Tingley liked Barbara. He was sorry for the life of prostitution that had been thrust upon her by others. His mother had been in the same line of work. He mourned her still.
He remembered the distant crack a moment after Barbara’s head exploded. Tingley ducking, turning, scanning the near and the distant horizons. A glint of light reflected somewhere high, then gone.
A sniper. It had to be Kadire.
There was no reason for him to kill Barbara. But then Tingley didn’t think he intended to. With a damaged eye from the beating he’d sustained, Kadire would not have been at his best. Tingley had been the target. He’d given the man a break and Kadire had repaid the gesture by trying to kill him.
There was only one way to respond to that.
Tingley roused himself, took a small case from the back seat and walked towards an illuminated hotel sign outside one of the larger palaces. The glass door shuddered as it caught in the wind and slammed behind him. He stood in the high, arched entrance hall for a moment. He thought he heard a baby cry; it might have been a cat.
He walked to the foot of a broad, marble staircase. It was unlit. He hesitated, drawn by the shabby grandeur, made cautious by the gloom. A soft voice, so close Tingley could feel the warm breath on his ear.
‘There is someone to meet you on the first floor.’
A tall young man, in a black suit and a white shirt, was standing beside him. He could have stepped from the sixties, a period now fashionable again in Italy. His hair was long over his ears and a large black moustache emphasized the paleness of his cheeks. Rather than a member of the Italian Mafia, he looked every inch the romantic hero.
Tingley stifled his surprise. He nodded his thanks and, conscious of his tired legs, started slowly up the steps into the shadows. He entered a spacious reception room and raised an eyebrow when he saw the same young man awaiting him there.
The young man glanced carelessly at the passport and car keys Tingley thrust into his hand.
‘Federico di Bocci. You have met my twin brother, Guiseppe, downstairs. My sister Maria will show you to your room.’
A young woman detached herself from the gloom and stepped across to the doorway.
‘Please,’ she said, in a voice even softer than her brother’s. She smiled and inclined her head slightly to indicate that he should follow.
She led him to a tiny lift. She walked gracefully, lightly. There was scarcely room for the two of them in the lift. He was conscious of her physical presence as they made their shaky progress up to the next floor. She was a shapely woman and her black woollen dress emphasized her breasts and hips. Her heavy perfume filled the chamber.
She had her brother’s melancholy eyes and thick black hair but her lips were fuller, her face less pale. Tingley found it hard to assess her age. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five perhaps.
When the lift jolted to a halt, she squeezed past him into the blackness. She reached for a switch on the wall and a dim overhead light illuminated about ten yards of a corridor. He followed her as she walked ahead and pressed another switch. As the light ahead came on, the one behind went out. And so they progressed, from darkness into light.
She stopped before a broad, carved door and he heard the rasp of a key in its lock. The room was long, with an ornate four-poster bed at its far end. On the left-hand wall were two long double windows. He went to one of them. It looked down into an interior courtyard strewn with broken marble and fragments of stone. Across the yard, identical windows, shuttered.
‘The Di Bocci family lives here long?’ Tingley attempted in his feeble Italian. He only knew the present tense, as she only seemed to know the present in English.
‘For three centuries. We are the last.’ She gazed at him until he turned his face away. ‘My father will be here in the morning,’ she added.
‘Good,’ he said.
He slept on top of his bed through the rest of the afternoon then went back into the rain. He found a trattoria and ate and drank hungrily, thinking about the task he had set himself. Thinking about the futility of revenge. Determined to have it anyway.
TWENTY
Tingley had gone first to Varengeville-sur-mer with his friend, Bob Watts. Old friends, old companions in arms. Survivors of many a conflict. They had returned to John Hathaway’s grand house in the picturesque village a few miles outside Dieppe a few days after Barbara’s murder.
At first sight the two of them together looked like some old comedy double act. Of an age, but Tingley compact and tidy, hair plastered down; Watts towering over him, rougher round the edges, hair wild.
They’d picked up a car in Dieppe and driven through the rain to find a posse of French toughs gathered around the gate of Hathaway’s house.
Tingley and Hathaway exchanged glances. Tingley and Watts had got embroiled in a gun-battle here some weeks earlier, fighting alongside Hathaway against the Balkan gangsters. Now they were back, but for different reasons. Tingley was thinking revenge but knew Watts was thinking justice.
‘I don’t know what I feel about killing people outside the law,’ Watts said. ‘I was a policeman.’
‘And a soldier,’ Tingley said. ‘You’ve seen a lot of deaths.’
Tingley sought revenge not just for recent events in Brighton but also for atrocities committed by the same people in the Balkans in the nineties when he was there covertly and Watts was part of the UN peacekeeping force.
The murderers, then as more recently, were led by the sadistic killer, Miladin Radislav, known during the Balkan conflict as Vlad the Impaler. Tingley had intended to track him back to the Balkans and serve justice on him. Battlefield justice. When Barbara was killed, he had added to his list the sniper, Drago Kadire.
Watts and Tingley were taken through to the old library where a middle-aged man and a woman waited. The couple introduced themselves as Patrice and Jeanne Magnon.
‘And why you are here?’ Watts said.
‘The Hathaway family did business with the Magnons for decades,’ Patrice said. ‘And whilst we liked John very much, business is business. He is gone, he will be missed, but the waters close over.’
Hathaway’s last moments had been spent in agony, impaled on a stake on the cliff just a few hundred yards from this house.
‘He left a will disposing of his property,’ Tingley said.
‘And we have heard that the woman who inherited is also dead. Barbara? Nature abhors a vacuum, does it not?’
‘I was standing next to her when she was killed,’ Tingley said quietly.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Patrice Magnan shrugged. ‘It is the modern world.’
‘In our family, Sean Reilly will be missed even more than John,’ Jeanne Magnon said. She had the gravelled voice of a heavy smoker. Of Jeanne Moreau, whom she vaguely resembled. Jolie laide.
Sean Reilly had been the right-hand man first of gangster Dennis Hathaway, then his son John. He had retired to this house and blown up himself and the Bosnian Serbs who had come to get him. That had been the start of the bloodbath.
‘Did you betray Hathaway?’ Tingley kept his voice low.
‘It is complicated,’ Jeanne said. ‘Charlie Laker visited us. You know him? A very bad man. He told our father, Marcel, that Hathaway had killed his own father, Dennis Hathaway. Marcel had wondered for forty years what had become of his old friend, Dennis. Now he felt the son had betrayed him. He wanted revenge. Then, we had warned John Hathaway we could not get involved in rough stuff.’
Watts indicated the two men hovering by the door.
‘Looks like you have your own tough guys.’
‘These?’ Jeanne said. ‘These are local boys. No match for the men from the Balkans.’ She shuddered. ‘That man Radislav. .’
Patrice put an arm round her shoulders for a moment but looked at the two Englishmen.