The Ties That Bind (30 page)

‘He got . . . how can I explain it? It was like his eyes changed colour. It was the same look he got when he’d decided that someone needed teaching a lesson, or when he’d found a new mark. I felt physically sick. He goes, “Yes,
widow
, that’s the brilliant bit. What you do is, you buy up properties with sitting tenants, so they’re dirt cheap, and then you make conditions so difficult for them that they have no choice but to move on, and you get to sell the property at a massive profit.” He was grinning his fat fucking head off. This was it, this brilliant idea he’d had from his friends in London.’

‘Hang on,’ interjected Luke. ‘Didn’t they tighten up housing law in the sixties? There was that bent landlord in Notting Hill, wasn’t there, who got done for putting all the immigrants in slums? And they changed the law to stop it happening again?’

‘Peter Rachman,’ nodded Grand. ‘He was
exactly
the kind of low-life I didn’t want to be any more. I said as much to Jacky.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘How’d you think?’ said Grand. ‘He said that the law was bollocks, it only worked if your tenants actually knew their rights. This little one, this Kathleen Duffy, he reckoned, was over from Cork with no family except a husband who’d just died in some building-site accident.’

Grand’s voice was as steady as his shortness of breath would allow; his only tell was twirling of the gold cufflink at his left wrist. The knobbled fingers of his right hand had an incongruous youthful dexterity and the repetitive movement was hypnotic. ‘While he was talking she come round again. She was just doing the block in circles to make the baby quiet but if anything it was even louder than it had been the first time. You could’ve heard that child screaming on the other side of the Channel. “See what I mean?” goes Jacky. He wasn’t even bothering to whisper. “Perfect. Easy to intimidate, no one to help her out. Silly little bitch won’t have a leg to stand on. She’ll fuck off to some council flat in Peacehaven and we’ll have a nice little house we can sell on for double the money. Silly little bitch.’’ I mean, what a way to speak about someone like her. I thought, you’ve gone too far this time, that’s it, it’s over.

‘I was almost relieved, that’s the funny thing, that he’d forced the issue. He didn’t even notice though. He said that there were dozens more where she came from, that if you combed the local papers for death notices you could target vulnerable tenants, families where the breadwinners had met a sticky end. Men come over from Ireland for the work, no papers, working cash-in-hand. People talk about health and safety gone mad these days and maybe it has a bit, but anyone who remembers what it used to be like before should know better than to complain. You’d have these young men, unskilled, working for pennies, fifty feet up a scaffold with no hard hats; they was dropping from girders and getting flattened by cranes the whole time. And it was the women they left behind that Jacky wanted us to move in on. He said the sky was the limit. I’d seen him do some nasty stuff, but
this
. . .’

Grand let his head drop into his hands. A single greased strand of iron-grey hair broke ranks, flopped forward and swung across his glasses like a windscreen wiper. He was completely still. Seconds passed. Luke looked at Vaughan to see if he, too, was about to check that Grand still had a pulse.

‘I felt like a prick for believing he’d ever want to go straight,’ Grand muttered. Luke slid his phone a fraction closer. ‘Jacky looked at this poor little bird, this
mum
, and he just saw pound signs. These were real people, they didn’t belong to our world, they weren’t crooked or greedy or asking for it – I mean, how could a widow and a little baby be asking for anything? I said, no way, Jacky. I said we do this straight or we don’t do it at all. It’s funny, we didn’t raise our voices or our fists but it was the biggest disagreement we’d ever had. And he said if we didn’t then someone else would, and that I was a mug to let this go.’

‘Couldn’t he have just done it without you?’ asked Luke.

‘That’s what he threatened. Eleven hundred quid wasn’t the sort of cash we kept in our pockets but I knew we had about that in the safe at the club. There was only one set of keys and they were on me. I told him that if I had to disappear for forty-eight hours to stop him buying that cottage I fucking well would. I’d have done anything to keep it out of his hands.’

Chapter 45

The little room had taken on the hushed, sacred air of the confessional, with Luke as the priest and Grand the repenter. Vaughan was a statue, forgotten when unseeen.

