Harvey woke. There was no rope round his neck, but he massaged the skin of his throat as he blinked and tried to get clarity. She stood in the door, had a silky gown round her, held loosely at the waist. He thought, a bad moment, that she had Pierrepoint’s posture – a couple of years back he’d seen a biopic about the executioner – but when she saw he had woken, she turned away and was gone. He hadn’t focused quickly enough to read her face.
The door closed, wasn’t slammed. It might have been another moment – if he’d been faster off his backside and crabbed quickly across the room – for him to take her in his arms and hold her close. He had not. The door was shut in his face.
He didn’t follow her. He went to the second bathroom and involuntarily touched the robe hanging from the door. It was, of course, dry. He considered then what made for a worse cocktail of poison. A contract on his life? Or the gardener shagging his wife? He ran the shower, letting it warm, then stepped under the spray. He wondered how his body stood up in comparison to Nigel’s. He wet-shaved with a plastic razor, there for a visitor who had stayed overnight without kit, but no one stayed over: they lived in isolation. He dried hard, didn’t use the robe, as if it was the personal property of another.
Ignoring the principal bedroom where there was a walk-in wardrobe that contained his best suits, good casuals and shirts, he dressed in yesterday’s clothes – but for the socks.
He put on flipflops. He wouldn’t go back into the bedroom to rifle in the wardrobe before hell froze over. He looked out of the window.
The sun was still low, peeping over the hills behind the Lulworth cliffs and throwing long ribbons of gold on to the water. The wind had died, and the ferry chugged across his view while a handful of yachts and launches hugged the inshore waters and went to sea. It was pretty damn normal. He stretched and coughed, then searched the trees behind the walls, the castle’s keep to the left and the rock promontories bordering the cove for sign of the threat. He saw nothing.
Like a child, chastened, he bent over the settee and straightened the cushions, smoothed them.
He looked for a friend. The dog still followed him as it had the previous day. When it had wolfed its food he picked up the bowl to wash it and found in the sink her mug with the dregs of tea. She had made some and not brought him any. It seemed important. He was reeling at the toxic nature of the dislike, distrust. He realised it would destroy him – more self-indulgence and self-pity.
He wouldn’t lie in a ditch and cower. He padded back to his office, and murmured to the dog that he needed a few minutes – tried to explain it was only a quick call that had to be made, asked for understanding, and found the dog reasonable. He flicked through his address book and dialled.
‘Monty?’
It was.
‘Harvey here – yes, Harvey Gillot. You good?’ Yes, Monty was good, but Monty was half in and half out of the shower and did Harvey know what time it was and how uncivilised a call was at ‘A couple of things I need.’ What did he need? ‘Can you get your hands quick on a BPV supplier?’ Yes, Monty had a stock of bulletproof vests in his own warehouse, but were they talking of the ones proof against gunfire or merely knives?
‘Bulletproof.’
Not a problem. And what quantity? A hundred? Two hundred, three? And what delivery date?
‘Bulletproof. Quantity of one only.’ Only one? Delivery tomorrow. He had the address. Obviously a discount for bulk orders – was Harvey aware of the price for a single item? It would be six hundred sterling, but for a long-standing friend it could be five hundred. It would be handgun-proof, but not, obviously, high velocity. Where was he going? Kandahar? Bogota? Gaza?
He said grimly, ‘It’s for going out here, the Isle of bloody Portland, Dorset, and walking the dog on the coastal path, but that is not, please, for shouting off the rooftops. What about sprays?’ There was US-made Mace bear pepper spray, recommended for campers up-country in Montana or Oregon and frowned on in the UK, about twenty-five sterling a canister. What was legal throughout the UK was a spray that let off a vile stench and marked clothes beyond the capability of household washing-machines at about thirteen pounds.
‘Whatever you have. Delivery tomorrow. I’m grateful, Monty.’
He rang off, and told the dog that – give or take five minutes – they would go for a walk.
He was alone now. Robbie thought this time, minutes but could be hours, was the hardest.
He waited and watched the gates.
He had told them, back at the hut at first light, that he wouldn’t attempt to scale the walls because there was too much ground that was dead to him, unseen, and he didn’t know what the alarm system was or where the cameras and beams were. He had said he would be close to the gates and would wait for the target to come out.
Vern had queried him – he didn’t often. ‘The gates are electronic and he’ll come out in his car. Where are you and what do you do?’
‘He won’t. He’ll be walking.’
Leanne had challenged him: ‘How can you say, Robbie, that he’ll walk out of the gates?’
‘Because of the dog.’
Both had looked at him, confused. ‘Because of the dog? You sure of that, Robbie?’
‘He has a nice garden, very pretty. He spends time and money on it. He doesn’t want dog shit all over it. He’ll take the dog out and walk to where the dog can shit and he doesn’t have to clear it up.’ It had satisfied them.
