Supping with the Devil

by Sally Spencer

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Meadows told him, with a confusion in her voice that Wellbeloved didn’t believe for a moment was genuine. ‘I applied for the job, and I got it. If you want further details, perhaps you should ask Mr Baxter or the West Midlands Constabulary.’

  Wellbeloved glared at her. ‘I would have thought, Sergeant, that given the understanding we’ve just established, you would have been a little franker with me,’ he said.

  ‘And, with the greatest respect, sir, I would have thought, for the same reason, that you’d never have asked me that particular question in the first place,’ Meadows countered.

  ‘You can go,’ Wellbeloved growled.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Meadows replied.

  The countess had insisted that they should take afternoon tea in the rose garden, and Paniatowski had not seen how she could refuse.

  There were just the two of them there, sitting on teak garden chairs, with a slatted teak table between them. The air around them was heavy with the heat and soaked with the scent of roses, and Paniatowski felt almost as if she were trapped in an Edwardian engraving.

  ‘Our gardeners are very clever,’ the countess said, as she poured tea from a delicate china pot. ‘Do you know, they manage to keep some roses in bloom for almost the entire year? I suppose that must be because we grow so many different species here.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it must be,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  The butler had brought sandwiches, scones and a variety of cakes, but neither woman seemed inclined to try any of them.

  As they sat sipping their tea, Paniatowski said, ‘This has all the trappings of a social occasion, but it really isn’t one, you know.’

  ‘No, you’re quite right, it isn’t,’ the countess agreed. She took a deep breath. ‘What do you think of my husband, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘It’s not really for me to express any opinion about him, one way or the other,’ Paniatowski replied guardedly.

  ‘Then if you will not tell me what you think, I will tell you what you think,’ the countess said. ‘You see him as a passionate idealist, but also as a rather weak man. You think that if he had not been born rich and privileged, he would have made virtually no impression on the world at all. And you curse the fact that he is rich, because that means he can make life more difficult for you. Is that a fair assessment of your thoughts?’

  ‘Now, you couldn’t possibly expect me to comment on that,’ Paniatowski said.

  The countess nodded, as if no comment was all the comment she needed to confirm her suspicions.

  ‘You’re wrong about him, Chief Inspector,’ she said. ‘Gervaise is a sensitive man, but he is also a man of great strength. I first met him in Prague, after the Warsaw Pact army had invaded. My husband – my first husband – was a liberal activist, and he had been arrested. It was pointless to ask the new Czech authorities to do anything about it – they had been hand-picked by Moscow just after the invasion – but one of my husband’s grandmothers had been English, so I went to the British Embassy to see if they could help. I was told the ambassador and first secretary would be unable to see me, and I was fobbed off with Gervaise, who held a very low position in the embassy pecking order. He seemed very sympathetic, and he promised he would do what he could, but I thought that was no more than words, and when I left the building, I was in tears.’ The countess paused, and an almost blissful smile came to her face. ‘But, of course, I didn’t know Gervaise then like I know him now.’

  ‘From which I take it that he did try to help.’

  ‘He did more than I could ever have hoped for, even in my wildest dreams. In his search of my husband, he went to places where even the bravest of Jan’s friends would not have dared to go.’ The countess paused again. ‘You’re thinking it was easy for him,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘You’re thinking that because he was not Czech and had diplomatic immunity, he was quite safe. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘You’re quite wrong, but I can’t blame you for that. No one who was not there at the time could ever imagine what Prague was like for those few months in 1968, when the Prague Spring turned into the Soviet Winter.’

  Despite the heat in the rose garden, Paniatowski shivered as she remembered the years that she and her mother had spent on the run in central Europe, with both the Russians and the Nazis constantly on their tail.

  ‘So what was it like?’ she asked.

  ‘Russia sent in some of its crack troops on the first wave of the invasion. They were well-disciplined, and knew that they had a role to play in the propaganda part of the operation, as well as in the military part. The official version of events, you see, was that they had only invaded to protect the Czech people from a government which had betrayed them, and they acted like kindly liberators, even though they were nothing of the sort. But the elite forces did not stay once resistance had been crushed.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘I suppose – though I do not know it for a fact – that Moscow feared there might be other parts of the empire which would try to follow our example, and those troops were deployed to deter them. At any rate, they left, and the task of keeping the order they had established was put in the hands of other soldiers who had not been so carefully selected.’

  ‘And they caused problems?’ Paniatowski guessed.

  ‘And they caused problems,’ the countess confirmed. ‘They were mostly uneducated conscripts – Ukrainian peasants with the dirt still under their fingernails, Uzbek cotton pickers who had never even seen a big town before, never mind a sophisticated city like Prague. They didn’t even know where they were, let alone why they were there. They had been treated brutally during their time in the army, and had become brutal themselves. They looted and raped and were drunk all the time – and they got away with it, for who would dare lodge a complaint against a member of the “liberating” army.’

  ‘I’m getting the picture,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Moving amongst men like that, a diplomatic passport provided no protection at all,’ the countess said. ‘Their own world was narrow and ignorant, and I doubt if most of them had any idea of what a diplomat was. Once, a group of them beat Gervaise up badly, and on another occasion, he came within a hair’s breath of being stood against a wall and shot. He didn’t tell me any of this himself, by the way – I learned it from another source entirely.’