‘Jacky had gone through a lot of cellmates in Lewes and one of them was a safebreaker. When I dropped into Le Pigalle the next evening, he’d blown the bloody thing open and taken all the cash we had. Not just enough for Kathleen’s house, every note in the safe. I don’t know what he’d done but I couldn’t get a peep out of anyone. I spent the rest of the day having Dave drive me round town looking for him. Brighton was in a bit of a funny mood that day, if memory serves. There was some big demonstration going on and there were students, police and press everywhere.’

‘Enoch Powell,’ said Luke. ‘He was giving a talk at the Town Hall.’

‘That’s it. There was traffic everywhere, marches blocking up all the streets. We looked all over but Jacky wasn’t in any of his usual haunts. I thought, maybe this is a good thing, maybe he’s taken the cash and gone off on a bender, or up London for a tart, and he won’t make it in time to get back for that auction. But before I gave up I had Dave take me to one last place.’ He panted with the effort of speech.

‘The West Pier,’ said Luke, almost under his breath.

‘Jacky was there, looking out at the water. I could see it was him even from the car window. Dave stayed behind the wheel, leaving the engine running the way I liked it – it was good for the car and showed you didn’t need to watch your money. It was blowing a gale. Half the lights on the pier were out.’

Luke chanced a glance at his phone to check that it was still recording their conversation.

‘Did you go there to kill him?’ he asked.

The phone absorbed twenty seconds of laboured breathing.

‘I went there to
end the partnership
,’ said Grand carefully. ‘With even half of what I had a stake in, I’d got enough to fuck off to Spain or Morocco or somewhere else I could get away from my life with him. I knew I couldn’t stop him doing this but I could at least make sure the blood wasn’t on my hands any longer. He wasn’t even bothering to pretend we was on the same side any more. He said that with me gone, he could do what he liked. Reckoned he had blokes lining up to take my place.’

‘And he went for you?’ said Luke.

‘Funnily enough, it was
me
that lost it.’

‘How come?’

‘I gave it one last go, didn’t I? I appealed to his better nature.’ Grand laughed bitterly. ‘Asked him what kind of man picked on a lone woman. And he went, “She can always make a few bob down the docks.” I reminded him she was pregnant and he said . . .’ Grand scowled at the memory and his voice grew stronger than Luke had ever heard it. ‘He said, “She can charge a premium then. I know a few kinky blokes that’d pay double for that.” I’ve never known anything like that anger before or since. I’d had tear-ups before but afterwards I could have talked you through them: who landed the blows on which parts of the body and which order. You know, I hit him on the chin then he caught me on the ribs and so on. But this time
I
saw the red mist that Jacky talked about and I turned it all on him. Even when he knocked my glasses off it didn’t make much difference. One minute we was scrapping and the next he was at my feet. I can’t even remember having my hands around his neck.’

He sank back in his chair, slack with relief or regret at the unburdening, it was impossible to tell. Luke’s instinct was to whoop and cheer and do a victory lap of his tiny lounge but he forced himself to remain perfectly still. Grand was cresting a wave of honesty, and what he had done to Jacky Nye was only half the story Luke needed. The prompt he offered was gentle.

‘Did you know you’d killed him?’ He had to get the actual words on record.

‘If you’d asked me on the spot, I’d have said no, but looking back, I think I did. I think I did know.’

And that was it, he had it. But instead of the expected triumph, Luke felt his protective bubble, increasingly fragile, burst once and for all. He had been so fixated on Grand’s given motive for talking now – that with Kathleen gone, he no longer cared what happened to his reputation – that he had lost sight of the rest of the picture. In confessing to Jacky’s murder, Grand had effectively given Luke a pair of handcuffs and offered up his own wrists. What if they had just been toying with him all along? What if Grand had second thoughts? Perhaps Luke should quit while he was ahead, end the interview now and download the audio file to his secret dropbox. But Grand gave no sign of playing games or regretting his words. He was on a roll, and Luke could not bear to stop him.

‘But I didn’t have time to think about it then. I called for Dave to come and get my other glasses from the glove compartment – I always keep a spare pair with me even now, I’m half-blind without them.’

This detail corresponded exactly with the report Sandy had given him. Luke was surprised by the little spring of relief welling in his chest, and understood it to mean that he had, on some level, been afraid for weeks that her story had been just another of the little delusions and disconnects that got her through the day.

