She didn’t want to rest.
She wanted to drink tequila from the bottle, and dance across the roofs of a line of cars.
She wanted to throw herself into a swimming pool fully clothed, and then perform an underwater striptease.
She wanted to do rock ’n’ roll things, not the sort of things her Auntie Madge might do.
‘Well, go on then,’ Dominic said.
She walked over to the golf cart, and got in. The Devil’s Disciple did look rough, but looking rough was rock ’n’ roll, too.
As they pulled away, Linda said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘You can call me CS,’ Chainsaw replied. ‘That was a good gig you just did.’
‘Thank you,’ Linda said.
‘So why aren’t you looking happier?’
It was too difficult to explain. ‘I’m just not.’
Chainsaw reached into his pocket. ‘I bet I’ve got something that will cheer you up,’ he said.
Lawrence Taylor was standing in line in the corridor, along with all the other guests from the third floor. In his hand he held a form he had partly completed himself, and he was waiting to be ushered into the ballroom, where ten detective constables were sitting at collapsible desks and taking statements.
‘You can go in now, sir,’ the uniformed constable on the door said to him. ‘Please go to desk six.’
Taylor went to desk six, sat down, and found himself facing a detective constable who looked as if he’d only just started shaving, and should, by rights, still have been in secondary school.
The boy looked down at the form.
‘Are you Lawrence Taylor?’ he asked, in a voice that sounded surprisingly authoritative.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you are the managing director and sole proprietor of Lawrence Taylor Sportswear?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Could you please confirm that your home address and home telephone number are the ones written on the form?’
‘They are.’
The form had been sitting in the middle of the desk, but now the detective slid it closer to his side and uncapped his fountain pen.
‘I would like you to look at this photograph, and tell me if you have seen the man who appears in it, either at this hotel or anywhere else.’
Taylor examined the photograph. The man didn’t even seem vaguely familiar to him.
‘I don’t know him,’ he said.
The detective retrieved the photograph, and wrote something down on the form.
‘Would you tell me where you were last night between the hours of eight o’clock and midnight?’ he asked.
‘I was feeling ill. I spent the entire night in my room.’
‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’
Taylor laughed. ‘What, am I a suspect now? Do I look like a cold-blooded assassin to you?’
‘Please just answer the question, sir,’ the detective said, in a perfectly flat voice.
He had a problem, Taylor suddenly realized. He couldn’t tell this lad that he’d spent the night alone now, and later tell Jeff Hill’s wife, her private detective – or anyone else who was trying to bring him down – a completely different story. And the deal he’d made with Hill was a very sweet one.
‘As a matter of fact, there is someone who can confirm it,’ he heard himself say. ‘A colleague of mine, Jeff Hill, was quite worried about me, and spent the night in my room, looking after me.’
The detective made another note.
‘What is your relationship with this Mr Hill?’ he asked.
‘I’ve already told you, he’s a colleague.’
‘I’m not here to judge you, sir,’ the detective said.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that if your relationship with Mr Hill is of a more intimate nature, I need to know.’
‘Are you saying I’m a queer?’
‘I’m not saying anything, sir. I’m merely asking you the questions that I’m supposed to ask.’
‘Jeff Hill is a colleague of mine. We are both very definitely heterosexual, and when we were single, we both had something of a reputation for our success with the ladies.’
‘Fair enough,’ the detective said.
‘Jeff was concerned that I wasn’t feeling well, and he decided to spend the night in my room in case I needed anything. There’s nothing more to it than that,’ Taylor said firmly.
The detective made a final note, blotted the form, and slid it into a brown folder.
‘Thank you, sir, you’ve been very helpful,’ he said.
While DS Meadows’ first team was busy questioning the Royal Victoria’s guests and staff, her second team – at the other end of the ballroom – had been given two other tasks.
The first was to coordinate the information that was coming in from the officers conducting inquiries out on the street.
The second was to deal with all the phone calls which always resulted from an appeal in the newspapers, in the hope that in amongst the calls made by the fanciful, the deluded and the deranged, there might just be a few solid bits of information which would help to crack the case.
DCI Wellbeloved finally put in an appearance at the ballroom at around one o’clock.
‘Impressive set-up you’ve got here, Sergeant Meadows,’ he said. ‘Very impressive indeed.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I could see last night, when I said I was putting you in charge of inquiries, that the other two – and Inspector Beresford especially – had their doubts, but I never thought for a moment that you couldn’t handle it.’
‘I luxuriate in the warm glow of your confidence in me, sir,’ Meadows said, almost under her breath.
‘What was that?’
‘I said, I appreciate it that you have confidence in me, sir.’
‘Yes, well, you’re clearly justifying it,’ Wellbeloved said. He paused for a moment. ‘I’ve … err … arranged to meet the chief constable later this afternoon, and I’d rather like to have something solid on this case to take into that meeting.’
