The Ties That Bind (11 page)

Luke walked around the cottage, tapping the walls to see if any of them were hollow or false, listening for missing bricks or holes in the plaster. He had been awake all night, turning theories over in his mind, and one of them was that the house might be a literal keeper of secrets. What if Kathleen Duffy had been hiding something for Grand, hiding it for half a century?

Even as he did it he felt foolish, and was glad there was no one there to see him acting like a kid in a Scooby Doo cartoon. What was he expecting to find? A gun, rolled up in an oily rag? A skeleton walled up behind a false door, some old crony from the Grand/Nye years?

The house was small and the treasure hunt did not take long. To humour himself and draw a line under the episode, he decided to search the little outhouse. Standing precariously on the cold black toilet seat, and sparing a thought for all those who had lived through the years before indoor plumbing, he scrabbled around in the dusty corners of the roof. A shower of grit rained down from the ceiling to coat his hair and skin.

When he came out, the security light was on in the next-door garden. The wall was low enough to reveal a young man with long hair and a handlebar moustache, poorly dressed for the night in an old T-shirt and flared denims.

‘Hey, neighbour.’ His accent was American, his voice deep. ‘Thought I heard someone. I’m Caleb, good to meet you.’

A wisp of cobweb fell out of Luke’s hair and caught on his eyelashes. ‘Hi. Luke,’ he said, blinking it away. ‘Er, likewise. Just been here a few days, still getting my bearings.’

‘You living here on your own?’ said Caleb, folding his arms against the cold. Luke nodded. ‘You’ve got the right idea. They’re one-person houses, really. I share with my girlfriend Belinda. We’ve just extended up into the loft and there still isn’t enough room for both our work stuff.’

‘What do you do?’ said Luke, spitting a fleck of something unpleasant from his lips.

‘I make props for theatre and TV and Belinda’s in costume, so it gets pretty cluttered in there.’

‘Sounds fascinating,’ said Luke.

‘It has its moments. We were both on location when the old Irish lady passed. They buried her like two days later, so we couldn’t get back in time for the funeral.’

‘Were you close?’

‘Kinda. Belinda knew her a lot better than me. You’ll have to come over for a drink one night and see what we’ve done with the place,’ said Caleb. ‘Next time we’re both home, we’ll call on you.’

‘That’d be great. Well, I’d better get back into the warmth.’ He had one last question to throw over his shoulder. ‘Just out of interest, when you built up into the loft space, did you have a proper survey done?’

‘Of course.’

‘So if these old houses had basements, you’d have known about it.’

‘God yeah. We’d have loved that. You can never have too much storage.’

So there was no basement. Good to know. Staring at the floor alerted him to one more hiding place that needed to be ruled out. Quietly, so that Caleb, who he now imagined to be listening with a glass at the wall, would not hear, Luke rolled back the carpets and prised up the central floorboards to shine a torch beneath them. His beam revealed nothing but sixty years of dust and dirt.

Right. Enough now. Michael Duffy had been truthful when he had said they had cleaned his grandmother’s house from top to bottom. Perhaps though the evidence, or the clue, had been removed. Perhaps there had been some ostensibly innocent possession of Kathleen’s – say, a red coat – hidden in the back of that old wardrobe. Perhaps even now Michael Duffy and his family were sifting through a lifetime’s possessions, unwittingly sending something vital to the charity shop, or bundling it away into the back of a wardrobe.

Imagination was for novelists. It was dangerous if you used it to plug the gaps that should be filled with facts. He had to back it up with something, before he let it possess him.

Chapter 16

Brighton Pavilion was a magnificent, onion-domed palace with minarets and ogee windows. It would have looked more in place in Jaipur or Rajasthan than it did in its actual location, between the staid facade of the Theatre Royal and the Old Steine with its university buildings and the buses that thundered along every ten seconds. But there it was, set in English parkland, thin paths winding between long borders where determined butterflies and bees squeezed the last of the year’s nectar from greying lavender bushes and buddleia whose purple plumes had already faded to brown. The gardens were full of self-consciously attractive young people eating lunch. The air smelled of cut grass, ground coffee, hummus and falafel. A dense clump of shrubs with a pair of scuffed boots protruding from its base puffed out a thin string of marijuana smoke.

