MEANWHILE, JONATHAN had deftly latched on to John and his companion when they approached the bar.
“Hello, boys. It’s a bit late for twinks like you to be up, isn’t it? Can I get you an ice cream soda, or would you prefer something stronger?”
John looked acutely embarrassed, but his friend was much more eager to play along. He turned to John and said loudly, “I know you said you preferred older men, but cocoa drinkers should really stick by the fireside with their slippers on a night like this.”
To which Jonathan promptly retorted, “Horlicks I’m not into, but we can explore other kinds of licks later. I’m Jonathan and this is Christophe. Beer or a short?”
The young man laughed and replied, “I’m Steve, and this is John. Corona if you’re buying. We skipped shorts tonight.” His dark brown puppy eyes flashed at Jonathan as he added, “But maybe later.”
As Jonathan was ordering the drinks, he took the opportunity to eye up John’s companion. His youthful looks were deceptive. He looked quite a bit older than John. Probably in his late twenties, if not early thirties. His head was shaved, and his athletic body sported a polo top and tight-legged jeans with braces and a pair of 16-hole Grinders boots on his feet. He looked a world apart from the sensitive-looking, Byronesque John.
“So are you two boys together?” asked Christophe, closely eyeing Steve as Jonathan handed out the drinks.
“Oh no. John is spoken for and couldn’t possibly sully himself with trade like me.” John’s face flushed red, but Steve just grinned as he went on, “Let’s just say we do a little business together sometimes. I help John out when he’s in need.” John’s face turned a shade darker.
“Hello, John,” said a voice behind them. “What sort of business would that be, then?”
DOMINIC WAS rather proud of his dramatic entrance. It certainly had an immediate reaction on John, who shrank visibly.
“Mr. Delingpole, hi,’” he mumbled. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Clearly,” said Dominic brusquely. “So tell me, John, exactly what business do you do outside your studies with this young man?”
“What’s it to you, mate?” asked Steve harshly. “Are you the police or something?”
“God no, we’re not the police,” cut in Jonathan quickly. “This is my partner and lover, Dominic Delingpole. He’s a lawyer and finds it a bit hard to switch off sometimes. Look, let’s get a round of drinks going. Money please, Dominic.”
Dominic glowered at Jonathan and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. Deflated after his theatrical arrival, he realized that perhaps he had been a little heavy-handed and grudgingly admired Jonathan’s deft gear change. All the same he would like to know just what business John and Steve were involved in.
“Dominic tells me you share a house with the boy in the hospital,” Jonathan began. “Did you know someone tried to kill him today?”
John’s hand jumped as he reached for his drink, knocking the glass and spilling its contents over Dominic’s sleeve.
“Oh my God,” said John, turning to Dominic. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? Shit. Is that why they won’t let me see him? Mr. Delingpole, why didn’t you tell me? You know how much he means….” John’s voice faltered.
“To be honest I thought that the police would be wanting to talk to you about it,” replied Dominic. “It’s pretty obvious now that someone wants Simon dead. Can you think who his enemies are? They’re very determined. You know him better than any of us here, John, and certainly better than his mother. I offered to help her, and that’s what I’m going to do. And I think it’s time you did too. Just who’s he been mixing with that would twice try to kill him?”
Dominic stared hard at John’s face as he spoke. He wondered if the young man knew more than he was revealing. All he could see was bewilderment and fear. John said nothing, absent-mindedly mopping up his spilled drink with a bar towel. It was Steve who spoke first.
“Come on, mate. Grandpa here’s right. After what you discovered tonight, don’t you think it’s time to tell them about your suspicions about not-so-innocent Simon?”
Dominic settled back on the wire-framed barstool, relieved that they might finally be getting somewhere. At that moment his cell rang.
Chapter 11
SAMANTHA STOOD by the vending machine, waiting for the sludgy brown liquid to stop pouring into the thin plastic cup. It was two in the morning, but she was wide-awake. Her mind was turning over and over the fragments of information she had been collecting.
