Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘May I see him for a moment?’

I would have liked to leave her on the doorstep but I knew I couldn’t.

‘Please,’ I said, stepping aside so she could enter our home.

She walked from the hips and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Of course, at that age I couldn’t take my eyes off any woman.

I was going to take her into the living room, but I was sure she was a threat and that seemed too intimate as it was full of family photos.

At the same time, I felt for her, didn’t want to pain her unnecessarily. Even without knowing, I knew who she was.

I’m not explaining this very well. I sensed this woman was trouble for our family and I wanted to defend my mother from any pain – but I also felt for this woman. Perhaps my feelings for her were callow – simply because she was beautiful.

I took her to Dad’s study.

‘I’ll get him,’ I said, ushering her into the room.

Afterwards I wished I’d taken her somewhere else. Maybe if I had, my mother would never have realized who she was.

‘And?’ my mother said, raising herself in her deckchair and looking back towards the house. My father looked up, frowning. He too glanced at the house.

My father’s study looked over the back garden. And now the woman – I realized I’d not asked for her name – appeared at the window of my father’s study.

My father rose abruptly.

‘I’ll see to it,’ he said to my mother. But not before she had seen the woman too.

She looked down. Sank back into her deckchair.

My father strode past me. I didn’t look at my mother, though I became uncomfortably aware that I was standing over her. I looked towards the house. As my father entered through the back door, the woman withdrew from the window, fading from view. Now all the window showed was the reflection of our family in the garden. Without my father.

He was in the house for ten minutes. He didn’t say anything when he came back out into the garden. He went back to his table and picked up his pen. My mother was looking at the book in her hand.

I swayed in the hammock, thinking about that beautiful woman, watching my mother and father pretend.

‘You know the man who was shot in the bathroom at Milldean as Little Stevie,’ Gilchrist stated, to get it on the record.

Parker was staring at her breasts again but he was fading. He was probably dealing on a daily basis with withdrawal.

‘Fucking little scuzz,’ he said, but without heat. ‘I gave him one once, just to show him what’s what.’

‘Why was he there?’

He rubbed his face, blinked a few times.

‘About a deal…’

‘What’s his last name?’

He dipped his head down to his left in an odd gesture, as if trying to see what was behind his left arm.

‘The last name, Gary.’

Gilchrist was watching him fade in and out. She was trying to stay calm but she was worried he was going to fade out before he’d given her anything. However, his drifting mind was working in her favour.

‘Never had no last name. Just Little Stevie. About a deal…’

‘You’re saying you know who those people were in the house in Milldean and why they were there.’

He frowned.

‘Am I?’

‘Are you?’

‘Fucking right.’

‘How do you know them?’

‘What about my fucking deal?’

‘I’ll talk to somebody. How do you know them?’

‘You don’t know my dad, do you?’

‘Mr Hathaway, good to meet you.’ Tingley offered his hand to the tanned, well-dressed man who bore a remarkable resemblance to an older Simon Cowell. Hathaway considered for a moment then gave Tingley’s hand a firm shake.

‘Hear you’ve been rearranging my friend’s furniture. Mr Cuthbert, I mean. Bit chancy that. You’d better be watching your back from now on.’

‘I have other people doing that.’

Hathaway tilted his head.

‘Oh, that’s right – you’re connected to some very secret people, aren’t you? Main reason I agreed to see you – courtesy to them.’

‘We know some of the same people?’

‘Doubt that, but let’s say the same kind of people. Our world is a small world.’

‘Our world?’

‘The shadow world.’

The world beyond the law. Tingley nodded and looked round.

They were in a bar on the boardwalk at the marina. The tables outside overlooked a small harbour, and through the open windows he could see brilliant blue sky and hear the chink and rattle of the hawsers and lines on the yachts moored there. Gulls were screeching.

Bright outside, gloomy inside. The bar was like the inside of somewhere Moroccan, maybe Indian. Rugs strewn around, some bench seating, plump cushions on low divans, hookahs on shelves, turquoise and terracotta tiled walls and floors. Tingley gestured round.

‘Business good?’

‘Students love it – all this. And the cheap shots.’

Tingley had been checking out Hathaway’s business interests online when the text had come through summoning him to this meeting. Although Hathaway’s power base was still in Milldean and he was into all the same scuzzy stuff as Cuthbert, he had his fingers in many other pies. He was a major landlord in Brighton and Newhaven and was said to use brutal methods when he wanted people out. He had shares in a recycling plant and there were doubts about exactly what he was recycling. And he ran a security operation providing bouncers for clubs and bars all along the south coast. That operation probably cloaked a protection racket.

Then there were the totally legitimate businesses, like this and other bars, a country house hotel over near Worthing and a small chain of dry cleaners in Burgess Hill, Haywards Heath and Crawley.

He lived in one of the large Spanish-style villas – haciendas really – on Tongdean Drive on the outskirts of the city near the Devil’s Dyke.

‘So what are you poking around for, Mr Tingley?’

Hathaway’s similarity to Cowell was quite striking. He obviously worked out every day. Although Tingley knew he must be in his early sixties, his T-shirt underneath his open suit jacket was tight.

‘I’m trying to find out what happened in Milldean on the night of the massacre.’

‘Police cock-up, as I hear it.’

Hathaway led Tingley into an alcove and sat down on a low, quilted bench behind an equally low table. He leant back against the wall.

‘I find these seats bloody uncomfortable but the kids seem to like them.’

Tingley sat on a similar seat opposite him.

‘Do you know who the people in the house were and why they were gathered there?’ Tingley said.

‘Do you?’

‘That’s what I’d like to find out.’

‘Why come to me?’

Tingley looked him in the eye.

‘You’re The Man.’

‘And what’s in it for me?’ Hathaway said. ‘Anything to trade? No? Thought not.’

‘You know I know some important people.’

Hathaway nodded. A pretty young woman walked past the alcove.

‘Amy.’ She started towards them.

‘Hookah?’ Hathaway said to Tingley. ‘With an “ah” on the end, that is. No? Just me, thanks, sweetheart.’

He watched her walk away, slowly shaking his head.

‘Sometimes the way a girl walks is enough to make you glad you’re alive – don’t you agree, Mr Tingley? Or, I suppose, the way a man walks, if you’re that way inclined, as a surprising number of people are – and not just here in Gomorrah-on-sea.’

‘What kind of trade do you have in mind?’ Tingley said.

‘Your soul?’ Hathaway grinned. ‘I don’t know whether you’d consider that too high or too low a price to pay. Supposing you haven’t already signed it away in the course of your secret escapades. Still yours to bargain with, is it?’