The Brighton History Centre was in a room at the top of the Museum and Art Gallery. Luke walked unseeing through local history exhibitions and fine art. He told himself that he wasn’t going behind Charlene’s back as such, that nothing he was doing would get her in trouble, and that in fact, he was simply trying to research the case so that he could do what she had suggested, lay it to rest, even if all he had to do was to satisfy himself that there was no story to tell. He was hardly risking her job by coming here, unless Grand had full-time spies lying in wait in the town archives on the off-chance that one day someone would come and research his past. He was just exploring. That was all.

The room had clean modern pine desks and swivel chairs. Shelves stretched up to a ceiling ornate with white plasterwork and three huge domes inlaid with a dark green gloss and silver swirls. It was empty apart from Luke and two librarians, a smiling, slightly pop-eyed woman about his mum’s age and a man with a wispy beard. A research service advertised itself on a poster – competitively priced to undertake all your local history study needs – but Luke was too confident in his own skills to be tempted.

Luke knew that the oldest of the newspaper archives were not yet available online, but he had at least expected them to have been digitised onto a CD ROM. He was surprised, and a little intimidated, to learn that everything was on microfilm, something he had read about but never come across, even when studying for his Master’s. From filing cabinets he gathered little reels of film from the sixties, the daily local newspaper and a couple of long-defunct weeklies. The unblinking female librarian showed him how to place the roll of film under the glass slide, then use the knobs to zoom, pull back, move forward and rewind. As the first facsimile of a 1968 front page, complete with grainy photographs and advertisements, slid into focus, Luke felt the unaccustomed thrill of a physical connection to the past. He had the strange feeling that if he looked down at his hands he would see fifty-year-old newsprint darkening them. More than once he unthinkingly put his fingertips on the screen and dragged them outwards, as if to enlarge the image. He was aware of, and embarrassed by, his reliance on touchscreens and digital media.

The
Argus
– or the
Evening Argus
as it had been then – was a daily local paper that led with national news, the local interest stories tucked a few pages in. Luke soon established a rhythm, reading the front page, learning to gauge the twist of the dial that would bring him to those crucial small-town pages, and then another, bigger twist to completely bypass the sports pages and the classified adverts at the back. It was slow going, and frequently he forgot the focus of his search, simply losing himself in the period. Matt Monro was in cabaret. The Concorde was offering tea dances for the over twenty-fives.
The Graduate
was still showing at the ABC. Mothercare had a sale on. A Brighton travel agent was the only one in Sussex offering package holidays to Sardinia. Local mothers were campaigning for more school places for five-year-olds. Brighton’s cyclists were a law unto themselves. A local heir had married a negress.

Grand and Nye were mentioned every now and then. In 1964, their club Le Pigalle was raided for illegal drugs. No charges were brought but this hadn’t stopped the paper printing a blistering editorial by the paper’s lead reporter, Keith Vellacott, on the new scourge of amphetamines. Arrests and fights at, or just outside, their nightclubs were frequent, and the people they attracted to Brighton were exactly the kind of people the town didn’t want. Luke imagined smoke issuing from Vellacott’s typewriter whenever Grand and Nye were mentioned apart from this one, happy story:

Evening Argus

Tuesday, 1 October, 1968

Headline: Local Tycoons Flog Vice Den

By Keith Vellacott

Champagne corks were popped across Brighton last night at the news that the notorious Brighton casino, The Alhambra, has been sold to an hotel chain. Rising from the ashes of an illegal fifties gambling den, the place was the site of violence as well as recently legitimised gaming. The Alhambra’s former owners, local businessmen Joss Grand and Jacky Nye, were unavailable for comment.

Of course even local papers in October 1968 had led with the Kray twins’ trial: here, the case was reported under the headline
Jack The Hat Witness Lied
. In world news, two American athletes had given the Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics, and been forced to quit the games. An anti-Vietnam march had brought London to a standstill. The notorious politician Enoch Powell, still dripping crimson controversy from April’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ oratory in Birmingham, was due to make another speech about Britain’s economic future at Brighton Town Hall later that week.

