The Last King of Brighton

TWENTY-FOUR

Hathaway took the old acoustic guitar out on to the balcony and sat on the front edge of a wicker chair. He picked at the strings, running the damaged fingers of his left hand up and down the frets. Long ago he’d burned his fingers. The scars remained, though he always tried to keep them hidden. But some chord shapes he’d never been able to do because the scars made his fingers too stiff.

All those years ago, Dawn had tried to deal with the burns with butter from the kitchen and snow from the garden. Before her love for him turned to hate.

He couldn’t say he missed Dawn. When she’d gone off with Charlie, she’d cut herself off from him. Whether because he’d killed their father, he didn’t know.

The lights in the garden threw up random shapes and deep shadows in the undergrowth. The pool was opalescent green beneath its glass roof.

There was movement in the trees to his left. A miniscule alteration to the depth of shadow. It might have been nothing. He continued to play, head bent over his guitar. He knew better than to try and sing. He was thinking about John Martyn the night he’d chased his manager down the centre aisle and whopped Dan in the chops. Then of the last time he’d seen Martyn, bloated, missing a leg, performing in the Dome concert hall.

Martyn’s fingers had seemed too thick to separate the guitar strings, his voice had been nothing more than a growl. One of Hathaway’s men running the get-out had told him that Martyn’s stump was bleeding at the end of the evening.

Hathaway hadn’t gone backstage to say hello. Some things are best left to lie.

Hathaway liked his balcony. The bulletproof, matt glass canopy did not reflect light, although brightly polished, so it was difficult to see that it was there. The sniper didn’t know.

When the first bullet pocked the glass above Hathaway’s head, he carried on playing. There were two more rapid attempts. Hathaway could see the sniper was good by the way the pock marks were grouped so closely together.

He put down his guitar and went back into his house to wait for the sniper to be brought to him. He assumed it would be the Albanian, Drago Kadire. He walked to the bar, nodding at Jimmy Tingley as he passed him.

‘Rum and pep?’

Kadire proffered a photograph from his pocket. It was the bridge at Drina.

‘You know this bridge?’

‘I know this bridge,’ Tingley said.

‘Do you know that the Turks built it. They buried twins in it to placate the spirit of the river Drina. Stoja and Ostoja. The mason couldn’t bring himself to kill the twins so he left a loophole through which their mother might feed them. The bridge took seven years to build. She lived on the riverbank each day and sold herself to the builders to get the food to feed them. But in seven years they grew. Their quarters became too small for them. As they crouched there, moaning, the mason did what he should have done years before. He sealed them up.

‘Their mother still had milk in her breasts for all those years. She had suckled them all that time. Over the centuries the mother’s milk still flowed from the bridge – a white stream from between the stones that was scraped off and sold to mothers without milk. Wild doves nest in the loophole now.’

Kadire looked down at his hands.

‘I was born in this village.’

‘You were a barber like your friend Radislav?’

‘He’s no friend of mine,’ Kadire spat out. ‘I am Albanian. He is Serbian. I tolerate him.’

‘So you had a better job?’

Kadire laughed.

‘No education. I was bright enough but my father lost his job – taken by Mussulmen, of course. I had to go to work young.’

‘How many times has that bridge been fought over? How much blood has been spilt over it? Spilt on it.’

‘I am no historian.’ Kadire leaned forward and pointed at the picture.

‘I was born in that house there – that one, below the bridge on the right. The one with the moss growing on the roof. You see it?’

Tingley looked closer.

‘I see it.’

Kadire dropped the photograph on the table.

‘My mother was raped on that rock there. Beside the bridge, stretched out on that rock, held down by two men whilst the third raped her. And then they swapped. When they had finished with her they cut her throat and threw her in the river.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tingley said, and he was. ‘During the Civil War?’

‘Before. Long before.’

‘They were Muslims?’

Kadire didn’t answer.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The men who did it were sorrier. I was watching from that small window up there – the one with the bars upon it? I saw them clearly. And I followed them. I was stealthy even as my eyes burned.’

‘Were they Bosniaks?’

‘I learned patience. I took them all some years later. I made them suffer. And their families. Rape. Slow roasting.’

Tingley looked down.

‘Revenge in the Balkans.’

‘Revenge.’ He dropped the photograph on the table in front of him. ‘It is a beautiful bridge, is it not?’

‘Drago, if you don’t talk to me you’ll have to talk to Hathaway. He’s not a gentle man. Where is Radislav and where is Charlie Laker?’

‘I am a soldier. A sniper.’

‘Where are they, Drago? We have to stop this.’

Kadire spat on Hathaway’s oriental rug and closed his eyes. Hathaway touched Tingley on the shoulder.

