The Last King of Brighton

FIFTEEN

Jimmy Tingley, ex-SAS, current status ambiguous, telephoned Bob Watts, disgraced ex-chief constable of the Southern police force. Watts said:

‘I’m on the train,’ then wished he hadn’t.

He was looking out of the window as the train crossed the high viaduct just beyond Haywards Heath. He loved the view across to Ardingly College and its Gothic chapel. He eased his neck in the stiff collar of his shirt. He was thinking about the West Pier but he was dressed for an interview. Funds were running low and he needed to get a proper job.

‘Nealson died in a memorable way.’ Tingley said.

The train went into a deep cutting. Watts frowned at his reflection in the train window.

‘Hello?’

Watts waited, glancing down at the front page of the Guardian. The second lead announced the imminent publication of the report into the Milldean Massacre, in which four civilians had been shot and killed by armed police. He was aware of the rush of the train above the wavering phone signal. His phone rang again.

‘There are tunnels coming up,’ he said. ‘I may lose you. You said memorable?’

‘To you and me.’

Watts frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Tingley and the signal was snatched away. But Watts had clearly heard: ‘Vlad the Impaler.’

Watts looked down at his phone. Then at the tremor in his hand.

After his interview, Watts phoned Tingley.

‘How did it go?’ Tingley said.

‘Pointless. Who wants a disgraced cop?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Did you say Vlad?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you meet?’

‘Where?’

‘Cricketers?’

‘Nah – I’ve moved on. Let’s meet in the Bath Arms.’

‘Big change.’

‘It’s a couple of hundred yards away. And it has free wi-fi.’

‘Don’t give me too many shocks at once, Jimmy. New pub and new technology? Next you’ll be drinking a proper drink.’

Watts phoned Sarah Gilchrist next.

‘I’m meeting Jimmy in the Bath Arms. Want to join us?’

‘No offence intended, Bob, but some of us work for a living.’

‘This is work. We can help you with Stewart Nealson’s kebabbing.’

Tingley looked pretty banged up.

‘You OK?’ Watts said, sitting down beside him. Tingley had a laptop on the table in front of him. The light from the screen gave him a terrible pallor and highlighted the black around his eyes.

‘Lost focus – my mistake.’

‘Where?’ Watts said. Tingley was a gun for hire and the government sent him to all the world’s hotspots.

Tingley took his drink.

‘Rum and pep. Loverly.’

Tingley, discreet as ever.

‘What’s with the high-tech?’ Watts said.

‘It’s all about intel. You know that, Bobby.’

‘And what intel are you looking at?’

‘Vlad the Impaler. I’ve been thinking about this. Those two in the bed?’

Watts nodded. The police operation that had gone disastrously wrong in the Milldean suburb of Brighton and had wrecked Watts’s career. It had been the armed entry into a house to arrest an armed robber. In the course of the operation four unarmed civilians had been shot dead. One had been identified as a local male prostitute but the others had never been identified. DNA indicated that two of them – a man and a woman who had been in bed together – were from somewhere in the Balkans.

‘So now the Serbian mafia have come for payback.’

‘Do you think Vlad could really be here?’ Watts said.

Tingley stared straight ahead.

‘God, I hope so.’

The Bath Arms was on the junction of two of the laines. A jewellers faced one side of it, a church converted into a pub the other. Watts and Tingley saw Gilchrist walk past the church in her civvies through a jumble of people. Jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket were her off-duty uniform. She came into the pub, saw them, then about-turned and went out again.

‘Excuse me a sec,’ she called over her shoulder. She approached two people. One of them scowled, one of them grinned, then both moved away.

‘Pickpockets,’ she said when she rejoined the men. ‘All this jostling makes easy pickings.’

‘That’s very proactive of you,’ Watts said.

She smiled.

‘Just didn’t want to disturb our meeting by having to nick ’em. They’ll be back when we’ve gone, and in the meantime they’ll just shift shop to the North Laines.’

Watts looked at her hands. Her right fist was tightly clenched.

‘My dad used to come here in the thirties,’ he said. ‘Selling information to the papers about the Brighton Trunk Murder.’

