The Ties That Bind (23 page)

‘Did you ever think . . . and I’m just playing devil’s advocate here,’ said Luke, ‘Maybe he
has
changed. I mean, all this charity work. He’s given millions away and raised even more. You don’t do that if you’re pure evil, do you? And how much damage can he do now, realistically? When I met him, OK, there’s still a bit of an ego, but are you sure he’s still dangerous? He can’t even stand up on his own.’

‘Oh, Luke, don’t be so naive,’ she said sharply. ‘That man who drives him around, Vaughan Parfitt, he’s not someone you’d want to meet in a dark alley. As long as people have money, they have power.’

Luke had not thought of it that way before. If a man’s wealth was a measure of his power, then Grand was more formidable now than he had been then.

Chapter 33

On the walk home, Luke was so lost in thought that he was nearly run over twice, once crossing Kingsway against a red light and then by a cyclist into whose path he had wandered. Leaving aside the other unanswered questions – if Kathleen Duffy was not the girl in the red coat, then who was she? – things had gone better than he could have hoped. He had a first-hand account of Nye’s murder and confirmation that his theory about the killer had been on the money. He had a
living witness
. He’d got closer to the story than any of those mouse-mat investigators had managed, close enough to touch. Sandy’s drunken revelation would give his true novel a narrative as strong as anything on the fiction shelves.

Back in Temperance Place, he transcribed all he could remember of their conversation. His recall was sharper than hers would be. Would she remember what she had told him? That she had told him at all? He had left her fully-clothed in bed, a bowl at her side, and could only imagine the morning she was in for, kneeling on the bathroom floor, one arm slung around the toilet seat, heaving juniper regret into the bowl.

He justified his treatment of her by telling himself that if he played this carefully, he could do it
for
Sandy. He was growing fond of this woman with her claw-hold on glamour, the hopeless cause of her archive and her drowned ambition. Telling Grand’s story, exposing him not only as a murderer but also as Sandy’s blackmailer, would be a kind of revenge for what he had done to her. Grand had stolen a young woman’s career. It was entirely appropriate that Luke should use him to make his own. Again Luke had given Sandy his word that he would drop the story.

His goal, he now saw, had to be the retelling of Sandy’s story from the murderer’s mouth. The confession of course must be an original. His approach to Grand needed to be official and professional with no hint that Luke already knew what had happened on the West Pier. Luke took seriously his responsibility to Sandy and her secret. He had already exploited and compromised her enough.

As he committed the final words of her story to the page, an unasked question leaked between the lines, making him swear and punch the table. Why hadn’t he asked Sandy about Jasper Patten while her defences were down? The shock of her disclosure had flung other questions out of mind. He had twice missed the chance to bring up the writer’s name and it was too late now. He would have to trust that the dark and expensive arts of Marcus McRae would uncover his fate. He pictured the private eye now, an old-fashioned gumshoe in a gabardine and trilby, name etched on frosted glass. The thought of McRae’s expertise heightened Luke’s awareness of his own limitations.

He saved the document not on his hard drive but in a Dropbox file online that also contained his interviews so far with Joss Grand. This file was Luke’s insurance, backup in case something happened to the laptop. Or to him, he reflected as he checked its contents once again, although he still felt his usual invulnerability and in any case, information stored in the Cloud was not much use if no one else knew of its existence.

As he went to shut the computer down, tiredness made him clumsy, and he accidentally opened a folder of pictures. Here were the contents of Jem’s camera card, unseen by Luke since he had downloaded them at the beginning of the summer. The first few photographs showed them at the beginning of their relationship. Most of them together were taken by Jem at arm’s length because they so rarely socialised with other people. There they were hanging out in the flat, in a pub beer garden, walking by the Aire. There were a few from a weekend in summer in Northumbria, tanned and laughing. It was less than a year ago but they both looked so much younger. He wondered where Jem was now and how he was feeling, how he was healing. He was surprised to have heard nothing from Serena since the day Jem had gone into rehab. Was this silence evidence of recovery or relapse? Luke felt an urge to call Jem directly. He lit a cigarette and waited for it to pass.

