiction of the 'thirties, a deplorable weakness as far as Lambert was concerned. It led him to an indulgence in quotations, which he made no attempt to control.

Lambert said drily, ‘That might well be the motto of forensic science. Are you quite sure that there was no evidence of sexual assault on this girl?'

‘As sure as I can be. Of course, modern advice to girls is to take the line of least resistance. Even the police tell women they should not fight if defeat appears inevitable. The fate is no longer seen as worse than death. But unless you assume that she meekly succumbed to avoid injury', you must accept that she was not assaulted.'

Lambert said heavily, to himself as much as to Burgess, ‘Does that mean that these murders were not by the same person?' He had already decided that he would rather that they were not; he would prefer two routine killings to the alternative of a madman embarking on a series of homicides.

Burgess's mischievous grin was in the worst possible taste. ‘You're the policeman. You'll have to decide that, John.' Perhaps he saw that the Superintendent was about to explode, for he went on hastily, ‘But there might be something to be learned from the method of killing, I suppose. It was very similar in both cases.'

‘Strangling.'

‘In layman's terms, yes. But not asphyxiation. Vagal inhibition.'

Lambert wondered where he had heard the phrase recently, then recalled the police surgeon using it in the darkness on the night before. That had been only nine hours previously: it seemed like many more. ‘By the same man?'

Burgess shook his head, disapproving of this lust after certainty. ‘Impossible to say. But there are similarities. Your man – a woman could have done this, by the way, but let's assume not for the moment – applied his thumbs to exactly the same point on the neck in each case. The bruising is almost identical. And death was mercifully swift on both occasions. Technically, it was from heart stoppage, caused by pressure on the carotid arteries in the neck.'

Without warning, Burgess stepped over to the corpse and turned back the top of the white sheet. The girl's face looked even paler in the strong overhead lights here than when it had lain in the undergrowth on the building site. The pathologist said, ‘If death had been from asphyxia, her face would have been purple and there would probably have been bleeding from the nose or the ears. You can see the marks of your man's thumbs clearly enough.' He pointed with his ballpoint at the girl's neck, which looked now as if it had been elongated to accommodate the huge, ugly bruises on each side of the slim throat.

Mercifully, Burgess had exposed only the face and neck of the corpse and not his workings lower down the body. Lambert forced himself to take the sheet and pull it back across the unlined face, so unnaturally serene in spite of the violence it had suffered. He turned away, drawing Burgess with him, putting distance between the two of them and the mutilated flesh they were discussing, guarding against any more visual demonstrations from the pathologist. Then he said, ‘What about those small abrasions on the neck?'

Burgess shook his head. ‘They were made by the girl herself, I'm afraid. When she tried to drag her killer's hands away. It must have been all over in seconds.'

‘Anything under her fingernails?'

‘Nothing useful. The skin and tissue are the girls' own, from those neck scratches you noticed.'

‘Did you find anything on the corpse that might be from the man who killed her?'

‘No. He wore gloves, as did the murderer of Julie Salmon. I can't even tell you what kind of gloves, because I've found no fibres on the neck.'

‘Leather?'

‘It's possible. Plastic of some kind is probably more likely. But I'm guessing – no traces of the gloves have been left on the girl's neck or arms.'

‘So this killer was at pains to leave no trace. And he probably went out expecting to kill.'

Burgess was immediately interested as always in the workings of the detective mind. He looked his question, and Lambert said, ‘On a warm night, he went out with gloves in his pocket. I can't think of many people in Oldford who would do that.'

Burgess said with uncharacteristic humility, ‘Yes, I see that as soon as you say it. Has your Scene of Crime team collected any fibres from her clothing?'