A Passion So Deadly

Eight

Constance and Freddie were sitting at the kitchen table together drinking coffee and watching breakfast television. The discovery of the body of a young man in the grounds of a Bristol hotel was just a brief item. Few details were given but the bulletin identified the Crescent Hotel and showed a quick shot of it. The young man was not named. Next of kin had yet to be informed.

‘God, Bristol’s getting like Chicago nowadays,’ remarked Freddie cheerily.

Constance put her coffee mug down carefully on the table.

‘Right, I must get on,’ said Freddie in a determined voice. ‘We’ve got the milk tester again. Blasted EEC. If it’s not one regulation it’s another nowadays.’ He looked out of the window. Another wet day. ‘Wish they could regulate the weather. We couldn’t half have done with some of this rain in the spring. Weeks of drought when there’s crops coming up and now this downpour right through the autumn.’

He rose from his chair, kissed Constance absent-mindedly on the top of her head, pulled on boots and coat and departed through the kitchen door, still grumbling contentedly.

‘Global warming, my aunt Fanny,’ he muttered. ‘There’s somebody up there determined to put us poor bloody farmers out of business, that’s what I think...’

For Freddie this was just another day. Business as usual. He was not unhappy, nor unduly concerned. Farmers enjoy a good grumble. It goes with the territory. And the truth was that he took the attitude that Chalmpton Village Farm had suffered lousy weather conditions and an assortment of stupid rules and regulations throughout its long history and still survived. Freddie Lange did not really believe he had anything in the world to worry about. Farming had its problems like any other way of life. And what you did was cope. That was the way Freddie had been brought up.

He was, however, perhaps a little more preoccupied than usual this morning. He did have a heavy day ahead. He certainly had not noticed his wife react at all to the news item about the Bristol murder. And if her hand had been trembling when she placed her coffee cup on the table, Freddie hadn’t noticed that either.

Charlie also saw the report of his colleague’s death on breakfast news. He kept a small portable television in his bedroom, inside his wardrobe and concealed behind the wardrobe doors when not in use, so it didn’t spoil his decor. It was his habit when at home to make himself a pot of tea in the mornings and then go back to bed and drink it while idly watching television. He had quite a cosy side to his nature, did Charlie.

When the shots of the Crescent Hotel were shown Charlie’s blood turned to ice. Marty Morris had been sent to Mrs Pattinson in Charlie’s place, and now he was dead.

‘That should have been me,’ Charlie muttered to himself.

He felt slightly sick. Charlie did not often consider the grim realities of his trade. He had it all worked out in his head. He never thought about the dangers, so many different sorts of dangers, which would be so obvious to almost anyone else. Prostitutes were more likely to be the victims of violent crime than any other sector of the community. But Charlie did not think of himself as a prostitute. He regarded himself as a professional, just like any other. And he was a man. He was fit and strong. He could handle himself. In almost ten years on the game now, Charlie had never been hurt once. There’d been that weirdo at the Portway Towers Hotel who’d been heavily into S and M. That wasn’t Charlie’s game. No way! When he’d found out what he was being required to indulge in he’d headed straight for the door. The mark had turned nasty. There’d been a struggle, but Charlie had coped easily. He wasn’t sure, but at the time he thought he’d broken the mark’s arm. No problem. Charlie had no crisis of conscience about that. It was however, the last time he’d been with a man. He was getting established by then, had a good clientele, didn’t need the gay trade any more. So he’d told Paolo there’d be no more of that for him.

Paolo. That was it. He must call Paolo, find out what was going on.

‘Don’t panic,’ said Paolo in his broad Bristol drawl. ‘Looks like we’ve got a nutter out there. But young Marty was never careful. It’ll all be sorted...’

Charlie’s brain, however, was starting to function again.

‘Paolo, Mrs Pattinson called you and she asked for me,’ he said as calmly as he could. ‘Not just any lad, and certainly not Marty.’

Chillingly it occurred to him that the murderer could actually have mistaken Marty for himself. After all, it should have been him walking through those gardens. And he knew what the grounds of that place were like after dark. The lighting was worse than useless. Marty was black and more or less the same size as Charlie.

‘I reckon the whole thing was a set-up,’ Charlie blurted out, his voice trembling a little.

‘Naw,’ said Paolo. ‘Just a coincidence, mate.’

