"Murder Club" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pearson Mark)

3

Easter week … Wednesday

ANDREW JOHNSON WAS a pillar of his local community. And he was quite happy to tell that fact to anyone who would listen.

It wasn’t entirely true.

He’d joined the Rotary Club at twenty-two years old and moved on to the Rotarians when he was past forty. He was a member of the local Masons’ Lodge and had been invited to dine with the Lord Mayor of London on more than one occasion. He was maybe still a few years away from getting the pin-striped morning-suit trousers, but it was only a matter of time. Patience and perseverance. That was Andrew’s mantra. All things come to he who waits. Even if you have to go out and get them sometimes.

He was the forty-five-year-old manager of a country pub called The Crawfish, in Lavenham, a pretty market town in Suffolk. He was married with no children. He had had a vasectomy at the age of thirty-eight, on his wife’s urging. He hadn’t baulked at the idea, having no particular desire himself to father children. The pub was medium-sized, with a lounge bar and a public bar. The lounge bar had a large open fire that was always lit on cold days, even in the summer, if it was wet enough out; and it was popular with the older local customers and the many thousands of tourists who flocked into the town. On one wall of the room hung an original Andrew Haslan — a local artist particularly renowned for his stunning wildlife paintings and etchings. It was of a hare in a wood under a full moon at winter, with snowflakes dancing in the air around him. It had the air of a 1930s Art Deco kind of illustration about it and Andrew Johnson particularly disliked it. But his wife had bought it at a charity auction, for a figure that still made his blood boil, and had insisted that it be proudly displayed so that the world would know what a charitable woman she was.

Charity should begin at home, Andrew would have told her, but he had learned in the many years of their marriage that it was simpler in the long run just to agree with what she wanted. One of these days he was going to toss the bloody painting in the open fire and see what she had to say when it went up in flames. For now, though, he gritted his teeth, sold pints of best or Broadside ale to the customers and listened to their inane CAMRA nonsense, contenting himself with the thought that fairly shortly he would be making one of his little trips. As far as his wife knew, he was going to London on Lodge business or to see his accountants. And sometimes that was true, but it wasn’t the only reason he headed south

Every couple of months or so, when his patience had worn thin and his desires waxed large — desires that could not be satisfied by his wife, for all manner of reasons — he travelled on the railway down from the country to London. It was a six-mile drive to the nearby town of Sudbury, where he would park his car and catch the train to London’s Liverpool Street. It was a pleasant journey with just one change at Marks Tey, and in an hour and twenty minutes he was in the capital.

Andrew liked travelling on the railway, for it gave him time to think of the pleasures that lay ahead. Anticipation was always nine-tenths of the pleasure after all, was it not, as he was wont to joke with his customers when they had to wait for him to change a barrel of the local ale from Adnams brewery. Most of the locals considered Andrew a genial host, and he was. But he was a businessman first and foremost, and his ready smile slipped away when he was not front-of-house.

He always stayed in the same place when he travelled south — a bed-and-breakfast boarding house in Harrow five minutes’ walk from the Underground station. He could have stayed closer to the city centre, but his accountant was based there — going back to the days when he and his wife ran a pub in Northwood Hills, before they sold up and moved to live the country dream. Andrew’s wife had berated him constantly until he finally gave in. She had been addicted to watching Escape to the Country type programmes and was like a dog with a bone about the idea. Country dreams … Country nightmare more like, Andrew thought. The trouble with quiet rural locations was just that. Too quiet, too little entertainment. So the locals made their own entertainment by keeping their noses in everybody else’s business. A short distance from Lavenham was the ancient town of Long Melford, which had the longest street of antique shops in England. It also had two pubs that had topless barmaids working twice a week, and Andrew would dearly have loved to visit them. But he knew that news of that visit would surely fly back to Lavenham and he would never hear the end of it from his wife. As much as he considered himself a pillar of the community, she did even more so. Although she rarely worked, helping out in the pub, she sat on numerous committees and did endless charity work. Face was everything to her and Andrew had to play very, very carefully. But play he did.

