by Dan Kavanagh
‘It was a sort of joke, really,’ said Damian, almost apologetically. ‘To start off with. We tried to think of who wouldn’t miss a chunk of cash, and we thought of Angela, and then we wondered what we might have on her. And then we remembered her sneaking off upstairs with some boy here. I mean, we didn’t catch them at it or anything, she may have been showing him the view from the roof for all we knew, but we just thought we’d give it a run.’
‘So you went to a phone-box and put on your funny foreign accent.’
‘Foreign? Oi put on moi Oirish accent, that’s all. Tells you how much Angela notices things.’
‘And she paid?’
‘We couldn’t believe it. I kept the folks entertained with some tittle-tattle, Sally pretended to go and lie down with girls’ trouble, and sneaked off up the drive. It was all so ridiculously easy. We didn’t really believe it, so we just kept going back to the same place.’
‘I don’t see why you didn’t ask her for a loan,’ Duffy repeated.
‘People are funny about money,’ said Sally again, as if pronouncing a rare truth.
‘Where do you do your shopping. Up in London?’
‘No, no, no. They come to us. It’s all very well-organized.’
‘What, here?’ Duffy imagined a van with a fancy name on the side and a royal ‘By Appointment’ crest on the front. ‘Messrs Smack, Coke & Hash: Purveyors of Narcotics to the Gentry. Deliveries Thursday and Saturday. Credit Allowances.’
‘Course not. We do it at the motorway caff.’
Fair enough. One of the usual places. Duffy sometimes wondered what would happen if they cracked down on all the naughtiness — from adulterous hand-holding to criminal meets — that took place in motorway caffs. Would the restaurants survive?
They all looked at one another for a minute or so. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ asked Damian.
‘I don’t know.’ Duffy had no particular reason — or desire — to be soft on them. ‘It’s up to D/S Vine from here on. Obviously I’ll pass on what you’ve told me. He’ll probably want to go over the same ground again. Then it’s up to him. He might think it would be a good idea for you to make another payment under laboratory conditions. Or he might just throw you in a cell, of course. It all depends on whether he takes a light-hearted view of blackmail and hard drugs or not.’
‘Oh God,’ said Damian, ‘you’re making it sound so serious.’
‘It was only fun,’ Sally repeated. ‘Don’t you ever have fun?’ Duffy didn’t answer that. He wasn’t altogether sure about fun. Take the dogs at Walthamstow: that had felt like fun, but maybe it was only fun because he’d just been having such a shitty time on the Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire borders. Sally had another question. ‘Are you going to tell Ange?’
‘Perhaps it would be better coming from you.’ Sally seemed to be one of those girls people always did things for. Well, she could get on with this by herself.
Duffy straightened up. As he turned to go, Damian said, ‘Assuming I’m not in the slammer, you won’t forget our little grudge match on the green baize?’
‘Assuming,’ said Duffy. Most people didn’t have any sense of priorities, he reflected.
‘And I’ll do my best to stay off the infamous marching powder beforehand.’
‘I can’t think why you use it,’ said Duffy.
‘I can’t think why you don’t, given the wretched little prod-and-poke game you seem to be managing with at the moment. Gives you flow, that’s what it does, gives you flow.’
Duffy agreed that his game required a bit of flow, as well as a few other things — like skill, accuracy, reliability, nerve — but he was committed to getting them in the old-fashioned way. When he turned up for his lesson at Winterton House the gravel made the same posh sound, like some breakfast cereal whispering back to him as he poured on the milk. Henry, in a typical mixture of large-checked jacket, floppy handkerchief, foulard and cavalry twill trousers, greeted him with a punch on the shoulder. ‘Who’s been going into the woods with me gel, eh?’
‘I told you …’ Duffy hoped that Angela hadn’t blabbed to Henry after he’d gone off to look for the drop.
‘So you did.’ Henry put his large, square, red face closer to Duffy’s. ‘How much is that doggie in the woodshed, and all that. Eh?’
‘Sure.’
‘Mother’s expecting us for tea at four-thirty, so why don’t we get down to it?’
