All the partisans were armed and angry. I showed no emotion even when Cortone showed me the injuries the fascists, at the count’s behest, had done to two of his men. As I closed the door on them, I saw the disgust in Cortone’s face. It scarcely compared with the disgust I felt for myself.
FORTY-TWO
Victor Tempest’s final exercise book
I never saw Knowles again, but in 1945 I attended the Nuremberg trials. I was trying to make sense of what had happened in the war. Not the people I had killed, but the millions murdered. Nuremberg had been chosen as the venue for the trials for symbolic reasons. It was there Hitler had held his grandiose rallies; there he had passed a law stripping Jews of their German citizenship. For the same symbolic reason the RAF had pretty much demolished the medieval quarters in bombing raids. Nuremberg was war-wrecked, its citizens gaunt and exhausted.
Lord Birkett was the British black-capped judge pronouncing the death sentence on Nazi war criminals in the Palace of Justice. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been plain Norman Birkett, barrister, successfully defending Tony Mancini, aka Jack Notyre, at Lewes Crown Court against the charge of murdering his mistress, Violette Kay.
The man hanging the criminals Birkett sentenced to death was Albert Pierrepoint, the butcher from Clayton I’d met in 1935. It had taken him until 1941 to move from assistant to official executioner. He told me that when I bumped into him in a bierkeller. I reminded him of our last meeting, almost ten years earlier.
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘You still a Blackshirt?’
‘That was a mistake,’ I said. ‘We stood for order but we caused disorder.’
‘Some mistakes you can recover from. I deal with people whose mistakes have consequences they can’t evade.’
‘When were you first in charge of the whole thing?’ I asked. ‘The hangings.’
‘1941. Seventeenth of October. Pentonville Prison. Happy enough fellow. Last thing he said before he went through the hatch was “Cheerio”.’
Pierrepoint and I sipped our beer. It was rubbish but then we’d bombed the breweries to buggery.
‘I did tell him he should have had a word with my dad,’ he said.
I frowned.
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Well, I was hanging him for knifing somebody in a brawl but he also told me that, years before, he’d chopped up some lass and he’d had a bugger of a time doing it. Didn’t know anything about jointing meat, you see. My dad, now, he could have jointed an elephant without breaking sweat.’
My mind reeled from more than the drink.
‘What was this man’s name?’
Pierrepoint thought for a moment.
‘Antonio Mancini. “Baby” to his friends. Soho gangster. Knifed a thug from a rival gang. A Jewish gang. It could have gone either way — who lived, who died, I mean. It would have made no difference to me — one of them would have dangled from the end of my rope.’
‘Baby Mancini.’
‘Daft name for a grown man, I know.’
I nodded slowly.
‘I met him once,’ I said. ‘Just for five minutes.’
Pierrepoint was an unnervingly placid man. He remained still, watching me, waiting for more.
‘This lass,’ I said. ‘He killed her?’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. Helping out his brother-in-law after the fact, apparently.’ He shrugged, though he seemed to make heavy work of the gesture. ‘Strange favours some folk do.’
‘Who was his brother-in-law?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a bloke called Martin Charteris, was it?’
Pierrepoint frowned.
‘No idea.’
And that should have been it with regard to the Brighton Trunk Murders and the hangings of Albert Pierrepoint and the two Tony Mancinis. But, of course, nothing ever finishes. No story is ever really done.
A year later I was back in London working for military intelligence. I bumped into Pierrepoint again. I was on my way to meet Ian Fleming — he had some girls lined up. But this bloke and his feelings for his chilly occupation fascinated me. Since I’d last seen him, he’d executed at least two hundred Nazi war criminals. Now he was back at Pentonville, hanging home-grown traitors.
Over a pint he said: ‘Good job you got out of the Blackshirts when you did. I hanged two of your former comrades yesterday. Lord Haw-Haw and another bloke who’d been high up. Mosley’s unofficial ambassador to Italy. Picked up in Germany.’
‘Eric Knowles?’ I said.
‘You knew him too?’
I was remembering the time Charteris had taken me to Tony Mancini’s club. As we were standing at the bar, Eric Knowles had come in and gone upstairs.
I laughed. A bleak laugh.
‘Albert, as I get older I’m not sure I know anybody.’
PART FIVE
The Thing Itself
FORTY-THREE
Kate Simpson was dressed and sitting on the edge of her bed when Sarah Gilchrist walked in. She gave the policewoman a lopsided grin. The bruising round her eyes had turned yellow and the swelling on her lip had subsided a little.
‘Ready?’ Gilchrist said.
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Sure I’m sure. You did the same for me.’
‘Only for a few days, though.’
Gilchrist picked up Kate’s backpack from a chair.
‘Stay as long as you like.’
Kate’s legs trembled as she got out of bed. Although physically she was making a rapid recovery, emotionally and psychologically she was still fragile from the shock and viciousness of the attack.
What she’d actually done to defend herself was something of a blur. She remembered the man hitting her, his weight crushing her, his hand jammed between her legs. She remembered scrabbling under the pillow and grabbing the volt gun. Pressing it to his temple and pushing the button.
