Wages of Sin (7 page)

He was getting really annoyed now, his voice surging upwards on the rising tide of his anger. Toyah thought he was going to hit her unless she could do something to stem that tide. She said despairingly, ‘All right, all right! I was only asking if you could see your way to a little reduction. If you can't do that, we'll go on as we are! Sorry I asked, honestly I am!'

He stilled his breathing, controlled the excitement which had risen in him with her distress. Then he growled at her, ‘I hope you do, Toyah Burgess. Because I'd hate anything to happen to you!'

‘Happen to me?' She echoed his words stupidly, her fear making her speak when she should have been meekly silent. She knew a lot about men and their sexual demands now, but still very little about the rest of life.

‘Yes, dear, happen to you, that's what I said.' He reached out, following her as she flinched away, and took her small chin into the iron grip he had fastened upon the fleshier jowls of Sally Aspin an hour earlier. ‘Because it's me who provides you with protection, you know. Protection against the people who prey on people like you. Peddling your pussy might be an easy way of making money, but it can be a dangerous one. Not everyone in the game is as kind and considerate as Joe Johnson, you see. Look what happened to that girl the other night. The one who was dumped in that shed on Dover Street. That Sarah Dunne. I'd hate anything like that to happen to you, Toyah Burgess.'

Toyah wondered how Joe Johnson knew the name of the dead girl.

He held her chin for a moment longer, her pain increasing as his grasp tightened still more. Then he released her, studied the marks his hand had left on her flesh for a moment, nodded twice at her to emphasize his message, picked up the envelope with his cash, and was gone without a further word.

T
he girl was very nervous. She looked up and down the street before hustling them quickly inside the Victorian house.

They had been fine residences, when they were built, this row, high and proud against the meaner brick of the terraces built behind them for the mill workers. They had retained a gradually eroding grandeur until after Hitler's war, when they had been divided into flats and gone rapidly downhill. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, as they moved past their century of life, the flats had been subdivided again, until most of them were little more than bed-sits. The standard of tenant had declined correspondingly, until the inhabitants were a heterogeneous collection of people, their only common feature being that they did not stay here for very long.

This old-young girl had dark, straight hair and eyes which seemed to have seen much more than the smooth face around them. She took them into a high room, where the ceiling was scarcely visible above a light fitting which hung a good five feet below it. The wallpaper was probably over thirty years old, its fading seventies colours dating from the time when a larger, more gracious room had been divided. The joins where the sheets of thick wallpaper met had been picked apart, low down above the deep skirting board, by some long-departed infant hand.

Lucy Blake took in the crack in the pane of the sash window, the cobwebs building in its upper corners, and tried not to contrast this room with the neat order of her own bright modern flat. She smiled encouragement into the anxious young face and said, ‘I'm Detective Sergeant Blake and this is Detective Constable Pickering. And you're Karen Jones.'

The girl scarcely acknowledged her words. ‘There was no need for you to come here. I said everything I had to say to that lad in uniform. Get me into trouble, you will.'

‘Trouble with whom, Karen?'

The girl shook her head. She was not out of her teens yet, possibly even younger than she looked. ‘People like me can't afford to be seen talking to the police. I don't want to go the same way as Sarah.'

‘And why should you do that, Karen?'

A shake of the head, agitating the dark, straight hair. It was a refusal to co-operate, not a denial of knowledge. ‘You shouldn't have come. You're wasting your time and mine.'

Lucy wondered how she could get this brittle girl to relax. She sat down on the battered sofa, felt Pickering follow her lead, held her peace until Karen Jones reluctantly sat down on an upright chair. Then she said, ‘No one will know that you have helped us. The uniformed officers called at every residence in this street. We get together a big team and they ask questions of everyone in the area. It's routine procedure, after a murder.'

The girl started at the introduction of the word, in the way people once reacted to the mention of cancer. She considered Blake's argument, then nodded very sharply, two or three times. ‘That's all right, then. But that doesn't apply to you, does it? You're not calling at every house in the street.'

