The Last King of Brighton (22 page)

‘I don't want to inherit!'

‘Don't you?' Hathaway senior moved to straddle a chair over by the table. ‘Don't you? Then you lied to me. That's not the impression you've been giving me over the past couple of years.
Au
bloody
contraire
, if you'll excuse my French.'

Elaine was wrenched by sobs, her whole body heaving. The concrete was harder round her legs. Dennis Hathaway caught Hathaway looking.

‘She's got lovely legs, John. You've been a lucky boy getting between them. But nothing comes free.'

Hathaway looked from Elaine to his father and around the room at the impassive faces. Only Charlie looked away.

‘I can't kill her and I can't let anyone else kill her,' he said flatly.

Dennis Hathaway stood.

‘I don't think you want to go there, Johnny. You being a coward is one thing, but that rather limits your options so far as anyone else doing what you can't do is concerned.'

‘John, please . . .' Elaine said, clear drool running from her nose over her mouth, wet eyes fixed on him. A supplicant.

‘Someone wipe her bloody nose.' Dennis Hathaway looked at Elaine and shook his head. ‘Dignity, darling, is everything.'

Dennis Hathaway looked back at his son, as Reilly took a blue handkerchief from his pocket and almost tenderly wiped at Elaine's upper lip and around her mouth. He folded the handkerchief once and dabbed beneath her eyes.

Hathaway watched, then looked over at Charlie, standing rigid against the wall. Could he enlist Charlie's help to overpower the others in the room and rescue Elaine? Even as he thought it, he realized what a ridiculous idea it was. He couldn't see himself fighting his own father and couldn't see Charlie helping.

His mind was racing. He did want the life his father was offering. He did want to be a name in Brighton. He did love Elaine. He did want to have sex with every other woman in Brighton. He did want to go to India with her. But the one thing he didn't want to do was kill this girl he knew so intimately and who knew him so intimately.

‘I'm not going to do it.'

His father leaned on his knees and looked intently at his son for what seemed an age. Then he stood again.

‘Well, some bugger has got to do it. What about you, Charlie? You want the life even more than Johnny here. You're his mate. Help me out. Help him out. Take his place.'

Charlie flicked a glance from Hathaway to his father.

‘Take his place?' He looked away. ‘It's not my kind of thing. Anything else – you know I'm up for anything else—'

‘It's not anyone's kind of thing,' Hathaway senior hissed. ‘Unless you're a fucking psycho, of course, and I don't employ them. It's just part of the business. Something that has to be done.'

Charlie looked at Elaine, slumped in the chair, quiet now. He waved a hand at Dennis Hathaway.

‘I can't, Mr Hathaway. I know her and everything.'

‘I know you knew her. You did her.'

‘No—'

‘Course you fucking did,' he jeered. ‘Last night you went for a quickie behind Johnny's back. If I were your age I'd be tempted, I tell you. She's a lovely-looking girl. Get those legs wrapped round you—'

‘You can fuck me however you want as much as you want.'

Elaine was sitting up, glaring at Dennis Hathaway. She jerked her head back towards Tommy.

‘I'll give head to your man here. Your men can have me –' her bravado ran out and she began to sob again – ‘but please, please, don't—'

Dennis Hathaway had a look of disgust on his face.

‘Jesus, someone put her out of her misery.' He looked at her. ‘Darling, I'd love to fuck you but I'm happily married, and whilst I'll do most things, I draw the line at doing my son's girlfriend, however much of a disappointment he is to me. I'm sure there must be a rule of etiquette about that.' He peered into the tub of concrete. ‘Plus, how would I get your legs wide enough apart to stuff it in you, the concrete as set as it is?'

Hathaway saw a look pass between his father and Tommy. His father shook his head and went over to a table in the corner.

When Dennis Hathaway walked over to Charlie he had a gun in one hand and a garrotte in the other. He proffered them to Charlie.

‘So you're not up to it? You're not capable of it?'

