Stranglehold (27 page)

Christine cooked him the bacon and egg she now denied him on all but special occasions. Perhaps she too was trying to turn him aside from the thought which gnawed so persistently at him. She observed him surreptitiously from the door of the kitchen, concentrated, intense, abstracted from his surroundings. She had seen him often enough like this over the years; indeed, his single-mindedness had almost destroyed their marriage twenty years and more ago. There was one new element now in his appearance as he sat slightly hunched at the table, toying with the cutlery and staring at the wall on the other side of the breakfast-room. He was ageing now, more rapidly than she cared to admit to herself.

She divined just how involved he was in this case and its climax when she found that he had gone out and left a rasher of bacon and a tomato untouched.

The Chief Constable lived in a large house in a splendid garden, one of the last in the area to be built in genuine Cotswold stone. It had a stone wall at the end of its front garden, only four feet high, but soaring at the entrance into high pillars which supported wrought-iron gates.

George Harding enjoyed his garden. It was his haven from the multifarious cares of his office. He was out there even before breakfast on a Sunday, examining a summer-flowering clematis which had a promising profusion of buds and trying to forget all about the Strangler for a few hours. His initial reaction when he saw Lambert's old Vauxhall crunching cautiously over the gravel between his gates was one of irritation.

Professionalism took over immediately. Lambert was not the man to arrive like this without reason. As the Superintendent levered his long frame rather stiffly from the driver's seat, that opinion was confirmed by his grey-faced concern.

They went inside to a small, comfortable study, lined with books and decorated with the well-polished scale replicas of the cups Harding had won in long-dead tennis triumphs. In that small, private room, where the two men were securely insulated from the world they had to deal with, Lambert told his Chief Constable of the notion that had burned in his brain from his first moment of consciousness on that Sunday morning.

Harding found it at first as preposterous as he had. Then, slowly, reluctantly, as Lambert drip-fed him with a series of tiny supporting facts, he came round to the view that there might after all be something in it. He was not committed to agreement: caution had been too deeply built in as he rose up the slippery pole of office for that. But he agreed that the notion must be tested. Meantime, the idea must be kept strictly to the two of them.

Ruth David only spoke to Lambert on the phone, so that she did not notice that he was even more uneasy on the Sunday night than he had been on the Saturday. She listened patiently while he repeated the instructions she had heard several times before. He was like a nervous mother telling her child to be wary of a busy road, she thought.

It annoyed her: did the man not realize she was jumpy enough, without the old-hen anxieties of her superiors? Sooner or later, the Strangler was bound to strike, if they went on with this deception. That was a thought that had excited her when she was persuading the top brass to use her in the scheme. Now that it was in progress, she felt fearful rather than excited.

Last night it had felt like amateur dramatics when she had put on the black tights and the garish make-up, as though there would be two hours of make-believe and giggling congratulations at the end of the evening. But tonight did not feel like a second night of the same play.

She had a new rose-pink silk blouse which exactly matched her make-up; she tried to give herself a smile by wondering how she might enter the details of it on her expenses claim. With the tight black skirt and the red shoes, it seemed to give the right impression of availability and brassy sex. She studied herself in the mirror, shook her ash-blonde hair free, and murmured ‘Come on, Raunchy Ruth!' at the reflection she saw. The smile she so wanted to see would not come. Perhaps it would be all right when she was on stage: it always had been in the past.

And it was, in the sense that the part seemed to take her over. The
Roosters
was busier that night, even though there was no live music. She managed to sit at a table in the centre of the floor, where she could create her effects without having to strain too hard. Without being upstaged by anyone, she thought grimly.

She noticed that there was a bigger cross-section of society in the place tonight, a better representation of the various groups of supporters a football club attracts. Don Haworth, the club doctor and police surgeon, was sitting with a couple of members of the board at a table at the end of the room furthest from the bar. They looked at her curiously; perhaps they had seen her in here before, but not in this persona. And of course they would not know that she was in the police, since she had never worked in Oldford before. Haworth smiled at her, then turned to speak to a woman who was the theatre sister at Oldford Hospital. Ruth preferred not to contemplate what tonight's impersonation might be doing to her reputation.

Ben Dexter came and sat on her table. He did not speak to her directly, but began to include her in the talk of his group, as if in due course he hoped to strike up a more personal conversation. She was glad to see Paul Williams keeping a surreptitious eye on developments from the next table. There was no sign of Darren Pickering. She had found herself hoping that Lambert would say that they had charged him when he rang, so that she need not attempt again to spring the trap on their anonymous psychopath.

She was studying her surroundings and displaying her legs when a waiter in his maroon trousers and white shirt appeared at her side and put a large gin and tonic on the table at her elbow. Someone had done his research: that was the drink she had sipped last night, though she had made sure that most of it was tonic. When she looked her puzzlement, the waiter said impassively, ‘With the Chairman's compliments, miss.' It was impossible to tell from his expression whether this was a service he had performed many times before.

Ruth picked the glass up, eyed it curiously, rolled it in her hands for a moment, and then sipped it. That was the reaction her part seemed to demand, though she wished she had been prepared for this bit of stage business. There was much more gin than tonic in this glass. She turned her head slowly, wondering if it was really the football club Chairman had favoured her with this early salvo at her dubious virtue.

She had to raise her eyes before she saw the source of it. From the small landing outside the hospitality suite he used as his own, Charlie Kemp watched until she noticed him, then slowly raised his own glass in salutation and smiled. In his dark suit, he looked curiously like a figure from a vintage Hollywood movie she had seen at the university cinema club. She could almost hear him saying, ‘Here's looking at you, doll!'

She would have been amazed to learn that Kemp had taken the gesture from exactly such a film, as he took most of what he thought of as his social poise. He gave her his Edward G. Robinson smile and went back into the panelled room behind him.

