Reg Williamson was in the office hunched over his computer when Gilchrist walked in. He clicked his mouse, then slid from behind his desk and hurried over to her.
‘Bingo. Bernie Grimes. Place called Homps on the Canal du Midi. Not far from Carcassonne.’
Gilchrist looked at him.
‘Fantastic, but you’re saying those place names as if they should mean something to me. I’m a Brighton girl. I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Carcassonne is this medieval walled town in the south of France. Looks just like it should — they used it for that Kevin Costner Robin Hood film donkey’s years ago. Reason it looks so Walt Disney perfect is that it was actually rebuilt in the nineteenth century. So it’s kind of a recreation.’
‘You’ve been there.’
Williamson looked away.
‘Me and the wife. Before. .’
His voice trailed away. Gilchrist realized she didn’t know anything about Reg’s private life.
‘Your divorce?’
Williamson flashed a look at her.
‘Our David killed himself.’
Gilchrist was swept back to a conversation she’d had in the car with Reg, it seemed an age ago now, about suicides off Beachy Head.
‘Reg, I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.’
Williamson worked his jaw.
‘His own daft fault. Drugs.’ Gilchrist saw tears in Williamson’s eyes as he turned away. ‘Anyway, we know where Grimes is. We now have to decide what we do about it.’
Gilchrist reached out and gave his arm a quick squeeze.
‘I don’t even know your wife’s name — I’m sorry.’
‘Angela.’ Williamson looked down. ‘Lovely lass but she’s suffering. Every day I see her sink further down. Don’t know what to do.’
He worked his jaw.
‘When I left for work this morning, she didn’t even have the energy to say goodbye.’
He gave an awful false smile.
‘Ay well, I’m sure it will all work out for the best.’
Gilchrist nodded uncertainly.
‘So what next?’ he said.
‘I bumped into Philippa Franks. Mentioned Bernie’s name.’
Williamson cleared his throat.
‘And?’
Gilchrist shrugged.
‘Nothing, really, but I have the feeling it shook her a bit.’
‘OK, we need to find a way to put pressure on her,’ Williamson said, all business again.
‘And I think I know where Charlie Laker is going to be in a while.’
‘Well done.’
‘Not really. He’s made a reservation at the Grand.’
Charlie Laker sat in the back of his Bentley heading south, his phone clamped to his ear. Time to move things up a notch. He looked out through tinted windows and made a series of calls. As the rugged northern landscape softened towards Nottingham, he put his phone away and closed his eyes. Thinking back. Again.
He’d vowed he wouldn’t do anything to John Hathaway for the sake of Dawn. But he’d planned. And prospered.
Dawn coped with her depression with therapy three times a week and cocaine every day. Charlie worried that the cocaine would trigger in Dawn the mental instability that had afflicted her mother, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
Charlie, in his mind having let down his brother, then been abandoned by his parents, valued loyalty. He would never leave Dawn, although that didn’t mean he didn’t have women on the side.
Dawn wanted him to get into films. It was a source of private humiliation for her that they lived next door to Cary Grant but had never met him, even over the back fence.
She expected Grant to throw lots of parties but she never heard a sound from the house. She read in some of the gossip rags that he had a reputation for meanness.
‘You’d think he’d like fellow English living next door,’ she said plaintively to Charlie when Grant’s secretary politely declined the latest invite to one of Dawn’s parties.
‘But he must be in his eighties,’ Laker said. ‘Old codgers don’t always like parties.’
When Grant died in 1986, all Dawn said, glumly, was: ‘That’s that, then.’
In the late eighties, comedy became the new rock ‘n’ roll and he opened a cross-country chain of comedy clubs. Pretty much legit, though the alcohol came in the front door and went out the back and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d paid retail price for a delivery of ciggies.
His management company looked after a few acts and that parlayed into TV productions on cable. And all the time he kept a distant watch on John Hathaway’s upward progress through life. Pondering how he was going to take his revenge on him.