She couldn’t face the thought of going back to her flat. Her mother had originally suggested she go up to London and stay at the family home but she had made it sound like an inconvenience. Anyway, Kate didn’t want to be in the same house as her father. Plus, her mother had not bothered to get in touch since the initial offer.
Her father hadn’t visited. He’d phoned, pleading pressure of work. She’d asked him what was behind the attack and he’d been evasive.
‘Some business complications, that’s all.’
‘That’s not all. That man made it very personal.’
‘It will all be taken care of, darling,’ he said.
She cringed at the word ‘darling’ coming from a man she despised.
Her father had at least taken care of her bail. She found it hard to take in the fact she had killed someone and might go to jail for it.
Gilchrist had offered the sofa bed in her new flat. This was by way of thanks for Kate putting Gilchrist up when the policewoman’s flat had been torched to discourage her from investigating the Milldean Massacre. Since Kate had a crush on her, it was a no-brainer, as Simon at Southern Shores Radio was fond of saying. Kate was on sick leave from her job there and looked forward to a week or two of rest and recuperation.
Gilchrist’s phone rang as they stood on the steps of the hospital.
‘DI Gilchrist. Hello? Yes, ma’am. Immediately, ma’am.’ She put her phone away and turned to Kate’s inquiring look. ‘The chief constable wants a word.’
Kate panicked.
‘Are we in it?’
‘Not we,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Me. And I’ve a horrible feeling I know what she wants a word about.’
Tingley slept late. After a quick breakfast he headed for the trolley car that went to the top of the nearby mountain. He walked down the Via Garibaldi, the sky a deep blue and the sun glaring on thick white walls. He was sweating again. He bought a newspaper from a kiosk and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
The road widened as it neared the southern entrance gate and the signs to the funivia. He turned left immediately outside the gate and walked
a couple of hundred yards uphill towards the ticket office.
When he saw the procession of slight green baskets making their way up the mountain face on a narrow black thread, he shook his head. He’d been expecting a proper cable car, with room for sixteen or so in each cage.
He bought a ticket and went to join a small queue. He watched the baskets come down. They were like birdcages with standing room for maybe three adults. Protective wiring came up to waist height. They were spaced at twenty-yard intervals on a cable loop that never stopped moving. Passengers jumped on as the cage swung round in a slow arc at ground level, the mechanic slammed the gate closed and they were on their way.
The cages looked fragile and the top of the mountain a long way away. Tingley thought he could see the cages wavering in the wind. He tidied things away in his pockets, felt the pistol fastened at the small of his back.
He clambered aboard the next cage and with a jerk it began a smooth ascent towards the mountain. Within moments Tingley was looking down at a rough scree of broken white rocks some hundred feet below.
He looked back at Gubbio falling away behind him. The plain beyond was vast, the foothills beyond that tiny. His cage brushed the tops of a clump of pine trees. Tingley smiled a hello at a couple with a little girl coming down about ten yards across from him.
He overbalanced as the cage reached the first of a series of tall metal pylons through which the cable was threaded. He grabbed for the guard rail as his cage tilted and juddered by. The sun was high in the sky, wisps of cloud hanging motionless. Tingley closed his eyes.
There was a flat concrete platform at the top, about twenty yards long. A man grabbed his cage and pushed away the safety bar so that he could drop out on to the concrete. The platform was beside a terrace cafe.
Tingley got a beer from the bar. He threaded his way through noisy youngsters playing table tennis, table football and videogames. He found a table with a view over a gorge and back across the Gubbio plain. Below him Gubbio seemed tiny, its red shingled roofs bright against the light green of the fertile plain.
To the side of him the mountain opened up into a series of valleys, their slopes clad in dark green firs and pines. In the cool under the umbrella Tingley looked for the glint of a scope attached to a sniper’s rifle.
Three girls at the next table were discussing a boy. An old David Bowie song, The Man Who Sold The World, was playing on the radio. Tingley sipped his beer. It was warm. He looked over as the cages bobbed up and on to the landing stage.
He went cold inside his shirt; his mind and his heart both raced. He watched Drago Kadire drop off the cage and walk into the cafe.
FORTY-FOUR
‘DI Gilchrist, come in.’
Sarah Gilchrist noted the formality as she stepped into the chief constable’s office. Karen Hewitt usually addressed her as ‘Sarah’.
‘Ma’am.’
Hewitt looked at her over her glasses.
‘We have a problem.’
Gilchrist said nothing.
‘The weapon Miss Simpson used to defend herself is illegal in this country.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And I gather you have admitted that the weapon is yours.’
‘I have, ma’am.’
Hewitt shook her head, her long blonde hair swaying as she did so. Her skin was pale and tired.
‘You understand that when you lost your right to carry arms after the Milldean incident, those arms included the taser legally issued to British police officers.’
Gilchrist shuffled her legs.
‘I do.’
‘So the fact that a serving police officer in such a situation has an illegal volt gun, illegally imported. .’ Hewitt shook her head. ‘For God’s sake, Sarah — what were you thinking?’
Gilchrist bit back what she wanted to say. That at the time she was thinking someone had just burned down her flat and she felt her life to be in danger.
‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’
‘So am I, Sarah, so am I.’ Hewitt looked weary. ‘I think this might cost you your job.’
‘It was used in self-defence-’
‘I know that,’ Hewitt said fiercely. Her sour breath wafted across Gilchrist. Last night’s garlic and too much coffee today. ‘But I need to distinguish between that fact and the fact that you, not Miss Simpson, had illegally imported this weapon.’
Gilchrist bowed her head.
‘You are under immediate suspension-’
‘But, ma’am, DI Williamson and I-’
‘-pending a tribunal to consider your dismissal.’
Gilchrist left the office red-faced. She considered going back to tell Williamson but decided simply to go home.
Back at her flat, Kate was fast asleep on top of her bed. Gilchrist stood by the balcony looking over the square, her mobile phone in her hand. She got through to Reg Williamson on the first ring. She told him what had happened.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sarah. Damned sorry. But, listen, we can turn this to our advantage.’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘Take a holiday. Take a friend with you. I’d go myself but I wouldn’t get the leave now you’re not in the office.’
‘Reg-’
‘I hear Homps is very nice at this time of year.’
Tingley reached mechanically for his beer. Kadire emerged from the cafe carrying a coffee cup, looked around for somewhere to sit. Tingley turned his head away and watched out of the corner of his eye. Kadire found an empty table between Tingley and the cable railway and sat down, facing the platform. Tingley noted he had dispensed with his cane.
Renaldo di Bocci had told Tingley where Kadire was going to be just before he died. Tingley didn’t kill Di Bocci — well, unless the shock he’d given him hustling him into the stairwell had brought upon the old criminal’s heart attack.
Tingley put his glass back heavily on the table. Just do it and get out, he advised himself. Just walk over and put the silenced gun in his ear, pull the trigger and walk away. Except that there was nowhere to walk. There was no way off this mountain except by the cable car.
Then leave. Tingley got to his feet. His chair scraped loudly on the concrete floor. Kadire was sitting quite still about fifteen yards away.
Tingley didn’t hurry, choosing a route as much out of Kadire’s line of vision as possible. He itched to look back but resisted the temptation. He felt sure he could feel cold eyes boring into his back.
In the cafe he made a pretence of looking at postcards whilst watching Kadire. He was sitting as before, except that now he was reading a newspaper, ankles crossed. According to Di Bocci, he was waiting to meet an important drug dealer.
Tingley went out of the side door of the cafe, skirted the edge of the terrace and watched the queue of people waiting to take the cable car back down the mountain. A basket arrived every forty-five seconds so a queue of six groups cleared in about six minutes. A fuck of a long time to be standing on the top of a mountain with a dead man slumped at a table twenty yards away.
Tingley was hidden from Kadire, but even if he abandoned his assassination of the sniper, once he stepped forward on to the platform he would be directly in front of his intended victim. Kadire had only to glance up to see him. Then all hell would break loose.
Fuck it.
Tingley had always moved deceptively fast. Liquid. Probably nobody at the tables he slid between even noticed him as he came alongside Kadire.
Kadire noticed. Tingley doubted the sniper knew who it was but he saw him jerk to see who was suddenly beside him.
Tingley had been thinking about a pay-off line but hadn’t come up with anything. So he leaned down, stuffed the silenced gun in Kadire’s left ear, clapped the folded newspaper to the other ear and pulled the trigger.
FORTY-FIVE
Watts was huddled over a mug of black coffee in his father’s wingback when his phone rang. He recognized the number.
‘Hello, Sarah.’
‘I’m sorry to dis
turb you but I wondered how easy it would be for you to go back to France.’
‘Varengeville-sur-mer?’
‘No. Carcassonne.’
‘Cathar country.’
‘You know it?’
‘I know the history books. The Templars-’
‘Don’t. My mind freezes when I hear that word. I used to go out with a SOCO who kept trying to force-feed me thrillers that involved the Templars.’ Simpson realized she was blathering from nerves. ‘I never read any, on principle. .’
She trailed off.
‘You don’t like being force-fed?’
‘That would be me, Bob.’ She cleared her throat. ‘We’ve located Bernie Grimes in a place near Carcassonne.’
‘Bernie Grimes?’ Watts thought for a moment. ‘The armed robber supposed to be holed up in Milldean?’
‘Maybe he can give us a way in to the Milldean Massacre. A way in to Charlie Laker and William Simpson.’
‘You want me to go and see him?’
Gilchrist swallowed.
‘With me.’
Watts frowned.
‘I don’t quite understand. Officially? How would that work for Karen Hewitt?’
Gilchrist explained her status.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Watts said. He pondered a moment. ‘What do you think we can achieve unofficially? Why would he even talk to us?’
‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ Gilchrist said. ‘We might need to overstep the mark.’
Watts considered. Quite aside from anything else, how would it feel to be alone with Sarah for such a length of time? Their brief passion had long faded. Hadn’t it?
‘What about Kate?’ he said. ‘Do you think we can leave her on her own?’
‘She’s safe enough, if that’s what you mean,’ Gilchrist said. ‘What do you think, Bob?’
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