His father, Donald, successful thriller writer under the name Victor Tempest, had been a bobby on the beat in Brighton in the early 1930s. Watts tried to picture him now as a young man propping up the bar.

‘This Stewart Nealson thing,’ Gilchrist said. ‘He was alive when he was found. They’d taken great care to miss the vital organs – the stake didn’t touch any of them.’

‘How long had he been impaled?’ Watts said.

‘All night.’

‘Poor sod.’

‘You know the worst thing?’

‘Worse than that?’

She nodded.

‘What?’

‘To have done it like that means they had obviously done it before.’

Tingley and Watts looked at each other.

‘Takes you back,’ Watts said.

‘Doesn’t it just.’

Gilchrist looked from one to the other.

‘What do you know about this?’

‘You know you said there was a theory those two in the bed in Milldean massacre were Albanian,’ Watts said.

She nodded.

‘Any chance they could be Serbian?’

She shrugged.

‘You two going to tell me what you know and I don’t?’

Watts gestured to Tingley.

‘The historical, fifteenth-century Vlad the Impaler was Rumanian. Transylvanian actually. He ruled Wallachia. He’s supposed to have been the source for the Dracula myth.’

‘So I’ve heard. He was a vampire. How have you picked up on this guy’s nickname so quickly?’

Tingley ignored her question.

‘Actually, the historical Vlad was best known for resisting the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. And for his cruel punishments. Pretty cruel age, though. His elder brother was blinded with hot iron stakes and buried alive. When Vlad came to power he burned people alive, decapitated many – but most of all he impaled hundreds.’

‘I don’t get the Dracula link.’

‘The family name was Dracul.’

‘OK. But now you think he’s loose on the South Downs. You’re sure you haven’t been spending too much time in Lewes?’

‘Jimmy and I served in the Balkans in the nineties,’ Watts said. ‘I was with the UN peacekeeping forces; Jimmy was doing – well, what Jimmy does. That’s when we first encountered another Vlad, real name Miladin Radislav.’

Watts had been stationed in Travnik, a hilltop village just north of Visegrad in Bosnia. He had been staggered by the wild beauty of this mountain region, where hamlets clung to the crags and steep valley sides, and the river Drina below seemed to burst out of a wall of rock. Travnik was a village of plum orchards and the scent of fruit was everywhere.

‘There was a famous – and staggeringly beautiful – stone bridge over the Drina at Visegrad, built centuries earlier by the Turks using Christian slaves when the Ottoman Empire ruled the area. Muslims, Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians and some Jews had, for most of the time since then, co-existed harmoniously in the town.

‘All that changed with the civil war. Spring 1992. Visegrad was of strategic importance because the bridge took the road from Saravejo to Belgrade over the Drina. There was also a hydroelectric dam nearby that provided electricity to the area and prevented the Drina flooding towns and villages further down the valley.

‘Over half the town’s twenty thousand or so people were Bosniaks – Bosnian Muslims. A third were Serbians. The rest a mix of ethnicities. When Serbia got its appetite for empire building the JNA – the largely Serbian Yugoslav People’s Army – bombarded the Bosniak neighbourhoods and nearby Bosniak villages. Some Bosniaks responded by taking local Serbian bigwigs hostage and taking over the dam. The JNA sent commandos in. They recaptured the dam and freed the hostages.

‘The JNA occupied the town for a month or so. When they left they put the local Serbs in charge.’

‘Then it started,’ Tingley said. ‘Local Serbs, police and paramilitaries decided to get rid of the entire Bosniak population. They were the paramilitaries knows as the “White Eagles” and “Avengers” – linked to the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj. They were avenging slights that had happened centuries before.’

‘They wanted to kill all twenty thousand?’ Gilchrist was pale.

‘They probably would have if they could. They attacked all the nearby Bosniak villages and killed whoever they found. Every day they marched Bosniak men, women and children on to the bridge – that beautiful bridge – and killed them, dumping their bodies in the river. They looted and destroyed the homes. They blew up the town’s two mosques.

