The Thing Itself

TWENTY

Tingley had gone first to Varengeville-sur-mer with his friend, Bob Watts. Old friends, old companions in arms. Survivors of many a conflict. They had returned to John Hathaway’s grand house in the picturesque village a few miles outside Dieppe a few days after Barbara’s murder.

At first sight the two of them together looked like some old comedy double act. Of an age, but Tingley compact and tidy, hair plastered down; Watts towering over him, rougher round the edges, hair wild.

They’d picked up a car in Dieppe and driven through the rain to find a posse of French toughs gathered around the gate of Hathaway’s house.

Tingley and Hathaway exchanged glances. Tingley and Watts had got embroiled in a gun-battle here some weeks earlier, fighting alongside Hathaway against the Balkan gangsters. Now they were back, but for different reasons. Tingley was thinking revenge but knew Watts was thinking justice.

‘I don’t know what I feel about killing people outside the law,’ Watts said. ‘I was a policeman.’

‘And a soldier,’ Tingley said. ‘You’ve seen a lot of deaths.’

Tingley sought revenge not just for recent events in Brighton but also for atrocities committed by the same people in the Balkans in the nineties when he was there covertly and Watts was part of the UN peacekeeping force.

The murderers, then as more recently, were led by the sadistic killer, Miladin Radislav, known during the Balkan conflict as Vlad the Impaler. Tingley had intended to track him back to the Balkans and serve justice on him. Battlefield justice. When Barbara was killed, he had added to his list the sniper, Drago Kadire.

Watts and Tingley were taken through to the old library where a middle-aged man and a woman waited. The couple introduced themselves as Patrice and Jeanne Magnon.

‘And why you are here?’ Watts said.

‘The Hathaway family did business with the Magnons for decades,’ Patrice said. ‘And whilst we liked John very much, business is business. He is gone, he will be missed, but the waters close over.’

Hathaway’s last moments had been spent in agony, impaled on a stake on the cliff just a few hundred yards from this house.

‘He left a will disposing of his property,’ Tingley said.

‘And we have heard that the woman who inherited is also dead. Barbara? Nature abhors a vacuum, does it not?’

‘I was standing next to her when she was killed,’ Tingley said quietly.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Patrice Magnan shrugged. ‘It is the modern world.’

‘In our family, Sean Reilly will be missed even more than John,’ Jeanne Magnon said. She had the gravelled voice of a heavy smoker. Of Jeanne Moreau, whom she vaguely resembled. Jolie laide.

Sean Reilly had been the right-hand man first of gangster Dennis Hathaway, then his son John. He had retired to this house and blown up himself and the Bosnian Serbs who had come to get him. That had been the start of the bloodbath.

‘Did you betray Hathaway?’ Tingley kept his voice low.

‘It is complicated,’ Jeanne said. ‘Charlie Laker visited us. You know him? A very bad man. He told our father, Marcel, that Hathaway had killed his own father, Dennis Hathaway. Marcel had wondered for forty years what had become of his old friend, Dennis. Now he felt the son had betrayed him. He wanted revenge. Then, we had warned John Hathaway we could not get involved in rough stuff.’

Watts indicated the two men hovering by the door.

‘Looks like you have your own tough guys.’

‘These?’ Jeanne said. ‘These are local boys. No match for the men from the Balkans.’ She shuddered. ‘That man Radislav. .’

Patrice put an arm round her shoulders for a moment but looked at the two Englishmen.

‘We betrayed him in that — like your Admiral Nelson — we turned a blind eye.’ Jeanne rubbed her face wearily. ‘But we had no choice.’

‘Charlie Laker knew our businesses, knew our weaknesses,’ Patrice said.

‘Where are Laker and Radislav now?’ Tingley said.

‘Long gone,’ Patrice said. ‘Laker back in England. In the north, I think. Radislav back to Bosnia.’

‘And Kadire?’

‘Drago Kadire? Was he even here?’

‘He shot the woman, Barbara, in Brighton a few days after Hathaway was killed here,’ Tingley said. ‘His face showed the signs of a bad beating. He could not have left England by plane. He would have been recognized too easily.’

Patrice Magnon tugged at his ear.

