“Ah, but that’s different,” objected Stephen. “I love you. So when you do it, it’s just play, isn’t it?”
Richard stared at him, and all the irritation and impatience dropped away from him. He gave Stephen a slow, sweet smile of invitation. “Come and show me you still love me,” he said in a small voice. “I’m feeling a little bit vulnerable right this minute, and I could do with some comfort. Some strength, too. Even if it is feeling over-butch tonight. Come and love me, Stevie, my lovely.” And Stephen, who could be melted out of even his hardest frame of mind by Richard when he chose to be cajoling, went across the room to the other bed, and set about comforting him.
* * *
In the bar at midday the following day Stephen took Tom aside, bought him a drink and left Richard serving the half a dozen early customers. “Got a problem,” he opened. “And I want to hear your views before I decide how to approach it.”
“Go on,” said Tom, suspecting what the problem was. “Apparently a lot of gay people have started coming here,” Stephen said evenly, betraying nothing of his own feelings.
“There’ve been a few,” admitted Tom. “Nothing very noticeable, though — till that pair last night.”
“You got any idea why they should have suddenly started using the place?”
“Nope,” said Tom. “Unless…” He made a small gesture with his hands. It said that he didn’t really want to say what he had to say, and didn’t think he needed to, either.
“Somehow they’ve heard about Rich and me, and thought they’d get a welcome here on our account?” supplied Stephen, raising his eyebrows. Tom nodded confirmation.
“What are your own feelings?”
Tom pursed his lips and thought about it. Stephen, watching closely, saw him wondering briefly whether to be diplomatic, and saw the notion rejected. “I’ve got nothing against them,” Tom said eventually in a carefully neutral tone. “You know that, I think. I’m not particularly on their side, but I’m not against em either. I’m on my own side, which means on the pub’s side. I want whatever’s best for the pub, because that’s what’s best for me, in the long run. Is that helpful?” Stephen sat in thought for a moment. “Suppose I issue an instruction,” he said slowly, considering as he spoke, “to the effect that they’re to be served unless you have any other reason to kick em out — if they’re pissed, or using dope, or anything like that? How would you feel about that?”
“I’d accept that, of course,” said Tom. “I don’t want to see the local people upset, particularly. But I don’t believe in prohibiting people, whatever they are, unless they misbehave somehow. I can’t say I found that… er, exhibition last night very edifying, shall we say. But they did nothing against the law, and they did nothing to damage the pub. No, I wouldn’t have anything to say against that.”
“Well, then,” said Stephen, “I don’t see that there’s anything to issue instructions about, is there? I mean, if I leave the matter in your hands — you’re in operational charge of the pub — and you use your own discretion, that seems to cover the situation, doesn’t it? You’ll eject anyone breaking the law, but you won’t refuse to serve anyone because of his dress, or appearance, that right?”
Tom thought about it for a moment. “Up to now,” he said, “before you and Richard appeared on the scene, that is, I’d always run an unofficial dress code of my own in here anyway. I won’t serve anyone who’s dirty, and I won’t serve anyone not wearing a shirt. The customers don’t want sweaty armpits beside em at the bar, and I don’t want to have to clean motor-bikies’ oil or clods of mud off people’s boots off the carpets. Other than that, I’ve tended to live and let live. I’d carry on with those rules if you gave me a free hand.”
“Fair enough,” said Stephen. “What would you have done if two punks had come in with pink and green Mohican haircuts and safety pins through their noses?”
“Well, we’ve never had any,” said Tom, laughing as he imagined the effect of such an apparition on the locals. “But if they were clean punks, and had shirts on, I’d’ve served em, and hoped they didn’t stay too long.”
“Okay,” said Stephen, getting up and picking up the glasses. “Carry on as you were, then. If gay people come in and they meet your own criteria, serve em, and treat em like any other customers. If Pat Gibson or any of the others make trouble about it, treat them as you’d treat anybody else making trouble in the bar, and let me know about it next time you see me, okay?”
