Loose Head (12 page)

Wicks merely shook his head, but a flush of magenta was creeping up his scrawny septuagenarian neck, a sure sign that he was ready to go off like a bomb. “You’ll be reporting directly to me,” Oakhurst continued. “Daily. I want you to begin by giving me a concise profile on each member on the Hastewicke Gentlemen, and every instance of potentially-embarrassing behavior you’ve ever witnessed on tour.”

“But sir...” my horror must have shown, because Oakhurst was suddenly smiling very broadly indeed. “Only four of them were being blackmailed. If there were more, Weathersby’s solicitor would’ve had other disks. He’s confirmed that there were only the four.”

“We don’t know that, DI Reed. We know Weathersby was both greedy and unscrupulous. There could very well have been others.”

“If there were, we’ll know soon enough.” Furious and appalled, I stood to go. “Was there anything else, sir?”

“Sit down, Reed – I’m not finished with you yet. I realize the delicacy of this investigation, and I appreciate the position it puts you in.” The cold mirth in his eyes showed just how deeply he appreciated it. “Your familiarity with the suspects could be the key to breaking this case. But I want you to know very clearly that if I discover a single instance of a potentially-relevant fact, however trivial, being suppressed to protect one of your teammates, you will face the severest possible disciplinary action. Is that absolutely clear?”

“As a bell, sir.”

“Good. And Reed?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That report – I want it on my desk. By tomorrow afternoon, without fail.”

I sat stunned for a moment, trying to come to grips with the enormity of this cataclysm. Wicks glared after Oakhurst’s departing bulk, then shut his office door. “Well, DI Reed? What’s the matter? Two days ago you were begging to stay on this case. Now you’ve a face like a slapped arse.”

I shot him a look of reproach. “Have you seen the videos, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve a sense of what’s at stake here. These men are my friends, Detective Superintendent. If the contents of those disks become known outside this office... they’re dynamite. They’re going to make headlines and things are going to get very ugly, very fast. Public humiliation, divorce, utter ruin. It’s all on the table.”

“They’ll blame you, of course. And if you try to shield them, Oakhurst will have your scrotum for a coin-purse.”

“Yes.” I could feel the weighty truth of that.

“Dex.” Wicks never called me by my Christian name; I glanced up in surprise, to meet his uncharacteristically fatherly gaze. “Don’t lose sight of the fact that, no matter how richly he may have deserved it, it’s very likely that one of your friends blew John Weathersby’s head off with an elephant gun. This isn’t the Old West. There’s a 98 percent clearance rate on London murders. We catch our murderers here, and lock them up.”

I nodded, and he went on. “This case is going to twist you like a pretzel, Reed. You can’t possibly bring the requisite objectivity to bear, and it’s going to tear you apart. I don’t want to see that happen.” He looked as though the words were being dragged out of him with red-hot pincers. “You’re a good investigator, Dex. But if you knock this one on, I won’t be able to protect you from Oakhurst. You’re simply going to have to approach this case as if you’ve never met these people before.”

“I appreciate the rugby metaphor. But why, sir?”

“Why what?”

“Why am I back on the case?”

“Oakhurst insisted, and managed to convince Deputy Assistant Commissioner Goddard. Obviously Oakhurst is counting on you giving him grounds for disciplinary action. Just as I am counting on you to bring this case to a quietly successful conclusion.”

“Ah.”

“There may also have been some pressure from outside the department to re-establish you on this case,” Wicks added delicately. “The English aristocracy, while a sad, jug-eared mockery of its former glory, is not wholly without influence. I believe there are some members of the Hastewicke Gentlemen who hope that having one of their own at the centre of the investigation may spare them some embarrassment. Just don’t let Oakhurst catch you at it.”

“I appreciate that, sir.” I rose to go, but his voice stopped me at the door.

“And Dex... perhaps now you also appreciate why I pulled you off this case.”

Brian glanced up as I re-entered our cube. “Good news!” I said with false heartiness. “Wicks and Oakhurst have decided that I‘m indispensable to the Weathersby case!”

For a moment, Brian just looked at me out of those basset-hound eyes of his, understanding. “You poor bastard,” was all he said.

Chapter 10

“Christ, let me at that toilet! I’ve just sharted!”

