The Last King of Brighton (33 page)

‘Barbara – that will be nice. As for me?' Reilly shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘I can protect myself, don't worry about that.' He grimaced. ‘The only thing I can't do is change my own bloody shitbag. Can you get Hattie Jacques?'

Hathaway left Barbara with Reilly and had dinner in a private dining room in a quiet restaurant in the backstreets of Dieppe. His hosts were Marcel Magnon, frail and thin-voiced, and his children, Patrice and Jeanne. Hathaway had been doing business with them for years and they greeted him warmly.

Marcel Magnon's first question remained the same whenever they met.

‘Any word of your father?'

As always, Hathaway shook his head.

‘No word but we don't give up.'

Magnon sighed and his head sank on to his chest.

The four of them shared a large tureen of
La Marmite Dieppoise
, the local fish stew, all dipping their bread in to soak up the liquor. Jeanne fed her father, who sucked on the wet bread as best he could. Conversation was kept general until the cheese course. Then:

‘Albanians control all our major ports now,' Patrice said. ‘Even Marseilles.'

‘Dieppe?'

Patrice shook his head.

‘Too small but we pay them a tithe for the quiet life.'

‘We know of your problems,' Jeanne said, cutting a small sliver from a hard goat's cheese. ‘But I do not know how we can help. Our rough stuff days are in the past.'

‘I don't expect anything,' Hathaway said, reaching out to pat her hand. ‘Just keep an eye on Sean, if you would, and let him know if bad men are heading his way.'

‘That we can gladly do,' Jeanne said, and Patrice nodded vigorously in agreement.

‘I'm sending men here,' Hathaway said, ‘but let me know if there are developments.'

Jeanne contemplated her sliver of cheese then looked intently at Hathaway.

‘And you?'

‘Things are in hand.'

‘You could get out,' Patrice said. ‘You have made your money.'

Hathaway reached over for the cheese plate.

‘It's not my way.'

His phone trembled in his pocket.

‘Excuse me. A call I am expecting.'

He took out a pen and small pad and listened to the voice on the phone.

‘Spell that, please,' he said. And twice more. ‘And Radislav?'

He ended the call without saying goodbye. A few moments later his phone made a series of beeping noises and he scrolled down the photos that had appeared on its LCD screen.

He put the phone on the table and Jeanne looked down at the last photograph.

‘I know that face. He has been here.'

The man who had just spoken to Hathaway phoned Jimmy Tingley next. Tingley and he had served together in the SAS before the man had joined the special Transnational Crimes Unit at Scotland Yard. He gave Tingley the same names and suspected British locations of four Balkan gangsters recently arrived in the country.

When he had finished he suggested Tingley and he meet for a drink the next time they coincided in London.

‘And, Jimmy, this is just intel for you, right? You're not going to do anything illegal?'

After a moment, Tingley murmured:

‘
Moi
?'

TWENTY-TWO

H
athaway's boat drove into the setting sun. Seeing the sun go down always made him think of illustrations in a book he had as a kid of the wounded King Arthur being carried towards the setting sun on a fairy barge.

He made a number of calls on his crossing back to England, waking most of those he called. He gave Dave two instructions. One to deliver a message, the other to collect a parcel.

‘Do the first in a public place – don't want any of that shoot the messenger shit happening to you.'

‘OK,' Dave said.

‘Be careful with the parcel too – take a few of the lads with you. Deliver it to our storage place near Shoreham. Storage room 2020 should do nicely.'

‘Will do, Mr H.'

Hathaway was sitting on his boat by the breakwater at the outside edge of the marina when the Serbians torched his restaurant. He had his feet up watching the sun rising in a golden glow. Then there was the faint noise of an explosion and a surge of orange flame gushed out of the front of his restaurant and reached out over the water.

‘The fuck?' he said, scrambling to his feet. Joggers and dog-walkers scattered along the boardwalk. He thought he could hear screams, then pops as bottles of alcohol exploded.

Dave came up from below.

‘Want us to cast off, Mr H., or go in?'

Hathaway waved him away.

He stayed on the boat, watching the black smoke spiral up into the sky, masking the sun. Emergency services arrived. Police milled about whilst firemen went in.

His mobile rang and he realized it had been ringing on and off for a while. The number was blocked.

He put the phone to his ear.

‘This is just the beginning,' a deep, lightly accented voice said.

‘You're wrong,' Hathaway said. ‘This is the end. You and your oppos are toast.'

‘Oppos?'

‘I warned you. I told you to get out of my fucking country. I told you I was coming for you. Didn't you get the message?'

The man chuckled, surprisingly warmly.

‘Think of what happened to your bar as my reply. Do not threaten us, Mr Hathaway. Aside from anything else, it makes you appear foolish. You don't even know who we are.'

‘Don't I? Well, you're one of four. I'm guessing you're Drago Kadire? What kind of name is Drago? You sound like a toilet cleaner. The Grand been treating you all right, have they? Hope you've had the afternoon tea. It's known for it.'

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

‘That room you're in – it's the one Norman Tebbit and his missus were in when the bomb went off. Refurbished since, of course.'

Hathaway gripped his phone more tightly.

‘Now you listen to me,
Drago
. I had nothing to do with the death of your friends in Milldean. Let it go and I'll let you flush back to your hovel in the Balkans.'

‘And if I don't?'

‘Well, Mr Kadire, when you get that knock on your door it won't be room service.'

Although he'd owned it for years, Hathaway hardly ever went to the storage facility near Shoreham. It was one of his legit businesses but he kept a couple of dozen spaces at the back end of the building for his own use. He had an armoury there, for instance, although he had another, more substantial, in the house in France.