“Okay,” said Tom, and Stephen went to refill their glasses feeling pleased with the ease with which he had resolved a potentially thorny problem.
They had a chance to test the effectiveness of their policy only a few evenings later. Elderton Park by chance had a blank date in their fixture list the following Saturday. Stephen, unwilling to go without his game if he could find one, had gratefully accepted the local captain’s offer of a place in the village side instead, and he and Richard were having a quiet drink before heading for the ground. There was a sprinkling of local drinkers ranged along the long bar, including Gibson, in his usual place near the door. Just after noon two strangers came in and stood next to Gibson at the bar. One of them, a slender boy with fine sandy hair, was clearly wearing eye-liner and lipstick. His movements were extravagant and uninhibited. Tom served them and took their money without changing his expression. Stephen and Richard halted their chat and watched covertly, with great interest, wondering what would happen next.
For some time nothing happened at all. The two newcomers stared round the bar, their eyes lingering on the two boys for a moment. But they made no move, and for a while Stephen and Richard turned away, listening to the scraps of conversation audible from the other end of the bar. It was clearly to do with the misdeeds of some former boyfriend of the made-up youth, and was illustrated by a series of snatches of dialogue and accompanying flamboyant gestures.
Predictably enough, after a while it became too much for Gibson’s endurance. There was a series of rumbled sneers and loud comments about fairies, pansies and the like. The boys turned and took notice, in time to see the made-up one flutter his long, almost white eyelashes winningly at Gibson and offer him a bright, mocking smile. At the same time he advanced a short pace towards Gibson, who, though short, was a stocky, powerfully built man, who looked as if he could have broken his slight tormentor in two with his bare hands.
“Get away from me, you disgusting painted little tart,” growled Gibson, enraged. “Piss off to one of your own places and give em AIDS there, and keep out of decent people’s pubs, why don’t you?” And he took a step towards the slight youth, raising a hand threateningly.
Tom glanced briefly at Stephen, who gave him a slight nod.
“Knock that off, Pat,” said Tom in a matter-of-fact tone.
Gibson swung round on him in surprise. “What?” he roared, staring at Tom in surprise. “Are you telling me to knock it off. Me? This… this… lipsticked little freak of a whore’s handbag comes in fluttering its eyelashes at me, and you’re telling me to knock it off. Why, I’ll…”
“You’ll calm down and behave yourself,” observed Tom, still speaking conversationally, “or I’ll throw you out. And bar you, if you give me cause.” He put down the towel and the glass he was wiping and stepped towards the hatch in the bar, watching Gibson with an expression of polite enquiry on his face.
Gibson goggled at him for a moment, so astonished that he forgot all about the two young men, who were watching the scene with undisguised delight all over their faces. Then he remembered them, and swung round on them again. “Good God, Tom, look at him,” he spluttered angrily. “I ask you, man. Look at him.”
“You’re not the arbiter of public taste, Pat,” said Tom mildly. “Or the resident fashion correspondent.”
Gibson did some more spluttering. “Do you think I want that standing next to me at the bar?” he demanded, gesturing at the decorated young man with a hand as if exhibiting him at an auction. “There’s plenty of room,” m
urmured Tom, making an identical gesture to indicate the long expanse of polished and vacant bar. “You don’t have to stand beside anyone you don’t want to. Just as long as you don’t start threatening or insulting the customers. I don’t want any trouble in my bar. Or rather, I should say, I won’t have any trouble in my bar. Now simmer down and have a drink.”
Gibson stood for a moment, and there was silence as everyone waited to see if he would calm down and accept his discomfiture quietly. For one moment he tensed himself, and it looked as if he would hurl himself on Tom or the two young men. Then he picked up his glass, almost hurling it to his lips, drained it, and stamped out of the bar with an inarticulate snarl of mingled outrage and disgust.
The young man thanked Tom shyly, peeking up at him from under his light lashes. Tom, however, was on his way up the bar to Stephen and Richard, who were wearing identical grins. “You did everything bar saying ‘There’s a good boy’, chuckled Richard approvingly.