Powell’s much anticipated visit warranted only a few inches in the
Argus
, nudged to a small corner of page seven on Tuesday 22 October. His visit and all other news were subsumed by the story of Jacky Nye, local crimelord, and his murder on the West Pier.

Every photograph Luke had ever seen of Grand and Nye accompanied the pages of reportage and speculation. The report itself was a disappointment, the content the same as the Cold Case Sussex story down to the letter, suggesting that whoever had written it was working from this source material and had been in possession of no newly uncovered facts. Luke felt, as he ploughed on through the familiar text, an echo of the frustration that detective John Rochester must have experienced.

There was an interview with the couple who had seen Nye’s prone body on the pier, and an appeal for the girl in the red coat. Luke’s conviction that it was Kathleen Duffy began to waver. The more he thought about it, the less inclined he was to believe in the girl’s existence at all. After all, a girl – sorry Charlene, a
young woman
– in a red coat was a trope, from Little Red Riding Hood onwards. It was just the kind of ready-made story that you would tell the police, if you were a dosser looking for attention or reward. Vellacott reported that Joss Grand was helping the police with their enquiries and while his alibi appeared solid, the police were continuing to focus their efforts on him. The subtext of Grand’s guilt shone through the lines of newsprint.

The last ever picture of Grand and Nye together was one that didn’t seem to have been uploaded to the internet. A long-lens shot taken at Nye’s funeral, it showed a sombre Grand, knee deep in floral tributes beside a glass horse-drawn carriage that contained an oversized coffin. An actress currently starring in a soap-opera was there, younger than Luke had ever seen her, her face half-obscured by a black veil. It was reported that Diana Dors had sent flowers.

After the burial, Vellacott seemed to run out of steam. Headlines diminished in their confidence and frequency.

Who Killed Jacky Nye?
became
Jacky: No Arrests
which turned into
Hopes Fading in Nye Murder Case
. The reports got smaller as the headlines got quieter, and in each one the detective John Rochester sounded more and more despondent and desperate and defensive. Even though Luke knew which way the story was going, he couldn’t fight the slow plunge of disappointment. The novelty of looking at the newspapers on microfilm wore off at about five o’clock, or towards the beginning of 1969, when Luke’s eyes began to throb with the effort of focus. Longing already for the cold clinical convenience of a search engine, he called it a day.

On the walk back to Temperance Place a woman in a short red coat passed him by and he turned his head so quickly that something in his neck went snap.

Chapter 17

It was a week before Caleb and Belinda were both at home on the same evening, the kind of wet windy Brighton Saturday that cleared the seafront and filled the pubs.

‘Ships that pass in the night, that’s us,’ she said, ushering Luke over the threshold of their cottage. It was as bright as his was dull, with paint, fabric, paper and props obscuring all surfaces. Lengths of jigsawed fibreboard leaned against the walls and a ladder was balanced across the jutting worktop, dormant slapstick. The dining table was covered by two sewing machines and patterns, so they ate the tagine Caleb had made cross-legged on the floor.

Caleb had called Belinda a wardrobe mistress but she described herself as a seamstress and the old-fashioned word suited her, with her mish-mash of styles from different decades, from the victory roll she wore her hair in to the dollyrocker shoes on her feet.

‘Were you close to Mrs Duffy?’ he asked when there was a lull in the conversation. She and Caleb exchanged a glance somewhere between amusement and annoyance.

‘I wouldn’t call it a
friendship
, as such. She was like fifty years older than me. I guess we didn’t see eye to eye on some stuff. But she was very friendly when we first moved in. And she was a good source.’

‘Source?’

‘Of clothes,’ said Belinda. ‘In my job I have to be able to recreate a look from any period, right? Modern clothes just aren’t cut properly. Fabric technology is awesome but it means that tailoring is a dying art. There’s no substitute for taking apart an original garment and seeing exactly how it was made. Mrs D didn’t have an extensive wardrobe but it was all original. She said she hadn’t thrown anything away since she was a teenager. She weighed the same in her seventies as she did in her twenties. She was very scathing of women who couldn’t keep their weight down. She was pretty scathing, full stop.’