A Killing Kindness (2 page)

But in the morning her mini was still in the  car park.

And a short time afterwards a farm labourer  setting out to clear a ditch not fifty yards behind  the Cheshire Cheese found her body neatly, almost  religiously, laid out amid the dusty nettles.

She had been strangled, or 'choked' as the  labourer informed any who would listen to him, a progressively diminishing number over the next  few days.

But the alliteration appealed to Sammy Locke,  news editor of the local
Evening Post
and 'The  Cheshire Cheese Choking' was his lead story till  public interest faded, a rapid enough process as  the labourer could well avow.

Then ten days later the second killing took place.  June McCarthy, nineteen, single, a shift worker at  the Eden Park Canning Plant on the Avro Industrial Estate, was dropped early one Sunday morning at the end of Pump Road, a long curving street  half way down which she lived with her widowed  father. Her friends on the works bus never saw  her alive again. A septuagenarian gardener called  Dennis Ribble opening the shed on his Pump Street  allotment at nine-thirty
A.M
. found her dead on  the floor.

She too had been strangled. There were no  signs of sexual interference. The body was neatly  laid out, legs together, lolling tongue pushed back  into the mouth, arms crossed on her breast and,  a macabre touch, in her hands a small posy of mint  sprigs whose fragrance filled the shed.

There were no obvious suspects. Her father was  discovered still in bed and imagining his daughter  was in hers. And her fiancé, a soldier from a local  regiment, had returned to Northern Ireland the  previous day after a week's leave.

Sammy Locke at the
Evening Post
read the brief  accounts in the national dailies on Monday, looked for an angle and finally composed a headline reading CHOKER AGAIN?

He had just done this when the phone rang. A  man's voice said without preamble, 'I say, we will  have no more marriages.'

Locke was not a literary man, but his secretary,  having recently left boring school after one year  of a boring 'A' level course, thought she recognized a reference to one of the two boring texts  she had struggled through (the other had been 
Middlemarch).

'That's
Hamlet,'
she announced. 'I think.'

And she was right.

Act 3, Scene 1.
I have heard of your paintings  too, well enough; God hath given you one face and  you make youselves another; you jig, you amble, and  nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath  made me mad. I say we will have no more marriages; those that married already, all but one, shall  live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery,  go.

Sammy Locke did not know his Shakespeare  but he knew his news and after a little thought  he removed the question mark from his headline  and rang up Dalziel with whom he had a drinking  acquaintance.

Dalziel received the information blankly and then  consulted Pascoe, whose possession of a second-class honours degree in social science had won  him the semi-ironical status of cultural consultant to the fat man. Pascoe shrugged and made an entry  in the log book.

And then came Brenda Sorby.

She was just turned eighteen, a pretty girl with  long blonde hair who worked as a teller in a  suburban branch of the Northern Bank. A picture  had emerged of a young woman with the kind of  simplistic view of life which is productive of both  great naiveté and great resolution. She had told  her mother that she would not be home for tea  that Thursday evening, and she had been right.  After work she was having her hair done, and  then she planned to take advantage of the new  policy of Thursday night late closing by some of  the city centre stores to do some shopping before  meeting her boy-friend.

This was Thomas Arthur Maggs, Tommy to  his friends, aged twenty, a motor mechanic by  trade and an amiable but rather feckless youth  by nature. He had got into a bit of trouble as a  juvenile, but nothing serious and nothing since.  Brenda's father disapproved of almost everything  about Tommy and his circle of friends, but was  restrained from being too violent in his opposition  by Mrs Sorby, who opined that it was best to let  these things run their course. They did, until the  night of Brenda's eighteenth birthday which she  celebrated with a party of friends at the town's most  pulsating disco. She returned home happy, slightly  merry and wearing a rather flashy engagement  ring. Jack Sorby exploded - at Brenda for her stupidity, at Tommy for his duplicity, at his wife  for her ill-counsel, at himself for taking heed of  it. He subsided only when his threats to throw his  daughter out were met by the calm response that  in that case she would start living with Tommy  that very night.