“I’m not too happy about it, Steve,” muttered Tom.
“Why?” demanded Stephen bluntly. “It’s only Pat Gibson. If you have to kick him out, kick him — hard. I’ve got no sympathy to waste on him.”
Tom looked at him for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it. But he’ll try to make trouble for us.”
“What can he do?” scoffed Stephen. “You were dead right,” said Richard encouragingly. Tom gave him a long, straight look. “I hope so,” he said. He shrugged, and left it at that.
* * *
Over the next week or so unfamiliar faces continued to appear in the hotel in slowly growing numbers. Many of them still went away looking a little puzzled or disappointed, but a fair number of them seemed to take a liking to the place, and returned. There were subdued rumblings from a few predictable voices among the locals, but Gibson had talked among his circle of mates, and when they found they received no support from Tom they remained subdued, and there was no trouble, until the event that made Stephen’s discussion with Tom, and their ready solution of the question, meaningless.
It wasn’t until towards the end of the following week that they discovered that the reporter’s interest in them had taken other, more practical directions; and that was when the trouble started.
11
For a moment Janet Knight thought she had seen nothing but a sheet of old newspaper stuck in the bushes beside the road. Then she saw clearly what it was that had caught her eye, and uttered a small, half-frightened gasp of surprise. “What’s up?” her husband said, shooting a quick glance in her direction. It was just after three o’clock on a wet, windy Saturday morning, and Geoffrey Knight was driving fast. They had been to a dinner party with friends in Arundel, and the conversation had run on far into the night. It had been very pleasant, but he was anxious now to get home to Bognor and bed. His wife had been dozing, almost asleep, up to the moment when she had seen whatever it was and become suddenly very wide awake indeed. Then he saw the thing himself, and jammed his brakes on so hard that their safety belts locked, slamming them back into their seats.
Knight slipped his belt and opened his door in a single movement. As he did so he observed his wife doing the same. “You stay here,” he said roughly. Fear gave his voice a brusque tone that he had never used with her before. “Keep the doors locked, and if it’s trouble, drive off.” He slid swiftly out of the car into the intense darkness before she could think of anything to say in reply.
His heart beating unpleasantly fast and sounding so loud in his temples that he felt it must be audible, he had enough presence of mind to open the boot and grab the heavy jack-handle before padding circumspectly back along the narrow, unlit country road. He did not know that he had raised the jack-handle above his head like a club, or that he looked utterly terrifying, a black, menacing shadow of deeper darkness against the night sky.
Fifteen yards back from the comforting twin red glow-worms of his tail-lights, he saw something white that moved. He edged still more gingerly off the metalled surface of the road, across a narrow strip of verge, and into the thin bushes beyond — and suddenly drew in a gulp of breath, with a thin hiss of horrified surprise. It was almost a shriek.
The boy was naked, soaked, spattered with mud and leaves, and in a state of utter, inarticulate terror that was close to catatonia. His eyes gleamed in the faint light from the few stars visible through the scudding clouds, huge with his fear. He was incapable of uttering a sound, but he raised a thin arm in front of his face to ward off Knight’s raised arm and the jack-handle. Knight suddenly became aware of the weapon, and realised how he must appear. He lowered the handle and stooped swiftly to take the child by the arm. “What in God’s name are you doing out like this?” he said. It wasn’t, he said, discussing it shakily with his wife much later, the most intelligent thing to have said, but he was too paralysed by the shock and horror of what he saw to think very sensibly about what to say.
In any case, it didn’t matter much what he said, because the child was unable to say anything at all in reply. “Jesus!” muttered Knight. “You must be perished. Come on.” He scooped the boy’s slight body into his arms, dropping the jack-handle, and ran awkwardly back to the car. The boy was quite well-made for his age, which Knight thought was about ten or eleven, and he was glad to regain the comforting security of the car. He kicked the door, and his wife’s face glimmered whitely, her features drawn and tight with fear. She recognised her husband, and opened the door.