Charlie could hear the tension as he spoke and knew exactly where Paolo was coming from. He was trying to cover his tracks. Paolo had a good thing going with Avon Escorts. Everybody got their cut, including the tax man, the police had never before been involved — Paolo had a partner who saw to that, Charlie had always been told — and the boys and girls earned good money without the risks and stigma of going on the street. They were also often able to maintain some kind of perfectly respectable front, if they wished, as Charlie had always done. Everybody had been happy. Paolo ran a happy ship. He was another professional. Charlie knew that Paolo would be just as dismayed to hear himself described as a pimp as Charlie would to be described as a male prostitute. But suddenly the facts of his way of life were beginning to penetrate the fragile veil of pretence which Charlie had created.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘I know those gardens, somebody must have been waiting there for Marty.’

‘What’s the matter with you, Charlie? Marty could have been followed. A nutter, like I told you.’

‘They said on the TV he was killed in the early evening. He must have been on his way to see Mrs Pattinson. Did she call to ask where “her Charlie” was?’

‘No,’ said Paolo.

‘Oh shit!’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t like this. It breaks a habit of a lifetime, but I reckon I should go to the filth.’

‘They’ll eat you alive,’ said Paolo.

‘As long as I am still alive, man!’

Charlie heard Paolo sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘Look they’ve been to see me already. In the middle of the fucking night, as it happens. They already knew who Marty was and that he was one of ours. I don’t know how.’

‘Oh shit!’ said Charlie again. ‘What did you tell ’em?’

‘As much as I had to, and no more.’

‘Did you tell them about Mrs P?’

‘Yep. More than anything else they wanted to know who Marty was going to see.’

‘Well, of course they damn well did. Mrs P’s got to be the number one suspect, hasn’t she? And if it was her, it was me she thought she was topping, not Marty Morris, that’s for certain.’

Charlie could feel rivulets of sweat running down his back. He was frightened and he was also confused. Why on earth would Mrs Pattinson want to harm him? It didn’t add up.

Paolo started to speak again. ‘Look, the filth’ll catch up with her in no time. I wouldn’t get in a state. It could still be a nutter. A one-off. If you go to the police now that’ll be the end of that wonderful double life of yours, mate. Finito. Think about it.’

Charlie knew that Paolo had his own reasons for wanting to keep everything as quiet as possible. When the word got out that one Avon boy had been topped and the Old Bill were running around all over the shop, that would be bad enough. The prospect of it being anything more than a random killing would be even worse. Nonetheless Paolo had come up with the most persuasive argument of all for Charlie to keep quiet.

Charlie thought about the wedding two days earlier and entertaining his family in his beautiful apartment. He could see his mother’s smiling face inside his head, her pride in her youngest son tangible enough to touch. He had to keep what he did a secret. He really did.

‘Oh shit!’ he said for a third time. ‘OK, I’ll stay stum, at least for now, hope it all gets sorted. But I’m taking a holiday, Paolo, starting this minute. I’m not bloody working again until we know what’s going on.’

After hanging up the telephone Charlie hurried to the only window in his flat which was on the street side of Spike Island Court and checked to see if anyone seemed to be watching. All was quiet. And he stepped back from the window feeling vaguely silly. Maybe Paolo was right. Maybe he was over-reacting. Maybe his imagination was running riot. He had always had plenty of imagination. However, Charlie could not help having really bad vibes about everything.

He decided to take no chances. He thought for a moment and then called his mother.

‘How’d you like me to come home to stay for a few days, ma?’ he asked.

‘Now why on earth would my rich son want to leave that fancy new apartment of his to slum it with his old ma?’

He knew his mother was pleased, but there was amusement in her voice too. Already he felt reassured by the familiar sound of her lilting West Indian accent.

Charlie had the lie ready. ‘Fancy it might be, but the whole block has got to be re-wired. There’s been a major cock-up. Building regulations job. They’re coming to do my place tomorrow. The builders have to re-decorate and all that, but it’s going to be mayhem.’

His mother’s lovely warm rolling laugh seemed to make the telephone receiver shake in Charlie’s hand.

‘So, no sooner have they finished building that fine apartment block than they have to knock half of it down and start again, is that what you’re telling me, boy?’

‘Kind of.’ Charlie supposed he’d asked for this. ‘So, if you don’t find the whole thing just too funny, have I got a bed for a few days or not?’