A truce was agreed, a very ill-defined truce  but one which Jack Sorby felt had been treacherously and unilaterally shattered when on that  Friday morning only four days later he rose  to discover his daughter had not come home  the previous night. Once again, all Mrs Sorby's  powers of restraint were called upon to prevent  him setting off for the Maggses' household only  a mile away and administering to Tommy the  lower-middle-class Yorkshireman's equivalent of  a horsewhipping. Curiously, his genuine if rather  over-intense concern for his daughter did not  admit any explanation of her absence other than  the sexual.

Winifred Sorby had a broader view of her daughter, however. As soon as her husband had left for  the local rating office where he was head clerk, she  had rung the bank. Brenda was usually there by  eight-thirty. She had not yet appeared. At nine, she  tried again. Then, putting on a raincoat because,  despite the promise of a fine summer day, she was  beginning to feel a deep internal chill, she went  round to Tommy Maggs's house.

There was no reply, no sign of life.

The Maggses all worked, a helpful neighbour told her. And, yes, she had seen them all go off  at their usual time, Tommy included.

Mrs Sorby went to the police.

The name of Tommy Maggs immediately roused  some interest.

At eleven-fifteen the previous night a Panda  car crew had been attracted by the sight of an  old rainbow-striped mini with its bonnet up and  a young man apparently trying to beat the engine  into submission with a spanner.

Investigation revealed that it was indeed his  own car which had broken down and, despite all  his professional ministrations (for it was Tommy  Maggs), refused to start. A strong smell of drink  prompted the officers to ask how Tommy had  spent the evening. With his girl-friend, he told  them. She, irritated by the breakdown and being  only half a mile or so from her home which was  where they'd been heading, had set off on foot.

Had they been in a pub?

No, assured Tommy. No, they definitely hadn't  been in a pub.

But you have been drinking, suggested one of  the policemen emerging from the interior of the  mini with an almost empty bottle of Scotch in  his hand.

A breathalyser test put it beyond all doubt.  Tommy was taken to the station for a blood test.  His protestations that he had not taken a drink  until
after
the breakdown evoked the kindly meant  suggestion that he should save it for the judge. The police doctor was occupied elsewhere looking at a  night watchman who'd had his head banged in  the course of a break-in and it was well after one 
A.M
.
before Tommy was released, a delay which  was later to stand him in good stead. By this time  it was raining heavily and constabulary kindness  was once more evidenced by a lift in a patrol car  going in the general direction of his home.

When the police approached him the next day  at the Wheatsheaf Garage, his place of work, he  assumed it was on the same business and his story  came out again - perhaps a little more rounded this  time. A quiet romantic drive with his fiancee, the  breakdown, Brenda's departure on foot, his own  frustration and the taking of a quick pull on the  bottle to soothe his troubled nerves prior to abandoning the useless bloody car and walking home.

When he realized the true nature of their  enquiries, however, his agitation was intense. The  police took a statement, then went on to the bank.  No one had heard of or seen Brenda since she left  the previous evening, but there had been a couple  of attempts to get her on the telephone earlier that  morning, apart from Mrs Sorby's, that was.

By lunch-time, the police were taking things  very seriously. Jack Sorby had created a diversion  by going round to the Wheatsheaf Garage and  attempting to assault Tommy who by this time was  too miserable and demoralized to defend himself.  Fortunately, the police arrived almost simultaneously and established peace. Tommy wasn't up to much except repeating his story mechanically  but at least they solved the mystery of the other  phone calls. He had made them, he admitted.  When asked why, he said with a brief flash of  his customary liveliness, 'To get her to back up  my fucking story about the drink, of course.'

This made sense to Pascoe, who since the two  stranglings had been told by Dalziel to keep an  eye on all female attacks or disappearances. While  it didn't actually confirm Tommy's version of the  evening, it helped a lot; or it meant he was ten  times more cunning than he looked.

