‘Ten?’ he spluttered. ‘Are you mad? We can’t lift ten.’
‘Sure you can. It’s Milldean. I hear it’s chaos down there at the moment with that hoodlum Stevie Cuthbert missing, presumed dead. I don’t know if that was down to you or John Hathaway, but with the crime boss of Milldean out of the way after all these years, who’s going to stop you?’
‘But ten all at once, Bernie. One missing kid is bad enough but a third of a class — that’ll definitely be noticed when they take the register.’
‘So what? They’ll be gone by then. Disappeared. I was thinking Africa — the Congo or somewhere?’
‘Lot of HIV down there, Bernie. Place is rife with it.’
There was silence on the end of the phone for a moment.
‘All the better,’ Bernie Grimes said.
‘Well — ’ Laker said, distracted by the sweet trolley going by. He fancied the look of the Black Forest Gateau — ‘they’re always complaining class sizes are too big.’
Next morning, Laker sat on the bench below the statue of Captain Cook and looked across to the ruined abbey on the opposite headland. He could picture the plague ship coming into the harbour below, the navigator strapped to the wheel, all the crew dead and drained of blood. Dracula lying in the dank hold of the ship, in his coffin of Transylvanian earth.
Laker’s car idled behind him. A handful of his men were spread across this headland keeping an eye on the people climbing up from the harbour and passing beneath the arch of the whale jaw cemented into the ground at the top of the incline.
Charlie Laker looked out to sea, squinting behind his sunglasses against the glare of the sun on the water. He disliked the sea but only because he wasn’t good on it. He’d never had sea legs.
The irony was he’d run pirate radio stations off ships for Brighton gang boss Dennis Hathaway back in the sixties. But in the three years he’d done it he’d never once set foot on the rusting hulks they were using.
Laker had never wanted to be a gangster when he was growing up. He wanted to be a pop star. But then his little brother, Roy, died and everything changed.
He thought about Roy almost every day. Charlie Laker had never forgiven himself for his brother’s death. He knew Roy hero-worshipped his Teddy-boy older brother. That’s why he’d allowed Roy to come with their friend, Kevin, up to the bonfire that fateful November day in 1959.
‘Let me get in the den, Charlie. I can be the guard.’
The den was in the middle of the bonfire. Charlie tousled his brother’s hair.
‘OK — but keep close watch.’
It was fucking freezing in the wind. It took Charlie and Kevin a good five minutes to light their fags.
‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ Kevin said. Charlie looked at his brother, who was grinning to himself as he explored the narrow space inside the rough pile of wood.
‘Back in five,’ Charlie called as he and Kevin hurried down the street to the cafe on the corner.
They stayed ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It wouldn’t have been that long if Kevin hadn’t fancied the girl behind the counter. She wasn’t even that good-looking.
‘We’ve got to get back to Roy,’ Charlie said.
Reluctantly, Kevin followed him out. They saw the bonfire burning at the top of the street.
‘Fuck.’
Charlie set off at a run.
Telling his parents was the worst thing ever. His father was too upset even to give him a hiding. His mum had been the one to offer violence, smacking him across the face and punching at his chest, screeching, until his father pulled her off.
Roy had always been her favourite — because he was the youngest, of course — and she never forgave Charlie for not looking out for him.
When Charlie saw On The Waterfront on the telly, he broke out into a sweat when Brando was in the back seat of the taxi with Rod Steiger, who played his older brother, Charlie.
‘You should have watched out for me, Charlie. Just a little bit.’
It was like hearing his grown-up brother’s voice.
His mother scarcely said two words a year to him for the next ten years. And his father didn’t even have the energy to beat him up again.
He went to work for his dad at his garage out of guilt. Sometimes he’d catch his dad staring at him, a perplexed look on his face.
His parents seemed to take it for granted the police investigation got nowhere. The life had been sucked out of them. In the evenings they’d sit in front of the telly, side by side on the sofa, morose and blank. Both chain-smoking. Both dead of lung cancer before they were sixty.
