Kiss Me Quick (4 page)

Victoria Station was busy with the Whitsun bank-holiday crowds pouring down to Brighton to escape The Smoke. For Vince, Brighton held little seaside appeal or escape from the city. It was a town, but with the feel of a city. A city by the sea. The
built-up
tenement flats and tightly terraced rows that climbed their way up to the race hill; the white-walled Regency squares offering a facade of symmetry and order to a place that Vince knew was more like a tangled web; the two hulking hotels, the Grand and the Metropole, which sat imperiously on the seafront; the paving stones and corroding blue railings of the promenade that led you down to the beach itself.

And then the stones. Lots of them. And broken glass, tar and gnarled, desiccated seaweed that scratched you like rusted barbed wire. There were no sand dunes to play in, no soft landings in this town. To Vince, it was a city like London, just smaller. In London, if you went too far south you got depressed; in Brighton you just got wet. Seagulls ruled the air, not pigeons. Someone once said it was where the debris meets the sea – and that went for the people as well as the place. Vince’s relationship with his home town was a two-fisted affair: Love and Hate.

He bought his ticket and boarded the packed train. With his second-class ticket, he sat in the first-class carriage; just a flash of the badge and the ticket clippy usually gave him the nod, like there was some sort of affinity in uniforms. Clippies and coppers, all trying to keep things running in a good orderly direction, and on time. The train was ten minutes late pulling out of the station, due to ejected drunks.

Three weeks, Markham had suggested, so Vince had packed accordingly. Two suits, five shirts, two knitted ties, three Fred Perry tennis shirts, a couple of pairs of summer slacks, a light-blue
seersucker
jacket, a dark-blue skinny-brimmed straw trilby and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses for when – or if – the sun ever came out. He also threw in a couple of paperbacks, and a signed hardback copy of the book Dr Boehm had just had published,
The Conceit of the Narcissist: A Long, Lingering Look at the Dangerously One-Track Mind in the Mirror
.

Vince had cooled on this case since Markham had assigned it. He now looked at it for what it was: keeping him off the scene until Eddie Tobin had cleared his desk, collected his mantel clock, and fucked off down to Bournemouth to get some sand in his crab-paste sandwiches.

It might be a murder case but, as far as the ID of the
perpetrator
was concerned, there seemed to be little mystery involved. It was not so much a
Who done it?
as a
Where is he?
and here’s how it had played out. Eleven weeks ago, the body of a male Caucasian in his mid-forties was washed up on Brighton beach. Wrapped in tarpaulin, it floated up smack-bang between the two piers. A major feature of the corpse was that its head and hands had been removed. And, as fingerprints and dental records were pretty much the alpha and omega for tagging stiffs, that made it next to impossible to identify the victim.

He didn’t match any missing persons within the time-frame of death given by Pathology. His blood type, O positive, was as common as muck. No tattoos or real distinguishing marks. The carving knife that had been used in the massacre was wrapped in air-tight cellophane and taped to the body. There were
fingerprints
, or partial print traces, still on the knife. All in all, making for a nice police package. Too nice a package, Vince reckoned. And, to top it off, an anonymous caller had tipped off Scotland Yard that Jack Regent was the killer. But for every murder there’s half a dozen confessors and a baker’s dozen of accusers; usually telephone thrill-seekers getting their long-distance kicks.

Markham contacted the Chief Supe in Brighton, and Jack Regent was nicked. Only he wasn’t, because he’d skipped town. And so had his fingerprints. It seemed there were no copies of Jack Regent’s prints on record. Or, if there were, they’d
disappeared
. As for the mysterious anonymous phone call nailing Jack Regent for this murder, it was commonplace. Regent’s status in the town was almost that of celebrity, but for all that he was
enigmatic
, publicity-shy and as seldom seen as Garbo. But everyone knew the name, knew the legend.

Vince opened his case and took out the Jack Regent file. Some fact, some fiction, but mostly accumulated speculation. Because, in his long criminal career, Jack Regent had only been brought to book once. A seven-year stretch for the malicious wounding of a bookie almost thirty years ago, reduced to eighteen months after he had saved a screw from a serious beating during a prison riot. And nothing else – but no surprises there. For shit, thankfully, has a downward trajectory, so there were plenty of others who had taken the fall for Jack Regent.

