A sad smile came to the countess’s face. ‘I could say I have no idea, couldn’t I?’
‘Yes, you could.’
‘Or I could say that Edward Bell asked to borrow it – and he can’t contradict me, because he’s dead.’
‘That’s true.’
‘But Edward was an honourable man, as far as circumstances allowed him to be – and I will not have him thought of as a murderer, now that he’s gone.’
‘I didn’t say anything about murder,’ Paniatowski said.
‘No,’ the countess agreed, ‘you didn’t.’ She paused. ‘You know who was behind the wheel, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And because you know who was driving, you know where to look for the forensic evidence which will prove it?’
‘However careful people are to wash away the traces, they always leave something behind.’
‘So there is no point in lying.’
‘None at all – but just to make things perfectly clear, who was driving your car that night?’
‘I was.’
‘And why were you going out so late in the evening?’
‘I had to get rid of Terry Lewis’ body.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And why did you kill him?’
‘Because he left me no choice.’
Cutting his way through the fence without being noticed had been nerve-racking, but once he has succeeded in that, and left the festival behind him, Terry Lewis starts to relax.
If he can get this story – and if he markets it right – it could earn him anywhere up to one hundred thousand pounds, and even after Harry Elton has taken his cut, he’ll still have a great wad of cash left over for himself.
The park is much larger than he’d thought it would be. You could drop the whole estate on which he lives into this park, and it would hardly be noticed. And unexpectedly, he finds himself resenting the man who owns Stamford Hall.
Why should the earl have so much money?
Why should he be able to put on this rock concert – almost as a hobby – when a poor bloody journalist like Terry Lewis has to struggle to meet his mortgage payments?
It is new to him – this envy. Perhaps it is a result of all he has gone through in the previous few months. He certainly doesn’t remember experiencing anything like it when he was drawing a regular salary. But it doesn’t matter what has caused the feeling. The simple fact is that it is bloody-well there!
As he approaches the woods, he starts to tense up again. He is spying on a motorcycle gang dealing in heroin, he reminds himself. If they catch him at it, there is no telling what they might do.
He will take the whole thing cautiously. He knows the gang is camped at the right-hand edge of the woods, so he will enter from the left. He will move through the woods slowly, and if he has any doubts, he will not move again until the doubts have gone away.
He doesn’t need to get too close to them, because he has a telephoto lens on his camera.
He doesn’t have to even hear their conversations, because he knows they are selling drugs, and he can make those conversations up. After all, it isn’t as if a motorcycle gang is going to sue him for slander, is it?
The couple are so well hidden in the trees that, if the woman hadn’t moaned when she did, he might well have walked right up to them before he even realized they were there.
But the woman does moan, and he stops in his tracks.
There are more moans, and some grunts. They seem to be having a better time than he’s had in bed since he lost his job. No, that’s not quite true, he admits bitterly, as a feeling of inadequacy sweeps over him – they seem to having a better time than he’s ever had in bed.
He knows he should not want to watch them, but he does. He slowly circles around so he’s got a better view.
It’s training for spying on the Devil’s Disciples, he tells himself. That’s all it is – training.
The woman is on top, bouncing up and down with a vigour which almost takes his breath away.
And then he realizes that he recognizes her – that in researching for this article, he must have seen at least a dozen photographs of her!
He carefully takes out his camera and aims it. The click it makes when he presses the button seems as loud as a gunshot to his ears, but the couple are so engrossed in what they are doing that it is doubtful that firing a cannon would disturb them.
He takes a second picture, and then a third.
He knows now that whatever he might have told himself over the previous few days, he would probably never have been brave enough to go close enough to the Devil’s Disciples camp to get his story. But what he would – or would not – have done doesn’t matter any more, because, without even looking for it, he has stumbled over a story which is just as good.
He thinks about confronting the lovers immediately, but the man is big and solid, and might turn nasty. Besides, the man doesn’t matter. He is nothing. It is the woman who is the prize.
They are still ploughing away at each other. They are like randy goats, he thinks in disgust – and wishes he could be like them.
Finally, they finish. They get dressed without saying a word to each other, then the man goes off in one direction, and the woman in another.
