The Thing Itself (7 page)

‘Let them fight it out,' he said.

Laker had made Whitby his temporary HQ for sentimental reasons. When he was a kid, before he became a Teddy boy, he'd been in the boy scouts and they'd come north from Sussex on a camping trip to Whitby, Scarborough and Robin Hood's Bay. In those days, the mid-fifties, their scoutmaster had managed to arrange for them to camp inside the ruined abbey. It was scary and it pissed down, and nobody slept very much, but they all loved it.

Now he was waiting in his suite for a couple of girls to arrive from Harrogate, the nearest place to Whitby you could buy quality arse. Not that he would be paying.

He was thinking about his late wife, Dawn. John Hathaway's sister. He'd got her pregnant, some forty years earlier. Her father, Dennis Hathaway, had given him a choice. They'd been in the chilly wooden hut Hathaway used as his HQ behind the firing range on the West Pier in Brighton.

Dennis Hathaway. Jesus. Burly, friendly-faced and vicious as fuck.

That day Hathaway had handed Laker a whisky – Canadian Club, naturally – and said: ‘Here's the choice, Charlie. You can go against my wishes and marry Dawn and have the kid. But you're out of the business. I don't want my Dawn involved in this.'

‘Or?' Laker said, feeling the whisky burn his throat.

He could tell Dennis Hathaway didn't take to his tone but Laker couldn't help it. He'd never been good at being told what to do.

‘Watch your lip, Charlie. It's your future we're talking about. The alternative is that you persuade her to have an abortion, you finish with her and you continue your career with me and you thrive.'

Hathaway scrutinized Laker.

‘I think you were made for this life. I hope John is going to come through, but you – I see it in you.'

Hathaway swigged his drink.

‘You lost your brother, didn't you?'

Charlie nodded.

‘Burned alive, wasn't he?'

Charlie nodded again.

‘Gives a man a bit of impetus.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Did the coppers ever get whoever did it?'

Laker shook his head.

‘No clue.'

Dennis Hathaway, still staring fixedly at Laker, nodded slowly.

‘Sorry,' he said.

Laker started to say, ‘It's OK—'

‘I'm going to need a decision from you this morning.'

Laker liked Dawn. Lusted for her. But he wasn't father material. He knew that.

‘I'm Catholic,' he said.

‘Lapse,' Hathaway said without missing a beat. He raised his glass. ‘What's it to be?'

Laker raised his own glass.

‘OK,' he said in a low voice.

‘OK what?'

Laker leaned over and chinked Hathaway's glass.

‘You get your way.'

Laker could see that Hathaway couldn't hold back.

‘I usually do.'

That was meant to be that but Charlie Laker couldn't get Dawn out of his head. He was getting plenty of women but there was something about her. He saw her after the abortion, from time to time, and she was dispirited and listless. Although Laker had insisted she have the abortion, she knew her father was behind it.

‘I wish I'd been able to stand up to him,' she said. ‘But I'm just a coward.'

‘You're no coward.'

‘Aren't I? To let him kill my child.'

‘We'll make another,' Charlie said, on absolute impulse.

She smiled then and took his hand.

‘Over my dad's dead body,' she said.

Which is the way it worked out.

Charlie decided to kill Dennis Hathaway for many reasons. For Dawn, yes, but mainly because he was ready to take over Brighton. He knew he would have to kill the enforcer, Sean Reilly, too. He would probably have to kill his mate and rival, John Hathaway.

He bided his time. He thought their joint trip to Spain in 1970 would be a good opportunity. As it turned out, John Hathaway thought the same – and then some.

One minute, they were sitting around getting pissed on Sangria and whisky, Sean Reilly standing at the edge of the terrace looking out into the mountains. The next, John Hathaway shot his own father in the head and was about to do the same to Laker.

‘Goodbye, Charlie,' Hathaway said and Laker closed his eyes, resigned, knowing this was payback for him executing Hathaway's girlfriend. He'd been ordered to because she'd witnessed something she shouldn't have, but he didn't blame his old friend for not understanding.

‘Don't,' Sean Reilly said, suddenly beside them.

