‘Don’t embarrass me, Mr Gillot, don’t go near her.’
‘Big talk for a bloody gardener – or am I just the last to be told?’
‘Just keep out of the way, Mr Gillot, and nobody gets upset.’
‘As long as we understand that for all your hard work this morning, and your duties as protector and baggage carrier for my wife, it’ll be she who pays you, not me.’
‘Cheap, Mr Gillot. I think she’s coming now so, please, don’t interfere.’
Did he want a fight? Nearly did. The front door was open. Also open were the driver’s door and boot of her car, parked on the driveway. Beside it, loaded with the wheelbarrow and the rest of Nigel’s paraphernalia, was his pick-up. They would leave, he assumed, in convoy from the Portland front line, the Lulworth View salient. The gardener had inserted himself between Harvey Gillot and the front door. It was an hour since she’d said she would go. He had not begged. There had been none of the bent-knee-and-welling-eyes stuff about his inability to see ‘this’ through without her.
He heard the small but shrill squeal of the suitcase wheels.
The cartridge cases had rolled on the kitchen table, which had been sufficient to start them off. She was not hanging about to have her head blown off by a gunman who might just, next time, get to aim straighter, with her alongside him. He was not about to miss her, and did she want some help with her packing? She was not considering setting down shallow roots in a god-awful ‘safe-house’ that was vetted by policemen. He had no intention of bugging out, as rats did. She had done nothing, but he had brought this on himself, through deceit. He had worked damn hard to put clothes on her back, and food on her table. She had called him a ‘cheat’ who’d reneged on a done deal. He had tried to laugh with irony, but made a poor fist of it, and had called her the cheat, the deal reneged on her marriage vows… which had concluded the shouting match. He noticed that the gardener had – step by step – positioned himself so that he could intervene if his employer had come at her with a knife from the kitchen block.
She carried one case and pulled another.
That left a dilemma for the gardener. He could do polite manners, pick up her bag and lug it to the car, leaving her without defence against her husband’s potential violence, or leave her to shift it. Harvey revelled in the moment. He reached past the gardener, took the bag she carried and murmured something about ‘always here to give a helping hand’.
His wife, Josie, started it again: ‘It was your greed that did it, and you ripped off those people. You deserve what’s coming to you.’
‘As long as you’re happy – and safe – I have no other concern.’
‘Don’t you realise what a shit you’ve become, Harvey?’
‘Having gained that stunning insight, I’m surprised you lasted so long with me.’
‘And don’t go near my daughter.’
‘Your daughter? Of course, never in doubt.’ They were at her car. He could have flared into a response about the payment of school fees, the cost of holidays, the rent for the field where the horse was kept and so much else, but he couldn’t be bothered. Nor could he be bothered to get snide about the gardener’s ability to keep a woman used to comforts. He forced a smile. ‘You look after yourself.’
‘I’ll be back for more of my clothes.’
‘You do that.’ Nothing about needing a removals van for the job. ‘I think you’re doing the right thing, and I’ll make it as easy for you as I possibly can.’
He congratulated himself that his voice sounded so reasonable. She was in her car and zapped the gates. The gardener peered out and up the lane, and he thought of the old stories he used to hear – with Solly Lieberman in Peshawar – about the Soviet boys who had to drive their trucks through the mountain passes from Kabul to Jalalabad and didn’t know where the ambush would be.
‘This is all because of your cheating.’
‘Correct again, as you always were – are…’
She slammed the door.
‘… and will, no doubt, continue to be.’
She wouldn’t have heard. The car and the pick-up enveloped him in exhaust fumes. He didn’t hang around long enough to see whether they made it up the lane, or whether the mujahideen got had them in a blast of RPG fire. She must have done it because the gates closed.
The dog was in the kitchen. Dogs understood. It was under the kitchen table and looked cowed. Harvey realised that the moment the gates had closed he had lost a focus against which to fight. What to do? He paced the length of the house. All the rooms were on the ground floor with the exception of their daughter’s – her daughter’s – bedroom, which was built into the roof and reached by a spiral staircase. He trudged through the kitchen, the dining room, the snug where the TV was, their bedroom – hers – and into his office. On the work surface by the keyboard he saw his pencilled sums of the figures relevant to a contract with the Iraqi police. He did the grand tour once, then went to the kitchen sink, poured water into a glass and swigged it.