‘He probably went via Calais. Albanian gangs control the port. They smuggle girls and drugs and who knows what else into Britain every day. Then he would make his way south overland.’

‘Back to Bosnia,’ Tingley observed flatly.

Patrice and Jeanne exchanged a glance.

‘Actually, he is based in Italy,’ Jeanne said. ‘In Chiusi, north of Rome. He does work for the Mafia from time to time. Killing work. But he is involved in the smuggling of ancient artefacts and is also a kind of liaison between the Italian and the Balkan mafias.’

‘There is a man in Orvieto you should see,’ Patrice said. ‘Crespo di Bocci. He bears Kadire a grudge. Crespo is a smuggler of antiques, mostly. Not the worst in the hierarchy of crime. But he has killed, when necessary.’

‘And smuggled artefacts are one way the Mafia launders the money it makes from the traffic in despair,’ Watts said. ‘Drugs and people.’

Magnan nodded.

‘Sadly that is so.’

Tingley stood.

‘I want access to Hathaway’s armoury.’

‘And a car, I would imagine,’ Patrice said.

‘You can provide that?’ Tingley said.

‘Of course. And a passport?’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘We did like John Hathaway. Our small betrayal we did with a heavy heart.’

‘But now you take over his house — and French businesses?’

Patrice shrugged again.

‘That is the nature of our trade. It is not personal.’

Tingley nodded.

‘Show me the armoury.’

Patrice looked at Bob Watts.

‘You too?’

Watts shook his head.

‘I have other plans. But there is something I need from you. Papers. Old papers to do with an unsolved murder from 1934.’

Watts was interested in the identity of the Brighton Trunk Murderer, the never-identified man who had so callously left a naked woman’s torso at Brighton railway station, her legs and feet in a suitcase at King’s Cross.

John Hathaway had mentioned before his death that his gangster father, Dennis, had acquired from a bent copper in 1964 most of the police files on the Brighton Trunk Murder. They were thought destroyed that year by then Chief Constable Philip Simpson, a close friend of Watts’s father. Dennis Hathaway had used the contents of the files to blackmail the corrupt Chief Constable Simpson.

John Hathaway had left them in the safe keeping of Sean Reilly in Varengeville-sur-mer.

Watts didn’t for one moment think his father had been the Brighton Trunk Murderer but there were other things hinted at in his father’s diary. Rape. Corruption. Betrayal. He wanted to see what the files said about those things.

‘I need some papers,’ he told the Magnons. ‘Old papers of no interest or value to you. They were in Sean Reilly’s keeping but I don’t exactly know where in the house they are.’

Patrice Magnon had gestured round the library.

‘I would imagine papers would be somewhere here. Papers you can have. Old papers, that is. Feel free to look.’

A half-hour later Tingley came back into the room. Watts was putting his mobile phone away.

‘I’ve got to go back,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Tingley said.

‘On the next ferry.’

Tingley waited.

‘My father’s housekeeper has just telephoned. My father has had a stroke.’

Tingley reached out and squeezed his friend’s arm.

‘I’m sorry, Bob.’

Watts nodded.

‘You got the papers you needed?’ Tingley said.

Watts indicated boxes of files beside a long table.

They went to a bar on the waterfront. Windows fogged, rain sluicing the streets.

‘Your dad is a fine man,’ Tingley said.

‘I don’t know what my father is,’ Watts said.

They parted at the ferry terminal in Dieppe. A clap of thunder sounded like artillery fire.

‘You going to be OK?’ Watts said.

‘I’m loaded for bear,’ Tingley said, patting the boot of the car.

‘You’re loaded for World War Three,’ Watts said. ‘God knows what Hathaway intended to do with rocket launchers.’ He put his hand on Tingley’s shoulder. ‘God knows what you’re going to do with them.’

‘Radislav is long overdue.’

‘But first Kadire?’ Watts said.

‘But first Kadire.’ Tingley held out his hand. ‘Once everything is sorted about your dad, you’re going after Charlie Laker?’

‘Him and others.’

They shook hands, then Watts turned and walked to where his own car was parked. He looked back and Tingley was watching him go. Thunder rolled. Neither man waved.