Supping with the Devil

by Sally Spencer

  It was never wise to cross anyone who was probably on first name terms with the Lord Lieutenant of the county, Baxter thought.

  ‘Very well, my lord, I will assign DCI Paniatowski to the investigation, if that is your wish,’ he said.

  ‘It is my wish,’ replied the earl, with a tone of absolute certainty in his voice which would have made his autocratic ancestors proud of him.

  Beresford, Meadows and Crane sat huddled together at a table in the corner of the police canteen. It looked like a meeting of Paranoiacs Anonymous – and that was what it felt like, too.

  ‘When we went into that interview, Wellbeloved already had Hill’s name written on the palm of his hand,’ Beresford said. ‘And the moment he’d got Elton to read that name, he washed it off.’

  ‘You’re sure of that, are you?’ Crane asked.

  ‘I’m bloody certain of it.’

  ‘But you can’t prove it, can you?’

  ‘Of course I can’t prove it! If I could prove it, I wouldn’t be talking to you two, I’d be talking to the chief constable.’

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘I couldn’t say whether or not Wellbeloved thinks Hill is guilty,’ Beresford said, ‘but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s determined to pin the murder on him – whatever it takes.’ He paused. ‘Before we go any further, I’d like to know if either of you think there’s a reasonable chance that Hill did actually commit the murder.’

  Meadows and Crane shook their heads.

  ‘If he’d done it, there’d have been forensic evidence – maybe not a lot, but some – at the Royal Vic, but the lads have been working on both his room and his car all morning, and they’ve come up with bugger all,’ Crane said.

  ‘Besides, that photograph clearly suggests that Lewis was killed either at Stamford Hall or pretty damn close to it,’ Meadows added.

  ‘So Wellbeloved hasn’t really got a case, has he?’ Crane asked.

  ‘He hasn’t got a case yet,’ Beresford said. ‘But who knows how much more evidence he’s going to doctor before he’s through?’

  ‘Still, without the forensics, he’s never going to make it stick in court,’ Crane said.

  ‘Without the forensics, it’ll be more difficult, but far from impossible. You have to bear in mind that most juries aren’t comfortable with forensics – they get confused by all the science. On the other hand, they love circumstantial evidence, especially if it’s fed to them by a good barrister, because it’s something they can relate to in their everyday lives. All of which means that there’s a good chance Hill will be found guilty.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Crane asked. ‘Take everything we have to the chief constable?’

  ‘Everybody knows how loyal we are to Monika Paniatowski, so how would it look if we went to George Baxter and complained about our new boss?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘It would go down like a cup of cold sick,’ Meadows said.

  ‘I still don’t see any alternative,’ Crane said.

  ‘I do,’ Beresford told him. ‘The thing that links Hill to Wellbeloved is that they were both in Honnerton at the same time. So one of us – probably you, Jack, because your absence will be less noticeable – needs to drive over there and find out exactly what Wellbeloved has got against Hill. Once we know that, we’ll have something to fight back with.’

  ‘You are aware that investigating your boss is considered very, very bad form, aren’t you?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘I am,’ Beresford replied.

  ‘And that if things go wrong, we could face disciplinary action, and might even be kicked off the Force?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Meadows smiled. ‘Well done, Colin, I’m really proud of you,’ she said.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘I’d spoken to the countess before, because once a year all the tenants and the staff are invited up to the Hall for a big dinner,’ Jean Harris said, ‘but it wasn’t until we ran across each other at the county agricultural show that we really got talking.’ She hesitated. ‘To be honest with you, I think it was not so much a case of us just “running into” each other as it was of her seeking me out.’

  ‘Go on,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘She asked me about my two boys – she knew both of them by sight – and she was particularly interested in how they were getting on at school. I said they were doing fine – both of them are near the top of their classes – but she didn’t seem happy with that as an answer. Does either of them have a subject he’s a little weak in, she asked. Well, yes, I admitted, Ben’s struggling a bit with his French. I could help him out with that, she said. My French is very good. And it is – at least as far as I can judge – but, do you know, even if I’d mentioned a subject she wasn’t good at, she’d have offered to help – and by the time she gave the first lesson, she’d already have been working hard at making herself an expert.’

  Jean Harris was no fool, Paniatowski thought – in fact, she would probably have made a cracking police officer.

  ‘Do you think there was any special reason the countess was so eager to come here?’ she said aloud.

  ‘I think she feels a bit lonely up at the Hall. The servants flatly refuse to call her Katerina, but I call her that – at least, when I can remember to – because even though my husband is only one of her husband’s tenants, and it felt a little awkward at first, it was what she wanted. And then, of course, there’s my kids. She hasn’t got any of her own – nor is she likely to have, as far as I can see – but she loves being with mine, and they adore her.’

  ‘You know why I’m asking these questions, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re trying to find out if anybody hates her enough to have done that terrible thing to her.’

  ‘And is there anyone?’