‘They systematically raped the women. They imprisoned the rest of the Bosniaks in various detention sites. The most unfortunate were housed in a concentration camp where they were beaten, tortured and forced to work. They were all sexually assaulted, of course.’

‘Terrible,’ Gilchrist whispered, her jaw tight.

‘They herded Bosniaks into a couple of houses then threw grenades through the windows. They burned them alive in other houses. The worst of the atrocities were done by this guy, Radislav. He’d been a barber in Visegrad. He was one of those psychopaths the war let loose from the country’s id. He ran amok. He tortured and raped children of both sexes. Murdered with gleeful ferocity.’

Watts’s voice was toneless:

‘His men dragged people through the streets tied to the rear bumpers of cars. They ripped out people’s kidneys. They took truckloads of people down to the Drina, shot them or knifed them in the guts then pushed them in. For target practice they threw children from the bridge and tried to shoot them before they hit the water.’

‘But why the name Vlad?’

‘That came after the UN arrived,’ Watts said. ‘He retreated with his band of men into the mountains, dragging their loot with them.’

A month later, Watts received word that Radislav’s band had returned to his village. Watts was ordered to get to Visegrad as soon as possible. Radislav’s gang had gone far beyond rape and beatings this time. This one had to be seen to be believed.

Watts and his squadron went down the mountain in four vehicles. It was a blustery day, clouds scudding between the mountain tops. The road was on the whole good, although they passed bombed-out and fire-destroyed houses. At two points they had to skirt deep bomb craters.

They approached the town from the other side of the river, winding down through the hills. The green water roared between the arches of the old bridge. The soldiers’ attention was drawn to what looked like a dozen statues in a row on a parapet raised some eight feet above the highest point of the bridge.

As the vehicles dropped down closer to the river they could see that the statues were in crude wooden frames. As they came on to the bridge their progress was halted by a large group of people, looking in horror at the statues, women keening and howling, men tearing at their clothes. A handful of peacekeepers in their bright blue helmets had formed a perimeter in front of the statues. Tingley was standing beside them.

Watts quit his vehicle and led his men through the throng. He could see now that the statues were men hanging in a line from long poles. A corporal stepped away from the perimeter. He was red-faced.

‘Bosnian-Serbs came out of the mountains in the night and raided the village. These are the young Muslim men they found here.’

‘Why do they look so stiff?’ Watts said.

‘They’ve been impaled,’ the corporal said. ‘Last night.’ He gulped. ‘Two were still alive this morning.’

Watts looked up at the sky and at the mountains. He looked at Tingley. Tingley shook his head.

‘He got the name Vlad the Impaler that day,’ Tingley said. ‘The lads weren’t hot on geography. But Radislav wasn’t inspired by Vlad. He was taking revenge for a Christian from his village who had been impaled by the local Muslims five hundred years earlier.’

‘Jesus,’ Gilchrist said.

‘Radislav took off back into the mountains,’ Tingley said, ‘I tracked him but never caught him.’

‘The coastguards have found a blood-soaked boat with a horribly mutilated body on board,’ Gilchrist said. ‘An Italian industrialist. It seems the boat was boarded in the Adriatic. It was Radislav, wasn’t it?’

Tingley and Watts exchanged glances.

‘Probably,’ Tingley said.

Gilchrist shuddered.

‘And he’s only just started,’ Watts said. ‘I don’t think the police can handle somebody like him.’

Tingley touched his swollen face and grimaced.

‘Well, someone has got to take him on.’

Gilchrist looked at the two men.

‘Now hang on – don’t you two vigilantes go getting any ideas. We don’t need you riding to the rescue. This is police business.’

She started to rise.

‘I’ve got to feed this information back, alert some other agencies.’

‘There was something else I wanted to talk to you about,’ Watts said.

Gilchrist paused.

‘It pales in comparison to these horrors but I’ve been asked to investigate the death of the chair of the West Pier Trust.’

‘Great. No offence, Bob, but how are you going to do that?’

‘Just ask around.’

‘You know I can’t help you. I’m a full-time police officer. I can’t get involved in private investigations. Plus, I’ve got enough on my plate if this Radislav is going to kick things off.’

‘That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’

‘Then what?’