‘My turn now.’

The men crowded into Reilly’s room. Four, five, six of them. Reilly opened his eyes and waved the one hand he had above his sheets.

‘Bit mob-heavy aren’t you?’ he croaked. ‘No wonder your country was always getting pissed on if it takes six of you to deal with one old man.’

‘You are the man who is going to be pissed on,’ the nearest man said, stepping towards the bed. ‘Then much worse. And you can blame Mr John Hathaway.’

‘He’s going to have your mates,’ Reilly said. ‘If he hasn’t already.’

‘And we’re going to have you.’

‘You Serbians. You know, I’m a great reader. Always have been. I’ve read a lot of your greatest writer. Ivo Andric. You’ve probably never even heard of him, have you?’

None of the Serbians responded.

‘Typical lowlife scum. Read him and you might learn to take proper pride in your country.’ Reilly tucked his hand back under his blankets. ‘In fact, come a little closer all of you and I’ll quote his words.’

‘We’re coming closer, old man,’ the first man said, yanking Reilly’s blankets off him.

They all looked first at his wizened, naked body and the tubes coming out of him. Then they saw the curled piece of metal in his right hand. The pin of the World War Two grenade that he proffered in his left.

Tingley looked at Kadire sprawled on the plastic sheets on the garage floor and thought how pathetic he looked, one ear hanging off, his nose mashed to one side of his face, blood pumping out of him.

‘This is not the way to get information,’ he said.

‘We’ll see,’ Hathaway said.

Then his phone rang.

‘Yes. Patrice.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘Did you warn him? And Barbara? Thank you, Patrice. I’m on my way.’

Hathaway dropped his phone into his pocket. He turned to Tingley.

‘Sean Reilly is dead, but he took six of them with him. I’m going to France.’ He gestured at Kadire. ‘Do it your way – but do it.’

Miladin Radislav killed coppers. He killed anything and anybody if the mood was upon him. He watched the copper jogging along the seafront. He itched to kill her.

Gilchrist was feeling both overwhelmed and out of her depth. So many deaths; so much violence. She’d worked out ferociously at the gym but now enjoyed the sight of the sea, calm after the fury of the storm some days before.

She dropped down to the lower promenade beside the beach and ran towards the West Pier. She loved running, loved getting the breath and the legs in rhythm. Sometimes felt she could run forever. She’d applied for the London Marathon but hadn’t yet heard back about her application.

She looked out at the tangled remains of the West Pier as she approached it. A group of teenage girls were gathered at the water’s edge. She watched them as she ran. She could vaguely hear their shouts. They were throwing stones into the sea.

After another hundred yards Gilchrist realized from the angle of their arms that they were throwing them at something.

When she also realized that some were using the cameras on their mobile phones she lost the rhythm of her breath. She had guessed what they were doing. Stumbling and gasping, she headed across the beach towards them.

‘Hey,’ she yelled, her voice breaking as her breath went again. She stumbled as she crunched through the pebbles. She called again.

Only when she was within fifty yards of the girls did they turn at what were by now her screeches. And only then did she recognize that she was running into a bad situation. She didn’t know what they were up to, but she did know there were about ten feral teenage girls now interested in her. Each one with a stone in her hand.

Gilchrist was big and strong but she knew about pack animals. She slowed to get her breath and her footing. The girls, hyped up, were actually snarling. Gilchrist was thinking that a Sussex University academic she’d briefly dated would have made a meal out of this apparent proof that pubescent girls are so overwhelmed by hormones they can become wild animals.

Personally, Gilchrist believed they were just horrible girls, though she was also thinking about vampire films as she slowed to a walk.

She was about twenty yards away before she saw the huddled form lying on the pebble beach below them.

‘Police,’ she called. ‘What are you doing?’

The girls gave her that same feral look.

‘Police, right,’ said a blonde with a lot of metal in her face. ‘Fuck off, bitch, or we’ll tear your tits off.’

Sarah, breathing deeply, walked steadily towards them. The girls watched her approach, intense looks on their faces. The body lying on the beach didn’t move.

The girls looked to be about fourteen or fifteen, some younger. One of them pointed her phone and photographed Gilchrist.

‘Who is that lying on the beach? They need help.’

‘You really a copper?’ a mixed-race girl with her red hair in dreadlocks said, her chin thrust out.

Gilchrist wondered about knives. Her training told her to withdraw and call for backup, but she didn’t want to leave whoever was lying on the shore to the mercy of these savages. She made a decision.

‘Get on your way now,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.

‘What – you not going to arrest us?’ metal-face sneered. ‘Why have you stopped? Don’t want to lose your tits?’

‘Just go on your way. All of you.’