So damn quiet.
No sound from his feet on flooring that was parquet, vinyl or carpeted. He had anointed his feet with a salve and wore socks, hoping they would protect the wounds from dirt. He didn’t know now what he should do. He had never told Josie about meeting Arbuthnot on the dockside at Rijeka. It had seemed a minor matter and nothing to concern her. In the early days the marriage had pulsed with love and achievement. It hadn’t seemed necessary to tell her of something small in which he had no pride… The silence weighed around him, and the emptiness.
He thought about the pain of walking, and the pair of 9mm cartridge cases that lay on the kitchen table. They were beside the day’s post, which Josie must have brought in – holiday brochures, a pack from a knitwear company and a telephone bill, everything addressed to her. He couldn’t escape the quiet. Without the pain and the cartridge cases it might not have happened.
She had said she would come back for more of her clothes, and he had said he would make it easy for her. He set off again, new purpose, for the bedroom.
He could recall the man, and had a lock-down picture in his mind of the gun. He knew it had been a Makharov or the Baikal imitation. He had sold Makharovs all over but not the Baikal. The man had seemed small, of almost insignificant build. He had not noticed the eyes behind the slits, or anything particular about the nose that had poked through a hole above the cut for the lips. When he had done business in old Eastern Europe or the Middle East and had negotiated with dealers, there had been bodyguards who floated in shadows, opened car doors and lounged in villa gardens. He would have regarded it as certain that any of them, any of a hundred, would have followed him down the track until he could run no further, then killed him.
If that was what the village had bought, they had not bought well.
‘I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this, Robbie, and I’m bloody sure you aren’t.’
A time had been arranged with his granddaughter for his grandson to stop on the journey back to London and call a phone booth at the bus and Jubilee Line station in Rotherhithe. At his age, Granddad Cairns still had presence, a sharp eye and a jaw that could be set firm. His voice rasped. Two minutes, or three, before the time scheduled for the call, he had looked at the woman in the booth he wanted and had asked her respectfully to terminate her call and vacate it. She’d effed him, then maybe had a second glance at the jaw and eyes of the bowed old man who wanted the phone. She had hung up and gathered her shopping together. Funny thing, as he’d stood and looked at the silent phone, there had been a queue of punters behind him, but none had cared to hassle him. The phone had rung out to the half-minute of the time he’d demanded and he had lifted it.
The voice down the line was subdued and he had to strain to hear it against the voice of the man in the next booth to his.
‘What did you say?’
Better the second time: ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’
‘Robbie, I’m not concerned about you standing on a wasp hole, or about a target ducking, or about a wasp up your nose, or about how many you let off that missed. You want to know what I’m concerned about, do you?’
He wouldn’t have said his grandson was lippy. He was a kid who was alone, ran his own life to his own instructions… but he had phoned at almost the exact time he was required to, which told Granddad Cairns a fair amount. Himself, at that age, sent a message from a clapped-out has-been, told what to do and when to do it – with the weight of a foul-up on his back – he would have ignored the demand to make a phone call on schedule.
‘You weren’t there.’ Quiet. ‘You don’t know.’
‘You said that once. Don’t need saying again.’ He had put grit into his tone. The kid was on his way back into London. He wanted the implications of what had happened that morning embedded in him. Wanted it to have swirled round the kid’s head before he reached London. He’d thought his grandson to be the best, had been proud of him, and it hurt to have the faith kicked aside… And it was too big a matter for him to give the kid a soft response. There had been a contract: the contract was fucked. ‘What I’m concerned about… He have a gun? Haven’t heard he did. All I hear is that he threw a flipflop at you, then ran barefoot away from you. Why couldn’t you catch him up? Why didn’t you go after him, finish him?’
‘I just didn’t.’
He would have put his shirt on his grandson. He would have bet his last fag on the kid following it through. Wouldn’t have said he liked him, but had respect for him, and couldn’t have believed that a couple of wasps and a flipflop would screw him up.
‘I’m getting there, Robbie. You failed. Big word, “failed”, not a Cairns word. You’re supposed to be hot and people believed the bullshit. Nobody reckoned that fucking wasps and a flipflop could skewer your reputation… What hurts me? That you didn’t go in after him and finish him, whether it was ugly, messy – but a job done.’
‘Have you finished, Granddad?’
