Peter Guttridge - The Thing Itself

Gilchrist bowed her head. Grimes didn’t even look her way.

‘And she thinks she can trade on that?’

‘Depends what kind of a father you are.’

‘I’m seeing them right, believe me.’

When Tingley woke, his head and his left hand throbbed. He looked at his hand. It was swollen to about twice its usual size and was coloured purple-red. Those ant bites. He looked down at the shirt wadded at his stomach. It was soaked in blood but he sensed that the bleeding had stopped.

He opened the glove compartment and took out his medical kit, dosed himself with antihistamine for his hand. He slid across to the driving seat and turned the engine on. He set off for Orvieto.

Williamson didn’t really know why he had a bee in his bonnet about Lesley White’s two names. He checked and cross-checked anyway, following his own rule that coppers never knew what was going to be important and what wasn’t.

After half an hour it looked as if Lesley White was simply her professional name. Punctilious as ever, he did one final check. He trawled the Land Registry for ownership of her house.

He sat back. He was having a Jeremy Kyle moment.

When Williamson was not working mornings, he would sometimes watch The Jeremy Kyle Show with Angela. She’d get cross at him shouting at the morons on the programme washing their shabby laundry in public. At some point, looking at DNA results to decide who was telling the truth about fidelity or parenthood or theft or whatever, Kyle would say: ‘Well, well, well.’

‘Well, well, well.’

The previous registered owner of the lighthouse, although only for a matter of days, was a certain Charles Laker.

He was pondering this when his phone rang.

He reached for it as Chief Constable Karen Hewitt tapped on the open door and stepped into the room. Williamson left the phone and started to get to his feet.

‘Ma’am. .?’

‘Don’t — don’t get up, Reg.’

She came and stood in front of his desk. Williamson noticed her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her they were entirely bloodless.

‘Reg, we’ve had a call. I thought I should tell you myself.’

‘Ma’am?’ Williamson said, his eyes fixed now on her scarlet mouth, his heart in free fall.

‘It’s about your wife.’

The phone rang on.

‘Have you got kids?’ Grimes said to Gilchrist. He sneered. ‘No, you look like you’d break some guy’s balls before you’d let him fuck you. So how could you have?’

Before Gilchrist could respond, Watts had backhanded Grimes so hard he fell off the sofa and actually skidded across the floor.

Rubbing his face, he looked at Watts with glazed eyes.

‘Forgot — you’ve been up there, haven’t you?’

Gilchrist moved to block Watts.

‘I can defend myself,’ she said, quietly but fiercely. She looked down at Grimes. ‘Try acting like an adult for the first time in your miserable life. Try doing the right thing for the first time. Morons like you use “family” as some kind of badge of honour — as if there was anything impressive about you having sperm. Getting a woman pregnant doesn’t make you a man, you moron — any idiot can do that. And they do. Standing by the child and bringing her up right makes you a man. And on that count you’re a miserable failure.’

‘I keep them,’ he mumbled, still rubbing his face.

‘In Milldean?’ Gilchrist laughed. ‘The scummiest place in Brighton? Congratulations.’

Grimes looked up at Watts.

‘You going to let me get up?’

‘When you’ve apologized,’ Watts said.

‘Leave it,’ Gilchrist hissed at him. She didn’t know how she felt about Watts coming to her rescue. First, because as a general rule she didn’t need anyone to rescue her. Second, because, even when she did, Watts, who had rejected her, wouldn’t be her first choice. Unexpectedly, she smiled to herself. Not that she had a first choice among older men outside of George Clooney.

‘I’m so sorry, Reg,’ Karen Hewitt said.

Williamson nodded and glanced towards the phone. All the time she was telling him the ruddy daft, fucking devastating thing Angela had done, it had rung and stopped, rung and stopped.

‘I need to take this call,’ he said.

Hewitt shook her head.

‘No, you don’t. You need to go home.’

‘What’s at home now?’ he said, picking up the phone. ‘DI Williamson.’

‘Reg, it’s DS Fairley down at Newhaven. The customs boys have a truck here looks a bit dodgy.’

‘And that’s news?’

‘The truck belongs to one of Charlie Laker’s companies. We know Brighton division has an interest in him.’

Williamson was blinking, conscious of Karen Hewitt standing in front of his desk, staring down at him. He looked at her. She looked like shit these days. He’d always been impressed that, despite the pressures of the job, she used to look glamorous as assistant chief constable. Her long blonde hair, her care over how she presented herself.

But since she’d become chief constable, all that had gone to pot. Her long hair was lank, framing a tired, narrow face. Her make-up was caked on dead skin. She seemed to have lost weight but not necessarily in the right places. She suddenly looked old.

‘Laker. Yes.’

He heaved himself up from behind his desk, keeping the phone at his ear.

‘I’m on my way.’

Karen Hewitt sighed.

‘At least take a bloody driver,’ she said. ‘And that’s an order.’

Maria di Bocci was leaning over Jimmy Tingley, enveloping him in her heady perfume. He was lying in bed, a drip attached to one arm, blankets pulled up to his chest. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them she was still there. She smiled.

‘What happened?’ he croaked.

She shrugged, incomprehension on her face. He closed his eyes again.

The next time he woke, Guiseppe di Bocci was standing by the bed, a solemn look on his face.

‘We found you in your car in the square outside the hotel. You were unconscious. We brought you in and sent for our doctor.’

‘Why?’ Tingley said. He felt himself drifting away.

Di Bocci looked puzzled.

‘You were ill. You have been shot.’

Tingley focused again.

‘Your uncle. .’

‘Betrayed the family.’

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘We know. The doctor has given you morphine. Sleep now. We will talk tomorrow.’

Williamson sat in the back of the patrol car, thinking about Angela leaving him alone forever. Thinking about how she had brought herself to commit her suicidal act.

The Downs glowered down on him. The driver, a nice enough young copper, kept glancing in the rear-view mirror with the idea of starting a conversation. Williamson wasn’t up for that so he kept his face sour — not hard to do as he got older — and turned to the window. The car reached Newhaven in twenty minutes, the orange lights of the decaying town looming abruptly out of the pitch dark of the Downs.

At the lorry park the lights were cold white. Williamson thanked his driver and struggled out of a back seat not designed for a man with a belly. He made up for that by striding with great purpose to the Newhaven police and customs officers milling around a container truck.

Introductions made, they looked at him and up at the rear door of the vehicle. He looked at the rear door and back at them. He nodded.

Kate Simpson rubbed her eyes and walked away from her laptop. She’d read Victor Tempest’s notebooks and immediately set about trying to discover the identity of Tony ‘Baby’ Mancini’s brother-in-law. She thought she knew but she wanted to be sure.

She was working on the assumption that Baby Mancini was the Mancini she had found in the archive who was born in Holborn in 1902 and that his sister was called Maria. However, she could find no wedding certificate for a Maria Mancini anywhere in Britain.