After feeling Simon’s hand tighten around her own, she was light-headed and elated. It seemed that her son was coming out of his coma. That it would only be a short time before he was fully conscious and she would be able to speak to him again.
Her optimism was short-lived however. A young woman doctor walked past the door shortly after the nurse had left. Samantha knew that Simon wasn’t the doctor’s patient, but asked her advice anyway. The doctor politely confirmed what the nurse had told Samantha. Coma patients do sometimes move as though they are awake. She explained how some patients even make noises and get agitated. The movements that Simon was making did not mean he was coming out of his coma. The medical team needed to see other signs to be certain of that.
The young woman doctor appeared not much older than Simon, with an accent that Samantha guessed to be from somewhere in Eastern Europe or perhaps Russia. She had been very kind and understanding with Samantha but also very firm.
“You can’t stay here with him all night. You are not helping him, and you are not helping yourself,” the young woman had said before smiling and adding, “We don’t want to have to admit you to the hospital as well for exhaustion. You must be strong for your son.”
Samantha had relented, which was how she came to be standing by the machine. Waiting for her hot brown beverage masquerading as coffee. She was in the almost-deserted reception lobby of the hospital, waiting for a minicab to turn up.
The taxi firm’s business card had been shoved into the frame of the vending machine. She had called them over twenty minutes ago. Frustrated with the wait, she called them again and listened to the insistent ringing as she sipped her ersatz coffee. After several minutes without an answer, the call disconnected. Samantha leaned against the glass windows of the reception area, her head swimming with the effects of the caffeine and exhaustion. She rested her eyes for a moment, desperately needing sleep. With her eyes still closed, she felt her way around the aging cell to redial the minicab company. She held the phone to her ear and listened to the ringing tone. Suddenly it was interrupted as a man’s voice answered at the other end.
“Mrs. Gregory? Are you all right?” It was Dominic.
Samantha jerked upright, her eyes wide open, suddenly very awake.
“Dominic! Oh, I’m so sorry. I must have pressed the wrong buttons on this cell. I really didn’t mean to call you at this ungodly hour. I’m so sorry to have woken you up.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Gregory” came the weary voice from the other end. “I’m still very much awake, although I would prefer to be in my bed just now.”
Samantha listened intently to the sounds coming from the earpiece. “Is that music I can hear in the background, Dominic? Are you in a club somewhere? You are a man full of surprises, I must say.”
“It’s a long story, Mrs. Gregory—Samantha. I’ll explain when I next see you. You’re not still at the hospital, are you?”
“Actually, Dominic, I am, and as you’re still up and about, I wonder if you might help me? I’ve been trying to get a minicab to pick me up from here for the past half hour without success. Do you think you could find one other than ABC Taxis, who seem to be quite useless? If they could come to the hospital and pick me up and take me back to the guesthouse, I would be so grateful. I desperately need some sleep, and Simon’s medical team have finally persuaded me that I’m simply in the way here.”
“I can do better than that, Samantha,” said Dominic. “I can come and
collect you myself. I was nominated to be the driver for this evening, so I have my car here.”
As Samantha began to protest, he simply interrupted with, “Don’t go away. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He hung up, leaving Samantha much relieved.
IN THE bar, Dominic turned to Jonathan. “You find out what these young men have to say for themselves. Don’t get distracted,” he added, as Steve turned his back on them to talk to Christophe and Jonathan started to eye his rear admiringly. “I’ll come straight back after I’ve dropped Samantha at her guesthouse.”
Jonathan whispered in his ear, “My dear, there are so many ways of extracting information. If it involves a little flirting, don’t be alarmed. I still love you more than dearly,” and he extended his tongue into Dominic’s ear briefly before giving him an affectionate kiss good-bye on the lips.
