Stranglehold (24 page)

‘He would also be the best test of whether your impersonation had been rumbled.' Lambert turned to his Chief Constable. ‘I think we should try it. The only stipulation I would make is that I insist on withdrawing Sergeant David immediately if there is even a suggestion that her cover has been blown. There's no guarantee that the Strangler would stick to his methods if he felt we were getting near to him.'

Harding nodded. ‘That is a rider I should have added myself. I think we should now put the scheme into action as quickly as possible.'

Lambert looked at the girl opposite him. Now that the scheme had finally been sanctioned, she was striving to conceal her excitement. For the first time since the idea had been broached, Ruth David felt nervous. But there was no trace of that in her voice as she said, ‘I'm ready to move into the
Roosters
tonight, sir.'

Darren Pickering was at once bored and uneasy. The
Roosters
was quiet for a Saturday night, and those that had made the effort to come out were not doing much dancing.

Perhaps the Strangler and all the talk about him was having a dampening effect upon the club. No one had said officially that these murders centred upon the place, but the regulars, unconsciously in some cases, had divined it for themselves. There were fewer girls in than usual. People watched each other more closely, were quicker to take offence. The laughter, when it came, rang loud and self-conscious across the big room with its expanse of shining dance floor.

Darren lounged back between the wooden arms of his chair and surveyed his third pint of beer. He could not raise a lot of enthusiasm even for drinking tonight; he kept thinking of the way the police had questioned him about the death of Amy Coleford. Despite his professed contempt for them, he wished he could provide himself with an alibi for the time of that killing. But he knew very well that no one was going to come forward to say that they had seen him on his motorbike that night.

Beside him, Ben Dexter sipped his beer and studied his companion. He wondered how long it would be before Pickering relinquished his earring. He would tell him in a week or two that it would be a point of weakness in any street fighting When the new season got under way. All the signs were that there would be bigger crowds around, as Oldford made their bid to get into the league. The Strangler would give the team a certain abattoir glamour: he wondered if they could build him into some of their chants. There might be more murders before the season began: Ben Dexter smiled his secret, mirthless smile at the thought.

‘Useful bit of crumpet on the next table,' he said to the doleful Pickering. ‘Might give her one myself, if she's a good girl.'

Pickering wondered how much success Ben Dexter really had with women. He had not seen much public evidence to support his companion's suggestions of his sexual successes. ‘She's been in before, but she looks different tonight,' said Darren. ‘More – more available.'

‘Big word for a young lad like you,' said Dexter. He looked across at the long expanse of black nylon, stretching out to where the ankles crossed above red heels; Ruth David had decided that fishnet tights would be too abrupt a change from her previous hose. ‘If you mean she's flashing her fanny and asking for it, you're right.' He stared appreciatively at the point where the black leather skirt creased over the transition from thigh to stomach.

‘Time you were putting it about again yourself, young Darren. Lack of oats is making you moody. You're not the same man now that you're not able to poke young Julie.' He knew he was on dangerous ground, but as always he enjoyed the excitement of being close to danger. And he got a perverse satisfaction out of speech and attitudes much coarser than those of his lumpish companion.

‘I've told you before. Leave Julie out of your conversation!' Pickering leaned across the table, and for a moment Dexter thought he was going to feel those large hands on his immaculate white shirt.

‘Steady on, old lad.' He backed off quickly; then, when he saw Pickering relax, resumed his thesis in more general terms. ‘All I'm saying is, if the tarts are putting it about a bit, let's have our share. Grab a handful of –'

‘Julie wasn't a tart!' Pickering's eyes blazed with a righteous indignation that Dexter found wholly amusing.

‘I didn't say she was, Darren. But it was you who told me she'd been playing away from home with an older man.' His face was full of his appeal to reason, his mind full of malice.

‘Just shut up, can't you? Leave Julie out.' Darren was shouting now, full of the indignation of the inarticulate man who knows he is right but cannot find the words to justify himself. People on other tables around them were looking across to see what the disturbance was about.