Maybe it was the end of another goddamn era, one of those changes in the Cairns family fortunes that were bloody volcanoes in their lives. Himself, it had been the ‘cleaning up’ of the Metropolitan Police – the end of knocking off wages vans and knowing that the squad cars were safely in the car parks behind the stations. His boy, Jerry, had faced his bloody brick wall when the cameras were introduced. Now you couldn’t blow your nose in London without it being seen, and the spread of the cameras had done for Jerry. For grandfather and father alike the happy days when hip pockets were well-filled and women wore big stones on their fingers were gone. The meal-ticket of today was the kid. In the family money was not saved, but spent when it came in. What Robbie did paid for Granddad Cairns’s groceries and helped with the electricity. Jerry and Dot lived off the kid’s earnings, Vern and Leanne too. It would have been easier for him if Robbie hadn’t rung in at all – near as easy for him if he’d been told to shut his face and bad-mouthed by his grandson. He didn’t understand why the kid had crumpled.
‘People put their faith in you and have been let down. Me and your dad, we’re pissed on. I like to say, in this world you have one chance. You’ve got to hope, kid, that you have two chances. One chance, you failed. Worst is that the money was paid.’
It was the kernel of what he had to say. Didn’t know why he’d taken so long getting there. He wouldn’t have considered going gentle on the kid because of family. In the world of Granddad Cairns the most important factor was money. Men were paid, men did not deliver, men went into concrete and always had. Might be the flyover at Chiswick, or the foundations of the Dome, or the support towers of the new Olympics site. Money had been paid and lodged in an account, and he knew it because the paper slip from the cash machine had told him so. To be paid and to break faith on a deal was a death sentence, and to have to pay back the money was a humiliation he doubted he’d survive.
‘We were paid, we had their money. I have to tell people you failed. Also, I’m telling them you’re worth a second chance. Get it in your skull. Money was paid and needs earning. If it’s not, you’re in the gutter, Robbie, bleeding bad and-’
The call was cut. Might have been that the kid ran out of money, or that he put the phone down on him.
She sat on a bench, opposite the museum, and the lane in front of her ran down past the terraces of cottages. The gate to the house was out of sight. She could sit there – she was just a pretty young girl out in the sunshine.
She had assumed it was the wife who had left. Blonde, highlighted hair looking a mess through the windscreen, driving fast up the lane and turning on to the road without a glance to right or left. She’d not seen more of her because of the privacy tinting on the rear windows. A pick-up had followed. Leanne Cairns wasn’t a fool. Might have been – as her grandmother, Mum Davies, said – the brightest of the whole tribe. Wasn’t taxed. Leanne could register the scale of the catastrophe that had hit them down that lane. She wondered if by now, without her as a crutch, Robbie had dragged himself together.
She was to watch and not attract notice, and she was to tell him what she saw.
She imagined that by now her grandfather would be hyperventilating at the failure, that a message was on its way to HMP Wandsworth and her father’s cell block. She thought a report on the failure would have reached Lenny Grewcock, and would be homing in on some village in Eastern Europe. That it was Robbie who had failed amazed her. Not her father or her eldest brother: little Robbie.
She knew where he’d be. She wasn’t supposed to but she did. With Vern, she was the only member of the family who was privy to where he’d be – and a fat lot of fucking good it would do him.
She stood up and started walking. She went past the museum, past a group of walkers in shorts and country shirts with ruck-sacks, past small houses with bright window-boxes. She saw the gates and the voice grille and stood rooted. A suitcase came over the gates and split open when it landed, clothes spilling out and- She spun on her heel.
So, his wife had quit on him, hadn’t told him they’d ‘see this through together’. She had done a runner and wasn’t expected back, and Harvey Gillot, with her Robbie, was in the pits.
‘From what you say, Benjie, Blowback is apt.’
‘The trouble with Blowback is that every little man, with the benefit of hindsight, can lob a brickbat.’
‘Stuck in you, as a dose of garlic is?’
‘Don’t get me wrong. I merely offered advice. It was his decision. It’s not me that has Blowback.’
