Supping with the Devil

by Sally Spencer

  And it was true. He felt on top of the world – and bursting with pride – because Badger, instead of stopping to chat to any of the dozen Disciples he had passed, had chosen to come directly to him.

  Badger nodded. ‘Never better, eh? Good lad! We’ll be moving on soon. We’re going to a rock festival.’

  Spike grinned. ‘We going to cause a bit of mayhem, are we?’

  Hearing his own words, he was suddenly horrified, because maybe Badger didn’t know what ‘mayhem’ meant.

  ‘I mean, are we going to have a rumble?’ he corrected himself, hastily.

  If Badger had noticed either the slip or the correction, he gave absolutely no sign of it.

  ‘No, we’re not looking for trouble on this trip,’ he said. ‘We’re going to run the festival’s security.’

  ‘I didn’t know we did that kind of thing,’ Spike said.

  ‘We don’t, normally,’ Badger agreed. ‘But we stand to make a hell of a lot of money – enough to see us through the whole winter.’

  ‘Through the whole winter – Jesus, they must be paying good wages!’ Spike said.

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ Badger asked, and there was a barbed-wire edge to his voice.

  ‘Didn’t say what?’

  ‘Didn’t say they paid good wages – all I did say was that we stand to make a hell of a lot of money.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Spike said, not quite sure what he was apologizing for, but sensing that an apology was necessary. ‘I didn’t mean to …’

  ‘Course you didn’t,’ Badger interrupted. ‘I know that. Anyway, this place that we’re going to is called Stam-something-or-other Hall, and it’s in Lancashire, just off the M6.’

  ‘Stamford Hall?’ Spike asked worriedly.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Badger agreed.

  Spike suddenly found himself fighting for breath.

  ‘I’m … I’m from around there,’ he gasped.

  And then he realized his mistake. It was one of the cardinal rules that Devil’s Disciples didn’t come from anywhere. They had no homes and no families, because the Devil’s Disciples were their home and their family, and before they had joined, they hadn’t really existed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Badger told him, almost like a kindly uncle – but still with just a hint of the barbed wire to his tone. ‘We all make mistakes.’

  Don’t make me go, Badger, a voice inside Spike moaned. Please don’t make me go.

  But he knew that if that was what the leader wanted, that was what would happen.

  ‘Anyway, I thought you’d like to know,’ Badger said, turning and ambling back towards his own tent.

  Spike lit up another cigarette, and noticed that his hands were shaking. He wondered why Badger had chosen him – a relatively low-ranking member of the gang – to be first to hear the latest plan.

  It was almost, he thought, as if the leader knew his secret.

  Paniatowski broke the news to her team over a lunchtime drink at their usual table in the Drum and Monkey.

  ‘I don’t want any of you kicking up a fuss about what’s just happened, because it won’t do me any good – and it certainly wouldn’t do you any,’ she said. ‘Is that understood?’

  None of them spoke.

  ‘Is that understood?’ she repeated, looking directly at DI Colin Beresford, who had worked with her since she was a mere sergeant and he was a fresh-faced constable.

  ‘Understood,’ Beresford grumbled, fixing his eyes on the table.

  ‘How about you, Kate?’ Paniatowski asked her elfin-like sergeant and bagman.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Kate Meadows replied.

  ‘And you, Jack?’ Paniatowski said, turning to DC Crane, the Oxford graduate who was destined for great things.

  ‘I’m way down at the bottom of the food chain, boss,’ he said. ‘Nothing I could do or say would make much of a difference.’

  ‘Clever,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Sorry, boss?’ he replied, attempting to look puzzled – and failing. ‘What’s clever?’

  ‘I asked you to say nothing, and you said that whatever you said would make no difference – which is not quite the same, is it?’

  Crane grinned, guiltily. ‘No, boss, it isn’t.’

  ‘So I want you to promise me, here and now, that you’ll keep your mouth firmly shut.’

  Crane sighed. ‘If that’s what you want, boss.’

  ‘It is what I want,’ Paniatowski told him. She took a plastic bag full of ten pence pieces out of her handbag. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to make my weekly call to Mr Woodend.’

