Loose Head (8 page)

“You’d... you’d do that, for me?”

“Yes. But don’t tell anyone it was me, all right?”

“I won’t. Bless you, DI Reed.”

And blessed I was. A scant few hours later, I found myself sitting across a steel table from Artemis Paul and his solicitor, a competent terrier of a man named Tom Jenkins, in a grimy ground-floor interview room at Hendon Station. Apparently my little gambit with Debra Paul had had the desired effect, and she had reminded him of his domestic responsibilities. “My client requested this meeting,” Vickery growled. “Against my advice.” 

Artie Paul leaned across the table. The recorder was turning, and a uniformed officer stood silently against the door. Gone was the steely facade he had shown me at Blue Hour and aboard the
Compound Interest
; he looked both shaken and stirred. Like he’d spent an hour in a paint-shaker, rather than a few minutes with his wife. “I only want to know one thing,” Paul said, and I noted with professional satisfaction the slight tremor in his voice. “If I’m a good boy, and I play the game, will it have an effect at my sentencing?”

I considered. “Without consulting the Crown prosecutor, I can’t make any promises. But if you cooperate, based on my experience, I’d say offhand that you’re looking at 20 years and out. You’d have to be a model prisoner, mind. Not try to, say, collect any outstanding debts.”

For a moment, Paul closed his eyes behind his lozenge-shaped spectacles. Then he nodded. “Done.”

Vickery fairly blanched in horror. “Artie, no!”

Paul removed his restraining hand. “This way there’s a chance I’ll see Debra and the girls again. And they can be a part of my life. Now.” He addressed me. “What d’you want to know?”

We spoke for two hours, and Paul never looked up from his hands where they rested on the table. He told me as little as he decently could, and volunteered nothing, but when I asked a question, he told me the truth. Except about Martin Wallace – he steadfastly denied any involvement in his murder. I let it slide for now, knowing that, if we were able to prove Paul’s involvement in that crime, all bets, in terms of my estimate of his likely sentence, were off.

Having shown him that this was the most advantageous course, given his present circumstances, for him, the person nearest and dearest to his own heart, at least Paul was talking to me. “One last question,” I said, as the interview wound down “– Lord Delvemere. He came to see you.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He needed money. Quickly. I lent it to him, at 10 percent a month.”

“Ten? You charged me 30. Why 10?”

“Because I knew he was good for it.”

“How?”

“Because he was a customer. A regular.”

My brain, knackered by the length and intensity of the interview, suddenly ticked over. “Boris.”

“Yes. Once a month, for the past three years. Like clockwork. Boris was a dead ringer for someone he knew at school, apparently.”

I trembled inwardly at the ramifications of this information. “Did he tell you why he needed the money?”

“No. He did say he didn’t want his wife to know.” Paul looked up at last. “Would you like my professional opinion?”

I already knew what that would be, but he told me anyway. “He was being blackmailed. Seen it before – I know the symptoms.”

III

Each Monday evening, I have a standing invitation to join Brian and his wife, Fiona, and their daughters, Rose, 10, and Kate, seven, for dinner. Fiona, tall, well-fleshed, with sharp, laughing brown eyes enlivening a sculpted oval face, met me at the door of their Southwark row-house; I handed her two bottles of Oddbins’ best and gave her a wet one on the cheek. “Sorry to be such a bachelor,” I said. “Is there enough for me?”

“Need you ask?” she said wryly “– Brian’s cooking.”

My partner was sweating over the stove when I arrived, a well-splattered “Shag the Cook” apron straining to protect his ample girth. “Smells lovely,” I observed. “What’s on the menu tonight, then?”

“Roast loin of pork with apples and cream, Potatoes Anna and veggies, with a greengage cocagne and cream for a sweet.” He wiped the sweat from his massive brow. “I forgot to get wine. Did you bring some?”

Dinner was a great success, as always; the pork was roasted to a sweet aromatic perfection, crisp and fatty outside, tender and juicy within. Brian harbors a deep distrust of anyone else in his kitchen; he fervently believes that if you love to eat, as he does, you’d better learn to cook yourself. He’s a brilliant cook, and has often avowed his intent to open an unpretentious but hideously expensive restaurant, specializing in the cuisine of Normandy, when he tires of policework.