Now, a tap on his shoulder. A voice in his ear.
‘Boss? A call for you. From Italy.’
TWELVE
‘Charlie. It’s Crespo di Bocci.’
‘Greetings from windswept Whitby, Crespo.’
‘There’s an Englishman coming here. Signor Jimmy Tingley. He is looking for Drago Kadire. Some of my family have a grudge against him, as you know. But I also know you are connected to Drago. What shall I do?’
Laker thought for a moment. When he’d made his play to take Brighton away from his former friend, John Hathaway, he had known the risk he was taking bringing in the Balkan gangs. Especially Drago Kadire, the Albanian sniper, and Miladin Radislav, who rejoiced in his nickname of Vlad the Impaler.
Laker had taken control of the Palace Pier through cut-outs but the local guys weren’t really up to the job of toppling Hathaway. That required people without conscience. Subhumans. That required Miladin Radislav.
But the danger had been: if he got them in, could he get them out? Not without pissing off his friends in the Italian mafia — quite aside from other Balkan guys running rackets in England.
Laker knew about Tingley. Ex-SAS. Handy. Tingley might offer a way out. Unconnected. Doing his ‘Man With No Name’ routine. Charlie idly wondered whether that ex-cop, Bob Watts, was with the old soldier. He knew they were friends. Laker didn’t think Watts was up to the job. Wasn’t certain Tingley was, either.
Kadire and Radislav. Get rid of them and the Balkan invasion would stall long enough for Charlie to sell up and get back to America. Once he’d done that, he didn’t give a toss what happened to Brighton. Oh, he had UK plans but they were bigger. Legit. Well, almost.
‘Let them fight it out,’ he said.
Laker had made Whitby his temporary HQ for sentimental reasons. When he was a kid, before he became a Teddy boy, he’d been in the boy scouts and they’d come north from Sussex on a camping trip to Whitby, Scarborough and Robin Hood’s Bay. In those days, the mid-fifties, their scoutmaster had managed to arrange for them to camp inside the ruined abbey. It was scary and it pissed down, and nobody slept very much, but they all loved it.
Now he was waiting in his suite for a couple of girls to arrive from Harrogate, the nearest place to Whitby you could buy quality arse. Not that he would be paying.
He was thinking about his late wife, Dawn. John Hathaway’s sister. He’d got her pregnant, some forty years earlier. Her father, Dennis Hathaway, had given him a choice. They’d been in the chilly wooden hut Hathaway used as his HQ behind the firing range on the West Pier in Brighton.
Dennis Hathaway. Jesus. Burly, friendly-faced and vicious as fuck.
That day Hathaway had handed Laker a whisky — Canadian Club, naturally — and said: ‘Here’s the choice, Charlie. You can go against my wishes and marry Dawn and have the kid. But you’re out of the business. I don’t want my Dawn involved in this.’
‘Or?’ Laker said, feeling the whisky burn his throat.
He could tell Dennis Hathaway didn’t take to his tone but Laker couldn’t help it. He’d never been good at being told what to do.
‘Watch your lip, Charlie. It’s your future we’re talking about. The alternative is that you persuade her to have an abortion, you finish with her and you continue your career with me and you thrive.’
Hathaway scrutinized Laker.
‘I think you were made for thi
s life. I hope John is going to come through, but you — I see it in you.’
Hathaway swigged his drink.
‘You lost your brother, didn’t you?’
Charlie nodded.
‘Burned alive, wasn’t he?’
Charlie nodded again.
‘Gives a man a bit of impetus.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did the coppers ever get whoever did it?’
Laker shook his head.
‘No clue.’
Dennis Hathaway, still staring fixedly at Laker, nodded slowly.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
Laker started to say, ‘It’s OK-’
‘I’m going to need a decision from you this morning.’
Laker liked Dawn. Lusted for her. But he wasn’t father material. He knew that.
‘I’m Catholic,’ he said.
‘Lapse,’ Hathaway said without missing a beat. He raised his glass. ‘What’s it to be?’
