Stranglehold (28 page)

What Ruth David had not appreciated was that in this area there was virtually no street lighting. There must have been two hundred yards between the single lamp which shone outside the small pub which still functioned after the loss of its clientele and the brighter, newer lamp which blazed where the muted orange behind the curtains showed that the houses were occupied.

This, if anywhere, was surely Strangler territory. It was not as dangerous as it looked: Ruth knew that there were officers sited in at least two of the empty houses as she passed between them. The sound of her footsteps echoed eerily back to her from the dark brick walls as her high heels rang over the old flagstones. She tried to whistle as she sauntered jauntily past the house where she thought there were friends, but could produce no sound from her dry lips.

It looked as if tonight's journey was going to be even quieter than Saturday's. The only person who had been anywhere near her was an elderly man walking a small dog on a lead, and he had turned away at her approach and moved down a street which ran at right-angles to hers. There was no sign of even an approach such as that fumbling, amiable drunk had made last night. She would welcome that harmless presence now.

She was acting on behalf of all women. If this plan succeeded and the Strangler was caught, the women of Oldford, of the whole region, would be safer as they walked the streets of the places where they lived. That grandiose purpose did not seem to raise her spirits on these dark streets as it had when she had first enthused about the scheme.

She reached the end of the area that was earmarked for redevelopment, began to move again among houses which had lights. Behind those upstairs windows, people were going peacefully to bed. Perhaps a few of them were making love. Legitimately. She glanced up as she went along, counting the lights on each block as she passed, ticking off the doors as once she had ticked off the days to a family holiday at the seaside.

There was one patch of darkness on her left, a dark cave on another road that had been included now on her slightly extended route. As she came up with it, she saw the agent's board advertising the development of luxury flats, and realized with a little frisson of apprehension that this must be the place where Hetty Brown, the second of the victims, had been killed.

It was perhaps because she was looking to her left that the man got close to her before she saw him. He came from the right, out of the shadows of the trees at the ends of the long front gardens there. There were lights behind him, but they only made his features more obscure, confining his visibility to no more than a silhouette against the distant amber light from the bay window of a detached house. He held up his right hand as he came, in a gesture that was meant to be reassuring, and he called a greeting in a voice which she recognized.

It was an educated voice. The confident voice of a professional man, who was used to dealing with the public and having their unquestioning respect. A voice which threw her off her guard, for the split second which could have been fatal.

He did not stop talking as he came right up to her. It was only when he raised both hands at once that she saw that he was wearing some sort of mask over the lower part of his face. And the hands which came at her throat glistened with plastic. Transparent plastic.

She knew the rules of combat. She should not have allowed the hands to get to her throat, but once they were there, you did not try to drag them away: that would be a contest of strengths, and a man would be stronger. Especially a madman, as she knew now this must surely be.

She tried to thrust her right foot round behind his left heel, so that she might throw him backwards, might crash his head on the flagstone, might smash it until there was no life there. She was reduced in the moment when those cold plastic hands fell upon her throat to a vicious fighting animal, wanting not merely to survive but to kill her adversary.

Her ploy did not work. She had always feared these high heels, but they had been a necessary part of her costume for the role. Now, as they scratched ineffectively to get a grip on the stone, they were going to kill her.

The Strangler, as they had all said, was swift and efficient. She felt his thumbs pressing into her throat like a tightening vice. Vagal inhibition, they called it: it was quick, and the pain was short. With all her remaining strength, she drove her knee up into the man's groin, trying to make it even sharper as she felt it drive accurately into his genitals.

She heard him gasp, felt him jack-knife almost double with the pain. But he kept his grip upon her throat, bearing her backward into the hedge, moving her towards the spot where he had laid out Hetty Brown like a mediaeval effigy, beginning to shake her like a rag doll. He was glad it was a Sunday night, as he watched the dying eyes. He would lay her out, he decided in this her last moment, exactly as he had laid out that other girl who offered her favours too easily. In exactly the same spot. The symmetry of it pleased him.

He never even heard the running feet. As the blood pounded in his ears and the blood-lust in his brain, he heard neither the shouts nor the whistles. He saw Ruth David rising gingerly from the hedge, heard her reassuring her colleagues that she was all right, without understanding the deception that had been practised upon him.

His arms were pinioned firmly behind him as Lambert uttered the words of the caution, so that it had to be police fingers which undid the straps and removed the green cotton which covered his face below the blazing eyes. They put him in the back of the patrol car with the thin plastic of the surgical gloves still upon his hands.

Dr Donald Haworth would be the first police surgeon to be convicted of multiple murder.

Rushton looked better when he came in on Monday morning. He had still not got his wife back home, but he had rested and looked more like his normal efficient self. But he was resentful that the case should have reached its climax without him.

He stared dully at his computer. He was glad the Strangler had been caught. Of course he was. But it was almost a personal affront that they should have caught the man without his presence. Without even the assistance of the complex system of cross-referencing of which he had been so proud. He had not even made a file on Don Haworth, though he had carefully recorded much of the medical information the doctor had fed them so cunningly.

Detective-Inspector Christopher Rushton looked sourly at the modern technology he had used so proudly and decided that on this occasion it had been a dead loss.

When he said as much, Lambert said generously, ‘Not entirely, Chris. It helped to eliminate a lot of people from the search, and it concentrated our minds on the common factors in the killings.' In truth, he felt a little guilty that he had insisted on Rushton's absence over the weekend; he was so much a natural hunter of criminals himself that he understood the feelings of the younger man perfectly. He said by way of apology, ‘You did look pretty seedy at our meeting on Saturday morning, you know.'

