‘A double negative. Thought your generation knew better than that.’
Charlie took the left hand, walked over to Elaine, tilted her head up and fired the gun full into her face.
‘Fuck,’ Dennis Hathaway said, one hand up to stop the spray of brain and blood hitting his face, ‘I was hoping he’d use the garrotte. Now we’ve got to clean this bloody place up.’
Hathaway looked down.
‘I’ll do it.’
TWELVE
The Man Who Sold the World
1970
A gun is a seducer. A gun wants to be fired. It exists to be fired. And, sooner or later, whoever has one will be seduced into firing it.
Hathaway’s father disappeared in 1970. He left without Hathaway’s mother. Hathaway shouldn’t have been surprised by how devastated she was, but he was shocked at her rapid decline once she took to the bottle. He was overwhelmed when she took her own life just a year later, in the summer of 1971.
In February 1970 Dennis Hathaway took his son and Charlie to Spain on business. Reilly went along, of course. It was the first time Hathaway had seen the family hacienda in the mountains near Granada. It was a lovely house but the grounds were like a building site. They were a building site.
Dennis Hathaway was having a swimming pool built inside a long building constructed of local stone. The roof was going to be retractable, like something out of a James Bond film.
‘More like Thunderbirds,’ his father had said, guffawing. ‘Watch your feet there. That cement’s still wet. Don’t want to see imprints of your big clodhoppers across the floor of the pool.’
‘You’re having it tiled, aren’t you?’
‘You bet – but even so.’
Hathaway’s father was in a good mood because they’d just concluded a deal in Marbella to get hashish in large quantities from Morocco, transiting to England overland through Spain and France, then shipping from a small harbour near Deauville up to the West Pier.
Charlie was, as usual, cautious around Hathaway. They had a kind of working relationship but he knew Hathaway had never forgiven him for killing Elaine.
He was half-right. Hathaway was in a place that nobody he knew would understand. What did he feel about the death of Elaine? If he were honest, on its own he could take it. But there were other things.
His father was outlining his plans. Hathaway half-listened. He had his own plans.
They’d been drinking solidly all day. On the terrace, looking at the speckled sky and the lights winking down the valley, Hathaway watched his father take another swig of brandy.
‘The Great Train Robbers never squealed on each other,’ he said. ‘Not a one. And the witnesses knew nothing. All they saw was a bunch of blokes in balaclavas and overalls. How could they identify anyone? Bloody hell, they didn’t even know how many robbers there were. Nobody did.’
‘But you do, Dad,’ Hathaway said.
Dennis Hathaway got a strange expression on his face.
‘Makes you say that, son?’
‘Something you said a while back. And I heard two got clean away.’
‘You know that for a fact?’ his father said.
Hathaway nodded drunkenly. Dennis Hathaway sniffed.
‘Remember when your mother and I went down to Spain for our second honeymoon. Left you alone for your birthday?’
Hathaway remembered.
‘I remember you coming back,’ he said, thinking of Barbara.
That passed his father by.
‘Well, I thought it best to be out of the country at that particular time.’
Hathaway thought back.
‘It was around the time of the robbery. I remember reading the papers.’
‘It was two days after the bloody robbery. We were supposed to be holing up at the farm for a couple of weeks, but we thought that one of the locals had got suspicious so we had to make other plans. We split the money. There was so much of it. It was all in fivers and single notes. We didn’t even bother with the ten bob notes. Well, Bruce did but he was like that.’
‘So you really were one of the Great Train Robbers?’
‘No big deal.’
‘And you took the loot to Spain.’
‘Nah, not all of it. Any idea how much space a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds in singles and fivers takes up?’
Hathaway shook his head.
‘A fuck of a lot.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘That lovely Oxford Morris – remember it?’
Hathaway nodded.
‘Had a false petrol tank and a false bottom to the back seat. Got the tip from a Kraut smuggler. Worked well for a couple of years. The rest – well, you know about the rest – you organized taking most of it over and converting it into diamonds, buying property and so on.’