  The rest of the team nodded. Woodend had been Paniatowski’s mentor, and both Beresford and Crane had worked with him. He had retired to Spain three years earlier.

  Paniatowski stood up and headed for the corridor, where the payphone was situated.

  ‘Why does she do that every Wednesday?’ asked Beresford, when his boss was out of earshot. ‘She didn’t used to.’

  ‘My guess would be that Wednesday is either the day immediately before his treatment or the day immediately after it,’ Meadows said.

  ‘What treatment?’

  ‘I don’t know, because I don’t know what he’s suffering from – but he’s obviously seriously ill.’

  ‘Is he?’ Beresford asked. ‘Did Monika tell you that Mr Woodend was seriously ill?’

  ‘Of course she didn’t tell me,’ Meadows replied, noting the hint of jealousy in the inspector’s voice. ‘You’re her best mate, and if she’d told anyone, she’d have told you.’

  ‘So if she didn’t tell you, then who did?’

  Meadows snorted. ‘With the greatest respect, sir, I’m sometimes amazed – not very often, but sometimes – that you ever managed to rise to the dizzy heights of detective inspector.’

  ‘So I’ve missed something, have I?’ Beresford asked, stung.

  ‘Yes, sir, you have,’ Meadows agreed.

  ‘And are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘When people change their phoning habits, it’s almost always because the person they’re phoning is seriously ill.’

  ‘In other words, you’re just guessing,’ Beresford said.

  ‘Not really,’ Meadows replied. ‘It’s not just that she’s phoning him regularly, it’s where she’s phoning him from.’

  ‘All right, I’ll buy it,’ Beresford said. ‘Why does the fact that she’s phoning him from the pub tell you he’s ill?’

  ‘Where else could she have phoned from?’ Meadows asked, answering the question with one of her own.

  ‘Police headquarters,’ Beresford suggested.

  ‘Ah, but if Mr Woodend doesn’t want it generally known that he’s ill – and from what you’ve told me about him, he’s not the sort of feller to welcome pity from anyone – then the worst thing the boss could do would be to ring him regularly from headquarters, because the news would spread and people would soon start drawing their own conclusions.’

  ‘She could always ring him from home,’ Beresford said.

  ‘And who handles the bills at home?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘Monika does,’ Beresford said automatically.

  And then he began to wonder if that was true. Monika was very sloppy over any details of her life which did not actually involve police work, but her adopted daughter, Louisa, was just the opposite, so it was more than likely that Louisa, exasperated with her mother’s inefficiency, had taken over the job herself, and merely gave Monika the cheques to sign.

  ‘It could be Louisa who handles the bills,’ he admitted.

  ‘Louisa would be very likely to start asking the same questions I have, wouldn’t she?’ Meadows asked. ‘And we all know just how fond she is of her Uncle Charlie.’

  ‘All right, if all that’s true – and, I will admit, you’ve made a good case for it being true – why does she ring from the pub, where we can all see her doing it?’ Beresford asked exasperatedly.
r />   ‘There are two reasons for that,’ Meadows replied, with infuriating self-assurance. ‘The first is that one of the things she’ll talk to Mr Woodend about is work – and it will give him that extra little thrill to know that she’s talking from the pub where he spent so much of his working life.’

  The annoying thing about Meadows, Beresford thought, was that when she challenged his judgement – and she did that much more regularly than any other sergeant would have dared – she was usually right. And in this case, she was definitely right. Charlie Woodend had done some of his finest detecting from the corner table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey, and he would get a kick out of the fact that Monika was calling him from there.

  ‘You said there were two reasons,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ Meadows said. ‘The other reason is that if there’s bad news, she needs people she can trust to be there to give her support.’

  And she was right about that, as well, Beresford thought gloomily.

  The bald man’s name was Harry Elton. On the frosted glass panel in the door of his office back in Manchester, it said he was a private investigator, and while that was true, it was not the whole story. His real job description, if engraved on that same door, would either have been in almost unreadable tiny letters or would have required a much bigger pane of glass, since he was also a wheeler-dealer, a fixer, a purveyor of difficult-to-obtain – and often illegal – products, a bender of rules and a skirter of regulations, a con man and a corrupter.

