Destroying Angel (23 page)

At last he did come, ejaculating copiously against her throat, and then taking himself in hand to drain his cock and spatter her breasts with the last of his sperm.

‘Oh, I do love the sight of a girl wearing a pearl necklace,’ the big man chuckled as Emil staggered back. ‘Now is when the real fun begins, girlie.’ Without consulting the bald man, he replaced Emil, opened his trousers, and held his semi-erect penis before Paulette’s face. She knew exactly what he wanted, and although it had not been part of the original deal, she peeled her lips apart and allowed him to feed it into her mouth, reasoning that it was best not to upset these men and risk Susan’s mission upstairs.

‘Oh yeah,’ he croaked as his cock stiffened under her expert ministrations. ‘I knew the horny bitch would give good head.’

Paulette correctly judged he was overexcited and braced herself as he curled his fingers into her hair and held her still, his cock fully embedded in her mouth and his humid groin pressed against her face. He tensed, and then his cock jerked and erupted into her throat. Paulette gagged and swallowed. He spurted again and held her in place, ignoring her efforts to push him away until he had spent fully and their breathing had slowed.

‘That wasn’t part of the deal,’ she complained as he pulled back.

‘No,’ he said weakly, ‘but you loved it.’

That, Paulette could not deny, although she would never let the arrogant pig know.

Before she could gather her wits the chubby balding bloke moved in, his trousers and pants already around his ankles. Paulette sat wearily as he squeezed her breasts together and ground his feeble erection between them. He squealed strangely as he thrust against her, and then at the last moment he gripped her head, stuffed his cock into her mouth, and with an erratic flurry of jerks and bucks he anointed her tongue and throat with yet more semen.

Paulette found some tissues and cleaned herself as the three men congratulated each other with much backslapping. She hoped Susan had got away with the evidence, and now she had to make her own hasty exit before the men went back up and noticed the missing wine and possibly that the files had been touched. They were straightening their clothing. ‘Wait—’ she blurted. ‘Let me go and get my friend.’

‘But you said she’s a prude,’ said Emil.

‘But I’ve enjoyed myself with you
so
much,’ she lied in her most sexy voice. ‘I’m sure I can convince her to come down, and then we can have some
real
fun.’

The men looked at each other, their eyes sparkling.

‘Would the two of you give us a show?’ asked the red-haired man, his husky tone betraying his returning lust.

‘Mmm…’ drooled Paulette, ‘that would be nice. We love it with each other.’

‘Blimey,’ panted the bald man. He dabbed his large forehead with his sleeve. ‘Blimey.’

‘I’ll go and get her, then?’

The three men nodded dumbly. She put her bra and top back on, explaining that she didn’t want to be seen topless from the street, and dashed back up the wooden steps. As she glanced down, just before closing the cellar door, the morons were lowering their trousers again in readiness for the delights to come.

Jilly pouted at Robin. They sat together on a car blanket belonging to her parents, on the floor of a square concrete room, featureless but for doors and a great cluster of rusting cables that protruded from one wall. Once it had housed switchgear for a major substation, but now it was given over to the elements. She had taken him there with the promise of sex, choosing the abandoned substation as somewhere Taz was not likely to turn up unexpectedly, and somewhere she could keep Robin indefinitely. She had then insisted on a long heart-to-heart, ignoring his protests that time was short, on the grounds that their fledgling relationship was more important than getting away to meet the Fire Ghost.

‘I’ve got to go soon, Jilly,’ he protested, glancing at his watch yet again. ‘I’m meeting him in Merton. I can’t let him down. He’s relying on me to tag the warehouse.’

‘But I thought you wanted to be with me?’ she sulked.

‘I do, Jilly, but…’

‘He can wait a little while, can’t he?’ she coaxed softly.

‘I—’

‘Robin,’ she pouted, ‘I’m here, ready for you. If you leave me now I swear I’ll never so much as kiss you again.’

‘But—’

‘Robin…’ she flashed him her most seductive look, with fluttering eyelashes, ‘what would you like me to do to you?’

