The Ties That Bind (29 page)

‘You nearly believe me,’ said Grand. ‘Let’s leave it here for today. I tell you what, look up those names first. I’ll talk to you again when you’re really convinced.’

Chapter 43

Luke was helping Sandy cut celebrity interviews from magazines. They weren’t even working with real news-stand magazines, just colour supplements from the weekend papers that were all available online now. Luke wondered if she even knew this. He carefully scored down the centre section of an interview with Keith Richards, his craft knife skimming the staples, and placed it to one side.

‘I was ever so disappointed when he wrote his autobiography without coming to me,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ve got enough files to fill in some of the gaps in his memories.’ Luke covered his laugh with a cough when he realised she was serious. It had been a while since he had seen her in work mode, and he had forgotten that her sense of humour deserted her when she was focused like this. Sandy let the hurt show briefly, then apparently decided to believe that the cough was genuine and went back to work, a dowager’s hump curving her spine as she bent over her pages. She bit her lip in concentration as she trimmed the edges of each glossy page with a paper guillotine before sliding it into a manila file, smoothing it closed, nodding and smiling to herself.

They kept going until the magazines were shredded skeletons that hung from stapled spines. Then the cut pages were off to the unmarked graves of the filing cabinets.

The rest of the house might be freezing but another storage heater had been wheeled into the sitting room and the space was stuffy with smoke; they had been slowly fumigating themselves as they worked, and now that they were finished the thick grey air dulled their appetites for a congratulatory cigarette. To whet it again, they opened the front window and leaned forward, stretching their backs to catch a sea view. Traffic dawdled along Kingsway and the horizon was a line of black glitter.

‘It’s November, they’ll be putting the Christmas lights up soon,’ said Sandy. ‘When I was a girl they had illuminations up here all year round. There was a big neon spike up on that bus stop. It was hideous. Made the Blackpool illuminations look classy and that’s saying something.
And
it was a traffic hazard. All the motorists were so distracted that they kept crashing. I wrote a piece about it.’

‘Heh,’ said Luke distractedly.

She passed a hand in front of his eyes. ‘Penny for them.’

‘What? Oh. Nothing. Blank as a blackboard,’ he replied, although in fact the cold air had swept the decks of his mind and his thoughts had returned to their default. In the morning, the History Centre would be open again and he intended to be up early for once, checking out those names that Grand had given him. His view of the man was still spinning after the handbrake turn of their last interview, and he knew it would not come to a standstill unless he had hard evidence, hard copies, of this research. Not that he could tell Sandy that.

‘You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?’ she pressed. Guilt, never far away, swam to the surface and infused his cheeks with blood.

‘Who?’

‘Lovesick of Leeds.’

‘Oh,’ said Luke, slumping with relief. ‘Yes.’

‘What’s the latest?’

‘He’s still off having his expensive therapy. I wish his ex-wife would just get him committed. I’d certainly sleep more easily.’

She placed her hand with its long nails, ridged but varnished, over his. ‘Well, I’ll still hang on to that log you gave me. And that note he wrote, I hope you’ve kept that.’

‘It’s in the bag somewhere,’ said Luke gesturing to his satchel. In fact he knew exactly where it was, folded and zipped inside a little compartment designed for valuables. Even knowing it was there made him uneasy. A superstitious fear of it was taking hold and he knew it would take a lot for him ever to open it again.

She ground out her cigarette on the windowsill. ‘Did you talk to your friend about whether he gave him your address?’

Luke blew a twister of smoke and steam into the night before replying. ‘He denied it. I’ve had sleepless nights trying to think of ways that don’t implicate Viggo, but it
must
have been him. And why would he switch sides like that, unless they’re seeing each other? I can see why they’d be attracted to each other on a surface level, even if they barely got on. But then . . . Viggo knows what Jem put me through, he wouldn’t risk getting into something like that. I don’t know, maybe it was just a one-off shag, and somehow Jem tricked him into saying where I was – I mean, he certainly wouldn’t do it deliberately – and he’s too ashamed to apologise.’

‘Maybe there’s another explanation,’ said Sandy, but she didn’t sound persuaded, and she couldn’t come up with a convincing theory.