Hathaway nodded.
‘But where do you hide paperwork about stuff like that?’
His father gave him a sideways look.
‘Why would you want to know a thing like that?’
‘Because I remember you telling me that the less paper around the better. Property leaves a long paper trail, doesn’t it?’
‘Not if you pay cash, son.’
Hathaway looked across at Reilly. He was standing at the edge of the terrace, his back to the others, looking up into the snow-capped mountains.
Hathaway shot his father first. He hadn’t intended to but it was just the way it fell out.
Hathaway had strolled behind Charlie, but his father saw the automatic he pulled from under his shirt and lunged for him.
His father didn’t say anything, but thinking about it later Hathaway assumed he was trying to save Charlie. He actually chose Charlie over his own son. It didn’t really help, even at the time.
His father came out of his chair, one arm stretched out for the gun, his head down. Hathaway shot him through the bald patch on the crown of his skull. It had looked like a target.
His father simply toppled forward and knelt on the marble tiles, his head touching them as if praying to Mecca.
Charlie, half-swinging to look over his shoulder, tilted his chair and toppled, getting it tangled in his legs.
He saw the gun in Hathaway’s hand and started to scrabble away on his back, kicking at the chair. Hathaway aimed the gun loosely in his direction.
‘Don’t,’ Hathaway whispered. He looked over at Reilly, still gazing up into the mountains.
Hathaway was registering the fact that the gun had made scarcely any sound. Later he would register the fact he’d killed his own father.
Charlie was motionless.
‘We’ve had some times, Charlie.’
‘We have,’ Charlie said, his voice croaky.
‘But then you killed my fucking girlfriend.’
‘I’m sorry about that but it had to be done.’
‘Oh Charlie. Don’t sweat it. I’ve done far worse.’
Hathaway pointed the gun at Charlie’s forehead.
‘Goodbye, Charlie.’
PART TWO
Today
THIRTEEN
He stood at the back of the boat, watching the propeller churning the grey water. He had four men to help him take the boat. They killed the crew straight away. The owners were tied up in their stateroom. He would torture the man and rape the woman. He didn’t think about which would please him more.
Once he was bored with her, he passed the woman on to his men. By the time they threw her overboard in the turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay she wasn’t good for much. They threw her head in somewhere off Vigo.
Morning seeping into the night. John Hathaway, crime king of Brighton, woke up sweating. He rolled out of bed without disturbing the girl. A mirror streaked with white powder on her bedside table. The air still as he stood on the balcony and looked over at the skeletal remains of the West Pier.
There was a long ship moving on the horizon, red lights winking at bow and stern. The sky whitening behind it. He looked at the stretch of wa
ter between the ship and the end of the pier.
The pier looked as if it was crumbling but iron and steel don’t crumble. Wood, certainly. Buffeted by salt winds and sea water, wood warped, rotted, decayed to dust. A new coat of paint every six months had been the only way to keep the end-of-pier shooting gallery and amusement arcade looking halfway decent.
Hathaway earned his pocket money until he was fifteen up a ladder painting the exteriors of his father’s end-of-pier attractions. He also painted his father’s office, that draughty wooden hut with gaps in the floorboards wide enough to see the water churning far below. He could still smell the fug of the paraffin heaters as the fire-hazard stoves burned all day to keep the chill at bay.
The stanchions, the scaffolding, the pier’s iron frame – they hadn’t rotted. They had rusted, twisted, bent. Bolts had sheared off. The pier had crumpled, not crumbled. Eventually, it would collapse into the sea. The sea that, according to Hathaway’s father, kept all secrets.
Hathaway sipped a glass of water, turning away from the ruin of the pier. He was thinking of the other theory about the sea: that eventually it threw up its secrets.
Usually when least expected. He knew from his own experience that most things happened when least expected. He had learned that preparation could be both essential and pointless. Lives were changed by the unexpected. Always.