‘Sorry, sir, but – as yet – we’ve got virtually nothing to offer you,’ Meadows said. ‘We know that Lewis was in a pub yesterday lunchtime, and that from there he came back to the hotel and went up to his room, but we still haven’t been able to find anyone who saw him after that.’
‘No one?’ Wellbeloved said.
‘No one,’ Meadows echoed.
‘All right then, well, keep plugging at it,’ Wellbeloved said.
Without a breaking lead, he was at loss to know what he should do next, Meadows thought, and, to a certain extent, she sympathized with him, because she was not sure that she would know either.
But the boss would have known what to do. The boss would already have been generating new ideas and suggesting new lines of inquiry. And that was what made her the boss – what distinguished her from Wellbeloved, who was merely a detective chief inspector.
‘Where will you be if I want to contact you, sir?’ she asked.
‘As I said, from three until possibly four, I’ll be in a meeting with the chief constable, and I wouldn’t want to be disturbed for any reason.’
‘Of course not.’
‘And … err … after that, I think I’ll wander around the area close to the crime scene. Didn’t this division have another DCI who used to do that? Someone they called “Cloggin’-it Charlie”?’
‘That would be Mr Woodend, sir,’ Meadows said. ‘He was here before my time.’
But I’ve met him, she thought – and he is twice the man you are.
‘I’d like reports on any findings you’ve made on my desk by six o’clock,’ Wellbeloved said. ‘Give me a couple of hours to digest them fully, and then we’ll have a meeting to thrash things out. I believe this team normally uses the Drum and Monkey, doesn’t it?’
The Drum was sacred soil, and Meadows was tempted to say that while they used to drink there, they went to the Three T
uns now.
But that, she recognized, would be running away – admitting that she was afraid of the effect Wellbeloved might have on the team and its pub.
‘That’s right, sir, we meet in the public bar,’ she said.
Wellbeloved wrinkled his nose. ‘The public bar? Is there something wrong with the lounge?’
‘Nothing at all wrong with it, as far as I know,’ Meadows said. ‘But we meet in the public.’
‘All right, I don’t want to fly in the face of tradition,’ Wellbeloved said. ‘Can I count on you to inform the rest of the team?’
‘Of course, sir,’ Meadows said, in her best secretarial voice.
ELEVEN
When Monika Paniatowski learned, via local radio, that there’d been a fresh murder in Whitebridge, her first thought was to get on the phone to Colin Beresford and ask him for all the details, but her second thought – following close on the heels of the first – was that calling him would be both pointless and pathetic.
She wasn’t involved with the investigation – and, whatever happened, she wasn’t going to be involved with it – so why torture herself?
So instead of making the call, she went back to the control room to continue the work that she and Edward Bell had been doing before the dowager countess – whose wishes must always come first, whatever else was going on – had interrupted them.
There were one hell of a lot of tapes to examine – the security company’s hard sell had spared no expense – but there was also a logic inherent to the system which made the task a little easier than it might otherwise have been.
When the intruder had gone beyond the range of Camera 3, the logic said, he should, by rights, have reappeared on Camera 4. Since he hadn’t, he must have disappeared into one of the blind spots that the technicians simply hadn’t calculated for. But unless he’d stayed in the blind spot forever – in which case, the Devil’s Disciples would have found him when they carried out their search – he was bound to be picked up by one of the cameras sooner or later – and the chances were, logically again, that it would be Camera 4.
And so it transpired. Camera 3 had lost the intruder at eight thirty-two, and Camera 4 picked him up again at eight thirty-four.
He was still walking in the same general direction – maintaining roughly the same distance from the main house as he always had – but since his intent was to burgle the house, he should soon be swinging to the right.
Camera 4 lost him when he reached the limit of its cover, but Camera 5 picked him up almost immediately.
Paniatowski frowned. Not only had the man proved inept at breaking into Stamford Hall once he was there, but he seemed to have chosen an unnecessarily circuitous way of reaching it.
The intruder suddenly veered to the right.
The Hall had never been his destination, Paniatowski realized. His target was – and always had been – Backend Woods.
That made no sense at all! The woods might be of interest to a genuine naturalist, but as far as Paniatowski knew, naturalists didn’t make a habit of cutting through chain-link fences during rock concerts.
The intruder had almost reached Backend Woods, and now he came to an unexpected halt, as if uncertain whether or not to go on.
‘What’s he doing?’ Paniatowski asked softly. ‘What the bloody hell is he doing?’
The man put his hand on his head, grasped his long hair tightly, and pulled upwards.
And the hair came away in his hand.
A wig! He was wearing a wig!
The man’s natural hair was short, but not excessively so, and though it was hard to say for certain on a black-and-white film, it appeared to be a shade of brown, rather than black.
‘Turn around,’ Paniatowski said, in what was very nearly a whisper. ‘Turn around so I can get a better look at you.’
And almost as if he could hear her across space and time, the man did turn around and scanned the path he’d recently been following.
He was too far away from the camera to give Paniatowski a perfect view, but he was close enough for her to see that he had a face which would not stand out in a crowd, and was probably in his mid-thirties or early forties.
