The Ties That Bind (15 page)

‘No,’ admitted Cecil, ‘But he wouldn’t have been afraid to. He was an old soak, but he had balls, I’ll give him that. I tell you what, if you do find him, will you let me know?’

‘I’m surprised you’d want to see him again, after that character reference,’ said Luke.

‘I don’t particularly. But the bastard borrowed a tenner off me for drink last time I saw him. I could do with it back.’

Luke laughed, and left for the gardens and a cigarette break. Insight came with the match’s flash, and he pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen still looked naked without its column of DON’T ANSWER numbers. He wouldn’t have said that he
missed
Jem’s calls as such, but he noticed their absence keenly. He tried not to think about where Jem was or what he might be going through there.

‘Features,’ she said over ringing telephones.

‘Alexa, it’s Luke,’ he said. ‘I’m calling in that favour you promised me.’

‘Luke! Lovely to hear from you. But it’s a bloody long way to ring out for a coffee.’

‘You’re hilarious. Listen, I know it’s cheeky, but could I log into your electoral register? Just for one search?’

‘Ooh, you know it’s more than my job’s worth,’ she said, but he could hear her fingers clicking over the keys and seconds later she had given him a temporary password that would get him into the database for an hour.

He returned to his desk with a renewed sense of purpose which was soon deflated when the electoral register drew a blank. Still, that didn’t mean all hope was lost: Patten might have left the country, and people removed themselves from the register for a million reasons.

While he still had access to the list, he called up the name Michael Duffy. It was actually worse than Googling, as at least then there was the possibility of pulling out some identifying detail. On the database, the thousands of men who shared Duffy’s name were classifed by address alone. Still, Luke downloaded all of their details and emailed them to his account, knowing that contacting each man would be a month’s work in itself.

Luke’s head suddenly felt heavy, and he let it rest on the desk. He bet Jasper Patten hadn’t spent weeks on end chasing relatives and leafing through photographs: his books had the assurance of someone who had leapfrogged the secondary sources and jumped straight to the primary. If Luke did not want to waste any more time and energy, he had to up his game. It was time to make contact with Joss Grand.

Chapter 22

Luke’s involvement with Len Earnshaw might have ended in disaster but at least its beginning had been straightforward. He had not been trying to solve a mystery so much as tell an old story in a new voice. With Grand, Luke didn’t even know if the story he wanted to tell
was
the truth. It still felt like little more than a hunch.

True, Grand’s life would make a good book even if it turned out that he didn’t kill Jacky Nye. He was still a torturer turned humanitarian, a baddie turned goodie. He was still a product of his time, a war child who had helped the sixties to swing. Luke repeatedly told himself that the mystery of Jacky Nye’s death could be part of Joss Grand’s narrative even without its resolution, but he could not smother the spark of hope that Grand was guilty and that he would be the one to extract the confession.

That was before he considered the question of how to persuade him to talk. Earnshaw had been easy. Luke had known from day one that he was dealing with the motivations of revenge, notoriety and a get-rich-quick scheme. Grand, on the other hand, had money, was a virtual recluse and had latterly made it his life’s work to distance himself from his youth.

He thought Grand would appreciate straight talk, but knew that the base line – you’re not going to live for ever so why not talk to me and set the record straight so that you can control your reputation after you die? – was
too
base. As sales pitches went, it was terrible, but he could not come up with a better idea. So he did what he always had done when he was stuck. He wrote down everything he knew, rearranging the facts into as many formats as they would comply with, lists and charts and timelines and spreadsheets. The hope was that if he presented the information to himself in enough ways, if it was filtered from page to page through his brain enough times, a new angle would assert itself between the parallel lines.

He drafted a single-page synopsis for the book, such as his agent might send to a publisher, then condensed that into the single paragraph blurb for the back of the paperback he hoped one day to hold, leaping ahead of himself and announcing that here was a sensational confession. He even drew, in a crude doodle, the Grand Truss, following to the letter the instructions the torture enthusiast had posted online. The hands and feet of his stick-figure victim were bound together so that the spine bent backwards in an unnatural arc. After he was confident he had got it right, he sketched it again, this time a proper anatomical drawing of a hog-tied man.

