Supping with the Devil Page 10

  Spike was not sure how long he had been on his trip back through time, but Badger was still speaking, so it might have been only a few seconds.

  ‘When we did them students, we were paid to hurt them,’ Badger was saying. ‘This time it’s going to be very different – this time we’re being paid to stop them getting hurt.’

  Several of the Devil’s Disciples looked puzzled – perhaps even perplexed – because what their leader was outlining seemed almost law-abiding.

  ‘We’re going to play it straight,’ Badger continued, expanding on the point. ‘We’re going to do the job they want us to do. And there’ll be other changes this time, as well. Normally, it’s Chainsaw and Sharkteeth who run things when I’m not around to do it myself, but they’ll be busy this weekend, so I’m putting Lobo and Spike in charge.’

  The words echoed around Spike’s head.

  I’m putting Lobo and Spike in charge.

  I’m putting Lobo and Spike in charge.

  He had never been put in charge of anything before, and he was both proud and terrified.

  He wanted to tell Badger how honoured he was.

  He wanted to jump up and down, like an excited kid on his birthday.

  But he knew he couldn’t do either of those things, so instead he just nodded, as if it was all in a day’s work.

  ‘Lobo and Spike will be in charge of actual security, but I’ll still be there, watching you,’ Badger said gravely. ‘And here’s what I’ll be watching for – I’ll be watching for you getting drunk, I’ll be watching for you starting fights, and I’ll be watching for you messing with the hippy chicks. Anybody who does any of those things will have to deal with me.’ He paused, and looked down at Ferret. ‘Do you understand that, Ferret?’

  The warning wasn’t really aimed at Ferret at all, Spike thought. After what had happened outside the motorway café, it would be a long time before Ferret contemplated stepping out of line again.

  No, it wasn’t aimed at Ferret – instead, it was Ferret himself who was the warning. It was the left side of his face, now a deep purple, which would serve as a reminder of what could happen if you didn’t do exactly what Badger said.

  ‘Five days isn’t too long to have to behave yourself,’ Badger said, his voice now more reasonable and persuasive, ‘and I promise you that once we’re out of here, we’ll have a real week of … What was that fancy word you used the other day, Spike?’

  A sudden chill ran down Spike’s spine. He had thought that Badger either hadn’t heard, or failed to register, the ‘fancy word’ he’d used – but Badger didn’t miss a thing.

  ‘Well, what is the word?’ Badger demanded.

  ‘Mayhem,’ Spike said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Badger agreed. ‘We’ll have a whole week of pure bloody mayhem.’

  The use of the word at that particular moment had been no coincidence, Spike told himself.

  It had been a warning to him, as much as Ferret’s battered face had been a warning to the others.

  It had said, ‘I know you’re a bit bloody odd, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’

  That was the way Badger worked – perhaps the way all leaders worked – using both the carrot and the stick.

  The carrot – I’m promoting you.

  The stick – if what’s different about you becomes a problem, it will be dealt with.

  It made Spike uneasy to have both these things hovering above his head at the same time – but it was still a marked improvement on his childhood, when there had only been the stick.

  PART TWO

  ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’

  6th–9th August

  SEVEN

  Friday, 6th August

  Jeff Hill was trying to work out how he’d got inside this room that seemed to have no window and doors, but the bloody ringing in his ears was making it very difficult to think.

  He’d been at the sales conference’s opening night drinks’ party.

  He remembered that.

  Baby Doll had been there, too, and when he’d bumped into her – totally accidentally, as it had happened – he’d said, ‘Nice to see you,’ in a disinterested, couldn’t-wait-to-get-away tone.

  Clever Jeff – clever little sporting hero!

  The problem was that the fleeting contact had sent his libido into overdrive, and several times during the course of the evening, he’d caught himself looking at her lustfully – which wasn’t clever at all.

  He supposed that was when he had starting drinking heavily, in some sort of attempt to assuage the impatient demon that lived in his underpants, but that – of course – had only made matters worse.

  So what had happened next?

  The party slowly fizzled out – as such parties tended to – until the only people left were a small group of men who spent much of their free time fighting a valiant battle against encroaching middle age. One of the members of this group – more aware than the rest of the growing hostility of the waiters whose shift had officially ended half an hour earlier – had finally suggested that they wrap up the evening with a nightcap in the bar, and it would have been highly suspicious if jovial Jeff Hill – who was well known to be always up for a drink – had said no.

  So he hadn’t said no. In fact, he had been so enthusiastic about the idea that by the time they reached the bar, most of the revellers were convinced it had been Jeff’s idea in the first place.

  They’d had three or four before they finally called it a night. Was that when he ended up in this windowless room?

  No. What he’d done after that was go up to his own room – and he’d made sure his drinking companions had seen that that was where he went.

  And then?

  Then he had waited for half an hour – fighting off the urge to fall asleep – before making his way down to Baby Doll’s room on the floor below.

  Had they done the dirty deed once he was there? He didn’t know for sure, but he suspected they hadn’t.

  But none of that came even close to explaining the closed room or the ringing sound.

