Supping with the Devil

by Sally Spencer

  Actually, Zelda had not at all minded taking them as trophies of war. But Zelda was a creature of the night, and on this bright summer morning, DS Meadows felt rather uncomfortable about having six rapidly withering human testicles in her possession.

  She wondered what she should do with them, and, for a second, considered feeding them to her neighbour’s cat. But even for Zelda, that idea was a little too black, she quickly decided.

  She found DI Beresford sitting at his desk and gazing blankly at a space on the wall.

  ‘You look really rough, Meadows,’ he said, when he noticed her standing there.

  ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ she admitted, ‘but I may just have come up with a lead.’

  Beresford’s eyes suddenly came alive.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve established a link between Harry Elton and the Devil’s Disciples,’ Meadows told him.

  ‘What kind of link?’

  ‘The Devil’s Disciples were selling heroin at the festival. Elton was the middleman in the deal.’

  ‘That’s a link, all right,’ Beresford agreed. ‘And since there’s also a link between Elton and Lewis …’

  ‘Well, exactly!’

  ‘… we have both a motive for murder and a comparatively small pool of suspects. Where did you get this information?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the problem,’ Meadows said. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you won’t like the answer at all – and because you might even feel obliged to act on the information in a way that I, personally, won’t find particularly pleasant.’

  ‘You haven’t gone and done anything illegal, have you, Kate?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘I certainly haven’t done anything I’m ashamed of,’ Meadows replied enigmatically.

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘I know.’

  Meadows wouldn’t be pushed any further on the matter, however much pressure he applied, Beresford decided. And when you were banging your head against a brick wall – as he clearly was – it was always advisable to stop before you did any permanent damage.

  ‘Are you sure that this information of yours about Elton is accurate?’ he asked.

  Meadows pictured Knuckles, his hands tied behind his back – hoping against hope that if the truth wouldn’t set him free, it might at least save him from a very painful experience.

  ‘It’s accurate,’ she said.

  Beresford sat processing what he had learned for a moment, then shook his head despondently.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how good the information is,’ he said. ‘Without confirmation, I can’t really use it.’

  The phone on his desk rang, and he picked it up.

  ‘Yes … yes … I see … thank you for telling me.’

  When he put the phone down on its cradle again, there was a broad grin on his face.

  ‘That was the Halifax police,’ he told Meadows. ‘One of the Devil’s Disciples – who just happens to be the earl’s brother – surrendered himself to them last night, and hasn’t stopped singing since. There’s your confirmation,’ he stood up and walked towards the door, ‘and I’m off to Manchester.’

  ‘There is one more thing, sir,’ Meadows said.

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Beresford, impatiently.

  ‘I think it is more than likely that Terry Lewis was actually murdered by the Devil’s Disciples, but when I was doing my “research” last night, I did come across another possibility.’

  ‘What sort of possibility?’

  Meadows hesitated.

  ‘It’s one I’d prefer to talk over with the boss, first, if you don’t mind,’ she said finally.

  ‘I don’t mind at all,’ said Beresford, who was itching to be gone.

  George Baxter’s campaign to humiliate Paniatowski into resigning was an ongoing, progressive one, and it was more than likely that, at some time in the near future, he would take her office off her, and assign her, instead, something that was little better than a broom cupboard. But that hadn’t happened yet, and it was in her office that Meadows found her.

  ‘You’re looking rough,’ she said to her sergeant.

  ‘You’re the second person to say that to me in less than ten minutes, boss,’ Meadows replied. Then she looked down at Paniatowski’s heavily bandaged hands, and added, with some concern, ‘You’re not looking too clever yourself.’

  Paniatowski grinned weakly.

  ‘It’s not just an old wives’ tale that if you don’t want to get burned, you shouldn’t put your hands in the fire,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t really have a great deal of choice in the matter – the surveillance tapes were burning up, and I had to do something.’

  ‘Where are the tapes now?’

