The Trawlerman, стр. 57

‘Here I am,’ she said, with a small smile. ‘A bad penny. I can’t help myself. Tell me, then, Bill.’

He nodded. ‘I’m sorry I tried to keep this from you. I have reasons. But you’re here now, so it’s your call what you do with it now.’

‘I never wanted to send you to prison, Bill, back then. You know that.’

‘Here we go again, then,’ he said, and the laughter stopped and his voice was serious again.

There was the sense of time moving on now. The bright greens of midsummer were fading. The grass around them was flecked with pale seed heads. The alders by the ditches were looking dry. The two of them sat on the bed, side by side, looking out of the square white window and the flat fields, and he talked and she listened, asking occasional questions, making the odd comment.

‘Beginning at the start. Everyone knew the Hogbens. Frank’s father, Max, was the big man in town. He drove a souped-up Ford Escort with all the trimmings.’

‘Sunburst red,’ she said.

‘Sunburst red. Yes. You heard about him, then? Fast car. A real people’s car. Know what I mean? Him and his mates used to race rallies, all around these lanes. Terrified people. Only, Max died in a stupid accident in that car and Frank inherited his father’s reputation, and the car.’

Alex shifted with impatience. ‘Frank Hogben was a drug dealer. Tell me about that.’

‘Wait now. Be patient for once.’

‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘But you found that out too, then? Yes. Frank was a drug dealer. Right under everyone’s noses.’

‘You knew that?’

‘God, no. Not at the time. I only found out after he was dead. I’ll tell you, Alex, if you’ll only be quiet for a minute.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ And waited what seemed like an age for him to begin.

‘Frank wanted to be the big man,’ Bill said eventually, ‘just like everyone said his dad had been. Max Hogben was a violent man. Always punchy, you know what I mean? I think he used to beat up everyone. Not just enemies either. We had Max a few times on assault charges, but nothing stuck. Like father, like son, it turned out. Frank was one of those who we suspected was up to stuff, but we didn’t know what, exactly. Found out later that Curly used to crew with Frank on The Hopeful and that’s where it all went on.’

He had a way of telling stories that made her want to scream, she thought.

‘What I found out after was Frank had been using the trawler to meet a Spanish boat in the Channel and bring back drugs. It started off as just a bit of marijuana but it grew into something pretty big. Curly turned a blind eye and then Frank kept giving him a bit of money to do exactly that. That way everybody kept quiet about it. I think it crept up on Curly. No harm in it at the start, he thought. Then, the bigger it got, the unhappier Curly was.’

‘Curly was in on all that too?’

‘Insofar as he was on the boat, yes. Frank had learned the value of scaring people from his dad. He threatened Curly. Told him to keep working and keep his mouth shut. Curly didn’t even want the money. Never spent a penny. It came to thousands of pounds in the end, and he never never once spent a single cent. He just kept it in a tin under his bed. Lucky for him he didn’t.’

‘Why was it lucky?’

‘I’ll get to that, for pity’s sake, Alex. Almost fifteen grand by the end of it.’

‘Jesus. It was a big operation.’

‘Not at first. Not big enough to get too much attention. Not big enough to get noticed by the bigger gangs either, who’d have wanted part of it. Just steady, over the years. I know. Either way it couldn’t last. They were bringing in up to almost a hundred kilos of heroin a trip by the end of it, Curly says. That’s industrial quantities. I believe Curly must have been terrified about what would happen if they were caught and just as scared about what would happen if they weren’t. Give it a couple of years, and Frank Hogben would have been a full-on don himself, you know. Or they’d all have been dead.’

‘You knew Curly and you had no idea any of this was going on?’

He sipped his tea. ‘I had a good idea that Frank Hogben was a self-centred bastard. I had a good idea that people were scared of him. But nobody dared peach. You have to understand what Frank was like. There was a man killed in The Grenadier eight years ago in a fight; we found his body in the toilets. He’d been beaten and kicked to death. Rumour was Frank had done it, but nobody would come forward. Everybody swore he wasn’t even there, though we know from CCTV outside the pub that his Escort was. Tina said he was at home with her, and she stuck with that, so there was nothing we could do. There was nothing on him.’

‘He was beating her up too.’

‘You found that out as well?’

‘She still wears it. I think you can see it in her face. I guessed it from the way she behaves, and I took a chance and looked at the domestic abuse stats in East Folkestone. Around the same time you’re talking about there were multiple reports of domestics taking place at the bottom end of Broadmead Road. That was all Frank and her, wasn’t it?’

He looked at the bare pine floor; the curve of planks where the softer parts had worn, leaving knots and the grain. ‘I remember all that. Neighbours said they heard fights but nobody named names, you know? They were afraid, too. Without Tina saying it, we couldn’t do a thing about it. The neighbourhood team up there knocked on doors to see if everything was OK, but