“She claims to be the fiancée of one of the injured parties, whom you attacked, without provocation, on the dance floor at the club.” I remembered the dark-haired girl with the pierced tongue.
“OK,” I said, holding up my hands. “I'll admit to the shoulder and I suppose to the testicle, but one of them had already glassed the other one in the face before I got there. That was nothing to do with me.”
“So you just waded in there, two against one, when you claim one of them was armed with an offensive weapon, and you inflicted major injuries on the pair of them?” the older one demanded incredulously. He caught sight of my punchbag on its hook in the corner of the living room. “A bit of a boxer, are you?”
I ignored his last sarky remark. “Yes, he still had the bottle on him when I got there,” I said. “Look, I was employed as a member of the security staff to deal with trouble. I saw the fight and I went to break it up, but they both had a go at me. What was I supposed to do while one had his arm round my throat and the other was trying to disembowel me – reason with them?” Oh God, I sounded like Len.
“And you fought them off?” Tommy asked, a picture of dubiousness.
“That's right.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes!”
“Any ideas what started this fight in the first place?” the older one put in.
I shrugged. “It looked like it was probably a classic case of "Oi, get your hands off my girlfriend" but it didn't help that he was definitely on something at the time.”
I thought of Marc's warning, delivered almost as a threat. Nobody spreads rumours that the New Adelphi is open house for aspiring chemists, he'd said. Don't worry, Marc, the only people I've mentioned it to are a couple of coppers. Oh well . . .
The pair opposite me exchanged pointed looks again, but to my surprise they didn't pursue it further. On cue they both got to their feet.
The older one screwed his hat into place and regarded me dubiously. “That will be all, for the moment, Miss Fox,” he said. “We'll let you know if any charges are being brought.”
I rose, too, stuffing my hands into my jeans pockets. “Is that likely?”
“Who knows? But if I were you,” he said with a faint patronising tone, “I'd try and stay out of trouble for a while.”
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered under my breath as they disappeared down the staircase. “That's a great help.”
Their footsteps faded as they reached the street. It was only as I turned away from the door that I saw Tommy had left his hat lying upside-down on my coffee table. I crossed the room and picked it up. I was just debating whether I wanted to bother going after them to give it back when I heard a single set of footsteps on the stairs again and Tommy reappeared in the doorway.
I dangled the offending item from a finger. “Forgotten something?” I asked, my voice acidic.
To my surprise, he gave me a level look as he retrieved his headgear. “No, actually,” he said, “I just wanted a chance to have a quiet word with you. On your own, like.”
I raised my eyebrows and said nothing.
Tommy hesitated, glancing uneasily over his shoulder as though his mate might somehow miraculously materialise on the landing behind him.
“I just wanted to give you a word to the wise,” he went on, hurriedly. “On the face of it, you don't look a likely candidate for a Section Twenty assault, know what I mean? You haven't got a record, but quite a few of the guys Quinn's got working for him have. You're mixing in dangerous company if you want to keep your nose clean.”
“You mean you don't believe that's how it happened?” I demanded, feeling my temper rise like a prickle of hairs. “You think that the kid was clean and I just went overboard?”
He flushed, looking uncomfortable. “Quinn swears security's tight enough so that nobody manages to get into the place with anything on them,” he said.
When he saw my face he added hastily, “Not that I take that as gospel, but by the time the boy was through with Casualty and our lads got to see him, he wasn't showing any signs of being on anything. On the other hand,” he went on, “he didn't seem very happy with his girlfriend that she'd got us involved, which was good for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if he hadn't been so dead against pressing formal charges, we'd have been breaking your door down at five this morning and hauling you down the station instead of coming round now for a friendly chat, like.”
“But I was just doing my job,” I protested.
He shrugged. “That's not the impression we got from Quinn's staff. They were dropping hints that you might have gone in too hard, like. You want to watch your back there, Charlie.”
“I will.” I managed to remember my manners enough to be slightly less ungracious. “Thank you, anyway. I appreciate the warning.”
He looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, you do quite a bit of work up at the Lodge, don't you?” he said. “I get called out to a lot of domestics. Mrs Shelseley's a nice lady.”
“Tom!” yelled a voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Are you going to be all day? Get a shift on, will you.”
“OK,” Tommy called back. “I'm on my way.”
He flashed me a quick smile, jammed his hat on, and trotted away to join his colleague.
I sighed, trying to roll away the tension that was cramping my shoulders. All in all, it wasn't quite the way I'd envisaged starting off my quiet Sunday morning.
***
By the time I'd changed into my leathers, got the bike fired up, and locked the flat, it was well past the eleven-thirty by which I'd promised to be at Jacob and Clare's. I knew Jacob, who timed the cooking of his meals like a covert military operation, was going to be spitting feathers, but I also knew it was going to be easier to explain my lateness face to face.
As I gunned away along the tree-lined quay towards town I should have been having a good time. The weather was just right, the sort of cold air the Suzuki really runs well in, but I would have felt better if it had been dark grey skies and raining buckets.
I was so angry it made my hands ache.
I slipped through into a gap in traffic on the main road going past the bus station and weaved smoothly across all three lanes to make the best progress. If I was going to ride like that, I really should have been giving it all my concentration, but half my mind was on other things.
How dare they not believe me! OK, so you tend to get pulled by the lads on Traffic more when you're on a bike than if you drive a car. Even so, that hardly made me a criminal, for heaven's sake. And anyway, it was clear they didn't have a clue about my past to damn me by.
I barrelled left round Sainsbury's and, by dint of dropping down two gears and caning it, managed to hit the temperamental lights on Parliament Street just as they were turning to amber.
I always used to think of myself as very law-abiding. Still do, I suppose – I even have a TV licence. But when I'd needed justice in the past, it had been spectacularly unforthcoming. Now I was suddenly on the receiving end of the boys in blue, when all I'd been doing was my job.
If this was the sort of treatment I could expect working for Marc, I made up my mind to tell him to stuff it!
I made it out to Jacob and Clare's place on the outskirts of Caton in record time for me. Clare came out to greet me as I pulled up. She had a couple of the dogs with her, a loopy wire-haired terrier called Beezer and a clumsy old half-blind black Labrador named Bonneville.
I wasn't surprised to see Clare waiting for me. Jacob not only deals in classic bikes, but all sorts of interesting antiques as well. He stores the stuff in the numerous barns and outbuildings dotted around the place and he doesn't like surprise visitors.
Somewhere along the drive are two hidden sensors, connected to warning buzzers inside the house. I've never been able to work out exactly where they are.