He shivered. Last night he’d had the dream again. He was drowning, out there in the chill water, sinking into its terrible depths. Tugged down, then tangled in a glade of trees. But not trees. A forest of corpses. Arms waving, bodies swaying with the tide. Men in rotting suits or naked. One, little more than a skeleton, with a pork-pie hat jammed on his skull.
Some were scrawny, some were fat. Some were gagged, mouths taped. Fish nibbled at them, sea worms writhed through empty eye sockets. Rooted, each of them, in cement poured in tin tubs.
Hathaway didn’t know how many men his father had taken out in his motorboat and dropped into the sea. Didn’t know the ratio of still alive to already dead. But the one he never dreamed about, the one he never saw, was the one he knew for certain had been dropped off the West Pier, her face shot away by Charlie.
Hathaway’s mobile rang. He looked at the number, answered.
‘Early morning, Ben.’
‘Sorry, Mr Hathaway. Thought you’d want to know. Stewart Nealson is dead. In a very bad way.’
And so it began again.
The scene of crime was the Ditchling Beacon on the northern edge of the South Downs. When Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist arrived at the National Trust car park she could see Ronnie Dickinson, the local community policeman, sitting on a stile some fifty yards away, looking like a stiff wind would blow him away. Reg Williamson, her sometime partner and now her superior officer, bulky in an ill-fitting suit, stood beside him. Both men were smoking.
The wind gusted at her coat when she got out of her car. A crowd had gathered in the car park, some with dogs. She looked down at Ditchling, a cluster of rooftops set among fields a few hundred feet below.
Gilchrist pushed her way through the crowd and walked up towards the two policemen. As she neared the stile she saw beyond them, further along the chalky path, scene of crime officers in white bunny suits clustered around something hanging from a wooden frame.
‘What’s going on?’ she said. Williamson offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. ‘Two years, two months, three days,’ she said. ‘Get ye behind me, Satan.’
Ronnie looked winded and sick. His hands were trembling.
‘You found him?’ she said.
‘I was summoned. By a dog-walker. In his own world. He resented the walk – it’s his wife’s dog really.’
His voice trailed off.
‘Never seen anything like it,’ Williamson said, looking over his shoulder. ‘Not even on the telly.’
‘So what’s happened to him?’
‘He was impaled,’ Williamson said. ‘A skewer put up his arse and out the other end.’
Gilchrist clenched her jaw.
‘Out of his head?’
‘No, his shoulder.’
‘All the way through his body?’ Gilchrist said, trying to imagine it and shuddering as she did so. ‘So he’d die pretty quickly once the heart was pierced.’
‘The dog-walker didn’t get close enough to see what had happened,’ Ronnie said. ‘Thought he might have been crucified because of the way he’s hanging. Just as well. We need to keep this quiet.’
‘Isn’t crucifixion bad enough?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Yes, but to have someone killed like this – can’t you see the headlines? “Vlad the Impaler loose on the Sussex Downs”.’
Gilchrist was watching the bunny suits as they lowered the body to the ground.
‘You’d be able to see that for miles around, being so high up,’ she said.
‘That was probably the idea,’ Williamson said.
‘Who’s Vlad the Impaler when he’s at home?’
‘Ancestor of Dracula,’ Williamson said. ‘Some Rumanian prince back in the middle ages who fought against the Turks. Favourite punishment was to stick prisoners on the end of a spike. Let their body weight do the rest.’
Gilchrist grimaced.
‘God. Do we know who the victim is?’
‘Didn’t get close enough to find out,’ Ronnie said. ‘I thought it was more important to keep people away.’
‘Probably right.’ Gilchrist frowned. ‘How do you get from pushing a stick up somebody to drinking their blood from a bite on the neck?’
Williamson shrugged.
‘I’m more of a sci-fi fan myself.’
He looked beyond Gilchrist.
