Wages of Sin (29 page)

‘Good. If there's a match, I shall charge the man myself.'

Peach went back down the stairs hoping that that sad creature David Strachan was not guilty of murder. With Tommy Bloody Tucker gunning for him, there must be a very good chance that he was innocent.

J
ohn Devoy presented a wretched figure to the succession of officers who checked on him in his cell at twenty-minute intervals. He sat with his face in his hands on the edge of the bunk, seeming not to alter his position over several hours. When he was eventually taken up to an interview room, he moved like an automaton, heeding the constable's commands but never looking up at him.

Peach took Lucy Blake in with him to question the man, but his attitude was very different from the one he had suggested to Tucker only minutes earlier. He studied the priest for a moment before he said, ‘You will understand that we need to record this exchange, Father Devoy. Do you wish to have legal representation?'

‘No.'

‘It might be advisable.'

‘It wouldn't make any difference. A lawyer would advise caution, and I don't want to be cautious. I'm finished.'

‘That sounds very like despair. Isn't that still the worst sin of all, for someone like you?'

Devoy lifted his eyes from the desk, seemed to take note of them for the first time. He glanced at Lucy Blake curiously, as if he had not realized until this moment that she was in the small, square room, then returned his attention to the man who had spoken to him. ‘You are of the faith?'

Peach smiled, recognizing an expression he had not heard for many years. ‘No, I have lost it. I was brought up a Catholic. But I don't attend church any more.'

‘But you remember that Despair is the ultimate sin, and remind me of it. There is a kind of charity in that, Chief Inspector, and I thank you for it. But it is difficult for me to see any hope at the moment.' He surprised himself with a weak smile. ‘There. We have touched on Faith, Hope and Charity already. Perhaps redemption is still possible, for you at least.'

Having secured the attention of a man who had seemed atrophied by his guilt, Peach hardened towards his more normal interviewing mode. ‘You're in a lot of trouble, Father Devoy.'

‘A hell of a lot, you might say. That might be the appropriate term, in my case.'

‘We deal with this world, Father, not with some hypothetical other world. And you were brought in here because of threatening behaviour.'

‘And for consorting with a known prostitute.'

‘No. That is not an offence, in itself.'

The priest was so steeped in the idea of sin, so sunk in his own guilt, that he seemed not to understand this. Eventually he shook his head and said. ‘I have given way to lust and spent my seed with harlots. As a minister of the church, I could scarcely have done worse.'

‘Perhaps. We in the police service see worse crimes than lust, every day, Father Devoy. But we are not here to debate theology. No doubt that aspect of your conduct will be pursued in other places and by other people. DS Blake and I are pursuing an inquiry into the worst crime of all. Murder.'

Devoy nodded. ‘The primal and worst sin. Cain and Abel.' He looked up suddenly. ‘But what have I to do with murder?'

‘That's what we're here to establish. You threatened violence against Miss Toyah Burgess.'

His face was blank for a moment before recognition dawned. ‘Is that the girl I was with when your men arrested me?'

‘Yes. Were you planning to harm her?'

‘I was planning to have sex with her. I had the price she charges for her body in the pocket of my anorak.'

‘We know that. The money was taken from you by the custody sergeant last night. If you are released from custody, it will be returned to you.' Peach spoke as if he were instructing not a man in his forties but an adolescent in his first brush with the law. He reminded himself again that the strange man on the other side of the square table might be a killer.

He had to do that, because this man of the cloth, who felt himself drowning in his sin, carried a kind of wild innocence about him. The first murderer Peach had ever seen, when he was still a young policeman on the beat, had been clothed in this same air of detachment from the world, even after he had put twenty-three stab wounds into the body of the bully who had tormented him.

John Devoy said, as if speaking through a medium, ‘That fifty pounds wasn't my own money. It belongs to the parish.'

