Stranglehold (4 page)

‘A few. It remains to be seen whether they're useful ones. They may have no connection with her assailant.' In his present gloomy mood, Lambert felt already that they would not. ‘What about the time of death?' It was the question they always wanted answered, but in this case he did not think Burgess would be able to give them much more than they already knew.

‘She'd eaten fish and chips about five hours before death. She died between nine o'clock last night and one o'clock this morning.'

Lambert nodded, suppressing a smile at how much wider this old hand set the boundaries than Don Haworth had last night. But the police surgeon was a younger man, enthusiastic to help them. And it was not his evidence which would be quoted and possibly challenged in court. He said, ‘You've conducted the autopsies on both Julie Salmon and Harriet Brown, Cyril. Would you say they were killed by the same man?'

Burgess prepared himself for an elaborate series of medical cautions to explain why it was impossible and undesirable to look for such certainties on the evidence available. Then he saw Lambert's strained face and thought better of it; he would like to be as helpful as possible to a man he now thought of as an old friend. Moreover, he was fascinated by the processes of detection, and loved to become involved in them.

‘It's impossible to be certain, on the forensic evidence so far available.' The pathologist dropped his voice into an awful American intonation: Hollywood B movie, circa 1950. ‘But you're asking me to play a hunch, Lootenant, and I'm gonna do that for you. I'm gonna level with you, and hope you'll do the same with me in doo course.' Whether in response to Lambert's pained expression or because he found the imitation too tiresome to sustain, he dropped back to his normal voice. ‘From the manner of the killing, I would be surprised if these two young women did not die by the same hand, John.'

Lambert nodded glumly. That was his own view: he had hoped to hear it refuted. He said, ‘And since I've managed to lure you at last into the realms of speculation, have you any other thoughts that might help us in the investigation?'

Burgess looked across at the shape beneath the sheet which he had worked on so carefully for two hours. He preferred the dead to the living, since with corpses he could carry his research to whatever lengths was necessary, a process not possible where life had to be preserved: that appealed to the scientist which was the strongest factor in his persona. Sometimes he spoke flippantly, as though his material was no more than dead meat. But he remained aware always that life had been abruptly and unlawfully terminated, that his work in this laboratory was ultimately concerned with justice and order.

Burgess said soberly, ‘I'm not a psychologist, John. But the manner of these killings – swift and apparently motiveless – is too similar for my liking. I think you should expect your man to kill again.'

Sergeant Bert Hook was supposed to be good with disturbed girls. It was one of those repetitive station jokes which CID sections love to perpetuate.

He did not feel himself very effective with Debbie Cook, and the WDC he took with him was too young to be of much assistance to him. Miss Cook was too tearful to be coherent, and though he knew she needed physical comfort, Hook was too old a hand to put the fatherly arm he knew she wanted around her narrow shoulders.

‘She looked so – peaceful!' she sobbed, for the third time. ‘I couldn't believe at first that she was dead.'

Hook could imagine the words being used for weeks to come, when she had ceased to weep and become a temporary celebrity through her association with the dead girl. He said, ‘You're upset, love, of course. But we're going to need your help if we're to catch the man who did it.'

She nodded, wiping a tear from her nose with her index finger. She looked very young and forlorn, like a child who sees the end of the world in a broken doll. ‘What happens next? What about the funeral?'

‘Well, first of all, Harriet will have to be identified formally by her next of kin, even though because of you we know for certain now that it's her.' She looked up at him gratefully at his acknowledgement of her help, and he knew suddenly that it was a long time since anyone had been kind to her. Except perhaps the dead Harriet.

As if she read that thought, the girl said, ‘It sounds funny, “Harriet”. She never called herself anything but Hetty.' She stared down at her sodden handkerchief, turning it over in her hands as if she could not understand how it had become so wet.

Hook, recognizing the effects of her ordeal upon the girl, took the cardigan he saw on the back of a chair and draped it round the slim shoulders as they gave a sudden shudder.