Ben Dexter said, ‘Cool it, Darren. All I'm saying is, don't waste opportunity when there's skirt like this about.' He gestured with his head towards the delights available on the adjacent table.

Ruth David, who was aware of his scrutiny but ostensibly concentrating upon her companions and her gin and tonic, uncrossed her ankles, studied the red toes of her shoes for a moment, and crossed her legs again at the knees. The Footlights had hardly prepared her for this. All acting was supposed to proceed from movement, she knew, but she found this role difficult without a script. She had never entertained any illusions that she could make a professional career on the stage, though a succession of moonstruck intellectuals at her ancient seat of learning had assured her breathily that she had the looks for it.

Calf-love, no more. She surveyed those two most desirable of her features and worked assiduously at the body-language which was the only script this part seemed to afford. Leaning back to make the most of breasts she had always considered small but beautifully rounded, she widened her green eyes interrogatively at Paul Williams.

The drug squad sergeant had had months to get inside his part. He stroked his stubble reflectively, then jerked his head wordlessly towards the dance floor. It was the kind of invitation which would have brought a sharp rebuke from her normally. Now she ignored its presumption and rose with a grateful eagerness, tossing her halo of ash-blonde hair, parting eagerly the lips to which she had assiduously applied too much bright red lipstick in the cloakroom. Her acting was improving.

The dance floor was sparsely populated, but that suited her purpose. Williams danced with the glazed eyes of a man well dosed with pot, moving in time with the rhythm, but with the air of one cocooned in a dream-world of his own. He was watching the people he wanted to observe, the men who waited for their summons to the room of Charlie Kemp, but no one would have known it from his actions.

Opposite him but divorced from him, Ruth David did not indulge in violent movements. She swayed gently, with a reptilian sinuousness, as though the bones which supported her slim frame had become temporarily plastic. Her arms moved first one way and then the other in unison, the longest finger of her right hand touching the back of her left. Her head was thrown back, so that her hair dangled behind her, lit occasionally by the coloured overhead lights so that it looked like hair in some undersea grotto. The large green eyes were almost closed within their patches of eye-shadow, witchlike but infinitely desirable. The garish lips were slightly parted, the nostrils dilated as though she were aiming at a slow, infinitely prolonged orgasm.

She quite enjoyed the part, to the extent that she had to remind herself of the dangers it was deliberately courting. She wondered if she was overdoing things, but the faces around the dance floor told her that she was not. Men were credulous creatures at the best of times, so that fact might as well be used to advantage in this, the worst of times for women. They said that there was a touch of harlot in the make-up of every woman; well, she was allowing hers full rein tonight.

And the men in their naivety was taken in. By the time the acned youth who led the group on the dais at the end of the room strummed his last frenzied chords and flung his guitar dramatically to one side to signal the end of the number, there was no man who was unaware of Ruth David. She looked at the faces, pale and dark, which were dotted in an uneven line around the dance floor. The women were trying to look indifferent; perhaps a few of them were. But she felt the male eyes upon her, roving like hands up and down her body, as she forced herself to move unhurriedly back to her seat.

Not many of them dwelt long on her face: she felt them upon her flanks, roving unashamedly, assessingly up them to the depression of her crotch and the round curve of her buttocks, and thought for a moment that she could not carry this through. But wasn't this the effect she had desired, had worked hard to contrive? It was of her making, not theirs. She had taken what these simple creatures scarcely understood about themselves and laboured to exploit it. It was the old Mae West thing: ‘Is that a revolver in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?' The difference was that here she couldn't laugh at sex to remove its danger.

Women on the catwalk had this attention to contend with all the time. But it was the clothes people came to see on those lean figures. The eyes which watched her were taking her clothes off, dwelling with lascivious conjecture on what lay beneath the leather of her skirt and the thin silk of her blouse. Well then, Sergeant David, the act was a good one, the plan was working. Don't let it go wrong now.

