The Thing Itself (22 page)

She gave a small smile and reached for her coffee. Her phone rang. Bob Watts.

‘How are you coping?' he said.

‘I'm trying to stay calm,' she said. She was surprised to hear the shakiness in her voice and to feel herself welling up.

‘Kate, Sarah and I are going to follow up a lead in France about the Milldean Massacre. We've located Bernie Grimes. Wondered if you wanted to come along.'

‘France?' Kate was surprised. ‘I – I don't know. Following up leads isn't really my thing.'

‘We're just a bit concerned about leaving you alone.'

Kate felt tears coming.

‘I'll be fine,' she said, a little breathy. ‘I'll use a kitchen knife next time.'

Watts laughed but still sounded anxious when he said: ‘Are you sure?'

‘I'm sure,' she said, her voice stronger, the tearful moment gone. ‘But thanks for worrying about me.'

‘We shouldn't be more than a couple of days,' Watts said. ‘You know, having a focus might be a good idea. When are you back at Southern Shores Radio?'

‘I'm not sure that provides any kind of focus.'

Watts was silent for a moment, then: ‘Listen. I've got a load more files on the Brighton Trunk Murders. The files that were supposed to be destroyed in the sixties?'

Kate had done all the research into the Trunk Murder papers that had turned up some months earlier in the Royal Pavilion. She had made a radio documentary about it.

‘How come?' she said.

‘Long story, to do with John Hathaway's father. They've been sitting in the boot of my car. Plus I've got some more stuff of my dad's. You interested?'

‘Sure. Can you get them to me?'

‘I can come to Brighton tomorrow.'

Kate was conscious of her ragged breath.

‘Will you do me a favour?' he continued. ‘Check out particularly three people: Martin Charteris, Eric Knowles and Tony Mancini.'

‘Tony Mancini is the other trunk murder – the two aren't connected.'

‘I know but there's something going on between him and Charteris – and, in fact, there's another Mancini, an Antonio “Baby” Mancini, who's a real Soho gangster. He worked for the Sabini brothers.'

‘I think there's stuff about him in the Brighton Tony Mancini file. The two got muddled. Who are the other two?'

‘Charteris is a petty crook but maybe more. Knowles – I'm not sure what he is. But I definitely want to find out.'

Radislav was wearing dark glasses and a lime-green suit that made his skin tone even more ghastly. Even from a distance, Tingley could see that he was grinning. The gap between the cages narrowed. Radislav was standing feet apart, both hands resting lightly on the bar in front of him, and he was looking straight at Tingley. Tingley half-expected him to wave.

Before, Tingley had never felt fear. But now, this thing in his belly . . .

He tried to take a deep breath. Half made it. Radislav is not a monster, he said to himself; he is just a man.

He looked down. He was nearing the part of the descent where the cages were only about twenty feet above a rocky scree. He was approaching another pylon. Tingley noted the small platform at the top and the steel ladder going up its spine. He looked across at Radislav's grey face.

The two cages drew closer.

Radislav was almost level and staring directly at him, still smiling his skull's-head smile. Tingley heard bird song, the girl's shrieks, the dislocated voice of the radio commentator coming from above and below him. Radislav was near enough for Tingley to see the grey at his temples, the gold screw in the hinge of his sunglasses, his right hand moving inside his jacket.

Radislav was reaching for a gun.

Tingley reached behind him to take his own gun from its holster. He gauged the distance between the two cages and kept his eyes on Radislav's jacket.

His cage was swaying. Radislav was fumbling, getting a grip on something. Then the hand withdrew. First, the cuff of his cream shirt with the glitter of its cufflink in the sunshine. The thin, pale wrist. The hand.

Tingley couldn't seem to release his gun from its holster. He was totally off balance, the cage swaying alarmingly. His eyes saw a drunken kaleidoscope of rock, trees, shingle roof and blue sky. He fell to the floor of his cage.

He lay curled there for what seemed an age but was only a few moments. He couldn't quite believe he'd been shot but the massive punch in his chest, the blood he could feel soaking him . . .