Once again, they went through the house to the gentlemen’s quarters, to the darkened billiard room with its smell of old leather and yesterday’s cigar smoke. On the sideboard Duffy noticed one of those Victorian decanter units with a lock to stop the servants from sneaking a drink; though, if Braunscombe Hall was anything to go by, the servants wouldn’t bother with half-full decanters of whisky. They’d just unload a case of the stuff straight from the wine merchant’s van into their own back kitchen.’ An old British custom in the big houses,’ as Mrs Colin had put it.
‘You rack the balls,’ said Henry, who was picking out his cue. Duffy gathered the reds together and began to corral them into the heavy mahogany triangle. Was it an illusion, or did they sound a bit solider as they clanked gently together? And weren’t some of the colours marginally different from those at Braunscombe Hall? The blue ball seemed a little darker, the brown a little redder. Of course: Henry had the authentic ivory balls, Vic the new super-crystallate jobs. Over the last few years they’d fiddled with some of the colours to make them show up better on television. Duffy wasn’t sure he approved. He was no traditionalist, but he preferred the feel of the old-fashioned set. He also preferred Henry’s immaculate 1866 Thurston to Vic’s table, which had more runkles than an unmade bed.
In the cloister calm of the billiard room, with its old smells, its quietly clicking ivory, and its fierce burst of colour in the midst of darkness, Henry became subtly altered. Duffy had seen fat men put on ice skates and acquire a sudden elegance as the blade bit its frozen trail; and something of the sort happened to Henry. A large, rigid fellow who bicycled with knees and elbows out became smoother and neater; even smaller, if that was possible. As Damian would have put it, he had flow. He wasn’t flash — he didn’t start moving on to the next shot before the pot had gone down — but he had a certainty of purpose about him. He looked at ease.
Duffy was much less relaxed. Henry’s confidence made him edgy, and Henry’s game made him edgier still. He found himself charging at risky long pots, then ruthlessly pinned back into baulk, then humiliatingly snookered. He had a little run on the colours towards the end, but still had to chew on the wrong end of a 72-28 scoreline.
Then they had the lesson. Henry was very keen on getting Duffy’s stance right. He made him take up position and promptly started adjusting him, like a photographer with a model. He fiddled with the splaying fingers of Duffy’s bridge hand. He pushed the head down further over the cue. He knelt and shifted Duffy’s legs around until his feet were a bit more parallel. He pushed the right hand a few inches down the cue and tried to make the forearm hang vertically from the elbow. Finally, he made Duffy practise locking his hips. This part involved Henry taking him by the waist, slipping his hands down a couple of inches, and tugging gently in a clockwise direction.
Duffy’s hips locked, and he found himself in a perfect cueing position; but something seemed to be preventing him from playing the shot. For a start, Henry was half-resting on his back; more noticeably, Henry’s large palms, which had been glued to Duffy’s hip-bones, had contrived to ease themselves into his trouser pockets. Duffy didn’t move. He let Henry rummage around for a while before coughing gently and lining up a brown.
Henry withdrew his hands. ‘Just checking the balls were in the right pockets,’ he said cheerily.
The lesson continued, with Henry occasionally laying hands on Duffy, who didn’t shrug him off but didn’t exactly reciprocate. Then they played another frame, which Henry won less easily, though whether this was because Duffy’s game had improved or Henry was t
hinking of other things was impossible to tell. With twenty minutes left before they were expected for tea by Henry’s mother, he suggested another lesson. Duffy claimed to have had enough, so they sat down on the creaky leather settle from which men with mutton-chops and big cigars and glasses of port would once have presided over some after-dinner billiards.
‘How’s Angela?’
‘Top-notch. Taken all this stuff like a trooper.’
‘I expect you can’t wait to get married?’ Duffy couldn’t resist the question, even if it might be a little cruel, given Henry’s recently declared fondness for pocket billiards.
‘Rather.’
‘Terrible thing to happen to her, though, so soon before the wedding.’
‘Fancy old Jimmy turning out to be a psycho.’ Henry shook his head sadly.
‘You wouldn’t have thought him capable, then?’
