Peter Guttridge - The Thing Itself

Now he was waiting in his suite for a couple of girls to arrive from Harrogate, the nearest place to Whitby you could buy quality arse. Not that he would be paying.

He was thinking about his late wife, Dawn. John Hathaway’s sister. He’d got her pregnant, some forty years earlier. Her father, Dennis Hathaway, had given him a choice. They’d been in the chilly wooden hut Hathaway used as his HQ behind the firing range on the West Pier in Brighton.

Dennis Hathaway. Jesus. Burly, friendly-faced and vicious as fuck.

That day Hathaway had handed Laker a whisky — Canadian Club, naturally — and said: ‘Here’s the choice, Charlie. You can go against my wishes and marry Dawn and have the kid. But you’re out of the business. I don’t want my Dawn involved in this.’

‘Or?’ Laker said, feeling the whisky burn his throat.

He could tell Dennis Hathaway didn’t take to his tone but Laker couldn’t help it. He’d never been good at being told what to do.

‘Watch your lip, Charlie. It’s your future we’re talking about. The alternative is that you persuade her to have an abortion, you finish with her and you continue your career with me and you thrive.’

Hathaway scrutinized Laker.

‘I think you were made for this life. I hope John is going to come through, but you — I see it in you.’

Hathaway swigged his drink.

‘You lost your brother, didn’t you?’

Charlie nodded.

‘Burned alive, wasn’t he?’

Charlie nodded again.

‘Gives a man a bit of impetus.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Did the coppers ever get whoever did it?’

Laker shook his head.

‘No clue.’

Dennis Hathaway, still staring fixedly at Laker, nodded slowly.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Laker started to say, ‘It’s OK-’

‘I’m going to need a decision from you this morning.’

Laker liked Dawn. Lusted for her. But he wasn’t father material. He knew that.

‘I’m Catholic,’ he said.

‘Lapse,’ Hathaway said without missing a beat. He raised his glass. ‘What’s it to be?’

Laker raised his own glass.

‘OK,’ he said in a low voice.

‘OK what?’

Laker leaned over and chinked Hathaway’s glass.

‘You get your way.’

Laker could see that Hathaway couldn’t hold back.

‘I usually do.’

That was meant to be that but Charlie Laker couldn’t get Dawn out of his head. He was getting plenty of women but there was something about her. He saw her after the abortion, from time to time, and she was dispirited and listless. Although Laker had insisted she have the abortion, she knew her father was behind it.

‘I wish I’d been able to stand up to him,’ she said. ‘But I’m just a coward.’

‘You’re no coward.’

‘Aren’t I? To let him kill my child.’

‘We’ll make another,’ Charlie said, on absolute impulse.

She smiled then and took his hand.

‘Over my dad’s dead body,’ she said.

Which is the way it worked out.

Charlie decided to kill Dennis Hathaway for many reasons. For Dawn, yes, but mainly because he was ready to take over Brighton. He knew he would have to kill the enforcer, Sean Reilly, too. He would probably have to kill his mate and rival, John Hathaway.

He bided his time. He thought their joint trip to Spain in 1970 would be a good opportunity. As it turned out, John Hathaway thought the same — and then some.

One minute, they were sitting around getting pissed on Sangria and whisky, Sean Reilly standing at the edge of the terrace looking out into the mountains. The next, John Hathaway shot his own father in the head and was about to do the same to Laker.

‘Goodbye, Charlie,’ Hathaway said and Laker closed his eyes, resigned, knowing this was payback for him executing Hathaway’s girlfriend. He’d been ordered to because she’d witnessed something she shouldn’t have, but he didn’t blame his old friend for not understanding.

‘Don’t,’ Sean Reilly said, suddenly beside them.

That Reilly had stepped in to save Laker’s life had surprised him. It was no surprise that Reilly told him to leave that night. Before Laker left, Reilly gave him the deeds to a couple of clubs in Ibiza and Majorca.

‘To help you start up on your own,’ he said. He handed Charlie?10,000, too. A fuck of a lot of money in those days.

Charlie kept to himself that Dennis Hathaway, as part of their deal over Dawn, had given him two clubs on the Costa del Sol, the pirate radio stations and cash in a Jersey bank account.

Charlie Laker went to Ibiza first. Set up a drug deal on his own with some Sardinian mobsters who provided the link through to the same Moroccan gangs Dennis Hathaway and now John were dealing with. It cost more to go 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.