Outside, cars shunted along Marine Parade. Even late at night the traffic was slow along this stretch, stopping at pedestrian crossings every hundred yards. Who needed Christmas lights when you had the red, green, amber and white illuminations of street furniture? To the west, Brighton Pier continued its year-round vulgar wink, the wheel was a giant snowflake and the necklace of lights that strung the seafront stretched beyond their sight, almost as far as Temperance Place. Luke had been wrong about them looking like real pearls when lit. Even from here they looked cheap, strings of plastic beads from a penny arcade.

Chapter 44

Luke spread the documents he’d tracked down at the History Centre on the table before Grand. He’d had them blown up and printed and the enlargement had distorted the tiny words into fuzzy curls and columns. The villains’ faces were blurred at this scale, taking on a weird, boneless look. Even Vaughan craned to see the three stooges of Jacky Nye’s violence. Grand’s old partner had shed his mantle of jovial incompetence to reveal a vicious monster beneath.

‘You were right,’ said Luke. ‘It all fits. Ian Foxlee, Bill Bennett, Robert Wilding.’ All sent down for almost identical attacks in almost identical circumstances. In all three crimes, the victims were licensees who were beaten on their own premises. All three were slashed across the face from ear to ear but in each case a different attacker walked into the police station and handed himself in before the police had a chance to make an arrest. ‘I looked for beatings with this MO after Jacky died and they stopped around the same time he did.’ He picked up the report on Bill Bennett. ‘This was the last one, June 1968. The details are so similar, I can’t believe the police didn’t pick up on it.’

Grand grunted. ‘You’d be surprised how lazy the filth can be when a man hands himself in. John Rochester was the only one who’d have been looking for a pattern and he’d been promoted by then, so he wasn’t dealing with common or garden assaults any more. Truth be told, we couldn’t believe we got away with it either. We was always waiting for the knock. Gawd, looking at those boys now, the time they done for us. For
him
.’ His expression was one of disappointed bewilderment, as though watching a news item about an atrocity in a far-off country.

Luke turned the papers face down and set them to one side. Today was a day for big questions and he hoped he would ask the right ones, in the right order. He squared his shoulders to his subject.

‘When I first approached you, you said that others had tried, and failed, to write your story. Have you ever done any formal interviews with other journalists?’

‘No. I wouldn’t have, would I, while Kathleen was alive?’ He spoke this truth, so recently revealed, as casually as though it had always been evident.

‘Did you ever speak to a writer called Jasper Patten? It would have been about a decade ago. He was investigating you for a while, but something seems to have happened to make him drop it.’

Grand’s eyes flicked vainly to the right. Luke could almost hear his brain creaking with the effort of recall.

‘He approached us, sir,’ said Vaughan from his gloomy corner. ‘The piss artist with the moustache. The one who’d been in contact with John Rochester.’

‘Oh,
him
,’ said Grand. ‘We sent him on his way didn’t we?’

Vaughan nodded.

‘When you say you sent him on his way . . .’ ventured Luke, half-turning in his seat to take Vaughan in too, ‘Is that a euphemism for something else? Like when you say “muscle?’’ ’ His attention pinballed between Grand and his driver. If their eyes clicked together in conspiracy for even a second, he wanted to know about it. But Grand turned the force of his indignation on Luke.

‘Christ on a bike, boy, haven’t you heard
anything
? I told you, it’s been fifty years since I laid a finger on anyone. And that includes having other people do it in my name. I just said I wasn’t going to co-operate with his book. I wasn’t ready then. I couldn’t stand the thought of Kathleen finding out about my past that way. If he’d come to me when you did I might have gone along with him. You was just in the right place at the right time.’

Luke decided to drop for good the subject of Jasper Patten. He was almost entirely convinced not only of Grand’s redemption but of his original virtue now. The remaining hairline crack of doubt was not worth excavating if it meant sacrificing goodwill, not when McRae would put him in touch with Patten any day now.