They ate in the dining room at the Special Forces Club, a discreet address in a road behind Harrods. Benjie Arbuthnot liked to support the place as the credit crunch and declining membership squeezed its finances. His guest could have belonged, might yet succumb to arm-twisting, and qualified through his commission in the Royal Marines and secondment to the Special Boat Service. They had met at that god-forsaken hole, the Iraq-Iran border, the old fighting ground of those countries in the 1980s, and twenty years later, Benjie had seen off the assets over the waterways that marked the frontier. They’d gone in RIBs with suppressed engine noise, and had been the responsibility of Denys Foster – Captain, Military Cross, the citation not published. It was an indulgence of Benjie’s to stay in loose contact with younger men: they freshened him, kept his mind alive.
‘Where we were – Iraq et cetera – that was a Blowback.’
‘Of course. We armed the old butcher, fed him intelligence, empowered him and it all blew back in our faces.’
‘And Afghanistan.’
‘Right again. I had a little part in that – fourth-rate ground-to-air kit was shipped in, and my young friend Gillot did what was asked of him. We helped expel the Russians and now we’re up to our necks in that awful place, toasted by the hairy blighters we encouraged.’
Benjie seldom met anyone in the bar these days whom he had known on the road. In the ranks of the SIS, he had served in Pakistan, Syria, Argentina, the Balkans and, of course, had done time as a cantankerous veteran in Iraq. There, he had not tolerated incompetence and had valued the friendship and humanity of the young man now opposite him.
‘You could say, Benjie, “They sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind”. Your Gillot sowed then and reaps now.’
The waitress hovered, and he indicated that they needed more time on the menu, but not on the wine list. A nicotine-stained finger stabbed on a house white, a chardonnay.
‘Book of Hosea, Jerusalem version of the Old Testament, chapter eight, I think verse seven. Yes? In my career – God, I sound pompous – I believe I tried to respond with fairness towards our assets. What do I owe him? Tell me.’
‘What are the police offering?’
‘Told him to hide in a ditch and keep his head down.’
‘Family stiffening his backbone?’
‘I doubt it. He’s a loner. All arms dealers are. They’re pariahs, on no one’s invitation list. Bizarre business, this blowback. The Americans slipped it into the lexicon to highlight the scale of the foul-up when they backed the Shah of Persia and created the monster of modern Iran. It was clever at the time, and they’ve cursed it for thirty years. The unintended consequences of an operation. Harvey Gillot made a fair profit out of that deal – set him on his feet, let him walk tall. Now it’s the ditch and maybe right into a wet culvert. I asked you, what do I owe him?’
‘In his case, put crudely, I’d want my hand held.’
‘Figuratively, literally?’
‘Maybe both – and something more in the way of advice.’
‘Spit it.’
‘He can’t hide for ever. Agreed? Can’t go into a ditch for the rest of his life. With me?’
He waved the waitress forward again. ‘Think so… Thank you. I make an abominable host. Can we order? I always go for chicken, safest, I think… Yes, with you. I hear what you say.’
It was enough to sap the enthusiasm of a convert. Megs Behan had always found those recently ordained into new branches of the clergy – or to the ranks of the anti-nicotine Fascists or the ones making the globe greener – nauseatingly saintly in the degree of their enthusiasm. Herself? The prospect of a trip to the coast had roused in her a rare sense of excitement. She had a giant canvas bag, containing her bullhorn, which was loaded with fresh batteries, and wads of leaflets describing the evils of the arms trade. Her enthusiasm drained away with a points failure west of Winchester. The convert’s loyalty to the cause suffered as she sat in a crowded carriage and watched nothing much happen outside. The coast, and the home of Harvey Gillot who sold weapons that killed innocents, was far away and the points stayed unrepaired. She had wanted to be there by midday – would be lucky now if it was late afternoon.
The battle raging inside her was fought along familiar lines: did she dare to poke her head out of the window and light a cigarette, or lock herself into the toilet and puff into the pan? She did neither, sat on the train and endured. Her mind was a jumble of statistics on weapons and ammunition exported, the destinations they went to, the schedules of flights out of Ostend, the ancient, unserviced aircraft that limped across continents in search of conflict, and men such as Gillot who met cronies and contacts in dark bars and select restaurants. None of them knew her name or what she looked like. He would, though. Too fucking right, he would. He would see her at his front gate, would hear her anywhere in his home and… Thinking of the blast of the bullhorn was almost better than dragging on a cigarette. A miracle. An answer to the faith of the convert. The carriage lurched. The train crawled forward.
‘Quite pretty, some of them,’ Bill said.
‘Nice choices, good styles,’ Suzie added.