Dominic sighed as he walked out of the club. He wished that he could be as relaxed with his sexuality as Jonathan. Be less possessive when they were in company. He felt constrained by the conventions with which he had been brought up. Meeting Jonathan had been a breath of fresh air, what with his constant challenges to Dominic’s ascetic approach to life. Being challenged was good for him, but also, well, challenging.
John asked to go with him to pick up Samantha, but Dominic pointed out that at this hour of the morning, all she wanted was sleep, not an emotional discussion about Simon’s condition.
SAMANTHA CLIMBED into the front seat of the silver Mercedes. She gave Dominic the address for her guesthouse before planting a grateful peck on his cheek. “My knight in shining armor,” she breathed.
Dominic blushed and attempted to adopt a matter-of-fact tone as he asked, “Is there any change in Simon’s condition?” He slipped the car into drive and pulled away as Samantha told him of the evening’s developments in the ICU.
“I really don’t know what to think now,” she said. “I’m sure that he was squeezing my hand, but they said it could be just involuntary movements. Perhaps I’m just wishing a bit too hard.” She sighed and stared out of the window as they drove down the seafront road to her guesthouse. “Have you had a nice evening? It sounded like you were somewhere very noisy when I called you.”
Dominic decided it was far too late to begin telling her of the evening’s events. “Oh, it was yet another club Jonathan wanted to go to. Not as noisy as the first one we were in, but still, the music was not really my thing, I’m afraid. Jonathan thinks I’m a real stuffed shirt because of that. But I simply don’t have his eclectic tastes in music. He loves so much—from Dvorak to Drum ’n’ Bass. We only really overlap on classical, and then he knows so much more than me. His knowledge of classical music is astonishing. His mind is like a Groves Dictionary.”
As they turned right into a quiet crescent of Victorian guesthouses, his cell beeped with a new message. Bringing the car to a halt by the curb, he picked up the phone and saw that it was from Jonathan: Dramatic revelations, hurry back lover. xx
“Is that Jonathan wanting to know where you are?” asked Samantha, unbuckling her seat belt. “You’ll have to keep secret the wild, passionate love we had on the cramped backseat of your little sports car, won’t you?” She turned, laid a hand on his knee, and kissed Dominic gently on the lips. “You’re such a lovely man. Jonathan is very lucky.” Then she fumbled for the door handle as she said, “Forgive me. I’m very tired, and that was probably entirely inappropriate. Hurry back to him and don’t let him go. You two are very fortunate.” She slipped out of the car and was gone.
Dominic slumped back in his seat, bemused and flattered in almost equal measure. He felt like the awkward teenager he had once been, both embarrassed and confused by girls who threw themselves at him and for whom he could not reciprocate with honesty. The strain had been almost intolerable in those days, and yet there had been no one to talk to about how he felt. He had gone through his first two years at Birmingham University with his head buried in his studies. He avoided potential sexual encounters by hiding in the library for much of the time. That had changed in the summer between his second and third year. He had bought a Eurail pass and spent eight weeks and too much money backpacking around the cities of Europe.
It was at the Berlin Opera House that he met Bernhardt. Dominic had been unsuccessfully trying to get a cheap ticket for a production of La Bohème when a voice behind him said, “It’s a beautiful story and I want to help one as beautiful as you to see it.” Dominic had turned to stare straight into the vivid blue eyes of a smartly dressed German man. He was probably only a few years older than the twenty-year-old Dominic.
His world changed that summer. It was a muddled, confused time. On the one hand, it brought bliss with the beautiful, tall, blond Bernhardt. On the other it brought terror at the prospect of coming out to his friends and family in England. It was a piece of drama that he could not face.
Dominic felt sublime that night as he watched Puccini’s masterpiece at the Berlin State Opera House with Bernhardt next to him. They spent fifteen tempestuous nights together. Bernhardt was endlessly seductive and often explosive. He lived in a Bohemian apartment in the increasingly fashionable area of East Berlin. His parents were very wealthy, and Bernhardt was not without money. With wealth came an arrogance and dominance in their fledgling relationship that Dominic found at first seductive but ultimately unbearable.
