beach huts on their left, a series of blocks of flats on the right. They passed the one that Philippa Franks lived in. One of the shooters at the Milldean massacre. Watts glanced up to see if she was sitting on her balcony. He was sure there was more information to be got from her about the massacre in which she’d participated but now wasn’t the time.
‘What kind of shit eco-friendly car is this?’ Watts said. ‘I could walk more quickly.’
‘I’ll take that as a “No”,’ Tingley said. ‘And, as a point of information, it’s the traffic, not my shit eco-friendly car that is inhibiting our speed.’
‘What a fucking mess,’ Watts said. ‘Charlie Laker, Radislav, Kadire – all disappeared.’
‘Do you fancy Laker for Laurence Kingston’s death?’
‘As Hathaway guessed, there was hardly any booze in the bloodstream and a lot in the lungs.’
They were silent for a moment.
‘Sarah had a lucky getaway.’
‘I know it,’ Watts said.
‘Maybe the Balkan guys were here earlier than we thought,’ Tingley said.
‘Meaning?’
‘Maybe they were involved with killing your policemen who did the Milldean thing.’
Watts roared. Tingley nodded. Watts, coughing, laughed.
‘Sorry, Jimmy.’
‘Listen to the lion,’ Tingley said.
‘We still don’t really have the links in the chain.’
‘What chain?’ Tingley said.
‘Only connect, Jimmy, only connect.’
‘Yeah, the prose and the passion. I know the quote, Bob. I’ve read a book or two. But that’s got nothing to do with our situation.’
‘You read Forster? I didn’t know that.’
‘I said I knew the quote. I didn’t say I’d read that particular book.’ Tingley grinned. ‘Now a couple of tanks in the front garden at Howards End, that might have piqued my interest’
Watts smiled reluctantly.
‘The point I’m trying to make,’ he said, ‘is that everything connects somehow. There’s a thread linking the Trunk Murder – groan if you want to but listen – the stuff that went down in the sixties and the Milldean Massacre and hence these Serbians.’
‘And what is that thread, O Master Weaver?’
Watts sat back and threw up his hands.
‘I wish I knew.’
‘But it’s none of this that’s bothering you, is it?’
Watts shook his head.
‘Go and see your father.’
‘Didn’t know you were one for family history, Dad,’ Watts said as he sat down opposite his father in the cafeteria of the National Archives.
‘Just checking on a couple of things.’ His father gestured vaguely. ‘Remarkable place this. The amount of stuff they have available. Even if I were fifty years younger and going at it every day, I wouldn’t be able to scratch the surface in my lifetime.’
‘Have you always kept diaries, Dad?’
‘Who said I ever kept one?’
Watts sighed.
‘Come on, Dad, coyness doesn’t suit you. You’re a call-a-spade-a-spade man. You mentioned there was more of your diary. Are you going to let me see it?’
‘What do you know about the Great Train Robbery?’ his father said.
Watts eyed him carefully.
‘Two, mebbe three, were never caught,’ his father said. ‘Never caught, never identified.’
‘None of the others gave them up?’
Donald Watts shook his head.
‘For all their memoirs and all that Ronnie Biggs posturing, none of them ever really said how it happened or who did what. And the Bucks police didn’t have a clue.’
Watts sipped his coffee and watched his father.
‘These people who were never caught?’
His father looked at him again.
‘You know there was a strong Brighton connection? Half the gang had been robbing trains on the Brighton to London line. Penny ante stuff at first but then they figured out a way to stop the trains by fiddling with the signals. Same method they used in the Great Train Robbery.’
‘These people who got away with it – they were from Brighton?’
‘One was a train driver they took along whose nerve went on the actual job. A couple of the gang wanted to kill him to stop him talking, but in the end they paid him off.’
‘And the other two?’
Donald Watts leaned forward. His tongue darted out to lick at his dry lips.
‘One is certain. The other more speculative.’
‘I like certainties.’
His father smiled. His teeth were yellow. He looked very old, and he gave off a rancid smell.
‘I recall going to a house-warming party with my friend Philip Simpson. Lively do. Very lively. Our host had been living in some squalor on what we would now term a sink estate, but here he was in a better part of town with a big garden and a lot of influential people paying court to him.’
‘And you concluded?’
‘I concluded that family fortunes can change very quickly.’
‘A little showy, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, he’d waited. This was a couple of years down the line.’
‘And the name of this gentleman?’
Watts’ father rubbed his cheek.
‘I think you know.’
‘Dennis Hathaway?’
Donald Watts inclined his head and looked down at his liver-spotted hands.
Watts thought for a moment.
‘And the speculative one?’
His father shrugged.
‘My friend Philip Simpson was never what you’d call a straight arrow.’
‘The chief constable of Brighton was one of the Great Train Robbers?’ Watts sat back and laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’
Donald Watts picked up his drink then put it down again.
‘I’m not saying he was actually on the track with a pickaxe handle in his hands. I’m just saying that he was implicated.’
‘Implicated how?’
‘Look, Philip Simpson ran crime in Brighton. Do you remember staying at their house in Spain? Did you never wonder how somebody on his salary could afford a bloody castle?’
‘OK, so you’re saying he was implicated in the robbery. That he got a share of the dosh. And everybody kept schtum about it.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘So what did he do for the money?’
‘Kept Dennis Hathaway out of the frame.’
‘And that’s it? How about all the others who were caught? He didn’t do a very good job with them, did he?’
