Stranglehold Read online

  ‘Any idea how long ago she died?’ He saw what he thought was a professional caution descending upon the police surgeon’s features, and said irritably, ‘Only an opinion, Don. No one’s going to hold you to it.’ He was surprised to find himself using the doctor’s name; he liked the air of helpful spontaneity which the man carried about him. He might be something of a loner, but they were often the most useful among those who assisted the police from outside the system.

  Haworth grinned. ‘I know that. I was only thinking how I might be as precise as possible.’ He looked up at the starless sky, sniffing the night air a little as he assessed the temperature. ‘I would guess between two and three hours ago. But that is a guess. The body hasn’t cooled much, and the bruises around the throat look quite fresh.’

  Ahead of them an unseen hand drew back the canvas a little to admit Sergeant Johnson, and the shaft of light from the canvas enclosure fell briefly across the doctor’s feet. Lambert was surprised to see them encased in training shoes beneath the polythene bags which all visitors to this site would now be required to wear, looking slightly ridiculous at the end of the trousers of a formal dark suit. He grinned a little at himself and his out-of-date ideas, which expected a professional man to be wearing city shoes, even when he was called out in the middle of the night. He said, ‘We won’t hold you to it, but thank you for trying to be so precise.’

  His gratitude was genuine. The early inquiries were often the most productive, and he could send his team now to find who had been seen around here at a precise hour. He said, to Hook and himself as much as to Haworth, ‘Around midnight, then. After the pubs had shut.’

  Haworth pursed his lips. ‘Maybe a little later. I’d say this probably happened between twelve and one.’

  Lambert was surprised but pleased to find him trying so hard to pinpoint a time for them. In his experience most medical men were too mindful of their reputation to be actively helpful; they usually sat on the fence until they had much more evidence than had been available to this man. He volunteered in response a little more of his own thoughts than he would normally have done. ‘The later the better, from our point of view, in some respects. The fewer people about, the fewer suspects. Though of course that also means fewer witnesses as well. But we only need one, if it’s a good one.’

  Haworth nodded. ‘I wish you luck, then. I hope you find the one who did it.’ It was a strange wish, like a priest stating that sin is a bad thing. But the public, when confronted by evil, often produced these nervous truisms; it seemed that by asserting their own, conventional virtue, people distanced themselves from what had disturbed them. Haworth by his calling must have seen death often. But he had not been a police surgeon very long: Julie Salmon and this were his first murders, apart from the routine domestic killings which became ever more frequent.

  Lambert nodded and turned towards the spot where the body lay, but Haworth’s only move was to lift his right foot a little and tap the toe of his trainer against the hard summer ground. His black businessman’s case with the tools of his trade swung lightly by his knee, contrasting oddly with that informal footwear. He said, ‘You’ll find her – odd. She’s been – well, you’ll see for yourself.’ He smiled briefly, so that his teeth caught what little light there was, then turned on his heel and left them.

  Lambert watched him as he went to his car, a sleek low Japanese coupé. He did not look back or speak again, as if he was embarrassed by his last, halting words. Perhaps he thought a man with his background should have expressed himself better, or said nothing at all. Death should be an impersonal thing, a fact of life, for medics as for policemen.

  When Lambert went into the little canvas enclosure, he saw immediately what had ruffled the doctor. This corpse had been prepared for their viewing.

  The girl lay on her back. She had fair hair; it was impossible to tell in that light whether it was natural or peroxided. But it was neatly ordered. Either it had not been disturbed in death, which was unlikely, or it had been tidied up after the event. The young features had a serenity which perhaps they had not had in life, and almost certainly not in the last minutes of it.

  The arrangement of the limbs was as regular as if this corpse had been laid out in a coffin in a funeral parlour. The heels and knees were together, the slim calves and shins pathetic in their youth and the absence of any trace of veins. The tight skirt was pulled decently and regularly over the knees; it was easy to see why Haworth had felt that ascertaining whether there had been a sexual assault might destroy important evidence. Whoever had touched that skirt and rearranged those limbs and hair might have left traces of himself upon his gruesome handiwork. Already Lambert was assuming the killer was male; statistically that was overwhelmingly probable.

  It was the arrangement of the arms which shocked even policemen attuned to such bloodier deaths than this. They were carefully composed, with the hands drawn together between the small, tight breasts as if in prayer. Whoever had done this had slipped a strong elastic band around them, holding them together until they could set into the coldness of death. And already on this warm night rigor had begun to set in upon the small muscles of the victim’s face.

  The murdered girl looked like a marble figure upon a cathedral tomb, or a saint in a religious painting. Her killer had mocked her, and through her the men who would try to arrest him.

  Lambert decided that he could not wait for the pathologist to arrive. He needed sleep more than anything else in the world, and Hook had come on duty at the same time as him. He checked the mechanics of the investigation with ‘Jack’ Johnson, agreeing that the SOC team should not attempt the detailed examination of the area until daylight.

  ‘How long is it since it rained?’ he asked Johnson wearily. He had tried to compute the answer himself, but found one day merging with another in his fatigue.

