The Ties That Bind (19 page)

‘OK, then. Can you remember the first time you stole something?’

Grand shrugged. ‘It was probably sweets. The old lady who ran the sweet shop was half-blind. She never lit the place properly, and if you didn’t talk, she didn’t know who you was. But nicking sweets was for kids.
We
was brilliant pickpockets.’ He seemed to be breathing easier than on the previous occasion, although there were still frequent pauses and intermittent panting.

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘I thought you said you’d read up on me! Who do you think? Me and Jacky, of course.’ This last sentence was spoken on the inbreath, the words wrapped around a sudden wheezing and sucking that was presumably a way of coping with whatever was wrong with his lungs. Luke started, but one look from Vaughan told him that to acknowledge this quirk would be to terminate their interview immediately. He had to lip-read as well as listen to make sense of it, and he wondered how clear his recording would be.

‘We could have your wallet out of your pocket, stripped of the cash and in the bin before you even knew it was gone,’ said Grand. ‘Bank holidays, we could bring home more than my old man made in a week. It’s an underrated skill, the picking of a pocket. We was like magicians.’ For a second Luke expected him to break into song like Fagin but instead he chuckled almost to himself. ‘I kept on doing it right up until the eighties, only then I was putting tenners
into
people’s wallets. Used to do it as sport long after I’d gone straight. I thought it was a shame to waste my skills. I’d still be doing it now if sleight of hand wasn’t an issue.’ He looked down at his hooked fingers. ‘I still see opportunities everywhere. You, for example, with your little boy’s schoolbag and your wallet hanging out your arse pocket. You’re asking to be robbed.’

Luke had in fact had his wallet stolen twice in the last year; Jem had bought him expensive replacements both times.

‘What about the first time you got caught?’

‘Piss off! Who d’you think you’re talking to?’ Luke made a mental note of Grand’s awareness of his own mythology and resolved to structure subsequent interview questions to exploit this. ‘I never got nicked for
pickpocketing
. Gawd, can you imagine the embarrassment?’ He considered this for a while. ‘We
did
get done for shoplifting, as it goes, when we was about nine. That wasn’t for sweets, we’d actually took something useful – I think it was a bunch of candles. The copper come round just as we crossed the front door with our pockets full of them.’

‘And what was your mother’s reaction?’

‘Not impressed.’ He laughed. ‘She said it was one thing for one of us to get nicked, but that between the two of us we ought to be able to get away with it. She told us that if we was clever we could be more than the sum of our parts. It was the first time I’d heard the phrase but I knew even as a littl’un what it meant. That together, we was a cut above the other kids.’

‘So your mum was effectively giving you her blessing to go out thieving?’

Grand bristled. ‘Yeah, but . . .
everyone
was on the make in some way or another back then. We’d grown up in the war, remember. It corrupted everyone a little bit and it didn’t all suddenly get back to normal on VE Day. We had ration books well into my twenties. Everyone was swapping coupons, knock-off fruit, iffy soap sold under the counter, that kind of thing. And look what happened to people like Jacky’s parents – you know the Luftwaffe got them?’ Luke nodded. ‘Entire buildings disappearing like that . . . it made you live for the moment. That didn’t stop after the war, neither. They started up the old slum clearance project again, so whole streets were being bulldozed. You’d come home from school and an entire row of houses that had been there in the morning would be gone. You saw your mates disappear. Someone wouldn’t be in class the next day and you’d find out they were in a new school on the other side of Brighton. You saw your parents’ mates disappear. They’d be shipped out to these sterile boxes halfway up to heaven, the new council flats. The lucky ones got to stay in town but mostly they’d be scattered out to Whitehawk or Crawley or Peacehaven or somewhere else that was two bus rides away. All of a sudden my mum had no one to have a cup of tea with, my dad had no one to have a pint with.’

This was more like it. Luke felt his shoulders lower a fraction of an inch as Grand got into his stride.

‘That working men and women didn’t even control where they got to live, that they had to go where the council told them . . .
Jesus
.’ A long death rattle punctuated the sentence. ‘Me and Jacky vowed that we’d never be at anyone’s mercy like that. I think that’s when we knew we had to make money. We always knew we would.’

