Loose Head by Jeff Keithly

grasp. “But John.”
    “What?”
    “What blackmailer, playing for these stakes, would fail to have a backup plan? An insurance policy, if anything should happen to him?”
    Brian smiled grimly. “That codicil in his will. The left-luggage key.”
    I nodded. “Better get a Section 1 warrant.”
    “I’ll get DC Burnett on it first thing tomorrow.”
    It abruptly hit home just how ugly this could get. And for the first time in a week, I was inexpressibly glad Wicks had pulled me off this case.
     

 
    Chapter 7
     
     
    During the Hastewicke Gentlemen’s first tour abroad, to Australia and New Zealand in 1984, we had come up against a brutally proficient team called Waimeearoa on the North Island of New Zealand. About half of their lads were Pacific Islanders from Samoa and Tonga, magnificent specimens of manhood, tall, heavily-muscled and tattooed, with a well-deserved reputation for warm hospitality off the pitch and ferocious violence on it. They had been looking forward to the chance to rub our generally aristocratic English noses in the rich North Island mud for some weeks, and the large crowd at Waimeearoa stadium obviously shared their enthusiasm, roaring their approval of every crunching tackle and niggling cheap shot.
    The game was going splendidly in their favour; the score was 23-6 at half-time. When the match resumed, despite one of Ian Chalmers’ most inspiring halftime rants, Waimeearoa picked up right where they had left off. With the crowd howling with savage glee, the local lads were pushing for the try that would have clinched it when their fly-half dropped the ball and the ref signaled a scrum.
    The two forward packs – eight men each, upwards of 2,000 pounds of prime English and Kiwi beef apiece – came together like coupling railroad-cars, with a tectonic “Oomph!” Just as the scrum-half put the ball in, Winston Tuaasusopo, Waimeearoa’s gigantic second row, took advantage of the referee’s momentary distraction to deliver a crunching uppercut, between his own prop’s legs, that struck our tight-head prop, Harry Barlowe, right in the balls. Barlowe, bound into the scrum and pushing his guts out, never even saw it coming. He collapsed the scrum, writhing in agony, and as their number 8 picked up the ball, I saw red.
    Vince Maitland, our blind-side flanker, made a saving tackle on the number 8, wrapping him up before he could get the pass away. As they squelched into the mud, the ruck – the phalanx of players who converge to control the ball after a tackle – formed and with savage joy I saw Tuaasusopo pick up the ball.
    I wasn’t the only one who had seen the punch and where it came from. As I rocketed toward the massive Samoan, Ian Chalmers matched me stride for stride, wrapping a meaty arm around my waist. We hurdled the ruck together and drove Tuaasusopo backward into the mud, flat on his back. The ball bounced free but we scarcely noticed. United in vengeful purpose, we methodically stomped him into the mud, using our rugby boots, with their long aluminium studs, to shred his jersey and carve bloody furrows from his ankles to his sternum. I believe he still bears the scars. On the way by, I stumbled and deftly broke his nose with my knee.
    Tuaasusopo tottered from the field, nose streaming crimson, and did not return; when play resumed, Waimeearoa found that they had lost their momentum, while we had found ours. In the 80minute of the match, a cunning kick from George Waters, our tubby but deft and useful little scrum-half, bounced magically along the touch-line and, at the last moment, up into my arms. I plunged over for the score, and we wound up sending the unhappy crowd home at the short end of a 30-26 score.
    Afterward, Ian had thrown an arm around my shoulders and handed me a beer. “This is why I love playing with you, Dex,” he said, teeth white in a faceful of mud. “Because you understand, so clearly, that you can never let the bastards win.”
     
     
    II
     
    When I