  ‘The lab’s working on them. It’s trying to salvage what it can, and I’m just sitting on my hands, though not literally, of course,’ she grinned again, ‘and waiting for the results.’

  ‘I’ve got something I need to tell you, boss – but I’d rather it was off the record,’ Meadows said.

  ‘Off the record?’ Paniatowski repeated.

  ‘Off the record,’ Meadows confirmed.

  ‘All right,’ Paniatowski agreed – wondering just what she was letting herself in for.

  Meadows sketched out what Knuckles had told her, steering clear of any reference to sawn-off shotguns, scalpels or castration.

  ‘I need to go to Stamford Hall,’ Paniatowski announced, when Meadows had finished. ‘I’d like you to rustle me up a driver – unless that’s another of the perks that our dear chief constable has decided I can live without.’

  ‘I’ll drive you, boss.’

  ‘Can you be spared?’

  ‘DCI Wellbeloved’s skulking in his cave, and DI Beresford has gone off – all gung-ho – to Manchester,’ Meadows said. ‘There’s nobody to notice whether I’m even here or not.’

  When Harry Elton looked up and saw who had just entered the office, his irritation was evident.

  ‘Not again!’ he said. ‘Not a-bloody-gain. I’m off the hook for anything that happened in Whitebridge, Inspector Beresford – and you should know that, because you were there when your boss let me off the hook.’

  ‘It’s quite true, that’s exactly what DCI Wellbeloved did,’ Beresford told DI James. ‘But you see, Harry,’ he continued, turning his gaze on Elton again, ‘since then, we’ve received some new information.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like this whole sorry affair started when the earl hired you to find his long-lost brother, Sebastian, and you tracked the lad down to a bunch of scumbags who call themselves the Devil’s Disciples. Incidentally, that was a rather good piece of detective work.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Elton said, reaching into his drawer for a Crunchie.

  ‘Was it the earl’s idea that the Devil’s Disciples should run the security at the RockStately Festival, or was it yours?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘It might have been mine, and it might have been his. I honestly don’t remember now,’ Elton said, biting into the chocolate bar.

  ‘It was yours,’ Beresford said confidently. ‘You might have sold it to him as his own idea, but you’d already worked out that it would be a great opportunity to peddle a lot of heroin.’

  ‘Is Harry a heroin dealer now?’ James asked.

  ‘No, but he knows a man who is, and he realized that whoever acted as middleman between the Devil’s Disciples and Mr X could earn himself a very nice little commission,’ Beresford said.

  ‘Mr X?’ James said.

  ‘That’s what we’re forced to call the heroin dealer for the moment, because we don’t yet know his real name. But we will know it soon, because Harry will tell us, won’t you, Harry?’

  ‘In your dreams!’ Elton said.

  ‘You’re surely not going to pretend that you don’t know the name of the man you were dealing with, are you?’

  ‘What I’m telling you i
s that I don’t know anything about any drugs,’ Elton said carefully.

  ‘We got quite a different story from Spike – or the Honourable Sebastian de Courtney, as we now know him to be. When he surrendered himself to the Halifax police last night, he said you were right there in the thick of it.’

  ‘He’s wrong.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Beresford said easily. ‘So let’s move on. It was then that you came up with yet another idea – and this one was a real cracker. Why not, you asked yourself, contact Terry Lewis and get him to run an exposé on the whole business? I’m right about that, aren’t I? That must have been what he was doing there at Stamford Hall, because it’s the only thing that makes sense.’

  ‘I’m not at all convinced about this,’ said DI James, playing his assigned part as the slow-thinking sidekick to absolute perfection. ‘I mean, if it’s true, it was a bit of a risk, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Beresford agreed. ‘But if our Harry could pull it off, the rewards would be amazing. The story had everything, you see – eccentric English earl, a rock concert, a motor bike gang and drugs. He wouldn’t have got that much money from acting as middleman for Mr X – a grand or two at most – but the Sunday papers would have paid a fortune for the story.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ James asked.