  ‘Four days. And not much then.’ Johnson had worked with Lambert over many years, even though he was not CID. He knew there was no need to ‘Sir’ him unless an audience demanded the formalities.

  ‘Any chance of footprints?’ Lambert was stiffly removing the plastic bags which all who went into the area around the corpse would put over their shoes, to eliminate the risk of a confusion of sole-marks.

  ‘Not a lot. It wasn’t much more than a shower four days ago. The ground s pretty hard, but there might be something among the long grass. The photographer’s already taken a picture of one print; it had a heel and most of a sole; it looked fairly fresh to me.’

  Lambert looked round. The ragged bushes looked sinister on the edge of the harsh white floodlights, as if they held more secrets than they cared to reveal. Above them, the higher branches of a beech tree were perfectly still. The big house which had once stood behind them in the darkness had been demolished. A few yards from his head, a board said, SITE FOR 16 LUXURY FLATS, with the builder’s and the agent’s names beneath it. They were almost into green belt land here, but there was no need for builders to breach that when they could replace one residence with sixteen.

  But recession ruins the most lucrative plans: the paint was peeling on the agent’s board, and the weeds around it had grown head-high, while the builder waited for the green shoots of economic recovery that were so reluctant to show themselves. ‘Do many people come here?’ he asked Johnson.

  The Sergeant shrugged. ‘The local beat man says plenty of kids mess about here. And young couples in urgent need of a bunk-up. We’ve already found two rubber johnnies; no doubt there’ll be plenty more tomorrow.’ He looked automatically towards that silent figure in its pose of mediaeval piety, as if he might have committed an impropriety by his coarseness. But the dead are less easily offended than the living.

  Lambert nodded, feeling his exhaustion surge swiftly back as they moved to the detail of the investigation. ‘Bert Hook and I are for bed. Would you radio in to DI Rushton with any news when Dr Burgess arrives. We’ll begin the door to door inquiries first thing in the morning – but Rushton will have all that i
n hand.’

  Johnson nodded. Lambert was one of the very few Superintendents who did not run his investigation by directing his team from an office, preferring to be closer to events himself. It occasionally led to tensions in the ranks above and below him, but he had men about him who understood the way he worked. And he got results: even as an anachronism, that guaranteed his survival.

  The hands on the clock in the hall showed 3.17 as Lambert crept past it. He went into the kitchen to make himself a drink, then decided against it as exhaustion wrapped itself about him, crushing him like a great bear.

  He did not put the light on in the bedroom: Christine was a light sleeper, and he did not want to disturb her now. That was for his own sake as well as hers; he was too tired even for her sympathy. He left on the light on the landing while he removed his clothes with deliberation and draped them over the chair.

  There was enough light through the open door for him to see his wife’s head on the pillow. She breathed deeply and quietly. A lock of hair fell becomingly over her left eye, making her look quite young; her hair had no hint of grey, but the oblique light edged it with a silver which made it look as though it were cut from marble. She lay on her back, peaceful, quiet, untroubled by the things he had had to witness. In this half-light he could detect no lines on her forehead; the years seemed to have fallen away from her.

  Her position reminded him inevitably of that other woman, whose life had been ended tonight. She had lain as tidily as this; and even more quietly. Creeping between the sheets beside his wife, Lambert thought again of the unknown hands which had composed those dead limbs into that parody of the good religious death.

  A murderer who chose to mock them. The kind of damaged mind which was most difficult to detect because it killed without clear motive. His last image as he lost consciousness was of the hands which had arranged that body for him to contemplate. Hands which had killed twice, and would kill again, unless they were arrested.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lambert had five hours of dreamless sleep. It was enough to refresh him, as it had always been. He had few words for his wife at the breakfast table, but that was not significant: he had never been an early-morning talker.

  ‘What time did you get in?’ Christine looked at him surreptitiously as she set two slices of toast at his left elbow; she knew that if he saw her assessing the state of his health openly, it would annoy him. Men liked to be pampered once they had decided they were ill, but until then they liked to pretend they were creatures of iron. Or this one did: having had only daughters to contend with, she was never sure whether the schoolboy remained in all men as strongly as it did in her husband.

  ‘Around three, I suppose. I tried not to wake you.’ He thought of her unconscious innocence and stillness as he had undressed. She looked altogether more brisk and experienced this morning; despite himself, he found his thoughts returning to that other woman, who had been despatched from life so abruptly when she was still so young.

  Christine looked at her watch. ‘I must be off. I’ve got my slow readers first thing, and I want to make sure the right books are there in the classroom for them.’

  He nodded, smearing vegetable-fat margarine across his toast with the grimace of ritual distaste he still thought appropriate to it. ‘There was another one killed last night.’

  Trust him to leave the interesting bit until she had no time to discuss it. ‘Another girl?’

  ‘Yes. Not much more than a girl, anyway.’ Not for the first time, he wondered what experiences qualified a girl to become a woman; certainly it was not merely a question of age.