The decision he had made was that the target would come out of the gates, swing to his right, go past the castle wall and the main building, then keep going that way till he had dropped down to the graveyard and where the church had been. From there he might go right or left, but the coastal path was closed in with rough brambles and gorse, enough for Robbie to get close to him. He had worked it through, always did. He wore overalls, had the balaclava in his left pocket, and was squatted in a gap in the scrub where the people from a house between the lane and the gates dumped their grass cuttings and garden rubbish. It was a useful place, but for all of its good points there was the bad one: he was hanging around, would stand out and… No other way. He stayed stock still when two men came past him on the path. They didn’t see him but one of their dogs yapped at him.
The Baikal pistol was in the right side pocket of the overalls. It was loaded.
Normally he slept well, in the house in Clack Street he shared with Vern and Leanne and in the apartment where he kept Barbie. He had slept all right when he was with his grandparents on the first floor of the block on the Albion Estate, and when he was in Feltham. He didn’t lose sleep on the night before a hit.
He’d tossed all night in the hut. Nothing to do with the floor, or the cushions he’d taken off the bench where Leanne was, and nothing to do with Vern in the easy chair, feet on the table. He hadn’t slept because his foot hurt. The pain was a reminder that he had reacted to a yob-kid, had allowed himself to be riled. He didn’t feel right.
They hadn’t argued with him, never did. They accepted that the man, the target, would come out of the gates and would be walking his dog: they had to accept it because that was what Robbie had said would happen.
He was hot in the overalls and his hands were tacky inside the lightweight rubber gloves.
He couldn’t speak to Vern or Leanne. Their mobiles had been switched off since they’d been on the ring-road motorway south of London before they had headed to the coast. Idiots left their mobiles switched on when they went to work – a phone could be tracked as sure as a bug under the car. His father, Jerry, might have left his mobile switched on: he was in HMP Wandsworth because he was an idiot. Vern would have the car parked up the street from the museum and the pub, and would be sitting somewhere, killing time, waiting. Leanne would be on the bench on the open ground, grassed, on the far side of the street to the museum and the entrance to the lane, and would have the wig on.
Hadn’t seen him, had he? Knew his name and age, had seen his wife and dog. Didn’t know what he looked like. Would shoot, wouldn’t he, a male aged forty-six who came out of the gates and had a dog with him? Understood why Vern and Leanne had queried, then challenged him. Was he rushing it?
He was never wrong, never had been.
The sun came up and clipped the treetops, and he realised there were apples, rotten and thrown out with the grass cuttings. The wasps found him.
As he swatted them away, he heard a telephone ring, far off.
Lunch awaited him at the Special Forces Club, and he had an appointment before that with the man who had overseen his hip’s resurfacing, but Benjie Arbuthnot had taken an early train that had dumped him with the commuter hordes at a London terminus. A taxi had brought him to Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the South Bank.
‘It was something or nothing, really. If it’s something, I’d say that Gillot’s on borrowed time. If it’s nothing, we just picked up the chaff of a few embittered old men who were doing some wishful thinking.’
Benjie and Deirdre had been guests at Alastair Watson’s wedding. When Benjie had run an obscure Middle East desk -mercifully with no links to weapons of mass destruction – his last job before retirement, Watson had been his personal assistant. When they were not in London they were in the Gulf, putting rather brave men on to the dhows that sailed backwards and forwards between Dubai or Oman and Iranian harbours. They had enjoyed, Benjie reckoned, a good relationship.
‘As we understand it, the village had given their lead man everything they had. No item of even trifling value was overlooked. The whole lot went to paying for the MANPADS. It was thought they would ensure the successful defence of the village. Its location was important: it guaranteed that the track through the cornfields remained open – only at night and only at great risk, but the symbol was huge. Gillot, we gather, took delivery of the valuables, then went down to Rijeka, put the whole lot in safety deposit while he made arrangements with a shipping agent for the offloading of the cargo when it was brought ashore.’
Benjie had a rule and had adhered to it strictly since he’d handed in his swipe card: he never took access for granted. With extreme politeness, he had requested the previous afternoon that he be accorded a short and non-attributable briefing on the matter of a contract for Harvey Gillot. He assumed Watson had been permitted a glimpse of a resume of the Zagreb contact, then sent down to an interview room to humour an old war horse – for whom, perhaps, the past had resurrected.
‘He did well. In a very few days he had located the merchandise, had it brought out of Poland, Gdansk, where there was Customs chaos. It was en route to Rijeka… where you showed up, Mr Arbuthnot. Well, no shipment was landed and nobody managed to get word to those expecting delivery. They stood in a cornfield, waiting, and were zapped. It appears that the bodies were treated badly – that is, badly by Balkan standards – and then the area was mined. Last week the mines were cleared, and a plough turned up a corpse who had the name of Harvey Gillot in his pocket. You’d know better than me, Mr Arbuthnot, that memories in that corner of Europe are long and hatreds don’t diminish. Our feeling – yes, he’ll be hit.’
The coffee had come from a machine, was almost undrinkable, but Benjie had emptied two sachets of sugar into it and swirled the dregs with a wooden spatula.
‘Does that help?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ He stood. He was about to ask after Watson’s parents and ‘Why, Mr Arbuthnot, did you block the shipment?’
