Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

‘What?’

‘He was naked. Worse than naked.’

‘How worse?’ Williamson said.

‘He had been skinned.’

‘Jesus. Did someone send us back to the Dark Ages and not tell me? One guy gets impaled, another gets skinned.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t like to ask, but did they find the skin?’

‘Doesn’t say. Blood everywhere. His wife, a former actress twenty years his junior, and the crew are missing.’

‘And the perpetrators?’

‘The dinghy from the vessel is missing. I assume they came ashore somewhere.’

‘In Brighton, do you think?’

‘Who knows? But don’t you think two such barbaric crimes must be linked?’

Williamson reached for a cigarette.

‘I’ve a horrible feeling they are.’

Jimmy Tingley, ex-SAS, current status ambiguous, telephoned Bob Watts, disgraced ex-chief constable of the Southern police force. Watts said:

‘I’m on the train,’ then wished he hadn’t.

He was looking out of the window as the train crossed the high viaduct just beyond Haywards Heath. He loved the view across to Ardingly College and its Gothic chapel. He eased his neck in the stiff collar of his shirt. He was thinking about the West Pier but he was dressed for an interview. Funds were running low and he needed to get a proper job.

‘Nealson died in a memorable way.’ Tingley said.

The train went into a deep cutting. Watts frowned at his reflection in the train window.

‘Hello?’

Watts waited, glancing down at the front page of the Guardian. The second lead announced the imminent publication of the report into the Milldean Massacre, in which four civilians had been shot and killed by armed police. He was aware of the rush of the train above the wavering phone signal. His phone rang again.

‘There are tunnels coming up,’ he said. ‘I may lose you. You said memorable?’

‘To you and me.’

Watts frowned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ said Tingley and the signal was snatched away. But Watts had clearly heard: ‘Vlad the Impaler.’

Watts looked down at his phone. Then at the tremor in his hand.

After his interview, Watts phoned Tingley.

‘How did it go?’ Tingley said.

‘Pointless. Who wants a disgraced cop?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Did you say Vlad?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you meet?’

‘Where?’

‘Cricketers?’

‘Nah – I’ve moved on. Let’s meet in the Bath Arms.’

‘Big change.’

‘It’s a couple of hundred yards away. And it has free wi-fi.’

‘Don’t give me too many shocks at once, Jimmy. New pub and new technology? Next you’ll be drinking a proper drink.’

Watts phoned Sarah Gilchrist next.

‘I’m meeting Jimmy in the Bath Arms. Want to join us?’

‘No offence intended, Bob, but some of us work for a living.’

‘This is work. We can help you with Stewart Nealson’s kebabbing.’

Tingley looked pretty banged up.

‘You OK?’ Watts said, sitting down beside him. Tingley had a laptop on the table in front of him. The light from the screen gave him a terrible pallor and highlighted the black around his eyes.

‘Lost focus – my mistake.’

‘Where?’ Watts said. Tingley was a gun for hire and the government sent him to all the world’s hotspots.

Tingley took his drink.

‘Rum and pep. Loverly.’

Tingley, discreet as ever.

‘What’s with the high-tech?’ Watts said.

‘It’s all about intel. You know that, Bobby.’

‘And what intel are you looking at?’

‘Vlad the Impaler. I’ve been thinking about this. Those two in the bed?’

Watts nodded. The police operation that had gone disastrously wrong in the Milldean suburb of Brighton and had wrecked Watts’s career. It had been the armed entry into a house to arrest an armed robber. In the course of the operation four unarmed civilians had been shot dead. One had been identified as a local male prostitute but the others had never been identified. DNA indicated that two of them – a man and a woman who had been in bed together – were from somewhere in the Balkans.

‘So now the Serbian mafia have come for payback.’

‘Do you think Vlad could really be here?’ Watts said.

Tingley stared straight ahead.

‘God, I hope so.’

The Bath Arms was on the junction of two of the laines. A jewellers faced one side of it, a church converted into a pub the other. Watts and Tingley saw Gilchrist walk past the church in her civvies through a jumble of people. Jeans, white T-shirt and leather jacket were her off-duty uniform. She came into the pub, saw them, then about-turned and went out again.

‘Excuse me a sec,’ she called over her shoulder. She approached two people. One of them scowled, one of them grinned, then both moved away.

‘Pickpockets,’ she said when she rejoined the men. ‘All this jostling makes easy pickings.’

‘That’s very proactive of you,’ Watts said.

She smiled.

‘Just didn’t want to disturb our meeting by having to nick ’em. They’ll be back when we’ve gone, and in the meantime they’ll just shift shop to the North Laines.’

Watts looked at her hands. Her right fist was tightly clenched.

‘My dad used to come here in the thirties,’ he said. ‘Selling information to the papers about the Brighton Trunk Murder.’

His father, Donald, successful thriller writer under the name Victor Tempest, had been a bobby on the beat in Brighton in the early 1930s. Watts tried to picture him now as a young man propping up the bar.

‘This Stewart Nealson thing,’ Gilchrist said. ‘He was alive when he was found. They’d taken great care to miss the vital organs – the stake didn’t touch any of them.’

‘How long had he been impaled?’ Watts said.

‘All night.’

‘Poor sod.’

‘You know the worst thing?’

‘Worse than that?’

She nodded.

‘What?’

‘To have done it like that means they had obviously done it before.’

Tingley and Watts looked at each other.

‘Takes you back,’ Watts said.

‘Doesn’t it just.’

Gilchrist looked from one to the other.

‘What do you know about this?’

‘You know you said there was a theory those two in the bed in Milldean massacre were Albanian,’ Watts said.

She nodded.

‘Any chance they could be Serbian?’

She shrugged.

‘You two going to tell me what you know and I don’t?’

Watts gestured to Tingley.

‘The historical, fifteenth-century Vlad the Impaler was Rumanian. Transylvanian actually. He ruled Wallachia. He’s supposed to have been the source for the Dracula myth.’

‘So I’ve heard. He was a vampire. How have you picked up on this guy’s nickname so quickly?’

Tingley ignored her question.

‘Actually, the historical Vlad was best known for resisting the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. And for his cruel punishments. Pretty cruel age, though. His elder brother was blinded with hot iron stakes and buried alive. When Vlad came to power he burned people alive, decapitated many – but most of all he impaled hundreds.’

‘I don’t get the Dracula link.’

‘The family name was Dracul.’

‘OK. But now you think he’s loose on the South Downs. You’re sure you haven’t been spending too much time in Lewes?’

‘Jimmy and I served in the Balkans in the nineties,’ Watts said. ‘I was with the UN peacekeeping forces; Jimmy was doing – well, what Jimmy does. That’s when we first encountered another Vlad, real name Miladin Radislav.’

Watts had been stationed in Travnik, a hilltop village just north of Visegrad in Bosnia. He had been staggered by the wild beauty of this mountain region, where hamlets clung to the crags and steep valley sides, and the river Drina below seemed to burst out of a wall of rock. Travnik was a village of plum orchards and the scent of fruit was everywhere.