She went back to her chair without touching Paul Williams, distancing herself from him as both of them knew she must if the scene was to progress further. She blew out warm air between lips that were almost closed, watching it move the strands of hair that had fallen over her face in the dance. She lay back in her chair, simulating exhaustion, stretching the long legs straight and a little apart away from her. She could almost hear the collective intake of breath around her when she made that movement. What easy creatures men were to manipulate!

Vic Knowles, the new Oldford FC manager, to whom she had been introduced twenty minutes earlier, raised his glass to her from fifteen yards away and gave her an outrageous wink. No doubt he would be over to ask her to dance at the first opportunity; he was fingering his watch as though it were some sort of talisman. He was not a bad-looking man, though his teeth were a little too prominent and his clothes were too young for him.

With his lined, lived-in face, he looked older than his years. She could just remember him playing, passing the ball skilfully in midfield, when she had begun to watch football, a determined small girl alongside her scornful elder brothers.

Darren Pickering had folded his arms across the legend on his T-shirt which proclaimed that ‘Bikers do it on full throttle' as if he wished to conceal that unsophisticated propaganda. He broad face carried a strangely abstracted grin; he was looking at her appreciatively and pulling at his left earlobe; she wondered if this was some masonic signal of his intentions of which she was as yet in merciful ignorance.

She did not turn her head as she felt a body sliding into the vacant chair on her left. She could hear him breathing, waiting for her to turn. She did so unhurriedly, half-closing her eyes, forcing herself into the bored look that men considered sultry. She found herself looking into blue eyes that glittered without a trace of humour beneath carefully cut yellow hair. When the words came, they were in cut-glass tones, with each syllable clearly enunciated.

‘You and I could have a lot of fun together,' said Ben Dexter.

Darren Pickering did not spend much more of that Saturday night at the
Roosters.
For some reason he could not quite explain, the sight of the rest of the men in the room ogling Ruth David irritated him. And Ben Dexter's monologue about her charms annoyed him even more.

He tried to analyse his feelings in the car park, walking gloomily between the lines of gleaming status symbols. Ben should not have spoken like that about Julie. If the flash bugger did it just once more, he'd smash him up. What had been between him and Julie was theirs, a place not to be trespassed upon by others who knew nothing of how they'd been with each other. That other, older man had been nothing. A passing phase, which had been over when she died. Julie had told him that, and he'd believed it. They'd have been together again now, if only ...

He wished he had come to the club on his motorbike. Then he would have been able to get right away out of the town, shutting out all the things about Oldford which puzzled and dismayed him as he put on his helmet. He loved to feel the wind racing past his face as he opened up the 500 and controlled the smooth power pulsing beneath him. Sometimes he felt the only moments when he could really be himself now were on the bike.

It was dark now, with the last vestiges of natural light banished by the harsh orange neon of the street lighting. He wondered if he should wait for Ben to come out of the club, so that he could have it out with him here and now. Without an audience. If it came to a fight and the use of his hands, he could handle Ben Dexter. But the idea shocked him as he thought of it. They were friends, weren't they? No use falling out, even over Julie. He'd tell him to keep off that subject, though.

He wondered if Ben was getting off with that Ruth inside the club. For all his talk, he didn't seem to be particularly successful with the girls there. That disloyal thought gave Darren a little satisfaction. Anyway, if he did come out with her on his arm, he wouldn't want a mate around. He paused for a moment beside Ben's blue metallic Porsche, then turned abruptly away from the
Roosters
and walked along the side of the football ground.

Two pairs of eyes watched him go. One of them belonged to the detective-constable who was posted to watch the exits from the social club. He had observed Pickering curiously ever since he had emerged, thinking at first that he was planning to steal a car. He was quite disappointed when the big man paused by the Porsche and then moved away: it would have done him no harm to arrest a murder suspect, even on a minor charge.