‘I… I…’ his brain churned slowly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, what would you like? You know, something sexy.’

‘Blimey! I’m not sure really.’

‘Shall I tell you what I’d like to do?’

Robin nodded dumbly, his mouth dry.

‘I’d like to tie you up, and then do all sorts of naughty things to you.’

‘B-blimey!’ he stammered again, not wanting to admit that she’d just hit on one of his favourite fantasies.

‘Would you like that?

‘I—’ he blushed as his cock lifted the front of his jeans and Jilly saw it. She grinned mischievously at the answer bulging clearly in his lap.

‘I think you would… wouldn’t you?’

Robin nodded again, too excited to speak.

Before her chance could be lost, Jilly undid his belt and pulled it free from his waist. Upon her order Robin crossed his wrists and she cinched the belt as tightly as she could around them.

‘Careful!’ he whined. ‘That bloody hurts!’

‘Shhh… It’s supposed too – just a little,’ she assured him, not really knowing if it was supposed to hurt or not. ‘It all adds to the excitement.’

Robin remained quiet after that, and allowed her to push him onto his back. He blushed again when he saw the denim tent pressing up from his groin.

Jilly gave him a teasing kiss, and then found a length of old cable. She wrapped and tied that around his ankles, and he was quickly bound and immobilised. Apart from making sure Robin was safe from the arsonist, she was also pleasantly surprised to discover an immense satisfaction in taking the dominant role and having him at her mercy. She took a hanky from inside her bra and stuffed it into Robin’s mouth, and mentally patted herself on the back for doing such a good job of stopping him from getting into trouble. She wouldn’t release him until much later, and by then the police would have their man.

She gazed down at him. He looked extremely appetising: trussed and gagged.

‘Now,’ she whispered sexily, as a finger and thumb found his straining zip and the heat from within the bulging denim warmed her palm. ‘Let’s see what we have here then…’

Susan lay back in her bath, her mind turning over the details of the case. It was coming together nicely. Once they had the evidence properly together and the formal support of Oswald MacNaughton and maybe even Christian Charrier, they would be able to present a solid case to the police. Ruddock and de Vergy would be charged with fraud and doubtless the details of the arson would come out in the course of the police investigation. Sowerby’s murder could then be investigated at leisure, although it was entirely conceivable that it would prove impossible to put a solid case together on that score. Still, if Ruddock or de Vergy had been in France…

‘Paulette?’ Susan called, an idea suddenly coming to her. ‘Have you got the number of the hotel in Choray?’

‘Somewhere,’ Paulette called back from the kitchen. ‘Why?’

‘Give them a ring and find out if either Annabella de Vergy or Philip Ruddock stayed there in late July or early August,’ she called. ‘Tell them you’re Ruddock’s secretary and ask for a receipt for their most recent stay. If there was one, you should be able to get the right dates.’

‘Okay.’

Susan began soaping herself as she listened to Paulette attempting to speak French on the phone. Eventually the stilted conversation ended and she heard the receiver click back into place.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Got him!’ Paulette beamed as she hurried into the bathroom. ‘Annabella was there in August and came back on the thirteenth. Ruddock was there from July the twenty-third to the twenty-ninth. That makes it Ruddock, doesn’t it?’

‘Probably…’

‘Oh, come on,’ Paulette said, unable to hide her frustration. ‘You say he was poisoned in the second week of August. To get him, Annabella would have had to make the lethal pâté and invite him to dinner to poison him in quick succession. Remember, he used to review restaurants. That means he had to dine out just about every night of the week. He wasn’t the sort of person you could just ring up on the off chance and ask over to dinner; he’d need weeks of notice…’

‘She could have planned it in advance,’ Susan countered. ‘It’s a shame his diary is inconclusive.’

‘Hold on,’ Paulette said, disappearing again.

She returned a moment later with Alan Sowerby’s diary, flicking through the pages to find the point where his entries ceased. ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Here we are. He left it in the Pipe of Port on the tenth, when Annabella was in France. He’s got reminders for dinners after that, but not with Annabella, so there was no arrangement. How’s that for logic?’