Sergeant Ruth David did not have time to ponder on what he might be planning there. Vic Knowles, busy acknowledging the greetings appropriate to the new manager of Oldford FC, detached himself from a group of admirers and came across to talk to her. He was dressed informally but well, if a little too flashily for her taste. The red and white of his expensive sweatshirt might be in the team colours, but the silver bracelet on his left wrist was a little over the top. For the first time that evening, she managed a little inward smile, at her own expense. She was hardly the one to be criticizing anyone for dressing to attract attention.

She looked round the animated scene, and decided that she was attracting plenty of interest; perhaps the news of her conduct in here last night had spread. In truth, she underestimated her looks in that judgement. She was a striking woman, with strong features and the ash-blonde hair that made men's heads turn easily enough. Her willowy, athletic figure had brought plenty of excitement to the young bloods of the
Roosters
even before she had decided to accentuate her obvious charms. The difference now was that she was declaring herself more available. Perhaps even generally available, to those who could afford it.

When someone offered her the opportunity with a comment about money, she laughed loudly and said, ‘Well, a girl's got to make a living somehow. And believe me, it ain't easy in these hard times.' The giggle with which she topped this off was itself a come-on. She sounded to herself like a parody of the real thing, a send-up of a vapid goodtime girl, but that would hardly matter in this assembly. The important thing was to be noticed.

She looked around at the animated array of male faces around her, steeling herself to ignore the resentful looks from the females. She wondered for a moment whether any of those myriad eyes which were intermittently upon her belonged to the Strangler.

Then she banished such conjecture; in the circumstances in which she was operating, which demanded all her concentration, it was a dangerous indulgence. In any case, the Strangler might not be here at all. There appeared to be a connection with the
Roosters,
but that might be no more than that the murderer had waited for his victims outside the club, following them from there until he found a suitable place to strike them down.

Back in the Murder Room at Oldford CID, Lambert experienced the familiar helplessness of waiting and wondering. He was glad that DI Rushton was still not present, for he had already caught himself snapping irritably at Johnson when the Sergeant had made an innocent query. Rushton's punctilious attention to detail, his need to occupy himself with paperwork as the crisis approached, would have needled him tonight.

The situation was made worse by the fact that only he and the Chief Constable were aware of the suggestion Lambert had made that morning about the identity of their killer. The concealment of information from the rest of his team was unique as far as John Lambert was concerned, and it made him uneasy with himself as well as the situation.

At ten o'clock, George Harding came into the room himself. There was a hasty fastening of buttons among the uniformed men, a tightening of ties pulled slack by the plain-clothes officers who wore them. He took Lambert outside for a moment, leaving a rustle of excitement and speculation in the room behind him. The Chief Constable in at ten o'clock on a Sunday night? Things must be moving! Each man and woman nervously checked the parts assigned to them in the night's business. It would never do to make a mistake with the Chief Constable breathing down your neck.

It was purely a conditioned police reflex to the sudden presence of top brass. With a serial killer about and three girls already dead, attention was not going to wander. Most of the men in the Murder Room that Sunday night now knew that one of their own number, Ruth David, was at the centre of the night's efforts. Certainly not one of them was going to give less than a hundred per cent to the job.

George Harding found himself actually enjoying the excitement of an investigation. Contrary to popular police mythology, some chief and deputy chief constables did miss direct involvement with the arrest of criminals. Harding was copper enough still to scent the successful conclusion of a serious crime investigation.

He envied Lambert the air of excited anticipation which hung about the station, understood tonight why the Superintendent clung to his direct involvement in the investigations he headed. He understood also why Lambert now fretted at the enforced inaction, why he found waiting for things to happen the most difficult task of all.

Harding said impulsively to Lambert, ‘Go out on the route she's to take yourself, if you like, John. Choose your own point, but don't upset the system.' It was the first time he had used his Superintendent's first name. Perhaps it was a sign of the trust he now accorded him.

He tried to thrust aside the idea that if Lambert's preposterous idea should turn out to be just that, it would do no harm if it was the Superintendent who was close to it when it was exposed, while his Chief Constable was safely distanced. He could not be sure of course, but he did not think that that had been his first consideration.

When it was time to leave the
Roosters,
Ruth David found it difficult to do so on her own. Both Ben Dexter and Vic Knowles had made bids to accompany her during the last hour at the club, and there were other offers as the glasses were collected and the disco player was disconnected.

She took advantage of some noisy exchanges in the gents' cloakroom to pass quickly from the brightly lit foyer of the club into the summer darkness outside, slipping quietly through the door before her departure could be noted, or her own resolution weaken.

It was dry tonight, with only a light breeze, but the sliver of moon was too low in the sky yet to offer much illumination, especially as the early part of her route was between narrow streets of tall houses. She walked casually, with one arm resting on her shoulder-bag and the other swinging lightly at her side. The sounds of noisy departures from the
Roosters
gradually receded into the darkness behind her.

When there were gaps in the houses on her left, she could see an orange glow on the horizon, the aura of the lights from some larger town: Cheltenham, she fancied, but her geography had always been patchy, and her sense of direction not that which might reasonably be expected of a police officer. Telling herself this, she realized that she was trying to divert herself from the business in hand.

That was not a good idea. The Strangler merited her most intense concentration.

They had varied the route a little from last night, making it even more lonely, taking her through a redevelopment area, where terraces of empty houses were presently to be demolished. The same team of unseen officers was overseeing her progress, losing a second night of their weekend to the demands of the scheme. Normally the team would have been changed, but Lambert, mindful of the thought that the killer could possibly be a policeman, had wanted to keep the knowledge of this attempt to as few people as possible.