The Demon Club

by Scott Mariani

  Grace described how Jeff and Tuesday had made contact and drawn out the men following her. ‘I’ve never seen anyone get shot in front of me like that.’

  ‘They were going to kill you,’ he said. ‘Because of me.’

  ‘No, they had other plans. They were going to kidnap me.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because when they came up to me in the woods and pulled out their guns, one of them said, “You’re coming with us, darling.” Darling. And they’d have taken me, if your friends hadn’t stopped them.’

  Ben wondered what Saunders’ strategy had been, trying to abduct her alive rather than carry out his original threat. None of it mattered now. The road ahead was suddenly free and clear, as though the traps and hazards and obstacles that had littered it had been magically swept away. All but one, which he’d still have to deal with.

  ‘When am I going to see you?’ she asked.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘That’s not soon enough.’

  ‘There are things I have to do, Grace.’

  ‘I’m so scared they’re going to hurt you.’

  ‘They’re the ones who should be scared,’ he said. ‘And they will be.’

  ‘Promise me that you’ll be careful, Ben. Come back to me. Be safe.’

  ‘Always,’ he promised.

  ‘Jeff’s calling me to go.’

  ‘Go,’ Ben said.

  ‘I love you.’

  She’d never said that to him before. He didn’t know if it was the tension and emotion of the moment, or whether she really meant it. But her words pierced him like a spear. Before he could muster a reply, she was gone.

  Ben put the phone away. He looked down at the scotch bottle that had fallen into the footwell. It was leaking whisky all over the carpet and the car was going to smell like a distillery. He picked it up and opened the passenger door. The picnic area in which Wolf had parked had some council litter bins. The nearest was about seven yards away. Ben lobbed the bottle into it. Then he drew the second, unopened bottle from his pocket and lobbed that one in too. It hit with a clatter and broke. So much for drinking himself half to death.

  Ben turned to Wolf. Said, ‘I’m sorry that I lost faith, Jaden. I was weak. It was wrong.’

  ‘It was human,’ Wolf said. ‘That’s what we are. That’s what makes us better than these shits.’

  ‘Whatever they are, they’d better start running,’ Ben said. ‘Because everything just changed. No more hiding in the shadows. The game of stealth is over. This is open war now. Saunders has lost his tactical advantage, and if he doesn’t already know it he soon will.’

  ‘Except we still don’t know what the fucker’s real name is,’ Wolf pointed out. ‘Or who any of them are. Or where we’re going to find them, unless you plan on staking out Karswell Hall indefinitely, in the hope that they’re all going to turn up en masse and we can nab the lot. For all we know, they only get together once a year.’

  ‘True,’ Ben said. ‘But Anthony Abbott knew exactly who they were. He was one of them. The information is right there in his book.’

  Wolf frowned. ‘Yeah, if only we could hack the password to get into his laptop. I’m not much of a computer guy. Are you?’

  ‘We don’t need a password. We’ve got something better.’ Ben popped open the Alpina’s glove box, reached inside and took out Abbott’s burner.

  He said, ‘We’ve got the Seaward & Laverack Literary Agency in London. And they’ve got the book.’

  Chapter 38

  Tristan Dudley was fifty-one years old, with an Eton and Downing College, Cambridge background. He had earned his first-class degree from the Faculty of Law, top of his class. After just ten years’ practice as a lawyer, having already become the youngest ever senior partner in the prestigious London-based firm of Butler, Caspar and McQueen, Dudley had ‘taken silk’ and arisen to the lofty position of Queen’s Counsel at the ripe old age of thirty-seven, at that time a record. From there he could have aspired to becoming a High Court Judge, ultimately even Justice of the Supreme Court should he have wanted; but instead he sidestepped from the law and entered politics, and was duly elected as Conservative MP for his home constituency of Worcester two days before his fortieth birthday.

