Wages of Sin by J. M. Gregson Page B

lot harder for her money if there were other tarts flashing their fannies around the street! You’d soon find your dainty little quim wasn’t in such demand if you had to put it on the counter and let the punters choose, I can tell you!’
    He was getting really annoyed now, his voice surging upwards on the rising tide of his anger. Toyah thought he was going to hit her unless she could do something to stem that tide. She said despairingly, ‘All right, all right! I was only asking if you could see your way to a little reduction. If you can’t do that, we’ll go on as we are! Sorry I asked, honestly I am!’
    He stilled his breathing, controlled the excitement which had risen in him with her distress. Then he growled at her, ‘I hope you do, Toyah Burgess. Because I’d hate anything to happen to you!’
    â€˜Happen to me?’ She echoed his words stupidly, her fear making her speak when she should have been meekly silent. She knew a lot about men and their sexual demands now, but still very little about the rest of life.
    â€˜Yes, dear, happen to you, that’s what I said.’ He reached out, following her as she flinched away, and took her small chin into the iron grip he had fastened upon the fleshier jowls of Sally Aspin an hour earlier. ‘Because it’s me who provides you with protection, you know. Protection against the people who prey on people like you. Peddling your pussy might be an easy way of making money, but it can be a dangerous one. Not everyone in the game is as kind and considerate as Joe Johnson, you see. Look what happened to that girl the other night. The one who was dumped in that shed on Dover Street. That Sarah Dunne. I’d hate anything like that to happen to you, Toyah Burgess.’
    Toyah wondered how Joe Johnson knew the name of the dead girl.
    He held her chin for a moment longer, her pain increasing as his grasp tightened still more. Then he released her, studied the marks his hand had left on her flesh for a moment, nodded twice at her to emphasize his message, picked up the envelope with his cash, and was gone without a further word.

Six
    T he girl was very nervous. She looked up and down the street before hustling them quickly inside the Victorian house.
    They had been fine residences, when they were built, this row, high and proud against the meaner brick of the terraces built behind them for the mill workers. They had retained a gradually eroding grandeur until after Hitler’s war, when they had been divided into flats and gone rapidly downhill. In the nineteen eighties and nineties, as they moved past their century of life, the flats had been subdivided again, until most of them were little more than bed-sits. The standard of tenant had declined correspondingly, until the inhabitants were a heterogeneous collection of people, their only common feature being that they did not stay here for very long.
    This old-young girl had dark, straight hair and eyes which seemed to have seen much more than the smooth face around them. She took them into a high room, where the ceiling was scarcely visible above a light fitting which hung a good five feet below it. The wallpaper was probably over thirty years old, its fading seventies colours dating from the time when a larger, more gracious room had been divided. The joins where the sheets of thick wallpaper met had been picked apart, low down above the deep skirting board, by some long-departed infant hand.
    Lucy Blake took in the crack in the pane of the sash window, the cobwebs building in its upper corners, and tried not to contrast this room with the neat order of her own bright modern flat. She smiled encouragement into the anxious young face and said, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Blake and this is Detective Constable Pickering. And you’re Karen Jones.’
    The girl scarcely acknowledged her words. ‘There was no need for you to come here. I said everything I had to say