‘Not if you pay cash, son.’
Hathaway looked across at Reilly. He was standing at the edge of the terrace, his back to the others, looking up into the snow-capped mountains.
Hathaway shot his father first. He hadn’t intended to but it was just the way it fell out.
Hathaway had strolled behind Charlie, but his father saw the automatic he pulled from under his shirt and lunged for him.
His father didn’t say anything, but thinking about it later Hathaway assumed he was trying to save Charlie. He actually chose Charlie over his own son. It didn’t really help, even at the time.
His father came out of his chair, one arm stretched out for the gun, his head down. Hathaway shot him through the bald patch on the crown of his skull. It had looked like a target.
His father simply toppled forward and knelt on the marble tiles, his head touching them as if praying to Mecca.
Charlie, half-swinging to look over his shoulder, tilted his chair and toppled, getting it tangled in his legs.
He saw the gun in Hathaway’s hand and started to scrabble away on his back, kicking at the chair. Hathaway aimed the gun loosely in his direction.
‘Don’t,’ Hathaway whispered. He looked over at Reilly, still gazing up into the mountains.
Hathaway was registering the fact that the gun had made scarcely any sound. Later he would register the fact he’d killed his own father.
Charlie was motionless.
‘We’ve had some times, Charlie.’
‘We have,’ Charlie said, his voice croaky.
‘But then you killed my fucking girlfriend.’
‘I’m sorry about that but it had to be done.’
‘Oh Charlie. Don’t sweat it. I’ve done far worse.’
Hathaway pointed the gun at Charlie’s forehead.
‘Goodbye, Charlie.’
PART TWO
THIRTEEN
He stood at the back of the boat, watching the propeller churning the grey water. He had four men to help him take the boat. They killed the crew straight away. The owners were tied up in their stateroom. He would torture the man and rape the woman. He didn’t think about which would please him more.
Once he was bored with her, he passed the woman on to his men. By the time they threw her overboard in the turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay she wasn’t good for much. They threw her head in somewhere off Vigo.
Morning seeping into the night. John Hathaway, crime king of Brighton, woke up sweating. He rolled out of bed without disturbing the girl. A mirror streaked with white powder on her bedside table. The air still as he stood on the balcony and looked over at the skeletal remains of the West Pier.
There was a long ship moving on the horizon, red lights winking at bow and stern. The sky whitening behind it. He looked at the stretch of water between the ship and the end of the pier.
The pier looked as if it was crumbling but iron and steel don’t crumble. Wood, certainly. Buffeted by salt winds and sea water, wood warped, rotted, decayed to dust. A new coat of paint every six months had been the only way to keep the end-of-pier shooting gallery and amusement arcade looking halfway decent.
Hathaway earned his pocket money until he was fifteen up a ladder painting the exteriors of his father’s end-of-pier attractions. He also painted his father’s office, that draughty wooden hut with gaps in the floorboards wide enough to see the water churning far below. He could still smell the fug of the paraffin heaters as the fire- hazard stoves burned all day to keep the chill at bay.
The stanchions, the scaffolding, the pier’s iron frame – they hadn’t rotted. They had rusted, twisted, bent. Bolts had sheared off. The pier had crumpled, not crumbled. Eventually, it would collapse into the sea. The sea that, according to Hathaway’s father, kept all secrets.
Hathaway sipped a glass of water, turning away from the ruin of the pier. He was thinking of the other theory about the sea: that eventually it threw up its secrets.
Usually when least expected. He knew from his own experience that most things happened when least expected. He had learned that preparation could be both essential and pointless. Lives were changed by the unexpected. Always.
He shivered. Last night he’d had the dream again. He was drowning, out there in the chill water, sinking into its terrible depths. Tugged down, then tangled in a glade of trees. But not trees. A forest of corpses. Arms waving, bodies swaying with the tide. Men in rotting suits or naked. One, little more than a skeleton, with a pork-pie hat jammed on his skull.
Some were scrawny, some were fat. Some were gagged, mouths taped. Fish nibbled at them, sea worms writhed through empty eye sockets. Rooted, each of them, in cement poured in tin tubs.
Hathaway didn’t know how many men his father had taken out in his motorboat and dropped into the sea. Didn’t know the ratio of still alive to already dead. But the one he never dreamed about, the one he never saw, was the one he knew for certain had been dropped off the West Pier, her face shot away by Charlie.
Hathaway’s mobile rang. He looked at the number, answered.
‘Early morning, Ben.’
‘Sorry, Mr Hathaway. Thought you’d want to know. Stewart Nealson is dead. In a very bad way.’
And so it began again.
The scene of crime was the Ditchling Beacon on the northern edge of the South Downs. When Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist arrived at the National Trust car park she could see Ronnie Dickinson, the local community policeman, sitting on a stile some fifty yards away, looking like a stiff wind would blow him away. Reg Williamson, her sometime partner and now her superior officer, bulky in an ill-fitting suit, stood beside him. Both men were smoking.
The wind gusted at her coat when she got out of her car. A crowd had gathered in the car park, some with dogs. She looked down at Ditchling, a cluster of rooftops set among fields a few hundred feet below.
Gilchrist pushed her way through the crowd and walked up towards the two policemen. As she neared the stile she saw beyond them, further along the chalky path, scene of crime officers in white bunny suits clustered around something hanging from a wooden frame.
‘What’s going on?’ she said. Williamson offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. ‘Two years, two months, three days,’ she said. ‘Get ye behind me, Satan.’
Ronnie looked winded and sick. His hands were trembling.
‘You found him?’ she said.
‘I was summoned. By a dog-walker. In his own world. He resented the walk – it’s his wife’s dog really.’
His voice trailed off.
‘Never seen anything like it,’ Williamson said, looking over his shoulder. ‘Not even on the telly.’
‘So what’s happened to him?’
‘He was impaled,’ Williamson said. ‘A skewer put up his arse and out the other end.’
Gilchrist clenched her jaw.
‘Out of his head?’
‘No, his shoulder.’