It was warm enough outside, but this small bedroom was on the second floor of the house, facing north, and the girl was in shock. He had a moment of sudden fear that the woollen might belong to the dead girl and not this one, but then she pulled it about her like a small blanket, without putting her arms through the sleeves.

‘My mother used to do that when I was little,' she said. There was surprise in her voice, as though the memory had come to her from a long way away and surprised her.

Feeling rather more like a social worker than a detective-sergeant, Hook said rather desperately, ‘There'll have to be an inquest.'

She nodded gravely, studying her bright red nails. ‘What happens there?'

‘Oh, it will all be over very quickly. And we won't need you for that, I don't think.' He had meant to be comforting, but she looked a little disappointed. ‘One of Harriet's – Hetty's – parents will give formal evidence of identification. Someone from CID will say a little about how she was killed. The Coroner will recommend the verdict of “Murder by person or persons unknown”. Then we'll get on with finding out who did it.'

She nodded sagely, as if she was digesting new information, then said, ‘Hetty wouldn't have hurt a fly.'

Someone nearly always said that about a victim of violence, but poor Debbie Cook wasn't to know that. Hook looked round the room with its faded flowered wallpaper, its two unmatching single beds, its brown stain of damp in the corner of the outside walls. There was a single small and uncomfortable armchair, which he now occupied and overflowed, and two painted blue wooden stand chairs. The WDC sat on one of these. Debbie was sitting on her bed, turning the threadbare candlewick bedspread to try to make its holes a little less obvious. There was a cheap plastic shade on the light which hung in the middle of the room, but someone had put too strong a bulb in the socket, so that one side of the shade was burned dark brown.

He said, ‘You and Hetty rented this room together?'

She nodded, crushing the small handkerchief between her palms until it disappeared. The WDC pushed a tissue between her fingers. He thought she was going to break down again, but she said with a touch of defiance, ‘We were going to get ourselves something better, before too long.' Then she looked up at him in fear, as though she felt that the little spurt of pride had tricked her into an indiscretion.

Hook said gently, ‘How long had you been here, love?'

‘Ten months.'

‘You didn't grow up down here, though, did you?' The girl's Black Country accent had been stronger in the extremes of her distress than it was now.

‘No. I came here from Walsall. To work at ICI in Gloucester. That's where I met Hetty. She'd come from Nottingham, just before me.'

‘So you both wanted to get away from home.' He made it a simple statement, and she accepted it as that.

‘Yes. I had a stepfather who decided when I was eighteen that it would be more exciting to fuck me than my mother.' She produced the word defiantly; its sudden harshness broke through the monotone of the sentence to hint at the bitterness she felt.

If she had thought to shock the avuncular figure who sat opposite her, she would have been disappointed; Hook heard worse tales than this far too often for his comfort. He merely nodded and said, ‘And was Hetty's home situation similar to yours?'

‘No, I'm sure it wasn't. Her parents are still together, for a start. But her dad was unemployed, and he wouldn't give her any freedom.'

Hook, who had two boys of his own who were not yet ten, thought of the trials of adolescence which lay ahead of them and him. He said gently, ‘What kind of freedom, Debbie?'

She shrugged, looking at him for a moment with a flash of petulance. ‘The usual things. When she went out with a boy, her father had to know who it was the whole time. Every time she was in later than they thought she should be, there was a shouting match.'

It was a familiar, even a routine story. And now a girl lay dead. But that was just bad luck for the father who had shouted, and the girl who had shouted back. ‘So she left home. How old was she?'

‘A year older than me. Nearly twenty-one.' That was the child in her, he thought, still wanting to be as old as she possibly could, counting away every day of her departing innocence.

If the uniformed men who knew this area were to be believed, it had been departing rapidly. He said, ‘But the work at ICI didn't last long for either of you.'