Rushton gave a faint, acknowledging smile. ‘I was, sir. I haven't had much sleep lately.' It was as much weakness as he would admit to, for they were not alone. The two sergeants, Bert Hook and ‘Jack' Johnson, were in the Murder Room with them, deciding which items among the multitude of evidence they had accumulated would have to be kept for the court case and which could now be discarded.

Rushton said dolefully, ‘I'll be able to get rid of all the stuff on what we thought were our leading suspects.' It was beautifully organized – and now, it seemed, totally wasted.

Lambert shook his head. ‘Keep everything on Charlie Kemp. He was arrested early this morning,' he said with satisfaction. It would raise morale in the CID to have the man who had cocked a snook at them for years behind bars at last. ‘Paul Williams was right when he said the drugs squad was waiting its moment to move. They arrested two of the international suppliers at Heathrow yesterday: a Greek and a Lebanese whom Interpol have been pursuing for months. Kemp had just bought a large consignment of heroin from them; Williams and the drug squad had pinned down both Kemp and his circle of retailers. Kemp was meeting some of them in his suite at the
Roosters
at the time when Hetty Brown was murdered. He pretended he'd been on his own because he couldn't tell us that, but it left him without an alibi for her killing.'

The Superintendent grinned at Rushton. ‘Oldford FC will be needing a new Chairman, if you fancy the hassle.'

‘And a new official doctor for their medical certificates,' said Rushton grimly.

‘What about Darren Pickering and Ben Dexter?' said Bert Hook.

Lambert grinned. ‘You'll be happy to hear that you were right about Pickering. The girl who scratched him on Saturday night has confirmed that she simply got scared and screamed the place down at the thought that he might be the Strangler. She's quite apologetic about it today, and feeling suitably foolish. And the lad seems to have no involvement in the drugs case; he isn't even a user.'

‘Unlike Dexter,' said Hook sourly.

‘Dexter will be done for possession, certainly. Coke and crack, not just pot. Williams thinks he was toying with the idea of becoming a pusher, but I suspect it will be difficult to make that stick: he seems to have been biding his time on the edge of things, as usual. But at least he'll have a record: maybe that will bring him to his senses.'

Lambert smiled wryly at his team. ‘We'll still need a lot of the Scene of Crime findings for the court case. It's just that we may have to re-align our sights a little to see the relevant evidence. Haworth was very clever at feeding us the information he wanted to plant, especially when we discussed the other suspects.'

‘The CC said you realized yesterday morning that it was Haworth,' said Johnson.

Generous of him not to claim the idea for himself, thought Lambert. He decided that he approved of the new Chief Constable. ‘I put the idea to him then, yes. Fortunately, Haworth knew nothing of the plan to use Ruth David. We put a tail on him when he left the
Roosters
last night. But there was no case against him until then that would have stood up in court; we had to catch him in the act to clinch it.'

Bert Hook looked round at the four men clutching mugs of steaming coffee, relaxed now with success where there had been only tension forty-eight hours earlier. ‘I suppose I'm the goon who's supposed to say, “What put you on to him, sir?”'

‘You're a much appreciated straight man, I'm sure,' said his chief. ‘You produced one of the pointers yourself, Bert, when you went round to talk to Julie Salmon's parents yesterday. Haworth had been Julie's GP; we already knew that – indeed, he mentioned it to us himself at our conference – but it hadn't seem important. But when you put it together with this mysterious older man she'd had a relationship with, he became a candidate we should have checked out much earlier. It must be a sign of my age, but I thought of older men being about forty. Julie Salmon was nineteen: to someone of her age, anyone around thirty must have been very definitely a much older man.'

‘He could have been struck off for it,' said Rushton. The enormity of Haworth's professional transgression seemed for a moment as shocking to him as murder.

‘Undoubtedly he would have been, if Julie Salmon had revealed a sexual relationship with him. I think it was her knowledge of that and her loyalty to him which ensured that she would never repeal his name. We've found her missing handbag in his flat. I suppose he removed it in case it contained anything which might connect him with her, but it probably didn't. No one else knew the name of the man she had associated with; that's why we were left looking for this mysterious “older man”, who was so vague that some of us began to wonder if he even existed, outside an adolescent girl's imagination. But it was her ending of the relationship with Haworth which sealed her death warrant. He couldn't take that. He said as much this morning – he's confessed to all three murders, incidentally.'

Hook said, as if reluctantly conceding credit where it was due, ‘The forensic psychologist said the rape of Julie Salmon and not the two subsequent girls suggested that there had been a relationship there.'

‘It was a power thing, as Stanley Warboys said. Haworth couldn't take his rejection, especially in favour of someone like Darren Pickering. But there were other clues as well – small things, but cumulatively they added up to something significant. You remember how with the second murder, that of Hetty Brown, he put the time of death at between twelve and one a.m., and reminded us two or three times of it. The official time from the post-mortem gave a wider margin, of course, and she was in fact killed earlier. The twelve to one time gave him a perfect alibi, if he'd needed it. He'd planted the idea himself, but because we thought him above suspicion we accepted it for a long time. I remember being grateful to him for trying to be so precise.'

Rushton said, ‘He even reminded us several times that the twelve to one time was only an opinion, which wouldn't stand up as medical evidence in court. That must have been to cover him if he was ever challenged by the autopsy findings.'

‘And the shoeprint we found at the scene of that murder – a city shoe. Was that his?' asked Johnson.

‘I think we shall almost certainly find it was. He attended to certify the death in bright white training shoes, if you remember. He'd changed, of course, between the murder and his official arrival at the scene of death. The print of the city shoe became something which would have exonerated him rather than incriminated him in our minds.'

‘If we'd ever considered him seriously in the first place. The English class system is an insidious thing. I never even thought of him as a candidate,' said Bert Hook bitterly. For a boy brought up in a Barnardo's home, the idea that he had been blinded by middle class polish was a bitter thought.