To Mark Roscoe what littered the lane and hung from the top of the gate, the thorn and gorse bushes, looked too pricey to be dumped as rubbish. They were all out of the car, but the engine had been left to idle. They picked their way among skirts, dresses and blouses, summer jackets and tweed ones for winter, outdoor coats for the city and anoraks for the island. There were boots and shoes in most colours, and a quality set of leather suitcases. The cases were not fastened, only partly zipped – some garments still bulged out of them while others had fallen clear.
Suzie said, ‘Looks like she had a full knicker drawer.’
Bill said, ‘Surprised she needed so many. I’d swear there was a washing-machine.’
The knickers made the best show, Roscoe thought. Maybe a slight wind had lifted the thinner ones because some were lodged in the lower branches of a couple of ash trees and on the upper foliage of the gorse. They made a bright display.
Then, sombre.
‘Do you reckon she’s all right, boss?’ Bill asked.
As they picked their way through the clothing there had been gallows humour, which police liked to peddle when they intruded on personal catastrophe. It was the protective armour they had all put on as rookies. It helped them through the worst road-traffic accidents and the deaths in housing-association flats where the cadaver had lain for a month or two and attracted enough maggots to… Roscoe had been a constable for less than a year, working in north London, when he had stood at the rail of a bridge from which a woman had jumped – fifty feet or more – into fast-moving traffic. She was splattered, some tyres had gone over her, and he could have heaved, but a veteran had said, ‘Did you hear about that bloke who went to the lethal-injection thing in the States? They took him into the execution chamber and laid him down and he said, “Never a stunt double around when you want him.” Got it?’ It was a fair question.
Suzie said, ‘Doesn’t look as though he’s as rational as he might be, boss.’
Bill killed the car’s engine and flashed the lock. He was first over the gates. Roscoe gave Suzie a boost; he made his hands into a stirrup and shoved. Then he scrabbled for a grip, clung to the top, sweated, panted and went over. He landed hard, the breath knocked out of him. Good thing about the holster he wore: the Glock stayed firm inside.
The front door was open and the dog came out, only a Labrador and not a threat, but it ran at them and barked. Roscoe reckoned they’d find one of three things. She would be in the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom or the living room and her blood would be on the walls and the carpet, and he’d be huddled in a corner, trembling. She would be dead and he would be in the garage with the engine running and the pipe over the exhaust, or slumped with two empty bottles – painkillers and Scotch. She wouldn’t be there, and he’d be struggling with the broadsheet crossword.
There was no blood on the dog’s coat or paws.
Suzie said, ‘He doesn’t have a shotgun licence, but he does have a firearms one. It’s on the record.’
‘What’s covered by the firearms?’ Bill demanded.
Suzie grinned, and her Glock was out of her bag. It seemed too big in her hand. ‘He has a deactivated AK-74 and had a usable AK-47. He also has an RPG-7 launcher, but not the grenade to fire from it, and there’s a Lee Enfield Mark 4 rifle, a collector’s piece. He has a handgun too, but I can’t remember what make. I suppose I should have told you up-front, but it didn’t seem important. There’ll be guns in the house. He’s an arms dealer, right?’
‘Does he have ammunition?’ Roscoe asked.
She said he had permission for limited stocks for the Kalashnikov and the Lee Enfield, but had never applied to hold any. Meant nothing. Maybe he had ten rounds, or five, or maybe one and it was in a breech. Enough? Enough for the three of them. The Glocks were drawn, armed. Couldn’t estimate what degree of lunacy they’d confront. No more humour. Not even ‘Did you hear about the condemned guy who was taken into the room where the electric chair was and he said, “Are you people sure that thing’s safe?”’ It always made him laugh – but not now. Bill first, then Suzie through the front door, the dog with her, bounding about like it was a goddamn game, and Roscoe at the back.
Through the hall: no body, no blood.
Into the kitchen: no body, no blood, but the dog pawed at a big cupboard door. Opened it. No body, no blood, but a see-through plastic bucket two-thirds full of dried dog food. Suzie pulled it out, lifted off the lid and kicked it over. Roscoe saw on the table the two spent cartridge cases and the voice on the phone had blurted that two shots were fired. Dog behind them, eating off the floor, they did the rush tactic. One to each doorway, and two covering, then one entering, one in the doorway and one in a ‘ready’ position with the Glock held high and two-handed.
