The Ties That Bind (16 page)

Outside, another arc of green bottles leaped from their tilting dumpster to the gaping maw of the van. Luke was horribly aware that this was the moment of truth, the point at which the book would either take its first breath or come to nothing. Grand stared ahead, his face a rock. He remembered the softness he’d seen at Kathleen Duffy’s house and in desperation used her name.

‘You’re obviously very upset at Kathleen’s death, and I wondered if talking to me, setting down memories you used to share with her, might be a way of keeping her alive.’

Luke had never seen anyone look at him the way Grand did then; fury was a vein that pulsed in his temple.
Fuck.
Mentioning Kathleen Duffy had pushed him all right, but in the wrong direction. That’s it, thought Luke, it’s all over, they’re going to throw me out of the car, they’re going to fling me into that recycling van with the broken glass. He felt the membrane of his protective bubble thin.

‘Well, you’ve obviously done your homework. You’ve got a brass neck, haven’t you, knowing who I am and still jumping me in my own car?’ Luke’s knees took on a life of their own and began to tremble in front of him. His hands on his lap, intended to still them, only exaggerated the movement. Then, to his astonishment, Grand smiled. ‘It’s a while since anyone had the balls to come up to me like that. Make you right. I think it might be time.’

‘
Really
?’ said Luke. Shock stilled his shaking body. Vaughan said nothing but Luke could practically see the hackles rise on the back of his neck.

‘Yeah. You’re not the first one to make this offer and if you’d asked me even two months ago, I’d have said to you what I said to the others, which is fuck off, but . . .’ He paused to take a few rattling breaths. ‘Well, losing Kathleen has changed it all. You
can’t
take it with you when you go, and I’m not talking about cash.’

Luke folded his arms to stop himself from punching the air.

‘Wow,’ he said, instead. ‘That’s . . . amazing. You won’t regret this . . .’ he wondered for a second if he should call him sir, but decided that toadying would emphasise his position as the weaker man. ‘Mr Grand.’

‘There’s a stipulation. Non-negotiable.’

‘Name it,’ said Luke, aware how fragile his hold on the new agreement was.

‘Firstly, that this agreement stays between me and you. I don’t want the world and his wife to know I’m talking. That includes your mate. The skinny kid that looks like Tintin.’

Luke smiled at this description of Charlene and seized the opportunity to protect her. ‘No, of course. She’d be furious with me if she knew I’d approached you. I’d hate you to think she put me up to this, or for her job to be in jeopardy because of it.’

‘No, I can tell she’s a good girl,’ said Grand. ‘What she done for you was a bit stupid but it was
decent
. She looks after her own. I get that. But it’s not good for my staff to know what I’m up to.’

‘Understood. Thank you. Let me know when you want me to come and see you.’

‘We’ll do the first one at Kathleen’s house,’ said Grand.

‘
Ah
. I mean, of course,’ said Luke, picturing his galleried sitting room walls and praying that he didn’t mean now. The Bentley was pointing in the right direction for Temperance Place and the truck in front suddenly turned the corner, leaving the way ahead clear. If Grand gave the nod they could be there in two minutes. The driver of the vehicle behind them sounded his horn, a loud continuous honk.

‘We’ll do Wednesdays, like always,’ said Grand. Luke didn’t realise he’d been holding his breath until the relief of his exhalation. ‘We’ll start next week half-two.’ He held his hand out to Luke. When they shook, he felt the grip of every hand Grand had held over the years, from the menacing clasp of the crooks he had mixed with in his youth to the pressed flesh of the dignitaries he courted in his maturity.

Vaughan unlocked the doors, stepping out of the car not to open the passenger door for Luke but to frown a warning at the driver of the car behind. The horn was immediately silenced. Luke scrambled from the car before Grand could change his mind. The Bentley rolled smoothly over the cobbles and out of sight.

Luke’s soaring exhilaration was tethered by the nagging feeling that it had been
too
easy. Grand had not put up a fight at all. Vaughan’s obvious shock and disapproval had unsettled him. Kathleen Duffy was clearly the key, and in the absence of any concrete reason why, Luke tried to concoct a theory. In evoking Kathleen he had meant to appeal to Grand’s heart but perhaps he had obliquely struck the man’s ego. Maybe Grand wanted to preserve the version of himself that she had known. She would have known him at the height of his power and glamour. For all Grand’s assertions of reform, it could be that he still wanted to resurrect in print a glimmer of the dirty foundations on which his clean empire was built.