  As he drove away from the Devil’s Disciples’ camp, Elton was feeling very pleased with himself.

  ‘All this started from just one job,’ he told the St Christopher medallion which hung from his rear-view mirror, and which he regarded – with some justification – as his only real friend. ‘Just one simple little job that I could have wrapped up in a couple of days. And for most men, it would have stayed at just that – but then I’m not most men, am I, Chris?’

  The medallion swung from side to side, as if it were nodding its head in agreement, though the truth was – more prosaically – that it was just reacting to a change in the camber of the road.

  ‘So how many extra angles did I manage to squeeze out of that one job, Chris?’ Elton asked, as he pulled off the country lane and on to the motorway feeder road. ‘One, you think? Maybe two? No, you’re quite wrong – it was three! And here’s how it was done. Firstly, I talk the original client – the original poncey idiot – into paying me to do a second job he hadn’t even thought of himself. Now it’s important that he agrees to that other job, because if he doesn’t, I can’t ring Big George in Liverpool, and make him my second client.’

  A tractor and trailer were slowly chugging along the road in front of him, and since the bend just ahead made overtaking impossible, Elton was forced to slow down.

  ‘Bloody bastard yokels – why don’t you stay on the bloody farm,’ he snarled, reaching into the glove compartment for the bar of chunky chocolate which he liked to think of as his emergency supplies.

  The tractor successfully negotiated the bend, and the driver stuck out his arm and signalled that it was now safe to pass. Elton pulled out and accelerated. He had broken off quite a large part of the chocolate bar, but he somehow managed to cram it all in his mouth as he drew level with the tractor, leaving his hand free to give the tractor driver a V sign.

  ‘But here’s the icing on the cake, Chris!’ he said, resuming his previous conversation with the patron saint of travellers. ‘Here’s the stroke of genius! Having got Big George on board, I call my old mate, Terry – who isn’t really a mate at all, and in his way is just as big an idiot as the first client – and suggest there might be something in it for him.’

  A large blue sign ahead announced that he was approaching the motorway, which meant that he was less than an hour from home.

  ‘I can tell you’re impressed, Chris,’ Elton said to the medallion, ‘and what you’re probably thinking now is that things could turn out quite hairy in Whitebridge in a few days time. Well, you’re not wrong about that. But if and when they do turn hairy, you and me will be at least fifty miles away, establishing an alibi that even the Spanish Inquisition couldn’t break.’

  ‘How’s the chemotherapy going, Charlie?’ Paniatowski said into the mouthpiece of the Drum’s public telephone.

  ‘Straight to the point, eh?’ former-DCI Charlie Woodend asked. ‘Still, you never were much of a one for small talk, were you?’

  Paniatowski, refusing to rise to the distracting bait that Woodend was attempting to dangle in front of her, kept silent.

  ‘It’s changed me, somewhat,’ Woodend conceded, when it became plain his gambit had failed. ‘I used to be just a grumpy old fart, but now I’m a bald, grumpy old fart.’

  ‘Is it working?’ Paniatowski pleaded.

  ‘It’s too soon to say yet, but the doctor’s looking a bit more hopeful than he did a couple of months ago,’ Woodend said, choosing his words carefully, ‘so while I’m not promising anything, I think there’s a chance, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction, that I might just pull through.’

  ‘Thank God!’ Paniatowski gasped.

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in God any more.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  And she didn’t. She had lost her faith soon after her stepfather had first slipped his cold body into her warm bed, and nothing that had happened to her since that terrible night had persuaded her she should try to find it again.

  ‘But enough of talking about me – how are things in the Mid-Lancs CID?’ Charlie Woodend asked.

  George Baxter’s trying to get rid of me, Paniatowski thought. He won’t rest until I’ve gone.

  ‘Things are rather quiet at the moment,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s often like that in summer.’

  ‘Aye, somehow people are less likely to turn to thoughts of murder when the sun’s shining.’

  ‘I’d better get back to the team,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Give them my best,’ Woodend told her.

