‘It isn’t. I wanted to give you a heads-up. The press will be on it tomorrow. You’ll be back in the limelight again, I’m afraid.’
Watts clenched his jaw.
‘Not published? Karen, that will look like yet another police cover-up.’
Karen reached into her handbag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She placed it on the table beside her knife.
‘That’s as maybe but it was a unanimous decision. Not just me. The Home Office…’
Watts emptied his glass.
‘And there I was thinking this was a social occasion.’
Hewitt took a cigarette from her packet and rolled it between her fingers. She looked at the varnish chipped on one nail. Policing and looking good didn’t necessarily go together.
‘Bob, I can’t let the past divert us just at the moment. Something very worrying is happening in Brighton. New criminal rivalries emerging. There’s a rumour the Palace Pier got robbed during the Party on the Beach. The heist team got away by sea. The Palace Pier people deny it but there are witnesses talking about masked men breaking into the pier offices.’
‘CCTV?’
‘Not working on the pier that day. Apparently.’
They shared a look. Ambitious as she had been to get on, Hewitt had nevertheless enjoyed her time as deputy to Watts. They had worked well together. She now understood what a poisoned chalice the chief constable’s job was.
‘I’d say that’s something to do with Hathaway,’ Watts said. ‘Has Gilchrist passed on to you the intel about Miladin Radislav – Vlad the Impaler?’
Hewitt put her cigarette back in the packet and sipped her drink.
‘She has. We’re in touch with the Transnational Crime Unit in London and with Interpol, who are trying to track him down. You think he’s after Hathaway?’
‘Stewart Nealson was linked to a lot of Brighton crime families but Hathaway is the biggest. It seems likely.’
Hewitt was conscious the waiter was hovering a couple of yards away. She glanced at the menu.
‘How’s your appetite, Bob?’
Watts made a sour face.
‘Dwindling fast.’
They both ordered salads. Hewitt decided against a fag outside and put the packet back in her bag. One small triumph for the day.
‘The Balkans is the breeding ground for a vast amount of crime in western Europe,’ she said to Watts. ‘It started with cigarettes – diverting Duty Not Paid fags destined for the Sahara, or wherever, through Montenegro, then across the straits to Italy for the Italian Mafia. Then narcotics and women. Afghan heroin. Now it’s that, plus people smuggling and even organ smuggling – livers and kidneys.’
Watts was nodding.
‘I was in the Balkans when it all kicked off. These criminals were supported by their governments and the paramilitaries – hell, they usually were the governments and paramilitaries. During the civil war Croatia and Bosnia were banned from buying weapons legally so this was a way to get money to buy them illegally. When I was in Kosovo, the smuggling routes went right across the frontlines. Kosovo was the hub for distributing Turkish heroin.’
Hewitt had forgotten about Watts’s military experience.
‘I’m behind on all this – though I shouldn’t be,’ she admitted. ‘I’m hearing that these gangs cross racial and ethnic boundaries. Syndicates of Turkish, Serbian, Macedonian and Albanian criminals working together with a common goal. Money. It’s like a United Nations of crime.’
Watts nodded again.
‘And Radislav is embedded in it.’
Hewitt reached into her handbag.
‘We’re in deep trouble,’ she said. The cigarette packet was back in her hand. ‘Have you got any matches?’
TWENTY
A woman was lurking downstairs when Dave let Watts and Tingley in to the big house on Tongdean Drive. She looked at them with cold eyes, then went into the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her.
‘Who’s that?’ Tingley murmured as Dave led them up to the mezzanine. ‘New mistress?’
‘Hardly,’ Dave said. ‘He likes them young. Maybe his mother.’
She looked like a junkie in rehab. Beautiful once, now stringy and lined, in a shapeless dress. Tingley thought he had seen faded trackmarks on her arms.
Hathaway remained seated when the three men walked in.
‘You two again – you’re like a bad fart. What is it this time?’
‘Do you know anything about the Visegrad genocide?’ Tingley said.
‘I’ve a feeling I’m about to,’ Hathaway said. ‘You two want a beer? Afraid I’ve got standards. I drink it out of a glass. I drink my wine the same way.’
Tingley told much the same story he’d told Gilchrist. Hathaway watched Tingley carefully as he talked.
‘The Serbs practiced eliticide, systematically killing the political and economic leadership. Then moved down the hierarchy, killing and raping at will. And the ethnic cleansing worked. These days Visegrad is a Serbian town. There’s hardly any Bosniaks living there.
‘Terrible,’ Hathaway said when Tingley had finished. ‘But there were war crime trials for these people.’
‘For some people. Eight men were charged with war crimes at The Hague for this and imprisoned. But some ringleaders got away – as we know, the two biggest Serbian war criminals did – Radovan Karadic and General Ratko Mladic. As did a certain Miladin Radislav. He parlayed the plunder he took from his victims into criminal wealth and a criminal empire. Ended up after the war in some fortified mountain eyrie as a white slaver and drug baron.’
‘I don’t know the name,’ Hathaway said.
‘Better known by his nickname. Vlad the Impaler.’
Hathaway looked off into the distance.
‘Nealson’s death, eh? You think Radislav is here.’
‘I think,’ said Tingley, ‘that he came across the oceans bringing plague and pestilence.’
‘That’s very poetical.’
‘I was thinking of Nosferatu. Dracula? Came from Transylvania in a plague ship. Killed all the crew. Captain tied to the wheel?’
‘You’re making him out to be a nightmare figure. But he’s just a gangster. I’ve known gangsters all my life. He doesn’t scare me.’
‘He should. He’s not just a gangster. He and his men are hardened in war. Trained killers. And he’s part of a pan-Balkan crime syndicate, thanks to the war. Which means he has a limitless supply of money and manpower. If they want to take over Brighton, they will. If they want you dead, you’re dead.’
Hathaway chewed his lip.
‘And you think I’m weaker than them?’
‘I think you’re twenty years older than them. And you have some sort of moral compass, skewed though it might be.’
‘Do you know why they’re here?’ Hathaway said.
‘Specifically? No.’
Hathaway stood and walked over to a desk against the wall. He picked up a small, plastic-covered red book then put it down.