On the sixteenth night, while Bernhardt went to cruise the bars of Schöneberg, Dominic packed his rucksack and took the U-Bahn to the Hauptbahnhof. There he took an overnight train to Prague. Two friends from university had been planning a trip there, and Dominic vainly hoped he might bump into them for some familiar company and a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. He got a bed in the YMCA in Na Poříčí, just off the Old Town Square, where he stayed for four nights before a longing to return to the UK overwhelmed him and he set off on the journey back home.
The Berlin experience left him hopelessly confused. He was unhappy for a long time. In the years to follow, he was to have many regrets about that summer. The main one being that when he returned to England, he had not come out to his family. It was only after another six months that he confided in close friends so that at least in their company he could be comfortable and satisfied with who he was. When he thought hard about it, it was only since his relationship with Jonathan that he had started to reach the contentment he sought, seventeen years after that summer traveling Europe.
Dominic’s cell began ringing and jolted him out of his reminiscence. It was Jonathan. “Where the hell are you, lover?”
Chapter 12
BY THREE thirty in the morning, Jonathan and Dominic were curled up on the settee in the front room of Jonathan’s tiny cottage in Lewes. They had vainly tried to stoke life back into the dying embers of the log burner. The room was rapidly losing its coziness, but Dominic still had adrenaline coursing in his veins from the evening’s revelations. Jonathan seemed happy to massage his partner’s neck as Dominic went over the night’s events.
“I don’t think it means Simon is a blackmailer at all,” mused Dominic, rolling a brandy glass in his left hand to warm it. “I’m not sure about this housemate, Jay. He’s a volatile character, and there seems little love lost between him and the others. We only have his word that he found those photographs in Simon’s room and concealed them from the police.”
“Are you saying he planted them to frame Simon? If so, why didn’t he just leave them in the room to be discovered?” asked Jonathan.
John’s revelation of what he had found in the rucksack had been a bombshell to everyone. Inside was an A4 manila envelope of freeze-frame photographic images, apparently taken from several surveillance cameras in what looked like the room of a stately home. The photographs showed several men engaged in vigorous sexual activities. Inside the envelope was a scrap of paper on which was typed, “Meet you at the location as agreed. Be alone, we’ll be watching.”
“But what if the rucksack wasn’t in Simon’s room but in Jay’s, and Jay simp
ly claimed that it was in Simon’s room? What if Jay is actually the blackmailer?” asked Dominic.
“If he is the blackmailer, then why show the rucksack to John? Surely he’d want to hang on to it to collect the spoils?” replied Jonathan, rubbing Dominic’s neck absently. “No, I think this gives someone an ideal motive to want Simon dead and explains the two attempts on his life. Using ketamine as the murder weapon, the murderer hoped to make it look like Simon had simply overdosed. Our man Mr. Freedman with the syringe at the hospital proved that. It’s clear that when Simon was first found in the house, someone—probably Freedman—had tried to kill him.”
“All of this has got to be reported to the police now. I can’t be party to withholding evidence any longer,” said Dominic decisively. “When we go to the police station tomorrow morning, we’re going to have to tell them we were chasing Freedman when he ran out in front of that car. And we must tell them about this blackmail evidence. It’s going to be devastating news for Samantha. I must talk to her first.” He sighed. “I have to go back home tomorrow as well. I can’t be out of the office any longer; I’ll lose what remaining clients I have.”
Dominic leaned back against Jonathan’s massaging fingers. He was dreading the thought of returning to Oxfordshire and being apart from Jonathan. Choosing to live separately had seemed the sensible thing to do while they were unsure of their relationship. But tonight, lying in his lover’s arms sipping a brandy, he felt content and certain that he wanted to move on from a weekend relationship. He was nervous about discussing the idea with Jonathan. He was still afraid he might be rejected. Perhaps the early hours of the morning were not the time to start talking about it. Instead he asked, “Where are the photos and list of names now?”
The Necessary Deaths Page 7