He scrolled through more images. The rest were mostly of Luke; working, reading, sleeping, showering. He had forgotten about Jem’s habit of taking pictures of him when he wasn’t expecting it. There was one he hadn’t noticed before, of him in the bedroom, changing into his suit. Jem must have taken it the night they went out to dinner in Ilkley. Memories of that night soured the other pictures. Luke sent the whole folder into the trash, along with all the unread emails.

It was another three days before Luke saw Belinda’s car back in Temperance Place. When he knocked for her she was hand-beading the skirt of a Tudor dress with thimbles on both her forefingers, and immediately launched into a description of the different kinds of farthingale. It took an hour for him to guide the conversation in his direction. He was angry at himself for moulding the evidence to fit his theory rather than the other way around and just wanted to pinpoint where he had gone wrong.

‘You know Mrs Duffy’s coat that you made a copy of?’ Belinda gave a tiny pursed smile, as though this was the question she’d been expecting.

‘Yes?’

‘What colour was it?’

‘Brown. All her clothes were brown or black. She probably thought red was for whores.’

‘But you said it was an
exact
replica of the one Mrs Duffy lent you.’

‘Did I? I meant like in terms of the pattern and the techniques I used. The client wanted something a bit more colourful.’

‘But a red copy of a brown coat is not an exact copy.’ It was himself he was annoyed with, but how was Belinda to know that? Too late, he saw her expression turn from amusement to irritation.

‘Red, brown, what’s it to you? Luke, what
is
all this about?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing, it doesn’t matter. It’s only a stupid coat.’

Chapter 34

Luke felt his new knowledge about Jacky Nye’s murder as a terrible pressure. He was terrified that some nervous slip of the tongue would betray what Sandy had told him. Desperate to rush ahead to the events of that night, he had first to wade through the remainder of Grand’s youth.

With this chapter came a new reticence in his interviewee. Expansive on his boyhood capers and teenage petty crimes, now that they were approaching the real and punished violence of his twenties, Grand was reduced to monosyllables. His account of the attack on Mario Zammit, for example, was little more than a series of yeses and nos to Luke’s leading questions. It made Luke nervous: if it was this hard to get him to talk about the crime that was a matter of public record, how much harder would it be to extract from him the confession that must be his closest secret?

Luke’s desire to write ran far ahead of his progress. He knew to begin crafting the book at this stage was to tempt the fate he had only lately come to credit, and like all born-again believers his superstition was acute.

But he couldn’t help himself. He spread the strips of newsprint, the interview transcript and the few available photographs on the table before him, scrying into the images. Willing colour into the monochrome, he began to write.

It was not until the middle of the 1950s that Brighton began to rise from the ash and rubble of the War. New buildings shot up like weeds but it was in the low-lying Lanes, that old winding network of inns and cottages, that the really interesting new scene was to be found. Coffee bars and youth clubs catered for the emerging teenage market, and it was to these that Grand and his acolyte Nye were drawn. They weren’t there for the girls or the music, the newly fashionable frothy coffee or the ping-pong. They saw that money was being made, and they wanted their cut.

Now in their twenties, the boys had grown in ambition and stature. Hanging up their boxing gloves, they squared up to the Brighton underworld with a bare-knuckled audacity.

Joss Grand today claims that his genius was to marry intelligence with brutality and it is true that he seemed to have a flair for human resources. From his choice of Jacky Nye as a right-hand man downwards, he was able to sniff out those who occupied the twilight area between legal and illegal. Banking on the fact that a crook can’t go to the police like an honest man can, he and his henchmen moved in on the independent bookmakers, the bars serving smuggled spirits, the clubs with hostess girls who would take you upstairs for a good time if you knew how to ask.