‘Here they come.’ He saw her look at the journalists heading their way. ‘The jackals.’
Brighton took a battering that afternoon. A storm came up, a high tide threshing the beaches, hammering at the clubs and bars on the lower promenade, slopping up on to the Kings Road, running from the Palace Pier to Portslade. By the evening the lower town was blanketed in fog. The frets clothed the seafront bars and restaurants, groping along the Old Steine and Middle Street, faltering at the steep slopes up to Seven Dials and the back end of town.
Ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts stood on the steps of the Grand Hotel watching the water sluice through the fog only to run out of energy halfway across the road.
The Kings Road was understandably quiet. However, Watts thought he could hear across the road, above the thrash and racket of the sea, the high drone of a motorboat. He listened to its engine cutting in and out in the wind. He started to turn. He was drawn back by faint flashes of light in the fog. Behind the fog. He watched them burst and die. He thought he heard the motorboat again. He went into the hotel.
He bought a gin and tonic in the ornate bar and took a table in a quiet corner. He was due to meet with Laurence Kingston, the chair of the West Pier Syndicate, the body that was raising money to refurbish the pier. Rebuild it, really. Watts had been made a committee member when he was chief constable and it was one of the few bodies that had not asked him to resign after his downfall. The Syndicate had just been given a promise of £20 million from the Lottery Fund. Several million in private money had also been pledged.
However, Kingston had phoned Watts out of the blue asking to meet privately to discuss the fund raising. He’d implied there was a problem.
Kingston, a fussy man, was usually punctilious about time but fifteen minutes after he and Watts had arranged to meet he had still not arrived. Watts assumed the frets had something to do with it.
He was thinking about his wife, Molly, from whom he’d been separated since his one-night stand with DS Sarah Gilchrist had been made public in the aftermath of the Milldean massacre. He hoped they could find a way to get back together, but things were on hold for the moment as she’d gone to stay with her sister in Vancouver. It was part of her drink cure – she’d been drinking heavily before they broke up but had given up soon after. Watts felt guilty that
he had clearly driven her to drink and was impressed by her new strength of will.
He had promised that he would keep a closer eye on their son, Tom, and daughter, Catherine, whilst she was away. Not that they cared, both off at university and critical of his behaviour. Catherine was coming down to Brighton at the weekend but he wasn’t sure if he was going to see her. A fashionable DJ who lived locally was hosting his annual party on the beach. Last time the entire town had been gridlocked as thousands of people hit the party.
A man sat down on a nearby sofa. Tall, broad-shouldered, with close-cropped hair. In his early sixties, Watts judged. Watts saw that someone had done some work on his face, probably with a Stanley knife.
The man’s top lip was puckered where it had been sliced open then sewn back together. His right nostril too had been sliced and sewn back, and there was a line down to his jaw that could have been mistaken for a laugh line if it weren’t so prominent. From the side, Watts could see his nose had been broken. There was a tattoo covering the back of his hand and his wrist, peeking out of his shirt cuff.
The man put a mobile phone to his ear and began a murmured conversation. Watts had more of his drink and looked across the room. It was quiet, with a mix of foreign and British tourists, some of them looking stiff and awkward in the elegant surroundings.
His father, Victor Tempest, the once best-selling thriller writer, had told him that when they lived in Sussex this had been his favourite bar as he liked to watch the London villains flash their cash. Watts preferred somewhere more informal himself.
Across the room he recognized a man with a small moustache and a self-important posture. He looked at him for a beat too long. The man looked back and his eyes widened. He stood and walked over to Watts.
‘Ex-Chief Constable,’ the man said, standing over him. ‘How nice to see you.’
‘Well, well – Winston Hart, Chair of the Police Authority.’
‘You must be relieved it’s all done and dusted.’
‘Milldean? Swept under the carpet, don’t you mean?’
‘Still banging on, then,’ Hart said.
The Last King of Brighton Page 17