Sean Reilly’s retirement home was Hathaway’s big house on the outskirts of Varengeville-sur-mer, not far from the church where the artist Georges Braque was buried and the road ended at the cliff edge. Reilly lived there under the vague protection of the family of one of Dennis Hathaway’s old smuggling partners, Marcel Magnon, a man who had also known Reilly during the war.
When Hathaway’s boat docked at Dieppe they took the waiting car along the coast road. The tide was out and a score or so people were picking mussels from the rock pools.
The house had high walls around it with barbed wire along the top and security cameras set at intervals. Hathaway buzzed the intercom at the outer gate and it swung open. A man with a bulge under his jacket escorted them into the house. Barbara waited whilst Hathaway went ahead.
Hathaway was led down a corridor that smelt of floor wax, toilets and harsh disinfectant. The whole place smelt like a hospital. The smell was more intense in a large drawing room that had been converted into a hospital room.
Sean Reilly was propped up in a bed facing out through open French windows on to a long, landscaped garden. He looked up from the book he was reading. Smiled a winning smile, his false teeth too big in his skeletal head.
‘John.’
‘Mr Reilly.’
Reilly smiled again.
‘Sean.’
‘You’re looking well, Sean,’ Hathaway said.
‘I look like shit – and smell like it mostly, thanks to this bag. Sit me up higher, will you?’
Hathaway leaned over and pressed the button that lifted the top end of the bed. Reilly’s head and upper body rose towards him.
‘That OK?’
‘Grand. So what’s happening?’
Hathaway proffered the bottle of single malt.
‘I’m sure you’re not allowed to but flowers are frowned on by your warders – nurses – I recall and I don’t remember you having a sweet tooth.’
‘Hope it’s Irish.’
Hathaway smiled.
‘Of course.’
With difficulty, Reilly raised a hand.
‘There are a couple of pretty decent glasses over there.’
Hathaway walked over to the table beside the open windows and poured two hefty measures of the best Irish he’d been able to find.
He handed a glass to Reilly, pulled over a chair and sat beside him.
‘How’s things?’
Reilly looked beyond Hathaway.
‘I’ve been thinking about the past a lot. Things I did. Things I didn’t do.’
‘Not regretting things?’
Reilly grimaced.
‘No point. Just wondering how my life might have been different. Alternative lives.’
‘The road not travelled.’
Reilly smiled, nodded down at the book he’d been reading.
‘I’m enjoying stuff that makes me think.’
‘Jesus,’ Hathaway said. ‘I used to have that.’
‘It’s your copy. I found it lying around. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bit late to turn hippy, isn’t it?’
Reilly smiled.
‘Did you know I started a philosophy degree at Trinity before the war? Then the war came and I went over the border and enlisted – don’t ask me why, that’s a long bloody story. And then, after the war, well, things had moved on for me.’
‘So you were going to be the new Bertrand Russell?’
‘Or James Joyce. I was all over the place. But then life took another course.’ He took a sip of the drink, closed his eye. His cheeks reddened within seconds. ‘That’s good. Slainte.’
‘Slainte.’
‘Never understood before why in Westerns cowboys would come into town dehydrated and go to the saloon and down whiskies. Wouldn’t a beer have been better?’
‘But?’
Reilly grinned again.
‘But this whiskey is just the drink for the thirsty man in the desert.’
Hathaway smiled, nodded down at the book and quoted from memory:
‘The truth knocks on the door and you say “Go away, I’m looking for the truth” and so it goes away.’
‘Personally, I’ve always thought truth overvalued.’ He passed his glass to Hathaway, his hand shaking. ‘Stephen Boyd was the best James Bond.’
Hathaway looked puzzled.
‘Who?’
‘Who?’ Reilly laughed. ‘The first one.’
‘Wasn’t that Sean Connery?’
‘Sean Connery? The guy who played Taggart? Runs the bar in Emmerdale now?’
Hathaway looked at Reilly’s glass.
‘That’s had a quick effect.’
‘I told you – I’ve been thinking about different ways life might have gone. But not just mine. Michael Caine didn’t get the posh part in Zulu, so the cockney actor who played Private Hook got all the attention, ended up doing The Ipcress File and went on to have Caine’s career.’
‘What happened to Caine?’
‘He did Steptoe and Son and now he’s a stallholder in EastEnders .’
‘And you?’
Reilly took another sip of his whiskey.
‘Me? I’m Seamus Heaney. Or Monet.’
‘Wouldn’t you have missed the action?’
Reilly looked away to one side. Hathaway put both glasses on a table beside Reilly’s old display cabinet. He glanced down at Reilly’s memorabilia. The guns, the knives, the medals. He recalled the first time he’d seen them, so many years before.
‘What’s happening with you?’ Reilly said eventually.
Hathaway turned.
‘There are some very bad men in town.’
Reilly cleared his throat and looked up at the ceiling.
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘I don’t mean the usual scum. These people have come from outside.’
‘What do they want?’
‘They want to kill,’ Hathaway said. ‘ Plus ca fucking change. You get rid of one set of scumbags and another one comes in.’
Hathaway leaned in.
‘I’ve seen enough films about this but I can’t believe it’s happening to me. I want out but I can’t seem to get out.’
