The Thing Itself (24 page)

Williamson didn't really know why he had a bee in his bonnet about Lesley White's two names. He checked and cross-checked anyway, following his own rule that coppers never knew what was going to be important and what wasn't.

After half an hour it looked as if Lesley White was simply her professional name. Punctilious as ever, he did one final check. He trawled the Land Registry for ownership of her house.

He sat back. He was having a Jeremy Kyle moment.

When Williamson was not working mornings, he would sometimes watch
The Jeremy Kyle Show
with Angela. She'd get cross at him shouting at the morons on the programme washing their shabby laundry in public. At some point, looking at DNA results to decide who was telling the truth about fidelity or parenthood or theft or whatever, Kyle would say: ‘Well, well, well.'

‘Well, well, well.'

The previous registered owner of the lighthouse, although only for a matter of days, was a certain Charles Laker.

He was pondering this when his phone rang.

He reached for it as Chief Constable Karen Hewitt tapped on the open door and stepped into the room. Williamson left the phone and started to get to his feet.

‘Ma'am . . .?'

‘Don't – don't get up, Reg.'

She came and stood in front of his desk. Williamson noticed her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her they were entirely bloodless.

‘Reg, we've had a call. I thought I should tell you myself.'

‘Ma'am?' Williamson said, his eyes fixed now on her scarlet mouth, his heart in free fall.

‘It's about your wife.'

The phone rang on.

‘Have you got kids?' Grimes said to Gilchrist. He sneered. ‘No, you look like you'd break some guy's balls before you'd let him fuck you. So how could you have?'

Before Gilchrist could respond, Watts had backhanded Grimes so hard he fell off the sofa and actually skidded across the floor.

Rubbing his face, he looked at Watts with glazed eyes.

‘Forgot – you've been up there, haven't you?'

Gilchrist moved to block Watts.

‘I can defend myself,' she said, quietly but fiercely. She looked down at Grimes. ‘Try acting like an adult for the first time in your miserable life. Try doing the right thing for the first time. Morons like you use “family” as some kind of badge of honour – as if there was anything impressive about you having sperm. Getting a woman pregnant doesn't make you a man, you moron – any idiot can do that. And they do. Standing by the child and bringing her up right makes you a man. And on that count you're a miserable failure.'

‘I keep them,' he mumbled, still rubbing his face.

‘In Milldean?' Gilchrist laughed. ‘The scummiest place in Brighton? Congratulations.'

Grimes looked up at Watts.

‘You going to let me get up?'

‘When you've apologized,' Watts said.

‘Leave it,' Gilchrist hissed at him. She didn't know how she felt about Watts coming to her rescue. First, because as a general rule she didn't need anyone to rescue her. Second, because, even when she did, Watts, who had rejected her, wouldn't be her first choice. Unexpectedly, she smiled to herself. Not that she had a first choice among older men outside of George Clooney.

‘I'm so sorry, Reg,' Karen Hewitt said.

Williamson nodded and glanced towards the phone. All the time she was telling him the ruddy daft, fucking devastating thing Angela had done, it had rung and stopped, rung and stopped.

‘I need to take this call,' he said.

Hewitt shook her head.

‘No, you don't. You need to go home.'

‘What's at home now?' he said, picking up the phone. ‘DI Williamson.'

‘Reg, it's DS Fairley down at Newhaven. The customs boys have a truck here looks a bit dodgy.'

‘And that's news?'

‘The truck belongs to one of Charlie Laker's companies. We know Brighton division has an interest in him.'

Williamson was blinking, conscious of Karen Hewitt standing in front of his desk, staring down at him. He looked at her. She looked like shit these days. He'd always been impressed that, despite the pressures of the job, she used to look glamorous as assistant chief constable. Her long blonde hair, her care over how she presented herself.

But since she'd become chief constable, all that had gone to pot. Her long hair was lank, framing a tired, narrow face. Her make-up was caked on dead skin. She seemed to have lost weight but not necessarily in the right places. She suddenly looked old.

‘Laker. Yes.'