‘It can go back to the parish, then. That's theft avoided,' said Peach acerbically. ‘I'm not interested in the money, or in what you intended to do with Toyah Burgess in the sack, Father Devoy. I'm interested in the threats of violence which you offered to her.'

‘She was using her body as—'

‘Last night wasn't the first time you had accosted her, was it?'

‘I've been with prostitutes before, if that is what you mean. It was my own money then, but whenever I could—'

‘We're not interested in the sex, Father Devoy. Please try to understand that. Why do you think our officers were waiting to arrest you last night?'

‘I – I don't know. I haven't even thought about it. I'm a priest who was consorting with harlots. Isn't that enough?'

‘That isn't why you were brought here under arrest. That isn't why we're interviewing you now. Two weeks ago tomorrow, a young girl acting as a prostitute was murdered very near to where you were arrested last night.'

‘Sarah Dunne, yes. She was a Roman Catholic. But she came from Bolton or greater Manchester, I think. She wasn't buried here.'

‘She hasn't been buried anywhere, yet. Her body hasn't been released. It is still part of the evidence in a murder case.' Peach heard the irritation creeping into his voice. He nodded to Lucy Blake.

She said softly, ‘You'd seen Toyah Burgess before, hadn't you, Father? And you'd spoken to her, as recently as Monday night.'

Devoy looked at her as if he had not expected her to speak. ‘Yes. How do you know that?'

‘And what did you say to her on that evening? Did you ask her to have sex with you?'

‘No.' It was suddenly important to John Devoy that this woman understood that. The Blessed Virgin loomed large in his culture, and if beautiful young women were not to be objects of lust, then they must be respected figures of authority. ‘I went to warn her that she must leave the path of evil. That if she persisted upon it, she would go to Hell herself and take vulnerable men with her.'

The phrases which had been familiar to Percy Peach as echoes of his childhood were alien to Lucy Blake. This strange, disturbed man seemed to her in need of psychiatric help, seemed to be divorced from the real world. He might be pathetic, but was he also very dangerous? She said gently, ‘So you didn't suggest on Monday night that she had sex with you?'

‘No. I took no money with me on Monday. I went out into the world of Satan to try to rescue one of his victims before it was too late.' He put his head on one side like a bird, appeared to weigh his words and his motives, and then nodded his head sharply two or three times.

The sudden, odd, uncoordinated movements of his body convinced her that he was very near to breaking point. She said, ‘You threatened Miss Burgess on Monday night, didn't you?'

He stared at her with wide bright eyes, then nodded sharply again, as if digesting a new idea. ‘You could call it a threat, I suppose. I told her that the wages of sin are death. There is surely no greater threat than the fires of Hell.'

It was a long time since Lucy had heard anyone talk about the fires of Hell. She said, ‘You offered her a more personal threat, didn't you, Father Devoy?'

‘I told her she was spending the glories of her body where they should not be spent. That she was spreading her own corruption amongst others. Amongst—'

‘You laid hands upon her, didn't you?'

‘Amongst fallible men. I told her she was taking fallible men with her into perdition.' He spoke as if he had not even heard her interruption.

‘Did you lay hands upon her, Father Devoy?'

Perhaps it was the repetition of his title that brought him back to the reality of the claustrophobic little room and the two persistent questioners. ‘I may have done. I wanted to convince her that she was the occasion of sin in others. Men are weak vessels, at the best of times. We are not proof against the temptations of women like her.'

‘She had a scarf around her neck. Did you get hold of it?'

‘Temptation must be removed from our paths, if we are to survive and attain the Kingdom of Heaven.'

Peach, noting his companion's increasing confusion with the man's language, took over the interrogation again. ‘Answer the question, please. Did you or did you not lay hands on Miss Burgess?'

‘She represented a dangerous occasion of sin. If she were removed from the streets, a dangerous occasion of sin would be removed from the paths of men. She was acting as an instrument of the Devil.'

Peach regarded him sardonically. ‘If I remember the Church's teaching about dangerous occasions of sin, Father Devoy, it was that they should be avoided. You were hardly avoiding such occasions when you pursued known prostitutes and paid them for their favours.'

