Shelton let out a yelp of relief and keyed in the letters. He snuggled deeper into his sofa and gaped in fascination at the screen as the video file began to play. Ben and Wolf didn’t move from their chairs. Neither of them wanted to see it, ever again.
‘This is amazing,’ Shelton gasped. ‘Camera crews have managed to penetrate Bohemian Grove and captured footage of the occult ceremonies there, but nothing like this. How the hell did you ever find this place?’
‘Serendipity,’ Wolf said.
‘Where is it?’
‘A little pad called Karswell Hall, tucked away in the Surrey countryside,’ Ben told him. ‘Keep watching.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry, I intend to.’
Moments passed. They could follow the unfolding spectacle of the ritual just from watching the expression on Shelton’s face. His eyes grew wider and wider, and his mouth fell open. Finding the words to speak, he managed to blurt out, ‘It’s unbelievable. Nobody on the outside has ever seen this.’
‘Technically speaking, you’re the third,’ Ben said.
Soon after, Shelton seemed to have stopped breathing. When the blond-haired sacrificial victim in the white dress was brought out and tethered up to the foot of the statue of Thoth, sweat began to bead on his brow and trickle down his temples. In a mixture of horror and fascination he couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen. ‘This is really happening. They’re really going to do it, aren’t they? Aren’t they?’
‘You wanted to watch, arsehole,’ Wolf said. ‘So watch. I hope it makes you chuck up all over your fat gut.’
Shelton flinched and almost dropped the phone, and Ben knew that he’d reached the point in the playback where the High Priest with the goat horns had plunged in his dagger.
‘Oh, my God. Oh. Oh.’
‘Enjoy that?’ Wolf snarled.
‘It’s a little different when you’re seeing it for real,’ Ben said.
But Shelton hadn’t finished watching yet. He said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me see that again.’
Wolf asked in disgust, ‘What, once isn’t enough for you?’
Shelton didn’t reply. He tapped and swept the screen to rewind the playback. Did the thing with his fingers to make the image zoom in closer. He peered closely at the phone and screwed up his eyes as though he wanted to see better.
Then he said, ‘I know that girl.’
Chapter 48
‘Absolutely,’ Shelton said. ‘I’m not dreaming. I’ve seen her before, and I know who she is.’
Ben stared at him. ‘Then tell us.’
‘I can do better than that. I can show you who she is. Come with me to the War Room.’
Shelton heaved himself out of his sofa and started making for a doorway, but diverted his path towards the chiller cabinet. ‘First I need another drink. My guts are churning and my heart’s beating so fast I think I’m going to drop dead.’
‘You don’t need another drink,’ Ben said. ‘You need to take us to the War Room.’
‘Whatever the hell that is,’ Wolf added.
Shelton regretfully passed on the beer, wiping sweat from his face. ‘Very well, then, step this way.’
He led them from the room and down another spaceship corridor to another door. The War Room was a conference-room-sized office space with screens everywhere and more computer power than NASA Mission Control. Where the living area had been minimalistic, Shelton’s command centre was hopelessly cluttered and it was clear he spent most of his time there. The room smelled of body odour, stale beer and yesterday’s fried food. Acres of wall space were packed with books, magazines, files, except for a gap where a reproduction of an eighteenth-century oil painting hung in a gilt frame. Digging deep into his memory, Ben recognised it as Satan Summoning His Legions, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. He’d seen the original in the Royal Academy in London, back when his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel used to insist on dragging him around art exhibitions for his cultural edification.
‘Let’s see if I’m right about this,’ Shelton said, lumbering towards the largest of several desks. The desktop was covered with empty mugs and beer bottles, biscuit crumbs and pork pie wrappers. A bank of monitors above it displayed the images from the hidden cameras that watched Ben and Wolf’s arrival earlier, the church ruins and the empty track winding away into the distance.
Shelton slumped in his well-worn desk swivel chair, reached out a fat hand for a cordless mouse and started clicking away. His desktop screen had about a thousand website tabs crammed along the top of the window. He ran the cursor along them, muttering, ‘Let’s see, now. Here we are.’ He clicked, and a mainstream media news website came up. A couple more clicks, and Shelton had found the article he was looking for.