Miriam Collins stopped laughing. ‘Son, do you really have to ask me? As long as I’m living and there’s a roof over my head, it’s your roof too.’

Charlie felt a lump in his throat. What on earth was he getting emotional about? His mother was always saying things like that. He knew that he was tensed up, likely to be easily upset or moved. Nonetheless he realised he had made the only decision. He really couldn’t do anything that would hurt his mum.

Decisively he went into his bedroom and removed his prized painting from the wall, revealing a state-of-the-art wall safe. He punched the combination number into the control panel and swung open the steel door. The interior of the safe was divided into a series of drawers and each drawer had a label. Among them were ‘Alice’, ‘Angela’, ‘Joanna’, ‘The Merry Widow’, ‘The Weepy One’, ‘Mrs Pattinson’, of course, and ‘Miscellaneous’.

The names were all of Charlie’s regular clients. He didn’t really know why, but often he was more comfortable using nicknames than the names the women gave him, perhaps it was because it kept his business more impersonal. In any case he knew that most of the names were made up anyway and sometimes he was not given one at all.

‘Miscellaneous’ was his collective label for his more casual clients, one-off or very occasional customers.

Each drawer contained money, some more than others. Charlie kept careful records and knew that in total the safe contained almost £20,000 in fifty, twenty, ten and five-pound notes.

He liked to know exactly how much he earned from each of his clients and that was why he stored the cash they gave him separately in the fashion that he did. That way he could indulge his habit of attributing the purchase of his various possessions to specific women.

Joanna, whom Charlie still met regularly in her room at the Holiday Inn where she stayed while on business trips, was responsible for his lavish wardrobe. She dressed beautifully and always passed comment on Charlie’s appearance. He felt sure she must be something big in the rag trade. And although she never actually told him what she did it seemed appropriate that his earnings from Joanna should pay for his clothes.

He began putting the contents of each drawer into envelopes which he labelled in the same manner that the drawers were labelled — he wanted to keep his system intact and he reassured himself that everything would be back to normal in no time — before packing them into a small suitcase.

‘Miscellaneous’ had paid, among other things, for his bedroom furnishings and decoration. He did not like the idea of sleeping in sheets provided solely by one client. That would seem wrong, somehow. Charlie had always slept soundly when alone in his own apartment — until now at any rate — and he did not want any specific images disrupting his rest.

‘Alice’ was an extremely large woman who liked her food. And she was equally enthusiastic about sex. She had been making use of Charlie’s services for even longer than Mrs Pattinson — almost three years now. Charlie attended to her needs at her home — she lived in a big house with a discreet back entrance — whenever her husband was away on business, which seemed to be frequently. Sometimes Charlie was called there as often as four or five times a month. He couldn’t imagine that Alice’s husband really had no inkling of what his wife got up to during his absences, and assumed that the man probably didn’t care. More than likely he had his own diversions. And although willing, in fact eager, to try anything, ‘Alice’ was by far the least attractive of his regulars, and so fat that when she got excited he sometimes feared that either he was going to be squashed or bounced across the room. Nonetheless he liked Alice. She was jolly and accommodating and, after they had completed the serious business of the day, always insisted on cooking him a lavish meal. At first he had demurred. Eating with them was a waste of time really, Charlie thought. Time was money, and anyway he preferred to eat alone or with company of his choice. Sometimes, though, he had no choice except to go through the motions. And Alice had turned out to be an extraordinarily good cook. The meals and his genuine appreciation of them were all part of the routine now.

It therefore had seemed appropriate that Alice should pay for his superb stainless-steel kitchen. Even the doors of the kitchen units were faced in stainless steel. It looked more like the interior of a spaceship than a kitchen, Charlie reckoned. He was very proud of it, and it was rare for him to cook a meal there — although his efforts were humble compared with hers and usually relied principally on the freezer and the microwave — without thinking of Alice.

He wrote Alice on an envelope stuffed full of ten pound notes and put it in the suitcase.