The priest's glittering eyes had been fixed above their heads. Now they dropped, first to Peach's impassive face and then to the small square table between them. ‘It is true. I am the worst kind of sinner, the shepherd who abuses the trust of his flock.'

Peach wanted to tell him to drop all this flummery and answer basic questions. But he sensed that there was an illness in this strange man, or at least an oddness that he must indulge, if he was to get through to the truth within a disturbed mind. He said quietly, ‘Miss Burgess had a chiffon scarf around her neck when you accosted her on Monday night. Did you seize the ends of it and draw it tight around her neck?'

‘Is that what the woman says I did?'

‘Answer the question please.'

‘I – I suppose I may have done that. I was agitated. I was trying to convince her that she must see the error of her ways. I was telling her how she was encouraging men to commit mortal sin.'

‘So you seized her scarf and tightened it about her neck.'

‘I probably did, yes, in my agitation. I was anxious to save her soul from Satan. Anxious to save the souls of the men she was leading into evil.'

‘So you were a little careless of her body.'

‘I suppose I may have been. I did not mean to hurt her.'

Peach regarded him steadily, trying to work out exactly what was happening behind those finely cut but now very mobile features. ‘You frightened her badly. She feels that if a car had not come along the street at that moment on Monday night, you might well have done her serious harm; might in fact have tightened that chiffon scarf around her neck until it strangled her.'

Devoy said nothing for several long seconds. Then he said, ‘I was very agitated. Very anxious to convince her of the evil path she was treading. But I don't think I would have done serious harm to her body.'

It was Peach's turn to pause now, weighing the man's words, estimating his sincerity as Devoy made this extraordinary attempt to evaluate his own conduct. Then he said slowly, ‘Let's come back to last night. You weren't trying to warn her off then. You were only too anxious to pay her and sample her wares.'

‘Yes. That is my own vice and wickedness. That is why I am finished as a priest.' There was no self-pity in him, but only the deepest of self-loathing.

‘And when you had finished the sex, what would you have done then?'

‘I don't know. Remonstrated with her, I suppose. I know that it's illogical to lie with her and then complain about her conduct, but I think I would have tried again to show her that hers was an evil calling, when I had spent my seed within her.' He gave a mirthless smile at the contradictions in his conduct.

Peach studied him, waiting to see if he would crack, would venture further into the exposure of this other self who had torn him apart. But Devoy kept his gaze fixed upon the scratched table between them, until eventually Peach said, ‘And what about that other girl, Sarah Dunne? Were you on the streets that night? Were you anxious to avail yourself of that young body? To warn her that she might be the occasion of sin for men like you?'

‘No. I didn't venture out on that Friday night.'

‘Is there any witness to that?'

A pause, in which he might have been thinking, or might not. He looked blank and defeated, near to collapse. ‘No. No witness. I was in my own room in the presbytery at St Matthew's.'

Peach said quietly, ‘Sarah Dunne was killed by someone who drew her scarf tight about her neck until it throttled her. That was exactly the method with which you threatened Toyah Burgess on Monday night. Father Devoy, did you kill Sarah Dunne?'

‘No.'

‘We would like you to give us a DNA sample, Father Devoy. It will be compared with samples taken from the body of Sarah Dunne. Do you understand the implications of this?'

‘Yes. I have no objection.'

They thought those would be his last words, but when they indicated that the interview was over, he said, ‘I shall have to give the Bishop all the details of this.'

It seemed as if that was a worse horror for him than all that had gone before.

T
he United Kingdom regards itself as a country where the law generally prevails. Yet for a fortunate few who escape the law, crime is a very profitable business.

An estimated four hundred crime barons in the country control some four hundred and forty million pounds of ill-gotten gains. The top thirty-nine among these are worth around two hundred million pounds. Joe Johnson had recently joined the ranks of this select – and infamous – group.