‘I’ve seen enough films about this but I can’t believe it’s happening to me. I want out but I can’t seem to get out.’
‘You know that from your dad,’ Reilly said, fixing Hathaway with a watery stare.
Hathaway looked down.
‘Aye, well.’
‘Who’s coming after you?’
‘Foreigners. Serbians. Mad fuckers. Real hard bastards. The kind who burn your neighbour’s house down just because they live next door to you.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Long term? Everything. Short term? Revenge for the death of one of theirs and his pregnant girlfriend in that Milldean thing.’
‘The massacre?’
‘Yeah. They think it was targeted at their guy.’
‘Was it?’
Hathaway shrugged.
‘Not for me to say. But they’re here and they’re starting up their own mayhem.’
‘That man on the Ditchling Beacon?’
Hathaway smiled.
‘I see you’re keeping up with the Brighton news. Yeah. Stuck a skewer right up him. Came out next to his ear. Left him there to have a slow, painful death. What are things coming to?’
‘We’ve done our share.’
Hathaway looked at his father’s old ally and his own mentor.
‘True,’ he said. ‘True.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Reilly said.
‘What do you think I should do? I was so nearly out of it and now I’m being dragged back in.’
‘You know you’ve got to go pre-emptive, John. It’s the only way. Nuke the bastards.’
‘That brings me right back in.’
‘But it’s your only way out.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can do it, John. I know you can do it. I know what you’ve done.’
‘I know you know,’ Hathaway said, then caught something in Reilly’s tone. ‘We never really talked about that.’
‘Your dad was my friend but he’d gone rabid. It was something you had to do. I didn’t like that you did it, but I could see why you thought you had to. So I let it go.’
‘And worked with me over all those subsequent years.’
Reilly reached out a thin, purple veined hand and laid it on Hathaway’s.
‘It’s a strange world you and I inhabit. I doubt anyone living outside it would understand. I think you had enough dealing with your guilt. I don’t think you’ve had a happy life, John.’
Hathaway smiled at him.
‘Are we supposed to have?’
‘Don’t let the guilt emasculate you. You can handle these Balkan johnny-come-latelies.’
Hathaway sighed and looked down at Reilly’s gnarled hand.
‘If I start it, they’ll come back with everything. You’ll end up in the firing line. I don’t know whether I can protect you.’ He indicated the passage outside the door. ‘I’ve brought Barbara with me. I’d like her to stay here. I’ll leave men too. Good men.’
‘Barbara – that will be nice. As for me?’ Reilly shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘I can protect myself, don’t worry about that.’ He grimaced. ‘The only thing I can’t do is change my own bloody shitbag. Can you get Hattie Jacques?’
Hathaway left Barbara with Reilly and had dinner in a private dining room in a quiet restaurant in the backstreets of Dieppe. His hosts were Marcel Magnon, frail and thin-voiced, and his children, Patrice and Jeanne. Hathaway had been doing business with them for years and they greeted him warmly.
Marcel Magnon’s first question remained the same whenever they met.
‘Any word of your father?’
As always, Hathaway shook his head.
‘No word but we don’t give up.’
Magnon sighed and his head sank on to his chest.
The four of them shared a large tureen of La Marmite Dieppoise, the local fish stew, all dipping their bread in to soak up the liquor. Jeanne fed her father, who sucked on the wet bread as best he could. Conversation was kept general until the cheese course. Then:
‘Albanians control all our major ports now,’ Patrice said. ‘Even Marseilles.’
‘Dieppe?’
Patrice shook his head.
‘Too small but we pay them a tithe for the quiet life.’
‘We know of your problems,’ Jeanne said, cutting a small sliver from a hard goat’s cheese. ‘But I do not know how we can help. Our rough stuff days are in the past.’
‘I don’t expect anything,’ Hathaway said, reaching out to pat her hand. ‘Just keep an eye on Sean, if you would, and let him know if bad men are heading his way.’
‘That we can gladly do,’ Jeanne said, and Patrice nodded vigorously in agreement.
‘I’m sending men here,’ Hathaway said, ‘but let me know if there are developments.’
Jeanne contemplated her sliver of cheese then looked intently at Hathaway.
‘And you?’
‘Things are in hand.’
‘You could get out,’ Patrice said. ‘You have made your money.’
Hathaway reached over for the cheese plate.
‘It’s not my way.’
His phone trembled in his pocket.
‘Excuse me. A call I am expecting.’
He took out a pen and small pad and listened to the voice on the phone.
‘Spell that, please,’ he said. And twice more. ‘And Radislav?’
He ended the call without saying goodbye. A few moments later his phone made a series of beeping noises and he scrolled down the photos that had appeared on its LCD screen.
He put the phone on the table and Jeanne looked down at the last photograph.
‘I know that face. He has been here.’
The man who had just spoken to Hathaway phoned Jimmy Tingley next. Tingley and he had served together in the SAS before the man had joined the special Transnational Crimes Unit at Scotland Yard. He gave Tingley the same names and suspected British locations of four Balkan gangsters recently arrived in the country.
When he had finished he suggested Tingley and he meet for a drink the next time they coincided in London.
‘And, Jimmy, this is just intel for you, right? You’re not going to do anything illegal?’
After a moment, Tingley murmured:
‘ Moi?’
TWENTY-TWO
Hathaway’s boat drove into the setting sun. Seeing the sun go down always made him think of illustrations in a book he had as a kid of the wounded King Arthur being carried towards the setting sun on a fairy barge.
He made a number of calls on his crossing back to England, waking most of those he called. He gave Dave