There was not much money left in the drawer labelled ‘The Weepy One’. After all, incredible though it might seem, she had paid single-handedly for his £30,000-plus motor car. ‘The Weepy One’ had been abandoned in middle age by her husband who had left her for a younger woman. For six months she had been Charlie’s most frequent client, summoning him as often as two or three times a week to a suite in the Portway Towers, probably the most expensive hotel in the city. There was always champagne in a bucket, and something light but delicious to eat like caviar or foie gras. She explained to Charlie that it was her ambition to spend every penny of her husband’s money before the divorce she had never wanted was finalised. She spent most of his visits to her in copious floods of tears which did not prevent her demanding increasingly more fervent sex from him, during which she would frequently cry out that she wished her husband could see her now. Charlie had realised from the start that she was just using him for revenge, and that when she screamed in orgasm it was her errant husband’s face that she saw and not his. Afterwards she would ply him with vast quantities of cash — much much more than the £200 which was all he was obliged to split with Avon Escorts. Once, and even more hysterically tearful than usual, she had tipped him £1,000 in fifty-pound notes. He had been so taken aback that he had actually been moved to murmur a mild protest — after all, Charlie saw himself as a professional. All he wanted was to be properly paid for services rendered. Anything more than that was not really satisfactory to either side in any business transaction, he reckoned. But ‘The Weepy One’ had insisted, telling him she didn’t want her husband’s money any more, and she could think of nothing better to spend it on than being fucked by Charlie.

Charlie winced at the memory. The word ‘fuck’ always made Charlie wince, except when used actually during sex. He had been brought up that way, and it was strange how that sensitivity had remained with him throughout his bizarre working life. It particularly made him flinch when used by a woman obviously of a certain educational standard and social position in whose vocabulary such language really should not, in his opinion, figure. Charlie thought such things were important. He was sure that ‘The Weepy One’ would not normally use that kind of language and he realised that she must be a deeply disturbed woman. Nonetheless he swallowed his lurking feelings of guilt and took the money. £31,000 in all, over the six-month period.

Five weeks ago ‘The Weepy One’s’ calls to Avon Escorts had ceased abruptly and Charlie thought he had a fair idea why. There had been yet another suicide jump from the suspension bridge, which had a long history of fatal leaps into the Avon Gorge below, at about the same time. Of course Charlie didn’t know for certain that the woman who died had been ‘The Weepy One’ — after all, he didn’t even know her real name — and he certainly made no attempt to find out. To tell the truth he didn’t even like to think about it.

He packed the last of the envelopes into the suitcase and wondered again if he was over-reacting. Better safe than sorry, though. He wasn’t going to risk losing all that hard-earned cash.

More hastily he packed some clothes in a second, slightly larger suitcase, then he left the flat, locking it carefully behind him and setting the burglar alarm. He ran down the stairs to the car park just as he always did, in spite of holding a suitcase in each hand. Even the prospect of driving his BMW did not improve his doom-laden mood. But he roared out of the car park confident at least that he was doing the right thing.

And it would only be for a few days, a week or so at most, he told himself yet again. The whole thing would blow over in no time.

At about the same time that Charlie was shutting up his flat, the Reverend Roland Morris, accompanied by Sergeant Peter Mellor, arrived in a patrol car at Southmead Hospital in Monks Park.

Southmead is an old army hospital which has grown in a straggly kind of fashion into a major medical complex spread over several acres. The Reverend Morris was driven straight past the main reception area to the detached single-storey pathology block which houses the city mortuary.

Investigations undergone throughout the night had ascertained that Marty Morris was the only son of the popular Baptist minister. The Reverend Morris had duly been contacted at his home in one of the toughest parts of St Paul’s and told, as gently as possible, that Bristol’s latest murder victim might well be his son. And the minister had agreed to submit to the necessary ordeal of identifying the body.

Rose Piper had somehow wanted to be there even though there seemed little doubt that the identification would be merely a formality. But when Mellor brought the Revd Morris into the waiting room and introduced him to Rose, she felt quite ashamed of half wishing, the previous night, for a serial killer. Once again she was confronted with the awful aftermath of violent crime. She suspected she would never get used to it and indeed rather hoped she wouldn’t.

Roland Morris was a small man with a big presence. His hair was almost white, his skin deep ebony — exactly the same colour as the body of the young man they believed to be his son, it quite suddenly dawned on Rose. The Reverend’s eyes were bright with pain, yet warm and gentle. She thought he had about the kindest face she had ever seen. There was about him the sadness of one who has seen pretty much the worst life can throw at the world, and the patient resilience of one who still carries on trying to make the best of it, trying to help. He looked to be in a state of total shock. Hardly surprising, she thought.

