Murder by the Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

cockroaches bobbing in the water along with the wadded sticking plasters. But most of all he’d hated the swimming instructor, a vindictive old man dressed all in white who mocked poor swimmers, like Langham, and was not averse to using a thick bamboo pole as a painful, prodding weapon.
    â€˜Are you going to stand there all day or do you want to go in?’ A sour-faced woman stared at him through an arched grille beside the turnstile. ‘It’s thruppence, but you’d better be sharpish. Baths close at six.’
    Langham paid the entrance fee and pushed through the stiff turnstile.
    The pool itself was situated in a cavernous, eerily echoing chamber where the reek of chlorine was even stronger. The rectangle of blue water was a shimmering lens magnifying the dirty white tiles. Changing cubicles with swing doors, like the entrances of saloons in cowboy films, flanked the pool. During the war the pool itself had been boarded over and the chamber utilized as a recruitment station, and even now, ten years after VE Day, faded posters exhorted the wartime populace to Keep Calm and Carry On, Buy War Bonds, and Dig for Victory.
    The last of the swimmers hauled themselves from the pool and hurried, dripping, across the tiles to the changing cubicles. Within seconds Langham was all alone in the chamber and he felt his gorge rise with nausea as the smell brought back unpleasant memories.
    At the far end of the pool a figure in white, like a younger version of his one-time persecutor, leaned against the tubular chrome frame of the diving boards and fixed him with a level gaze.
    Langham walked around the pool, his footsteps ringing on the tiles. ‘Kenneth?’ he asked.
    The boy nodded, suspicious. Langham was surprised at how young he appeared, and amazed that Charles had allowed his head to be turned by such an unprepossessing specimen. Kenneth was skinny, unhealthily pale, and his thin face was made even more unattractive by a sullen scowl.
    â€˜Don’t like the stink?’
    â€˜Is it that obvious?’ Langham replied.
    â€˜Either that or you don’t like the company.’ The youth continued to lean casually against the bars. He nodded to the cubicles. ‘Young boys, they piss on the boiling hot water pipes. Charmin’, they are.’ Without a change of tone, he said, ‘You a copper?’
    â€˜Do I look like one?’
    The youth perked up. ‘A guardsman, then? You look the military type.’
    â€˜I was sent by Charles Elder.’
    No flicker of recognition passed across the youth’s face. ‘He a customer?’
    â€˜That’s right.’
    The boy nodded, pushed himself languorously from the diving frame and said over his shoulder, ‘This way.’
    Glancing around self-consciously to ensure he was not being observed, he followed the youth from the pool and along an ill-lit corridor. Kenneth’s shoulder blades were prominent beneath the white shirt, the material of his trousers tight across his buttocks.
    He considered Charles’s lack of inhibition, his readiness to assuage his libido. Langham had been celibate for over six years now, sublim-ating his desires in work and more work, and the occasional binge drink, and lacking … what? The gall or bravery to confront his loneliness and do something about it.
    Not that one-night stands with women would help him, he knew, just as Charles’s assignation with the youth had done nothing to ease his loneliness; it merely provided a release of his needs.
    Langham felt a quick surge of revulsion, soon quashed.
    They came to a small room equipped with massage tables and leather-upholstered benches. He looked around, searching for the vantage point from which the youth’s accomplice would have taken the photographs. There were a couple of doors leading to other rooms, and an interior window looking into a room equipped with gym apparatus and punch bags.
    The youth locked the door behind him, then