‘No. It's our job to follow up anything which might be of interest. We study what the uniformed officers doing the house-to-house enquiries bring in. You were able to tell us who the dead girl was. We're grateful for that.'

‘I didn't say I was sure it was her. I just said I thought it might be.'

Lucy went on as smoothly as if the girl had never spoken. ‘And naturally we want every scrap of information you can give us. Sarah isn't here to help us herself, is she?'

‘No. She's gone. So I can't help her any more, can I?'

Gordon Pickering said gently, ‘But I think you might want to help us catch whoever killed her like that, once you think about it.'

He was a gangling, fresh-faced young man, not very much older than Karen Jones, and she appeared to give some thought to these first words from him. She said grudgingly, ‘I'd like to see that bastard put away, yes.' Then, immediately defensive, ‘But I don't know who did it, so I can't help, can I?' The Welshness she had striven to put behind her when she left the valleys came out suddenly and strongly in the inflection of the last phrase.

Gordon Pickering was persistent as well as surprisingly perceptive: they were among the qualities which had secured him an early transfer from uniform to CID. He smiled into the anxious features and said, ‘Sometimes people can help us more than they realize, once we put together what they tell us with what comes in from other sources. And you really won't be putting yourself in any danger by talking to us, Karen.'

Lucy saw the girl responding to his youth and sincerity. It made her feel forty-eight instead of twenty-eight as Karen Jones's face lightened and she said, ‘I hardly knew her, really. What is it you wanted to know?'

‘Anything you can tell us. We don't even know for certain that Sarah is the dead girl yet.'

Karen's face was suddenly full of a childish terror. ‘You don't want me to identify her? I don't want to do that. I've never had to look at a dead body, see, and I don't want to start with this one. Is she badly—'

‘We won't be asking you for an identification, Karen,' Lucy Blake intervened firmly. ‘We'll need the next of kin to do that: probably one of the parents, when we find them. But you'll understand that we don't want to put any parents through that ordeal unless we've good reason to think this is their daughter.'

Relief flooded into the girl's face and she became a woman again. She gave them a surprisingly precise description of the girl she had known as Sarah Dunne, answering DC Pickering's questions quietly and watching him make a note of her answers. It made them increasingly certain that she was describing the woman whose remains had been dumped on the building site. She concluded with, ‘I told the uniformed constable, she came from somewhere over the other side of Bolton, I think, but I haven't got any address. She never told me that.'

Pickering closed his notebook and looked into the earnest young face. ‘And what was your connection with Sarah Dunne, Karen?'

The face which had opened up during her description of the dead girl now shut as suddenly as a book. Karen Jones looked past Pickering instead of at him as she said, ‘We was just friends, wasn't we? I told the constable earlier, I didn't know her all that well.'

‘But you knew her well enough to give us a very good description. Even to remember some of the clothes she wore. That's very helpful to us, Karen.'

The girl didn't respond. Her face set sullenly as she said, ‘That's good then, isn't it? But there's nothing more I can tell you.'

Lucy Blake said, ‘Oh, I think there is, Karen. Not much more, perhaps, but that little might be important. You say Sarah was your friend. So I'm sure you'd want us to find out who killed your friend and put him away for a long time.'

They could see the struggle going on behind the old-young, too-revealing features. But her face set into a frown as she said, ‘I'd like you to get whoever killed her, yes. But I can't help you. You've had everything I know.'

‘Not quite, Karen. Perhaps I should tell you that we know how your earn your living. How you pay the rent for this place.' Lucy Blake looked round the room, with its tiny kitchen beyond a small arch, its door to the cramped bathroom built in hastily a decade ago, its high, grubby walls and dusty curtains. She let her gaze come to rest on the new wide-screen television and hi-fi stack, which gleamed incongruously in their shabby setting.

Panic flashed across the smooth face of Karen Jones as she saw a detective sergeant looking at these things. ‘I save up my money. I do a few hours in the Red Lion at lunch times.'