In London. Where every variety of play was to be had. The Bamp;B where he stayed in Harrow was frugal, basic accommodation, cereal for breakfast, a shared bathroom, but the place was cheap. The old woman who ran the house kept her rates low and her rooms full. Andrew Johnson liked it that way — he wanted to spend his hard-earned money on other things. More exciting things. The sort that would make the blood pound in his brain. The sort of entertainment he couldn’t readily undertake in Lavenham.

Sometimes he saw the same girls, but not often. It wasn’t about what was comfortable for Andrew Johnson. What was familiar and safe. For him it was about the new. But he always went for the same type of woman. Dark curly-haired women. Of medium height. And he always wanted them to dress the same way. This had posed a problem for him initially — as most working girls in the price bracket he liked to use didn’t usually have the sort of outfit he liked them to wear. Schoolgirl uniforms, nurses’, policewomen’s. These were commonplace enough. Bought cheap from Ann Summers or online. Tools of the sex trade. But Andrew liked his women dressed like businesswomen. Power suits and suspenders. Attitude in Armani. High heels and haughty couture. But the wardrobes in the small rooms he visited above the staircases of Soho contained no such expensive items. And so Andrew had bought his own, at considerable expense.

He kept the clothes in a small locked suitcase in a locked cupboard in his windowless office, which used to be a storeroom, at the back of the pub, behind the kitchen. And he would take them with him when he made one of his ‘essential’ business trips to London. His wife, Marjorie, was a large, tall, blonde woman who would have fitted into one of his outfits as easily as the proverbial camel would have fitted through the eye of a needle. He would have said that he didn’t know why he married her. But he knew exactly why. Without her money he would still be a second-rate salesman for a second-rate recruiting agency in Wembley specialising in accountancy personnel, where his entire client base was made up of people from the Indian Subcontinent. Andrew Johnson was not a racist by any means, as he was happy to tell anyone who wished to listen to him, but the one thing he didn’t miss by moving to Suffolk was the world of dark-skinned faces that he had had to deal with every day. Suffolk was like England in the Fifties, and a foreign or ethnic face was something of a rarity, something to provoke comment. And the fact that the women he chose to play with were all white was not being racist either. How can a sexual attraction be racist? he thought. Given the things he liked to do, and dreamed of doing, he would have been more racist, in his opinion, had he chosen ethnic women. But he didn’t.

The woman who was modelling his favoured outfit that evening was a tad chubbier than he usually liked. She was called Melody, according to the card on the wall at the base of the stairs, and the notice by the grimy bell on the door to the small flat. In reality her name was Natalie, and she was a single mother of two young children. She lived in Birmingham and commuted down to London three days a week. She earned enough in those three days to take the other four off.

At that moment, however, her hands were tied to the bedstead behind her. The silk blouse she had been given to wear had been opened to expose her breasts, which were cupped in a blood-red corset/bra combination from Agent Provocateur, that was a good size too small for her ample figure. The pinstriped skirt of the suit was pushed up around her waist. One of her high-heeled shoes had flopped from her right foot as it bounced uncontrollably as Andrew Johnson penetrated her. She would have grunted, maybe screamed as the weight of him landed on her soft belly. But the silky knickers he had supplied as well, had been removed and stuffed into her mouth. Her eyes bulged as much as those of the red-faced and perspiring man above her.

Then Andrew’s eyes closed as he came, the tension in his thighs and knees relaxing as he collapsed his full weight upon her again, so that she feared she might well suffocate. He snatched the knickers from her mouth and used them to wipe himself.

‘Jeez, you nearly crushed me to death,’ said the woman beneath him.

Then Andrew Johnson opened his eyes again.

And there was no kindness in them.

Half an hour later he was waiting on the west-bound platform of the Bakerloo Line. Waiting for the train to take him to Baker Street, where he would catch his connecting Metropolitan Line train back to Harrow-on-the-Hill.

A small smile broke out on his face as he replayed in his mind what had happened in the flat. The look of fear in her eyes. The thought of it aroused him once more. He moved his hand surreptitiously down and stroked himself through his trousers.

The sound of a train clattering in the tunnel did little to distract him from his dark thoughts. Past and future pleasures imagined. He smiled again.

A hand fell on his shoulder.