  ‘I am – but you don’t have to take just my word for it. Terry Lewis – who knew all about the newspaper business – was convinced it was huge, too. That’s why he was willing to hand over five thousand pounds to Harry as a down payment on his commission – because that was nothing in comparison to what they’d eventually end up being paid.’

  ‘Of course, now we know what was really going on, we also know why Harry looked so frightened when you told him that Lewis had been murdered, don’t we?’ James suggested.

  ‘Exactly,’ Beresford agreed. ‘His first thought was that Mr X had killed Lewis – and that he was next. But when I told him that Lewis had been stripped down to his underwear and dumped in the town centre, he stopped being worried – because that didn’t sound like something Mr X would do at all.’

  ‘Are you making this up as you go along, Mr Beresford?’ Elton asked, with a quiet sneer.

  ‘The Devil’s Disciples, on the other hand, could have done both things – and probably did,’ Beresford said.

  ‘What both things?’ Elton asked.

  ‘What two things, Harry,’ Beresford corrected him. ‘They could have killed Lewis because he was doing a story on him, and they could have taken his hippy clothes off him because they didn’t want the police connecting him with the RockStately Festival while they still had a lot of heroin to shift.’

  Of course, that still didn’t explain why they’d dumped the body in Whitebridge instead of just burying it, he thought, but he certainly wasn’t about to start discussing the contradictions in his theory with Elton.

  ‘Anyway, with Lewis dead, there will be no big payment from the newspapers, but Harry’s still got the five grand that Lewis gave him, so he’s reasonably happy,’ he said to DI James.

  ‘But then Sebastian de Courtney turns up at Halifax police station,’ James said.

  ‘But then Sebastian de Courtney turns up,’ Beresford agreed. ‘That changes everything, and also explains our presence here in your place of business, doesn’t it, Harry?’

  ‘Does it?’ Elton asked.

  Beresford looked mildly annoyed.

  ‘I hate it when people I’m trying to browbeat into a confession don’t pay attention,’ he said. ‘It does absolutely nothing at all for my self esteem.’

  ‘Maybe Harry just missed the point,’ James said sympathetically. ‘After all, he’s not very bright, or he wouldn’t be in the business he is in. So perhaps if you go over it again – much more slowly this time – he’ll finally get the picture.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Beresford said. ‘Everybody deserves a second chance. So listen very carefully this time, Harry. We have a chain in operation here. At one end of the chain, we have the Devil’s Disciples. The Staffordshire Police are currently rounding them up, but it’s not as easy as it once might have been because – for some unexplained reason – the gang suddenly split up last night, with all the members going their separate ways.’

  But the police will find them, he thought, and when they do, I’ll interrogate each and every one of them – and I’ll keep on interrogating them until they tell me which one killed Terry Lewis.

  In the meantime, however, he had other fish to fry, and one of them – a bald, fat, sweating fish – was just across the desk from him.

  ‘So we have the Devil’s Disciples at one end of the chain,’ he continued. ‘Then we have the other end of the chain – the dealer – but the problem is, we only know him as Mr X. And that – as I explained to you earlier – is why we’re here in what’s the middle of the chain, because we’d like you to tell us who Mr X is.’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue who he is, since this has nothing to do with me,’ Elton replied.

  ‘I told you he wouldn’t talk,’ James said to Beresford.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Beresford said. ‘There is, as we discussed earlier another way to get to Mr X – though that way will be rather painful for Harry.’

  He turned, and walked towards the door.

  ‘See you around, Harry – though I doubt if you’ll see me,’ James said, following him.

  Beresford had turned the handle and was stepping into the corridor when Elton said, ‘Hang on, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Talking about?’ Beresford asked quizzically.

  ‘All this, “it will be rather painful for Harry” and “See you around, though I doubt you’ll see me”.’