  Dudley’s rise in that world had been as meteoric as the trajectory of his legal career. He was smart and educated but never condescending, highly articulate and persuasive, with a winning personality and a ready smile that, together with his gracefully silvering mane of hair, his ruggedly handsome features and his frequent public appearances with his glitzy wife Clarissa on his arm, made him a darling of the media. The camera adored Dudley as much as he relished posing for pictures at every available opportunity.

  Behind the scenes, he was a canny and hard-nosed negotiator, trampling without mercy over any hapless person who impeded his progress or tried to cross swords with him. Yet for all the flattened careers and politically bloodied noses left in the wake of his spectacular ascendancy to the limelight, Dudley seemed to have no real enemies and appeared to be completely bulletproof and without blemish. His growing horde of supporters unanimously hailed him as a serious future contender for party leader and, very possibly, Prime Minister. His legal standing had quickly earned him a place on the Privy Council, as an official policy advisor to Her Majesty the Queen.

  In short, the Right Honourable Tristan Dudley QC could do no wrong and the political world was, pretty much, his oyster.

  But Dudley had a secret problem, and its name was Annie.

  Annie Dudley was Tristan and Clarissa’s only child. From an early age, their daughter had exhibited signs of wayward behaviour that had only grown more concerning – and for her father, more potentially embarrassing – as she’d got older. True, the kids of top-level, high-profile professionals were often known for their inability to stay on script, but Annie seemed determined to take the art of scandalising her family’s reputation to a new level. As a schoolgirl she had been suspended multiple times for offences including smoking in the toilets, smuggling in alcohol, selling cigarettes to her fellow pupils, vandalising school property and abusing her teachers – all this before the age of eleven.

  In the hope that her behaviour would benefit from the extra discipline, her parents had packed twelve-year-old Annie off to one of England’s finest all-girl boarding schools, the St Aloysius Academy in Gloucestershire. Things had seemed to go well at first, until Annie had been caught distributing pornographic material among her peers. When the St Aloysius heads attempted to punish her by confining her to her dorm, Annie set fire to a pair of velvet drapes and caused a blaze that could have destroyed half the school. It could have been every bit as damaging to her father’s newfound political career, too. Then forty-four and still in his first term as Member of Parliament for Worcester, Dudley had had to wrangle hard with the school authorities and agree to a painful settlement out of court to prevent the sordid affair from blowing up into a whole press hoo-ha.

  But his troubles with Annie were only just beginning. Her teenage years were a nightmare of one narrowly avoided scandal after another. At thirteen she was picked up by the police after a store detective caught her with hundreds of pounds’ worth of shoplifted cosmetics. At fifteen she was one of a group of underage kids found in a car, stoned out of their minds on cannabis and ecstasy. At seventeen she became involved in a fracas where someone got zapped at a rock festival with an illegal stun gun; and just months later, having somehow managed to get into Sussex University to study some trendy non-subject, she was in trouble again – this time after bombarding one of her first-year professors with obscene poetry and nude pictures of herself.

  This incident was an early indicator of Annie’s burgeoning nymphomaniac tendencies. It would not be the last. As ever, only her father’s considerable influence in high places, a lot of money discreetly changing hands and a great many assurances that it would never happen again saved him from public embarrassment over the affair. He was skating on thin ice with
Annie. He’d long feared it was only a question of time before his dear daughter landed him in it so badly that not even his most powerful friends would be able to get him out.

  Annie had celebrated her nineteenth birthday three months ago. Soon afterwards had come the moment that her father most dreaded.

  Dudley had been at home alone one morning at the family residence near Goring-on-Thames when the anonymous letter had arrived in the post. Clarissa was off somewhere, doing whatever it was that Clarissa did. When Dudley opened the envelope and examined the letter, he was extremely glad his wife hadn’t been the one to read it – or to see the half dozen enclosed photo prints.

  The letter was a blackmail demand, crudely written but all too clear in its message. It seemed that Annie’s latest exploit was to get herself photographed cavorting with a gang of what could only be described – judging by their tattoos which were on obvious display in several of the explicit images – as neo-Nazis. She was obviously a willing participant in the gymnastics, which involved up to four bulky, swastika-festooned skinheads at a time. Their faces, if nothing else, had been blacked out, but in all six of the shots hers was clearly identifiable.