‘Aha. This is from just two days ago. I take it you fellows haven’t been watching the news too closely.’
‘We’ve been busy,’ Ben said.
The article’s headline was MP’S DAUGHTER DIES IN TRAGIC ROAD ACCIDENT. Shelton scrolled down. There were three images, the largest a picture of a young woman with a lopsided smile and tousled blond hair. She was younger than twenty, although something in her eyes hinted at experience beyond her years.
‘Bingo,’ Shelton said. ‘Nailed it.’
Ben and Wolf leaned close to the screen and stared hard at the girl’s face. Ben’s blood turned cold as he realised that Shelton was right. Wolf looked at Ben and nodded, thinking the same thing. She was the girl in the video, no question about it.
The image below showed a middle-aged couple who were obviously the girl’s parents, photographed outside an elegant Edwardian country home with a tall wrought-iron gateway in the foreground. The husband was tenderly comforting his wife, who was distraught and had her face pressed into his shoulder. The third image, below, was of the wreck of a two-seater sports car embedded in a tree and so badly smashed up that its front end was squashed like a concertina all the way up to its shattered windscreen.
‘Annie Dudley,’ Shelton said. ‘Nineteen years old, a model student at Sussex University. Travelling home alone from college when she lost control of her BMW Roadster on an empty road, for reasons as yet unclear. There were no witnesses. She suffered multiple injuries. Died instantly at the scene. Neat way to disguise the real cause of death, eh?’
‘Nice work,’ Wolf said acidly. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time someone pulled that trick.’
‘A private funeral service will be held on March twenty-eighth at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Hanbury, near the family home,’ Shelton read from the article. ‘That’s tomorrow, isn’t it?’
Ben nodded. He examined the picture of the parents. The man was tall, well-dressed, trimmer and more ruggedly handsome than the average politician. ‘Who’s the father?’
‘Some politician,’ Wolf said noncommittally. ‘Another fucking suit. They all look the same to me. At least this one still has his hair.’
Shelton turned away from the computer and raised his eyebrows at them. ‘Why, that’s Tristan Dudley, MP for Worcester and party favourite. Can’t say I know all that much about the guy, except that he’s one of the biggest names in British politics right now. Could be our PM one day. “Teflon Tris”, some of his rivals call him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because nothing ever sticks to him. I’ve read a couple of rumours that Dudley has managed to escape a number of scandals that would have been political death to most of his peers. Of course, he wouldn’t be the first politician to earn that kind of nickname.’
‘Friends in high places,’ Wolf said. ‘Useful thing to have.’
‘You have to wonder how useful,’ Ben said. ‘And how high.’
Shelton gave him a quizzical look. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, how did she end up the way she did?’
‘Maybe she was kidnapped,’ Shelton replied. ‘Happens all the time.’
‘I’m sure she was,’ Ben said. ‘Unless she went willingly, which I’d doubt. But think about it. Let’s suppose that a bunch of Satanists,
mostly drooling perverts with psychiatric control issues, are looking for their next victim. I’d imagine that any reasonably pretty young female would fit the bill for them.’
‘The textbook choice,’ Shelton said. ‘So?’
‘So, why not pick a runaway, or some poor homeless kid, or a drug addict, someone nobody’s going to miss? Have you any idea how many people go missing each year? Easy pickings, and you could easily tart them up to please the scumbags who gather to watch them being butchered. Instead they choose the daughter of a high-profile politician, whose tragic death is bound to generate big headlines. Which means they now have a lot of work to do to cover their tracks.’
‘Okay,’ Shelton said.
‘Think about what happened after the ritual was over, when the sickos had all disbanded and gone home. Someone had to take charge of cleaning up. The body had to be removed and disposed of, but they couldn’t just chop it up and feed it to the pigs or bury it in quicklime.’
‘Thank you,’ Shelton groaned, clutching his belly. ‘Just what my stomach needed after seeing that video.’