The bedroom was empty. The bed was made, the counterpane smoothed, but all the wardrobe doors were wide open and the drawers were on the carpet, stripped bare – but no body, no blood, no empty bottles, pills or whisky.
Roscoe heard the voice. Too faint at first to identify or to hear what was said. The three gathered at the door of a room that was at the back and led off the dining area. All three, all straining.
‘… No, I’m assured the end user isn’t a problem. The UK has good relations with them. Frankly, we can ship stuff into Oman with no difficulty. It’s only communications gear. I’m talking about what’ll fit on to three pallets, and it’ll be under a total of five hundred kilos. What are we looking at if I get delivery to Ostend? Does the price dip if I get delivery to you at Bratislava? Look, friend, I’m trying to push the business your way. You’re saying, then, that Bratislava isn’t as convenient as Ostend?… Ostend it is then, usual rates. Which are you using? That TriStar or the Antonov?… The Antonov still gets into the skies?… Bloody amazing… Yes, I’m fine. Everything’s rosy, and thanks, it’s a pleasure to do business.’
Roscoe called Gillot’s name and gave his own.
The door was opened.
He would have seen the guns and the postures. The dog must have cleaned up what had been tipped from the bucket and it came from behind them, fast. It cannoned into Bill’s legs and he was jolted towards Suzie. Roscoe laughed – just for a moment, then stifled it.
He was brusque. Where was Mrs Gillot?
‘Gone, quit, took the gardener with her.’
Why were Mrs Gillot’s clothes scattered outside the gates?
‘She said she’d come back and get the rest of her stuff and that’ll make it easier for her.’
The laughter he’d stifled was about a hoary anecdote that had run the length of his crowd, Royal and Diplomatic Protection, Special Branch, Firearms in London and most of the provincial forces that supplied protection officers to politicians: a minister had had a West Country constituency, and the sniffer dog had run through the man’s home to check for explosives. It had jumped on the bed and crapped on the duvet. It had been shut back in the van while the team had hustled to the nearest launderette. Always made him laugh, but not for sharing with a Tango.
By dumping her stuff on a public highway, was he not making an exhibition of himself? ‘Not that fussed – good enough for you?’
What were his plans in view of the attack? ‘To reject the advice you’re about to trot out, stay put and consider options.’
Rising impatience and anger. Would he show them the location of the attack? ‘Yes.’
They went out into the sunshine. Roscoe saw that Gillot was limping – he had eased his feet gingerly into old sandals. Both Bill and Suzie went into a practised routine in which she was at the front and he behind. Roscoe had slipped in alongside the Tango. They approached the gates and a smile, almost a sneer, was on Gillot’s face. Suzie asked, not taking her eyes off the shrubs, the gates and the top of the wall, whether he had taken out any of his weapons from whatever secure store he kept them in. He replied easily that he had not, and threw questions back at her. Did she know that the AK-74 was deactivated? Did she know also that the AK-47 was not deactivated because it had actually been run over, in the Panshir Valley, by the tracks of a Soviet main battle tank? And the RPG-7 launcher had a half-bucket of Sinai sand in its tube, had rusted through and would kill anyone who tried to use it. Last, did she know that the Lee Enfield Mark 4 had been buried in a shell blast in the bocage battle of Normandy in 1944 and not dug up until the skeleton was recovered in 1998? It would need more than engineering oil to free up its working parts. There was a Luger pistol, from the Great War, and the barrel had been drilled. It didn’t work and she should check why her paperwork did not provide the up-to-date situation with the near-historic weapons. They were kept under the living room in a safe mini-bunker, reached by a trapdoor and hidden from view by the carpet.
A bit of fear would have helped Gillot’s cause, Roscoe reckoned. The last three cases he had done for his small wing of SCD7 had involved safeguarding an Albanian brothel owner, a cocaine dealer in west London and, most recently, a scrap-metal king who had minded the prime proceeds from a jewellery heist at Heathrow for ten years until the guys who had done the heist, and done time, wanted the sparkle back. All involving lowlife, all with a sense of humour and a degree of dignity, and all with respect for the job Roscoe had tried to do. The Albanian was now back in Pristina with his nephews and cousins and had dispersed his assets; he had offered the team the chance to meet some ‘nice clean girls and young’, and had sent a postcard via New Scotland Yard. The dealer had wisely returned to Jamaica, and the scrap-metal king had gone quiet, perhaps had been encouraged to find what he had minded. In the three cases there had been congratulations from on high, men had faced conspiracy-to-murder charges, advice had been taken and shots not fired.