This constant guesswork was torture, and Luke took comfort from the thought that now that Grand was on side, answers must be on the horizon.

He longed to share the news with someone. He couldn’t tell Viggo as it wasn’t fair to ask him to keep it from Charlene. Maggie was the obvious choice, but it was too soon. Pitching a book on the strength of a handshake was something he might have done a couple of years ago, but not now. He was not that impetuous boy any more. This, his third stab at success, would find its target.

He rifled through his notes again, saw Sandy Quick’s business card poking out of his notebook and recollected Marcelle’s discouragement when he had mentioned her name in conjunction with the Grand case. She might not have known much as a rookie in 1968, but if she was a serious scholar of Brighton history then surely she would be better informed now. Perhaps her private archive would give him an insight into private lives. Just because Kathleen Duffy didn’t show up in official records didn’t mean she hadn’t left some other kind of mark. He flexed the card between his thumb and forefinger. What the hell. It was somewhere to start.

Chapter 24

This was the easternmost part of Brighton Luke had visited on foot, way beyond Brighton Pier and the big wheel, and almost to the Marina. He thought he was still in Kemp Town, although it was hard to tell as down here on the far wing tip of gentrification there were no longer any rainbow-flagged pubs or boutique guesthouses, just concrete mansion blocks and the odd terrace.

He made part of the journey via a wide footpath hewn into the chalk escarpment. This was not somewhere he would have wanted to come on his own at night. Even on a bright afternoon like this, it was all too easy to imagine Graham Greene’s Pinky and his mob lurking, razors at the ready.

Disraeli Square was a gap-toothed curving street, the poor neighbour of the large buttery piazzas up in Hove. The central garden was a patchy scrubland, edged with a link wire fence rather than wrought-iron railings. The cars that wedged themselves into tiny parking spaces were cheap and dull and, looking up at the façades, Luke noticed that several window frames were made of peeling, crumbling wood. Shockingly, several houses had replaced the traditional windows with PVC frames. That would never have done in the conservation areas of Palmeira or Brunswick Square. Even the railings on the esplanade were neglected here, the turquoise paint having faded to a dirty verdigris.

Number 33 was almost on the seafront really, a tall narrow house with four floors and heavy, greying net curtains at all windows except the top two. The adjoining house seemed vacant, its exterior a mess of scaffolding. A black fire escape helixed tightly up the detached side of the building. Luke climbed three uneven front steps – original chessboard tiles in situ, if not all intact – and rang the doorbell.

No one answered. He listened for footsteps inside before ringing again, then cursed himself for doorstepping without telephoning first. Who just turned up like this these days apart from meter-readers, evangelists, cold-callers (well, and the occasional gangster-turned-philanthropist)? Just as he decided to leave, the letterbox opened a chink.

‘Mrs Quick?’ said Luke, dropping to a squat and turning on what he hoped was his most charming smile. ‘I’m Luke Considine, I got your card from the library. I’m a writer researching a book.’

‘What sort of book?’

‘Local. True crime,’ said Luke. ‘I wondered if—’

The letterbox slammed closed.

‘Hang on,’ came a voice from the other side. ‘Just doing the locks.’ There followed the slide and tumble of half a dozen bolts, chains and catches, before the door opened to reveal a woman who could have been the mother – if he was being generous – of the girl in the picture outside the dry cleaners. She had the blowsy look of a tragic chanteuse, the Platonic ideal of a certain type of drag queen. Her hair was still white-blonde but now long, piled and, surely, enhanced with hairpieces. A black wrap dress showcased a formidable bosom, perfect legs and a macramé of veins and tendons on her neck and the backs of her hands. Sparse lashes looked as though they struggled to bear the weight of thick mascara.

‘Before I let you in, you do know that I’m a private archive, don’t you?’ she said, a generic southern accent lent character and charm by a nicotine rasp. Luke noticed a slight ruching in the skin of her jawline, and wondered if lifting a tendril of hair would reveal the scars of a facelift behind her ears. ‘That I have to bill you for any research I do for you? It sounds very mercenary but there’ve been misunderstandings in the past, so I like to get that out of the way now.’