‘Her death had to be accounted for,’ Ben said. ‘The sacrifice took place more than a week before the car accident, so they kept the body on ice all that time while they arranged what must have been quite a tricky operation. Most faked accidents are obvious setups. If the police were fooled, it must have been fairly convincingly done. To pull that off takes planning, manpower and money. Why go to all that trouble, if any other victim would have served their purpose just as well? Why Annie Dudley?’
‘As a warning to her father, maybe,’ Wolf said, hunting for ideas.
Ben looked at him. ‘And why would that be?’
Wolf shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me, pal. Maybe he knows more than he should.’
‘Which makes our man Dudley a definite subject of interest,’ Ben said. ‘I want to know more.’ He turned to Shelton. ‘Over to you, Maestro.’
Shelton rose to the challenge. ‘Let’s start with the most recent thing I can find and work backwards from there.’ Jumping onto YouTube and rattling keys, he quickly found a day-old BBC TV interview with the grief-stricken father, filmed at home in a nice room with a grand fireplace covered in family photographs artfully positioned in the shot. It was one of those maudlin, hushed moments of journalistic insincerity where all concerned had to pretend they weren’t in it strictly for the ratings. Close to tears but manfully sucking it up, Tristan Dudley described how he’d spoken to his dear departed daughter just hours before she died, and seen her just the previous day. With a tremor in his voice he told the interviewer that Annie had been a wonderful, bright girl with her whole life ahead of her. The light of their lives, the best daughter anyone could wish for. Everyone loved her so much. They couldn’t believe she was gone. He and his wife were suffering from terrible shock but he intended to go on serving his constituency and his country as best he could, yadda yadda.
‘He’s lying,’ Ben said.
Chapter 49
Shelton paused the YouTube playback, freezing Tristan Dudley’s highly scripted monologue in mid-sentence. ‘I agree. Unless he’s in contact with the spirit world, no way can he be telling the truth.’
‘Someone got to him, you reckon?’ Wolf asked.
‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘Still doesn’t answer the question: why Annie?’
Wolf raised his arms. ‘Well then, what then?’
Ben turned to Shelton. ‘What kind of scandals did Dudley dodge, to get him the nickname “Teflon Tris”?’
‘Like I said, all I know is rumours. From what I heard, I got the impression that little Annie might not have been quite the model student and perfect daughter that her daddy’s cracking her up to be.’ Shelton shrugged. ‘Then again, he would say that, wouldn’t he? People don’t usually say negative things about their kid who just died. Especially not politicians, who lie their arses off even at the best of times.’
Ben said nothing for a long minute as thoughts churned through his mind. They needed to know more. The information to hand was just too flimsy. There had to be a better source than rumours, hearsay and speculation.
Then an idea suddenly came to him.
‘When did Georgie send you Abbott’s book manuscript?’ he asked Shelton.
Shelton looked taken aback by the unexpected question. ‘Just a few days ago. But the agency had already had it for three weeks. She said the ass was holding back from telling her about it, worried she’d get upset.’
‘So the hundred-page sample you’ve seen is at least three weeks old.’
‘I suppose so, yes. Why are you asking?’
‘Abbott had been up in his study working on his book when we found him dead at his home. If he was scribbling away hard and fast, several hours each day, he’d have completed a lot more of it in the space of three weeks. The latest draft could be hundreds of pages longer than the version you’ve seen.’
Shelton nodded. ‘True, but those extra hypothetical pages wouldn’t be of any more use to us than the earlier draft, if he was concealing real names.’
‘Which brings me to my next question,’ Ben said. ‘Because it doesn’t make sense to me that he’d have pulled his punches like that. If you’re going to blow the whistle, then blow it. Who writes an exposé making serious criminal allegations against their peers, but at the same time protects them from being identified?’
‘Someone who’s well placed to know what could happen to them if they named names.’
‘Then why take the risk in the first place? Abbott must have known they wouldn’t take it too well, either way. The whole point of writing the book would be to make a packet out of it, and run like hell in the hope that they’d never catch up with him.’