They were under the castle’s walls. Suzie said that the English Heritage website stated it had been built in the eleventh century, then fought over, repaired and strengthened over the next five hundred years. More important, there was a place where the weathered stone had been hacked away. Roscoe bent down while the others maintained a guard. He found the bullet, squashed and almost unrecognisable except to a trained eye, which lay at the side of the path. Further down, Gillot indicated where he had been as the second shot was fired and pointed to the gap in the undergrowth where the rotting apples and wasps were. They did the alignments and saw the mark on a branch where sap oozed and a bullet had lodged.
Roscoe noted the prettiness of the place and the beauty of the sea’s colours. Easy to imagine murder on the streets round the King’s Cross brothels, in the dealer’s estate territory or under the mountains of scrapped vehicles in the yard, but not here. Walkers came past and must have wondered why a man who was unshaven and sweat-streaked was with two well-turned-out younger men and an attractive girl, and why the two men wore jackets in the heat and the girl carried a big bag.
‘Have you seen enough?’ Gillot asked.
Roscoe said they had.
‘I shouldn’t have been left alive. If that’s the best they could dig out, they paid for a bum.’
Roscoe said he supposed killing wasn’t an exact science.
‘I was helpless, half down, had flipflops on – then nothing. He didn’t follow me. A wasp fazed him.’
Roscoe said, drily, that he imagined even contract killers had the occasional bad day at work.
‘You taking this seriously?’
He was, and tried to muster some sincerity.
They were walking back up the hill, the sea behind them, the sun hard on their heads.
A salesman’s smile cracked Gillot’s face. ‘Crap, he was.’
‘If you say so, Mr Gillot.’
They were at the front gate. Gillot walked through the clothing, as if it wasn’t there. A family had come down the lane, laden with beach kit and little fishing rods, and stepped through the mess. Bill and Suzie started to pick up and fold the clothing as best they could, then stacked it in the cases. Gillot didn’t help. He said he was not open to advice, was not going to run, was staying in his home.
Roscoe shrugged.
Gillot opened the gates, and the dog leaped at him with enthusiasm. ‘I doubt he’ll be back.’
‘Of course he will,’ Roscoe snapped. ‘He won’t have moved till he had confirmation that the money had been paid. He has to be back. It’s your privilege to reject advice.’
‘I suppose you think I was just lucky-’
Roscoe interrupted: ‘A man once said, “You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.” That was after he had failed to kill the prime minister. It’s a mantra of ours, Mr Gillot. We think it’s hard to be lucky all the time when he only has to be lucky once.’
He was alone, stretched out in a chair, the one he always sat in. Vern had dropped him off, and there had been a curl of contempt at his elder brother’s mouth that he hadn’t seen before. Another time, Robbie would have made a punchbag of Vern’s face. Another time, he would have telephoned the extension on the counter where Barbie was and demanded that she make an excuse and get back to Rotherhithe.
He felt exhausted, and had not before. On each occasion that he had fired at a man and seen him crumple, he had known only calm satisfaction. Then the feelings of power had gushed. Now he had fired and a man hadn’t crumpled. There was no calm satisfaction and no… It played, as if it was on a loop, in his mind and he couldn’t escape it. A man walking, a dog running, wasps around him, the man stumbling, the shot fired and hitting a stone wall. A man down, the shot lined up, the wasps in the face mask and the shot gone high. A flipflop thrown at him. The man running… Hadn’t missed before – had once shot at twice that distance and done two hits, head and upper chest. He didn’t know why he hadn’t run down the track after the target – and the target was barefoot, the track rough stone – caught him and killed him. He remembered when a steer had broken out of a wagon transporting animals to a slaughterhouse, had kicked out of the tail flap when it stopped at the lights on Jamaica Road. They hadn’t just let the thing go, but had gone after it and killed it with a rifle shot. The eleven-year-old Robbie Cairns had seen it all.
And with the images were the words spoken by his grandfather on the telephone. His eyes were tight shut and the sunlight didn’t penetrate. He held the pistol in his hand, couldn’t stop the trembling. Maybe, for failing, they would put him in the concrete while he was still alive, and it would come up over his knees, his gut, his chest and his head. He held the pistol tight, his knuckles white and- He heard the key in the door, slipped the weapon into his waist band and covered the bulge with his shirt tail.