‘Yes, I get that. I’ve been a professional journalist for six years.’

‘Well then, come on in,’ she said. The house smelled of cigarette smoke, damp and hairspray.

‘I’m sorry, were you on your way out?’ he said, taking in the heels and hose.

‘No, no,’ she said, ushering him in. She shooed him through a corridor of generous proportions that had been halved by dull grey filing cabinets stacked two high against the walls. Cast iron hot water pipes, thick with paint, hadn’t been boxed in. Sandy scuttled rather than walked; her shoes clicked against the tiled floor like fingernails on a keyboard. ‘Who’ve you written for, Luke … ?’

‘Considine. I used to edit a little local paper up in Leeds, and I’ve freelanced for the broadsheets. Longform journalism mostly. Campaigning pieces, undercover work, that sort of thing.’

‘I never made it past the tabloids,’ she said, ruefully. ‘Still, you wouldn’t get me back on Fleet Street for anything. Local news is where my heart is. Been covering Sussex since late ’sixty-nine, early ’seventy.’

Luke had guessed as much from her byline but still it was a disappointment to confirm that she couldn’t have had first-hand knowledge of the Nye murder.

‘Do you still write for the
Argus
?’ he said.

‘They blow the mothballs off me every now and then,’ she sighed. ‘Usually for obituaries these days, which says it all. But I’d hate to think I’d seen my last byline. It was all I’d ever wanted to do, be a journalist. Women didn’t, when I was a girl. I had to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously. It’s hard to let go of it, even though sometimes I feel it wants to let me go.’

‘I know the feeling.’

She looked him up and down and snorted. Luke tried not to mind – she couldn’t know – as he followed her into a flouncy reception room. In here warmth came not from the old-fashioned school radiators but a single storage heater in the middle of the room. Yet more cupboards and shelves, mismatched and from various periods, stretched across the bottom of the windows, reducing what little light the nets let in. A bank of dented beige lockers subdivided the room. Little red and white boxes dotted around the floor revealed themselves on closer inspection to be rat traps, laced with poison. The drinks cabinet was conspicuously the least dusty thing in the room. The bottles behind the glass were supermarket value brands, a mouldering lemon returning to green in a silver bowl at their side.

Sandy disappeared through a gap between two cabinets into a kitchen where she filled and flicked on a kettle. Luke saw that the fridge she opened was almost empty and that she used the same teabag for both their drinks. The tea came in semi-circular glass cups, the sixties kind you used to see ten-for-a-pound in charity shops until they became fashionable and the dealers and collectors moved in on them. Luke supposed that Sandy had had them for ever.

‘So, Marcelle sent you here, did she?’

‘Thanks,’ said Luke, accepting the drink she handed him. ‘Yes, she did.’

‘Strange woman. Never blinks, have you noticed?’

‘She doesn’t, does she? I thought that was just me being paranoid.’ Luke laughed, then gestured at the archives that surrounded him. ‘So all this is local history?’

‘Not on this floor. I’ve got two parallel archives really. The ground and first floors are a general magazine archive, which is what brings the money in.’ She drew from the top of a messy pile a profile of Kate Winslet. ‘Now there’s a lovely girl. I’ve interviewed her a few times. Ever so down-to-earth. Which is more than I can say for
some
.’ She cast her eyes to the left and it took Luke a few moments to understand that she was giving the evil eye to the CD player, where a Shirley Bassey album had been playing since Luke’s arrival. ‘Never the same once she became a dame,’ she sniffed. The floor was a mess of lettered confetti that reminded Luke of the cut-out newsprint snowflakes his mother used to make with him at Christmas.

‘The second floor is probably what you’re interested in, a mixture of old papers, private photographs, diaries, letters, ephemera . . . it’s probably easier to give you a tour than to tell you how it works.’

Cup and saucer still in hand, he followed her up the stairs. Each floor was divided by heavy modern doors, keys poised in their locks. Luke struck one with his palm and heard the dull ring of solid metal. On the landings were fire extinguishers of the kind you’d expect in public buildings.

‘It’s an airlock system,’ she said. ‘These archives are my
life
. My greatest fear is of this place burning down. Well, that and rodents making their nests in the paper, the little bastards. It’s a full time job waging war on them.’