He drew breath and considered. He liked the young man, trusted him, and thought him owed some honesty. ‘Sanctions busting, wasn’t it? UN Security Council resolution and all that. Criminal stuff. I simply advised Gillot – a useful asset of the Service at that time – of the risks he was running and rather quietly nudged him towards the docks at Aqaba, a Jordanian arsenal… They might have gone to Israel, might have gone to Syria, might have gone to an outfit in Azerbaijan. You see, that place on the Danube was doomed. Only obstinacy and bloody-minded blindness prevented those people bugging out down that track and accepting the inevitable. They didn’t do the sensible thing, and there are graves to show for it. Well, thank you.’
‘But he reneged on the deal he’d done because of your intervention.’
‘A little black and white, Alastair, in a grey and murky situation.’
‘Nobody will put their hand up and admit to guilt, obviously… Is it because of us – sorry, you – that he’s in deep trouble?’
‘Difficult times… but I expect Gillot will come through. The blame game seldom helps towards a satisfactory conclusion, in my limited experience.’ He stood, and his bloody hip hurt.
‘My regards to Mrs Arbuthnot.’
‘She’ll appreciate that. I’m grateful for your time.’
‘Need to know and all that.’
‘Of course.’
‘I haven’t asked how you were alerted to this matter, nor shall I. But you ought to know we’re told that the recommendations of a Gold Group have been chucked back in their collective faces. It was suggested to Gillot that he should move out and do a runner. He refused.’
‘Surely he’ll get a policeman on the door?’
‘Will not. I absolutely don’t mean to patronise but there’s health and safety to be considered. I mean, what we did in the Gulf or up on the border from the Basra station – well, I don’t remember you filing a risk assessment, Mr Arbuthnot. Who guards the policeman on the door? Who watches the posteriors of the back-up squad? And they’re twenty-four-seven, so cash registers ring. Anyway, that’s where he is, Gold Group have a headache and Gillot’s planning a George Custer moment. May I ask, were you fond of Gillot?’
He said stiffly, ‘I did not like or dislike him. He was an agent – damn you, dear boy, for asking. He was a useful asset. Do we in the Service now sign up to duty of care?’
‘A bit… Good to have seen you again, Mr Arbuthnot. We acknowledge duty of care today, but they were difficult times, and pretty bloody, I believe. I would have thought your man made staunch enemies.’
‘Quote me and I’ll deny it… Once he was almost a son. But we wanted that gear in Jordan. Do I care about some remote, murderous corner of outer Europe? Not a jot. Do I care about Harvey Gillot? Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Thank you for your time.’
He looked hard into her eyes… The first time they had touched was when the boy, Simun, turned sharply to point behind him and his fingers brushed her arm, only a trifling contact.
They walked on a path of caked mud, cracked, dusty and rutted from a tractor’s wheels. Penny had left the car outside the cafe, had been careful to lock it and make sure nothing was left on show inside. She had realised then that the boy was on the veranda, watching her, with a slight mocking smile and that the chance of anyone stealing from the vehicle was unthinkable to him. Her security measures were almost offensive. She’d murmured, flushing, that it was ‘force of habit’, ‘London’, and ‘sort of goes with the job’. Then he’d greeted her formally, very passable English, repeated what she’d said the previous evening about wanting to see the Cornfield Road – he’d called it the Kukuruzni Put. He’d told her the villagers had named it the ‘Way of Rescue’, and that he and she would go on foot.
He wore jeans that were tight around his waist and hips and a loose-fitting T-shirt of a band from Zagreb who had played a concert the previous summer in Osijek. He had a mass of hair that reached his shoulders, was perhaps an inch more than six foot, slim, muscled and tanned. Not quite the looks of a Greek god, but not far short, Penny thought.
They had gone past the cemetery, where she had seen the four mounds of earth. Now they were on the path. She thought it, at first, insignificant but quite pretty. One side of where they walked was given over to a crop of sunflowers, some as big as soup plates, drooping beneath the weight, nearly ready for harvesting. On the other side of the path corn grew thick and dense. The sun beat on her mercilessly. The first time he had touched her was when he had turned and pointed back at the great bowl of the water tower. She had squinted against the sun and made out the bright colours of the flag that topped it.
She was in her thirtieth year – and he had said outside the cemetery that his mother had been among the first to be buried there after her body had been exhumed from a battlefield grave: she had died in the crypt under the church from his birth’s complications. So, no calculator needed, he was eighteen, would turn nineteen in the autumn. That morning in the hotel, she had chosen a pair of lightweight dark brown slacks, a sober grey blouse, with the upper buttons unfastened – it was bloody hot – and lace-up walking shoes that were comfortable but made her look like a schoolmarm. She had swept her hair back into a ponytail and wore no makeup. She should have used the sunscreen but it was still in her handbag’s pouch… No, not in a relationship currently… Too busy on Alpha to worry about the absence of a guy in her life… No, not fussed that in the team the men would have thought of her as ‘proper’ and maybe ‘priggish’. No, she had not gone on a bounce after the break-up with Paul, and it was a full two months since she’d had a postcard from Antigua. No, she didn’t feel she was ‘missing out’ or ‘going short’. If Asif had not backed out on her at Heathrow, she would have let him walk ahead with the boy, would have kept a haughty distance and used her notebook to jot things. He wasn’t there.
