Loose Head (3 page)

I held up a placating hand. “I know, I know, I’m an ass.”

“What were you thinking, you stupid, stupid twat? How could you go see Paul without me?”

“I know. Look – it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. I should’ve called you.”

He eyed me shrewdly. “It was Ryan, wasn’t it? You wanted to get back at Paul. For renting him out.”

Prodigious leaps of intuitive logic indeed. Brian knew me too well. I could’ve lied, but it would have been a waste of breath. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I wasn’t planning a confrontation. It just happened.”

“Look – we’re partners! We’re mates! If you had a feeling... I should have been there, all right?”

“No argument. I was wrong.”

Brian seemed mollified, but I wasn’t fooled. He was hurt, and it was going to take time. He hid it well, though. He squeezed past me and sat down at his desk, managing a sour grin. “So you’re a wanker, as if we didn’t know that already. Tell me about the client list.”

“I’m just amazed at the sums involved. We’ll contact everyone, of course, but there is one name sticks out. Timothy Bernard Plantagenet.”

“What, Lord Delvemere? Don’t you play rugby with him?”

“That’s right. Old Bernie. Plays hooker. He was on our recent tour to Vegas. I’ll see him tonight, in fact. The Ian Chalmers memorial bash.”

“Ah. Perhaps the opportunity will arise for a quiet chat.”

“Perhaps.” I felt a prickling of unease, as if a tarantula was crawling up my leg. “Hate to mix business and rugby, though.”

“I thought he was rich – thought all of the Hastewicke Gentlemen were, except for you.”

“So did I – it’s a mystery.”

Chapter 3

In the end, curiosity got the better of me, and I left work early so that I could dart home, slip into my lone dinner jacket, and head over to Bernie’s Belgrave Square abode for a private chat before the festivities. Why had Lord Delvemere, whose Devonshire estates yielded a startlingly large annual income, needed to borrow £100,000 from the most vicious loan-shark in England?

As anyone who has ever played – or even watched – a match will tell you, the game of rugby is governed by a most intricate set of laws. However, one of rugby’s most sacred rules isn’t set down in any manual. This unwritten law is simple and inviolable: what goes on on tour, stays on tour.

Even at the amateur level, touring is central to the life of any rugby team, a blissful, intoxicating, much-anticipated interlude of sport, beer and travel, in the company of two dozen or so congenial mates, to exotic locales, where you will meet – and often, appall – people you will most likely never encounter again. It’s a sort of turbocharged holiday, a delirious, testosterone-drenched escape from the harrowing banality of the everyday, filled with merry companionship, pranks, laughs and the sort of behaviour you’d never get away with at home.

Populated as it was with, myself excepted, the scions of wealthy and privileged English society, the Hastewicke Gentlemen Rugby Club toured more than most. During my tenure alone, the club had been to Italy, South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand twice, Argentina, Texas, and, most recently, Las Vegas. On those tours, I had  witnessed all sorts of reprehensible behaviour – drunken buffoonery, sexual misadventures, cattle tipping, the frequent theft of small boats and electric golf carts, and one particularly repulsive incident involving a marsupial. Any especially grotesque infringements were dealt with by the team, primarily via the kangaroo court held at the close of each tour. But because protecting the guilty is one of the most sacred tenets of rugby life, such events were never, on pain of excommunication, revealed to those outside the team – wives, girlfriends, co-workers. We all knew one another’s darkest secrets – and held them in sacred trust.

It was with a certain heaviness of heart, then, that I approached Bernie’s house in Belgrave Square. I didn’t know that his sudden and clandestine need for funds had anything to do with what had happened on our recent Las Vegas tour, though the timing, at least, was suggestive. What I did know was that, if my professional duties compelled me to shine the bright light of official inquiry into the tour activities of any of my teammates, it would be an unforgivable violation of the sacred bond that is rugby touring. I fervently hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

Bernie was in his study when the housemaid showed me in. An aromatic fire of split oak logs crackled merrily in the Georgian fireplace, keeping the autumnal at bay. The flickering firelight burnished a room of privileged wealth and good taste. Bernie stood on the hearth, struggling to do up his tie. “Here,” I said, “let me – you were always hopeless.”

“Dex! Yes, thanks -- never have gotten the hang of these bloody things.”

