Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

‘Then get closer.’

Radislav was walking in circles.

‘And me? I’ve been here for two weeks for nothing?’

Charlie watched him bare his teeth. He chuckled.

‘I’m sure we can find someone for you. Do you kill coppers?’

Hathaway took the old acoustic guitar out on to the balcony and sat on the front edge of a wicker chair. He picked at the strings, running the damaged fingers of his left hand up and down the frets. Long ago he’d burned his fingers. The scars remained, though he always tried to keep them hidden. But some chord shapes he’d never been able to do because the scars made his fingers too stiff.

All those years ago, Dawn had tried to deal with the burns with butter from the kitchen and snow from the garden. Before her love for him turned to hate.

He couldn’t say he missed Dawn. When she’d gone off with Charlie, she’d cut herself off from him. Whether because he’d killed their father, he didn’t know.

The lights in the garden threw up random shapes and deep shadows in the undergrowth. The pool was opalescent green beneath its glass roof.

There was movement in the trees to his left. A miniscule alteration to the depth of shadow. It might have been nothing. He continued to play, head bent over his guitar. He knew better than to try and sing. He was thinking about John Martyn the night he’d chased his manager down the centre aisle and whopped Dan in the chops. Then of the last time he’d seen Martyn, bloated, missing a leg, performing in the Dome concert hall.

Martyn’s fingers had seemed too thick to separate the guitar strings, his voice had been nothing more than a growl. One of Hathaway’s men running the get-out had told him that Martyn’s stump was bleeding at the end of the evening.

Hathaway hadn’t gone backstage to say hello. Some things are best left to lie.

Hathaway liked his balcony. The bulletproof, matt glass canopy did not reflect light, although brightly polished, so it was difficult to see that it was there. The sniper didn’t know.

When the first bullet pocked the glass above Hathaway’s head, he carried on playing. There were two more rapid attempts. Hathaway could see the sniper was good by the way the pock marks were grouped so closely together.

He put down his guitar and went back into his house to wait for the sniper to be brought to him. He assumed it would be the Albanian, Drago Kadire. He walked to the bar, nodding at Jimmy Tingley as he passed him.

‘Rum and pep?’

Kadire proffered a photograph from his pocket. It was the bridge at Drina.

‘You know this bridge?’

‘I know this bridge,’ Tingley said.

‘Do you know that the Turks built it. They buried twins in it to placate the spirit of the river Drina. Stoja and Ostoja. The mason couldn’t bring himself to kill the twins so he left a loophole through which their mother might feed them. The bridge took seven years to build. She lived on the riverbank each day and sold herself to the builders to get the food to feed them. But in seven years they grew. Their quarters became too small for them. As they crouched there, moaning, the mason did what he should have done years before. He sealed them up.

‘Their mother still had milk in her breasts for all those years. She had suckled them all that time. Over the centuries the mother’s milk still flowed from the bridge – a white stream from between the stones that was scraped off and sold to mothers without milk. Wild doves nest in the loophole now.’

Kadire looked down at his hands.

‘I was born in this village.’

‘You were a barber like your friend Radislav?’

‘He’s no friend of mine,’ Kadire spat out. ‘I am Albanian. He is Serbian. I tolerate him.’

‘So you had a better job?’

Kadire laughed.

‘No education. I was bright enough but my father lost his job – taken by Mussulmen, of course. I had to go to work young.’

‘How many times has that bridge been fought over? How much blood has been spilt over it? Spilt on it.’

‘I am no historian.’ Kadire leaned forward and pointed at the picture.

‘I was born in that house there – that one, below the bridge on the right. The one with the moss growing on the roof. You see it?’

Tingley looked closer.

‘I see it.’

Kadire dropped the photograph on the table.

‘My mother was raped on that rock there. Beside the bridge, stretched out on that rock, held down by two men whilst the third raped her. And then they swapped. When they had finished with her they cut her throat and threw her in the river.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tingley said, and he was. ‘During the Civil War?’

‘Before. Long before.’

‘They were Muslims?’

Kadire didn’t answer.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The men who did it were sorrier. I was watching from that small window up there – the one with the bars upon it? I saw them clearly. And I followed them. I was stealthy even as my eyes burned.’

‘Were they Bosniaks?’

‘I learned patience. I took them all some years later. I made them suffer. And their families. Rape. Slow roasting.’

Tingley looked down.

‘Revenge in the Balkans.’

‘Revenge.’ He dropped the photograph on the table in front of him. ‘It is a beautiful bridge, is it not?’

‘Drago, if you don’t talk to me you’ll have to talk to Hathaway. He’s not a gentle man. Where is Radislav and where is Charlie Laker?’

‘I am a soldier. A sniper.’

‘Where are they, Drago? We have to stop this.’

Kadire spat on Hathaway’s oriental rug and closed his eyes. Hathaway touched Tingley on the shoulder.

‘My turn now.’

The men crowded into Reilly’s room. Four, five, six of them. Reilly opened his eyes and waved the one hand he had above his sheets.

‘Bit mob-heavy aren’t you?’ he croaked. ‘No wonder your country was always getting pissed on if it takes six of you to deal with one old man.’

‘You are the man who is going to be pissed on,’ the nearest man said, stepping towards the bed. ‘Then much worse. And you can blame Mr John Hathaway.’

‘He’s going to have your mates,’ Reilly said. ‘If he hasn’t already.’

‘And we’re going to have you.’

‘You Serbians. You know, I’m a great reader. Always have been. I’ve read a lot of your greatest writer. Ivo Andric. You’ve probably never even heard of him, have you?’

None of the Serbians responded.

‘Typical lowlife scum. Read him and you might learn to take proper pride in your country.’ Reilly tucked his hand back under his blankets. ‘In fact, come a little closer all of you and I’ll quote his words.’

‘We’re coming closer, old man,’ the first man said, yanking Reilly’s blankets off him.

They all looked first at his wizened, naked body and the tubes coming out of him. Then they saw the curled piece of metal in his right hand. The pin of the World War Two grenade that he proffered in his left.

Tingley looked at Kadire sprawled on the plastic sheets on the garage floor and thought how pathetic he looked, one ear hanging off, his nose mashed to one side of his face, blood pumping out of him.

‘This is not the way to get information,’ he said.

‘We’ll see,’ Hathaway said.

Then his phone rang.

‘Yes. Patrice.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘Did you warn him? And Barbara? Thank you, Patrice. I’m on my way.’

Hathaway dropped his phone into his pocket. He turned to Tingley.

‘Sean Reilly is dead, but he took six of them with him. I’m going to France.’ He gestured at Kadire. ‘Do it your way – but do it.’

Miladin Radislav killed coppers. He killed anything and anybody if the mood was upon him. He watched the copper jogging along the seafront. He itched to kill her.