That Reilly had stepped in to save Laker's life had surprised him. It was no surprise that Reilly told him to leave that night. Before Laker left, Reilly gave him the deeds to a couple of clubs in Ibiza and Majorca.

‘To help you start up on your own,' he said. He handed Charlie £10,000, too. A fuck of a lot of money in those days.

Charlie kept to himself that Dennis Hathaway, as part of their deal over Dawn, had given him two clubs on the Costa del Sol, the pirate radio stations and cash in a Jersey bank account.

C
harlie Laker went to Ibiza first. Set up a drug deal on his own with some Sardinian mobsters who provided the link through to the same Moroccan gangs Dennis Hathaway and now John were dealing with. It cost more to go through the middleman but it kept his name out of it.

He stayed in Spain for a couple of years. Dawn moved into the house Dennis Hathaway had been building. Her brother had given it to her, without saying why. Charlie saw to the laying of more concrete in the bottom of the swimming pool. They chose turquoise tiles for the pool bottom.

Charlie never swam. Told Dawn he didn't know how. She swam there all the time. Her mother came to stay just twice. Bewildered, strung out on the Valium wonder drug she'd been prescribed a couple of years before. She was devastated by her husband's abrupt disappearance.

‘I know Dennis must be dead,' she said once, in a rare lucid moment. ‘I just want to know where he's buried.'

Charlie watched her slow breaststroke across the pool, neck stretching out of the water, mouth pursed and eyes closed, swathes of her swim-dress floating behind her. And he wondered if he should tell her that with each length she was passing just four feet above her husband, buried underneath the tiled bottom of the pool.

The clubs and the drugs were complementary and provided a regular flow of money into his Jersey account. The system pretty much ran itself.

After two years, Charlie sold out his businesses to his Sardinian partners. He got a good price, not a great price, but he was pragmatic. He knew eventually they would have simply taken them from him.

He'd sold off the pirate radio stations to Keith Jeffery, a manager on the make with a club in Majorca. Jeffery was getting as bad a reputation as Charlie once had in the pop music business.

Charlie made a deal with him over his own roster of groups. Jeffery ostensibly took them over but Charlie remained a silent partner and occasional enforcer. He still liked getting his hands bloody.

His trips to England were rare and he always made sure he stayed under the radar. More frequent were trips to the US to handle Jeffery's burgeoning business there.

He got involved with the Mafia, who controlled transportation, backstage and technical stuff on pretty much all the pop tours.

He supposed the rumour that he had offed Jimi Hendrix came about because he was a bit of bogeyman in the business. He still smiled at it.

Dawn and he had been trying for another child. After her mother's death, they had been trying with increasing desperation. Dawn was still in touch with her brother. John Hathaway never asked about Charlie. Just in case he changed his mind, Charlie was armed at all times. Sean Reilly phoned from time to time, kept him vaguely informed.

Dawn went to see doctors in Spain and England. They said the same. The abortion had been botched. It was possible she was now unable to conceive.

Laker told Dawn how her father died soon after her mother passed. He didn't tell her where he was buried – thought that would totally freak her out – but he did tell her that John Hathaway, her brother, had shot her father in the head.

He didn't know exactly what process of osmosis went on in her mind, but the death of her mother, the discovery she could not bear children and the revelation about her father's death gave her a single focus. Her brother, John Hathaway, was responsible for fucking up her life.

She never spoke to him again. She wrote him a letter saying she was cutting all ties with him. Didn't really explain why. She and Charlie moved to America. New York, though the music business was booming in California.

He did go to the west coast from time to time. He bumped into Dan, the lead singer of his old group, The Avalons, a couple of times, but they had little to say to each other. They'd been in a band together but they had never been close.

He had good contacts in the US Mafia. There were cousins of the Sardinian guys who were cousins of other families in the US. They got fed up with Jeffery. Some unspecified offence. Told Charlie how Jeffery had been ripping him off. Told him about Jeffery's secret accounts in the Bahamas. Asked Charlie if he felt up to taking over?