No second shot came. Tingley straightened and looked over his shoulder. Radislav's cage was about five yards above him and moving away. Radislav had his back to Tingley, facing up the mountain. His left elbow was raised. Tingley saw a plume of smoke and smelled the acrid smell of freshly burning tobacco.

Then a siren sounded and the long necklace of cages jerked to a halt.

K
ate Simpson immediately went on line to look up the Soho gangster Tony Mancini. In
The Times
archive she found some background on him in the reports of his trial and ultimate execution.

On 1st May 1941 he had killed Harry ‘Little Hubby' Distleman at a Wardour Street club and wounded Edward Fletcher. There had been a disturbance, then the police had found Distleman dead in the club's doorway with a wound five inches deep in his left shoulder. Fletcher had a stab wound to his wrist.

There were two clubs on the premises. Mancini was manager of one members' club and a member of the other, on the floor above. After a fight on 20th April in the members' club, Distleman had been barred. He had threatened Mancini and the owner. Mancini claimed he had bought a double-edged seven-inch blade for self-protection.

At three a.m. on 1st May there was a disturbance in the first-floor club. When it was over, Mancini went up to survey the damage. On the stairs he heard a voice behind him saying: ‘Here's Baby, let's knife him.'

Mancini ran upstairs. Distleman followed and there was a ‘general fight' using chairs, billiard balls and cues. Mancini claimed Distleman attacked him from behind with a chair and a penknife and he responded by striking out wildly with the knife in his pocket, not knowing who he'd hit. He didn't recall wounding Fletcher.

Distleman was a thug too, Kate had no doubt. He had been convicted of assault six times. He had a billiard ball in his pocket and attacked Mancini from behind.

She went to Wikipedia for the other Tony Mancini, the Trunk Murderer who'd got off murdering his mistress. According to his entry, he'd moved down to Brighton after being brutally attacked whilst in a Soho gang. He had a reputation for brutality – once forcing someone's hand into a meat grinder – and had been attacked by razor-wielding rival gangsters on Brighton prom.

She sat back. That didn't square with anything she'd come across about the Brighton Tony Mancini. But the meat grinder thing sounded like just the thing a real Soho gangster like Baby Mancini might do.

In the National Archives she found Baby Mancini born in Holborn in 1902. He had a sister, Maria. Kate yawned.

The siren and the stalled cages could mean only one thing: Kadire's body had been discovered. Tingley didn't hesitate. He shot Radislav in the back of the head. Radislav slumped forward and Tingley spread four more shots across his back. He didn't remember the make of the bullets he was using but he knew they expanded on impact. If the first bullet didn't kill Radislav – and Tingley couldn't see how it could fail to do so – then the body shots would destroy pretty much all his internal organs.

Hugging his own wound, he climbed out of his cage, dangled below it for a moment, then dropped down on to the scree. He let out a cry when he landed and tumbled down head over heels. He fetched up, scratched and bleeding, at the base of a tree.

He hobbled off at a diagonal, sliding down the scree, keeping an eye on the buildings at the base of the
funivia
. He assumed the police had been called and only once they had arrived would the cages move again.

Within five minutes he was round the side of the mountain and out of sight of the
funivia
buildings. He had glanced back only once to see Radislav's corpse, half-hanging over the front of his cage.

He buried his gun behind some bushes and continued down towards a dirt road. He started to shake some twenty yards from the bottom. He gulped down air.

He jumped down on to the dirt road, rubbery-legged. His knees caved in. He straightened and hurried along the road, trailing blood, ignoring someone from a house opposite who called something after him.

As he hurried into town, face burning, he was sure all eyes were on him. He could hear the police sirens as he located his car and drove out of Gubbio.

Reg Williamson gazed blankly at the files scattered over Sarah Gilchrist's desk. His thoughts were on Angela, his wife. Married thirty years. He'd never so much as looked at another woman. As it should be, but in the police that was quite something.

She'd been in decline ever since their son had killed himself. Williamson still loved her to bits but got precious little back.

He sighed and picked up a file at random. He wanted to nail Charlie Laker. He hoped Bernie Grimes would provide the testimony that would make it possible. But whilst Sarah and Bob Watts were going after Grimes, Williamson intended to trawl through the files relating to the Milldean Massacre to see if anything popped up that they'd missed before.