“You never had to – you even had a valet at school.”

“Yes, that was my mother’s doing, bless her soul. Whisky?”

“Yes, please.”

He handed me a heavy cut-glass tumbler half-full of nut-brown spirit. There was a wary pause. “So – to what do I owe this honour? You’ll be at John’s later?”

“I will.” I took a warming sip; this
was
awkward. “I’m afraid this visit has a bit of an official tinge, and wanted to speak to you privately. Do you know a man called Artemis Paul?”

Bernie looked away, considering. He was still the same old Bernie, physically; still a compact, strong-looking 5'10" and 15 stone. But there was more grey than I remembered in his thinning sandy hair; while he was still reasonably fit, the skin of his face suddenly looked loose, like a badly-fitted slipcover. “Rings a bell,” he said noncommittally. “Should I know him?”

“He tried to kill me last night.”

Bernie put down his glass. “Yes, I heard – it was on the news. Bloody maniac!”

“The reason I’m here... look, this is awkward. But I was poking ‘round the client list on his computer, and there you were. A hundred thousand pounds is a lot of money. But not, I would’ve thought, to you.”

“Look, Dex.” He set down his glass, then picked it up again and drained it. “When I heard what Paul had done, I thought you might be coming to see me. You and I have known each other a long time. We’ve been teammates for over 30 years. In some ways, we’re closer than brothers – you certainly know things about me my brother doesn’t, and never will. If I tell you, in confidence, why I went to Paul, can you keep it confidential?”

I thought about that. There were plenty of other names on Paul’s client list. But I owed Bernie an honest answer, at least. “You haven’t committed a crime, I assume. Have his collectors been to see you?” He shook his head. “Then there’s a chance you’ll be asked to testify against him, but I doubt it. We’ll be more interested in the clients he’s roughed up. Certainly your reasons for borrowing the money shouldn’t be an issue in court, even if you are called to testify. But there’s always a chance it could come out on cross.”

He sighed and poured himself another stiff drink. “But you’re curious?”

“Not curious enough to get out the thumbscrews. But Bernie, if you’re in trouble with someone...”

“Tell me, Dex. When we were on tour in Vegas, did you go to Suite 455?”

“Suite 455?” I searched my somewhat clouded memory; after a moment, the light came on. “Ah... our anonymous benefactor.” During our stay in Vegas, a note had been slipped under each of our doors. It read: “An anonymous benefactor wishes it to be known that Suite 455 has been booked through the weekend for the discreet use of any Hastewicke Gentleman. Time is available in four-hour blocks. Please book in advance with the tour secretary.”

I shook my head. “No, there was no need. I was rooming with The Gland – he didn’t spend a single night in our room. What about Suite 455?”

Bernie looked up then, and in his eyes I saw infinite regret. “Ask John,” was all he would say.                                                       

II

A few minutes later I stood outside Bernie’s house, still pondering this enigmatic reply. A black cab approached the curb, and I absent-mindedly hailed it. Then the taxi door opened, and as the passenger stepped out, all thoughts of the mysterious Suite 455 were driven from my head.

I thought, as I always did, that the years had been extraordinarily gentle with her – the same slim figure, the same lustrous, curly, shoulder-length honey-colored hair, the same perfect skin, the color of warm desert sand. Rarer still, the weary weight of time had failed to dim the ethereal intelligence and earthy good humor that shone from her face like the halo ‘round a Botticelli Madonna.

I had seen her many times in the 15 years since our brief intimacy – after all, she had been Bernie’s wife all that time. But I felt the old familiar pain all the same. When she saw me, her eyes kindled with pleasure. “Dex! What brings you to darken our doorway?”

“Lady Delvemere! What an unexpected pleasure! Just wanted a quick word with Bernie before the party.”

“What’s he done this time?  Aren’t you going to arrest him?”

“Nah, let him off with a caution for impersonating a lord, and criminal abuse of a tie.”

Her eyes sparkled gaily. “Really pathetic, isn’t it? Are you coming to the party? Of course you are – black tie, you look smashing.”

“Just my usual Wednesday night attire, Jane. Look, I won’t keep you – I know you need to get ready. I’ll see you later.”