  He was clearly thinking about saying more, and Paniatowski gave him the space to do so.

  ‘I really do think I might beat this thing inside me,’ Woodend continued, after a few seconds had passed. ‘But if I don’t – if it really is the end of Cloggin’-it Charlie – then I’ve absolutely no complaints. I’ve had a good marriage, and though I don’t love Joan in quite the same way as when I married her, the love’s still as strong as it ever was. I’m as proud as punch of my wonderful daughter – she’s a hospital ward sister now, you know.’

  ‘That’s great. She deserves it.’

  ‘And looking back on my career in the force, I’ve not done all that badly, have I?’

  ‘You’ve done brilliantly, Charlie.’

  ‘And then there’s you,’ Woodend said.

  Oh God, please, no, Paniatowski thought.

  But she couldn’t find it in her to silence a man who – for all his new apparent optimism – might be dying.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you were a bit of a mess when you first started working for me, Monika,’ Woodend continued.

  ‘I was a complete bloody mess,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘I was a robot. I thought it was the only way to survive.’

  ‘But look at you now. You’ve got a daughter who adores you, and friends and colleagues who’d do anything for you. You’ve only been a chief inspector for a little over two years, and you’re already practically a legend.’

  ‘I’m not … it isn’t …’ Paniatowski mumbled.

  ‘Given time, you’ll be a better DCI than I ever was, Monika, and years after they’ve forgotten all about me, they’ll still be talking about you.’ Woodend paused, but only for a second. ‘Most of that’s down to you,’ he continued. ‘You’ve got a fine brain, and enough courage for a regiment … but you wouldn’t mind if I took a little credit for where you are now, would you?’

  ‘I owe everything to you, Charlie,’ Paniatowski told him.
/>   ‘Now then, lass, there’s no point in going to extremes,’ Woodend said awkwardly. ‘I mean, I appreciate a pat on the head as much as the next man, but I don’t want you hanging a bloody halo over it.’

  Paniatowski laughed, though she had to force it.

  ‘I’ll call you next Wednesday,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend agreed. ‘And in the meantime, keep locking the bad buggers up.’

  ‘We should let the chief constable know just how we feel about him reassigning the boss,’ Beresford said firmly.

  ‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ Meadows told him. ‘Mr Baxter already knows how we feel, and he simply doesn’t care.’

  ‘He’s always struck me as a man who knows how to lead a team,’ Beresford said, ‘a man who takes his officers’ feelings into account, because he understands that’s the way to get the best out of them.’

  Meadows looked at Crane for support. ‘Will you tell him, or shall I?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not about the force, sir, it’s about the boss,’ Crane said. ‘Mr Baxter blames her for his wife’s death, and he wants her out.’

  ‘But that’s preposterous!’ Beresford exploded.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Meadows agreed. ‘It’s totally preposterous – but that doesn’t make it any less true.’

  As she put down the phone, there was a part of Paniatowski – she recognized it as the less worthy, weaker part – which was wondering if she should have discussed with Charlie Woodend what had happened that morning.

  No! the other part – the stronger, better part of her – answered quickly. You’ve no right to burden Charlie with this problem, especially since it’s partly a problem of your own making.

  It’s not of my own making, the weaker part argued defensively. I never gave Jo Baxter cause to be jealous. Any jealousy she might have felt came from the way her husband looked at me, not the way I looked at him.

  Ah, said the stronger part, if you’re examining the facts at the scene of the crime, what you say is entirely true. But if you follow the chain of evidence right back to the beginning, you’ll get a completely different story.

  Detective Sergeant Paniatowski – almost destroyed by her recent break-up with DI Bob Rutter – is in Yorkshire, tying up the loose ends of a case which has its origins in Whitebridge, and Chief Inspector Baxter has been assigned to ride shotgun for her. Baxter has a shock of red hair, and reminds her of nothing so much as a big, ginger teddy bear. She is relaxed in his company, and when he makes a pass at her, she does not resist. She expects it to be no more than a one-night stand, but Baxter seems to want to go beyond that, and since she finds it both a comfortable and comforting relationship, she does not resist that, either.