  ‘Where?’ She found herself hoping it was not anywhere where she moved, that it was miles away, in another county. Her world should not contain such things.

  ‘Out on the edge of the town. Towards Gloucester.’

  Too close, then. She felt immediately threatened, and wondered if that small, unpleasant thrill of physical danger was a selfish emotion. Her second thought was maternal, and almost as automatic as her first: she was glad for once that her daughters were married and away from here. Sleepv Oldford seemed suddenly a dangerous place for voting women.

  She grabbed her briefcase, swept up her car keys from their place above the radiator. ‘Where exactly, John?’

  "Off Mill Lane. On the road out towards Ditton Farm. They’re building a new block of flats there, though God knows when.’ He had to force out the little snippets of information. For years, he had said nothing in this house about the work which had once almost divided them. Now he made himself say a little, but that little did not come easily.

  ‘Near the Football Club?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He should have thought of that immediately Oldford FC was a flourishing non-league outfit; as the new housing had spread around the town in the ’eighties, so had the ‘gates’ and the prosperity of the soccer team increased. There was talk among the optimistic about eventual league status for the club.

  The football club had a compact little ground, just a little nearer to the centre of the town than where the policemen had stood beside that slim young body last night. Beneath the permanent stand erected six years earlier, it had its own social club, the Roosters, which was the nickname of the team. Drinking there was confined to members, but membership was cheap, and the beer was cheaper than in the town’s pubs.

  As Oldford FC’s success and support had grown, the social club had grown noisier and rougher. There were not too many houses near, but the noise was a continual source of complaint from what residents there were. Lately, there had been more serious disturbances: outbreaks of violence between small gangs, the occasional knife, even on one evening open confrontation between a gang of drunken louts and the police called in to control them.

  He should have thought of the place last night was annoyed with himself now that it had been his wife’s first thought, when he had overlooked it – Exhaustion made a man inefficient, as he told his subordinates on occasions: he should observe his own dictum. He forced himself to relax, watching his hand as it poured his tea. Rushton and the others would have thought of the Roosters dub immediately, even if he hadn’t: he must learn to trust his team, just as he had had to learn to delegate.

  There was no need to say anything else to his wife. Christine’s Fiesta was away through the gates before he had finished castigating himself.

  Three hours later he had more immediate problems. Cyril Burgess. MB. Ch.B. had that streak of sadism which seemed possessed by all pathologists, in Lambert’s experience: he loved to test the stomachs of working policemen with the detail of his findings. Lambert did not find it an agreeable quality: Burgess had long since understood that, and decided that such squeamishness only added to his amusement.

  He stood now by the corpse he had just investigated, threatening at any moment to twitch back the sheet and reveal his awful handiwork. ‘The stomach contents were interesting.’ he said affably. ‘I can show you why, if you’d like to see them.’

  Lambert shook his head; Burgess, who had known he would refuse, scarcely registered the gesture. ‘Who was she?’ he said.

  Lambert checked automatically on his notes, relieved to look anywhere away from that shape beneath the sheet on the stainless steel. ‘Harriet Brown. She would have been twenty-one next week. Unmarried.’

  ‘But not a virgin. Be unusual if she was, nowadays, at that age.’

  ‘She seems to have been on the game. Or starting on it, perhaps. The uniformed lads knew her, but she had no convictions.’ It was the usual route into prostitution. Girls tried it for pin money, or because they were in debt, found it lucrative, and were drawn into it full-time. If they lasted, they usually ended up with pimps. Oldford, thankfully, had not yet many of those; organized prostitution was still seen as a city activity.

  ‘Local girl?’

  ‘We don’t think so. Word has it that she came here from the Midlands or the North about a year ago. We should know more before the day’s out.’ He wondered about th
e girl’s parents in some distant town, ignorant as yet of their daughter’s death, and pictured some young WPC charged with the duty of breaking the news. Then there would be other relatives; grandparents, perhaps, with a girl of this age. The ripples of suffering spread outwards for weeks; he wondered uselessly if murders might sometimes be prevented if the killers had an overview of the consequences of their acts.

  Burgess said, ‘I can give you semen samples for the DNA profile. Your victim had had intercourse not long before death.’

  Lambert nodded, still picturing the distress of those faceless parents. ‘Julie Salmon, the first girl killed, had been raped as well.’

  Burgess shook his head. ‘You misunderstand me, John. This girl wasn’t raped. I said she’d had intercourse, that’s all. There’s no evidence on the corpse that the act was accompanied by any undue violence.’

  Lambert castigated himself for the second time that day, this time for jumping to conclusions. He said woodenly, ‘How long before death?’

  Burgess shrugged: he was not prepared to speculate as readily as his medical colleague Don Haworth had done. I should say in her last hour of life. Very probably in her last few minutes, but I couldn’t be certain of that.’

  ‘Are there any tests you could do to be certain?’

  ‘No. Nothing that would provide evidence strong enough for a court of law. Is it important?’

  ‘It could be very important. If she is a girl who sold her favours, your semen sample could come from someone who was nowhere near her when she was killed.’