He heaved himself up from behind his desk, keeping the phone at his ear.

‘I'm on my way.'

Karen Hewitt sighed.

‘At least take a bloody driver,' she said. ‘And that's an order.'

M
aria di Bocci was leaning over Jimmy Tingley, enveloping him in her heady perfume. He was lying in bed, a drip attached to one arm, blankets pulled up to his chest. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them she was still there. She smiled.

‘What happened?' he croaked.

She shrugged, incomprehension on her face. He closed his eyes again.

The next time he woke, Guiseppe di Bocci was standing by the bed, a solemn look on his face.

‘We found you in your car in the square outside the hotel. You were unconscious. We brought you in and sent for our doctor.'

‘Why?' Tingley said. He felt himself drifting away.

Di Bocci looked puzzled.

‘You were ill. You have been shot.'

Tingley focused again.

‘Your uncle . . .'

‘Betrayed the family.'

‘I didn't kill him.'

‘We know. The doctor has given you morphine. Sleep now. We will talk tomorrow.'

Williamson sat in the back of the patrol car, thinking about Angela leaving him alone forever. Thinking about how she had brought herself to commit her suicidal act.

The Downs glowered down on him. The driver, a nice enough young copper, kept glancing in the rear-view mirror with the idea of starting a conversation. Williamson wasn't up for that so he kept his face sour – not hard to do as he got older – and turned to the window. The car reached Newhaven in twenty minutes, the orange lights of the decaying town looming abruptly out of the pitch dark of the Downs.

At the lorry park the lights were cold white. Williamson thanked his driver and struggled out of a back seat not designed for a man with a belly. He made up for that by striding with great purpose to the Newhaven police and customs officers milling around a container truck.

Introductions made, they looked at him and up at the rear door of the vehicle. He looked at the rear door and back at them. He nodded.

Kate Simpson rubbed her eyes and walked away from her laptop. She'd read Victor Tempest's notebooks and immediately set about trying to discover the identity of Tony ‘Baby' Mancini's brother-in-law. She thought she knew but she wanted to be sure.

She was working on the assumption that Baby Mancini was the Mancini she had found in the archive who was born in Holborn in 1902 and that his sister was called Maria. However, she could find no wedding certificate for a Maria Mancini anywhere in Britain.

She'd found out more about Martin Charteris from police reports of a couple of trials for muggings – or possibly a 1930s form of cottaging? – in London. Nothing at all had come up about Eric Knowles.

She wandered over to the Brighton Trunk Murder files Watts had left with her. She had felt overwhelmed by them when she first saw them. She was excited by the treasure trove of documents but there were so many of them.

She dug through to find the file marked: ‘Sightings of man with trunk'. Some of the witness statements in the folder she'd seen before. Man coming in from Worthing taking up room on a crowded train with a trunk on the seat beside him. Porter at London Bridge lugging a surly man's trunk with something sliding around inside. A statement from a couple who'd seen two men struggling to get a trunk out of the boot of a car on the road by the racecourse on Derby Day.

She remembered that last sighting from the files that had been discovered in the Royal Pavilion. When the men saw they were being observed, they pushed the trunk back in the boot and drove off. The couple had taken down the registration number. When the police had spoken to the – unnamed – owner, he said his car had been out of his possession at that time. There was nothing else in that file.

Here, there was a second sheet. On it a policeman had handwritten a note that the car had been traced to its owner, who had reported the car stolen a couple of days earlier. The owner lived in Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. The note gave the man's name. Bingo.

Jimmy Tingley surfaced and this time stayed afloat. He looked up at the painted canopy above his bed; glanced down at his arm where not one but two needles were attached to tubes leading to drips. One, he knew, was saline, the other morphine. Maria was sitting beside the bed watching him. She became aware of his stare and looked his way.

‘Stomach cancer,' he said. ‘I worry I have stomach cancer. Inoperable.' He looked down his body. ‘But now my insides are really messed up.'

She shook her head, not understanding. He smiled at her.

‘It's OK. I was saying it to me, not you.'

