Mark Pearson
Murder Club
For Lynn and Shirley
The majority of women in society fear rape — no woman is allowed to ignore it. The majority of children are taught to be afraid of ‘strange men’ who offer us sweets, lifts, etc. We are taught as adults to keep our doors locked, not to be alone, not to look or act in any way that might ‘bring rape upon ourselves’. Perhaps the most obvious situation in which we are taught to be afraid is when walking home alone at night. The threat of violence is a total intrusion into women’s personal space and transforms a routine and/or potential pleasurable activity (for example, a walk in the park, a quiet evening at home, a long train journey) into a potentially upsetting, disturbing and often threatening experience.
40 % of adults who are raped tell no one about it. 31 % of children who are abused reach adulthood without having disclosed their abuse.
Only 15 % of serious sexual offences against people 16 and over are reported to the police and of the rape offences that are reported, fewer than 6 % result in an offender being convicted of this offence.
From the Rape Crisis (England and Wales) website, 2010
Prologue
1
Twelve Months ago … Christmas
‘FUCK THAT!’ SAID Jack Delaney.
The middle-aged woman dressed in a Salvation Army uniform looked horrified and would have backed away, but the pub was extremely busy, and she was jammed in tight amongst the revellers. Friday night at The Crooked Hat off the Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush was always busy. But it was only a short while to the Christmas holidays and The Hat was packed with people, young and old alike, getting into the spirit of the season. Office parties mingled with the regulars and the pub was filled with laughter and shouting and the kind of unresolved sexual tension that usually leads to regret and red faces the morning after. The couple behind the Salvation Army woman were going some way to resolving that tension, however, if the way they seemed to be swallowing each other’s tongues was anything to go by. Young women today, thought Delaney, you’ve got to love them.
But he wasn’t smiling. Delaney wasn’t getting into the spirit of the season, he was just getting into the spirit. Irish whiskey to be precise and drinking it without strict adherence to the guidelines about the number of units of alcohol it was safe to consume. Jack Delaney had already consumed more than a week’s worth of them and tossed back another large Jameson’s as he scowled at the woman holding a collecting box under his nose.
‘Will you take a drink instead?’ he said to the woman, who shook her head outraged.
‘I don’t drink alcohol,’ she said. ‘The Salvation Army is a temperate organisation. “It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink, lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgement of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.” Proverbs 31, 4 to 6!’
Delaney nodded at her and took a glug of his pint of Guinness. ‘Psalm 104: 14–15 “He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate — bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart.”’
‘You have studied the good book?’ she asked surprised.
‘I have studied man,’ he replied. ‘And was he not made in God’s image?’
‘So the Bible tells us.’
‘Then I have no desire to meet the maker of such a despicable race. Troll your jolly bowl around somewhere else, lady!’
The woman’s face flushed, whether with anger or embarrassment Delaney couldn’t tell. He didn’t care either way. ‘Get us another whiskey here,’ he shouted across at the barmaid, a young woman called Aysha, who winked and stuck her thumb up before fetching his drink.
‘Oi, I was next.’
Delaney turned round to the man standing beside him. In his late twenties with a goatee beard, jeans and a loose, blue linen shirt. Probably working at the BBC, Delaney surmised, the place was filled with them nowadays. Creeping about from their numerous buildings around Shepherd’s Bush and further up the road at White City and Television Centre. Turning a proper old boozer like The Hat into some kind of trendy, yuppie, yahoo nightmare. It had even started calling itself a gastropub, for Christ’s sake. Delaney resisted the urge to smash his fist into the outraged prig’s face. ‘Fuck you!’ he said instead and the man seeing the latent violence in Delaney’s eyes backed away. Delaney wasn’t a particularly big man, but he was six foot tall with broad enough shoulders, dark, curly Irish hair. And eyes that would have been blue in the spring sunshine of a May morning, had he been well rested and refrained from strong liquor. As it was, the blue was tinged with red, and his eyes were not peaceful, if they were, indeed, the windows to the soul the BBC script editor was gazing into a very dark place. Dark and dangerous. He held his hands up and backed away. As best as he could, that is, with his heehawing colleagues from Media Central clustered around him like so many braying donkeys.
‘Cheers, darling,’ he said as he took the drink from Aysha, an extremely pretty, young woman, with come-to-bed eyes and a full, womanly figure. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘if I was ten years younger, I’d be having you in my bed faster than you can say “Christ on a bicycle”.’
The Salvation Army officer took a deep intake of breath and made an involuntary sign of the cross on her chest.
‘Come back tomorrow when you are sober enough to get it up, and I might let you, Jack,’ said the barmaid with an earthy laugh.
The Salvation Army woman shook her head at Delaney with both contempt and sadness. ‘I shall pray for you,’ she said.
‘Any woman gets down on her knees for me,’ he replied, ‘it’s not her prayers I’ll be wanting.’
‘Blasphemy, drunkenness and sins of the flesh. You are an unhappy man. And you’ll find no answers in that.’
She nodded at the whiskey glass in Delaney’s hand.
‘I’m not looking for answers, lectures or salvation, lady.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Oblivion,’ he said and swallowed the rest of his whiskey.
A dark-haired woman, somewhere in her late thirties or early forties, threaded her way through the crowd towards him. A group of office workers in their best suits and dresses wearing novelty hats had struck up a chorus of ‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly’. She was a curvaceous woman with thick, dark curly tresses, striking eyes and lipstick as red as a holly berry. She wore a short leather skirt, high-heeled boots and her ample chest was barely constrained by a tight bustier. She slipped her leather motorcycle jacket off as she approached the bar.
‘Now I wouldn’t mind putting something in her box,’ said Jack Delaney to the Salvation Army woman, having to raise his voice to be heard. The woman pulled a face as if she had swallowed a pickled walnut and pushed her way through the crowd, heedless of the cries of protest as people spilled their drinks in her wake.
‘Is that yourself, Jack?’ said the dark-haired woman as she got to the bar.
‘Who the fuck else would it be?’ said Delaney. ‘I’m sure as shit not the Pope.’
‘No. You’re not that. That’s for sure.’
‘Good to see you, Jackie,’ he said, tilting his glass at her. ‘What can I get ya?’
Jackie Malone leaned in and whispered in his ear, pushing her breasts into his chest as she did so. ‘You wouldn’t have something to perk a girl up, would you?’ she said, with a deep, musical Irish accent.