  ‘It must have taken considerable courage.’

  ‘It did – and despite the setbacks and the dangers, he kept on looking until he eventually found out what had happened to my husband.’

  ‘And was he …?’

  ‘He was dead. The authorities said he’d had a heart attack, and perhaps, because of what they put him through while he was in custody, that was, strictly speaking, quite true.’

  ‘How awful for you,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Yes, it was, though, in a way, it was a relief to know he was gone,’ the countess replied. ‘You tell yourself he may still come back, but there is a part of you – deep inside – which knows he never will. Yet you can only truly begin to mourn when you know for certain that he’s dead.’ The countess wiped a tear from her eye with her napkin. ‘But this is not about me, and it is not about my first husband. It is about Gervaise. Why do you think he tried so hard to find Jan? Was it out of a sense of duty, do you think – because he was an embassy official and my husband had an English grandmother?’

  ‘No,’ Paniatowski said softly. ‘It wasn’t because it was his duty, it was because he had fallen in love with you.’

  She and her mother had been taken under the wing of an Englishman, too, when they were thin and shivering and trying to scratch out an existence in Berlin, just after the war ended. But Lieutenant Arthur Jones hadn’t brought them to his own country because of love, he had done it for much darker reasons – and a few years later, when Monika, still a child, had woken up one night and found Jones in her bed, she had finally realized what
those reasons were.

  ‘Yes, Gervaise did it because he had fallen in love with me,’ the countess said. ‘And what a love that was – a love which had, as its only objective, my happiness. A love which knew that in restoring that happiness of mine – in finding my husband for me – it would be denying happiness for itself forever.’

  ‘It’s breathtaking,’ Paniatowski gasped.

  The countess smiled. ‘And once I was free to choose, how could I not love a man who had loved me like that?’ she asked.

  It seemed strange for there to be only three of them at the corner table in the Drum and Monkey. But it could have been worse – Wellbeloved could have been sitting in Paniatowski’s chair.

  ‘I don’t mind the new boss being a bastard,’ Meadows said, sipping at her tonic water. ‘I can take bastards in my stride. What I don’t like is the fact that he’s also a complete bloody idiot.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Beresford asked, reaching for his pint.

  ‘His game plan,’ Meadows said.

  ‘His game plan?’ Beresford repeated, mystified.

  In the good old days – when Monika Paniatowski was still in charge – Meadows would have sighed in theatrical exasperation at Beresford’s obtuseness. But these were not the good old days. Paniatowski was gone, and those who survived her needed to stick together – which meant that antagonizing the inspector really wasn’t a very good idea.

  And so, instead, she turned to Crane and said, ‘I’m guessing that when he spoke to you, Jack, he reminded you that you were both university men, and that was bound to cause resentment and downright jealousy among the lesser mortals in the force.’

  ‘He did say more or less that,’ Crane confirmed, ‘but he couldn’t quite disguise the fact that he thought that while a double first from Oxford was all very commendable in its way, a two-year sandwich course in criminology from Birmingham University was of much more use in modern policing.’

  Meadows nodded. ‘Stupid,’ she said. ‘And I’d be willing to bet that he told you, sir, that we were after both your jobs, and that people of inspector rank and above need to stick together.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Beresford said thoughtfully.

  ‘What he was banking on was that we’d feel so insecure about our new situation that we’d lie to each other about what had been said. And with a lot of teams, that would have worked, but in building her team, the boss has taught us how to trust each other, so it hasn’t. Still, it was a stupid risk for him to have taken.’

  ‘So his game plan is to turn us against each other, is it?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Yes, but not too much – not so we’re going at each other’s throats – just distrustful enough to make us all rather dependent on him.’ Meadows shook her head. ‘It’s no good – he’ll have to go.’

  ‘How do you expect to get rid of a DCI, Sarge?’ Crane asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Meadows said, ‘but where there’s a will, there’s usually a way.’

  ‘When he was interviewing me, he seemed a little unhappy about your history in the force before you came to Whitebridge,’ Beresford said.

  ‘Did he?’ Meadows asked, as if it was of no interest to her.

  ‘Yes,’ Beresford persisted. ‘Why was that?’

  Meadows sighed. ‘I suppose it was because my file says I was working for the West Midland Traffic Division.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘My file says I was, so I must have been.’

  ‘What were you really doing?’ asked Crane, who had made it a personal challenge to try and piece together as much about Meadows’ background as he possibly could.

  What had she really been doing?

  She has been undercover for over a year, living among the vicious and cruel, and working so hard at pretending to be one of them that she wonders if she will ever be able to find her old self again.

  It took her months to even get on the fringes of the Pagans’ motorcycle gang, and it has taken even longer to get close to Doc, the charismatic six-foot-eight giant who leads them. But she has done it, and is not surprised when her handler sends her a message that Chief Superintendent Addison would like to have an urgent meeting with her.

  The meeting, under the tightest possible security, takes place in a run-down motel just outside Birmingham.