Within these shady operations, they knew exactly who to target. To attack those in power would be suicide. Crooks, like legitimate businessmen, have their supply chains; a thief cannot work in isolation, and Grand and Nye could not have hoped to take on Brighton’s underground trade union and win. Instead, they went straight for the frontline, making their first offers of protection to the migrant workers, the journeyman bouncers, those on the margins of the business. Police reports from the time state that Nye would restrain the man while Grand made his brutal mark along with his demands. The footsoldiers’ slashed cheeks or their acid-blistered faces warned the proprietors of the consequences if protection was refused. Grand and Nye moved swiftly, sometimes targeting a dozen businesses in a single day. By the time those in control could compare notes, the young men already had a stranglehold on the town. No one dared to suggest, even in private, that the emperor might be naked.

Until Mario Zammit.

No one is sure whether it was arrogance or naivety that made Zammit call the boys’ bluff in the most humiliating of ways. He might, but for a well-timed police raid, have paid with his life.

Mario Zammit ran a coffee shop in the Lanes, and operated on the borders of Brighton’s criminal brotherhood. Photographs show a man with a spread nose and thick black hair only partly tamed by brilliantine. He exaggerated his Maltese heritage, thickening his accent to intimidate the local criminal fraternity. In 1957, anyone from that island was still automatically considered dangerous in criminal circles thanks to the enduring legend of the Messina brothers, the ruthless mob who had ruled Soho for decades.

The Milk Bar’s name belied the true purpose of Zammit’s premises. The place itself was wholesome enough; a long chrome bar, Formica tables and red benches that looked and felt like real leather, a glowing jukebox stacked with Elvis, Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte. But through a fringed plastic curtain and up narrow stairs was a private cinema, carpeted from floor to wall to ceiling, the better to muffle the unmistakeable soundtracks of hardcore pornographic films smuggled in from the continent.

When Grand and Nye offered Zammit protection, he scoffed. Who, he wanted to know, were they protecting him from? The low-level firms with controlling interests in local business had always given the man from Malta a wide berth. That he had pointed out this truth was uncomfortable: that he had laughed in their faces was unforgivable.

The following evening, Grand and Nye returned to the Milk Bar and, hat brims pulled low over their faces, paid to view a Dutch film whose content transcended the language barrier. Afterwards, when the other punters shuffled out into the darkness that had hooded their arrival, the two friends remained seated. As Zammit emerged from the projector room, they closed in on him.

Nye was absent for most of the torture. He left Grand to carve and to slash, to threaten and to promise while he stripped Zammit’s projection room of its contents. He stacked canisters of film one on top of the other to make a silver totem that he carried on foot the few hundred yards to his childhood home in Redemption Row.

Unfortunately for Joss Grand, this was the day that the local constabulary, who had long known about Zammit’s upstairs enterprise, decided to raid the Milk Bar. The arresting officer, the then Constable John Rochester, met Grand on the stairs.

While one police car took Grand to the station, another was dispatched to arrest Nye, as Rochester believed that it was pointless to incarcerate Grand while Nye remained at liberty. The big man was dumb but he was obedient, and Grand would have operated him like a robot arm, even from the inside.

Just as the Chicago law enforcers of the thirties famously got Al Capone on tax evasion charges, so the Brighton Constabulary of 1957 decided to charge Nye for theft and possession of indecent images. The downside of this was that by this point Zammit was only in possession of one film, so they couldn’t send him away for long. However, even his few months in prison had the desired effect. After his release, he returned to Malta and did not set foot on British soil again.

Rochester was praised for his triple collar. But the fact that no rival firm moved in to fill the vacuum Grand and Nye left suggests that they were arrested a little
too
early. Grand and Nye had not yet amassed anything like the power that would eventually come to them, and so when they disappeared, the vacuum was not nearly big enough for anyone to identify, let alone fill. It seems that no one really foresaw what they were to become. Could they have stopped it even if they did? Had they been sent down a few years later, Rochester could have amassed enough charges to put them away for life.