‘Well, I’d better get on with it before you change your mind, hadn’t I?’ said Luke, encouraged when Grand smiled to show that the nervous attempt at humour had been taken as intended. ‘Let’s talk about 1968. Things had already started to change the previous year, hadn’t they, with the Richardsons done for torture. And now in London you’ve got the twins’ trial about to kick off. Is that when things started to go wrong between you and Jacky, too?’

Grand nodded. ‘Whatever happened up London would filter down here sooner or later. These new coppers rising up through the ranks said they was anti-vice and anti-corruption and they bloody well meant it. Soho was
unrecognisable
from just a few years before. I could see which way the wind was blowing. I wondered if it was time to start putting some of our money into property, something
completely
legitimate. But Jacky was dead against it. I remember what he said like he was standing here now. He goes, “Where’s the glamour in bricks and mortar, Joss? Where’s the excitement?” ’ Grand gave a bitter, airless laugh. ‘Truth be told, I was
sick
of his idea of glamour. I was sick of the way we was running things, sick of waiting for Jacky to turn up covered in blood again, sick of paying off doctors to turn a blind eye. Jacky loved playing the host, getting the famous faces into our clubs. He couldn’t see what I could: that it was only the
pretence
of friendship with those people that we had. What he thought was respect and social standing, I knew that was just fear. But Jacky didn’t get it. He thought it was all real. And he wasn’t ready to give all that up.’

‘Basically you wanted to go straight and he didn’t.’

‘Yes. Although, Gawd, I didn’t put it to him like that, I wasn’t stupid. That was my long-term goal, but I knew it couldn’t be a clean break. I thought either we’d sell the casino then make a few investments, and if the returns were good maybe Jacky would come round to my way of thinking . . .’

‘Or?’

Grand sighed. ‘Or I’d make it a long, slow break, with him looking after the clubs and me becoming a landlord.’

‘And how did Jacky take that?’

‘He wouldn’t let me. You’ve got to remember we was partners, everything we had was tied up together. Even in them days it was easier to get divorced than break up a firm like ours. He fought me every step of the way for months, and then one day he just come into the club and said, “Make you right, Joss, let’s give this property thing a whirl.” I asked him what had happened to make him change his mind. He told me that he’d been talking to friends in London and that there was a whole new way to make easy money from property, that you could start small, as long as you was clever about it. I couldn’t wait to hear what it was. I was so thrilled, I can’t tell you. I saw this future where we could eventually make money respectable, a whole new life opening up in front of us on the back of one deal.’

‘He had Dave drive us to an address down by the seafront in Hove. We had to get out and walk the last bit while Dave parked, and we ended up outside this little terrace. It was maybe three, four hundred yards from where Redemption Row used to be. I couldn’t believe it. I thought they’d all been lost to slum clearance, but there it was, this little street, if you can call it that, just a pair of tiny cottages left in between all the big houses – is this thing empty, Vaughan?’

His ensuing deep inhalation had a note of panic about it. Vaughan rose to check the dial and shook his head. Grand sank back in his chair, taking greedy gulps of oxygen until his breathing patterns had returned to their version of normal.

‘You were outside this house,’ Luke prompted, when he thought that speech might be possible again.

‘All right, all right. “What’s so special about this place?” I asked him, and he goes, “That one on the left’s for sale. It’s on at auction tomorrow and we’re going to buy it.” The guide price was eleven hundred quid, fuck-all even by 1968 standards.’

Eleven hundred pounds. That was less than the monthly rent on a decent two-bed flat in Brighton these days. Luke wondered what Caleb and Belinda had paid for their cottage. A quarter of a million? More?

‘As we was looking at it, the door opened. And this massive, battered old pram came squeezing through the front door. This
tiny
little sparrow of a girl was pushing it. She was so little, I thought she must be taking her baby brother or sister out for a walk, but as she turned the corner I could see she was older than that, and she was expecting again. She walked straight past us. She was all long dark hair and eyelashes, that lovely look those Irish girls have when they’re young. “There she is,” said Jacky. “Kathleen Duffy, widow of this parish,” and his face went . . .’ Grand’s voice trailed off.

Vaughan cracked his knuckles in an unspecific warning.

‘What do you mean, his face went?’ Luke said eventually.