The Ties That Bind (14 page)

‘He spent all yesterday in with the consultant psychiatrists. They say he’s had a nervous breakdown. All that bloody lying and denial taking its toll at last. It started off being all about you but there’s a lot more to it than that. There’s stuff going back years – the wasted years, as he refers to our marriage, which I’m sure you can imagine makes me feel great.’ Her laugh was forced and fractured. ‘Anyway, apparently there’s a lot of grief for the life we’d built together, and he’s been struggling with the loss of his friends, and apparently there’s guilt for leaving me too. Rather than deal with it he just leaped straight into a relationship with you, carrying all this shit with him, and when he fucked
that
up . . . anyway, it’s early days. They want us to have couples counselling, if you can believe that? Apparently he’s not the only one in denial.’ She broke off with a heaving sigh.

‘Oh, Serena, you poor thing,’ he said.

‘I know, what a mess. Hang on, will you?’ She put the phone down and blew her nose. Luke suddenly warmed to Serena and envisaged with a pang a parallel past in which she and Jem had parted on good terms, and she had remained part of his life. A friend, a safety valve, someone Jem could spend time with and talk to. Perhaps then he wouldn’t have had to channel everything he had into Luke.

Chapter 21

Luke was at the Pavilion before the History Centre was even open for the day, tingling with impatience. Knowing that Jem was out of the way had allowed his thoughts to return to Joss Grand. He had tried not to jump to conclusions about the date of Joseph Duffy’s death but the idea that Grand, deeply in love with Kathleen and knowing that she was too devout to divorce, had dispatched an inconvenient husband, was too tempting to dismiss. He tried, now, to see aspects of Joss Grand’s face in Michael Duffy’s. While he had plenty of images of the former, the latter he had met only fleetingly, and the impression of him had faded to the basics of height and colouring.

He could find the right cache and load the microfilm into the machine in seconds now. Scrolling through April 1968 and no longer distracted by the advertisements, he located the story he wanted in under a minute. Luke smiled to find that his old friend Keith Vellacott had covered the construction accident, but could not help his disappointment as the report snuffed out his conspiracy theory. Duffy had been one of three men buried alive by a landslide, caused by weeks of heavy rainfall, on a building site in Preston Park. Even at the height of his powers, Joss Grand could not have controlled the weather.

Luke’s eyes were still tired from too much screen work, and a muscle in his eyelid started to flicker uncontrollably. With little more in the archives than was available to him online, he decided to give himself a break from newspapers and to wallow instead in atmosphere. Happily he lost himself in the Centre’s vast photography archive, studying photographs of the backstreets of Brighton in the forties and fifties, hoping two of the little boys in those cobbled streets, or later on Teddy Boys on street corners, would turn out to be Grand and Nye. To put their crimes into context, he read a dozen short local history books in two days. So deeply was he immersed in the Brighton of the mid-twentieth century that when he stepped outside for a cigarette break he felt like a time traveller cruelly dumped in the twenty-first.

At the end of the week, when his eyelid had finally come out of spasm, he returned to the
Argus
archives, picking up where he’d left off. By January 1970 Keith Vellacott’s ubiquitous byline had by now been replaced with that of another reporter, Cassandra Cameron. From this point on, Grand was mentioned in a very different context. The first sighting of the new Joss Grand was in a report by Cameron from later that year. She had covered the ceremony in which he had laid the foundation stone of Black Rock Heights, a new high-rise on the edge of the then-controversial Brighton Marina development. She had nothing but praise for Grand, writing that private renting was entering a new era, and that he was an exemplary landlord, proof that the exploitative practices of the early sixties were well and truly in the past. She had gone on to write several more versions of the same feature, each praising Grand more lavishly than the last. Luke thought it strange that this reporter had not mentioned Grand’s past, even in passing, even if just to mention his exoneration. Didn’t she know who he had been?

An explanation for Cassandra Cameron’s ignorance was partly given the following week, when she was pictured in a story about a local dry cleaners who had a reputation for charging by the inch to clean mini-skirts. She looked about twelve, short hair bleached and backcombed, wearing a skirt that only just covered her knickers, asking if the incoming fashion for maxi skirts would be the financial ruin of Brighton’s young women, and challenging the dry cleaner to change his policy. You couldn’t imagine Keith Vellacott getting a gig like that.

