The Enemy Within (11 page)

Besides, she had another ace up her sleeve. She had met Bryant's wife – the world-famous foreign correspondent – and what a sad-looking, middle-aged, washed-out blonde the woman had turned out to be. Constance Bryant couldn't possibly be giving a vigorous man like Dexter what he needed – which meant that he must constantly be on the lookout for someone else who could. And should he choose to take advantage of it, such a person could soon be landing on his lap – both metaphorically and literally! All he needed to do to make his dreams come true was to see the sense of allying his experience and knowledge with the energy and ruthlessness of a young reporter determined to make it to the top by the time she was thirty.

As the train came to a juddering halt in Whitebridge station, Elizabeth Driver took a last drag on her cigarette, then threw it on the floor and ground the butt with the toe of her shoe.

‘See?' she said, looking across at her fellow passenger. ‘All gone! No more smoke! Are you happy now?'

The man said nothing, but now the train had ceased to clatter, she could hear how badly he was breathing.

Perhaps she'd been a little unfair to him, she thought, feeling the slight mental twinge which was the closest she ever came to guilt. Perhaps, after all, she should have taken her cigarette into the corridor.

Still, it was too late for that now. She'd have to think of some other way to make it up to him.

She stood up. Her small suitcase and her portable typewriter were in the luggage rack above her head. She reached up for them – stretching more than was strictly necessary – and felt her skirt begin to ride high up her legs. A little more stretch and she knew the skirt had risen high enough to reveal the tops of her stockings.

She held the pose for several seconds before lifting her luggage clear of the rack. The asthma sufferer would have got quite an eyeful of her long, slim legs, she told herself. She was willing to bet he didn't have anything half as nice as that to look at in his own home.

She opened the carriage door, and stepped on to the platform. Whitebridge railway station was just as she remembered it: crenellated woodwork; old gas mantles which were still in place though it must have been decades since the station had gone electric; travel posters for holiday resorts which had long since ceased to be fashionable. What a dump!

This was the town in which she had already lost several battles – but not yet the war. Though the station buildings blocked any view of Whitebridge from her, she still turned to face the direction in which she knew the police headquarters lay.

‘Up yours, Charlie Woodend!' she said, not quite under her voice.

T
he late afternoon was normally one of Rawalpindi Road's quieter times. With the husbands still at work, the children still in school and the wives toiling over a hot stove, the street could normally expect no more foot traffic than the occasional pensioner on a careful measured stroll and the odd door-to-door salesman chasing his quota.

It was a very different story that particular afternoon. Those residents who had yet to be visited by one of the team of police officers working the road waited impatiently indoors for the call to come. Those who had received the visit gathered together in clusters on each other's doorsteps. They looked at No. 40, then at each other, then back at No. 40 again. The street buzzed with speculation and revelation. It was all very exciting.

In the house where the dead woman had lived there was an air of ordered calm. Surfaces were being dusted for fingerprints, and drawers were being opened in the search for clues. The bedding had already been stripped off and sent to the lab, and the drain in the back yard was being dredged on the off chance that it might contain something useful. Now that the team had a centre from which to operate, things were finally starting to happen.

Woodend walked into the front room of No. 40 and looked around him. It was all pretty much as he would have expected it to be from the outside. The floor was covered by a fitted carpet patterned with purple and yellow swirls. There was a cloth-covered three-piece suite which was probably several years old, but looked hardly used. Three pottery ducks of decreasing sizes were in full flight on the wall, and an electric fire with coal-glow effect sat snugly within a polished tiled fireplace.

‘All this must look a bit old-fashioned to you, Monika,' the Chief Inspector said to his sergeant.

Paniatowski, who had been to Woodend's home and recognized the similarities, shrugged awkwardly. ‘Well . . .' she said.

‘You have to understand what this room represents,' Woodend told her, ‘an' to do that, I suppose, you have to have grown up in Whitebridge – or some place like it – in the thirties. We saw pictures in the newspapers of millionaires swiggin' champagne on their private yachts, but we never thought for a second that anythin' like that would ever come our way. What we hoped for – what we
aspired
to – was this. We wanted a nice front parlour full of furniture that we didn't owe a penny on. We didn't have to use it – that wasn't the point – we just had to
have
it. It would be our own little palace in the middle of harsh, grimy Whitebridge. Go into any front room on this terrace, an' you'll find the mirror image of this one.'

‘I suppose you're right,' Paniatowski agreed, slightly mystified.

‘You're missin' the point, aren't you?' Woodend asked.

‘I think I must be.'

‘There are places – like that area we went to in Manchester when we were investigatin' the moorland murders – where women grow up almost expectin' to go on the game. They'd never have thought to put together a room like this. What this room says is “respectable”. It says that the woman who arranged it was more than willin' to play by all the rules of the society which surrounded her. It's not the room of a woman who ever thought that she'd end up sellin' herself.'

‘Yes, I can see that,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘But life doesn't always go as we've planned it, does it?' Woodend continued. ‘Husbands die when they're not supposed to, an' electricity bills an' rent demands take no account of personal tragedies.' He lit a cigarette. ‘She was on the game purely an' simply because she needed the money, wasn't she?'

Paniatowski nodded. ‘According to the neighbours, her husband was a heavy gambler who died leaving her nothing but debts. The bailiffs were hammering on the door even before he'd gone cold.'

‘When was this?'

‘Three years ago.'

‘An' how long after her husband's death did she first go on the game?'

‘About six months.'

Aye, Woodend thought, that would be just about right. For the first couple of months she'd be feeling too much of a sense of loss to worry about anything as trivial as her debts. For the next few months, she'd be telling herself there had to be a pleasanter way out of her problems. Finally, when no other solution had magically presented itself, she'd have given in to the inevitable.