The second time he had touched her was when she had paused to look at the horizon and they had been level with the end of the sunflower strip where a monster bloom sagged over the path. She had taken its weight and marvelled at the detail of the pointed orange petals, the core of ochre where bees fed. A spider – tiny, delicate – had come on to the back of her hand and scuttled towards her wrist. She would, at any other time and in any other place, have flicked it away, and would have done so there if he had not taken her hand and guided the spider to his palm, then freed the spider on the upper petals.
He had talked of the death of his mother, and her reburial in the new cemetery, had described to Penny where defence positions had been dug and she had seen what were now shallow trenches, little more than ditches. He had called the Kukuruzni Put the lifeblood route of the village, and had spoken of Marinci, Bogdanovci, and of the town behind them where the water tower was.
He had dropped his voice when they came to a newly ploughed strip that was above a gully in which a river flowed. There were many tyre marks, a flattened area that might have been under a tent and a pit some four feet deep, seven feet long and four feet across. He had told her of the death of four men, three of his age and the schoolteacher who had taught his father, then of a great betrayal. She had said Harvey Gillot’s name.
He looked hard into her eyes. Her older colleagues and line manager said she had doggedness, commitment and focus. Before they had reached the cemetery she’d shown her ID and put a card into his hand, which he’d pocketed without a glance.
He asked, simply, ‘Have you come to preserve the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘No.’
‘You deny that you have come here to save the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘I deny it,’ she said boldly. Penny Laing had made a remark that would have been greeted in the Alpha office with disbelief and astonishment. Bleaker: ‘I’m part of a team that regards him as a target for a criminal investigation.’
‘Did you hear of a contract?’
‘I did.’
‘Is the contract investigated?’
‘Not by me.’
Silence hung. He told her she stood where the men from the village had waited in the dark hours for the shipment to come through. Here they would have taken delivery. He told the story simply and well. She could almost feel the blast of the artillery shells and mortars, almost see the flash of the knives taken from sheaths, and experience the fear of those waiting for death, the pain before it. She almost understood the weight of the betrayal. She must have turned, as if she was preparing to sit down on the path, perhaps better to share what had happened at this place. He stripped off his T-shirt and laid it on the ground. She blushed scarlet and thought that to refuse was to offend. She sat on it and got out the sunscreen. He took it.
The third time the boy touched her was when he rubbed the white cream on her hands and lower arms, on her cheeks, chin, nose and forehead, and she allowed it.
To learn more, he said, she must talk to his father.
He had his hand on the butt, inlaid plastic, of the Baikal pistol. Not tight or frantic, just resting there. To keep his hand on it seemed to drain the tension and help him to relax. Always important to be calm, have the breathing steady. He waited and watched the gates. He could picture how it would be. He had seen it enough times. Late, very late, the target was aware that someone was close to him and had entered the protective circle that men imagined was around them. Might be defiance or fear, or just a stunned moment of shock that stopped the function of legs and arms – because the target had seen the pistol. Sometimes, if the target froze, Robbie would do the double tap of two head shots. If the man had fight in him – could be a rolled newspaper, a plastic bag of shopping or a coat on his arm as he came out of a club or a pub, or a glass in his hand if he was still inside, then Robbie did a chest shot to drop him and a head shot to finish him.
The wasps were worse than they had been earlier and he was surprised that the gates hadn’t yet opened, that the target hadn’t come out with the dog. More walkers had used the path but he was still and wasn’t seen. Once he’d had to allow two wasps to crawl on his face because he couldn’t swat the little bastards while people went by…
Never anything to show from a chest shot other than the hole in the clothing that a schoolkid’s pencil would slip into. It might have a trace of burn round it, a scorch, but that was hard to see. The head shot also made a hole where a pencil could slot. The blood didn’t come out of the chest or the head until the target was down and dead – not that Robbie had seen the bleeding: he was gone by the time the dribble started. Didn’t run – important to walk.
His dad, Jerry, had done a stretch when Robbie was a youngster: his mum had said that after a snatch at a jeweller’s had gone wrong – a shop assistant ignored the raised cosh and slung an adding machine, then her shoe at the lead guy in through the door – his dad had run till his lungs half burst. Everyone on the street had noticed him and yelled to the police which way he’d gone. The old fool had still had a balaclava tight in his hand when they found him sagged against a lamppost.
He thought the dog must have crossed legs and almost chuckled, but the bastard wasps hadn’t left him. He watched the gates and waited.
The phone call ended. It had been a long one – and no coffee to go with it because she was in the kitchen: he wasn’t going to carry his notepad, pen and the phone in there and keep talking while the kettle boiled. His friend from Marbella had rung back to say that 82mm mortar shells and RG-42 hand grenades could be included in the package. Did they not have enough of that gear already in Baghdad? No, because the Yanks had blown up arms stores the length and breadth of the country. Did the Iraqi police need mortar shells designed for use at battalion level and in an infantry assault? They could be persuaded. Did they need hand grenades with burst-radius of up to twenty metres? A dark night on the airport road, manning a roadblock, with most of the grunts gone home, any Iraqi policeman would be glad of half a box. They had talked round it and haggled – as friends did – and Harvey would go back to his people in Baghdad and the friend would talk to the contact in Tirana. Then there had been chat about the problems that summer in Marbella – algae in the swimming-pools. Time had slipped, and he had almost forgotten that his first call of the day had been to order, special next-day delivery, a bulletproof vest.