‘Which they would have,’ Wolf said. ‘They only employ the best manhunters in the business. Right, Ben?’ Ben made no reply. Wolf paused a moment, then added, ‘How d’you suppose they found out that he was getting ready to spill the beans on them all?’
‘Like I said, they have eyes and ears everywhere,’ Shelton replied. ‘He was a damn fool if he thought he’d ever get away with it.’ Turning back to Ben he said, ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I don’t know much about publishing,’ Ben said, ‘but I’d bet it’s a tough game. Truckloads of competition, no guarantees. When he submitted his proposal to them, he couldn’t assume they’d run with it, or agree to represent him, or whatever it is that literary agents do. For all he knew he’d get a rejection letter by return post.’
‘So?’
‘So he wouldn’t have tipped his hand too early by letting them see all the dirt. That would be far too trusting. Instead he’d have played it safe, and sent them a redacted version that offered a taster, but no more, with all the real names temporarily switched for fictitious ones. At least, that’s what I would have done.’
Shelton didn’t look convinced. ‘Rewriting a whole chunk of your manuscript with fake names and editing out all the incriminating details sounds like a lot of work.’
‘Didn’t you and your buddies in the Gang of Four pull a few all-nighters when you were creating the computer app that made you your millions?’
‘Damn right we did; more than a few.’
‘Abbott thought he was about to hit the mother lode, too. Same principle.’
Shelton considered it, and nodded slowly. ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’
‘If I’m right,’ Ben said, ‘then if the agency had agreed to take him on, the final draft he’d have given them would be totally uncensored, with all the stuff he’d taken out put back in again. And I’m certain that Seaward and Laverack knew that’s what he was planning. Hence, the real reason why they got cold feet and declined his book. Explosive’s not the word for the effect it would have had.’
‘Fine, fine, whatever you say,’ Shelton replied impatiently. ‘But why are we even discussing this? It’s an academic point, considering that the redacted version – assuming that’s what it is – is all we have, all anybody’s ever going
to see. Right?’
Ben replied, ‘Wrong. Abbott’s laptop with the original version on it is inside my bag.’
‘Thanks to moi,’ Wolf said, stabbing his chest with his thumb and then pointing at Ben. ‘He was going to leave it behind.’
Shelton stared at them both. ‘If you are right about this, then it could blow the whole thing wide open for us. It would reveal who they are.’
‘Just one thing, though,’ Ben said. ‘Abbott had his book manuscript password-protected and we couldn’t get into it. Is that going to be a problem?’
‘Hey, I’m a multi-millionaire tech wizard who wrote the code that revolutionised the internet,’ Shelton said. ‘If I can’t get into someone’s laptop file, then nobody can.’
‘That’s what I was hoping you were going to say,’ Ben said. ‘Then get to it, Veritas.’
Shelton detached himself from the desk chair and went padding off in haste to retrieve Abbott’s laptop from the crate in the other room. He returned a few moments later, puffing hard and clutching the shiny black Dell under his arm. Back in his chair, he cleared a space among the debris to set it down and get to work. He examined the ports on the laptop, then from a bale of tangled wires selected an interface cable to hook it up to his own, much more powerful, system, before grabbing a remote keyboard and launching himself into a flurry of key-tapping like a concert pianist. Jasper Shelton couldn’t move his body very fast, but his fingers were a blur.
‘This might take a while,’ he warned. ‘The decryption application has to process millions and millions of digit combinations.’
‘How long?’
‘Maybe as much as six or seven minutes,’ Shelton said, unimpressed by such primitive steam-age technology. ‘Someday I’ll get around to remapping the data code. But it’ll do for now.’
A window appeared in the middle of Shelton’s main screen, assuring them that it was WORKING ON IT. They waited while the machine zipped at light-speed through the near-infinite number of possible password combinations. Wolf perched on a nearby desk. Ben lit a Gauloise. Shelton pawed the air and said, ‘Really? Must you?’
The Demon Club Page 26