‘And when you could see again?’

‘I saw Jacky’s face,’ said Grand, and here he stopped to gulp for air. ‘He was all bog-eyed, gob open, fat white tongue hanging out. Jesus. One thing I’ll say for Dave, he knew which side his bread was buttered. He didn’t make a murmur about helping me get Jacky into the sea. We could’ve done with a third man to heave him over the side, but at least this way only two of us knew. I might not have chosen my partner wisely, but I’ve always known how to pick a loyal driver.’

‘How did you feel at that point?’ said Luke, aware only as he spoke of the therapeutic ring. He waited for Grand to sneer at the psychobabble but the question was answered straight.

‘Peaceful,’ he replied, with a loose shrug. ‘I’ve never felt so peaceful. It sounds strange, I know. I’d just killed a man. Not just any man. My best friend, my
brother
. Even Jacky never did that, although it was more by luck than judgement. But I knew that I’d never hurt anyone again, that my biggest act of violence was the last one ever.’

‘Just peaceful? Not guilty?’

‘Not then, although I was waiting for guilt to set in. I had right on my side, didn’t I? I done it to save Kathleen and fuck knows how many others like her. The guilt came later, when I got to know her and saw myself through her eyes. That’s when I started up my foundation, so that if she ever found out, she’d know . . .’ He trailed off. Luke fought the temptation to click his fingers and bring Grand back to the room.

‘And your glasses?’ he said. ‘What happened to them?’

Grand brought his hand to the bridge of his nose. ‘Dave found them on the boardwalk and threw them into the sea. Didn’t wipe them or nothing. I told you he was loyal but I didn’t say he was bright. It’s sheer luck they never turned up.’

Luke was wrestling so hard with a smile that his lips quivered. Grand had gift-wrapped his confession in atmosphere and trimmed it with the red ribbons of method and motive.
This
was the money shot that Maggie wanted, the backbone of the book. Get the scene with Sandy on record and the rest was all colour. Luke had shrugged off paranoid notions about second thoughts and was drunk with the anticipation of what must come next.

‘And someone saw you.’ Imminent relief tightened his muscles.

Grand shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It was just us.’

Luke’s heart, so high in his chest, plunged into his belly. His surprise was short-lived; of course, Grand’s treatment of Sandy did not fit with his preferred narrative. He had killed his friend to stop the monster and save one young woman, but in doing so he had terrorised – and ruined the life of – another. Of course this last barrier would be the hardest to break down; it struck right at the heart of Grand’s rebirth. Luke persisted with trepidation.

‘You were definitely alone on the pier? Because—’

Grand hissed his reply. ‘I
said
there were no witnesses.’

Vaughan leaned forward, blocking the window and darkening the room. Luke, having all but forgotten him, now wondered if he was the inhibiting presence, whether the detail about Sandy was a secret of which even Vaughan was ignorant. He racked his brains for a way to get the driver out of the room, just for a minute.

‘Right then,’ Grand said as quickly as his breath would allow. ‘I might not have regretted getting rid of Jacky but that doesn’t mean I wanted to do time for it. We got back in the car and drove straight back up to the club. I counted the cash I’d taken out of his inside pocket: fifteen hundred pound, in twenties. Enough to meet the guide price on the cottage in Temperance Place and a few hundred if the bidding went higher.’

Luke’s brain hurt, trying to listen to Grand while simultaneously wondering how to steer them back to the moments on the pier after Jacky died, but Grand had moved on; he was talking faster than Luke had ever heard him do before, racing from crime to aftermath like a man in a getaway car.

‘Back at Le Pigalle, I decided to front it out. I got a few key boys together and told them I’d been in the club all night, they’d all had a drink with me, and that they had to stick to that story no matter what happened next. I wasn’t about to depend on loyalty so I told them there was money in it – big money, life-changing money – if they kept schtum.’

‘So
that’s
why no one could ever break your alibi,’ said Luke. Grand ignored him and carried on.

‘When the police came, I had a club full of people who swore blind they’d been drinking with me since early evening. The police took me in for questioning that first night, but they didn’t actually arrest me, probably because Rochester was so confident he’d get something on me eventually. It was the stupidest thing he ever did; it gave me time to let everyone know just what they could expect as a reward for their silence.