Sir Percival Henry St. John Barlowe, Harry to his mates, cracked the shower door in alarm. Through the billowing steam, he saw his suite-mate, Jester Atkinson, hobble through the door, snatch his trousers to the floor, and leap astride the crapper with a groan of relief. A deafening glissando shook the room, as if someone had attached an industrial air-compressor to a bassoon. It was followed, seconds later, by a stench most foul and ominous – fruity, yet repulsive, with a hint of rotting prawn.

“So fell a blast hath ne’re mine ears saluted, nor yet a stench so all-pervading and immortal!” quoted Barlowe, and opening the shower door wider, he turned the showerhead full blast on his unwelcome teammate. “Mark Twain, you graceless twit.”

Atkinson stoically endured the deluge, and sat dripping and gurning as he strained to crimp off another length. “I hate it when that happens,” he observed sadly.

Harry couldn’t help but laugh. You never knew what would happen next when you were on tour with Jester. He was simply unhinged. One minute you might enter the room to discover him at the window, gleefully squirting catsup and mustard at the unsuspecting pedestrians far below. The next, you might catch him applying a thin layer of Atom Balm to your athletic supporter, or humming as he wired a 9-volt battery to the sink taps. His was a mercurial wit that fairly sparked and dazzled, like one of his booby-trapped washbasins, and lesser men could only shake their heads in wonder.

Once, during the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s first Australian tour, Harry and Jester had been sitting in the bar of their Sydney hotel with Lord Ewan Ramsay, Hastewicke’s towering, dour Scots second-row. The door of the lobby toilet had opened, and a portly Aussie had emerged, his huge beard only slightly less voluminous than the fluffy crinoline dress that sheathed his loins. Its colour, an aggressive mustardy yellow, was particularly ill-suited to his ochre-red complexion; he was more an autumn than a spring. As the three Hastewicke Gentlemen had looked on in wonder, the Aussie had seized the arm of a much smaller bloke dressed in a matching Coleman’s-yellow suit and flounced off toward the ballroom. Gazing about the hotel lobby, the three teammates beheld other couples, all men, all dressed in similar his-and-hers outfits, all headed in the same direction.

Unable to restrain their curiosity, Harry, Jester and Ramsay had carried their pints over to examine the placard at the ballroom door: “Welcome Pan-Australian Gay Men’s Square Dancing Society!” The three had made their way to the gallery above the ballroom, to gaze down upon a scene of exquisite weirdness: dozens of colorfully-dressed male couples, do-se-doing and promenading like the chorus from a production of “Oklahomo!”

For a moment, the three Hastewicke Gentlemen could only stare in wonder. Then Jester had a brainwave. “I say, Ewan. What’ your room number?”

Ramsay, his gloomy Calvinistic features twisted into an expression of loathing at the scene below, distractedly fished his key from his pocket. “Ah... 661.” He started to tuck the key away, but it was too late; he had already fallen into the trap. With an underhand slap, Jester sent the key spinning through the air. It landed with a tinkle at the feet of one of the dancers, who retrieved the key and, looking upward for its source, encountered Ramsay’s eyes, bulging in horror. With a fey little wave, he tucked the key into his purse and mouthed the word “Later.”

Harry couldn’t help but chuckle when he recalled the scene, and its aftermath. Still smiling, he stepped from the shower and began to towel off. Jester, reaching for the toilet-roll, whistled. “Have you seen your back? Lovely set of rake-marks – I think I can see your spine.”

Harry had felt the sting of them in the shower; toweling off the fogged-up mirror, he examined them critically: four long, raised, angry-looking welts in the skin over the hard muscles of his lower back, inflicted by the cleats of an opposition number 8 when Harry had deliberately been slow rolling away from the ball in a ruck. He paused for a moment to examine his reflection – six feet tall, 17 stone, his once-luxurious hair now but a fringe, his beard full and sternum-length, with just a trace of grey. Still considerable muscle there, particularly in the chest and arms, thanks to his daily work with hammer and chisel.

“They’re beauties all right,” Harry said at length “– but they’ll heal. Anyway, I’m grateful to have them. It wasn’t long ago that I thought my days on rugby tour were gone forever.”

