Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘Does Lizzy know? That you’re bisexual? Would it upset the apple cart at home if it came out?’

He snorted.

‘You obviously haven’t met her friend Erica.’ He sighed. ‘Bob, I have no idea why you’ve come today. I’m truly sorry your career has gone down the pan. I can understand your lashing out. But lashing out at me will achieve nothing but more grief.’

‘So far as that goes, I know you’re somehow involved. Maybe you were actually the one pushing for me to be fired. What I don’t understand is that I thought we were friends. Why screw me over?’

‘Ah, yes – friendship. Forged in youth, tempered in battle and all that. But don’t you think we were pushed together by circumstances? Our fathers. Do you even know how our fathers met?’

I shook my head.

‘In Brighton in the thirties. They were in the police force together.’

‘I know that,’ I said.

‘Ask your father about it.’

I didn’t respond. He sighed.

‘You and me – we never really had much in common, except the odd girlfriend. Politics and police – they don’t mix well, you know.’

He got up in one fluid motion from the sofa.

‘Bob. I saw you as a courtesy. There’s nothing here for you. If you try to embroil me in this, I say only one thing. Hunker down.’

I walked over to him. We were of a height but I was broader. I stood closer to him than he liked. I wanted to hit him, wanted to pummel him back into his soft sofa. He saw it in my eyes and stepped back. He didn’t take his eyes off me, though.

‘You’re out of your depth, Bob. Let it go. Accept your fate.’

I moved past him, opened the door and went out into the hall. As I swung open the front door, I called back:

‘Never.’

Which was a reasonable parting line, except that I hadn’t a clue what I could do to change things.

Tingley pressed the doorbell and heard it ring somewhere in the back of the house. He looked across at the Union Jack fluttering on top of the tall flagpole stuck in the middle of the impeccable front lawn. He shook his head. Tongdean Drive.

A small, neat man opened the door and stepped aside to allow Tingley to enter. Neither man said anything. Another, bigger man was waiting in the wide hallway to lead Tingley through to the back of the house.

Hathaway was sitting in a faux-Victorian conservatory which looked out over a long stretch of garden, mostly given over to another neat lawn. Tingley presumed that the building at the bottom of the garden housed a swimming pool.

The gangster, in cashmere pullover and neatly pressed blue slacks, didn’t rise but gestured to a seat opposite him. Tingley sat, aware that the man who’d led him here was standing just behind him.

There was a sports programme playing on a massive TV screen. Hathaway pressed the remote and turned to Tingley.

‘So have you figured out what’s in it for me, Mr Tingley?’

Tingley shrugged.

‘My eternal gratitude.’

Hathaway leant forward and smiled a brilliant smile.

‘Now that’s worth something if, as I’m assuming, your gratitude is a liquid currency?’

Tingley shook his head.

‘It doesn’t change into anything more concrete, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Shame – that’s exactly what I mean.’ Hathaway eased back into his seat. ‘Then I don’t see exactly how I can help you.’

‘You’ve checked my references.’

‘But you don’t want a job.’ Hathaway grinned again. ‘Do you?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I know that – as best I can gather – you have been a very bad boy on your government’s behalf. Very bad. Tsk, tsk. I know that your friends and my friends in the shadow world are about equal. I don’t know that I can tell you anything you don’t already know.’

Tingley looked up and behind at the man standing guard over him.

‘Do you think I could have a glass of water?’

The man looked at Hathaway.

‘Yeah, I’ll have a beer and a bowl of chips – tell the cook.’ He looked at Tingley. ‘Beer better?’

Tingley shook his head.

‘Next time,’ he said.

Hathaway gestured at the man’s retreating back.

‘He wasn’t a threat to you, you know. Or protection for me. Knowing what I know about you, if you came here to take me out, there’d be little he or I could do about it.’ Hathaway patted his chest. ‘I don’t carry a weapon. I’m no longer into chop suey or any of that Bruce Lee shit.’

‘Nor I,’ Tingley said quietly.

‘What is your martial art of choice? Just out of interest. That Brazilian thing? I hear the Hindi system is pretty effective.’

Tingley shook his head.

‘It’s an Israeli thing – a street-fighting thing.’

Hathaway smiled with his perfect teeth again.

‘The Jews have a mano a mano self-defence system?’ He laughed coarsely. ‘I assume it’s a post-World War Two thing. Back then it was grovelling and pleading, wasn’t it?’

Tingley simply looked at him. Hathaway continued to chuckle then said:

‘Tingley, I play consequences. You’re a bright guy, you’ve figured that out. That’s why I know I can send my boy out of the room and I’m going to be safe from you, despite what you did to Cuthbert – who is straining at the leash to do terrible things to you, might I note.’

‘Consequences?’

Hathaway pointed a finger at Tingley. ‘You harm me and you lose – in ways too horrendous to describe on such a sunny day – every single person related to you or close to you. Every person remotely connected to you. Every person who remotely knows you. Every person you passed in the street today.’

‘The Colombian way,’ Tingley said.

Hathaway shrugged.

‘Them and others. Colombian drug-dealers, Russian mafia, Albanian headbangers, ex-IRA psychopaths, Serb war criminals turned villains – a bloody United Nations of sick crooks have transformed the nature of violence in the UK. We home-grown boys have got to big up to keep up.’ He shrugged again. ‘Nature of the beast. Capitalism, that is. The unacceptable face of.’

Hathaway’s man returned with a tray and handed Tingley a glass of water. As Tingley took a long drink, the man put a pint glass of beer, a bowl of chips and salt and pepper on the table. Tingley drained his glass and handed it back.

‘Thanks.’

Hathaway pushed the bowl of chips towards him. Tingley shook his head. Hathaway put the salt and pepper in the ashtray and pushed them to the other side of the table.

‘You have a problem with condiments?’ Tingley said.

‘Only the word.’ A smile at the corners of Hathaway’s mouth didn’t make it any further. ‘I’m a recovering saltaholic. Don’t ever bring crisps into my presence.’

Tingley waited as Hathaway tucked in.

‘OK, I’m going to give you something,’ Hathaway said through a mouthful of chips. ‘Just so you’ll go away. You poking about is potentially bad for business. There’s a delicate balance and I don’t want you upsetting it.’ He reached for his glass of beer. ‘Never got this modern thing about drinking from the bottle. Disgusting habit. Got it from the Aussies, who are, by and large, a disgusting people. I happen to have it on good authority they shag kangaroos.’

‘Wouldn’t the tail get in the way? Even supposing they could catch up with one?’

Hathaway’s eyes glinted.

‘Maybe it’s koala bears. My point remains the same.’

‘Only the country is different,’ Tingley said. ‘Could you get to the point? I’m not getting any younger.’

Hathaway’s smile was at half-wattage.

‘There’s a close relationship – you might call it a synergy, if you were so inclined – between some local politicians, some national politicians, local criminal entrepreneurs such as myself, elements of Her Majesty’s constabulary and those government employees who live in the shadow world.’