“It’s a little boy,” he gasped. “He’s… I don’t know… he’s been out in the weather, he’s got nothing on, he’s filthy. Get in the back and look after him, will you? Get him to hospital.”
He reached round and unlocked the rear door while his wife was scrambling out of her seat and into the back of the car on the other side. In the dim, sickly glow of the interior light they saw that as well as the splashes of mud, grass and leaves stuck to the child’s wet body, he was also liberally covered with ugly dark bruises. Janet Knight drew in her breath in horrified astonishment. “Great God!” she exclaimed, her voice low and appalled. “What in the world’s happened to him? It’s all right now,” she whispered, taking the boy into her arms and hurriedly wrapping him in her coat. He stared up at her from the same huge, terrified eyes. His mouth worked, but no sound came out. Her own eyes filled, suddenly and infuriatingly, with tears. She cradled his head on her lap and rocked him gently, murmuring to him, and acting throughout more from instinct than from any coherent thought. “There, there,” she said softly as her husband almost hurled himself into the driver’s seat and roared off. The jack-handle lay, a blunt instrument devoid of all the menace it had briefly held, in the wet grass beside the road, and neither of them remembered it until many hours later, when they would return for it in the company of the Sussex Constabulary.
In the back Janet Knight was hardly aware that her husband was driving like a maniac for the last few miles back into Bognor Regis. She blinked the tears out of her eyes and wondered vaguely, with the small part of her mind that was not concentrated on comforting and soothing the child, what could possibly have reduced him to such a state of such primordial terror and hurt, like a small animal, unable to remember speech.
An hour later the Knights stood talking to a young night-duty houseman in the hospital where they had screeched to a halt fifteen minutes after discovering the child. The doctor was bone-achingly tired, but his almost ill-looking expression of shock showed clearly through the tiredness and the normal doctor’s mask of impassive, seen-it-all-before worldliness. “It’s a police matter, that’s certain,” he was saying to the Knights. “He’s been deeply traumatised, and he’s in very deep shock. I don’t know exactly what’s happened to him, that’ll have to wait for full examination. At the moment he’s under heavy sedation. But it’s sexual, for certain. He’s certainly been… Well, I won’t go into details. But I’m calling the police in, and I think they’ll want to talk to you. If you wouldn’t mind hanging about for a bit
… I’ll ask one of the nurses to give you some tea, or coffee. Do with some myself, come to that. Lucky we’re not busy.” He gestured into a small room, and they went in and sat down, looking at each other and, for the first time since they had stopped the car in the dark, tree-shadowed lane, beginning to feel a little afraid.
* * *
A quarter of an hour later two uniformed policemen arrived. The same doctor sat and described the boy’s condition in general terms, offered a fairly precise surmise of what had been done to him, and agreed to go to the police station the following day to make a full statement when the boy had been examined more thoroughly. Then he led them through corridors to the small private room where the boy, heavily sedated, was sleeping, watched over by a tired nurse. He allowed them to peep at the child briefly, but would not allow them to examine him at all. “S’all right, doc,” said the senior officer. “No point in disturbing him now. Poor little devil,” he muttered feelingly. “We’ll come back tomorrow, with women officers. Time enough for questions when he’s recovered a bit. For now we’ll just have a word with the people who found him.” The doctor nodded, and led them through more corridors.
They found Geoffrey Knight sprawled out in a wheelchair. His wife was reclining on a medical gurney, her back propped against a pile of pillows. They were both asleep.
“Seems a shame to wake em,” said the PC, a grizzled giant in his early fifties.
“Have to all the same,” muttered the other man. He wore the two pips denoting an Inspector, though he was twenty years younger than the PC. “If this is anything like as nasty as the doc says we’re gonna need all the help we can get. Be nice to get these two eliminated as quick as poss, save a bit a time. CID’ll be takin it over in the morning.”
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