II

Harry Barlowe was the only member of the Hastewicke Gentlemen who wasn’t drinking on this tour. It had been two years since his last drink, two gloriously productive and fulfilling years. It had taken this long to regain enough of his wife’s trust to be allowed to go on rugby tour again. Thinking of all he had lost, and then regained, he didn’t miss the booze.

It is an indisputable fact that rugby and beer are intimately entwined. For most players it isn’t a serious problem; for those genetically predisposed to alcoholism, however, it can be a dangerous marriage. Both Harry’s father and paternal grandfather had been very committed alcoholics; both had died young and badly, after making catastrophes of their once-promising lives. Harry had never paused to consider that he might follow in their footsteps. By the time that thought occurred, at the age of 43, he found that he already had.

At first, drink hadn’t been a problem for Harry – he could have a few pints with the lads after a match or training-session, and stagger home none the worse for wear. Harry had always been a bit retiring, socially, always secretly afraid he was going to make an ass of himself. After a few pints, his shyness vanished, and he felt one of the lads.

He had begun spending more time at the pub with the boys, sometimes reeling home well-after closing-time. And, of course, weekends and tours were complete piss-ups. Before long, he was drinking every night. When his wife Sarah, home all day with their two young sons, became alarmed at his increasingly habitual insobriety, Harry had obligingly stopped drinking at home. At fairly regular intervals, uneasy at the toll the drink was taking on his work, he would stop drinking entirely, for a few weeks, a month, half a year.

It was easy enough to stop for a time, but he never managed to convince himself it was permanent. One day, he would look down and notice, with some surprise, that he once again had a pint in his hand. An empty pint. Almost before he had realized what was happening, the drinking had begun again.

One dreary November day, Harry emerged from his fog to discover that he had installed a well-stocked drinks cabinet in his sculpting studio. His drinking then assumed a deadly furtiveness; he experimented with various methods of disguising his intake, and felt a thrill of ignoble triumph whenever Sarah seemed not to notice he was intoxicated. When she did notice, he would ignore the desperation in her eyes and lie as he’d never lied before.

The end came on the clear, frosty Christmas night of 2009. Knowing that Sarah’s family were coming to dinner, Harry nevertheless managed to consume two bottles of Stolychnia vodka between breakfast and the arrival of their guests. Erroll Flynn had written, in his autobiography, that he preferred vodka because its neutral odor was undetectable on the breath. Flynn was, of course, quite wrong, in this and many things; after all, what can you expect from a man who died at the age of 50 with a liver the size of a rugby ball?

Christmas dinner was an utter fiasco; even Harry’s four-year-old son could tell he was ripped. Despite Sarah’s mortified attempts to wrest away the cutlery, Harry had stubbornly insisted on carving. He had nearly lopped off a finger and had bled all over the goose she had labored over for half the day. At last he had staggered outside for a breath of air, stopped for a piss, and plunged face-first into his wife’s prize rose-garden.

There he had lain, near death, until morning’s gentle light, and his own uncontrollable shivering, wakened him. Covered with frost and filth, and scourged by rose-thorns, he had reeled, appalled, into the house. The mess from last night’s dinner was still on the table. Sarah and the boys were gone. She had left him a note on the bed: “You have ruined our life. Words cannot convey what an unutterable bastard you are. I never want to see you again. My solicitor will be in touch.”

It was only then that he realized the truth: that unless he stopped drinking, for good this time, he would die disgraced, alone, and soon. It was as inevitable as the morning mail, as certain as the fact that a ringing phone in the middle of the night heralded bad news. And so he had dried his tears, gone to his studio, poured every drop of booze down the sink, and binned the empties. Then he had checked himself into a very expensive rehab clinic called The Elms.

A month of treatment and many gut-wrenching conversations with Sarah later, he had managed to talk her and the boys back into his life. But she had made it very clear that it was either alcohol, or her; if he ever drank again, they were finished. But he no longer felt the urge to drink; it was as if a great weight of anxiety had been lifted from his soul. He knew, deep down inside, having been mostly sober for the first 25 years of his life, that it was possible to find happiness without alcohol. He threw himself into work, into fatherhood, into rebuilding his shattered relationship with his wife, cheerfully and without self-pity. At length, to his eternal gratitude, he had succeeded.