Three months later, Jeffery was dead, killed in a plane crash. Three months after that, Charlie and Dawn were living in LA, next door to Cary Grant no less.

And it was Charlie's turn to have his emotions undergo osmosis.

One drunken evening by the pool, the lights of Los Angeles carpeted below them, Dawn told him about an evening back in 1959 when John Hathaway had come home with burned hands and singed eyebrows, the smell of petrol strong on him. She tended to him with butter from the larder and snow from the back garden. Didn't get much sense out of him.

A couple of days later, it was in the local papers a little boy had been burned to death in a bonfire maliciously set alight. The police were assuming it was manslaughter not murder, but they wouldn't know for sure whether the arsonist knew the little boy was hiding in the bonfire until they tracked him down.

‘Did John know my brother was in the den?' Charlie croaked.

‘He didn't say,' Dawn said.

Charlie remembered the conversation he'd had with Dennis Hathaway when they did the deal over Dawn and the abortion.

‘Did your dad know what John had done?'

She pursed her lips.

‘Oh yes.'

R
eg Williamson was in the office hunched over his computer when Gilchrist walked in. He clicked his mouse, then slid from behind his desk and hurried over to her.

‘Bingo. Bernie Grimes. Place called Homps on the Canal du Midi. Not far from Carcassonne.'

Gilchrist looked at him.

‘Fantastic, but you're saying those place names as if they should mean something to me. I'm a Brighton girl. I've never heard of them.'

‘Carcassonne is this medieval walled town in the south of France. Looks just like it should – they used it for that Kevin Costner Robin Hood film donkey's years ago. Reason it looks so Walt Disney perfect is that it was actually rebuilt in the nineteenth century. So it's kind of a recreation.'

‘You've been there.'

Williamson looked away.

‘Me and the wife. Before . . .'

His voice trailed away. Gilchrist realized she didn't know anything about Reg's private life.

‘Your divorce?'

Williamson flashed a look at her.

‘Our David killed himself.'

Gilchrist was swept back to a conversation she'd had in the car with Reg, it seemed an age ago now, about suicides off Beachy Head.

‘Reg, I didn't know. I'm so sorry.'

Williamson worked his jaw.

‘His own daft fault. Drugs.' Gilchrist saw tears in Williamson's eyes as he turned away. ‘Anyway, we know where Grimes is. We now have to decide what we do about it.'

Gilchrist reached out and gave his arm a quick squeeze.

‘I don't even know your wife's name – I'm sorry.'

‘Angela.' Williamson looked down. ‘Lovely lass but she's suffering. Every day I see her sink further down. Don't know what to do.'

He worked his jaw.

‘When I left for work this morning, she didn't even have the energy to say goodbye.'

He gave an awful false smile.

‘Ay well, I'm sure it will all work out for the best.'

Gilchrist nodded uncertainly.

‘So what next?' he said.

‘I bumped into Philippa Franks. Mentioned Bernie's name.'

Williamson cleared his throat.

‘And?'

Gilchrist shrugged.

‘Nothing, really, but I have the feeling it shook her a bit.'

‘OK, we need to find a way to put pressure on her,' Williamson said, all business again.

‘And I think I know where Charlie Laker is going to be in a while.'

‘Well done.'

‘Not really. He's made a reservation at the Grand.'

Charlie Laker sat in the back of his Bentley heading south, his phone clamped to his ear. Time to move things up a notch. He looked out through tinted windows and made a series of calls. As the rugged northern landscape softened towards Nottingham, he put his phone away and closed his eyes. Thinking back. Again.

He'd vowed he wouldn't do anything to John Hathaway for the sake of Dawn. But he'd planned. And prospered.

Dawn coped with her depression with therapy three times a week and cocaine every day. Charlie worried that the cocaine would trigger in Dawn the mental instability that had afflicted her mother, but he didn't know what to do about it.

Charlie, in his mind having let down his brother, then been abandoned by his parents, valued loyalty. He would never leave Dawn, although that didn't mean he didn't have women on the side.

Dawn wanted him to get into films. It was a source of private humiliation for her that they lived next door to Cary Grant but had never met him, even over the back fence.