‘There ain't nothing I'm not capable of.'

‘A double negative. Thought your generation knew better than that.'

Charlie took the left hand, walked over to Elaine, tilted her head up and fired the gun full into her face.

‘Fuck,' Dennis Hathaway said, one hand up to stop the spray of brain and blood hitting his face, ‘I was hoping he'd use the garrotte. Now we've got to clean this bloody place up.'

Hathaway looked down.

‘I'll do it.'

TWELVE

The Man Who Sold the World

A
gun is a seducer. A gun wants to be fired. It exists to be fired. And, sooner or later, whoever has one will be seduced into firing it.

Hathaway's father disappeared in 1970. He left without Hathaway's mother. Hathaway shouldn't have been surprised by how devastated she was, but he was shocked at her rapid decline once she took to the bottle. He was overwhelmed when she took her own life just a year later, in the summer of 1971.

In February 1970 Dennis Hathaway took his son and Charlie to Spain on business. Reilly went along, of course. It was the first time Hathaway had seen the family hacienda in the mountains near Granada. It was a lovely house but the grounds were like a building site. They were a building site.

Dennis Hathaway was having a swimming pool built inside a long building constructed of local stone. The roof was going to be retractable, like something out of a James Bond film.

‘More like
Thunderbirds
,' his father had said, guffawing. ‘Watch your feet there. That cement's still wet. Don't want to see imprints of your big clodhoppers across the floor of the pool.'

‘You're having it tiled, aren't you?'

‘You bet – but even so.'

Hathaway's father was in a good mood because they'd just concluded a deal in Marbella to get hashish in large quantities from Morocco, transiting to England overland through Spain and France, then shipping from a small harbour near Deauville up to the West Pier.

Charlie was, as usual, cautious around Hathaway. They had a kind of working relationship but he knew Hathaway had never forgiven him for killing Elaine.

He was half-right. Hathaway was in a place that nobody he knew would understand. What did he feel about the death of Elaine? If he were honest, on its own he could take it. But there were other things.

His father was outlining his plans. Hathaway half-listened. He had his own plans.

They'd been drinking solidly all day. On the terrace, looking at the speckled sky and the lights winking down the valley, Hathaway watched his father take another swig of brandy.

‘The Great Train Robbers never squealed on each other,' he said. ‘Not a one. And the witnesses knew nothing. All they saw was a bunch of blokes in balaclavas and overalls. How could they identify anyone? Bloody hell, they didn't even know how many robbers there were. Nobody did.'

‘But you do, Dad,' Hathaway said.

Dennis Hathaway got a strange expression on his face.

‘Makes you say that, son?'

‘Something you said a while back. And I heard two got clean away.'

‘You know that for a fact?' his father said.

Hathaway nodded drunkenly. Dennis Hathaway sniffed.

‘Remember when your mother and I went down to Spain for our second honeymoon. Left you alone for your birthday?'

Hathaway remembered.

‘I remember you coming back,' he said, thinking of Barbara.

That passed his father by.

‘Well, I thought it best to be out of the country at that particular time.'

Hathaway thought back.

‘It was around the time of the robbery. I remember reading the papers.'

‘It was two days after the bloody robbery. We were supposed to be holing up at the farm for a couple of weeks, but we thought that one of the locals had got suspicious so we had to make other plans. We split the money. There was so much of it. It was all in fivers and single notes. We didn't even bother with the ten bob notes. Well, Bruce did but he was like that.'

‘So you really were one of the Great Train Robbers?'

‘No big deal.'

‘And you took the loot to Spain.'

‘Nah, not all of it. Any idea how much space a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds in singles and fivers takes up?'

Hathaway shook his head.

‘A fuck of a lot.'

‘So what did you do?'

‘That lovely Oxford Morris – remember it?'

Hathaway nodded.

‘Had a false petrol tank and a false bottom to the back seat. Got the tip from a Kraut smuggler. Worked well for a couple of years. The rest – well, you know about the rest – you organized taking most of it over and converting it into diamonds, buying property and so on.'