He catalogued the known charges made against Grand and Nye that had subsequently been dropped: and these were only the ones that got as far as the newspapers. God, what more was there to find? It seemed that the more he found out, the more he realised just how much he did not know. Luke wondered if he had progressed any further than Jasper Patten, or if all of this was just retracing his predecessor’s footsteps.

His right hand was clawing around his pencil and threatening to cramp. Luke turned his attention to what he knew of Joss Grand in his present incarnation. Maybe the trick was to stop focusing on Grand as he had been as a younger man and instead concentrate his efforts on the person he was now. This, after all, was the man he must approach. He pulled the computer towards him again. In a parallel list he noted all the charities he donated to (again, he was limited to those that he knew of), the accolades he had garnered and the people he had sponsored. Grand’s more recent activities were all charitable. He wasn’t the type to pose with oversized cardboard cheques, but that hadn’t stopped the recipients of his donations giving grateful interviews with the local press; the women’s refuge thanking him for bequeathing an entire house when theirs was under threat, the paralysed soldier whose house had been converted to accommodate a wheelchair, the little boy with lymphoma Grand had sent to Disneyland. Only once did the man himself appear in a photograph, heading the table at a three-course Christmas lunch he had bought at the Metropole Hotel for the local carers support group. If Grand was, as John Rochester had theorised, trying to buy back his soul because he had killed his best friend, then he was sparing no expense. Could a soul, once lost, truly be redeemed?

On a whim, he papered the small walls of the sitting room with his printouts, photographs, sketches and notes. The larger blank wall he devoted to
then
, the smaller space above the mantelpiece to
now
. He overlaid the patchy squares of Kathleen’s own missing pictures until all the wallpaper was covered. He had meant it to look like an incident room, but it had taken on the appearance of the stalker’s lair, the serial killer’s shrine, the kind of room the police burst in on with only minutes remaining to find the missing girl.

The young Joss Grand and his older self, the sinner and the saint, locked paper eyes with each other across the narrow divide. Luke stood in the crossfire of their gazes and wondered how someone could change so completely. How could that feeble elderly man, who cried at the death of his sweetheart, be reconciled with the gangland boss of local legend?

Luke ran his hands through his hair until the salty tangle of curls stopped his fingers in their tracks and it struck him that it was this very contradiction that was key. The way to sell the project to Grand was to package it not as a life of crime but a memoir of redemption; he must pitch the book as a sordid past refracted through the prism of the benevolent present. With so much charity work relating to housing, what if he focused on the backstreet upbringing and its brutalising effects? He could present it as a kind of social history of Brighton told through the eyes of someone who had run the streets as a boy, terrorised them as a young man, and owned them as an old one. He wrote the phrase in his notebook and ran a highlighter through it. They could put that on the cover.

Now what? Just because he knew how to present it to Grand didn’t mean he was home and dry. It wasn’t just the phrasing of it but the method of the approach that mattered. He drafted a letter, letting Grand know that he had an agent, assuring him of his honourable intentions and his literary aspirations, his social-history angle. He even included the awards he’d won. When he re-read it, it was more CV than query. Then he tore it up. If this were any other journalistic assignment, he wouldn’t choose a medium that could go unanswered for weeks. He ought to call, but he had no phone number. He could always doorstep him like a tabloid hack, but the shock could put Grand on the defensive. And it wasn’t any old doorstep; everything about the house on Dyke Road said that it was the most private of residences.

How, then, were they to meet again? Yesterday had been Wednesday. If only he had honoured his usual appointment at Temperance Place, Luke could have invited him in and made his pitch. It seemed that every other second of Grand’s week would be accounted for by his strict routines and he could hardly rock up at the JGP office on a Monday morning, the only other time slot he knew of—

Hang on. Charlene had told him
exactly
how he could find him. Luke looked at the clock. It was nearly four. He shut down his laptop, slung his bag over his shoulder, and headed for the Lanes.