  Addison is in his late forties. He has the body of a rugby prop forward who doesn’t get enough exercise any more, and hooded eyes which could be either dangerous or greedy.

  He looks more than pleased to see her.

  ‘We’ve been trying to infiltrate the Pagans for years – and had no luck at all,’ he says. ‘When your chief inspector said you could do it, I thought he was mad, because if we couldn’t even get a man into the charmed circle, how the hell did we hope to achieve anything with a woman? But he was right, and I was wrong. How did you do it?’

  She shrugs. ‘In some ways, being a woman made it easier, because that was the last thing they expected.’

  Suddenly, Addison’s eyes are alive with excitement.

  ‘You must have had to do some terrible things to get them on your side,’ he says. ‘Some terrible disgusting things.’

  His salacious interest sickens her. Yes, she has had to do some disgusting things, but she isn’t going to recount them now just to stoke this man’s pornographic imagination, which is already causing his eyes to bulge.

  ‘I did what needed to be done,’ she says, and there is an edge to her tone which tells him he will get no more out of this line of questioning.

  ‘Are you sure those fingerprints you gave us were Doc’s?’ he asks, doing his best to hide his disappointment by changing the subject.

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘We checked them thoroughly. They’re not on record.’

  ‘Then he must never have been arrested.’

  ‘And you’re sure he’s the actual leader of the gang, are you?’ Addison asks sceptically.

  ‘He’s the leader,’ Meadows confirms. ‘It’s beyond doubt.’

  ‘And yet we know nothing about him.’

  ‘From the odd thing he’s let slip, I’m almost certain he was a real doctor at one time,’ Meadows says.

  ‘His gang has been causing a great deal of trouble, and the top brass want him banged up as soon as possible,’ Addison tells her. ‘There’s one hell of a lot of pressure on us to put him behind bars. Careers – including yours – may well depend on it.’

  ‘I need more time to collect evidence,’ Meadows says.

  ‘There is no more time,’ Addison counters. ‘The deputy chief constable’s applied for a new job, and by the time he goes for interview, he wants a few triumphs under his belt.’

  ‘I’d like to help if I could,’ Meadows says, although she couldn’t really give a damn about the deputy chief constable’s promotion prospects.

  ‘There’s been a string of unpleasant attacks on schoolgirls while you’ve been working under cover,’ Addison says. ‘One of the victims actually died from the internal injuries she received, and we’ve been getting considerable flack from the press over it.’

  She says nothing – there doesn’t seem to be anything to say.

  ‘We’d like to charge your friend, Doc, with those attacks,’ the chief superintendent says.

  ‘There are a lot of terrible things Doc would do without even thinking about it – but raping schoolgirls isn’t one of them,’ Meadows replies. ‘He likes his women big. He likes them to be able to give as good as they get.’

  ‘I didn’t say he did it,’ Addison replies, with a chill in his voice. ‘I said we were going to charge him with it.’

  ‘And what will you use for evidence?’

  ‘The university boys back at headquarters are a bunch of wankers, but they can sometimes be useful. And on this occasion – by using statistical analysis and other such mumbo-jumbo – they’ve come up with a pattern which ties in the Pagans’ movements very closely to the scenes of the attacks.’

  ‘I wouldn�
��t have thought that was enough,’ Meadows says.

  ‘It isn’t,’ Addison agrees. He smiles. ‘The prosecution will be mainly based on the testimony of an undercover detective sergeant.’

  She can hear the words – can understand them perfectly – but she still can’t quite believe that they’re actually being spoken.

  She looks around the motel room. The armchairs are worn and faded. The sheets on the bed have a bleached look, but even the bleach has not succeeded in quite removing the stains of a thousand hasty lunchtime encounters.

  The whole place is sordid – but nowhere near as sordid as the proposal that Chief Superintendent Addison is making to her now.

  ‘How can I testify to something I didn’t see and don’t even believe happened?’ she asks.

  ‘You’ll be given a good script that will have been written to tie in with circumstantial evidence,’ Addison tells her. ‘And remember, Kate, Doc might not have done what we’ll charge him with, but he’ll have done plenty of things that are just as bad.’

  ‘What about the real rapist, who’ll still be at liberty?’ she wonders aloud. ‘What about his future victims?’

  ‘The important thing is to get Doc off the street,’ Addison says, and there’s an odd tone to his voice now, as if he’s just realized she’s not quite as intelligent as he thought she was.

  ‘But you’ll still be looking for the real rapist, even once he’s banged up, won’t you?’ Meadows asks.

  ‘Of course we will,’ Addison says quickly.

  Far too quickly!

  ‘I don’t see how you’d justify an ongoing investigation, since you’d be claiming to have already caught the guilty man,’ Meadows says.

  ‘You’re a mere detective sergeant,’ Addison says, and there is real ice creeping into his voice now. ‘It is not for you to question department policy and procedures.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think you’ll do,’ Meadows says. ‘I think you’ll put the investigation on hold until the rapist strikes again, and you’ll claim it’s a copycat crime.’

  ‘By putting Doc in gaol, you’ll have taken a menace off the streets, and you’ll get a promotion for it,’ Addison says. ‘That really should be quite enough for you, Sergeant.’