  ‘You’d have to go a long way to find somebody who even mildly dislikes her. Our Ben isn’t the only one she’s helped out, you know. She’s done countless little kindnesses for the other tenant farmers. And she’s not done any of it in any grand lady-of-the-manor patronizing way – she’s done it as a neighbour. We respect the earl – he’s an honourable, caring landlord – but we look on Katerina almost like she was one of our own.’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell me about the attack?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Anything you might have noticed which was unusual?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t,’ Jean confessed. ‘Everything was just as it normally is on a Sunday morning – apart from the fact that poor Katerina was lying there half battered to death.’

  ‘I want you to do something for me,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I want you to close your eyes tightly and take yourself back to the last minute or so before you found the countess.’

  Jean closed her eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Paniatowski asked soothingly.

  ‘I’m walking down the steps from the kitchen to the yard.’

  ‘And what can you see?’

  ‘I see the legs. I think they’re a dummy’s legs at first, and then I know they can’t be, and I feel sick.’

  ‘And what can you hear?’

  ‘I hear motorbikes, roaring away in the distance.’

  ‘Open your eyes again,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Was it motorbikes you heard, or just a motorbike?’

  ‘It was motorbikes,’ Jean Harris said.

  Crane’s car had been climbing for some time, but once he reached the top of the Pennines, it was downhill all the way to Honnerton.

  When you crossed these hills, you were entering a different world – or at least, a different history – he thought. Lancashire folk had spun cotton for over a hundred years, but Yorkshire folk had been weaving wool since the Middle Ages, and had, it seemed to him, a greater sense of permanence – and perhaps even complacency – about themselves than their neighbours had.

  He turned his mind to how he would handle things once he had reached Honnerton itself.

  ‘I can’t just walk into the local nick and ask them what they can tell me abo
ut Wellbeloved, a man who used to be one of their own, now can I?’ he had asked Beresford, before he left Whitebridge.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you can,’ Beresford had agreed.

  ‘So how am I supposed to get the dirt on what happened between Hill and Wellbeloved?’

  ‘I suggest you follow the sound advice of the legendary Charlie Woodend.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Charlie always used to say that if you wanted to find out what had happened in a place, you were wasting your time going to the police station or the council officers. The local newspaper, he said, was marginally better, but if you wanted rock-solid information, you were most likely to find it at the pub – as long as it was the right pub.’

  ‘So where’s the right pub to find out about what went wrong when Hill was a star football player and Wellbeloved was a uniformed inspector?’ Crane mused, as he drove past the sign welcoming him to Honnerton.

  It was the Midnight Crawlers’ second gig of the festival, and Linda Davies was feeling not just great but rock ’n’ roll great as she climbed on to the stage. This was going to be the best performance she had ever given, she thought. It was going to be the best performance anybody had ever given.

  She looked out at the audience, and was shocked to find that their heads were sort of wavy and swirling, like the picture on a television which wasn’t quite tuned right.

  It was the excitement, she told herself. She was just so excited that it was warping everything.

  Behind her, she could hear the band striking up the opening to ‘Downhearted Blues’, and she suddenly realized – with horror – that she couldn’t remember any of the words.

  Her legs were feeling wobbly now, and there seemed to be something going on in the rest of her body that she really didn’t like.

  Suddenly the fear swept over her – a fear which told her that her life was about to end before it had ever really begun.

  ‘Help me,’ she croaked.

  And then her legs gave way under her, and she crumpled on to the stage like a rag doll.

  There was a collective gasp from the audience, and her band mates stopped playing and crowded around her.

  ‘Get back – all of you!’ screamed her brother, Dominic. ‘Give her room to breathe!’

  Two St John’s Ambulance volunteers came out of the wings, carrying a stretcher.

  One of them bent over Linda.

  ‘She’s still breathing,’ he said.

  The two men lifted the girl on to the stretcher, and carried her to the ambulance waiting on standby behind the set.

  The compère appeared on stage. ‘Get your lads off,’ he said to the Midnight Crawlers’ drummer. ‘Get them off now.’

  He walked over to the microphone into which – less a minute earlier – Linda Davies had been preparing to sing her heart out.

  ‘Linda’s going to be all right,’ he assured the audience, ‘and I know she’d want us to carry on as normal, so I’d like you all to give a really big hand for Venus Flytrap.’

  And by the time the ambulance was pulling away, Venus Flytrap were already singing about the hard-hearted woman who ruined their lives.

  The countess’s leg was in plaster, and was raised above her head by an elaborate pulley system. There were stitches in her cheeks and on her forehead, and in her hand she held a button which would activate the morphine delivery.

  ‘She can talk – but not for long,’ the doctor said. ‘Five minutes at the most. And if you start to upset her, I’ll cut you off immediately.’

  ‘Understood,’ Paniatowski said.

  She opened the door, and stepped into the room. From the bed, the countess smiled weakly at her.

  ‘Hello Monika.’

  ‘Hello Katerina,’ Paniatowski said softly. ‘Would you like to tell me what happened?’

  ‘I’d gone to the farm to give Ben his French lesson. I parked in front of the barn, and then there was this car, pulling up beside me.’

  ‘A car?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘You’re sure it was a car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘A … a blue Ford Escort.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘A man got out. He was wearing a handkerchief over his face. He didn’t say anything. He just attacked me.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. It all happened so quickly.’