There was a back entrance so his men could come and go unnoticed by the people who stored up their lives in the units at the front. The front was noisy, since everything was metal, including the corridor floors. A walk down those corridors set up a horrible, clanging reverberation.

The back, though, was all rubber. And the storage unit he was headed for had soundproofing. And an extractor fan.

Hathaway's shoes squeaked just a little as he walked along the corridor to the pool of light spilling from unit 2020. It was empty except for Dave and two other tough-looking men leaning against the wall, looking towards a chair bolted to the floor in the centre of the room. All were armed with handguns.

Stevie Cuthbert, in an England football shirt and khaki cargo pants, was taped to the chair.

‘Stevie, my old mucker,' Hathaway said, walking into the room. He clamped his hand around Cuthbert's jaw, tilting his head. ‘God, that Jimmy Tingley really did a job on your nose, didn't he? Surprised you can still breathe through it.'

Cuthbert jerked his head away.

‘He got his,' he snarled.

Hathaway recalled the faded bruising on Tingley's face the first time he had seen him again.

‘Hardly, Stevie.'

He looked down at the man squirming against the ropes tying him to the chair.

‘God, this scene takes me back.' He looked over at Dave. ‘A word, Dave.'

Outside in the corridor, Hathaway put his head close to Dave and whispered.

‘You've got a decision to make, son. So far I've kept you away from the dark side, but if you stay for what's about to happen you will definitely have crossed over. I won't think the worse of you if you want to walk away. But I need to know now.'

Dave scanned his face. He glanced back into the room.

‘Those Serbians were tough-looking fuckers,' he said.

‘But you delivered my message. Good lad.'

Dave looked at the floor.

‘I need an answer. And if it's yes, there'll be no turning back.'

Hathaway waited. Finally, Dave looked up, squared his shoulders and walked back into unit 2020.

‘You never knew what happened to your father, did you, Cuthbert?'

Hathaway was standing to Cuthbert's right, Dave behind his left shoulder.

‘What do you mean?' Cuthbert said, twisting his head to look at Hathaway. ‘We both know he died in a car crash.' He frowned. ‘What are you saying, you fucking tosspot?'

Dave cuffed him across the side of his head.

‘Watch your language.'

Cuthbert looked up at him.

‘You're fucking dead for that, dickhead.'

Dave hit him again. Blood splashed bright red on to the white football shirt. Cuthbert looked back at Hathaway.

‘Don't you think a man taped to a chair making threats is utterly ridiculous?' Hathaway said. ‘And pathetic?'

‘What's this about?'

‘Well, originally, it was about you taking the piss as a loan shark and antagonizing the people we all need to be on our side. But something else has come up – to be precise, somebody has burned down my club in the marina. So, this is now about finding out what the hell is going on.'

‘How would I know?'

‘Oh, you know, compadre. You're in this up to your bloody stupid cauliflower ears. Now the word I'm hearing is that these are Serbians and other Balkan riff-raff. I know they're already over here doing drugs and girls in London and slave labour out in the country, but this particular lot have something else in mind. And I want to know what.'

‘How would I know?'

‘You a student of history, Cuthbert?'

‘Is that likely?'

‘Good point. OK, well most big changes happen because of local bickering when there's a big bloody threat hanging over everyone's heads. And some idiot, looking only at the narrow picture, invites this big bloody threat in to help him. And once they're in, that's the end – they take over the whole country.'

‘You've brought me here to give me a history lesson.'

‘No, Stevie, I've brought you here to whack you because you're as thick as shit, and that's why I think you might have been the moron who invited these Serbs in. But before I whack you, I just want to know what deal you made with them. And whether you do, in fact, get out of this room somehow by your own volition depends entirely on the quality of your answers.'

‘You're fucking bonkers. Two things. You want to whack me, why the fuck should I tell you anything? Second, you whack me, you'll start a war you can't win.'

‘I'm already in a war and I want to know why.'

‘Cos you're past it. Your day has gone. You can't fight the future. You mention the Serbians. These guys are in another league.'

‘Are you helping them?'

Cuthbert laughed.

‘You don't get it. These guys don't need my help. They don't want my help. I don't even figure on their radar. I'm irrelevant to them. They'll kill me, sure, but they don't want me dead in the way they want you dead. You want to talk history? These guys are the fucking Mongol horde. Attila the Hun drank milk compared to these guys. You point a gun at them? They'll point a fucking rocket launcher back at you.'

Hathaway grabbed at Cuthbert's England shirt, getting flesh with it.

‘You're wearing an England shirt and spouting this crap.'

He tore the England shirt across the front and tried to rip it from Cuthbert's body but it got stuck in the tape. He left it in tatters, Cuthbert's gut exposed, hanging over his belt. His chest was heavily tattooed.

‘What do they want?'

‘Payback.'

‘For that Milldean thing?'

‘Of course.'

‘Is that why they want me dead?'

‘Of course.'

‘But I had nothing to do with that.'

Cuthbert grinned.

‘They think you did.'

Hathaway moved in front of Cuthbert.

‘And why would they think that?'

Cuthbert attempted to shrug but the tape round him gave him little room for movement.

‘You?'

Cuthbert just looked at him.

‘Does it matter?' he said. ‘Pandora's out of the box.'

Hathaway gave him a contemptuous look.

‘Pandora was never in the box.'

Cuthbert looked puzzled.

‘Who was in the box, then?'

‘How would I know? Jack, probably.'

‘So where was Pandora?'

‘How the fuck do I know?'

‘I mean, what's she got to do with it?'

Hathaway sighed.

‘It's her bloody box. Now, I was saying about your father.'

Cuthbert watched him.

‘That car accident.'

‘What about it?'

‘It wasn't an accident.'

Cuthbert narrowed his eyes.

‘But, actually, that doesn't matter because your dad wasn't in the car.'