Laker raised his own glass.
‘OK,’ he said in a low voice.
‘OK what?’
Laker leaned over and chinked Hathaway’s glass.
‘You get your way.’
Laker could see that Hathaway couldn’t hold back.
‘I usually do.’
That was meant to be that but Charlie Laker couldn’t get Dawn out of his head. He was getting plenty of women but there was something about her. He saw her after the abortion, from time to time, and she was dispirited and listless. Although Laker had insisted she have the abortion, she knew her father was behind it.
‘I wish I’d been able to stand up to him,’ she said. ‘But I’m just a coward.’
‘You’re no coward.’
‘Aren’t I? To let him kill my child.’
‘We’ll make another,’ Charlie said, on absolute impulse.
She smiled then and took his hand.
‘Over my dad’s dead body,’ she said.
Which is the way it worked out.
Charlie decided to kill Dennis Hathaway for many reasons. For Dawn, yes, but mainly because he was ready to take over Brighton. He knew he would have to kill the enforcer, Sean Reilly, too. He would probably have to kill his mate and rival, John Hathaway.
He bided his time. He thought their joint trip to Spain in 1970 would be a good opportunity. As it turned out, John Hathaway thought the same — and then some.
One minute, they were sitting around getting pissed on Sangria and whisky, Sean Reilly standing at the edge of the terrace looking out into the mountains. The next, John Hathaway shot his own father in the head and was about to do the same to Laker.
‘Goodbye, Charlie,’ Hathaway said and Laker closed his eyes, resigned, knowing this was payback for him executing Hathaway’s girlfriend. He’d been ordered to because she’d witnessed something she shouldn’t have, but he didn’t blame his old friend for not understanding.
‘Don’t,’ Sean Reilly said, suddenly beside them.
That Reilly had stepped in to save Laker’s life had surprised him. It was no surprise that Reilly told him to leave that night. Before Laker left, Reilly gave him the deeds to a couple of clubs in Ibiza and Majorca.
‘To help you start up on your own,’ he said. He handed Charlie?10,000, too. A fuck of a lot of money in those days.
Charlie kept to himself that Dennis Hathaway, as part of their deal over Dawn, had given him two clubs on the Costa del Sol, the pirate radio stations and cash in a Jersey bank account.
THIRTEEN
Charlie Laker went to Ibiza first. Set up a drug deal on his own with some Sardinian mobsters who provided the link through to the same Moroccan gangs Dennis Hathaway and now John were dealing with. It cost more to go through the middleman but it kept his name out of it.
He stayed in Spain for a couple of years. Dawn moved into the house Dennis Hathaway had been building. Her brother had given it to her, without saying why. Charlie saw to the laying of more concrete in the bottom of the swimming pool. They chose turquoise tiles for the pool bottom.
Charlie never swam. Told Dawn he didn’t know how. She swam there all the time. Her mother came to stay just twice. Bewildered, strung out on the Valium wonder drug she’d been prescribed a couple of years before. She was devastated by her husband’s abrupt disappearance.
‘I know Dennis must be dead,’ she said once, in a rare lucid moment. ‘I just want to know where he’s buried.’
Charlie watched her slow breaststroke across the pool, neck stretching out of the water, mouth pursed and eyes closed, swathes of her swim-dress floating behind her. And he wondered if he should tell her that with each length she was passing just four feet above her husband, buried underneath the tiled bottom of the pool.
The clubs and the drugs were complementary and provided a regular flow of money into his Jersey account. The system pretty much ran itself.
After two years, Charlie sold out his businesses to his Sardinian partners. He got a good price, not a great price, but he was pragmatic. He knew eventually they would have simply taken them from him.
He’d sold off the pirate radio stations to Keith Jeffery, a manager on the make with a club in Majorca. Jeffery was getting as bad a reputation as Charlie once had in the pop music business.
Charlie made a deal with him over his own roster of groups. Jeffery ostensibly took them over but Charlie remained a silent partner and occasional enforcer. He still liked getting his hands bloody.
