Murder Club - Mark Pearson [2]
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.
Delaney smiled. ‘Put your coat back on and let’s repair to the beer garden,’ he said.
‘Repair?’ replied Jackie Malone.
‘I read a book once.’ He grinned and steered her through the crowd to the back door.
Outside it was cold. Their breaths made mist-streams in the air as they leaned up against the back wall, away from the rear exit. The garden was enclosed but not overlooked, not at night, anyway, when the office block beyond was closed.
Delaney pushed her up against the rough surface of the brickwork and kissed her.
‘You hungry tonight, Cowboy?’ said Jackie Malone in a husky voice.
‘Always hungry for you, Jackie.’
‘Got a little something for me then?’
Delaney reached into his pocket, unscrewed a small cylinder and tapped some white powder onto his hand. Then held it up to her nose. She snorted it down, then Delaney poured some more onto his hand and did the same.
A drunken man stumbled out from the pub into the garden. Delaney reached into his pocket and pulled out his warrant card, which he held up to the man. ‘The beer garden is closed,’ he said. ‘Fuck off.’
The man stumbled hurriedly back inside, as Jackie Malone undid Delaney’s zip.
‘Now where were we?’ she said then gasped as Delaney entered her. ‘Not such a little something after all,’ she continued with a smile and gasped again as Delaney thrust hard, gripping her hips tight against the cold brickwork.
His eyes glazed over as he built a steady rhythm. Not oblivion but getting close to it. La petite mort, as the French called it, the little death.
And at that moment, a mile or so across London, a woman was raped and mutilated.
‘Happy fucking Christmas everyone!’ shouted Delaney as he juddered to a climax.
2.
EARLIER
THE WOMAN PULLED her coat around her and folded her arms.
She looked up at the monitor and again at her watch. It was ten o’clock. The sound of the train still rattled in the tunnel ahead. Normally she would have caught an earlier train. But the blind date she had met at Kettner’s of Soho had ordered a bottle of Veuve Clicquot for them both after they had had a glass of unoaked Chardonnay, and it seemed