  ‘Was he tall? Short? Skinny? Thickset?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t know.’

  She was a very bad liar, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think happened,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a man in a car at all. It was two Devil’s Disciples on motorbikes.’

  A fearful look filled the countess’s eyes.

  ‘You mustn’t think that,’ she pleaded. ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘Did they threaten you?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Did they say that if you told the police what had happened, they’d come after you again?’

  ‘It wasn’t them.’

  ‘I can understand you being frightened of them …’

  ‘After my husband – my first husband – was arrested, the StB – the Czech secret police – pulled me in for questioning,’ the countess said. ‘They held me for three days. They made all kinds of threats – and I told them nothing!’

  ‘I don’t see …’

  ‘If fearsome secret police like the StB couldn’t frighten me, do you really think that three thugs on motorbikes could?’

  ‘So there were three of them,’ Paniatowski said.

  The doctor, who had been monitoring the conversation through the window, opened the door.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  ‘I need another couple of minutes,’ Paniatowski told him.

  ‘I said that’s it – and I meant it,’ the doctor told her.

  There was little point in arguing.

  ‘Get as much rest as you can,’ Paniatowski said to the woman in the bed. ‘Your friends on the farms will be thinking of you – and so will I.’

  ‘There is only one thing I am frightened of,’ the countess said, as if she hadn’t heard the words. ‘And do you know what that is?’

  ‘No,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I am frightened of my own ability to destroy the things I love.’

  Chief Superintendent Holmes was taking a break from the command post outside the East Gate of the Hall, and was in his office – with his feet up – when Inspector Mitchell came to see him.

  Holmes did not like Mitchell, partly because the man was an out-and-out Methodist. There was nothing wrong with religion, of course – Holmes himself made a point of being seen at church nearly every Sunday – but he saw no need to take it quite as seriously as Mitchell seemed to.

  ‘The girl – Linda Davies – is dead, sir,’ Mitchell said. ‘The doctor thinks it was an overdose of heroin – there were needle marks in her arm – but whether she took too much, or it was simply a bad batch, we won’t know until after the autopsy.’

  ‘Write it up for me, will you?’ Holmes said.

  Mitchell waited for his boss to say more, and when it was clear that Holmes wasn’t about to, he asked, ‘What are we going to do about it, sir?’

  ‘Do about it?’ Holmes repeated.

  ‘There’s someone in the grounds of Stamford Hall selling heroin, sir,’ Mitchell said.

  ‘Yes, there probably is,’ Holmes agreed. ‘It’s what tends to happen when you get a large number of degenerates crowded into one small area. Although, for all we know, the girl might have brought the stuff with her.’

  ‘So shouldn’t we be making an effort to arrest the heroin pushers?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘And how do you propose we do that? Send the lads in?’

  ‘Well, yes, sir.’

  ‘And have them search nearly two hundred thousand people?’

  ‘No sir, we obviously couldn’t do that, but I thought we could round up t
he suspicious-looking ones—’

  ‘They all look suspicious,’ Holmes interrupted him. ‘And even if it was possible, there’s a more-than-even chance that the mere sight of policemen would be enough to make some of those animals go on the rampage.’

  ‘But sir—’

  ‘Just think about it for a minute, Inspector. Are you really asking me to risk my men – and my own reputation – on the slim chance that we might be able to arrest a few sleazy drug peddlers.’

  ‘I thought we were supposed to protect the innocent, sir,’ Mitchell said. ‘I thought that was what we were paid for.’

  Holmes gave him a hard stare. ‘If you ever wish to rise above your present rank, Inspector Mitchell, you’d better start learning the difference between what we’re supposed to do and what we can actually do. And as far as I’m concerned, if some of those innocents inside that enclosure are willing to run the risk of killing themselves, then good luck to them. They won’t be missed.’

  Badger had been in the concert enclosure for most of the festival – leading from the front, Spike thought, with his customary admiration – but now he was sitting in front of his tent, looking mildly worried.

  ‘Chainsaw told me you wanted to see me,’ Spike said.

  ‘That’s right, I did,’ Badger agreed. ‘We may have run into a bit of a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘Linda Davies, the lead singer with the Midnight Crawlers, has died from an overdose of heroin.’

  ‘Yes, I heard. She was so young. What a terrible waste.’

  ‘She got the stuff from us.’

  Spike thought he must have misheard.

  ‘She got the stuff from us?’ he said. ‘We’re selling heroin?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Badger agreed. ‘We’ve made a lot of money out of it in the last few days. No more squats for us when winter comes – we’ll be able to buy a club house.’

  ‘So that’s why you got us this job in security?’ Spike said. ‘That’s why you backed away from the fight with the Red Dragons?’

  ‘I didn’t want us to end up in gaol when we could have been making money,’ Badger said.

  It couldn’t be true, Spike told himself. There was no harm in selling a bit of pot, but heroin was evil. Heroin killed people – young, innocent people like Linda Davies. And he refused to believe that his leader – the man who, for all his faults, he almost worshipped – could ever have become involved in anything so vile.