Peter Guttridge - The Thing Itself
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- Название:The Thing Itself
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She never spoke to him again. She wrote him a letter saying she was cutting all ties with him. Didn’t really explain why. She and Charlie moved to America. New York, though the music business was booming in California.
He did go to the west coast from time to time. He bumped into Dan, the lead singer of his old group, The Avalons, a couple of times, but they had little to say to each other. They’d been in a band together but they had never been close.
He had good contacts in the US Mafia. There were cousins of the Sardinian guys who were cousins of other families in the US. They got fed up with Jeffery. Some unspecified offence. Told Charlie how Jeffery had been ripping him off. Told him about Jeffery’s secret accounts in the Bahamas. Asked Charlie if he felt up to taking over?
Three months later, Jeffery was dead, killed in a plane crash. Three months after that, Charlie and Dawn were living in LA, next door to Cary Grant no less.
And it was Charlie’s turn to have his emotions undergo osmosis.
One drunken evening by the pool, the lights of Los Angeles carpeted below them, Dawn told him about an evening back in 1959 when John Hathaway had come home with burned hands and singed eyebrows, the smell of petrol strong on him. She tended to him with butter from the larder and snow from the back garden. Didn’t get much sense out of him.
A couple of days later, it was in the local papers a little boy had been burned to death in a bonfire maliciously set alight. The police were assuming it was manslaughter not murder, but they wouldn’t know for sure whether the arsonist knew the little boy was hiding in the bonfire until they tracked him down.
‘Did John know my brother was in the den?’ Charlie croaked.
‘He didn’t say,’ Dawn said.
Charlie remembered the conversation he’d had with Dennis Hathaway when they did the deal over Dawn and the abortion.
‘Did your dad know what John had done?’
She pursed her lips.
‘Oh yes.’
FOURTEEN
Reg Williamson was in the office hunched over his computer when Gilchrist walked in. He clicked his mouse, then slid from behind his desk and hurried over to her.
‘Bingo. Bernie Grimes. Place called Homps on the Canal du Midi. Not far from Carcassonne.’
Gilchrist looked at him.
‘Fantastic, but you’re saying those place names as if they should mean something to me. I’m a Brighton girl. I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Carcassonne is this medieval walled town in the south of France. Looks just like it should — they used it for that Kevin Costner Robin Hood film donkey’s years ago. Reason it looks so Walt Disney perfect is that it was actually rebuilt in the nineteenth century. So it’s kind of a recreation.’
‘You’ve been there.’
Williamson looked away.
‘Me and the wife. Before. .’
His voice trailed away. Gilchrist realized she didn’t know anything about Reg’s private life.
‘Your divorce?’
Williamson flashed a look at her.
‘Our David killed himself.’
Gilchrist was swept back to a conversation she’d had in the car with Reg, it seemed an age ago now, about suicides off Beachy Head.
‘Reg, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’
Williamson worked his jaw.
‘His own daft fault. Drugs.’ Gilchrist saw tears in Williamson’s eyes as he turned away. ‘Anyway, we know where Grimes is. We now have to decide what we do about it.’
Gilchrist reached out and gave his arm a quick squeeze.
‘I don’t even know your wife’s name — I’m sorry.’
‘Angela.’ Williamson looked down. ‘Lovely lass but she’s suffering. Every day I see her sink further down. Don’t know what to do.’
He worked his jaw.
‘When I left for work this morning, she didn’t even have the energy to say goodbye.’
He gave an awful false smile.
‘Ay well, I’m sure it will all work out for the best.’
Gilchrist nodded uncertainly.
‘So what next?’ he said.
‘I bumped into Philippa Franks. Mentioned Bernie’s name.’
Williamson cleared his throat.
‘And?’
Gilchrist shrugged.
‘Nothing, really, but I have the feeling it shook her a bit.’
‘OK, we need to find a way to put pressure on her,’ Williamson said, all business again.
‘And I think I know where Charlie Laker is going to be in a while.’
‘Well done.’
‘Not really. He’s made a reservation at the Grand.’
Charlie Laker sat in the back of his Bentley heading south, his phone clamped to his ear. Time to move things up a notch. He looked out through tinted windows and made a series of calls. As the rugged northern landscape softened towards Nottingham, he put his phone away and closed his eyes. Thinking back. Again.
He’d vowed he wouldn’t do anything to John Hathaway for the sake of Dawn. But he’d planned. And prospered.
Dawn coped with her depression with therapy three times a week and cocaine every day. Charlie worried that the cocaine would trigger in Dawn the mental instability that had afflicted her mother, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
Charlie, in his mind having let down his brother, then been abandoned by his parents, valued loyalty. He would never leave Dawn, although that didn’t mean he didn’t have women on the side.
Dawn wanted him to get into films. It was a source of private humiliation for her that they lived next door to Cary Grant but had never met him, even over the back fence.
She expected Grant to throw lots of parties but she never heard a sound from the house. She read in some of the gossip rags that he had a reputation for meanness.
‘You’d think he’d like fellow English living next door,’ she said plaintively to Charlie when Grant’s secretary politely declined the latest invite to one of Dawn’s parties.
‘But he must be in his eighties,’ Laker said. ‘Old codgers don’t always like parties.’
When Grant died in 1986, all Dawn said, glumly, was: ‘That’s that, then.’
In the late eighties, comedy became the new rock ‘n’ roll and he opened a cross-country chain of comedy clubs. Pretty much legit, though the alcohol came in the front door and went out the back and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d paid retail price for a delivery of ciggies.
His management company looked after a few acts and that parlayed into TV productions on cable. And all the time he kept a distant watch on John Hathaway’s upward progress through life. Pondering how he was going to take his revenge on him.
FIFTEEN
Kate Simpson, radio journalist, daughter of former government spin doctor William Simpson, was walking home when she saw the long, skinny man coming towards her on the narrow pavement. A man who’d frightened her months earlier in the cemetery beside the grave of the Brighton Trunk Murder victim. As they drew closer, he smiled at her in that same malevolent way.
She crossed the street and he stopped and watched her go, still smiling, slightly bent in a kind of half-bow. She looked back repeatedly as she hurried home but he didn’t seem to be following her.
She checked behind her before she opened the main door to her block. Checked it had closed properly behind her. She went up the stairs at a run.
She was out of breath at her own door and fiddled with the security locks in her nervousness. She got in and slammed the door, bolting it and turning the key, then leant against it for a moment.
She let out a long breath, dropped her bag and walked into her bedroom. A different man was waiting there.
Squat, broad-shouldered. He grabbed her round the waist, swung her off her feet and in a wide arc hurled her on the bed. She hit the bed hard, face down and bounced straight off.
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