Again he delivered it as a statement, not a question, and she looked up with apprehension into his round face, wondering just how much these people did know about her. Perhaps those things she had heard about never trusting the police were true; but this kindly man with the fresh red face had seemed so much like the father she envisaged but could not remember.

She said, like one searching for a footing in mud, ‘No. We were only temporary, but we thought it would become permanent, if we kept our noses clean. We weren't the only ones made redundant, you know.' It seemed important to her that she should convince her listener that their dismissals had been through no misdemeanour.

‘No, of course not.' He looked round the room unhurriedly, fixing his eye upon the battered wardrobe where the dead girl's clothes lay. They would have to be removed for examination and storage in the Murder Room they had set up at headquarters. ‘Do you have a kitchen, Debbie?'

‘Yes, and a little bathroom – well, a shower room really, but we don't have to share. And there's a tiny little lounge with a telly.' She was like a girl trying to convince her mother that the accommodation was adequate. ‘You can come and see, if you like. It might be a bit untidy, but –'

Hook held up his hand, arresting the nervous flow of her words as he had long ago stopped traffic. ‘And how much does it cost, Debbie?'

She knew then where his questioning was going, and looked at him with a helpless resentment. He thought for a moment she was going to refuse to answer, but then she said, ‘Seventy-five pounds a week.'

‘And did you find other work, when you were laid off at ICI?'

‘No. We tried, but we had to go on the social.'

‘So how do you survive and pay your bills?'

She merely shook her head sullenly, unwilling even to attempt to frame an answer for him.

‘Are you behind with your rent, Debbie?'

‘No. The landlord wouldn't stand for that.'

‘So how did you pay him, you and Hetty?'

‘We saved hard.' It was her last defiance, and neither of them thought it worthy of investigation.

‘The arithmetic doesn't work, Debbie. Besides, we found as much money on Hetty as she'd have got in a week from the DHSS.'

‘The bastard! He didn't even kill her for her money, then.' It flashed out before she could control herself, surprising her as well as him with its vehemence.

While she was still off guard, Hook said curtly. You were taking money from men, weren't you? Selling your favours to pay the rent and the bills.'

She drew in a huge, racking breath, and just for a moment he thought she was going to spring at him in her frustration. Then her shoulders collapsed hopelessly beneath the woollen tent of the cardigan and she said. ‘What did you expect me to do? Go back to Walsall, to be fucked again by him?' Again she produced the obscenity like a pistol shot, as though shock might be the only weapon she had with which to defend herself.

He said calmly, ‘I'm not interested in any prosecution at the moment, though you should be aware that soliciting is a criminal offence. I'm only interested in the girl you've just seen lying dead, and anything that will help us to find out how she died.'

She looked down miserably at her small feet in their cheap silver plastic shoes. ‘All right. We took money for it. Hetty said I might as well be paid for it here as be fucked for nothing in Walsall by a man I hated.'

It was his first real glimpse of the dead woman. He could see them sitting on these threadbare beds in their poverty, with the older girl being persuasive to this one who feared so much to go home. ‘Where did you pick up your clients?'

The phrase alarmed her. She had not thought of herself as setting out to pick up men, nor had she considered them as clients. She had thought of herself as an amateur, beginning to take a little money because she needed it. She attempted the experienced woman's hardness, setting her lips sullenly as she said, ‘I can't tell you any more. You lot twist anything to –'

‘You can and will tell us more.' His voice was like a whiplash across her face. ‘You've just seen your flatmate lying dead in the mortuary. Either we catch the man who did it, or it will be you or some other young fool like you on that slab next week!'

She nodded several times, refusing still to look at him, fearing that the kindly face with its thick, rounded eyebrows would have changed. She sobbed again, producing an involuntary shudder which shook the whole of her body. ‘All right.'

‘Where did you meet these men?'

‘At the
Roosters
Club, mostly, by the football ground. It's a big place inside, you know, and always busy. And the drinks are cheap. Cheap and cheerful, Hetty always said it was.' Another sob racked her thin frame at the thought, but there were no tears.