The man turned again, and headed towards the woods.
Why was he going there? What possible interest could the woods have for him?
Didn’t he know that the Devil’s Disciples – an unpredictably dangerous motorbike gang – were camped in those woods? True, they were at the other end – as far from where he was as it was possible to be – but no sane man would take the risk of going anywhere near them, unless he had a very good reason indeed.
Paniatowski’s eyes had started to itch, and she switched off the machine. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would track the intruder’s progress from the woods to the point at which he left the grounds. And then she would hand over what she had to Burglary Squad down at headquarters.
She was pleased with the work she had done. It was not like tracking down a murderer, but at least it was something – and when something was all you had left to hold on to, you held on to it for grim life.
Ever since he’d seen his statement to the police being slid – finally and irrevocably – into the brown folder, Lawrence Taylor had been worrying about the conversation he’d had with the young detective.
‘Would you tell me where you were last night, between the hours of eight o’clock and midnight?’
‘I was feeling ill. I spent the entire night in my room.’
‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’
‘What, am I a suspect now? Do I look like a cold-blooded assassin to you?’
‘Please just answer the question, sir.’
In other words, he was a suspect, as was everyone else who was staying or working in the hotel, but there were some people who – for reasons that were glaringly obvious to him now – were more deserving of the finger of suspicion being pointed at them than others.
As his concern deepened, his need to talk to Jeff Hill became ever more pressing, but though he spent the whole afternoon looking for the bloody man, he was simply not to be found.
It was not until early evening – when Taylor was desperately checking in the bar for the fifth or sixth time – that he finally caught sight of the ex-footballer, sitting alone at a table in the corner of the room, and looking as if he really didn’t have a care in the world.
Taylor walked over to the counter.
‘I’d like a double Johnny Walker Black Label,’ he said to the barman. ‘No, make it a treble.’
The barman’s bushy eyebrows rose a barely perceptible fraction of an inch.
‘A treble, sir?’ he repeated, just to make sure he had heard correctly.
‘That’s right,’ Taylor growled.
While the barman was measuring out his drink at the optic, Taylor turned round to look at Hill again.
Yes, there was no doubt that Hill looked relaxed – but that could just be for show.
Taylor picked up his glass, crossed the room, and sat down at Hill’s table uninvited. Hill, for his part, seemed no more than mildly interested in his arrival.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been all sodding afternoon, Jeff?’ Taylor demanded.
‘Round and about,’ Hill replied, with an irritating vagueness.
Taylor took a sip of his whisky. It should have helped, but it didn’t, so he took a second sip and then a gulp.
‘I gave my statement to the police,’ he said. ‘I told them you spent the night in my room.’
Hill nodded. ‘Good – I told them the same thing.’
‘The thing is, I’ve been thinking,’ Taylor said awkwardly. ‘You told me you had good reason to believe that your wife had someone watching you, and I automatically assumed that that someone was a private detective. But it didn’t have to be a private detective at all, did it? It could just as easily have been a reporter from one of the scandal sheets. In fact, it could have been the reporter who got himself killed last night.’
‘You’re quite right, it could have been Terry Lewis – but, as it happens, it wasn’t.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
‘I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.’
‘What’s the name of this woman you’ve been having the affair with?’ Taylor asked.
‘That’s really no concern of yours – and the fewer people who know who she is, the better.’
‘I want you to give me her name.’
‘Why?’
‘I need to talk to her. I need to ask her if you really were with her all last night.’
‘And what would you hope to gain from that?’
‘If she assured me that you were with her, I’d feel a lot happier in my own mind.’
‘Ah – because if she gave me an alibi for last night, it couldn’t have been me who killed Terry Lewis!’
‘Well, yes.’
‘I was with her, I didn’t kill the reporter, and you’re not having her name,’ Hill said.
‘In that case, I shall be forced to take some other course of action,’ Taylor threatened.
Hill laughed. ‘Forced to take some other course of action?’ he repeated. ‘What other course of action could you take, without first admitting to the police that you’d lied to them?’
‘I … I …’
‘It’s a serious matter – lying to the police in a murder investigation – and I wouldn’t be surprised if you went to prison for it.’
‘You did kill that reporter, didn’t you?’ Taylor asked.
‘Did I?’ asked Hill, looking mildly amused and very superior. ‘You say I did, I say I didn’t – but only one of us will ever really know which is true.’
‘This is a bit of a dump, isn’t it?’ DCI Wellbeloved said, looking around the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.
‘We like it, sir,’ Beresford said.
But it was more than just liking it, he thought – over the years, the bar had become almost a part of the team’s personality.
‘Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste,’ Wellbeloved said, opening his briefcase and taking out a stack of the day’s reports.
Now that was bad form, Beresford thought. The team didn’t bring documents to the pub. They didn’t need to, because they were living the case, and all the information was in their heads.
Supping with the Devil Page 15