Vince read on and pieced together Jack’s personal trajectory. Little of the early life of Jack Regent’s, neé Jacques Rinieri, was known. No known documentation or records, just hearsay, and here’s what it said. Born in Corsica, he came to London in his late teens, and settled in the slum area of the Seven Dials. But he then made his rep in Saffron Hill, London’s Italian quarter in Clerkenwell. Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini and his Italian mob were the prevailing force at the time, holding sway over Soho and clubland. But their biggest racket, in fact the biggest racket during the twenties and thirties, was conducted at the racetracks.

Sabini’s razor gang ran the racecourses in England. The top coppers and judges of the day were rumoured to all be in his pocket and, with the money he was making, his pockets were deep and plentiful. The racetrack rackets were like any other protection racket. If a bookie wanted to set up his ‘pitch’ and lay bets at the races, he had to pay someone for the privilege. Protecting the bookies and taking a percentage of their earnings could bring him in twenty grand in a day. For a big meeting like the Epsom Derby, it could go up to fifty grand. In the twenties and thirties, that was big, big money. And control of the racetracks meant you could control every street-corner bookie, spieler, betting and lay-off parlour in London.

A young Jack (or Jacques as he was still known then) was recruited by Sabini when his gang went to war with the Brummigan Boys. The rival gang from the Black Country was headed up by William Kimber, a Birmingham-based bookmaker. Young Jacques Rinieri fitted the bill: though not Italian by nationality, he had enough hot-headed Mediterranean blood coursing through his veins to find an affinity with Sabini. And Sabini liked young Jacques, saw something of himself in him. He treated him like a son and renamed him ‘Jack’. And so it was that young Jack went about his work for Sabini with a diligence and enthusiasm that, along with his club foot, marked him out from the others. Jack was soon leading from the front, cutting, beating and shooting his way to a reputation of fearlessness.

The battles on the racecourses, involving gangs of one or two hundred, made a day at the races a dangerous place to be for the average punter in the late twenties. But Jack didn’t just wait for the race meetings to show his supremacy; he took the fight to them. Ambushing the Brummigan Boys in their pubs, clubs, spielers, train stations or on street corners. When dead bodies started turning up, this new type of organized violence made front-page news, and questions were soon asked in Parliament. An elite group of tough coppers known as the Ghost Squad, with the authorization to fight as dirty as the gangsters themselves, was put together to crush the gangs. It all came to a head in a fierce battle at Lewes racecourse. The Sabini mob, with Jack leading the fray, beat Kimber’s Brummigan Boys, but the game was over and his men were rounded up. At Lewes Assizes, forty of Sabini’s men were handed heavy sentences of up to twenty years each.

But young Jack, and Darby Sabini himself, slipped under the net and moved down to Brighton. It’s in Brighton that Jack
further
anglicized his name, deferring to the royal origin of the town by turning Rinieri into ‘Regent’. Darby Sabini, wise to the last, understood the Darwinian nature of his business and, sensing Jack’s growing contempt for the old-school ways, began to fear his ambition and ruthlessness and decided not to stand in his way. Sabini relinquished his penthouse suite in the Grand Hotel, and retired to the more sedate garden squares of neighbouring Hove.

Whatever mobs existed in Brighton, they were no match for Jack. They’d never seen anything like him. He soon imposed his will and took his slice of everything Brighton had to offer. And that was a lot, including gambling, thieving, fencing,
protection
, prostitution, pubs and clubs. The town was wide open, ready and waiting, and when the War came, Jack turned even more profit. The black market, ration cards, petrol cards, blackout smash-and-grabs, not to mention headline-grabbing bank and wages robberies. Post-war austerity soon turned into post-war prosperity and ‘You’ve never had it so good’, and no one was having it as good as Jack. With rock and roll playing on the jukebox and a packet of three in every man’s back pocket, Jack invested in vending machines – slots, jukeboxes, arcades. Every time a day-tripper put a penny in a slot machine on the south coast, they also were putting a penny in Jack’s pocket. He had the town sewn up, his enemies stitched up, and ‘allegedly’ the law in his pocket.