Harvey crossed the hall and went into the kitchen. The dog was by the door, panting, tail wagging, and she was lifting down the lead from the hook by the coat pegs. He still had on his flipflops and his rough trainers were in the cupboard. He did the dog walk. Didn’t hang on to much, but the fucking dog walk was his.
He snatched the lead, beat her to it. She had binoculars round her neck, walking boots on her feet and a light sweater hooked over her shoulders. The shades were on her hair and would cut out the glare off the sea. He had nothing suitable for walking the coast path and going out towards the lighthouse and the great Pulpit Rock.
No explanations. Nothing about a late call coming through and putting him off his schedule. He might as well have struck her. She, his Josie, recoiled from him, almost flinched. He didn’t know what to say, how to say anything. Had yesterday’s shirt on and no hat to keep the sun off his forehead, no glasses to keep the brilliance out of his eyes, creased trousers and the flipflops that flapped on the kitchen floor as he went to the door, opened it, let the dog bound ahead of him and closed it. He didn’t turn to see her face, had no interest in her expression.
He walked towards the gates. They were closed.
The zapper that opened them was on his key-ring, which was beside the phone in his office.
He stared at the closed gates. Yes, he could have climbed them, but would not have been able to lift the dog over – too heavy and too big a drop. He was about to go back.
They opened. Well-oiled, they eased away from the post and stopped when there was enough space for him and the dog to go through. He looked behind, couldn’t help himself, and she was on the step with a zapper in her hand. He thought she mouthed one word, pathetic – he lip-read it.
He went out through the gate and the pick-up was coming down the lane. He saw the face and acknowledged a curt hand gesture – Nigel might have had some pillow talk about the unreasonableness of a husband – and Harvey swung on to the path and walked away from his gardener, Josie’s comforter… Yes, he believed it.
The dog went ahead.
Jumbled thoughts, incoherently put together… his wife, pathetic… the gardener… a contract from a village… the dog peering into bushes at the side of the track, hackles rising… the need for grenades in Baghdad… the requirement for police, Shia or Sunni, to have mortar bombs… a BPV coming in the morning with a spray… the sun’s strength in his eyes, brightness off the water… the ferry late… the growl of the dog… the fucking gardener… His thoughts were a mess and then there was a stone, sharp, under his foot. The flipflop was bloody useless.
He went on past the dog, his fingers touched the ruff of its neck, and he was too distracted by the pain in his foot, the light on his face and every other thing on his mind to stop and check the dog’s aggravation… Pathetic. No one had ever called Harvey Gillot pathetic – not in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Syria, the ministry buildings in Jakarta, Beijing, Seoul or Dubai, or in an odd little backwater of the Pentagon or in a garret on the top floor of Whitehall’s defence building, off Horse Guards Avenue. No one who worked from Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the Albert Embankment had ever called him pathetic.
A cloud lifted. To hell with confusion. His mind hooked on to the grenades and mortars, the signal he would send to Baghdad, to the interior ministry, and the calls he would make to Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the pen-pushers who issued the export-clearance forms and- Where was the dog? He whistled. The path ahead was empty and he could see down the side of Rufus Castle to the rocks and the beach. He turned.
The man wore overalls.
His hands pulled the balaclava down over his upper face, then came together and the scrape of metal on metal, the arming, carried to him. One hand, right side, was raised.
Very clear to Harvey Gillot. The hand held a pistol that looked to him like a Makharov. He knew the Makharov, had handled the sale of Makharov pistols pretty much since the first day he’d been with Solly Lieberman. It might not have been a Makharov that was coming up to aim at his chest, might have been the Baikal lookalike. Came from the same factory and- The aim was on him. He tried to turn, and the twist of his foot seemed to gouge the stone, between the flipflop and his sole, deeper into the skin and the pain of it came on. He bent, reflex, and the shot was fired. He was half down, on his knee, and his ears rang with the crack of the bullet going high and wide. A hanging in the morning concentrated the mind – as did a raised handgun when aimed, ten-foot range, at a guy who had dropped to one knee. Harvey Gillot saw everything with such clarity. And the wasps.
He had never missed before. Robbie Cairns had never failed to drop his target with the first shot. He had seen the strike against the old stone of the castle ruin.
He steadied.
The target was down, on one knee, and the dog cringed at the side of the path. Fucking wasps. He had to aim again because the impact of the first shot had lifted his firing arm and destroyed the zero he’d taken. The fucking wasps were in his face. One at the balaclava slash for his nose, another at the slit for his left eye, one hovering and one crawling on him. He had the aim. Steadied. Now the man stared at him. Should have been fear, wasn’t. Should have been like the dog, but wasn’t belly down and didn’t cower. Started to squeeze and – fucking wasp in his fucking nose, and the other was half an inch from his eyeball. It had never been like this before.
