“Done what?” Rebus was lowering himself onto a chair.
“Got me imagining things.” King paused, studying his visitor. “You don’t look much younger than me.”
“Thanks for that.”
“But it means you’ll remember the Mods? Early sixties?”
“I’m not sure they made it this far north. We had the music, though…”
“I grew up in London. Had the Lambretta and the clothes. My wages either went on one or the other. Weekend trips — Brighton and Margate. I liked Brighton better…” King drifted off, his eyes becoming unfocused. There was a tumor in him that had grown too large to be dealt with. Rebus wondered what painkillers the doctors were giving him. He had a headache of his own — maybe they had a few pills to spare. There was loud wheezing from somewhere beyond the curtain — another patient jolted into life by a coughing fit. King blinked away whatever memories he’d been replaying.
“Your wife,” Rebus said. “When she called us she said there was something you wanted to say.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” King retorted, sounding irritated. “I’m telling you the story.”
“About your days as a Mod?”
“My last time in Brighton.”
“You and your scooter?”
“And a hundred others like me. It was a religion to us, something we were going to take to the grave.” He paused. “And we hated those Rockers almost as much as they hated us.”
“Rockers were bikers?” Rebus checked, receiving a slow nod of agreement from King. “Pitched battles on the seafront,” he went on. “I remember it from Quadrophenia.”
“Anything and everything became your weapon. I always had a blade with me, taken from my mum’s cutlery drawer. But there were bottles, planks of wood, bricks…”
Rebus knew now what was coming, and leaned in a little closer toward the bed.
“So what happened?” he prompted.
King was thoughtful for a moment, then took a hit of oxygen before saying what needed to be said. “One of them — jeans stained with oil, three-inch turn-ups, leather jacket, and T-shirt — he starts running the wrong way, gets separated from the pack. A few of us peel off and go after him. He knows he’s not going to outrun us, so dives into a hotel just off the esplanade. Far as I remember we were laughing, like it was a game. But it wasn’t, not once we’d cornered him in one of the storerooms off the kitchen. Fists and feet to start with, but then he’s got a blade out and so have I, and I’m faster than him. The knife — my mum’s knife — was still sticking out of his chest when we ran.” King looked up at Rebus, eyes widening a little. “I left him there to die. That’s why I need you to arrest me.” His eyes were filling with liquid. “Because all the years since, I’ve never gone a day without remembering, waiting for your lot’s knock at the door. And you never came, did you? You never came…”
Back in his second-floor tenement flat, Rebus smoked a couple of cigarettes and dug out his vinyl copy of The Who’s Quadrophenia. He flicked through the booklet of photos and the little short story that accompanied them. Then he lifted his phone and called DI Siobhan Clarke.
“Well?” she asked.
“It’s archaeology,” he told her. “Summer of sixty-four. I’m assuming it landed on my lap because someone mistook me for Old Father Time. Didn’t even happen in Edinburgh.”
“Where, then?”
“Brighton. Mods and Rockers. Blood in the nostrils and amphetamines in the blood.” He exhaled cigarette smoke. “Nearly fifty years ago and a confession from a man with days left to live — always supposing he did it. Stuff the hospital is giving him, he could be telling us next he’s Keith Moon’s long-lost brother.”
“So what do you think?”
“I just wish he’d asked for a priest instead.”
“Worth bouncing it south?”
“You mean to Brighton?”
“Want me to see if I can find a CID contact for you?”
Rebus stubbed out the cigarette. “King did give me a couple of names, guys who were there when he stabbed the victim.”
“The victim being?”
“Johnny Greene. The murder was in the papers. Frightened the life out of King and that was the end of his Mod days.”
“And the others who were with him?”
“He never saw them again. Part of the deal he seems to have made with himself.”
“Fifty years he’s been living with this…”
“Living and dying with it.”
“If he’d confessed at the time, he’d have served his sentence and been rid of it.”
“I thought it best not to bring that up with him.”
He heard her sigh. “I’ll find you someone in Brighton,” she eventually said. “A burden shared and all that.”
He thanked her and ended the call, then slipped the first of Quadrophenia’s two discs out of its sleeve and placed it on the deck. He’d never been a Mod, couldn’t recall ever seeing a Mod, but at one time he’d known this record well. He poured himself a malt and turned up the volume.
For the first time in several months, after an unusually high spate of murders in the city of Brighton this spring, Roy Grace finally had some time to concentrate on cold case reviews, which was part of his remit in the recent merger of the Sussex and Surrey Major Crime branches. He had just settled at a desk in the cold case office when DS Norman Potting entered without knocking, as usual, his bad comb-over looking thinner than ever and reeking, as normal, of pipe tobacco smoke. He was holding an open notepad.
“Had an interesting call earlier this morning from a DI in Scotland, Chief, name of Siobhan Clarke. Pity is, she had an English accent. I’ve always fancied a bit of Scottish tottie.”
Grace raised his eyes. “And?”
“One of her colleagues went to see a bloke in hospital in Edinburgh — apparently terminally ill, wanted to make a deathbed confession about killing a Rocker in Brighton in the summer of sixty-four.”
“Nineteen sixty-four? That far back, and he’s dying — why couldn’t he keep his trap shut?”
“Maybe he reckons he’ll avoid hell this way.”
Grace shook his head. He’d never really got this religious thing about confession and forgiveness. “Just your era, wasn’t it, Norman?”
“Ha!”
Potting was fifty-five but with his shapeless frame and flaccid face could have passed for someone a good decade older.
“I’ve had dealings with Edinburgh. Don’t know anyone called Clarke, though.”
Potting looked down at his notebook. “Colleague’s name is Rebus.”
“Now that name I do know. He worked the Wolfman killings in London. Thought he’d be retired by now.”
“That was definitely the name she gave.”
“So what else did she say?”
“The deathbed confession belongs to one James Ronald King. He was a Mod back then. The bloke he killed is Johnny Greene.”
A phone rang at one of the three unoccupied desks in the office. Grace ignored it. The walls all around were stickered in photographs of victims of murders that had never been solved, crime scene photographs, and yellowing newspaper cuttings. “How did he kill him?”
“Stabbed him with a kitchen knife — says he took it with him for protection.”
“A real little soldier,” Grace said sarcastically. “Have you checked back to see if there’s any truth in it?”
“I have, Chief!” Potting said proudly. “It’s one of the things DI Clarke asked me to find out. A Johnny Earl Greene died during the Mods versus Rocker clashes on May 19, 1964. It was one of the worst weekends of violence of that whole era.”