Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

They didn’t look behind the door. When the man they were escorting was halfway in the room, Tingley slammed the door into him. He shot the two bodyguards, the first in the back and the back of the head, the second, as he turned, in the chest and the side of the head. Perfect double taps.

The bullets made ‘phtt’ sounds because of the silencer. Tingley swung back the door and kicked the man trying to get up from the floor in the side of the head. He grabbed his feet and dragged him into the room, swung him over and dropped on to his back, swiping the door closed with his left hand. He grabbed the man’s head and pulled back.

‘I want names or I’ll break your back as well as your nose,’ he said, bearing down with his knees. ‘All the way back to the slum you came from.’

‘Go fuck yourself,’ the man said between gritted teeth.

Tingley grabbed his hair.

‘All the way back.’

‘ You did well, Sarah.’

Karen Hewitt dropped her hand on Gilchrist’s shoulder and left it there for a moment. Gilchrist stared at the ground between her trainers. She wanted to vomit.

‘How’s the girl?’ she said, gulping down air.

‘The girl?’ Hewitt said. ‘Oh – she’ll be fine.’

Gilchrist was being debriefed in one of the station’s ground-floor interview rooms. There was hot coffee on the table in the centre of the room, but even in her state she knew better than to drink it. The coffee in this place spawned as many jokes as microbes, if the jokes were to be believed.

She smiled at the thought. Tried to smile. She was flashing back to the beach. And still trying to figure out how she had missed the man she now knew was Radislav with her electric charge.

He had moved so quickly, knocking her arm to one side as he bowled into her. The charge had gone into the man to his right as she fell.

She had scrambled away from Radislav, twisting his arm to get his hand off her throat. She still clutched the volt gun as the other two stopped in their tracks, watching their friend writhe and judder on the shingle beach.

She looked down at the grey-faced man, who was scrambling to his feet with difficulty, his attempt to propel himself up with his left arm failing because his hand was sinking into the shingle.

She stood at bay, her arm extended with the volt gun pointing at each man in turn. From the corner of her eye she saw uniformed police making a slow progress towards them. Radislav saw them too. With an almost pantomime snarl he set off down the beach towards the West Pier, followed by the other two men.

Gilchrist’s legs were shaking by the time the uniforms arrived. Her volt gun was back in her pocket. Radislav and his two cohorts were too far away to chase. She abruptly sat down.

Charlie Laker had followed Hathaway to France or was already there. This much Watts surmised. He met Tingley on the Old Steine and drove them down to Newhaven.

‘I’m not quite sure why we’re doing this,’ he said. ‘How far are we willing to go in support of a gangster?’

‘It’s relative, isn’t it?’ Tingley said as they waited in the line of cars to board the ferry.

‘Are you willing to kill?’ Watts said. ‘Did you kill Kadire?’

‘I called the police to take care of him,’ he said.

‘And from now on?’

‘We’ll see what happens.’

They took the overnight ferry. The only time either had crossed to Dieppe before had been on a hovercraft that had done the journey in a bouncy two hours. This was a ferry brought up from Sicily.

The crew and stewards were Italian. They spoke little English or, indeed, French. It was a four-hour journey that turned into six because the captain, more used to the calmer waters of the Med, deemed the sea too rough to get into port without the help of tugs.

It took an hour for the tugs to arrive, another hour for them to haul the boat in backwards to its dock.

Tingley and Watts were only partly aware of this. They’d bought a bottle of duty-free brandy when the boat first left Newhaven. They’d laid on the narrow beds in the narrow cabin and sipped the brandy until around midnight. Conversation had been muted.

Both had dozed off, fully clothed, lying on their backs, lulled by the sea. They woke at four and went upstairs, expecting the boat to be docking. They waited aft by a big window, watching the lights of Dieppe as the tugs manoeuvred them into port.

They went down to the car deck, huge trucks dwarfing them on every side. Off the boat they drove around town looking for somewhere to get coffee and croissants.

The sky was drab, shedding reluctant light on sodden streets. They parked outside a neon-lit worker’s cafe on the other side of the harbour and sat peering out of the rain-streaked windows at the deserted promenade.

‘You a fan of Jean-Pierre Melville?’ Tingley said.

Watts looked blank.

‘French film-maker influenced by Yank gangster movies. Did one that starts with a bank robbery on a seafront just like this – rain sweeping across it.’

‘I’m not much of a movie-goer,’ Watts said.

The coffee was good, served in bowls. The croissants less so. The little pats of butter were straight from the freezer. Tingley put a shot of brandy in his coffee. Watts shook his head.

After twenty minutes Tingley looked at his watch.

‘Time to go.’

The road out to Varengeville wound along the coast, rising and falling. They passed the remains of World War Two gun emplacements. Tingley drove slowly, occasionally checking the rear-view mirror for anyone following.

On the ferry they had scoped out the other passengers. Mostly men, mostly rough-looking. Poor, blue-collar, lorry drivers and low-paid workers. None of them looked particularly like Balkan gangsters but how would they know? Besides, the grey-faced Miladin Radislav kept to his cabin for the entire journey.

They dropped down into a village right on the sea. People in hooded anoraks or raincoats were walking dogs on the shingle beach, the undertow of the water dragging at the pebbles, sucking it out to sea.

The road rose and curved away from the beach, up and inland. Varengeville was little more than a single street with a few shops along it. A boulangerie was open.

Tingley watched the road until Watts returned with some kind of quiche and two more coffees in Styrofoam cups.

‘We go through town and turn right on to a semi-paved road to get to the church. There’s a big car park.’

Tingley waved away the coffee and tart.

‘I’ll have it when we’re there.’

The unpaved road was narrow and went past a number of large houses protected by high walls. The church was on a promontory looking out over the sea. Tingley parked at the back of the car park off in a corner. They ate and drank their coffee in silence.

‘You know I’m going to follow the trail back,’ Tingley said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I hate this tidal wave of sewage washing over us all. It’s my duty to try to stop it.’

‘Your duty?’

Tingley shrugged.

‘Besides – what the hell else have I got to do?’

Watts looked over at the church.

‘Live?’ he said. ‘You know I can’t go with you.’

Tingley reached out and squeezed his arm.

‘You’ve got a family to win back,’ he said. He pushed open his car door. ‘Let’s take a look around.’

There was a headland beyond the church, reached by a path that dipped down into a little shingle cove then climbed up a sleep incline. They slithered in the rain. When they reached the top they could see the back of John Hathaway’s house.

Charlie Laker sat in the thirteenth-century church of St Valery, contemplating the gaudy, abstract stained-glass window done by Georges Braque in 1954. He’d seen the artist’s tomb in the graveyard earlier, topped by a mosaic of a white dove.