‘How many punters did she normally see in the course of a week?' he asked Paniatowski.

‘As far as we can calculate, there were at least a dozen. Of course, it wasn't always the
same
dozen. Some of her original customers stopped coming after a while, and new ones appeared on the scene.'

‘Plus – if she's anythin' like the other cases of prostitution I've come across – there'd be the ones workin' on a schedule, who only saw her once a fortnight or once a month,' Woodend said.

‘The travelling salesmen who drop in when they're in town?'

‘Aye, an' the henpecked husbands who have to wait until their wives are off on a visit somewhere before they'll risk goin' to a prozzie.'

‘Of course, she's not been seeing anything like that number of men recently,' Paniatowski said sombrely.

And no wonder, Woodend thought. The poor woman simply wasn't up to it – she was bloody dying!

‘We know
why
she went on the game,' he said. ‘Now what we need to know is
how
she went about it.'

‘That shouldn't be too difficult to discover, should it?' Paniatowski asked.

‘You tell me,' Woodend replied. ‘Suppose you were a middle-aged woman who'd led a conventional life up to now, but was thinkin' about turnin' her hand to prostitution. Where would you start?'

‘The Boulevard?' Paniatowski hazarded.

‘There's only two kinds of prozzies who work the Boulevard. The very young ones who don't know any better – an' the very old ones who have no choice. Betty Stubbs didn't fit into either category. Besides, she didn't pick men up off the street – they came to her house.'

‘So maybe she had a pimp,' Paniatowski suggested.

‘An' how would she find one? Put an ad in the Mid Lancs
Courier
– “Middle-aged woman, in desperate straits, seeks procurer?” That doesn't seem very likely, does it now?'

‘No,' Paniatowski admitted. ‘It doesn't.'

‘Anyway, pimps like their girls to be young. There are plenty of spring chickens ready to be snapped up. Why would they bother with an old broiler like Betty?'

‘And if she did have a pimp, he'd want her to see a lot more than twelve punters a week,' Paniatowski said.

‘Exactly,' Woodend agreed. ‘Twelve punters a night would be nearer the mark. Did Betty have a phone?'

‘No.'

‘Then we can rule out her puttin' advertisements in tobacconists' windows as a way of makin' contact. They never include an address on the cards, only a phone number.'

‘Maybe she met her customers at some kind of social gathering,' Paniatowski said.

‘Like what, for example?'

‘I don't know. A church hall whist drive?'

‘Aye, you meet some rum buggers at church hall whist drives,' Woodend said, only partly sarcastically.

‘Or a social club.'

‘It's worth checkin' on. In the meantime, we might get a clearer picture by talkin' to some of her punters. I'll need a list of as many names as you can come up with.'

‘That won't be easy,' Paniatowski warned him. ‘I might manage to squeeze a few names out of her neighbour, but there aren't many men in Whitebridge who'll be willing to volunteer the information that they pay for sex.'

‘We might be able to reach some of them through the
Courier
,' Woodend suggested. ‘Get on to the Editor. Tell him I want him to put an appeal in tonight's paper for Betty's clients to come forward. Say he should make it plain that their confidentiality will be respected.'

The idea seemed to trouble Paniatowski. ‘Isn't that a bit like putting a box of matches into the hands of a pyromaniac?' she asked.

‘You're askin' me if we can trust Bryant not to turn our appeal into a sensationalist front-page story?'

‘More or less.'

‘We can trust him. He'll do a good job for us.' Woodend lit up a cigarette. ‘Not that it really matters
how
good a job he does. I don't expect the appeal will lead anywhere.'

‘You don't think the killer was one of her punters?' Paniatowski asked.

‘If he was, he'll have taken care to ensure that neither the neighbours nor any of Betty's other customers caught sight of him.'

‘Why? Because he always knew that he was going to kill to kill her?'

‘Because he always knew there was a
possibility
that he might.' Woodend took a drag on his Capstan. ‘I don't know what game he's playin', Monika, but I don't see him havin' anythin' personal against Betty.'

‘You don't? Why?'

‘Because the most important thing to him is not that he killed her, but what he did with her body afterwards. He needed a bonfire, an' the kids built one for him. He needed a dead body, an' Betty Stubbs was available. She was nothin' more than a prop to him.'

‘Who's he playing this game of his
with
?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Partly with the people he expected to gather around the bonfire once the incendiary device had gone off. That particular pleasure was denied to him when those two kids found the body. But mostly I think he's playin' with
us
.He wants to show us how superior he is. He wants to demonstrate that even though he took tremendous risks, we still can't catch him.'

Paniatowski shuddered. ‘The problem is, he caught us with a sucker punch – and he'll know that as well as we do.'

‘Exactly.'

‘If he's really to convince himself that he's superior to us, he's going to give us a second chance – one we'll be ready for.'

‘Yes.'

‘And the only way he can do that is to give us another body, isn't it?'

‘Looks like it,' Woodend agreed gravely.

F
rom her vantage point in the reception area of the Mid Lancs
Courier
, Elizabeth Driver was in an excellent position to observe much of the workings of the newspaper. Not that it was exactly an enthralling sight, she thought. The place could never have been mistaken for Fleet Street – and that was putting it mildly. In fact, it only a shade more impressive than the offices of the Maltham
Chronicle
, the provincial weekly rag on which she'd been working when Charlie Woodend – miffed that she had slightly distorted reality in order to produce a better story – had personally seen to it that she'd lost her job.

Her musing shifted from Woodend to Dexter Bryant. The Editor might well put on a brave face in public about his changed fortunes, but a face was all it could possibly be. The simple truth was that going from the
Daily Standard
to the Mid Lancs
Courier
was the equivalent of moving out of Buckingham Palace and into a small, damp council flat.