He saw the two wasps. One was halfway up a nostril and the other was now on the material beside an eye. He had the flipflop, right foot, in his hand. A Makharov or a Baikal lookalike was aimed at him, and in retaliation Harvey Gillot readied to throw a flipflop. The pistol’s aim was gone, and the man’s arms flailed and brushed the balaclava. He hurled the flipflop – ten feet, could have been less. It hit the upper body. Not enough, of course, to hurt or injure, but more than enough, with two wasps in harness, to confuse.
He ran.
They said, military guys he met, that the big decision was between ‘flight and fight’. It was a response to acute stress. A bullet had gone over his head, fired from ten feet or less, and a goddamn insect had given him the chance of a double play. Now he did flight – but he’d done fight with the flipflop.
He ran and shrieked out loud for the dog, didn’t realise it was at his knee and belting with him. Another crack. A whiplash in the air and a splatter of bark on a tree ahead, and then he was round the bend in the path and cut away into scrub. He went down on his elbows and knees and burrowed through thorn and gorse. His shirt was snagged and torn but he kept going and the dog came with him.
Couldn’t go further – was at a drop. He had reached a place where level ground ended and he was trapped between rock that went up sheer, and rock that went down vertical. He lay still, hoped he was hidden, and held the dog. After the exhaustion, the heart’s pumping and the adrenalin, there was a god-awful pain in his foot.
Maybe it wasn’t clever.
Two minutes or three, he waited and listened. He thought the dog had the best hearing and would respond, but nobody came down the track. People came up, though, a boy and a girl, dressed to walk the coastal path. They might be going the whole way round the Bill. He used them as a human shield. If they reached the top of the track where it joined the lane, he reckoned he’d be fine. He came out of his lair and stumbled after them. His second flipflop fell off and he didn’t stop for it, but he pocketed the cartridge of the second round fired. The boy and girl were laughing, stepping out well and sharing a water bottle. They didn’t look back at Harvey, trailing them, and went right past where the first spent cartridge case had been ejected. Didn’t see it. Harvey picked it up. They didn’t have reason to look at the gap in the foliage where bloody Devonish dumped his grass and prunings, but Harvey saw the wasps there, angry and swarming. He reached the gates.
He beat on the button with his fist.
He held it down.
He yelled at the skies over the gates. ‘If you two haven’t started shagging yet, let me in.’
No one answered him and no one came.
He scraped up a handful of dirt and stones and threw it high over the gate towards the house, but knew it would fall short.
Vern had been waiting, seemed an age, at the car. He’d endured boredom and anxiety alternately but had known the confidence that came from belonging to a top-rated team, and his brother was pick-of-the-bunch. At his feet there was a small mess of ground-out cigarettes, self-rolled ones, and he prided himself that he had learned in gaol how to make them narrow and firm so that the tobacco lasted longest. He had been halfway through smoking the fourth or fifth when they had come out of the lane, crossed the road, then come up the slope, away from the museum and the pub.
He knew there had been failure. Body language told him: his brother’s head and the slump of the shoulders. Robbie still had the overalls on and – dear God, couldn’t believe it – he had in his hand something that looked the right colour for the balaclava. They didn’t run, but Leanne was trying to speed him up. He could see – but not yet hear – that she was pestering him with questions and not getting answers.
How had it been every other time that Vern had done the driver’s role? He had been sitting or standing by the car and Robbie had materialised round a corner, never panting, never with a hair out of place, and had sauntered over, opened his door, lowered himself into the seat, slipped on the seatbelt and locked it. He had never looked fussed or troubled. Nothing to shout that he was stressed. Every other time Vern had eased the car away from a kerb or a supermarket parking bay and hadn’t screamed the tyres or burned the rubber, but had gone off main roads on to back doubles and rat-runs where there weren’t cameras. Didn’t quiz. Every other time he had let Robbie have his space and let him break the quiet in the car. And every other time there had been a half-wink, a slight nod or a wisp of a smile. They were near to him, and no reaction from Robbie, Leanne biting her lip and opening the big plastic bag from her pocket, and there in the street, but behind a tree, his brother peeled off the overalls and dropped them in, then the balaclava. She reached into the boot and had the lighter fuel out, was spraying his arms and trying to dab his face with cotton wool. Nobody came. The street stayed empty. The museum still had the closed sign up and the pub was shuttered. Seemed to take for ever.
It was an untravelled road, new territory.
He was in the car, twisting the ignition, when he heard the smack of the rear door closing. Then Leanne was beside him, her expression dead, as if shock had hit her. Her hands shook.
‘Where to?’ He was entitled to ask.
Nothing from Robbie, except the stink of lighter fuel. Leanne said, ‘Just get clear.’
‘How fast?’ Needed to know – big speed or like nothing had happened?
Robbie didn’t speak. Leanne did: ‘Out of here.’
He had never peppered questions before because there had been no need. Was now. ‘What happened?’
A little hiss of breath from Robbie. Leanne spoke for him. ‘It didn’t – didn’t happen.’
Robbie accepted it – had no choice. Like the first time he’d been in an interview room, aged ten years and four months, and his mother was the ‘responsible adult’. She answered all the questions the big butch police cow had put. Leanne would be the mouthpiece.