He re-read her piece on the Marina development, this time concluding that her failure to research her subject was attributable to her youth, but for her editors to let the piece through without any background was a disgrace. Luke’s professionalism was offended across the decades. A familiar twitching began under his left eye. He pushed his chair away from the machine and sighed, louder than he’d intended.

‘That’s some stamina you’ve got there,’ said the librarian with the bulging eyes. ‘Most people can’t hack the microfilm for longer than an hour. What are you researching, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m completely intrigued. I’m Marcelle, by the way.’

‘Luke,’ he said, following her lead and speaking in a whisper. ‘Well, I’m trying to get a feel for what Brighton was like in the sixties but also, I’m trying to find out everything I can about Joss Grand, the property magnate. Or rather, about Joss Grand
before
he became a property magnate?’ He showed her the printouts he’d made. ‘I’m a writer, and I’m wondering if there might be a book in this unsolved murder.’

Marcelle looked the documents over. She still hadn’t blinked, unless she was timing her own exactly with Luke’s. It was disconcerting.

‘Oh, that’s reared its head again, has it?’ she said. ‘I have to say it’s been a while since anyone asked after that. A few people have started writing that book but no one’s ever finished.’

Luke refused to be discouraged. ‘Well, that’s because
I
haven’t tried yet. Although the problem is that the further ago it gets, the fewer living witnesses there are. I was wondering if any of the old hacks from the
Argus
are still around. Like, what about this journalist?’ he said, digging out the picture of Cassandra Cameron. ‘I wonder if she—’

‘Oh,
Sandy
,’ said Marcelle, with an upward flick of the eyes. ‘I was at school with her. She was with the
Argus
for years, but she’s been freelance for a while now. She’s very much still in Brighton. She used to be married to Ted Quick, one of the
Argus
’s photographers, she’s got a fabulous photography collection, easily as big as our own.’

Something clicked into place. ‘Hang on,’ said Luke, diving into his bag and pulling out the tatty business card. Sandy Quick, Local Archivist. ‘Is this her?’

‘Yes,’ said Marcelle, then bit her lip as though the confirmation had been an indiscretion. ‘I’m not sure she’s the best person to ask about Joss Grand, though. I’d give it a couple more days here first. What we have is pretty comprehensive. Have you done the local weeklies yet?’ She nodded to a glass-fronted cabinet lined with bound periodicals that Luke hadn’t noticed before. He shook his head. ‘Well, no guarantees, but they
occasionally
cover stories in greater detail than the
Argus
. Sandy’s collection is fascinating but it’s patchy. Also, she’ll charge you, quite a bit, and there’s no point in going to her until you’ve exhausted all our resources. All you pay here is printing fees. Speaking of which, you owe six twenty for today.’

Luke felt in his pockets for change, sensing that Marcelle wanted to keep him away from Sandy Quick for reasons that went beyond saving him money.

‘I don’t suppose you can remember any of the journalists who looked into this?’

‘Ooh, now you’re asking,’ said Marcelle. ‘You want to talk to Cecil, who volunteers here sometimes. He’s your man for all the grisly stuff. He’ll be in tomorrow, you can ask him them.’

The man who introduced himself the following day did not look like Luke’s notional Cecil. He was five feet tall, nearly as wide, with a two-day stubble of white hair evenly covering his head and most of his face. He wore a faded band T-shirt so old that Luke could identify only the genre – heavy metal, from a patch of printed skull and peeling gothic lettering – vast, stained jeans, Doctor Marten boots and an impeccable coat of cobalt blue varnish on each fingernail.

‘Marcelle told me to look out for you,’ he said. ‘I hear you’re blowing the dust off the Jacky Nye case?’

‘I’m trying to,’ said Luke. ‘She said you might know who the last journalists were to investigate the case.’