‘Fair,’ Susan admitted. ‘She could have called him from France after the tenth, or he could have cancelled a date for the sake of his beloved Annabella. But I do concede it’s less likely. Did he have dinner with Ruddock after the twenty-ninth of July?’

‘Hang on,’ Paulette said as she turned the pages back. ‘Yes, on the eighth, after Annabella left for France!’

‘Well, it looks like we might have him,’ Susan concluded, with not a little pang of triumphant pleasure.

‘So let’s go and see Paul Berner.’

‘No. This is the point where we take things carefully. Before we present the case to the police, we need every loose end tied up. For instance, we need Oswald’s support for the wine analysis, maybe Charrier’s, too. We need to know why Sowerby didn’t realise he’d been poisoned deliberately and accuse Ruddock. We need to know what happened between his dinner with Ruddock and his death. What was he supposed to be doing on the evenings from the ninth to the thirteenth?’

‘Let’s see,’ Paulette responded. ‘Attending a tasting in Guildford on the ninth… nothing on the tenth… reviewing somewhere called Jacob’s Barn on the eleventh, in Chelmsford… another tasting on the twelfth, and also the thirteenth.’

‘According to the poisonous fungi book, he’d have been suffering agonising stomach cramps on those days,’ said Susan. ‘We can probably find out if he reviewed Jacob’s Barn easily enough; the tastings might be harder. Basically, the question is: was he ill on those days?’

Ted Gage surveyed the narrow approach road. A tall fence on either side held back straggly brambles and sycamore trees, and a single streetlight illuminated fifty yards or so of the gravel track. It was the most obvious approach to the trading estate on which he and his men were concealed, watching for the fire-raiser to make his eighth strike. At the main entrance a night-watchman and plenty of illumination made an approach unlikely. Here, at the rear, there was a much better chance of catching the man. That was why he had chosen the station for himself, leaving a constable to guard the front.

The tip-off had come from a worried girl who wouldn’t leave her name, nor the name of the man who had boasted to her that he intended to set fire to a DIY warehouse in Merton. She had sounded genuinely scared, but after three hours of waiting in the upper story of an empty industrial unit, Gage was beginning to wonder if it might not have been a hoax. The seven fires had attracted a fair bit of publicity, and it was inevitable that sooner or later the cranks, jokers and attention seekers would crawl out of the woodwork.

Another nagging, though minor, doubt came from Susan MacQuillan’s theory about canals. The Merton estate had no canal bordering it. Still, at the end of the day, only three of the seven fires had been close to proper canals and he remained fairly certain that MacQuillan’s ideas were nothing more than over-elaborate hot air.

A slight movement at the far end of the approach road caught his attention, instantly causing a rush of adrenaline. He raised his radio to his lips and whispered a message to control.

As two shadowy figures ambled closer and passed under the light his pulse returned to normal. They were a couple, teenagers, presumably intent on using the deserted estate for a little hanky panky. He watched as they approached, giggling, occasionally swigging from a bottle.

The girl looked quite pretty, blonde, and dressed in a light frock that showed plenty of shapely leg and clung to a pair of pert breasts. The boy was tall and also fair-haired. Gage wet his lips, experiencing a not unwelcome pleasure in spying on them – and also a touch of jealousy.

He watched as they stopped in the lee of a clump of brambles that had worked its way through the fence. The girl glanced up the track as her boyfriend folded her in his arms, one hand still clutching the bottle, the other fumbling at her bottom. They kissed, and her skirt was edged up to reveal brief white knickers stretched tight across a rounded teenage bottom. Gage found his hand inching to his crotch and he was unable to resist squeezing his cock through his trousers. The youth lowered her knickers, revealing a little of her pale buttocks.

Gage felt his jealousy rising with his lust as he squinted and strained to see as much of her as he could. He envied the scrawny youth, and yearned to have those soft buttocks in his own hands. How was it even an inexperienced and undeserving teenager should have more fun than him?