As always, I felt a familiar pang as we sat around the scragged-up old pine dinner table, a part of their merry and contented domesticity, but an outsider as well. Brian adored his girls, and the feeling was obviously mutual. Tonight, Fiona was wonderfully sarcastic, as always, and Katie and Rose were in rare form as well. 

“Uncle Dex, have you and daddy ever arrested a cat burglar?” Rose asked me, as Fiona served up the cocagne, still warm from the oven and drowning in cream custard.

“Matter of fact I have – bloke by the name of Peter McCaffery. He was ever so clever, and robbed lots of nice houses while the people inside were sleeping. But he wasn’t as clever as your dad, and one night, when he climbed out the window with his bag of loot over his shoulder, we were waiting for him.”

“Why was he called a cat burglar? Did he have a tail and whiskers, like Tabby does?” And then, with the wonderfully mercurial mind of a 10-year-old, “I used to wish I had a tail, when I was a baby like Kate.”

“I’m not a baby, Rose!” Kate cried in a wounded voice.

“But you do have a tail,” I told her seriously. “It’s called a coccyx. It’s all that’s left of the tails we used to have, ages ago when we were still swinging through the trees.” She turned to have a look. “You can’t see it,” I smiled “– it’s under your skin, at the very end of your backbone.”

“Uncle Dex, are you having me on?”

“Daddy has a tail,” Kate interrupted brightly. “Only it’s on his front, and you
can
see it. When he’s in the bath. It’s called a penis.”

“Oh, lovely,” said Fiona drily. “Pity your parents aren’t here tonight, Brian.”

When we finished, I borrowed Brian’s apron to do the dishes. Fiona went to give the kids their bath; Brian joined me in the kitchen, and set a cup of coffee on the drainboard at my elbow. “Ta,” I said. “By the way, I may have found your motive.” I scrubbed energetically at a roasting-pan.

“Are you going to dazzle me with your wisdom, then, or make me guess?”

The random bits of evidence that had stuck in my brain had begun to come together, like the seemingly-unconnected lines on the easel of a portrait sketch artist I had once stopped to watch in Venice. “I saw Artemis Paul this afternoon. You remember my mate Bernie? Lord Delvemere? Paul said he was being blackmailed. He didn’t know who the blackmailer was. But I think I may.”

Brian leant forward. “I’m listening.”

So I told him about my conversation with Bernie, and his cryptic comment about Suite 455. “I thought he was just telling me Weathersby had been our ‘anonymous benefactor,’ and later that night, John confirmed he had been. But there was more to it than that. After all, knowing John, generosity on that scale would’ve been completely out of character. He was legendary for squeezing every pound coin until it screamed. I can’t remember the last time he so much as bought a round of drinks.”

An incident from our tour of Canada, six years previously, suddenly leapt to mind. One night in Vancouver, five or six of the lads, including John and I, were on our way to a Gastown restaurant for dinner. A grizzled, ancient homeless man had asked us for change. “We can do better than that, can’t we lads?” John had said, and, with a wolfish grin, invited the man to join us for dinner. John sat the poor old dosser down at our table, despite the disapproving glares of the staff, and proceeded to order the finest the house could provide, all the while regaling his guest with tales of his rugby prowess and amorous conquests. As we watched in awe, old Aqualung, unable to believe his good fortune, tucked in with a vengeance that left us fearing for his digits.

“John had just finished some sordid story, something about waking up tied to a strange bedstead with alligator clips attached to his scrotum, and ordered a large armagnac. Then he got up and went for a piss.

“We awaited his return. Then waited, and waited some more. But John was already back at the hotel, laughing that hyena laugh of his. In the end, he stuck us with the bill, not only for his own meal, but for the old wino’s tab as well. And that was John’s idea of a fine joke. On us,” I finished.

Brian pondered this moving anecdote. “So your point is...?”

“John wasn’t a generous man, except with himself. Look at how he treated Tess and his children. He begrudged them every pence. Why would he suddenly pay for a separate suite to provide a venue for the boys’ bad behavior on tour? He’d never done that before.”

The light of reason was slowly kindling in John’s bloodhound eyes. “You told me he was a man who always had to have the upper hand – an edge of some sort.”

“That’s right.”

“I finally spoke to the man who sold him Finch-Hatton’s rifle. Weathersby paid cash.”

“£200,000.”