‘Last serious writer was Jasper Patten,’ said Cecil. This time Luke made the association instantly: [email protected]. Hope rose in his throat as he watched Cecil wheel the library steps to a dark corner and climb them to retrieve a slim hardback from a high shelf. ‘This is all we have of his. It’s local, that’s why it’s here. He wrote half a dozen others. Have a look through this, bung him into Google and see what you get, then give me a shout if you need me to fill in the gaps.’

The book pressed into Luke’s hand was called
Hell on the Rocks
and was about a Hell’s Angel’s murder further along the coast in Shoreham in the early seventies. It had been written in conjunction with the case’s chief investigating officer. The back flap had headshots of the policeman and of the author: they looked the same, with their shaggy hair, long pointy collars, thick moustaches and their determined expressions. From the first page Luke knew that despite the awful title, he was reading good work. Patten was no Capote, but atmosphere and fact were seamlessly interwoven, and the young male victim was a human being before his death became a riddle to be solved.

What made the book was the level of co-operation from the victim’s family and friends. Patten wore his extensive research lightly and conjured a time and a place that was vanishing even at the time of writing. In short, it was the kind of book Luke was desperate to put his name to. He could easily have stayed in his chair and read to the end, but instead forced himself back online to see where this book fitted into the writer’s canon.

Even a cursory search showed that
Hell on the Rocks
was typical of Jasper Patten’s output; not for him the rehashing of true crime stories that had been done before. This man dug up obscure and forgotten stories and did a good job on them, sometimes taking cases that were almost contemporary, occasionally pushing back the limits of living memory.

The disturbing thing was the downward trajectory of Patten’s career. His books were all out of print, with none digitally available. A prolific period in the late seventies and early eighties had dribbled away to a book every five years or so by the nineties, and his last publication, about a man who had left the Provisional IRA, had been in 1998.

He made a note of Patten’s publishing house, a small independent press he’d never heard of. Like their author, they had no website, only a phone number that proved unobtainable. Further Googling revealed they had folded a decade ago. So what had happened to Jasper Patten to make him stop writing? Why hadn’t he finished his life of Grand, or any other book? The initial envy now turned to foreboding. With the early promise squandered, Luke sensed for a moment the looming shadow of the ghost of Christmas yet to come.

He searched the National Archives and found no record of Patten’s death. He searched Missing Persons: he was not on their register. Luke felt again a cold dark shadow pass over him, then realised that Cecil was standing behind him, blocking the natural light from the windows.

‘What do you reckon?’

‘I’m impressed,’ said Luke, holding up the book. ‘What happened to him?’

‘He’d be harder to find than most,’ said Cecil, reading over Luke’s shoulder.

‘How come?’

‘Well, to show up on these things, you have to have someone who gives enough of a shit about you to report you missing. Jasper Patten was one of the most unpleasant bastards I ever had the misfortune to meet. A bitter old soak, thought the world owed him a living. Apparently he could be quite charming when he was sober, but I wouldn’t know. I never saw him before he’d had a drink, and he used to come in here
early
.’

‘When did you last see him?’

Cecil stroked his chin. ‘It’s got to be nine, ten years, easy. He started off like you, in here, and then he got in with John Rochester, who had a drink problem himself by then. He was still touting around a list of possible suspects in the Nye case even after he retired. I don’t know what they thought they were going to discover that the massed intelligence of Brighton police couldn’t do at the time, but they’d hash out conspiracy theories in the pub. He’d lost it by then, John had: he sent Jasper off on a wild goose chase to some old face who was living out on the Costa del Crime, only for Jasper to find out that the face had been inside when it had happened. That was the last of the collaboration between Jasper and John. I think after that Jasper thought he’d do it his own way. By the time I spoke to him he was trying a different tack, going through all the records at Companies House and trying to get a list of assets through the Land Registry. Don’t ask me why.’

‘You wouldn’t know if he made any progress with the idea of a witness, would you? This woman in the red coat that some of the papers talk about?’

‘Sorry.’ Cecil shook his head.

‘And you’ve never heard the name Kathleen Duffy mentioned in connection with this case?’

Cecil’s blank look was an answer in itself. Luke pressed on.

‘Do you know if he ever got as far as talking to Grand himself?’