through the middleman but it kept his name out of it.
He stayed in Spain for a couple of years. Dawn moved into the house Dennis Hathaway had been building. Her brother had given it to her, without saying why. Charlie saw to the laying of more concrete in the bottom of the swimming pool. They chose turquoise tiles for the pool bottom.
Charlie never swam. Told Dawn he didn’t know how. She swam there all the time. Her mother came to stay just twice. Bewildered, strung out on the Valium wonder drug she’d been prescribed a couple of years before. She was devastated by her husband’s abrupt disappearance.
‘I know Dennis must be dead,’ she said once, in a rare lucid moment. ‘I just want to know where he’s buried.’
Charlie watched her slow breaststroke across the pool, neck stretching out of the water, mouth pursed and eyes closed, swathes of her swim-dress floating behind her. And he wondered if he should tell her that with each length she was passing just four feet above her husband, buried underneath the tiled bottom of the pool.
The clubs and the drugs were complementary and provided a regular flow of money into his Jersey account. The system pretty much ran itself.
After two years, Charlie sold out his businesses to his Sardinian partners. He got a good price, not a great price, but he was pragmatic. He knew eventually they would have simply taken them from him.
He’d sold off the pirate radio stations to Keith Jeffery, a manager on the make with a club in Majorca. Jeffery was getting as bad a reputation as Charlie once had in the pop music business.
Charlie made a deal with him over his own roster of groups. Jeffery ostensibly took them over but Charlie remained a silent partner and occasional enforcer. He still liked getting his hands bloody.
His trips to England were rare and he always made sure he stayed under the radar. More frequent were trips to the US to handle Jeffery’s burgeoning business there.
He got involved with the Mafia, who controlled transportation, backstage and technical stuff on pretty much all the pop tours.
He supposed the rumour that he had offed Jimi Hendrix came about because he was a bit of bogeyman in the business. He still smiled at it.
Dawn and he had been trying for another child. After her mother’s death, they had been trying with increasing desperation. Dawn was still in touch with her brother. John Hathaway never asked about Charlie. Just in case he changed his mind, Charlie was armed at all times. Sean Reilly phoned from time to time, kept him vaguely informed.
Dawn went to see doctors in Spain and England. They said the same. The abortion had been botched. It was possible she was now unable to conceive.
Laker told Dawn how her father died soon after her mother passed. He didn’t tell her where he was buried — thought that would totally freak her out — but he did tell her that John Hathaway, her brother, had shot her father in the head.
He didn’t know exactly what process of osmosis went on in her mind, but the death of her mother, the discovery she could not bear children and the revelation about her father’s death gave her a single focus. Her brother, John Hathaway, was responsible for fucking up her life.
She never spoke to him again. She wrote him a letter saying she was cutting all ties with him. Didn’t really explain why. She and Charlie moved to America. New York, though the music business was booming in California.
He did go to the west coast from time to time. He bumped into Dan, the lead singer of his old group, The Avalons, a couple of times, but they had little to say to each other. They’d been in a band together but they had never been close.
He had good contacts in the US Mafia. There were cousins of the Sardinian guys who were cousins of other families in the US. They got fed up with Jeffery. Some unspecified offence. Told Charlie how Jeffery had been ripping him off. Told him about Jeffery’s secret accounts in the Bahamas. Asked Charlie if he felt up to taking over?
Three months later, Jeffery was dead, killed in a plane crash. Three months after that, Charlie and Dawn were living in LA, next door to Cary Grant no less.
And it was Charlie’s turn to have his emotions undergo osmosis.
One drunken evening by the pool, the lights of Los Angeles carpeted below them, Dawn told him about an evening back in 1959 when John Hathaway had come home with burned hands and singed eyebrows, the smell of petrol strong on him. She tended to him with butter from the larder and snow from the back garden. Didn’t get much sense out of him.
A couple of days later, it was in the local papers a little boy had been burned to death in a bonfire maliciously set alight. The police were assuming it was manslaughter not murder, but they wouldn’t know for sure whether the arsonist knew the little boy was hiding in the bonfire until they tracked him down.
‘Did John know my brother was in the den?’ Charlie croaked.
‘He didn’t say,’ Dawn said.
Charlie remembered the conversation he’d had with Dennis Hathaway when they did the deal over Dawn and the abortion.
‘Did your dad know what John had done?’
She pursed her lips.
‘Oh yes.’
FOURTEEN
Reg Williamson was in the office hunched over his computer when Gilchrist walked in. He clicked his mouse, then slid from behind his desk and hurried over to her.
‘Bingo. Bernie Grimes. Place called Homps on the Canal du Midi. Not far from Carcassonne.’
Gilchrist looked at him.
‘Fantastic, but you’re saying those place names as if they should mean something to me. I’m a Brighton girl. I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Carcassonne is this medieval walled town in the south of France. Looks just like it should — they used it for that Kevin Costner Robin Hood film donkey’s years ago. Reason it looks so Walt Disney perfect is that it was actually rebuilt in the nineteenth century. So it’s kind of a recreation.’
‘You’ve been there.’
Williamson looked away.
‘Me and the wife. Before. .’
His voice trailed away. Gilchrist realized she didn’t know anything about Reg’s private life.
‘Your divorce?’
Williamson flashed a look at her.
‘Our David killed himself.’
Gilchrist was swept back to a conversation she’d had in the car with Reg, it seemed an age ago now, about suicides off Beachy Head.
‘Reg, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’
Williamson worked his jaw.
‘His own daft fault. Drugs.’ Gilchrist saw tears in Williamson’s eyes as he turned away. ‘Anyway, we know where Grimes is. We now have to decide what we do about it.’
Gilchrist reached out and gave his arm a quick squeeze.
‘I don’t even know your wife’s name — I’m sorry.’
‘Angela.’ Williamson looked down. ‘Lovely lass but she’s suffering. Every day I see her sink further down. Don’t know what to do.’
He worked his jaw.
‘When I left for work this morning, she didn’t even have the energy to say goodbye.’
He gave an awful false smile.
‘Ay well, I’m sure it will all work out for the best.’