‘And in the evenings, you're a hooker. Bringing men back here. Earning enough to pay the rent and buy a few luxuries.'

‘You can't prove that.'

Lucy sighed. ‘We could, if we wanted to, Karen. But we're not here to harass you. We're here to find out all we can about a dead girl you knew. A girl very much like you. A girl who was murdered.'

‘I told her to be careful.' The words were out before she could check them.

‘I'm sure you did, Karen. But she wasn't very experienced, was she? You were giving her a few of the tips of the trade, weren't you?'

Karen Jones nodded, her eyes now on a worn patch in the fading Persian carpet, which had graced a grander room than this in its heyday. ‘There are places you can't go in this town. Not to work, I mean. Not to pick up men.'

‘And why is that, Karen?'

‘There are people who control the trade, aren't there? People who keep the best areas for their own tarts. They cut up your face, if you don't keep off. You can't work, without your face being right.'

‘And they might even kill a young girl, if they thought they could get away with it. To encourage the rest of you to stay in line.'

She nodded dumbly. Perhaps she felt that if she didn't put that idea into words, if she let the phrases come from the police, she wasn't grassing on the men she feared. The man she feared, to be accurate.

‘So you think one of the pimps who control prostitution around here might have had your friend killed?'

Again she nodded rather than put it into words. All she actually said was, ‘I can't think who else would have wanted to kill Sarah. She was a good kid.'

It was a belated assertion of her own seniority, a pathetic reminder that this young, vulnerable creature had been a mentor to someone even younger, even more defenceless against the dark forces of this strange half-world she inhabited.

Karen Jones looked fearfully up and down the street as her visitors departed, but was relieved to see no one in sight, as a wan sun lit up the faded dignity of the Victorian facades. Then she went and made herself a cup of coffee and sat down to an anxious review of what she had said to them.

It didn't seem too bad. She hadn't even mentioned Joe Johnson's name.

‘We don't even know how long she's been dead yet.' Percy Peach was professionally lugubrious with his chief.

‘This is ridiculous, you know. Things moved much faster than this when you were away!' said Chief Superintendent Tucker peevishly.

Peach allowed his black eyebrows to rise expressively beneath the bald pate. ‘I see, sir. Bodies were presumably discovered more quickly in the last year, then.'

Tucker stared at him suspiciously. Irony was not his strong point. That left him at a severe disadvantage with DCI Peach. ‘I expect they were, yes. Things were generally much tighter when you were away.'

This was manifestly untrue. Peach had skimmed the crime figures quickly and then studied the clear-up rates very closely. Even his experienced eye had been shocked by them: he was holding his own private sessions in the CID section to amend matters; some Inspectorial fur had been considerably ruffled two storeys beneath Tucker's penthouse office. He looked hard at Tucker and said, ‘Really, sir. Well, I expect Traffic would still have me back if you think I am a drag on the progress of your section.'

‘No, no, Peach, I'm not suggesting that.' Tucker forced the kind of smile we don for the dentist and said, ‘Goodness me, you didn't use to be so touchy in the old days. Do come and sit down, Percy.'

Peach sat down with extreme care in the armchair indicated by Tucker's expansive gesture. His first name had been forced through the closed teeth of the Head of CID's wide, artificial smile. Well, Percy didn't want to hear it any more than Tommy Bloody Tucker wanted to say it. He said, ‘The girl's been dead two or three days at least. We may get a more accurate time of death from the PM report.'

‘Do we have an identification?'

‘Probably, sir. One of our young ladies of the night thinks she was called Sarah Dunne.'

‘A prostitute?' Tucker's face dropped at the thought. Low-life murders were always the most difficult to solve. And the least worthwhile: Tucker was firmly of the view that people who dabbled in crime deserved whatever they got. Sometimes it seemed to him a pity that he had to give his full resources to chasing up crimes like this, but he supposed that the law had to be upheld.