Now I cut the engine and toed the side-stand down, pulling off my helmet. Beezer greeted me by bouncing three feet into the air and yapping excitedly. Clare took one look at my face and swallowed the crack she'd undoubtedly been going to make about me being late.
“What's happened?” she demanded, leading the way in through the studded oak front door.
“Don't ask,” I said. My anger had dissipated, replaced by a weariness that went through to my bones. I told myself I was just tired, but I knew it went deeper than that.
We moved along the uneven stone flags of the hallway to the big cosy kitchen, where Jacob should have been slaving over a hot stove.
He was actually sitting at the scrubbed pine table. There was a glass of wine by his elbow and a pile of paperwork in front of him, and he was speaking in what appeared to be Klingon on the telephone. It turned out to be Japanese. Clare whispered to me that he was winding up the sale of a pair of restored Velocettes to a collector in Tokyo.
“On a Sunday?” I whispered back.
Jacob looked up and dazzled me with that slow grin of his, then went back to his unintelligible conversation.
Clare dragged me a cold beer out of the fridge and we went through to the snug back sitting room to leave Jacob to finish the call in peace. Despite the sun outside, a blazing fire was lit in the huge open hearth. I disappeared into the depths of their big squashy sofa when I sat down, quickly buried by the arrival of the terrier on my lap.
“So,” Clare said when I'd had my first mouthful of beer, “are you going to tell me what's been going on?”
I told her the whole tale about my experiences at the nightclub since I'd rescued her from the clutches of Susie Hollins. Jacob came in just as I was telling her about my confrontation with Len. They both sat in silence until I'd gone through the events of the night before in full, and my subsequent encounter with the police that morning.
“The fascist little shits!” he said with feeling when I'd finished. “Do they honestly think you're going to start a major fight on your first night? Unbelievable!”
“What are you going to do?” Clare asked. Bonneville came waddling into the lounge then, following the sound of our voices, and collided with a standard lamp. Clare caught it without taking her eyes off me, well used to the dog's blunders.
“There's not a lot I can do,” I said. “I'm not sure I want to carry on working at the club, though. I rely on recommendations from the local police for some of my business. I can't afford to upset them.”
“What interests me,” Jacob put in slowly, “is why they came round to see you at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, why didn't this Len and Angelo back up your story? I thought you bouncer types were supposed to stick together,” he said with a bit of a grin. “It doesn't sound like they've tried to help you at all. In fact, it sounds more like they're actively trying to drop you in it.”
I thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I know Marc said afterwards that he'd told them to let me handle something on my own, just to check me out, but I would have thought it should have been obvious to someone of their experience straight away that it was serious.”
“Exactly,” he said, downing the last of his wine as he stood up. “Perhaps you should be asking yourself what you know that could be so important, Charlie. Or what you might find out when you're there. It might tell you why someone seems to want to get you out of the way.”
“That's ridiculous,” I argued. “I didn't go after them for a job at the place. Marc made me an offer last Saturday night when Susie had a go at Clare. Why on earth would he do that one week, then try and get rid of me the next?”
“Maybe he didn't have a choice,” Clare put in. “If I remember right it was actually that bar manager chap – Gary is it? – who first suggested they employ you. Maybe Marc couldn't say no without it appearing suspicious.”
“Suspicious to whom?” I asked, idly scratching the terrier's head. Beezer wriggled her muscular little body with delight. “He could have shot Gary down in flames instantly and it wouldn't have looked anything out of the ordinary. No,” I shook my head, “he seemed quite keen then.”
“So,” Jacob said, “what happened between then and yesterday to make him change his mind about you?” He moved stiffly over to the door. “Do you want to come through to the kitchen, by the way? I'll see if anything of my culinary masterpiece can be salvaged at this late hour.”
Clare grinned at me behind his back as I stood up, tipping the disgruntled terrier off my knees. We followed Jacob's halting steps back along the hallway. He walks with a permanent limp, his legs more steel than bone in places.
Jacob used to race bikes when he was younger, with more courage than was good for him. If he travels abroad he jokes that he has to take his X-rays with him to avoid being strip-searched going through the airport metal detectors.
Once we were settled round the kitchen table and Jacob had retrieved an absolutely perfect beef and baby onion stifado out of the oven in the Aga, he repeated his earlier question. “So, come on – what's happened to warrant this man Quinn's sudden reversal of opinion of you?”
“Susie Hollins was murdered for a start,” Clare supplied, getting carried away with the idea. “Hey, that could be it! She'd just been in his club, and we've only got his word for it that he actually threw her out.”
“Clare,” I said, tearing off a hunk of crusty bread to shamelessly sop up my gravy with. “Marc was sitting down talking to us just after that. I hardly think he'd had time to do Susie in, change into an identical set of clothes so there'd be no bloodstains, and get back upstairs to chat, all within the space of about ten minutes, do you?”
She looked crestfallen. “Oh. No, I suppose you're right.”
I recalled the incidents at the Lodge, but I didn't mention them to Jacob and Clare. I don't know why. I suppose I just didn't want to admit that since Susie's rape and murder someone had been taking rather too much of an interest in other vulnerable women. It was as if putting voice to my fears would make them more real.
Jacob got up to replenish our drinks, giving Clare's shoulder a reassuring squeeze as he went past. “Anything else you can think of?”
“Well, Terry did come round last Sunday with a computer he said he'd picked up from someone at the club as part of a debt,” I said uneasily, remembering he'd been supposed to be collecting the lap-top this weekend, but he hadn't been in touch.
“Hang on a minute – who’s Terry?” Jacob said, sitting down again.
“He’s the local mobile video man,” Clare put in promptly. “He comes round to the office every Friday. Or he usually does, but this week he didn’t show up.”
“And he gave you a computer as part of a debt?”
“No, no,” I explained. “He told me that someone at the club owed him money, and they’d given him a lap-top computer instead, but they’d password protected it, so Terry couldn’t use it.” I forked a chunk of meat into my mouth and savoured it as it dissolved on my tongue. If I believed all the scare stories that I was going to get mad cow disease from eating British beef, I reckoned it was probably worth it.
“So why did he come to you?” Clare asked. “You don’t even own a computer.”
“No,” I agreed, “but I have friends in low places. You remember Sam Pickering, with the Norton? He’s a bit of a whizz with the things and he managed to get round it, no problem. The only thing was, when we got into the machine, there didn’t seem to be anything on it, so I don’t know if it was one stolen recently from the club itself, or if it just happened to belong to somebody who worked there.”