on for at least forty minutes until the ship’s horn finally blared and, painfully slowly, the ship started to move away from the dockside. Penny blew a thousand kisses down to Jack, and Charlie repeatedly gave him the thumbs-up. Jack walked the dockside as far as he could, waving and smiling. He could no longer distinguish his parents from the people around them, but he hoped they’d be able to spot him ‒ seeing as he was the only person following the ship out to sea.
Jack checked his ticket to the Isle of Wight for the umpteenth time.
‘Shit!’
He turned tail and raced for the ferry . . . which turned out to be the second ship that day he watched disappear without him.
CHAPTER 8
The facilities on the Isle of Wight ferry came a very poor second to the cruise ship that was currently heading towards St Lucia with Charlie and Penny. Jack imagined that, by now, they’d be in an open-deck restaurant eating as much shellfish as they could ‒ the extravagance of it would be too much for Penny to resist, and as long as Charlie had a drink in his hand, he’d do whatever kept her happy. Jack smiled at the thought of his parents trying to ‘fit in’ with the other posher passengers . . . then he wondered how many more passengers had gone to sea to die. And his smile disappeared.
Jack had researched the Fisher brothers, using various police databases and Google. The name of Fisher had been slurred by Ken Moore towards the end of their evening together; the mention had been brief, but it was the only lead Jack had for now.
Arnie and Tony Fisher had run a club in Soho, which had been the subject of numerous failed drug, gambling and underage prostitution raids. Arnie Fisher was clearly the smart one, keeping his criminal activities well concealed. He was slick and charming with a penchant for young men, but he was also known to be ruthless and brutal when the mood took him. Arnie was a slimy character, with eyes like a shark – unreadable and terrifyingly soulless. He never got his hands dirty but, throughout the seventies and eighties, the police suspected his orders had resulted in numerous unsolved robberies, assaults and murders. Tony Fisher, on the other hand, was an out-and-out thug. He loved being hands-on, loved fast cars and tarty women, loved terrorising and torturing – Tony was a dangerous psychopath and had a rap sheet to prove it. Jack had to scroll three times on his mobile screen to get from the top to the bottom of Tony’s police record.
One newspaper article from 1984 covered the brutal murder of a man called ‘Boxer’ Davis. It seemed ‘Boxer’ had been a low-level, gullible dogsbody whose loyalties tended to shift towards the biggest pay packet. He was loosely connected to both the Fishers and to Harry Rawlins ‒ and he was murdered in the spring of 1984. According to police reports at the time, ‘Boxer’ had been in a Soho alley when a car crushed him against a wire fence, backed up, drove over his body twice more, then drove away. Nobody saw a thing. ‘Boxer’ was found among the rats the following morning by a chef throwing out the slops.
This was the seedy world that Jimmy Nunn had frequented once his Formula One career went down the pan. Jimmy stuck with the only thing he knew how to do – driving – and he must have done it well, because he never served any substantial amount of time in prison.
Jack called Laura.
‘Would you do me a favour, mate? Would you get hard copy police records for Arnie and Tony Fisher?’
‘Course,’ Laura chirped. ‘Who are they?’
Laura was so smitten with Jack that she blindly misinterpreted how he called her ‘mate’. She thought it was an endearment – when in fact, from Jack’s perspective, it was just easy, non-committal and levelling. Everyone was ‘mate’ to him.
‘I’m digging about in the pasts of the women from The Grange, and Dolly Rawlins’ husband was a big-time crook back in the seventies and eighties. The Fisher brothers were around at the same time and . . . I dunno. Might be something, might not.’
‘Ester gave you those names, did she?’ Laura asked.
Jack looked up. Ahead of him was the stunning Cowes harbour, with its motor cruisers, yachts and tall ships. Laura jabbered away in his ear.
‘I bet she’s a rough old hag by now, isn’t she? I mean, she was