This file had his report about the murder of Finch, the policeman involved in the raid who had been thrown off Beachy Head in a roll of carpet by ‘Persons Unknown'. Next in the file was Gilchrist's report of the interview with Lesley White, the posh woman who lived in the converted lighthouse on the clifftop where Finch had been heaved over into the sea.

She'd known nothing about the killing of Finch but she'd banged on about her cat going missing. Bizarrely, this had turned out to be significant when its remains were found in a burned-out car on Ditchling Beacon. Typical of police work: most of the time you had no bloody idea what was important and what wasn't.

Williamson mouthed her name. Lesley White. White in name, white in nature. He remembered her looking at him with distaste as he sweated on her white sofa. She checked her white carpet for his footmarks.

He hadn't taken to her either. Snooty. One of the ‘I'm Better Than You But I Want Your Protection' brigade.

That wasn't pricking at him. He rubbed his chin. But something was.

He rolled his chair a yard or so to his computer and pecked the keys.

Why did her name sound odd, despite her white carpeting and furniture?

He brought up Sarah's account of a more recent interview with the same woman. This was about Elaine Trumpler, a girl murdered in the sixties whose skeletal remains had been found under the West Pier. She'd been a girlfriend of the gangster John Hathaway. Laker was in the frame for that too. White had been interviewed because Trumpler had been her flatmate at university.

Williamson cleared his throat. There it was. In the very first line: ‘Interview with Claire Mellon, The Lighthouse, Beachy Head.' Suddenly Lesley White had changed into Claire Mellon.

S
arah Gilchrist and Bob Watts walked along the towpath of the Canal du Midi past barges bigger than any Gilchrist had ever seen in Britain. She'd once been persuaded to go on a barging weekend with a boyfriend and it had been one of the longest two days of her life. Her idea of hell – a tall woman trapped on a narrow boat going at five miles an hour with someone she realizes she doesn't like very much.

She looked across the width of the canal and down its length, straight to the horizon. The rows of tall plane trees on each bank narrowed to a point on the horizon like an art class exercise in perspective.

‘What's the plan?' she said as she kept pace with Watts's long stride.

‘Lunch, I'd say. This place on the right is supposed to be good.'

They'd flown from Gatwick to Toulouse the previous afternoon and hired a car to drive over to Homps. She felt awkward and had done so since they'd met at the airport to take the budget flight. This would be the longest time they had spent together and, given their history, it wasn't the easiest situation. Especially as a part of her felt rejected that he had been trying to get back with his wife.

Not that she wanted him, she told herself repeatedly; it was simply a pride thing.

Both tall, they had been scrunched up on the plane, their knees tucked under their chins. It hadn't been much better in the car they had rented, the smallest in the rental agency's fleet but the largest they had available at short notice.

Gilchrist had driven the thirty kilometres to the inn they'd booked just outside Homps. Conversation had been desultory.

‘Jancis Robinson is supposed to have a place round here,' Watts said.

‘Jancis—?'

‘The wine writer?' he said.

Gilchrist liked wine but didn't know anything about it.

‘How do you want to play this?' she said.

‘I want you to take the lead,' Watts said.

‘He's going to be armed, you know,' Gilchrist said.

‘Depends where we find him,' Watts said. ‘We find his house but we don't necessarily go there.'

‘Wait for the cocktail hour, you mean?' Gilchrist said.

‘Or the morning trip to the
boulangerie
,' Watts said.

‘My French isn't great,' Gilchrist said. ‘The where?'

‘To pick up his French stick,' Watts said.

They'd scouted around, then Watts had insisted he go off alone to ‘do a bit of business'. Gilchrist had bridled at this, which is perhaps why they'd slept in separate bedrooms. Any other notion hadn't seemed to come up. Gilchrist had been cross but she was curious about Watts's reasons for not bringing it up.

The restaurant on the right was set back about twenty yards from the canal bank. A brightly lacquered barge was moored on the water directly in front of it. Gilchrist saw Watts pause as they passed it and give it the once-over.