Peter Mellor, all six foot four inches of him, bent almost double by his side, leaning towards the older man as if trying by his mere physical closeness to give comfort and support, more considerate in manner than Rose had ever seen him before. The sergeant, a practising Baptist, had already told her that he knew the Reverend Morris and had explained that the older man was regarded, with justification in Peter’s view, as some kind of saint in St Paul’s, which alongside the drug pushers and pimps for which it was famous, boasted a big devoutly religious community. Mellor had asked to break the news to the minister himself, and to be the one to take him to the mortuary for the identification.

Rose accompanied the two men into the chapel of rest, inside the pathology department, where Marty Morris lay, his body having been cleaned up and made to look presentable before any relative would be called upon to identify him. Rose knew that most people who have been fortunate enough not to have to undergo this experience imagine the B-movie concept of mortuary drawers being pulled open to display the body, which doesn’t actually happen in the UK. At Southmead, with its tastefully decorated little chapel, everything possible is always done to diminish the unpleasantness. Nonetheless, as Rose was well aware, formal identification remained a terrible ordeal.

As the little party walked through the door Peter Mellor had a hand under Revd Morris’s left elbow, ready. The older man obviously at once recognised the body, discreetly covered by an ornamental cloth, which lay before him. He seemed to slump against the policeman. He did not speak at first, just nodded his head. Rose saw that tears were starting to roll down his cheeks.

‘I have to formally ask you now, Reverend, is that your son?’ said Peter Mellor.

‘Yes. Yes. That’s Marty.’

Roland Morris seemed even smaller when he left the mortuary than when he had arrived. They sent him home in a patrol car again, but this time Peter Mellor did not accompany him.

‘Forgive me, Reverend, I have a murderer to catch,’ he said quietly.

Although patently deeply distressed, the elder man still had great dignity about him. But he seemed to have no further words. He merely patted the sergeant’s hand.

There was nothing more for anybody to say. The two police officers stood silently together watching the car drive him away. Neither spoke nor moved until several seconds after it had disappeared around a corner out of sight. Then quite suddenly Sergeant Morris smashed a clenched fist against the wall of the pathology unit. Rose, engrossed in her own thoughts, was shocked. Mellor was normally icily controlled.

‘Why the hell did it have to be the Reverend’s boy?’ he half shouted. ‘Can you imagine how he’s going to feel when he finds out what his blessed son did for a living?’

‘Ah,’ said Rose. ‘You didn’t tell him, I gather.’

‘Didn’t see the point in making it even worse for him. I know he has to know. And I know we have to talk to him about it. But I reckoned the shock of his son dying was enough for one day.

‘Fair enough,’ said Rose, who was not used to this degree of sensitivity from the sergeant. ‘You don’t suppose then that he might know already?’

‘No way!’ Mellor spoke quite angrily.

‘All right, all right,’ said Rose, holding up both hands, palms towards him, in a gesture of conciliation. She eyed him with interest.

‘So tell me,’ she continued. ‘Just what’s so special about the Reverend Roland Morris, anyway?’

Peter Mellor turned to look at her. ‘He’s about the most decent man in the history of St Paul’s, that’s all,’ he said. His voice was still clipped and angry. ‘Now he’s going to have to live with knowing that his worthless shit of a son was a male Tom who got himself murdered. Marty Morris hasn’t just let down his family, he’s let down his race. I resent his kind. He had a good father and a good upbringing yet he still turned out rotten — and that’s exactly what the majority of people in this country still expect from a black. Pity the sick little bastard was ever born, if you ask me.’

Rose was again startled. Usually if she had any criticism at all of Peter Mellor it was that he was such a cold fish. Now she thought that might be preferable to this sudden explosion of pent-up emotion. Fleetingly she wondered what lay behind it. Something must, she was sure of it. But she didn’t have the time to play psychiatrist.

‘Peter, it’s not your job to judge,’ she reminded him sharply. ‘We do the police work. That’s all.’

He did not reply. His mouth was set in a thin hard line. For him there were no other standards, no other rules in life than his own, she knew that.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘The PM’s due to begin in ten minutes.’

