Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

Morning seeping into the night. John Hathaway, crime king of Brighton, woke up sweating. He rolled out of bed without disturbing the girl. A mirror streaked with white powder on her bedside table. The air still as he stood on the balcony and looked over at the skeletal remains of the West Pier.

There was a long ship moving on the horizon, red lights winking at bow and stern. The sky whitening behind it. He looked at the stretch of water between the ship and the end of the pier.

The pier looked as if it was crumbling but iron and steel don’t crumble. Wood, certainly. Buffeted by salt winds and sea water, wood warped, rotted, decayed to dust. A new coat of paint every six months had been the only way to keep the end-of-pier shooting gallery and amusement arcade looking halfway decent.

Hathaway earned his pocket money until he was fifteen up a ladder painting the exteriors of his father’s end-of-pier attractions. He also painted his father’s office, that draughty wooden hut with gaps in the floorboards wide enough to see the water churning far below. He could still smell the fug of the paraffin heaters as the fire-hazard stoves burned all day to keep the chill at bay.

The stanchions, the scaffolding, the pier’s iron frame – they hadn’t rotted. They had rusted, twisted, bent. Bolts had sheared off. The pier had crumpled, not crumbled. Eventually, it would collapse into the sea. The sea that, according to Hathaway’s father, kept all secrets.

Hathaway sipped a glass of water, turning away from the ruin of the pier. He was thinking of the other theory about the sea: that eventually it threw up its secrets.

Usually when least expected. He knew from his own experience that most things happened when least expected. He had learned that preparation could be both essential and pointless. Lives were changed by the unexpected. Always.

He shivered. Last night he’d had the dream again. He was drowning, out there in the chill water, sinking into its terrible depths. Tugged down, then tangled in a glade of trees. But not trees. A forest of corpses. Arms waving, bodies swaying with the tide. Men in rotting suits or naked. One, little more than a skeleton, with a pork-pie hat jammed on his skull.

Some were scrawny, some were fat. Some were gagged, mouths taped. Fish nibbled at them, sea worms writhed through empty eye sockets. Rooted, each of them, in cement poured in tin tubs.

Hathaway didn’t know how many men his father had taken out in his motorboat and dropped into the sea. Didn’t know the ratio of still alive to already dead. But the one he never dreamed about, the one he never saw, was the one he knew for certain had been dropped off the West Pier, her face shot away by Charlie.

Hathaway’s mobile rang. He looked at the number, answered.

‘Early morning, Ben.’

‘Sorry, Mr Hathaway. Thought you’d want to know. Stewart Nealson is dead. In a very bad way.’

And so it began again.

The scene of crime was the Ditchling Beacon on the northern edge of the South Downs. When Detective Sergeant Sarah Gilchrist arrived at the National Trust car park she could see Ronnie Dickinson, the local community policeman, sitting on a stile some fifty yards away, looking like a stiff wind would blow him away. Reg Williamson, her sometime partner and now her superior officer, bulky in an ill-fitting suit, stood beside him. Both men were smoking.

The wind gusted at her coat when she got out of her car. A crowd had gathered in the car park, some with dogs. She looked down at Ditchling, a cluster of rooftops set among fields a few hundred feet below.

Gilchrist pushed her way through the crowd and walked up towards the two policemen. As she neared the stile she saw beyond them, further along the chalky path, scene of crime officers in white bunny suits clustered around something hanging from a wooden frame.

‘What’s going on?’ she said. Williamson offered her a cigarette. She shook her head. ‘Two years, two months, three days,’ she said. ‘Get ye behind me, Satan.’

Ronnie looked winded and sick. His hands were trembling.

‘You found him?’ she said.

‘I was summoned. By a dog-walker. In his own world. He resented the walk – it’s his wife’s dog really.’

His voice trailed off.

‘Never seen anything like it,’ Williamson said, looking over his shoulder. ‘Not even on the telly.’

‘So what’s happened to him?’

‘He was impaled,’ Williamson said. ‘A skewer put up his arse and out the other end.’

Gilchrist clenched her jaw.

‘Out of his head?’

‘No, his shoulder.’

‘All the way through his body?’ Gilchrist said, trying to imagine it and shuddering as she did so. ‘So he’d die pretty quickly once the heart was pierced.’

‘The dog-walker didn’t get close enough to see what had happened,’ Ronnie said. ‘Thought he might have been crucified because of the way he’s hanging. Just as well. We need to keep this quiet.’

‘Isn’t crucifixion bad enough?’ Gilchrist said.

‘Yes, but to have someone killed like this – can’t you see the headlines? “Vlad the Impaler loose on the Sussex Downs”.’

Gilchrist was watching the bunny suits as they lowered the body to the ground.

‘You’d be able to see that for miles around, being so high up,’ she said.

‘That was probably the idea,’ Williamson said.

‘Who’s Vlad the Impaler when he’s at home?’

‘Ancestor of Dracula,’ Williamson said. ‘Some Rumanian prince back in the middle ages who fought against the Turks. Favourite punishment was to stick prisoners on the end of a spike. Let their body weight do the rest.’

Gilchrist grimaced.

‘God. Do we know who the victim is?’

‘Didn’t get close enough to find out,’ Ronnie said. ‘I thought it was more important to keep people away.’

‘Probably right.’ Gilchrist frowned. ‘How do you get from pushing a stick up somebody to drinking their blood from a bite on the neck?’

Williamson shrugged.

‘I’m more of a sci-fi fan myself.’

He looked beyond Gilchrist.

‘Here they come.’ He saw her look at the journalists heading their way. ‘The jackals.’

Brighton took a battering that afternoon. A storm came up, a high tide threshing the beaches, hammering at the clubs and bars on the lower promenade, slopping up on to the Kings Road, running from the Palace Pier to Portslade. By the evening the lower town was blanketed in fog. The frets clothed the seafront bars and restaurants, groping along the Old Steine and Middle Street, faltering at the steep slopes up to Seven Dials and the back end of town.

Ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts stood on the steps of the Grand Hotel watching the water sluice through the fog only to run out of energy halfway across the road.

The Kings Road was understandably quiet. However, Watts thought he could hear across the road, above the thrash and racket of the sea, the high drone of a motorboat. He listened to its engine cutting in and out in the wind. He started to turn. He was drawn back by faint flashes of light in the fog. Behind the fog. He watched them burst and die. He thought he heard the motorboat again. He went into the hotel.

He bought a gin and tonic in the ornate bar and took a table in a quiet corner. He was due to meet with Laurence Kingston, the chair of the West Pier Syndicate, the body that was raising money to refurbish the pier. Rebuild it, really. Watts had been made a committee member when he was chief constable and it was one of the few bodies that had not asked him to resign after his downfall. The Syndicate had just been given a promise of?20 million from the Lottery Fund. Several million in private money had also been pledged.

However, Kingston had phoned Watts out of the blue asking to meet privately to discuss the fund raising. He’d implied there was a problem.