The Last King of Brighton bt-2
Page 29
‘Do you fancy Laker for Laurence Kingston’s death?’
‘As Hathaway guessed, there was hardly any booze in the bloodstream and a lot in the lungs.’
They were silent for a moment.
‘Sarah had a lucky getaway.’
‘I know it,’ Watts said.
‘Maybe the Balkan guys were here earlier than we thought,’ Tingley said.
‘Meaning?’
‘Maybe they were involved with killing your policemen who did the Milldean thing.’
Watts roared. Tingley nodded. Watts, coughing, laughed.
‘Sorry, Jimmy.’
‘Listen to the lion,’ Tingley said.
‘We still don’t really have the links in the chain.’
‘What chain?’ Tingley said.
‘Only connect, Jimmy, only connect.’
‘Yeah, the prose and the passion. I know the quote, Bob. I’ve read a book or two. But that’s got nothing to do with our situation.’
‘You read Forster? I didn’t know that.’
‘I said I knew the quote. I didn’t say I’d read that particular book.’ Tingley grinned. ‘Now a couple of tanks in the front garden at Howards End, that might have piqued my interest’
Watts smiled reluctantly.
‘The point I’m trying to make,’ he said, ‘is that everything connects somehow. There’s a thread linking the Trunk Murder – groan if you want to but listen – the stuff that went down in the sixties and the Milldean Massacre and hence these Serbians.’
‘And what is that thread, O Master Weaver?’
Watts sat back and threw up his hands.
‘I wish I knew.’
‘But it’s none of this that’s bothering you, is it?’
Watts shook his head.
‘Go and see your father.’
‘Didn’t know you were one for family history, Dad,’ Watts said as he sat down opposite his father in the cafeteria of the National Archives.
‘Just checking on a couple of things.’ His father gestured vaguely. ‘Remarkable place this. The amount of stuff they have available. Even if I were fifty years younger and going at it every day, I wouldn’t be able to scratch the surface in my lifetime.’
‘Have you always kept diaries, Dad?’
‘Who said I ever kept one?’
Watts sighed.
‘Come on, Dad, coyness doesn’t suit you. You’re a call-a-spade-a-spade man. You mentioned there was more of your diary. Are you going to let me see it?’
‘What do you know about the Great Train Robbery?’ his father said.
Watts eyed him carefully.
‘Two, mebbe three, were never caught,’ his father said. ‘Never caught, never identified.’
‘None of the others gave them up?’
Donald Watts shook his head.
‘For all their memoirs and all that Ronnie Biggs posturing, none of them ever really said how it happened or who did what. And the Bucks police didn’t have a clue.’
Watts sipped his coffee and watched his father.
‘These people who were never caught?’
His father looked at him again.
‘You know there was a strong Brighton connection? Half the gang had been robbing trains on the Brighton to London line. Penny ante stuff at first but then they figured out a way to stop the trains by fiddling with the signals. Same method they used in the Great Train Robbery.’
‘These people who got away with it – they were from Brighton?’
‘One was a train driver they took along whose nerve went on the actual job. A couple of the gang wanted to kill him to stop him talking, but in the end they paid him off.’
‘And the other two?’
Donald Watts leaned forward. His tongue darted out to lick at his dry lips.
‘One is certain. The other more speculative.’
‘I like certainties.’
His father smiled. His teeth were yellow. He looked very old, and he gave off a rancid smell.
‘I recall going to a house-warming party with my friend Philip Simpson. Lively do. Very lively. Our host had been living in some squalor on what we would now term a sink estate, but here he was in a better part of town with a big garden and a lot of influential people paying court to him.’
‘And you concluded?’
‘I concluded that family fortunes can change very quickly.’
‘A little showy, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, he’d waited. This was a couple of years down the line.’
‘And the name of this gentleman?’
Watts’ father rubbed his cheek.
‘I think you know.’
‘Dennis Hathaway?’
Donald Watts inclined his head and looked down at his liver-spotted hands.
Watts thought for a moment.
‘And the speculative one?’
His father shrugged.
‘My friend Philip Simpson was never what you’d call a straight arrow.’
‘The chief constable of Brighton was one of the Great Train Robbers?’ Watts sat back and laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Donald Watts picked up his drink then put it down again.
‘I’m not saying he was actually on the track with a pickaxe handle in his hands. I’m just saying that he was implicated.’
‘Implicated how?’
‘Look, Philip Simpson ran crime in Brighton. Do you remember staying at their house in Spain? Did you never wonder how somebody on his salary could afford a bloody castle?’
‘OK, so you’re saying he was implicated in the robbery. That he got a share of the dosh. And everybody kept schtum about it.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘So what did he do for the money?’
‘Kept Dennis Hathaway out of the frame.’
‘And that’s it? How about all the others who were caught? He didn’t do a very good job with them, did he?’
‘Two of them were broken out of prison, three others were on the run for years. Who do you think bankrolled all that?’
‘What about the files he tried to destroy? Did they contain the identity of the Trunk Murderer?’
‘Don’t be gormless. It were nothing to do with that. It were his deal with Dr M.’
‘Dr M?’
‘Massiah,’ Watts said. ‘The society abortionist. Philip were the one who egged that idiot policeman from Hove to go and try to get him. He knew he’d muck it up. But he couldn’t afford to let anything come out about him.’
‘Because he protected him?’