‘Well, that’s the point, you can’t tell with psychos, can you?’
‘Anyway,’ said Duffy, ‘they’ll soon prove whether it was him or not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, tests and things.’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘That sort of thing …’ Duffy was deliberately drawing it out. ‘Not exactly …’
‘Look, just spit it out. She’s my gel, I think I ought to know.’
‘Sorry, Henry, it’s just a bit… embarrassing, really.’ Duffy appeared to be broaching a tricky subject with reluctance. ‘I was talking to D/S Vine about it. He’s very interested in all the latest technology, that sort of stuff. Well, you know what happened to Angela … after she was tied up.’ Henry looked away and nodded. ‘According to Vine, what they can do now is examine it. They’ve found a way of analysing it. Under a microscope. Sperm,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s like fingerprints. They can find out where it came from.’
‘I’ve never heard of that,’ said Henry.
‘Nor had I,’ said Duffy. ‘Apparently it’s pretty new and pretty expensive, so they can only use it in special cases. I mean, someone does a rape in London, they couldn’t possibly go round collecting samples from everybody. But in the present case … well, Jimmy’s denying it, isn’t he? It may have happened up at his camp but no one saw him there. Angela didn’t recognize him. So obviously they’ll make him give a sample and that will clinch it one way or the other.’ Duffy paused, waiting for Henry to ask the obvious question. He didn’t. ‘And of course, if they don’t get a match, then that would put Jimmy pretty much in the clear.’ Again, no question came. ‘And as there can’t be that many males who are regular frequenters of Braunscombe Hall, I should think the obvious course would be to come round and collect a few more samples. Eliminate all the obvious candidates, as it were. I’m only guessing. It’d be up to Vine to make the decision.’
Henry nodded and didn’t say anything. ‘What about tea?’ Duffy suggested.
Henry’s mother was in the conservatory, surrounded by Kew Gardens. She still had on her pink running-shoes but was now in a cream linen suit with lots of beads round her neck. Except that they wouldn’t be just beads, any more than Henry’s snooker balls would be made of super-crystallate.
‘Still wearing that nasty tie you borrowed from the crook.’
‘He doesn’t have a criminal record, if you must know.’ Suddenly, Duffy felt defensive about old Vic, even if he was a bit of a chancer.
‘That’s a very narrow definition of a crook. If you had to have a criminal record to be a crook … Take Henry, for instance.’
‘Mother!’
‘Well, you’re a crook, aren’t you, dear?’ Duffy noted that the first time Henry’s mother had used a term of endearment to her son was in the same breath as accusing him of being a criminal. Henry opened his mouth, but his mother went on. ‘That diseased veal you sold, remember?’
‘We didn’t know for sure it was diseased.’
‘You mean they hadn’t actually died?’
‘But you can’t obey all the Min. of Ag.’s regulations, otherwise you’d go mad. I only did what any other farmer …’
‘Exactly. All the other farmers are crooks, too. Are you a crook, by the way?’
‘Me?’ said Duffy.
‘You’re certainly wearing a crook’s tie. You don’t mind my asking?’
‘No, sure. I’m a crook, too. You can tell by looking.’ Duffy was less charmed on this visit by Henry’s mum. He took a bite of fruit cake. That tasted posh as well. Where he came from it was cake with bits of fruit in; here it was fruit with bits of cake in. Easy on the flour, you could hear them shouting.
Henry wasn’t saying much, and after a single cup of tea Duffy got up to leave. ‘So sorry you have to go,’ said Henry’s mum brightly. ‘Do come again. I still want to be told what goes where.’
By the time Duffy got back to Braunscombe Hall, Detective-Sergeant Vine was installed for another session. The analysis on the Datsun had come through but had proved inconclusive: no bomb, no commercial explosives, on the other hand no carbonized squirrel with sharp teeth, and no reports of summer lightning striking at random across the county. A bit of string stuck down the petrol tank, something like that seemed the most likely. An efficient piece of destruction, but less than hi-tech.