But, to Vince, Jack Regent wasn’t just a name on a case file, or a criminal that needed catching. Vince had grown up on Albion Hill, a tough breeding ground for young tearaways, so he had lived under the spell that Jack cast over the town. Kids would sit around and swap stories in hushed tones of his daring deeds: the headline-grabbing jobs he’d pulled, the beatings he’d doled out, the killings he’d committed, and the fear that he invoked in grown men. Young Vince would listen to those whispered stories, and had once asked his mother about Jack Regent. He’d registered the fear on her face as she told him never to mention that name again. Her reluctance to talk just confirmed what Vince had heard on the streets. And therefore, filtered through the imagination of a child, Jack became omnipotent, omnipresent, a bogeyman, a hex and altogether the stuff of nightmares.

Then there was the physical twist that further set him apart and gave him a quality of otherness:
Talipes Equinovarus
, a club foot. Vince had once read up on Jack’s affliction, and discovered he was in historic company. The Roman emperor Claudius, along with a list of other ailments, was club-footed. But as Roman emperors went, he wasn’t as exciting to read about as his predecessor, Caligula. Then there was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist; as well as possessing a forked tongue, he, too, was rumoured to have a club foot. But the most famous club-foot pin-up boy was Lord Byron. Vince had struggled through
Don Juan
and, whilst Byron’s verse hadn’t stuck in his mind, his reputation had: ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. So bad, in fact, that the club foot was rumoured to have been a cloven hoof. Jack Regent would appreciate that, thought Vince.

Vince closed the file, deciding he’d fill in the blanks for himself.

‘Here he is now, come down to help us swedes. Want a lift, guv?’ called out Detective Tony Machin as he saw Vince emerge from the concourse at Brighton station. Machin was leaning against his racing-green Jaguar Mk X, parked where the taxis sat and waited.

‘Don’t tell me – you’ve given up being a copper and become a taxi driver?’ Vince smiled.

‘Better tips, and I get to hear what’s really happening in this town.’

The two men shook hands. It had been about ten years since they’d last seen each other. They’d grown up in the same
neighbourhood
, but on different hills.

Machin took Vince’s suitcase and put it in the back seat. ‘Let’s get a drink, son,’ he suggested.

Machin shouldered his way into the pub, with Vince following behind him. It was a small boozer off Edward Street, just up from Brighton police station.

‘Two pints please, Shirley.’

‘Make one of those a club soda,’ said Vince.

‘What? Don’t drink on duty?’ Machin asked with a big grin.

‘Don’t drink full-stop.’

Machin stopped grinning when he realized that Vince wasn’t kidding. He looked as if he’d genuinely never heard anything like it before. ‘Fuck me, son, a copper that doesn’t drink.’ He looked around at the barmaid for verification that he wasn’t imagining things. ‘Hear that, Shirley?’

‘Not all pissheads like you, Anthony,’ said Shirley, giving Vince her customary wink and rolling out a gregarious smile. The term ‘bubbly blonde’ was invented for her, but she’d missed out on ‘bombshell’.

Machin was a regular, so she paid him little mind, because her eyes were all over Vince Tciked what she saw: thick black shiny hair swept back, smooth olive skin, green-brown eyes, a strong straight nose and full lips that Shirley decided were eminently kissable, above a chin that held a dimple – like that actor she fancied, Kirk Douglas. But his dark looks gave him a touch of that other one she liked, Tony Curtis. Shirley habitually compared the pub’s punters with Hollywood film stars, thus
managing
to turn a dingy little backstreet pub in Kemp Town into the Brown Derby in Hollywood with her, ‘Ooh, a fella came in the other night, looked just like so and so …’ All much to the
annoyance
of her friends, who’d turn up expecting to find at least a Dirk Bogarde or a Terence Stamp, only to be confronted with a Norman Wisdom. Very few of those men matched up to Shirley’s flights of fantastical description, but this one finally did. He was tall, and she liked them tall, just scraping six foot, with broad shoulders. A light middleweight, athletic and fast-looking under a smart light-grey three-button suit, black knitted-silk tie and crisp white shirt. Took pride in his appearance, she could tell by his footwear, for he was wearing polished black Chelsea boots. Classy, she thought. The sight of men’s socks were always a turn-off.