“In used hundred-pound notes.” Brian tapped his teeth with a pencil, a mannerism he had when the old brain cells were firing at an especially rapid clip. The tapping stopped. “Your friend Weathersby was shearing black sheep.”

“I’m inclined to agree. And the Hastewicke Gentlemen were his flock.”

“What would you wager that, when I ring the security staff at your hotel in Vegas tomorrow, they tell me they found some recently-filled holes in the walls of suite 455? Holes for fiber-optic video cameras, the latest stuff, sited to cover every angle of the sitting room, the bedroom and the toilet?”

I nodded. “And when we return from tour, John has the boys over, one by one, for a friendly drink. Then he brings out the computer, and treats them to a video replay of their worst indiscretions, complete with editing, soundtrack and popcorn.”

“It’s diabolical, really clever – what better candidates for blackmail could there be than a bunch of wealthy nobs on rugby tour? I shudder to think what they might have got up to. They’d pay through the nose to keep it quiet.”

I knew only too well how true that was, and suddenly felt a bit queasy as the magnitude of John’s sacrilege struck home. “Or resort to more primitive means of ensuring his silence. After all, the bond of rugby touring is firmly rooted in mutual sin. If he really did this, some might think John got what he deserved.”

“But murder? Come on, Dex – that’s a bit harsh, just to keep a bit of slap-and-tickle from the wife.”

“Some of us have more to lose than others.” Then a sudden thought occurred, and the plate I was washing almost slipped from my grasp. “But John.”

“What?”

“What blackmailer, playing for these stakes, would fail to have a backup plan? An insurance policy, if anything should happen to him?”

Brian smiled grimly. “That codicil in his will. The left-luggage key.”

I nodded. “Better get a Section 1 warrant.”

“I’ll get DC Burnett on it first thing tomorrow.”

It abruptly hit home just how ugly this could get. And for the first time in a week, I was inexpressibly glad Wicks had pulled me off this case.

Chapter 7

During the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s first tour abroad, to Australia and New Zealand in 1984, we had come up against a brutally proficient team called Waimeearoa on the North Island of New Zealand. About half of their lads were Pacific Islanders from Samoa and Tonga, magnificent specimens of manhood, tall, heavily-muscled and tattooed, with a well-deserved reputation for warm hospitality off the pitch and ferocious violence on it. They had been looking forward to the chance to rub our generally aristocratic English noses in the rich North Island mud for some weeks, and the large crowd at Waimeearoa stadium obviously shared their enthusiasm, roaring their approval of every crunching tackle and niggling cheap shot.

The game was going splendidly in their favour; the score was 23-6 at half-time. When the match resumed, despite one of Ian Chalmers’ most inspiring halftime rants, Waimeearoa picked up right where they had left off. With the crowd howling with savage glee, the local lads were pushing for the try that would have clinched it when their fly-half dropped the ball and the ref signaled a scrum.

The two forward packs – eight men each, upwards of 2,000 pounds of prime English and Kiwi beef apiece – came together like coupling railroad-cars, with a tectonic “Oomph!” Just as the scrum-half put the ball in, Winston Tuaasusopo, Waimeearoa’s gigantic second row, took advantage of the referee’s momentary distraction to deliver a crunching uppercut, between his own prop’s legs, that struck our tight-head prop, Harry Barlowe, right in the balls. Barlowe, bound into the scrum and pushing his guts out, never even saw it coming. He collapsed the scrum, writhing in agony, and as their number 8 picked up the ball, I saw red.

Vince Maitland, our blind-side flanker, made a saving tackle on the number 8, wrapping him up before he could get the pass away. As they squelched into the mud, the ruck – the phalanx of players who converge to control the ball after a tackle – formed and with savage joy I saw Tuaasusopo pick up the ball.

I wasn’t the only one who had seen the punch and where it came from. As I rocketed toward the massive Samoan, Ian Chalmers matched me stride for stride, wrapping a meaty arm around my waist. We hurdled the ruck together and drove Tuaasusopo backward into the mud, flat on his back. The ball bounced free but we scarcely noticed. United in vengeful purpose, we methodically stomped him into the mud, using our rugby boots, with their long aluminium studs, to shred his jersey and carve bloody furrows from his ankles to his sternum. I believe he still bears the scars. On the way by, I stumbled and deftly broke his nose with my knee.