The Last King of Brighton (38 page)

‘Why are you doing this?'

‘Why?' Dave was almost jeering. ‘I'm a soldier of fortune. A mercenary. I go where the money is.'

Barbara came in shooting. The recoil of the sawn-off almost knocked her off her feet but she kept her balance. The blast was a terrible violation of the room. Dave fell against the fireplace and lay, still and broken, arms flung out. The Serbian by the window was writhing on the floor, blood spreading from his right hip down his trousers and up his shirt.

A shattered hip, Tingley judged. He tried to stand, taking the chair with him. Barbara looked at him and the chair hanging down behind him. She looked at Watts, slumped on the floor.

‘Where's my John?' she said.

‘They took him,' Tingley said, turning sideways on to her. ‘Could you? I can't reach.'

‘What good are you going to be to me?' she said. ‘Scrawny guy like you.'

‘I'm better than I look.'

‘Then why are you tied to a chair?'

‘Misjudgement. But I won't make another one.'

Barbara took a knife from her jacket pocket. Tingley laughed.

‘You come prepared.'

She sawed at the rope.

‘You have no idea.'

She cut him free and pointed at Watts.

‘I'll take care of him,' Tingley said. He looked over at the man with the shattered hip. ‘What about him?'

Barbara was already striding out of the room.

‘Fuck him.'

Tingley gathered up Watts. Though his friend outweighed him by a couple of stone, he hoisted him up and brought him out of the room.

‘You are deceptive,' Barbara said as they went down the corridor.

They got into Tingley's car, Watts laid out on the back seat.

‘What now?'

‘We find Hathaway.'

It took until dusk. They'd driven to Dieppe, haunted the ferry point, driven out into the country. They found him on the cliff-top beyond the church, silhouetted against the sinking sun in the west. He was hanging in a crude frame, a black silhouette outlined in orange flame from the sun beyond him. Naked. Impaled.

Barbara gave an animal moan and dropped to her knees. Watts, who'd come round in the car hours before and immediately vomited, looked at Tingley.

‘He's still alive,' he whispered.

Tingley and Watts moved closer. Hathaway was keening.

‘John?' Watts looked up at him.

‘We should kill him,' Tingley said. ‘Put him out of his misery.'

‘How?' Watts said.

‘Barbara has a knife.'

Hathaway's eyes were rolling. He worked his mouth.

‘Where . . .?' he gasped. A gout of blood streaming from his mouth made his next words indistinguishable. He gave a terrible cough. He raised his head. He gargled part of a word.

‘Aval . . .'

‘Jesus,' Tingley said. ‘Where's the lady of the lake when you need her?'

TWENTY-SIX

‘
Y
ou OK?' Tingley said.

Watts was looking out of the window watching the kids they passed on the streets. They went past the King Alfred centre and Tingley kept to thirty mph until the speed camera was out of view. There were brightly painted beach huts on their left, a series of blocks of flats on the right. They passed the one that Philippa Franks lived in. One of the shooters at the Milldean massacre. Watts glanced up to see if she was sitting on her balcony. He was sure there was more information to be got from her about the massacre in which she'd participated but now wasn't the time.

‘What kind of shit eco-friendly car is this?' Watts said. ‘I could walk more quickly.'

‘I'll take that as a “No”,' Tingley said. ‘And, as a point of information, it's the traffic, not my shit eco-friendly car that is inhibiting our speed.'

‘What a fucking mess,' Watts said. ‘Charlie Laker, Radislav, Kadire – all disappeared.'

‘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 café.

‘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 doesn'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.'