‘How?’ asked Luke, noticing that he had tuned in to Grand’s way of speaking, rather like the way his mum had always been able effortlessly to translate the babyish babblings of his little nephews and nieces.

‘We was just cleverer than the rest. Sometimes you’d find a butcher’s lorry or whatever unattended, if you was down the Shoreham docks. You wouldn’t know if it was an arm or a leg, a pig or a lamb. You just took it. And if you saw another kid carrying something he’d obviously nicked, well, you took that too. I remember the time we saw two boys we knew who’d nicked a pair of massive hams on the bone.’ He held up his hands to indicate the size. ‘They couldn’t hardly carry them. Me and Jacky didn’t even have to look at each other to know what to do. We picked the littlest kid with the biggest ham, and we lamped him until he handed it over. The bigger boy got away with his ham and took it straight back to his mum, silly bugger. She shared it out along the street like Lady Bountiful. The police got wind and come after her boy. He ended up in Borstal. But our ham, we gave it to the butcher because we knew that if he could sell it, our mum would get the best cuts and extra meat for months after. See what I mean?
Clever
.’

‘What did your other friends think of all this?’

Grand looked surprised, as though this possibility of other friends had only just occurred to him. ‘We . . . well . . . we knew people from school and that, but we was never interested in
kids
, apart from each other, I mean.’ He talked of himself and Nye in the same way twins did: reluctant or unable to separate themselves into individual actions, motives or culpabilities. ‘While the other boys was still playing in the streets, we was already in the pubs, talking to the old ones. Jacky loved to spin a yarn for them, especially if it was about his old man. To listen to him, his dad had been a bookie, his dad had been a gangster, his dad had been a docker, he was a sailor whose boat had gone down, he was a smuggler . . . but more often than not, he’d worked with the horses.’

‘How come?’

‘That was where you went for your glamour, your thrills. We started off as bucket boys, sponging down the blackboards between races, and later as lookouts for the bookies’ runners. That’s where we saw our first proper tear-up, when we was about fourteen.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Luke, his heart breaking into a canter.

‘The big mobs, the ones running serious books, used to come down from London to the races for the day. Even the crooks were tourists in those days. This day I’m talking about, one of the bookies stood in someone else’s pitch and got slashed for his trouble. Cheek to cheek.’ With an unsteady forefinger, Grand drew a line from one ear to the other, across his mouth. ‘The way the blood got into his clothes . . . I mean, he had on all the gear, all silk and wool. I felt all these little sparks go off in my belly. On the way home I said to Jacky, “
That
’s what it’s going to take, if we want to make something of ourselves.” I was nervous even saying it. I wouldn’t have been able to say it to anyone but Jacky, but he’d thought the same thing.’

‘But you never actually worked the races as adults, did you?’

‘Nah, it was all winding up by the time we was old enough to get involved. The racecourse gangs was on the way out already by then. The carve-up we saw was probably one of the last of its kind. I remember the Maltese gang was arrested in Chepstow a month or so later. We knew we’d have to find something different. I mean, we had to start off at the bottom, just to get some cash together and show the old faces we was somebodies. I mean, you can’t just
tell
them. You have to show them, too. Granted, we didn’t always know when to stop. But young men are idiots, aren’t they? Even the bright ones. Even the ambitious ones. Especially the ambitious ones.’

Grand was suddenly miles – or years – away. Luke detected a shadow of the sadness he had observed when breaking the news of Kathleen Duffy’s death.

‘You must miss him,’ said Luke, watching his subject closely to see whether his reaction was one of remorse or unresolved grief. Grand gulped for the answer and when it came it was suspended tantalisingly between the two.

‘I miss the way he was – no, I miss the way
we
was – before that day at the races. I miss that like you wouldn’t believe.’

The wheezing suddenly turned swift and savage and at a word from Vaughan their session was over. Luke knew better than to protest: protective Vaughan asserted the needs of his master’s condition without ever naming it and Luke, who had spent a couple of fruitless hours online trying to diagnose him, sensed that their ongoing relationship was contingent on his playing along with this.