D/S Vine had talked to the Datsun’s owner again, and Sally had had a small confession to make. Damian had come along, and offered a small confession of his own. But the morning story and the afternoon story — as Duffy discovered when D/S Vine relayed the latter version to him — were about as similar as a video nasty and a kid’s pop-up book. There had been some thinking done while Duffy had been away, and it was pretty clear that Damian had been doing it. There had been some thinking, and also some closing of ranks. Angela, for a start, had been squared.
The new account — the one some expensive lawyers might in the future be hired to defend — went like this. Damian and Sally had, they admitted, been a little naughty in the past. They had, because it was part of the life-style of their generation, dabbled in drugs; well, go to London nowadays and you practically get a free sample as you buy your return ticket, you know what it’s like, Mr Vine, sir, don’t you? They’d done a little coke in their time, and they were prepared to pay for this sin whatever price society demanded. But they hadn’t used for a while, in fact they’d given up going to London. They lived quietly in the country with their friends now. The trouble was, London had come to them. They were being blackmailed by someone they had once bought drugs from, someone who had sought them out and demanded money. They’d paid him three times so far, but he was still greedy. The terrible thing was, they didn’t have much money between the two of them, and when they’d mentioned their plight to Angela she had insisted on footing the bill. She was incredibly generous, Angela, and said she had lots of money, but it was all getting out of hand. The blackmailers must have seen Sally taking Ricky for a walk and then killed him; they’d set fire to her car; and they probably had worse things up their sleeve. Could Mr Vine help them, please? Perhaps when Damian made their next payment, which Angela was kindly putting up, and which was due to be handed over at the motorway caff the following day?
Duffy whistled when he heard Vine’s version. Not bad for a couple of hours. The best quick-change artists outside the music hall: from blackmailer to blackmailee in the twinkling of an eye. Angela changed from victim to sterling friend as soon as you turned your back. Roll up, roll up, and watch posh people closing ranks! Duffy supplied the earlier account of events and it was Vine’s turn to whistle. ‘It makes you just want to let them all get on with it, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘But you won’t.’
‘Not if they’re blowing up cars, et cetera.’
‘Sure.’
‘After all, we’re still after the same person or persons. Then, when we catch them, we’ll decide whether to do them for blackmail or pushing.’
‘You’re going to have to alert London.’
‘I know.’
‘Pity we couldn’t have had that r
aid on the Hall.’ Duffy wished he’d been able to watch Damian being held upside-down by a muscular police sergeant while all sorts of pills and powders and funny tobacco fell out of his trouser pockets. But what hadn’t been destroyed before Detective-Sergeant Vine’s first visit would certainly have been flushed away by now.
Vine didn’t need any help from Duffy in planning things for the next day. He would alert London, get the local drugs squad back off traffic duty, arrange the tail, fix for a takeover vehicle half-way to London, and so on. But perhaps Duffy might like to sit in on the drop; just in case the messenger turned out to be local. Wouldn’t do to scare him away with a familiar face. Duffy accepted.
He stayed away from the Hall that evening. He didn’t want to meet Lucretia in the family room and be told whether he was funny ha-ha or funny peculiar. He didn’t want to sit opposite Damian at dinner and find him shiny with self-confidence again, all plumped up with how cleverly he’d snookered D/S Vine and how he and Sally might be looking at not much more than a suspended sentence, max. He didn’t want to run into Angela and start wondering how she woozily sorted out what she thought of her charming friends; nor did he much want to look at her and remember Henry’s big red hands sliding into his trousers. ‘Just checking if the balls are in the right pockets.’ Duffy sat in the motorway caff pushing a lukewarm shepherd’s pie round his plate, and sipping at the alcohol-free lager he’d chosen to counteract the effects of the shovelful of chips with which he’d anointed his pie. After a slice of fruit tart and a plain yoghurt he returned to the Hall and went to bed early, taking care not to disturb the others.
‘Any advice?’ said Damian the next morning when they ran into one another on the terrace. Duffy, keen to get out of the house, had gone for an uncharacteristic walk: an hour or so of plodding head-down through the woods, watching out for nettles and bear-traps, trying not to OD on the country air.
‘You mean generally?’ Duffy could have got quite enthusiastic when it came to giving general advice to Damian.