‘A
bout bloody time,' Charlie Laker said as he swung open the door of the converted lighthouse.

His mouth fell open when he saw who was standing in the doorway but he recovered quickly.

‘DI Williamson, isn't it? I'm guessing you're not here with my pizza?'

Williamson pushed him in the chest. As Laker fell back, Williamson barged into the room and slammed the door behind him. The woman – Lesley White/Clare Mellon – was sprawled on her white sofa, naked from the waist down, her legs akimbo.

She looked up at Williamson, eyes glazed, a bruise on her cheek. Williamson saw the white powder on the table, a flake of it beneath Laker's nose.

‘Hey, fat man, fuck you and your family.' Laker's fists were going up. ‘Are you mental? Laying your hands on me—'

Williamson swept the cosh out of his pocket and brought it down on Laker's collarbone. He heard more than felt it snap.

Laker howled and sagged to one side, his right hand reaching weakly up. Williamson stepped forward and pushed him in the chest again. This time Laker went down, screaming as his shoulder hit the wooden floor.

The woman on the sofa hadn't moved. Williamson caught a breath.

‘Hello Lesley – or Claire – which is it?' Williamson shrugged. ‘Doesn't matter. I came to question you about your relationship with Charlie Laker and to ascertain his current whereabouts. Looks like I can skip down quite a bit.'

Laker was groaning, gripping his shoulder. Williamson kicked him and got another cry.

‘I've had a hell of a day, Charlie, a hell of a day. Quite aside from anything else, I've been wondering could I have done things differently, done things better? So if I'm a bit tetchy, blame it on the fact there's a lot gone on today. Oh, and I've just been at Newhaven with the customs boys, opening one of your containers bound for Dieppe. Expecting, you know, rotten meat or some other scummy thing you were intending to offload on our European Community friends. Know what we found?'

Laker moaned, hugging himself.

‘You broke my collar bone – I can't fucking believe it.'

‘I'm going to do worse than that,' Williamson said, his belly wobbling as he raised the sap.

Laker had taken beatings before. Dennis Hathaway had beaten the shit out of him when he'd discovered Laker had made his daughter, Dawn, pregnant. The Mexican in prison who'd sliced his face had damned near punched a hole in him first. But all that had been a while ago.

This cop was old school. He knew how to lay it on with minimum effort. A flick of the wrist rather than putting the arm and shoulder into it. He knew where to hit, too. He could do this all day and not break a sweat, despite his weight.

As Laker thought this, Williamson brought the sap down on his elbow. Laker roared. He'd never espoused the idea that keeping shtum when you were taking a beating showed what a tough guy you were. Screaming your nuts off frankly made it more bearable. That way he could take it and survive – and then he'd see about this fat fuck.

‘I'll beat you to death, you don't talk to me,' Williamson said. ‘Then I'll throw you out of the window and say it was hara-kiri. Think anyone will give a shit?'

The rage was on Williamson all right. He wanted to kill Laker. Williamson's life had effectively ended when his son had killed himself and Angela had blamed him. Made his life unbearable, in fact. He loved his wife and he lived in misery because he knew he could never leave her.

Instead, she'd now left him. Forever. Taken their car with her. No note. Just their car – and her – smashed to smithereens on the beach below Beachy Head. God. Yeah, God had a lot to fucking answer for.

Williamson looked at Laker and the gangster saw it in his eyes.

‘Do you know the filth I've waded through these last months,' Williamson said, ‘because of your sick ambitions?'

Laker ducked his head and cried out again as his collar bone shifted.

‘Do you know what we found in the back of your container? Do you?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' Laker gasped.

Williamson bent and hit him on the knee joint. It wasn't a good strike but Laker grunted. Williamson turned to the woman on the sofa, who was blearily trying to sit up.

‘Five young girls we found,' Williamson said. ‘Trussed like pigs, lying in their own piss and worse, scared out of their wits. Snatched off the street in Milldean.' He turned back to Laker. ‘That's what we found in your container. Headed where, Mr Laker, sir?'