  The letter made clear that these were only a sample of the photo album, promising to send copies of all of them to the national media unless her father coughed up a payment of one million pounds to a bank account whose number was scrawled at the foot of the page. He had a week to deliver – or else.

  It wasn’t the sight of his daughter in flagrante delicto with a gang of musclebound imbeciles that bothered Dudley. Truth was, he no longer cared a damn what the crazy bitch did or what became of her. It wasn’t so much the money, either. What troubled him was the fact that these pests couldn’t be trusted to stick to a deal. Pay, and they’d soon be back wanting more. Then more. And more, until the day they decided to publish the photos anyway and sink him forever. This would never go away.

  And so Dudley acted swiftly. One phone call, and the full force of his most powerful secret allies was unleashed on the blackmailers. These amateurish idiots didn’t realise who they were messing with.

  The letter itself bore no fingerprints and the postmark revealed nothing, but the bank account number was easily traced to an address in east London, which turned out to be a shared house. A nocturnal visit ensued that resulted in three shaven-headed individuals being hauled from their beds, bundled into a van and taken away to a remote spot deep in Epping Forest, where confessions were extracted and bad things happened to them. The bodies would never be found.

  Over the following weeks the remainder of the gang – there were seven of them altogether – were hunted down, the last man standing having fled to a campsite in Zeebrugge, which only delayed his inevitable violent demise. Along with the blackmailers themselves, every copy of the compromising pictures had been destroyed. The threat was neutralised, for now – but the problem of Annie still remained. Dudley knew she had no intention of ever mending her ways. Which led him to the only possible conclusion. This could not be allowed to happen again.

  Annie had to go. And her father’s shadowy associates had a way of making it happen that served both their purposes. Because what nobody in the public world knew about the Right Honourable Tristan Dudley QC, Member of Parliament and the Privy Council, was that he was also a member of a secret society with very particular methods of dealing with people.

  Its name was The Pandemonium Club.

  Chapter 39

  What should have been a ninety-minute drive from the heart of the West Sussex countryside to east-central London took over two hours in the crazy traffic. Ben had found the website of the Seaward & Laverack agency and set a course for their office address in Leonard Circus. Wolf was doing the driving while the whisky worked out of Ben’s system. Ben made use of his recovery time by making a tough phone call.

  ‘Hello, Ruth.’

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said in amused surprise. ‘Fancy hearing from you. Wow, so it’s true, I really do have a brother. Thought I’d just imagined it.’

  ‘I know it’s been a while.’

  ‘And you’re sorry you haven’t been in touch but you’re just so busy. I know the score.’

  Ruth’s life path had in many ways been even stranger than her brother’s. After being abducted as a child by Moroccan slave traders and miraculously escaping her captors during a sandstorm, she had lived for a short time with a community of kindly Bedouin people until the appearance of a wealthy Swiss couple, Maximilian and Silvia Steiner. The Steiners had lost their seven-year-old daughter Gudrun in a tragic riding accident some time earlier, and while travelling in North Africa had been astounded to discover this blue-eyed, blond-haired little girl playing with the Bedouin kids. They fell in love with her, pulled strings to get the adoption fast-tracked, and before Ruth had known what was happening to her she’d gone from being a desert urchin to a cosseted rich kid living on a huge gated estate with golf courses and servants. As a young woman she had rebelled violently against her adoptive father Max, but eventually returned to the bosom of the family and gone on to run their multi-billion industry and aerospace empire.

  Ruth’s kidnapping had been a defining moment in Ben’s life, torn his family apart, and caused him to spend many years in profound agony over her loss. It pained him that they were so little in contact now, and even more so that it was his fault for neglecting their relationship. He cared for her very deeply.