Chapter 23

Traffic was pleasingly slow in the labyrinthine spirals of the one-way system and Luke made circuits, eyes peeled for the car. His long shot seemed to lengthen as the hour passed. Every time he darted into a coffee shop to buy a drink or use the toilet he convinced himself that the car had been purring outside for the duration of his visit. At five the rush hour slowed the crawl to a halt and in a back street lined with dry risers and ugly security doors, Luke gave up, sitting heavily down on a dirty aluminium barrel that had been left outside the back of a dive bar.

Seagulls flocked to peck at restaurant slops in the gutter. A lorry pulled up alongside him and began to tip dumpsters full of glass into recycling compartments to deafening effect. Luke got up, squeezed himself behind the lorry and found himself brushing against the black Bentley, eye-to-eye with Grand’s driver. The car was stuck directly behind the recycling van. Luke was instantly adrenalised, and recognised the growl of apprehension in his stomach as fear not of violence but of rejection.

He studied the bins: there were over a dozen still to go, giving him a few minutes before the car could move. He approached the car and rapped on Grand’s window. The old man’s face was blank as a pebble.

‘Mr Grand?’ mouthed Luke through the glass. The faintest flicker of recognition showed and the window came slowly down.

‘Kathleen’s boy,’ he said, a challenge in his eyes. ‘I mean, the boy in Kathleen’s house. What do you want?’

‘Have you got time for a quick chat?’

The cascade of shattering bottles made it hard to hear. Luke had to lean in through the open window, aware that if Vaughan put his foot on the gas and advanced even a few feet, he could take his head off.

‘I don’t see why not. Let him in, Vaughan.’

‘Sir?’ said Vaughan, a single word that translated as, ‘Are you fucking serious?’ but the locks clunked open and Luke let himself in to sit beside Grand on the garnet leather. Luke tried not to think about what had been wiped off those seats, what had been vacuumed from the inside of the boot, in the car’s lifetime. It too was a witness. Despite its history, the interior still smelled showroom-new, of power and money. It was waxed and polished like a museum piece but some modifications had been made, he noticed, as Vaughan reactivated the central locking system, this time to keep Luke in the car.

The back of Vaughan’s head was more menacing than a snarling face. The thick fold of skin above the nape, the military shortness of his hair and the extreme cleanliness of his ears made Luke nervous again. Grand, on the other hand, seemed calmer than at their first meeting. He was as dapper today as he had been then. His three-piece, three-button suit was chalk-stripe on a dark slate.

‘Is it about Kathleen?’ There was that shortness of breath again, more acute than it had seemed on their first meeting although Grand could not have exerted himself in the back seat of the car. What was it? Asthma? Something worse? People his age were always getting lung cancer. He realised now that while Jacky Nye had rarely been pictured without a cigarette burning in his hand, Joss Grand had never been pictured with one.

‘In a way,’ said Luke. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you. I’m a writer. I’m an established journalist, a professional – I’ve won awards, you’re welcome to see my cuttings – and I wonder if you’d ever considered letting anyone write your biography for you.’ Grand curled his lips in what might be a sneer or a smile. Luke cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been reading about your early life, and I do think that your rise to philanthropist is a remarkable one. You must have seen the city change so much in your lifetime.’

Vaughan answered for his employer without turning round. ‘Do you know how many people have tried that one on?’ It was an echo of what he’d heard from Marcelle and Cecil, although this time it was threat rather than concern, that shaped the words. Luke had never found it harder to speak.

‘But I wonder if others have taken the approach I want to. Obviously I’d want to include your . . . rise to power, but it would absolutely be in the context of the work you’ve done
since
the late sixties. We could write about what inspires your charity work, and why you decided to go into property. I’m not saying we would gloss over the . . . your past, it’d have to be warts and all. But someone else might turn your story into a lurid paperback. I want to treat it like literature.’