Vern ignored his brother. ‘He fired. That’s why we’ve done clothing and why we’ve this bloody smell. So what happened?’
‘He missed,’ she said softly.
‘He missed? Am I hearing right? How many shots?’
‘Two. He told me when I met him. I don’t know everything.’
‘He missed with two shots? What range?’
‘He said it was about three yards.’
‘He missed with two shots and three yards – nine feet? Not possible. How?’
‘He stood where some grass was dumped, off the track. There were rotten apples and wasps and-’ She spoke without expression.
‘He stood on a wasps’ nest – is that what you’re saying?’
‘He saw the target, with the dog, came out on to the track after him, and the target ducked as he fired first so he missed and-’
‘The target ducked? What’s the target supposed to do? Stand fucking still?’ He was close to losing the car. Head shaking, eyes big, hands off the wheel and over his eyes and ‘He missed with the second shot because he had a wasp in his nose and a wasp in his eye.’
Vern had control again of the car, had bumped the kerb and missed a tree, and was back on the road. ‘Yes – so?’
‘I don’t know much more, Vern. He fired twice, missed twice and quit. Vern, the target threw a flipflop at him.’
‘Was armed with a flipflop and threw it.’
‘And hit him with it.’
And Vern – on new territory, milking the moment and maybe reflecting years of resentment at the kid brother who used him as chauffeur and messenger-boy, never as a trusted confidant – said, ‘Oh, that’s serious. Should we go to Accident and Emergency? What a prat – a tosser. What a-’
An arm came from behind, and the hand was at his throat, closing on his windpipe. The skin on the fingers stank of lighter fuel, and he fought for breath. He hung on to the wheel and stayed off the pavement, and heard her voice, soft, speaking past him. The grip loosened. There were no sirens.
He didn’t respond, wouldn’t have rubbed his neck or showed that it had hurt him. He didn’t apologise for what he had called his brother – a prat and a tosser – and could have called him worse. He couldn’t get his head round Robbie standing on rotten apples, stirring shit in a wasps’ nest and missing twice. No Cairns ever apologised, not his granddad or his dad, and he wouldn’t be the first.
He turned off at a line of shops and went right, heading towards the high old buildings of the prison for young guys. He found a narrow entrance to an old quarry he had located when he had done his drive round.
What he understood was pretty clear: his young brother had screwed up big. He didn’t know if, in Robbie’s trade, second chances were handed out.
‘Let him wait,’ she’d said. ‘Let him bloody wait and stew.’
They should have had an hour, maybe more. If her husband took the dog right up to the Bill and had a coffee or tea at the cafe, it would be more than an hour. If he went the other way, took the path past the young-offenders prison and went all the way to the adults’ gaol, that would be an hour too. She had been standing behind the chair in the kitchen, and her hands had been on the man’s shoulders. She had been working the muscles, taking the tension from them when she had heard the shots. Then nothing, silence. Perhaps a little anxiety had eaten at her resolve. A couple of minutes had passed and her hands had been off his neck.
She couldn’t have said what she wanted – for Harvey to walk into the house, soft-soled shoes and quiet, when they were in the kitchen, her hitched up on the table, or they might have been on the floor in any damn room… It was her dream, ever-present. But she jibbed a little at its fulfilment… she didn’t know how he would react. Fine if he was apoplectic, scarlet-faced, broke down in tears or threatened violence. Grim if he stayed in the doorway, watched the hips bounce and asked if there had been calls, then went off to his office.
Two shots.
In the early days, she had been with him to arms fairs where there were 25-metre ranges and customers were invited to shoot, the prizes champagne magnums. There had been a day out – four-course lunch in the officers’ mess – at the Infantry Training School’s firepower demonstration, when blank and live rounds had been fired.
Her gardener did not know that her husband’s life was threatened and a contract taken, but would have seen him go out of the gates and heard shots. She strained to listen.
A young man’s laughter, then a young woman’s, from behind the high wall that bordered the driveway and the patio. Must have been wrong, not shots. Could have sworn they were, though. She couldn’t ring Harvey because his phone was within arm’s reach. Her hands had gone back to the shoulders, the rippling muscles, and her fingers slipped down into the mat of chest hair – and there had been his voice: If you two haven’t started shagging yet, let me in.
There had been the fall of stones on the drive, and she could see the high gate rocking as if someone was trying to force it.
Let him wait. Let him bloody wait and stew.
A kiss, wet against the salt gathered behind an ear. There would be no more. She yearned for it, but wouldn’t have it – even though she had a condom in her pocket, and knew there was always one – ribbed – in his wallet. A good bet her Harvey wouldn’t care anyway. He used to tell her that in Belarus or Bulgaria, Romania or Georgia the whores would be queuing in the bar for his attentions. Skinny girls and heavy girls, tall and short, natural and artificial blonde patrolled the corridor outside his room in the hope he’d weaken and take the chain off the door. Implants, suspenders and HIV. Would have been easier for her, if she could have been the wronged wife because he took tarts into his room. She let go of the shoulders.
From the kitchen, she watched Nigel go past his pick-up and walk to the gates. He fiddled with the pad, and let them open just wide enough.