“Right, see you at John’s, then.” And with that heartbreak smile and an airy flutter of her fingers, she was gone from my life. Again.

III

Ten years ago tonight, on a stormy autumn afternoon, Ian Chalmers, the charismatic captain of the Hastewicke Gentlemen, boarded his twin-engine Cessna at Gatwick for a routine business trip to Paris. Instead, he had joined Glenn Miller’s choir invisible. Early the next morning, his business partner, awaiting his arrival, reported him overdue. Two days later, the plane’s tail section was found floating in the Channel. The main wreckage, and Ian’s body, were never recovered.

The team were shattered. For a time, we considered never playing again. How can you overcome the loss of such a man? Ian was the heart and soul of the team – our unquestioned leader, on and off the field, a rugby player of consummate skill and ferocity, the most charming and loyal of companions off the pitch, the ringleader of a thousand merry pranks, dating back to a time when we were all kids together. He seemed to lead a charmed life – born wealthy and noble, lucky in love and business, unfailingly generous, tall, strong and unfairly handsome, with a charmingly self-effacing sense of humor. And then, one day, he was gone.

For many months afterwards, the team struggled to come to grips with his death. And then, late one night in the venerable bar of the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s Hampstead clubhouse, John Weathersby, Lord Southhampton, our loose-head prop and newly-elected skipper, rose to his feet. “Here’s to Ian – may all the buxom barmaids in rugby Valhalla vie to fill his horn.”

We somberly raised our glasses and drank the toast. John remained standing. “Listen. We can’t replace Ian. But we can remember him, as long as one of us has the strength to raise a glass. I propose that we gather together each year on the anniversary of his death, and tell stories about the old bugger. My house, my treat.”

And so it came to pass that I stood in the sumptuous, candlelit main hall of Penthorne House, John Weathersby’s posh Notting Hill address, on the night of October 11, 2005, with my arms around two of my teammates, clutching a flute of Veuve Cliquot and fighting back the tears. For some reason, I found myself harkening back to the first time I laid eyes on the man who would have such a profound effect on my life.

Hastewicke, in Devon, is one of the oldest public schools in England, an academic hothouse which, for more than two centuries, has nurtured some of the most exotic blooms of British society: poets and Prime Ministers, saints, scientists and scoundrels, explorers, big-game hunters, and an impressive roster of the mightiest names in Debrett’s Peerage.

Each year, Hastewicke also admits a handful of scholarship students of humbler means. In the fall of 1969, having attracted the favorable attention of the masters of my neighborhood school, I received the Sir Arthur Nichols Scholarship, and found myself, a skinny little sprog nine years of age, enrolled at Hastewicke.

I’ll spare you the gory details; suffice to say that life among the sons of the mighty and privileged wasn’t always easy for a publican’s son from East London. There was a series of ugly and humiliating incidents involving the scholarship boys, which culminated in the expulsion of my best mate, a gentle and studious lad named Bill Tanner, when a valuable watch, stolen from another boy in our house, was found under Bill’s mattress.

The next day, I was in the changing-room, miserably donning my gear for our afternoon cross-country run, when I heard Colin, son of Lord Westbrook and the ringleader of the gang of bullies who were making our lives so miserable, laughing to his cronies that it was he who had stolen the watch, planted it in Bill’s room, and told the headmaster where to find it.

We Cockneys regard swearing as a Shakespearean art-form, and some of my dad’s customers, sailors and stevedores from the splintery end of the London docks, were true virtuosos. They would have wept with quiet pride if they could’ve heard my frank appraisal of Colin’s character and ancestry. Our little chat swiftly escalated into an epic fistfight, which culminated with my pushing Colin’s head into a toilet and pulling the chain.

When he arose, bloodied, dripping and murderous, two of his minions had me by the arms. He drew back his fist. “You’re dead meat, Reed, you little Cockney pile of shit. It’s your word against mine. The headmaster will never believe you.”

Then a heavy hand fell on Colin’s shoulder. “No – but I will.” Looking up, my wondering eyes beheld a towering fourth year who looked familiar, in some sort of vaguely heroic context. “Now go piss your beds, you pathetic firsties, while I decide your punishment.” Colin opened his mouth to bray forth an indignant reply, but a swift kick to the backside sent him and his swarm of sycophants stampeding for the exit.