He gives the woman a good start, and then runs after her. She has almost reached the Hall when he catches her up.
‘Countess!’ he gasps.
She turns around, and he can see the fear which is already in her eyes. This is going to be easy.
‘Who are you?’ she asks.
‘I’m a newspaper reporter,’ he tells her, ‘and I’ve just got one hell of a story to report.’
She glances around, worried that someone might have seen them, then she points to the stable block, and says, ‘In there.’
There are three magnificent horses in the stable. He does not know what breed they are – how could he? – but they only serve to fuel his rage to even higher levels of intensity.
How much would a single one of these horses cost, he asks himself.
And answering his own question, he thinks, thousands and thousands of pounds.
‘What do you want?’ the countess asks him.
‘As I said, I’ve got a fantastic story – the countess and her lover. I could sell it to one of the Sunday papers for a fortune, or …’ He pauses for dramatic effect. ‘… I could sell it to you.’
‘How much do you want?’
Shoot for the moon, he thinks.
‘One hundred thousand pounds,’ he says.
She gasps. ‘I have a little money of my own, but nothing like that amount,’ she says.
‘That’s the price,’ he says firmly. ‘Get it from your husband – he can afford it.’
‘Yes, he has the money,’ she admits. ‘But how could I get it from him without telling him what I want it for?’
‘That’s really not my problem,’ Lewis tells her.
‘Please,’ she says, as the tears stream down her face, ‘be reasonable. I can give you five thousand pounds now, and more next month. You would get your hundred thousand pounds in the end.’
‘How long a period of time are we talking about, here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘One year? Two years?’
‘Much longer than that.’
‘I’m not prepared to wait. And I don’t see why I need to. Your husband won’t want this story spread across the front pages of the newspapers any more than you do.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she says, and she is really sobbing now. ‘I don’t want him to know about it. I wouldn’t care if the whole of the rest of the world knew – if everyone pointed at me and ridiculed me wherever I went – as long as Gervaise didn’t find out.’
He has planted the seed of fear, and the woman’s tears will make it grow, without any help from him.
‘I’ll give you a week,’ he says.
He turns his back on her,
and starts to walk towards the stable door.
He never even sees the blow coming.
‘I love my husband,’ the countess said. ‘I really do love him.’
‘I believe you,’ Paniatowski tells her.
‘But I am still a fairly young woman, and I have needs in bed that Gervaise is unable to meet. It … it sounds so weak, so selfish, to talk about something which is, after all, only physical, but the lack of fulfilment was making me ill – it was destroying my mind.’
‘Go on,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I chose Edward Bell. I did not love him. I don’t think, in all honesty, that I even really found him attractive. But I knew he would be discreet – and that he would fulfil my needs.’
‘How did he feel about you? Did he ever tell you?’
‘No, we never discussed it. Physically, we were very compatible, but I doubt he was emotionally involved. He was my husband’s servant, and he would have done anything for him. If Gervaise had been unable to walk, Bell would have carried him halfway around the world without complaint. If he couldn’t satisfy his wife, then Bell would take that strain off him, too. He loved his own wife. I’m sure of that. And in sleeping with me, he was not betraying her – he was merely doing what had to be done.’
‘Did you tell him you’d killed Lewis?’
‘No, he must have found out the same way you did – from the surveillance tapes.’
Yes, that made sense, Paniatowski thought. Bell could never have carried off the innocent act if he’d actually known what had happened.
‘He burned the surveillance tapes to protect you from being charged with murder,’ she said aloud. ‘Don’t you think that argues that he did feel something for you all along?’
The countess laughed. ‘Of course not! He wasn’t worried about me at all. His only concern was the effect that my being arrested would have on Gervaise.’
There was no more that needed to be said, Paniatowski thought.
She stood up.
‘I’ll be back later with some other officers to take your statement, and after I’ve taken it, you’ll be arrested and charged.’
‘Do I have to say why I killed him?’ the countess asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Couldn’t you just say that I killed him because I was so outraged that a man like him had dared to invade the estate?’
Anyone else making the suggestion would have done so with an eye to pleading diminished responsibility, Paniatowski thought. But the countess wasn’t doing that – her sole aim was to prevent her husband learning of her affair.