  He looked up and saw a great hollow metal object swinging to and fro above his head.

  A bell! He was inside a bloody bell!

  But how could he even see the bell, when he knew for a fact that his eyes were shut tight?

  He opened his eyes – for real, this time – and then quickly closed them again when they found the light too painful.

  He wasn’t in a bloody bell at all. He was in a bloody bed – probably Baby Doll’s bed.

  He opened his eyes again – more cautiously this time – and tried to focus on the alarm clock which had so disturbed his dreams.

  Seven thirty-five!

  Shit, he had his first meeting of the day in less than an hour. And worse – far worse – than turning up late for that meeting, was the fact that, at seven thirty-five in the morning, there were probably already quite a lot of people moving around in the hotel.

  He hit the alarm clock button with the palm of his hand, and climbed out of bed.

  ‘Well, you weren’t much good last night,’ said a sleepy voice from beneath the covers.

  ‘What time did you set the clock for?’ he demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The alarm clock! What time did you set it for last night?’

  ‘Half past six, like you asked me to.’

  He had slept through nearly an hour of the bloody thing, he thought, searching around the room for his clothes. How could he have been so stupid?

  His suit and his shirt were on the chair, his socks, vest and underpants were strewn on the floor. He had no idea where his shoes were, but he’d worry about that once he was dressed.

  Baby Doll got out of bed and went into the bathroom.

  Hill dressed at high speed, then looked around for his shoes. They didn’t seem to be anywhere.

  Baby Doll came out of the bathroom again, wearing a white hotel dressing gown.

  ‘I can’t find my shoes,’ Hill said.


  ‘Have you checked under the bed?’

  ‘Now why – in God’s name – would my shoes be under the bloody bed?’ he asked, irritably.

  But that was where they were.

  He slipped on the shoes, laced them up, and moved over to the door. There was no noise in the corridor outside, so maybe he’d get lucky.

  ‘Sorry about my performance last night,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back on form tonight.’

  ‘You’d better be, or I’m trading you in for a new – younger – model,’ Baby Doll told him.

  He put his hand on the door knob.

  The most dangerous moment of his escape was the one in which he left Baby Doll’s room and exposed himself to the wider world, he thought. And the second most dangerous moment came immediately after it – walking along the corridor on a floor where he had no business to be.

  After that, it was a doddle. Once he had reached the emergency stairs at the end of the corridor – once he was actually on them – he could have come from anywhere and be going anywhere, and there would be nothing at all to tie him to Baby Doll.

  He listened for a second, with his ear pressed up against the door, took a deep breath and turned the handle.

  It was as he was stepping into the corridor that he saw the man turn the corner. He was a pretty average-looking feller – around thirty-five, brown hair, maybe five feet nine – and yet there was something vaguely familiar about him.

  To retreat into the room would be fatal. There was nothing for it but to try and brazen it out.

  Hill headed down the corridor towards the man – walking neither too slow nor too fast, and trying to look like someone who had so much on his mind that he was hardly registering the fact there was anyone else there.

  The two passed each other, and he was almost at the fire doors when he heard a bedroom door back down the corridor open, and a woman’s voice call, ‘You’ve forgotten your tie, Jeff!’

  He turned around. Baby Doll – the stupid bitch – was actually in her doorway, waving his tie at him. And not only that, but the other man had turned around too, and was taking in the whole scene.

  There were a number of things he could have said, some of them smart and some of them stupid. But if he’d sat down and thought about it for a long, long time, he could not possibly have come up with anything quite as stupid as what he did actually say.

  ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ he told her. ‘My name’s not Jeff.’

  He turned again, and strode quickly down the corridor. And with each heavy footfall, a single word was reverberating around his head.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’

  Chief Superintendent Holmes had never ridden in a helicopter before, and every time it banked he made a mental resolution never to ride in one again. Yet despite his growing belief that he should never have put his faith in aeronautical science, he was forced to admit that being up in this rattling death machine did give him a wonderfully strategic view of the area around Stamford Hall, and made policing the flow of traffic so much easier.

  The festival-goers – or the scruffy, layabout, dope-smoking sex mad students, as he preferred to think of them – had started arriving in the afternoon of the previous day. Some had come in beaten-up vans with crude logos daubed on their sides, some on motorcycles, and some in cars (which they had no doubt cajoled their weak-willed parents into lending them). The majority, however, had reached the site via the special buses which were running a shuttle service between Whitebridge railway station and the Hall.

  Official police estimates were that around thirty thousand had reached the site by the time night fell, and the tent city they had thrown up was already covering several fields which, in Holmes’ opinion, could have been put to much better use.

  And it would only get worse, he thought. Already, the roads around Whitebridge were becoming clogged, and this was only Friday.

  Come Saturday, when the other scruffy layabouts – the ones who pretended to work for a living – were free, there would be a positive deluge.

  He didn’t see the point of the festival at all. If the layabouts wanted to listen to loud jungle music, why didn’t they just stay at home and turn their gramophones up to full volume?