Hathaway nodded.

‘But where do you hide paperwork about stuff like that?'

His father gave him a sideways look.

‘Why would you want to know a thing like that?'

‘Because I remember you telling me that the less paper around the better. Property leaves a long paper trail, doesn't it?'

‘Not if you pay cash, son.'

Hathaway looked across at Reilly. He was standing at the edge of the terrace, his back to the others, looking up into the snow-capped mountains.

Hathaway shot his father first. He hadn't intended to but it was just the way it fell out.

Hathaway had strolled behind Charlie, but his father saw the automatic he pulled from under his shirt and lunged for him.

His father didn't say anything, but thinking about it later Hathaway assumed he was trying to save Charlie. He actually chose Charlie over his own son. It didn't really help, even at the time.

His father came out of his chair, one arm stretched out for the gun, his head down. Hathaway shot him through the bald patch on the crown of his skull. It had looked like a target.

His father simply toppled forward and knelt on the marble tiles, his head touching them as if praying to Mecca.

Charlie, half-swinging to look over his shoulder, tilted his chair and toppled, getting it tangled in his legs.

He saw the gun in Hathaway's hand and started to scrabble away on his back, kicking at the chair. Hathaway aimed the gun loosely in his direction.

‘Don't,' Hathaway whispered. He looked over at Reilly, still gazing up into the mountains.

Hathaway was registering the fact that the gun had made scarcely any sound. Later he would register the fact he'd killed his own father.

Charlie was motionless.

‘We've had some times, Charlie.'

‘We have,' Charlie said, his voice croaky.

‘But then you killed my fucking girlfriend.'

‘I'm sorry about that but it had to be done.'

‘Oh Charlie. Don't sweat it. I've done far worse.'

Hathaway pointed the gun at Charlie's forehead.

‘Goodbye, Charlie.'

PART TWO

Today

THIRTEEN

H
e stood at the back of the boat, watching the propeller churning the grey water. He had four men to help him take the boat. They killed the crew straight away. The owners were tied up in their stateroom. He would torture the man and rape the woman. He didn't think about which would please him more.

Once he was bored with her, he passed the woman on to his men. By the time they threw her overboard in the turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay she wasn't good for much. They threw her head in somewhere off Vigo.

Morning seeping into the night. John Hathaway, crime king of Brighton, woke up sweating. He rolled out of bed without disturbing the girl. A mirror streaked with white powder on her bedside table. The air still as he stood on the balcony and looked over at the skeletal remains of the West Pier.

There was a long ship moving on the horizon, red lights winking at bow and stern. The sky whitening behind it. He looked at the stretch of water between the ship and the end of the pier.

The pier looked as if it was crumbling but iron and steel don't crumble. Wood, certainly. Buffeted by salt winds and sea water, wood warped, rotted, decayed to dust. A new coat of paint every six months had been the only way to keep the end-of-pier shooting gallery and amusement arcade looking halfway decent.

Hathaway earned his pocket money until he was fifteen up a ladder painting the exteriors of his father's end-of-pier attractions. He also painted his father's office, that draughty wooden hut with gaps in the floorboards wide enough to see the water churning far below. He could still smell the fug of the paraffin heaters as the fire-hazard stoves burned all day to keep the chill at bay.

The stanchions, the scaffolding, the pier's iron frame – they hadn't rotted. They had rusted, twisted, bent. Bolts had sheared off. The pier had crumpled, not crumbled. Eventually, it would collapse into the sea. The sea that, according to Hathaway's father, kept all secrets.

Hathaway sipped a glass of water, turning away from the ruin of the pier. He was thinking of the other theory about the sea: that eventually it threw up its secrets.

Usually when least expected. He knew from his own experience that most things happened when least expected. He had learned that preparation could be both essential and pointless. Lives were changed by the unexpected. Always.