  ‘So to what do I owe the pleasure of your call this time, big brother?’ she asked archly. ‘Don’t tell me. You need to borrow another plane? Still haven’t paid me back for the one you ditched in … what was that lake called again?’

  ‘Lake Toba,’ Ben sighed. ‘In Indonesia.’ Ruth knew perfectly well, but she enjoyed needling him about it. The little things she just wouldn’t let him forget.

  What he was about to ask her to do wouldn’t be easily forgiven, either. He said, ‘Where are you living these days? Still on the estate?’

  ‘No, I bought myself a nice new house in Zermatt and spend most of my time there now, when I’m not travelling around for business. Why do you ask?’

  Ben took a mental deep breath and jumped right in. ‘Because I need you to get out, right now, and go where nobody can find you or contact you. Don’t ask me to explain why, but it’s not safe for you there.’

  ‘Why am I so surprised? This has to do with you, doesn’t it? What have you been up to now?’

  ‘Please. Action first. Answers later. Okay?’

  ‘Oh, okay. I’ll just put everything down and take a vacation. Just what I needed, when I’m up to my ears in running a global enterprise.’

  ‘Do you still have that yacht?’ he asked. Last time they’d spoken, she’d told him about the latest addition to the Steiner fleet.

  ‘Uh-huh. Currently at mooring in the Sweetwater marina in Trinidad. Just a hop and a skip away in the family jet, for a nice little cruise around the Caribbean, whenever I choose. “I” being the operative term. Get it?’

  Ben said, ‘You sound tired, Sis. I’d say you could do with a holiday.’

  ‘Oh, sure. But for how long exactly did you have in mind?’

  Ben said nothing.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘You have no idea, do you?’ Sounding worried now. ‘Ben, is someone trying to hurt you? Are you in trouble? Is that why you’re trying to protect me?’

  ‘I’m dealing with it,’ he said.

  ‘I know you will, whatever it is. You always do. But if you need help—’

  ‘Just do this one thing for me. Please? I need time to fix this.’

  There was a long pause on the line, followed by a weary sigh. ‘All right, I’m going to make you a deal. I’ll do what you ask. Get out of here just as fast as I can and go where nobody can find me. You can rely on that.’

  ‘Thanks, Ruth.’

  ‘But here are my deal terms. If I haven’t heard from you in one week – that’s exactly seven days to the hour, from right this mom
ent – then I’m calling in the troops.’

  ‘What troops?’

  ‘Whatever troops are necessary to find out where you are and what the hell this is about. I have a lot of money and human resources at my disposal, and I’ll deploy them all if I have to. Deal?’

  She was a hard driver, but she’d given him what he needed. He could worry about the timeframe later. He said, ‘Deal.’

  ‘And you’re still going to have to tell me everything.’

  Ben was going to have a lot of talking to do when this was over. ‘Just as soon as I can, I promise we’ll spend some time together.’

  ‘If this is what it took for me to get to see you, maybe it’s worth it.’

  ‘Go,’ he told her. ‘Pack your bags and get out of there. In fact, don’t even pack. I’m sure you’ve got a whole wardrobe on board the yacht.’

  ‘A week,’ she said, and hung up the call.

  Ben blew out a sigh of relief.

  ‘Sounds like one less thing to worry about,’ Wolf said. ‘All we have to do now is take down a whole secret cabal of psychopathic nutters and get out of it alive. Piece of cake.’

  They sped onwards. Ben made another call, this time to check that someone would be there at the agency to meet with them. A male voice answered, somewhat testily as though Ben’s call was interrupting important business. Ben said, ‘Is that Andrew Laverack?’

  ‘No, this is Roland Seaward. How may I help you?’

  ‘I was returning his call on behalf of Mr Abbott.’

  Seaward didn’t sound happy. ‘Who is this? Do you work for Abbott?’

  Ben knew that if he told Seaward at this stage that Abbott was dead, he would clam up and call the police, and it would be impossible to get any more out of him. It was easier just to lie. ‘I represent Mr Abbott’s interests, yes.’