  The helicopter swooped over the Hall, and he found himself thinking about Monika Paniatowski, trapped – with no real job to do – inside the walls. She was being badly treated – very badly treated – and she had his sympathy. He would have liked to help if he could, but – when all was said and done – a man with his own career to think of didn’t want to make any waves.

  A solid metal turnstile had been installed at the East Gate, and after passing through it, the fans would be inside the wire-netting enclosure. The stage stood at the opposite end of the enclosure from the gate, and it was planned that the acts would enter it through the back, from the part of the grounds which hadn’t been fenced off.

  ‘Everything seems to be moving along exceptionally smoothly,’ Edward Bell said to Paniatowski, as they stood on the stage, looking down. ‘The festival starts at six o’clock. The opening act, by the way, is called Long Sad Day. Have you ever heard of them?’

  ‘No,’ Paniatowski admitted, ‘I can’t say I have.’

  ‘Neither had I, until just before I booked them,’ Bell said.

  ‘You booked them?’ Paniatowski asked, surprised.

  ‘That’s right,’ Bell agreed. ‘It turns out that, as well as all the other things that I do around Stamford Hall, I’m also a rock concert promoter. Whoever would have thought it?’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘You’re not being serious, are you?’

  ‘No, not entirely,’ Bell said. ‘The earl had a few acts he particularly wanted to appear, and I got in touch with them myself, but an agency in London organized most of it, from contacting the groups to handling the ticket sales. Still, I am the one who had the final say – because I’m the one who signed the cheques.’

  ‘How much did the whole thing cost?’

  ‘You really don’t want to know,’ Bell said, with a slight shudder. ‘But as I told the dowager countess when she asked,’ he continued, sounding more optimistic, ‘with a bit of luck we might just break even.’

  It was a pointless exercise to be standing there on the stage at all, Paniatowski thought, because Edward Bell was right – everything was running smoothly without her having to lift a finger.

  And even if things ceased to run smoothly, there was nothing she could do, without the necessary authority, to make things right.

  She couldn’t even talk to the motorcycle gang, for Christ’s sake, because the earl – in his infinite wisdom – had decided that it would be far too upsetting for a hardened bunch like the Devil’s Disciples to actually come into contact with one unarmed police officer.

  So, if she couldn’t be of any use where she was, why didn’t she simply go back to the Hall?

  Because there was no point in that, either!

  Say she did go back to the Hall – what would she do once she was there?

  Go up to the room that Edward Bell had allocated her?

  Lie on the bed, in a fetal position, feeling even sorrier for herself than she was already?

  Bell looked at his watch. ‘Do you fancy a bite of lunch at the Lodge, Chief Inspector?’ he asked.

  ‘Where’s the Lodge? Is it a pub?’

  ‘Bless you, no – it’s where I live.’

  Paniatowski hesitated. ‘I wouldn’t like to intrude.’

  ‘It’ll be no intrusion,’ Bell assured her. ‘It was my missus who came up with the idea of inviting you round, and she’ll be expecting you.’

  Jeff Hill knew where he had seen the man in the corridor before. It had been a little more than a year earlier – in the divorce courts.

  Hill is there as a character witness for his mate, Dave Langtree, another ex-footballer who has made good after leaving the game, though in his case it is as the host of a nationally televised chat show.

  Hill has already given his ev
idence, under oath.

  ‘I cannot swear that Dave Langtree has not committed adultery,’ he has testified. ‘How could I, unless I was with him twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year? But I will say this, the Dave I know has never had eyes for any woman but his wife.’

  He’s been lying, of course – Dave Langtree is, and always has been, randier than a stoat in heat – but the lie had been delivered with complete sincerity and conviction, and if you can’t take the word of a sporting hero, then who can you believe?

  Terry Lewis takes the stand. Under the guidance of Elaine Langtree’s barrister, he outlines how – in order to obtain a story for the Sunday Gazette, the newspaper he worked for – he had secretly followed Langtree around for several weeks.

  ‘And what did he see, during that time, which is of any relevance to this hearing?’ Elaine’s barrister asks.

  ‘On five occasions, I saw him enter a motel room with a woman I now know to be Lucy Hetherington,’ Lewis answers.

  Elaine’s barrister nods complacently, and sits down.

  Dave’s barrister rises to his feet.

  ‘You have no proof of these wild accusations you’ve just made, have you?’ he asks.

  ‘I had proof at the time,’ Lewis answers.

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘At the time I made them – the time when we were planning to run the story in the Gazette.’

  ‘And what was the nature of this proof?’

  ‘I’d taken several dozen time-stamped photographs of them entering and leaving the motel rooms I mentioned earlier.’

  ‘Then perhaps you can show these “several dozen time-stamped photographs” to the court.’

  ‘I said I had them at the time – I don’t have them now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I gave them to my editor.’

  ‘Then perhaps he can show them to us.’

  ‘He denies ever having received them.’

  ‘Ah, I see!’ the barrister says. ‘No further questions.’

  ‘Three days after I gave him the photographs, Dave Langtree agreed to write a weekly column for the Gazette,’ Lewis blurts out.

  ‘I said, no further questions,’ the barrister reminds him.