‘You come up to me next time,’ said Grand with breath he could ill-afford to spare. ‘There’s stuff I want to show you that I don’t want leaving the house.’

Luke, who had been wondering how on earth he would secure an invitation to Dyke Road, tried not to let his excitement show as he saw his guests to the front door. Vaughan quirked his eyebrows towards the rear of the car and at Grand’s answering nod, produced from the boot an old-fashioned woollen blanket with a tartan weave. He laid it carefully across Grand’s lap where it rippled and rolled over his shaking knees. The car rolled away and neither passenger nor driver looked back. Luke watched them go, wishing he could photograph the moment. The grieving millionaire whose only remaining friend was on his payroll painted a more perfect picture of loneliness than anything he had ever seen.

Chapter 28

‘How are you getting on with your Joss Grand book?’ asked Marcelle. ‘Have you spoken to him? Did you go and see Sandy?’

‘I’ve seen her but not him,’ said Luke evenly, although privately he was so excited about his forthcoming visit to the Dyke Road mansion he had barely slept for two nights. Dissemblance came easier this time, each untruth a softening echo of the lie he’d told Charlene. ‘What’s the story with Sandy and him? It was all going great until I mentioned his name, then she freaked and threw me out of the house. Told me to drop the story.’

‘And will you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, not to deceive her but to buy himself some peace. He was getting sick of people overreacting. ‘It’s not worth the effort.’

Marcelle pursed her lips, looking almost disappointed. Luke suddenly knew she had more to say, and hoped he could flatter it out of her.

‘I get the feeling you’re not one for gossip and you’re trying to be discreet,’ he said, ‘But what
is
her problem with Joss Grand? If I end up working with her on something else, I’d like to know. I’d hate to go blundering in and upset her again.’

The faintest of blushes stained Marcelle’s cheeks and for a second it even looked as if she might blink. ‘If you’re not going to write the book, I don’t suppose it matters. Look, we can’t talk in here. I’m due a tea break.’

The museum’s cafe stretched the length of a mosaiced corridor between the History Centre and the Gallery. It was empty save for the waitress who took their order in silence and one old lady reading the
Argus
, the atmosphere almost as hushed as in the reading room.

‘Sandy was always a bit stuck up,’ said Marcelle, stirring an eddy in her Earl Grey and dropping a sugarlump into it. ‘Brighton was never good enough for her. She was on the first train to London as soon as she could leave school. I think she made quite a splash, starting off on the phones and elbowing her way into the newsrooms, because within a couple of years she was back down here in head-to-toe Mary Quant. I’ve still never seen ambition like it. She was the first woman I ever heard say she was married to her career. She was going to be a household name columnist and then she was going to be the first female editor in Fleet Street. She might have done it; she was working for the
Mirror
by the time I was sitting my A levels. Obviously
we
didn’t take that paper, but you’d always get talking to someone who did, who’d seen that Sandy had met this person, Sandy was covering that trial. They used her as a stringer sometimes, so she’d turn a trip home into a working visit; if there was a big event in the town like a party conference or some such, the nationals would often send their staff down to cover it.’ Marcelle’s gaze suddenly dropped to her lap. ‘In October sixty-eight, Enoch Powell came to give a talk at the Town Hall. That’s how come Sandy was in Brighton the night Jacky Nye died.’

Luke choked on his tea.

‘She was
there
?’ he said. ‘She covered the murder for the
Mirror
?’ He was sure he hadn’t seen her byline in conjunction with the case.

‘Well, yes and no,’ said Marcelle. ‘She
wasn’t
there, that was the problem. She screwed it up. She got drunk on duty, trying to keep up with the rest of the press pack, and missed the whole story. The
Mirror
was the only paper who didn’t have their own words and pictures. I think they ran something from an agency on the second edition, but by then . . . well, they sacked her for it of course; she never got over it. Her name was mud. She couldn’t find work and she had to come back to Brighton.’

It was a mirror held up to his own situation and reflecting across generations. Luke thought about the woman, alone in her house with only newsprint and delusion and an army of scrabbling unseen rodents for company.