They walked back into the pathology block just as the body of Marty Morris was being wheeled into the mortuary. It annoyed Rose that she could never quite get used to the sight of the line of fridges along one wall which provided storage space for over thirty corpses. The stench of formaldehyde was already heavy in the air. The other smells would come later. Rose shuddered.

She had watched enough post-mortem examinations to have become reasonably hardened, but her tendency towards a weak stomach still occasionally let her down.

Marty Morris had been naked beneath the cloth which had covered him in the chapel. All his clothing, so wet that it had to be dried first using the facilities at Southmead Police Station, and personal effects had already been removed, bagged up by an evidence officer and sent to the regional forensic laboratory at Chepstow.

Now the dead man was lifted on to a mortuary table, a marble slab with shallow gutters around the edges and a drain hole at one end. Post mortems are a messy business, as Rose knew only too well. It was the initial incision which always caused her the biggest problems. If she could get over that she would be all right.

Dr Carmen Brown, of course, had no such qualms.

‘Morning, Rose, Peter,’ she said cheerily, rather as if they had popped round for nothing more than a cup of rather good coffee.

The doctor asked for the corpse to be laid face down at first. Before opening up the body, she would of course conduct a thorough external examination, looking for anything she might have missed in the unsatisfactory surroundings of the murder scene, and paying particular attention to the wound in Marty Morris’s back.

From that alone she could not really take things much further than she had at the scene of the crime, she said. Almost certainly a knife with a long, very sharp blade had delivered the death blow. There had only been one incision. That was all that had been needed.

‘The blade penetrated several inches into the body,’ said Dr Brown, in her usual matter-of-fact way. She was using a tape recorder to chronicle her findings as she worked. ‘We’ll see exactly what damage it did when we open him up.’

Even the thought of that made Rose feel vaguely nauseous. She pulled herself together with considerable concentration of will.

‘How much actual physical strength would be required to push the blade of a knife that far into somebody’s back, Carmen?’ she asked.

‘Not a great deal.’

‘Even through a leather jacket?’

Carmen Brown shrugged.

‘Finest Italian kid,’ she remarked. ‘Would have provided hardly any extra resistance to the kind of weapon used. If you want to kill somebody quickly and efficiently with a knife, some knowledge of human anatomy is a lot more useful than brute force. But in this case it needed to be only the most elementary. Small of the back, up behind the ribs. The heart’s around there. Can’t miss something vital...’

‘So a woman could have done it?’

‘Yes, no problem in that.’ Carmen pushed and prodded the area around the wound. ‘In fact, one blow like this is the way women do kill. Men are inclined not to be able to stop once they’ve started. Gay killings are often the worst, really frenzied attacks — but then you know all this...’

Eventually Carmen and her assistant turned the body of Marty Morris over and began the nitty-gritty of the post-mortem examination. The first deep incision caused the corpse to emit a kind of whistling noise, as if air or gas were escaping. Rose had to struggle not to visibly flinch as the thorax was swiftly split from throat to pubis.

Carmen Brown, however, might have been slicing open a melon for all the reaction she showed as she parted flesh, exposed and sawed through bones and carved into organs.

‘I was right,’ she remarked conversationally. ‘The killer scored a direct hit on the spinal cord. Caught the aorta too. Our victim had no chance. Would have died at once.’

Rose found the post-mortem examination as disturbing as ever but at least managed to hang on to the contents of her stomach. What there were of them. She’d had no time for breakfast, merely grabbing tea and biscuits on the run. This was always a mistake. Curiously perhaps, she found she was usually less queasy with a full stomach than an empty one.

On the way back to the station she asked her driver to stop for fish and chips. The diet of the average police officer is not often a health-conscious one, and Rose knew it was a miracle she remained as slim as she did. However, this was not a moment for worrying about such things. Some good British grease was what she needed both to settle any remaining stomach flutters and to get her through the rest of the day. The afternoon and evening would be taken up with pure admin, and Rose was still getting used to exactly how much of it was required from a senior investigating officer.

It was gone nine when Rose got home, the end of another long day, but Simon was still waiting to eat the meal he had prepared for both of them. Sometimes it seemed to her that he only cooked supper in the first place, knowing that she was in the middle of a big case, to put pressure on her — and she almost wished he wouldn’t.

But she sat down at the dining table and did her best to attack rather dried-up lamb chops with a gusto she certainly didn’t feel.