What finally took Tommy off the hook was  the last thing anybody wanted - the discovery  of the body. It was not pleasant. Right through  the heart of the city, a straight line alongside the  shallow and meandering river, ran the old canal,  a relict of the last century and little used since  the war until the holiday companies began to  sell the delights of inland cruising in the 'sixties and commercial interests began to react to  soaring fuel costs in the 'seventies. It was a barge  that quite literally brought Brenda's body to light.  Riding low with a cargo of castings, the barge was  holding the centre of the channel when a careless  cruiser forced it over towards the bank. The bargee  swore with proverbial force as the bottom bumped  and the propeller stuttered, thinking he'd caught  some sizeable bit of rubbish dumped in the murky  waters.

Switching off the engine he hurried to the stern and peered over. At first he was just aware that the  dark brown water was imbued with a richer stain.  Then as he saw what came drifting slowly to the  surface, he began to swear again but this time as  a kind of pious defence.

The pathologist was able to confirm that all the  mutilations on the body were caused by the action  of the propeller and had nothing to do with the  girl's death. She had been strangled but had not  been dead, though possibly moribund, when she  entered the water. Asked when death occurred,  he refused to be more definite than not less than  twelve, not more than twenty hours. Pressed, he  became irritable and talked about special circumstances such as the high temperature of the canal  water and the opening up of the chest and lungs  by the propeller. Pascoe, long used to the imprecisions of science, had looked for other evidence of  timing.

Twenty hours took him back to six-thirty
P.M.
 
on the Thursday. He was able to move forward  to eight
P.M
.
because that was when Brenda and  Tommy had met. Their rendezvous had been at the  Bay Tree Inn, a half-timbered former coaching inn  not far from the city centre which had fallen into  the hands of a large brewery group renowned  for the acuteness of their commercial instincts  and the awfulness of their keg beer. Now the  Bay Tree's history attracted the tourist set, its  twin restaurants (one expensive, one extortionate) attracted the dining set, and its cellar disco attracted the young set. Thus it was always packed.  The meeting had been witnessed by Ron Ludlam,  a workmate of Tommy's and one of the friends  of whom Mr Sorby so fervently disapproved. He  had been drinking with Tommy while he waited  for Brenda. Brenda had not wanted to stay at  the Bay Tree. Ron Ludlam who had accompanied  the distraught Tommy home after the news of  Brenda's death, said she seemed more interested  in having a serious talk with her fiancé about  marital matters. Alone. They had gone off in the  noisy, multicoloured mini.

According to Tommy they had spent the evening  just driving around. Without stopping? Of course  they had stopped, just parked out in the country  to have a fag and a talk. Was that all? They might  have played around a bit but nothing serious.

'Nothing serious' was confirmed by the pathologist. Brenda was
virgo intacta.

The canal was flanked on the one side by warehouses. Access could be obtained to the waterfront,  but only by dint of climbing over security gates. In  addition, from eleven
P.M
. on, there had been great  police activity in Sunnybank, the canyon-like road  which serviced the warehouses, for it was in one of  these that the night watchman, whose injuries had  kept the doctor from sampling Tommy Maggs's  blood, had been attacked.

On the other side of the canal, the side where  the body had been found, was a grassy isthmus  planted with willows and birches to screen the industrial terrace from the view of those taking the  air in the pleasant open spaces of Charter Park. This  air on the night in question was filled with music  and merriment. The city's fortnight-long High Fair  was coming to the end of its first week there. The  City Fathers in a fit of almost continental abandon  permitted the municipal Boating Station to stay  open until midnight during the fair and those who  tired of the roundabouts and sideshows could hire  rowboats to take them across to the isthmus where  the trees were strung with fairy lights and a couple  of hot-dog stands provided the wherewithal for a  picnic. This area was far too well populated for  a body to have been dumped in the canal until  eleven-thirty when the clouds which had slowly  been building up in the south suddenly came  rolling northwards, ate up the moon and the stars,  and spat rich, heavy raindrops into the sultry night.  Within twenty minutes the isthmus was vacated  by laughing holiday-makers and cursing hot-dog  men alike, while on the canal the pleasure cruisers  had either puttered off to more congenial moorings  downstream or battened down for the night.