‘You know that from your dad,’ Reilly said, fixing Hathaway with a watery stare.
Hathaway looked down.
‘Aye, well.’
‘Who’s coming after you?’
‘Foreigners. Serbians. Mad fuckers. Real hard bastards. The kind who burn your neighbour’s house down just because they live next door to you.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Long term? Everything. Short term? Revenge for the death of one of theirs and his pregnant girlfriend in that Milldean thing.’
‘The massacre?’
‘Yeah. They think it was targeted at their guy.’
‘Was it?’
Hathaway shrugged.
‘Not for me to say. But they’re here and they’re starting up their own mayhem.’
‘That man on the Ditchling Beacon?’
Hathaway smiled.
‘I see you’re keeping up with the Brighton news. Yeah. Stuck a skewer right up him. Came out next to his ear. Left him there to have a slow, painful death. What are things coming to?’
‘We’ve done our share.’
Hathaway looked at his father’s old ally and his own mentor.
‘True,’ he said. ‘True.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Reilly said.
‘What do you think I should do? I was so nearly out of it and now I’m being dragged back in.’
‘You know you’ve got to go pre-emptive, John. It’s the only way. Nuke the bastards.’
‘That brings me right back in.’
‘But it’s your only way out.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can do it, John. I know you can do it. I know what you’ve done.’
‘I know you know,’ Hathaway said, then caught something in Reilly’s tone. ‘We never really talked about that.’
‘Your dad was my friend but he’d gone rabid. It was something you had to do. I didn’t like that you did it, but I could see why you thought you had to. So I let it go.’
‘And worked with me over all those subsequent years.’
Reilly reached out a thin, purple veined hand and laid it on Hathaway’s.
‘It’s a strange world you and I inhabit. I doubt anyone living outside it would understand. I think you had enough dealing with your guilt. I don’t think you’ve had a happy life, John.’
Hathaway smiled at him.
‘Are we supposed to have?’
‘Don’t let the guilt emasculate you. You can handle these Balkan johnny-come-latelies.’
Hathaway sighed and looked down at Reilly’s gnarled hand.
‘If I start it, they’ll come back with everything. You’ll end up in the firing line. I don’t know whether I can protect you.’ He indicated the passage outside the door. ‘I’ve brought Barbara with me. I’d like her to stay here. I’ll leave men too. Good men.’
‘Barbara – that will be nice. As for me?’ Reilly shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘I can protect myself, don’t worry about that.’ He grimaced. ‘The only thing I can’t do is change my own bloody shitbag. Can you get Hattie Jacques?’
Hathaway left Barbara with Reilly and had dinner in a private dining room in a quiet restaurant in the backstreets of Dieppe. His hosts were Marcel Magnon, frail and thin-voiced, and his children, Patrice and Jeanne. Hathaway had been doing business with them for years and they greeted him warmly.
Marcel Magnon’s first question remained the same whenever they met.
‘Any word of your father?’
As always, Hathaway shook his head.
‘No word but we don’t give up.’
Magnon sighed and his head sank on to his chest.
The four of them shared a large tureen of La Marmite Dieppoise, the local fish stew, all dipping their bread in to soak up the liquor. Jeanne fed her father, who sucked on the wet bread as best he could. Conversation was kept general until the cheese course. Then:
‘Albanians control all our major ports now,’ Patrice said. ‘Even Marseilles.’
‘Dieppe?’
Patrice shook his head.
‘Too small but we pay them a tithe for the quiet life.’
‘We know of your problems,’ Jeanne said, cutting a small sliver from a hard goat’s cheese. ‘But I do not know how we can help. Our rough stuff days are in the past.’
‘I don’t expect anything,’ Hathaway said, reaching out to pat her hand. ‘Just keep an eye on Sean, if you would, and let him know if bad men are heading his way.’
‘That we can gladly do,’ Jeanne said, and Patrice nodded vigorously in agreement.
‘I’m sending men here,’ Hathaway said, ‘but let me know if there are developments.’
Jeanne contemplated her sliver of cheese then looked intently at Hathaway.
‘And you?’
‘Things are in hand.’
‘You could get out,’ Patrice said. ‘You have made your money.’
Hathaway reached over for the cheese plate.
‘It’s not my way.’
His phone trembled in his pocket.
‘Excuse me. A call I am expecting.’
He took out a pen and small pad and listened to the voice on the phone.
‘Spell that, please,’ he said. And twice more. ‘And Radislav?’
He ended the call without saying goodbye. A few moments later his phone made a series of beeping noises and he scrolled down the photos that had appeared on its LCD screen.
He put the phone on the table and Jeanne looked down at the last photograph.
‘I know that face. He has been here.’
The man who had just spoken to Hathaway phoned Jimmy Tingley next. Tingley and he had served together in the SAS before the man had joined the special Transnational Crimes Unit at Scotland Yard. He gave Tingley the same names and suspected British locations of four Balkan gangsters recently arrived in the country.
When he had finished he suggested Tingley and he meet for a drink the next time they coincided in London.
‘And, Jimmy, this is just intel for you, right? You’re not going to do anything illegal?’
After a moment, Tingley murmured:
‘ Moi?’