  ‘Oh that!’ Beresford said. ‘We think Mr X is either based in Liverpool or Manchester, so we’re going to spread the word in both places about the deal you made with Lewis. I imagine Mr X will be a little miffed when he learns what a double-dealing arsehole you really are.’

  ‘Then all we have to do is keep you under observation, so that when Mr X sends somebody to kill you, we can arrest him,’ James said.

  ‘We’ll arrest him after he’s killed you, of course,’ Beresford added. ‘We’ll have much more leverage that way than we would have if we stopped him doing the job he was sent to do.’

  ‘We’ll offer the hit man a deal in return for leading us to Mr X, and – hey presto – job done,’ James concluded.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Elton croaked.

  ‘Can’t do what?’ Beresford wondered. ‘State the plain simple truth – that you were working with Lewis – and then sit back and watch what happens? My conscience will be clear.’

  ‘Mine too,’ James said.

  Elton licked his lips. ‘Listen, I want to make a deal.’

  ‘Very sensible of you, Harry,’ Beresford said.

  The dowager countess was in her sitting room, surrounded by antique furniture and oil paintings of earls and countesses long dead. Though it was the middle of the warmest summer for fifty years, there was a blazing log fire in the hearth, and the heat it was pumping out mingled uneasily with the countess’s heavy perfume, filling the air with a sticky-sweet smell which was almost making Paniatowski retch.

  The dowager countess herself was sitting in a chair that was so grand it was almost a throne. She was wearing a silk dress which hung slackly on her, and the row of large pearls around her scrawny neck seemed so heavy that it was a miracle she could keep her head upright. She was heavily made-up, but that was not, Paniatowski decided, because she desired to be thought young – she seemed to have little interest in other people’s opinions – but rather to disguise from herself, as much as possible, the fact that she was old.

  The countess looked up at the chief inspector. She could not have failed to notice Paniatowski’s bandaged hands, but she did not comment on them. Nor did she invite her visitor to sit down.

  ‘I wish you to know from the outset that I have only agreed to speak to you because my son i
nsisted on it,’ she said.

  Her voice was thick with a contempt which could have been directed either at the police officer standing before her, or for the earl who had mandated this meeting – and possibly was meant for both of them.

  ‘And you always do what your son tells you to, do you, my lady?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘What choice do I have in the matter?’ the dowager countess replied, and now, merging with the contempt, there was a hint of self-pity. ‘My son is the earl. He owns Stamford Hall, and though I was once mistress of it myself, I am now nothing more than a guest who he tolerates only because he does not have the backbone to throw me out on to the street.’

  ‘If you dislike him so much, why don’t you leave?’ Paniatowski wondered. ‘Don’t you have any money of your own?’

  ‘You will cease to be impertinent immediately, or – whatever my son says – I will refuse to speak to you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry – it must be very hard for a woman like you, used to the finer things in life, to admit she’s poor.’

  ‘I am not poor,’ the countess said fiercely. ‘With the money my husband left me, I could buy the finest house in Whitebridge.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’ Paniatowski challenged.

  ‘Because I am not like you,’ the countess said – and her contempt was definitely back in control again. ‘If you were to be given a five- or six-bedroom house, you’d think you were in heaven. But I could see through the veneer, and the shoddy modernism which would captivate a stockbroker – or a senior police officer – holds no charm for me.’

  ‘You despise anyone who is not an aristocrat like yourself, don’t you?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No, I do not despise the common men with hoary hands who built this Hall. Nor do I despise their successors, who have cared for it over the centuries,’ the countess replied. ‘I have a powerful bond with them.’

  ‘A powerful bond,’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘How powerful? Did you ever invite any of these successors round for afternoon tea?’

  ‘Of course not,’ the dowager countess said dismissively. ‘They would be extremely uncomfortable taking tea with one of their superiors – and quite rightly so. But that does not mean that they cannot share in this great enterprise with me. They learned their trade from their fathers, who had learned it from their fathers. That trade became their religion – their reason for being on this earth – and this Hall was their cathedral.’