‘And some.’
Watts looked around the cafe.
‘Dad, I’ve got to ask-’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then ask away.’
Donald Watts put his coffee cup down.
‘This isn’t easy,’ Watts said. His father just stared. ‘You made a career of chasing women. You were a bastard to my mother. We all knew. She never let on. She never once commented on it whilst we were growing up, but I’m sure it helped kill her.’
Donald Watts continued to stare at his son.
‘Did you have an affair with Philip Simpson’s wife?’
His father sat back.
‘Nice lass.’
‘Someone told me that when she had William Simpson it was the Immaculate Conception,’ Watts said. ‘Is William Simpson related to me?’
His father sat back.
‘I don’t quite understand you, son.’
Watts looked at his father.
‘Simpson takes after his mother and I take after you, so the fact we don’t look alike doesn’t mean anything.’
His father absently watched another group of people arrive.
‘We never talked about it.’
‘That’s it? Why are you so cold, Dad – and don’t give me that Graham Greene sliver of ice in the heart thing.’
‘Why are you so wet? Do you have any backbone?’
‘Don’t be fatuous, Dad. It d
oesn’t become you. I’ve proved I’ve got backbone.’
‘But you haven’t proved you’re not an idiot. An idiot who doesn’t see what’s in front of his face and who gets too exercised over unimportant things.’
Watts reached over and grasped his father’s scrawny hand.
‘Dad, you’ve got to stop being the tough guy. You haven’t the strength for it and it comes over as bombast.’
‘Bombast. Nice word. You should be writing, not me. Philip assumed the boy was his. His mother never said he wasn’t. William had no reason to think otherwise. Why don’t you leave it at that?’
Watts looked round as people began to fill up the tables around them. Why indeed? He looked at his father’s clasped hands and down at his own. He laughed grimly.
‘Because I can think of only one thing worse than not being able to nail William Simpson for what he’s done. And that is to discover that, because my father was fucking his best friend’s wife, William Simpson is my half-brother.’
Jimmy Tingley crossed the Kings Road near the Palace Pier and went to join Barbara at the railings overlooking the beach. Below him were the tables of a bar, chairs stacked on them.
It was a still night, the water calm, the moon high. The Palace Pier lights had been extinguished but there were others flickering on the horizon. Fishing boats, passing ships.
Tingley watched the lights. He was tired. Tired of killing. But what to do in a world of wicked men?
‘I was scared of him at first,’ Barbara said, still facing out to sea. ‘John. Then I fell in love with him. Then his father sent me away…’
‘John didn’t stand up for you?’
‘No?’
‘Nor when you had cancer?’
She shook her head.
‘Then why?’
‘Go back to him? I didn’t have anywhere else to go. My sister dead, my husband long gone, my life a nightmare. He was the best I had. And he took me in.’
Tingley turned and tried to see beyond the lights. He imagined himself standing at the Ditchling Beacon, looking down on the town. Looking at himself, standing here tonight. He turned back to look out to sea.
‘I’m going after them, you know.’
‘Why?’
The men he had killed had been wicked men. He hadn’t hesitated.
‘I’ve got something of the trail back to the Balkans. I’ll set out on it in the next few days. Kill everybody I can find. Including Radislav and Kadire.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what I do best. All I do well.’
‘It won’t stop it. You know that.’
‘But there’ll be a lull. Until the next flood forward.’
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ she said. She reached out and put her hand on his. ‘I inherit, you know. He left me everything. If you need money.’
‘What was Hathaway’s guilty secret?’ Tingley said. ‘What had he done to Charlie Laker that would make him take such revenge on him after so many years. It had to be more than the abortion thing.’
‘It went way back,’ Barbara murmured, then the bullet shattered the back of her skull and exited through her left eye socket, taking eye, brain matter and shards of bone with it.
EPILOGUE
November 2nd, 1959. It was cold in the den. Roy Laker pulled his duffel coat hood over his head and curled his fingers in his mittens. He shuffled on the makeshift orange box seat. His brother, Charlie, and Charlie’s mate, Kevin, had gone down to the cafe to get warm but Roy wanted to stay in the den. After all, he was on guard.
He peered out through the boards and crates and tree branches piled against each other. The den was right in the centre of the stack of wood and he’d had to crawl on his hands and knees to get in. The bonfire was big but would be lot bigger by Guy Fawkes night.
‘Penny for the Guy,’ Roy muttered as he saw an indistinct figure approach the bonfire. His heart jumped. Rival gangs tried to set fire to each other’s bonfires before November 5th. Roy couldn’t see properly but followed the figure flitting around the stacked wood. He heard the splash of liquid and smelt paraffin.
The flame shot up the side of the bonfire. Roy heard the sharp crackle as tree branches caught. He scuttled backwards for the tunnel. His feet slipped on the torn pieces of lino that had been laid across the mud floor. He turned awkwardly, seeing flames shoot up on every side, and stuck his head into the tunnel. It was blocked with a large crate and a railway sleeper.
Gulping down panic, he pushed against the crate, for the first time feeling the heat of the blaze. He coughed as smoke swirled round him. He vaguely heard singing. ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November. The Gunpowder Plot…’
He could vaguely see someone peering in at him. With a whoosh the entire bonfire took flame.
Young John Hathaway walked away without a backward glance.
To be continued in God’s Lonely Man
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