Harvey limped, might have been walking on coals. The dog bounded after him. His hair was dishevelled and his knees were scratched. Shock was etched on his face and his eyes were wild.
He came into the kitchen and winced as his feet left blood smears on the vinyl. He looked into her eyes and said nothing, but his right hand slipped into his pocket and he dropped on to the table, scrubbed oak planking, two empty cartridge cases. They bounced and rattled, then were still. He went on through the inner door and towards his office.
The sun, through the window, gleamed on the cartridge cases.
Leanne waited in the phone box, heard the ring tone and lifted the receiver. She had called a neighbour of her grandfather in the Albion Estate, had given the number of the box, and the neighbour would have hurried three doors down the walkway to bang on his door. The connection was now via two public phones and the chance of an intercept was minimal: it was a reasonable precaution because Granddad Cairns’s home phone was a possible target under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and its reference to ‘interception of communications’. She could not be placed on the Isle of Portland.
At the quarry down the road, long exhausted and with its tally of burned-out cars, a small fire would now be dying and all evidence of a firearm’s residue would have been eliminated from a set of overalls, a balaclava and lightweight plastic gloves. The lighter fuel had the dual purpose of speeding the conflagration and killing the remnants of the chemical discharge on firing from Robbie’s face and wrists. He had been led, half stripped, to a puddle where, without ceremony, his brother had scrubbed him.
Leanne had realised that the relationships had changed, that an old pecking order was broken. Her younger brother had given no further explanation and had not complained at the harsh way Vern handled him: she barely knew him.
Her grandfather was on the phone. She thought he might have been having his breakfast, working his way through the flat runners of the afternoon, when the neighbour had rapped at his door. He would have hurried down into the street and then, clutching a slip of paper with a number on it, gone to the station and found a phone that wasn’t broken. He would have dialled and expected the good news. She told it like it was. She didn’t shield her brother but relayed back what she had been told. A lie-up where there were rotting apples, wasps, a sudden duck as the first shot was fired, which had missed the target, a second shot, again off-target because of wasps in his face and a flipflop thrown. Twice she had had to repeat herself because Granddad Cairns had sworn and another time there had been a gasp of utter disbelief. One question: how was Robbie? She was succinct: ‘He’s bollocksed, on his knees.’
Leanne loved Granddad Cairns, and held him in devoted respect. He was in his eightieth year, had skin the colour of old parchments she’d seen as a kid in the library, was seldom without a fag hanging from his mouth and coughed in convulsions most mornings, but she reckoned his brain was keen. She and Vern, certainly Robbie, were unused to catastrophe. None of them had known how to react other than to shed the clothing and destroy it. She heard her grandfather out, listened and absorbed, rang off and went back to the car to tell them.
The voice was incoherent.
Roscoe interrupted: ‘But you’re all right? You’re not hurt?’
It had been a result, a brilliant one, the previous evening in Wandsworth. Three officers inserted into the shop via the backyard entrance and two builders’ vans out the front, well loaded with people, and the guns were in support. They had waited until the bad guys were on their way across the pavement, face masks on and pickaxe handles ready to knock out the display windows, and they’d done the ‘Go, go, go.’ Four on the pavement in custody and two drivers.
‘Yes, Mr Gillot… Of course I take this development most seriously. Two shots, yes? I confirm you’re unhurt.’
One of the bad guys had spun, a dancer’s pirouette, then sprinted for the far side of the street and tried to lose himself in the traffic. He had gone straight into the arms of Mark Roscoe, who had brought him down and sat on him. Four hours to write up the reports, and afterwards the pub.
‘My superior will be consulting with relevant parties, Mr Gillot… There is no need to shout at me, sir. A very unpleasant experience, yes. My colleagues and I will be on our way… No, I doubt very much that he’s sitting outside your gate. I imagine he’s legged it. Try to keep yourself secure in the meantime, Mr Gillot.’
The pub had gone on late. The minicab home had lost itself and he’d been asleep in the back, so he was into the bedroom later than… She wasn’t pleased. She’d not woken him when she’d gone to work. No note on the table but a box of Alka-Seltzer, and the windows were open, which meant that the room stank. He’d come in feeling fragile and was pottering, and his phone had rung.
‘No, Mr Gillot, I’m not suggesting you dig a bunker under the table… That’s uncalled for, sir, and I would remind you that you were offered advice and chose to reject it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I can get off the phone and start driving.’
He put down the receiver and grimaced. Bill twirled the car keys and Suzie gazed at him with a degree of annoyance as if it was too obvious he’d been taking abuse from the bloody man and hadn’t slapped him down. What did Mark Roscoe think? Not repeatable in company, but something along the lines -watered down – that the world might have been a better place if the contract man had aimed a bit straighter and earned his money. He would never consider saying to a superior that the Tango didn’t deserve the care put into safeguarding a miserable second-rate life but he could think it. They’d made their bloody bed and they, husband and wife, could bloody lie on it.
They hit the road.
Coming out of the first turning, the junction at the lights, Bill turned to him. ‘Boss, don’t take any shit from Gillot. Don’t.’