Simon had thawed out a little during the day, as Rose had known he would. He wasn’t that unreasonable about her job, after all. And he did love her. But there was still an edge between them. And their early attempts at starting a conversation seemed to Rose to resemble a couple of wrestlers stalking each other around the ring, each waiting for the other to make the first move.

‘So, you haven’t caught your killer yet, then,’ remarked Simon, who it transpired had at least been interested enough to watch the TV news bulletins of the murder case. ‘I’d have thought a top-drawer cop like you would have had the whole thing sewn up by now.’

Rose realised that he was almost certainly being sarcastic, but decided to play the thing straight. She didn’t need a quarrel right now.

‘It’ll be a while before we do that on this one, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘We’ve found out one or two interesting things that wouldn’t have been on the news yet, though. Our victim was a male prostitute.’

‘What, a rent boy, you mean?’

‘Well, yes. But he was on his way to see a woman client — not a man.’

‘Good God!’ said Simon.

Rose smiled. In spite of his determination to be a liberal new man, Simon was pretty conventional in his attitude to women.

‘Why on earth would a woman want to pay for sex?’ he asked.

‘For exactly the same reasons men do, I should imagine. They’re lonely. They want something they don’t get at home. They find it exciting.’

Simon shuddered. ‘Good God!’ he said again.

Rose found that she was becoming irritated in spite of her good intentions.

‘Male prostitution is no different from female prostitution, Simon,’ she said coolly.

‘That’s as maybe, in theory,’ he responded. ‘But you have to admit that female prostitution is more normal.’

‘Normal,’ repeated Rose, almost sadly. ‘No Simon, I don’t have to admit any such thing. I’m sick to death of living in a man’s world, as a matter of fact. I get it day in and day out at the nick, and I sometimes think you’re just as bad in spite of your liberal pretensions. The truth is that the male attitude to women in this country hasn’t really changed in centuries.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Simon. ‘You can’t possible believe that, Rose.’

And now even he sounded as if he was patronising her. Well, damn him, he’d asked for it and he was going to get it. The first forty-eight hours of a murder investigation are always considered the most important, and they are certainly the most pressurised. This is the vital time — after that the trail is likely to cool rapidly. Rose already feared that the case might slip away from her now. She was tired and fed up. She had no patience with him suddenly. She put down her knife and fork, giving up all attempts to do battle with the unappetising lamb chops, and let rip.

‘Rubbish, is it?’ she stormed. ‘Have you never had a laugh with your mates about what they did in the knocking shops of Bangkok or Amsterdam? You wouldn’t find that distasteful, would you, because you’re steeped in double standards. All men are.

‘Our Royal Family, the so-called upper classes, they have a full-scale tradition of using brothels. The Duchess of York’s father was stupid enough to get caught out and there was a bit of a fuss, but you knew damn well that privately his male friends were probably clapping him on the back. That’s the way it is. And if it’s more or less socially acceptable for men to use prostitutes, almost lauded in some circles, then what is wrong with the situation being reversed? But how many men could accept that? I know bloody well, you can’t. However, I see absolutely no difference.

‘Come to that, I can understand totally why there are women, married to some missionary-position bore, who seek out no-strings fun with young lads. If the only price they have to pay is a few quid a time — then it’s damn good value.’

Rose pushed back her chair and stood up. Already she regretted her outburst, but it was too late now. All that was left was to beat a fast retreat before she said even more that she would later regret.

Simon had not replied and she knew that was an ominous sign. She sighed.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, rather more quietly.

Simon sat at the table for several minutes more. He was shocked. Rose was quite right up to a point — he would maintain that he believed in sexual equality but, all the same, he had been appalled by much of what she had said.

He still loved Rose and had always been confident, even at their blackest moments, of her true feelings for him. Rows like this were not that unusual in their marriage and did not necessarily upset Simon that much. He accepted that he and his wife were both volatile independent people who were bound to clash occasionally. And, in fact, he had always taken the attitude that husbands and wives who proudly professed that they hadn’t had a cross word in twenty years together were probably too boring to have a point of view worth having a cross word over.

This time, however, he had found Rose’s outburst deeply disturbing. He wondered uneasily how much she had been expressing her own suppressed views on sex. And, not for the first time in their marriage, he found himself harbouring suspicions about her sexuality and where it might occasionally lead her.