Dead Man's Grip

father’s creepy but he’s pretty sensible. Very shaken. The mother’s poison. But, hey, she identified her dead son, right? That’s not a good place to judge anyone, so who can tell? But she wears
the trousers, for sure, and I’d say she’s the bitch queen from hell. I wouldn’t want to tangle with either of them.’
    Grace was heading west on the A27. Coming up on his right was the campus of Sussex University. He took the left slip, heading to Falmer, passing part of Brighton University on his right, where the dead boy had attended, and the imposing structure of the American Express Community Stadium where the local football team, the Albion, would soon be moving to, a building he was beginning to really like as it took shape, even though he wasn’t a football fan.
    ‘The wording Spinella used about the reward. Do you see anything sinister behind that – about paying money for the van driver’s identity rather than his arrest and conviction?’
    His question was greeted with silence and Grace realized the connection had dropped. He leaned forward and redialled on the hands-free.
    When Glenn answered, Grace told him the ACC’s concerns.
    ‘What does he mean by the potential to go pear-shaped ?’ Branson queried.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Grace answered truthfully. ‘I think a lot of people get nervous at any mention of the word Mafia . The Chief Constable’s under pressure to get rid of Brighton’s historic image of a crime-ridden resort, so they want to keep the Mafia connection as low key as possible, I’m guessing.’
    ‘I thought the New York Mafia had been pretty much decimated. ’
    ‘They’re not as powerful as they used to be, but they’re still players. We need to find that white van fast and get the driver under arrest. That’ll take the heat off everything.’
    ‘You mean get him into protective custody, boss?’
    ‘You’ve seen too many Mafia movies,’ Grace said. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’
    ‘One hundred grand,’ Glenn Branson replied, putting on an accent mimicking The Godfather , sounding as if he had a mouth full of rocks. ‘That’s gonna be an offer someone can’t refuse.’
    ‘Put a sock in it.’
    But, Grace thought privately, Branson could well be right.

30
    Lou Revere didn’t like it when his wife drank heavily, and these past few years, since their three kids had gotten older and left home, Fernanda hit the bottle hard most evenings. It had become the norm for her to be tottering unsteadily around the house by around 8 p.m.
    The drunker she was, the more bad-tempered she became, and she would start blaming Lou for almost anything that came into her head that she was not happy about. One moment it was the height at which a television was fixed to the wall, because it hurt her neck to watch. The next might be because she didn’t like the way he’d left his golf clothes on the bedroom floor. But the most consistent of her tirades was blaming him for their younger son, Tony, on whom she doted, going to live with that piece of trash in England.
    ‘If you were a man ,’ she would shout at him, ‘you’d have put your foot down and made Tony complete his education in America. My father would have never let his son go!’
    Lou would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘It’s different for today’s generation. You have to let kids do what they want to do. Tony’s a smart boy. He’s his own man and he needs his independence. I miss him, too, but it’s good to see him do that.’
    ‘Good to see him getting away from our family?’ she’d reply. ‘You mean, like, my family, right?’
    He did mean that, but he would never dare say it. Privately, though, he hoped the boy would carve out a life for himself away from the clutches of the Giordinos. Some days he wished he had the courage himself. But it was too late. This was the life he had chosen. It was fine and he should count his blessings. He was rich beyond his wildest dreams. OK, being rich wasn’t everything, and the money he handled came in dirty and sometimes bloody. But that was how the world worked.
    Despite his wife’s behaviour, Lou loved her. He was proud of her looks, proud of the lavish gatherings she hosted, and she could
still be wild in bed – on the nights when she didn’t fall into a stupor first.
    It was true also, of course, that her connections had not exactly done his career any harm.
    Lou Revere had started out as an accountant, with a Harvard business