‘I could play it for all it was worth,’ the countess continued. ‘The grand lady looking down on the filthy peasant – the jury would hate me.’
‘I’m sorry—’ Paniatowski began.
‘The judge, too,’ the countess interrupted her. ‘He’d be bound to give me a much longer sentence than he’d hand down if I told the truth.’
‘I’m not interested in you getting the longest possible sentence,’ Paniatowski told her.
In fact, if it was up to me, you wouldn’t be in prison for long at all, she thought.
‘Justice would be served whatever story I told, wouldn’t it?’ the countess pleaded.
‘I’m sorry,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I’m really sorry. But I can’t do it.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you can,’ the countess agreed sadly. She sighed. ‘Poor Gervaise! He was born under a bad sign – and so was I.’
Paniatowski was almost at the door when the countess said, ‘Can I ask you one more question?’
‘Of course.’
‘How could you be so sure it was me driving the car?’
‘One of the great unanswered questions in this investigation was why the killer risked dumping the body in Whitebridge, when it would have been considerably safer to bury it somewhere,’ Paniatowski said. ‘And a second was why – having stripped him of his clothes so we wouldn’t know where he’d died – the killer left Lewis’ wallet where it was bound to be found. There was only one answer which could successfully resolve both questions – and that was that the killer had done it so the body would be identified as soon as possible.’
‘Yes, I see that,’ the countess said.
‘But why would the killer want us to identify it – when that was bound to help us?’ Paniatowski continued. ‘Again, there could only be one answer. The killer – which, in this case, was you, and could only have been you – wanted Lewis’s wife to know, as soon as possible, that he was dead. You didn’t want her to be like you were in Prague, wondering for months if he was still alive, while knowing, deep inside, that he wasn’t. You wanted to give her certainty – so that she could start to come to terms with her grief.’
‘It would have been inhuman to have done anything else,’ the countess said.
Epilogue
30th September, 1976
The doctor sat at one side of the desk – the medical reports in front of him – and Paniatowski sat at the other.
The doctor’s name was Brydon. He was in his mid-forties, and Dr Shastri had recommended him as being both discreet and sympathetic. Paniatowski liked him as a man, but hated her reasons for having to visit him, and had resolved that once this matter had been cleared up, she would never see him again.
The doctor picked up the report.
‘The good news is that there are no apparent internal injuries and you do not seem to have contracted any sexually transmitted diseases,’ he said.
‘That is good news,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘However,’ the doctor continued, ‘there is the other complication.’
‘What other complication?’
The doctor frowned. ‘You do realize that you’re pregnant, don’t you? You must have noticed you’ve missed your period.’
‘I … I can’t be pregnant,’ Paniatowski gasped. ‘I was tested, years ago, and the doctors told me I could never have children.’
‘Medical science can never say never,’ the doctor told her. ‘The human body is capable of surprising the most skilled practitioner – and let me assure you, you are pregnant.’
Paniatowski closed her eyes and was back in the woods – her head aching and her vagina on fire.
She could sense the presence of the three Devil’s Disciples. She could feel their breath on her face. And she could hear their voices.
‘You’re just like all the other slags that we’ve screwed.’
‘If I was you, bitch, I’d just put it down to experience.’
‘And let’s be honest, you must have enjoyed being shagged by three real men for a change.’
‘I would recommend an abortion under any circumstances, given your age, but under these circumstances, I don’t think there’s any question about it,’ the doctor said.
‘I can’t have an abortion,’ Paniatowski told him.
‘I really think you need to consider the risks,’ the doctor advised. ‘And even if the birth goes without a hitch, how you will feel about the child once it’s born, given the nature of its conception?’
‘I can’t have an abortion,’ Paniatowski repeated.
‘Are you saying that on religious grounds?’
‘Yes.’
The doctor looked down at her folder again.
‘There’s no indication here that you have any religious affiliation,’ he said. ‘I’d have handled the matter quite differently if there had been, but, you see, I didn’t know you were a Catholic.’
‘No, neither did I,’ Paniatowski said.
e-share-buttons">share
Supping with the Devil Page 25