Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

Gilchrist was feeling both overwhelmed and out of her depth. So many deaths; so much violence. She’d worked out ferociously at the gym but now enjoyed the sight of the sea, calm after the fury of the storm some days before.

She dropped down to the lower promenade beside the beach and ran towards the West Pier. She loved running, loved getting the breath and the legs in rhythm. Sometimes felt she could run forever. She’d applied for the London Marathon but hadn’t yet heard back about her application.

She looked out at the tangled remains of the West Pier as she approached it. A group of teenage girls were gathered at the water’s edge. She watched them as she ran. She could vaguely hear their shouts. They were throwing stones into the sea.

After another hundred yards Gilchrist realized from the angle of their arms that they were throwing them at something.

When she also realized that some were using the cameras on their mobile phones she lost the rhythm of her breath. She had guessed what they were doing. Stumbling and gasping, she headed across the beach towards them.

‘Hey,’ she yelled, her voice breaking as her breath went again. She stumbled as she crunched through the pebbles. She called again.

Only when she was within fifty yards of the girls did they turn at what were by now her screeches. And only then did she recognize that she was running into a bad situation. She didn’t know what they were up to, but she did know there were about ten feral teenage girls now interested in her. Each one with a stone in her hand.

Gilchrist was big and strong but she knew about pack animals. She slowed to get her breath and her footing. The girls, hyped up, were actually snarling. Gilchrist was thinking that a Sussex University academic she’d briefly dated would have made a meal out of this apparent proof that pubescent girls are so overwhelmed by hormones they can become wild animals.

Personally, Gilchrist believed they were just horrible girls, though she was also thinking about vampire films as she slowed to a walk.

She was about twenty yards away before she saw the huddled form lying on the pebble beach below them.

‘Police,’ she called. ‘What are you doing?’

The girls gave her that same feral look.

‘Police, right,’ said a blonde with a lot of metal in her face. ‘Fuck off, bitch, or we’ll tear your tits off.’

Sarah, breathing deeply, walked steadily towards them. The girls watched her approach, intense looks on their faces. The body lying on the beach didn’t move.

The girls looked to be about fourteen or fifteen, some younger. One of them pointed her phone and photographed Gilchrist.

‘Who is that lying on the beach? They need help.’

‘You really a copper?’ a mixed-race girl with her red hair in dreadlocks said, her chin thrust out.

Gilchrist wondered about knives. Her training told her to withdraw and call for backup, but she didn’t want to leave whoever was lying on the shore to the mercy of these savages. She made a decision.

‘Get on your way now,’ she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.

‘What – you not going to arrest us?’ metal-face sneered. ‘Why have you stopped? Don’t want to lose your tits?’

‘Just go on your way. All of you.’

‘Nah,’ the red-haired girl said. ‘Come on down and we’ll help you with your inquiries.’

The other girls laughed but Gilchrist had never heard a chillier sound.

‘Go along now or you’ll be in serious trouble.’

‘Ain’t we already?’ metal-face said. ‘We’ve really messed her up, you know.’

Gilchrist took a deep breath. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She didn’t have a phone with her, didn’t have her warrant card. Could she bluff this out? She had to try to help the girl lying so still. She needed to get to a phone to do that. The nearest phones were just ahead of her, snapping her picture.

She put her hand in her tracksuit trouser pocket. Gripped the oblong piece of plastic there. Her dirty little secret.

She walked slowly towards the metal-faced girl. She was expecting that at any moment they would throw their stones at her. At this distance she wasn’t sure how accurate they would be.

‘You’re making such a fucking serious mistake, bitch,’ the girl said.

‘You’ve already made yours,’ Gilchrist said, stopping two feet from the girl, towering over her. As she stopped, the other girls started to move round her.

The red-haired girl looked beyond her. A man’s voice came from behind. Accented.

‘You sluts – we have a present for you unless you go away.’

She heard crunching footsteps, more than one.

The teenage girls stared resistance, then, as one, started to run off down the beach.

Hathaway turned. Four men were approaching her in a loose line. The grey-faced one slightly ahead of the others smiled, but there was no warmth in it.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘No problem, policewoman Gilchrist,’ he said.

Gilchrist stepped back, her feet sinking into the shingle. This wasn’t right. She risked a look at the unconscious girl beside her. There was blood everywhere. A bruised and bloodied face. Water was swirling nearer to her as the tide rose. Gilchrist looked down the beach at the gang of girls scrambling across the pebbles. The men were just a few yards away.

Gilchrist used to carry Mace. Illegally imported from the US, illegally carried. Now she had something better. Certainly better than the officially sanctioned Taser she used to carry when on duty.

The Taser was fine in its way. You could use it from fifteen feet away. You fired its two darts on the end of their fifteen feet wires and pumped 50,000 volts into your antagonist. Screwed up their neuromuscular system – for the next fifteen minutes the person on the receiving end was useless.

But it was a one-shot weapon and came under firearm regulations, so she was no longer allowed to use one after being stripped of her firearm privileges.

Her dirty little secret didn’t have wires. The XR5000 Nova Stun Gun was powered by a nine-volt cadmium rechargeable battery – the kind used in transistor radios. It produced, through two brass studs, a sawtooth 47,000 volts in around one and a half seconds at up to twenty cycles per second. Didn’t burn, bruise or damage tissue. Just incapacitated somebody within three seconds.

Four men. She wasn’t sure it could recharge in time for four men. She swept it from her pocket and pointed it at the leering, grey-faced man. At least she’d get him.

Tingley phoned Watts.

‘I’ve crossed the line too.’

‘I didn’t know you had a line.’

Tingley was silent.

‘Sorry, that came out wrong.’

‘I know where they are.’

‘And Charlie Laker?’

‘Him next.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

Tingley looked out of the flat’s window at the Ravenscourt Park below. A Polish neighbourhood since the Second World War. Now the hidey-hole for Serbian gangsters.

Kadire had talked.

‘I’m already here.’

Tingley had meant it when he said the Balkan gang couldn’t be stopped. But maybe they could be stopped from coming to Brighton.

He watched a car draw up. A big man got out of the front passenger side and scanned the street. The back doors opened and the other men got out on either side. Both were lean, wiry. One of the men scanned the street whilst the other moved to the door of the apartment block and was lost from view. The car drove away.

Tingley moved away from the window and went to stand beside the door. He heard the ping of the lift down the corridor, then nothing until the key in the lock. He hefted the Sig Sauer Hathaway had given him.

The two bodyguards came in first. They scanned the room but weren’t really expecting anybody to be here – Tingley had made sure he’d replaced the couple of security indicators on the door. They had no reason to suspect anyone was in the room.