His trips to England were rare and he always made sure he stayed under the radar. More frequent were trips to the US to handle Jeffery’s burgeoning business there.
He got involved with the Mafia, who controlled transportation, backstage and technical stuff on pretty much all the pop tours.
He supposed the rumour that he had offed Jimi Hendrix came about because he was a bit of bogeyman in the business. He still smiled at it.
Dawn and he had been trying for another child. After her mother’s death, they had been trying with increasing desperation. Dawn was still in touch with her brother. John Hathaway never asked about Charlie. Just in case he changed his mind, Charlie was armed at all times. Sean Reilly phoned from time to time, kept him vaguely informed.
Dawn went to see doctors in Spain and England. They said the same. The abortion had been botched. It was possible she was now unable to conceive.
Laker told Dawn how her father died soon after her mother passed. He didn’t tell her where he was buried — thought that would totally freak her out — but he did tell her that John Hathaway, her brother, had shot her father in the head.
He didn’t know exactly what process of osmosis went on in her mind, but the death of her mother, the discovery she could not bear children and the revelation about her father’s death gave her a single focus. Her brother, John Hathaway, was responsible for fucking up her life.
She never spoke to him again. She wrote him a letter saying she was cutting all ties with him. Didn’t really explain why. She and Charlie moved to America. New York, though the music business was booming in California.
He did go to the west coast from time to time. He bumped into Dan, the lead singer of his old group, The Avalons, a couple of times, but they had little to say to each other. They’d been in a band together but they had never been close.
He had good contacts in the US Mafia. There were cousins of the Sardinian guys who were cousins of other families in the US. They got fed up with Jeffery. Some unspecified offence. Told Charlie how Jeffery had been ripping him off. Told him about Jeffery’s secret accounts in the Bahamas. Asked Charlie if he felt up to taking over?
Three months later, Jeffery was dead, killed in a plane crash. Three months after that, Charlie and Dawn were living in LA, next door to Cary Grant no less.
And it was Charlie’s turn to have his emotions undergo osmosis.
One drunken evening by the pool, the lights of Los Angeles carpeted below them, Dawn told him about an evening back in 1959 when John Hathaway had come home with burn
ed hands and singed eyebrows, the smell of petrol strong on him. She tended to him with butter from the larder and snow from the back garden. Didn’t get much sense out of him.
A couple of days later, it was in the local papers a little boy had been burned to death in a bonfire maliciously set alight. The police were assuming it was manslaughter not murder, but they wouldn’t know for sure whether the arsonist knew the little boy was hiding in the bonfire until they tracked him down.
‘Did John know my brother was in the den?’ Charlie croaked.
‘He didn’t say,’ Dawn said.
Charlie remembered the conversation he’d had with Dennis Hathaway when they did the deal over Dawn and the abortion.
‘Did your dad know what John had done?’
She pursed her lips.
‘Oh yes.’
FOURTEEN
Reg Williamson was in the office hunched over his computer when Gilchrist walked in. He clicked his mouse, then slid from behind his desk and hurried over to her.
‘Bingo. Bernie Grimes. Place called Homps on the Canal du Midi. Not far from Carcassonne.’
Gilchrist looked at him.
‘Fantastic, but you’re saying those place names as if they should mean something to me. I’m a Brighton girl. I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Carcassonne is this medieval walled town in the south of France. Looks just like it should — they used it for that Kevin Costner Robin Hood film donkey’s years ago. Reason it looks so Walt Disney perfect is that it was actually rebuilt in the nineteenth century. So it’s kind of a recreation.’
‘You’ve been there.’
Williamson looked away.
‘Me and the wife. Before. .’
His voice trailed away. Gilchrist realized she didn’t know anything about Reg’s private life.
‘Your divorce?’
Williamson flashed a look at her.
‘Our David killed himself.’
Gilchrist was swept back to a conversation she’d had in the car with Reg, it seemed an age ago now, about suicides off Beachy Head.
‘Reg, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’
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