‘Nah,’ the red-haired girl said. ‘Come on down and we’ll help you with your inquiries.’

The other girls laughed but Gilchrist had never heard a chillier sound.

‘Go along now or you’ll be in serious trouble.’

‘Ain’t we already?’ metal-face said. ‘We’ve really messed her up, you know.’

Gilchrist took a deep breath. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She didn’t have a phone with her, didn’t have her warrant card. Could she bluff this out? She had to try to help the girl lying so still. She needed to get to a phone to do that. The nearest phones were just ahead of her, snapping her picture.

She put her hand in her tracksuit trouser pocket. Gripped the oblong piece of plastic there. Her dirty little secret.

She walked slowly towards the metal-faced girl. She was expecting that at any moment they would throw their stones at her. At this distance she wasn’t sure how accurate they would be.

‘You’re making such a fucking serious mistake, bitch,’ the girl said.

‘You’ve already made yours,’ Gilchrist said, stopping two feet from the girl, towering over her. As she stopped, the other girls started to move round her.

The red-haired girl looked beyond her. A man’s voice came from behind. Accented.

‘You sluts – we have a present for you unless you go away.’

She heard crunching footsteps, more than one.

The teenage girls stared resistance, then, as one, started to run off down the beach.

Hathaway turned. Four men were approaching her in a loose line. The grey-faced one slightly ahead of the others smiled, but there was no warmth in it.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘No problem, policewoman Gilchrist,’ he said.

Gilchrist stepped back, her feet sinking into the shingle. This wasn’t right. She risked a look at the unconscious girl beside her. There was blood everywhere. A bruised and bloodied face. Water was swirling nearer to her as the tide rose. Gilchrist looked down the beach at the gang of girls scrambling across the pebbles. The men were just a few yards away.

Gilchrist used to carry Mace. Illegally imported from the US, illegally carried. Now she had something better. Certainly better than the officially sanctioned Taser she used to carry when on duty.

The Taser was fine in its way. You could use it from fifteen feet away. You fired its two darts on the end of their fifteen feet wires and pumped 50,000 volts into your antagonist. Screwed up their neuromuscular system – for the next fifteen minutes the person on the receiving end was useless.

But it was a one-shot weapon and came under firearm regulations, so she was no longer allowed to use one after being stripped of her firearm privileges.

Her dirty little secret didn’t have wires. The XR5000 Nova Stun Gun was powered by a nine-volt cadmium rechargeable battery – the kind used in transistor radios. It produced, through two brass studs, a sawtooth 47,000 volts in around one and a half seconds at up to twenty cycles per second. Didn’t burn, bruise or damage tissue. Just incapacitated somebody within three seconds.

Four men. She wasn’t sure it could recharge in time for four men. She swept it from her pocket and pointed it at the leering, grey-faced man. At least she’d get him.

Tingley phoned Watts.

‘I’ve crossed the line too.’

‘I didn’t know you had a line.’

Tingley was silent.

‘Sorry, that came out wrong.’

‘I know where they are.’

‘And Charlie Laker?’

‘Him next.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

Tingley looked out of the flat’s window at the Ravenscourt Park below. A Polish neighbourhood since the Second World War. Now the hidey-hole for Serbian gangsters.

Kadire had talked.

‘I’m already here.’

Tingley had meant it when he said the Balkan gang couldn’t be stopped. But maybe they could be stopped from coming to Brighton.

He watched a car draw up. A big man got out of the front passenger side and scanned the street. The back doors opened and the other men got out on either side. Both were lean, wiry. One of the men scanned the street whilst the other moved to the door of the apartment block and was lost from view. The car drove away.

Tingley moved away from the window and went to stand beside the door. He heard the ping of the lift down the corridor, then nothing until the key in the lock. He hefted the Sig Sauer Hathaway had given him.

The two bodyguards came in first. They scanned the room but weren’t really expecting anybody to be here – Tingley had made sure he’d replaced the couple of security indicators on the door. They had no reason to suspect anyone was in the room.

They didn’t look behind the door. When the man they were escorting was halfway in the room, Tingley slammed the door into him. He shot the two bodyguards, the first in the back and the back of the head, the second, as he turned, in the chest and the side of the head. Perfect double taps.

The bullets made ‘phtt’ sounds because of the silencer. Tingley swung back the door and kicked the man trying to get up from the floor in the side of the head. He grabbed his feet and dragged him into the room, swung him over and dropped on to his back, swiping the door closed with his left hand. He grabbed the man’s head and pulled back.

‘I want names or I’ll break your back as well as your nose,’ he said, bearing down with his knees. ‘All the way back to the slum you came from.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ the man said between gritted teeth.

Tingley grabbed his hair.

‘All the way back.’