A light kiss – how was he? Fine.
A little hug – had his day been good? Yes.
Where had he been? Just around, nowhere special.
Fingers on his face, gentle – would he like some tea? He would.
She had dumped her bag, was in the kitchen. She never asked why he didn’t make tea for himself if he wanted it. And, she didn’t question how he spent his time. And the fingers had made a little pattern on his cheeks, the hands had held his shoulders when she’d hugged him and, almost, he could taste the kiss she had put on his lips. It was important to him, more important than he could tell her. He peeled off the clothes he had worn under the overalls that morning, and put the Baikal pistol under a cushion on the chair he always used.
She was at the kitchen door. ‘You smell, Robbie – mind me saying that? No offence.’
‘Want you to wash these.’
He didn’t pick up the T-shirt, the trousers, the vest, underpants and socks, let her. When he was naked she didn’t touch him. She bent and gathered up the clothes. ‘What was it I smelt, Robbie?’
‘I spilled some lighter fuel on my arm. Maybe I’ll take a shower.’
She went back to the kitchen and he heard her load the washing-machine. Then it rumbled and the kettle whistled. She knew nothing. He’d wait for the tea, then take the shower. Uppermost in his mind were the people who had paid for his failure and how they’d be.
‘Why, in London, should you be interested now in us and our village?’ The boy, Simun, translated the question put by his father.
Penny Laing answered him: ‘There were regulations in place, British laws, and we believe that Harvey Gillot conspired to breach them. We have a strict policy in our country for the suppression of illegal trading in weapons and ammunition. Harvey Gillot is a target of the agency I work for, and we wish to build a picture of his operations, so we begin here.’
Penny had often spoken through a third party and understood the pace she should set and the gaps she should leave. They walked on the main road through the village, leaving the cafe behind them. In front she could see the church, the crossroads, the shop and little else. If she had been a holidaymaker, driving between two points, she would have gone through it in half a minute and registered nothing.
The man, Mladen, waved an arm expansively. ‘You would have wanted us all dead.’
‘A question or an opinion? I haven’t said I wanted you all dead.’
The boy’s voice was quiet in her ear. ‘You wanted us dead. There was a United Nations embargo on weapons. Your government was an architect of it. It decided what was best for people in Croatia. It made decisions on whether we should survive or whether we should be butchered and go to hidden graves. If you had succeeded in the embargo, my village and I would not be here.’
‘I don’t follow you.’ She was flushed, but not by the sun – the cream had been smeared on her arms, neck, forehead and cheeks. People didn’t challenge her work in chasing down arms dealers, searching out crevices in their activities, exploiting them and bringing them to court.
‘You are intelligent. Of course you follow me. There, look there
…’ His thin arm reached out and the long fingers, bright with artist’s oil colours, jabbed to their right. Between two homes, with flowers in window-boxes, there was a low, squat concrete shape, an entry-hole gaping in its side. His son translated. ‘That was the command post. It was where Zoran, our schoolteacher, led the defence of our village and I was beside him. We defended the village with rifles, grenades and a few bombs for the antitank launcher, the RPG, most of those items bought in Hungary by Zoran before the fighting. We had very little from the police because Vukovar, and Vinkovci, was more important. Marinci and Bogdanovci were like us. We defended ourselves and we kept open the Cornfield Road. After Zoran was dead, I directed the defence from that bunker. Harvey Gillot would have been a criminal to you, but to us he was an angel. But the weapons did not come.’
‘It was thought at the time that-’
‘You knew, Miss Penny, what was best for us. You were very clever people and we were only simple peasants. You knew it was best for us not to have the weapons that would keep back the Cetniks. I think, perhaps, you thought it best for our homes and our land to be given to the Cetniks, and for us to go quietly to refugee camps and not to make a bad smell in the sophistication of Europe. There, Miss Penny, you see the church.’
The walls were concrete blocks and panels. The tower beside the porch at the front was as high as the roof, but the metal spikes that would reinforce poured concrete protruded upwards. She was still stung by the blunt sarcasm with which she had been put down. Should she ask why the church was still being rebuilt some nineteen years after the siege of the village and twelve after its liberation? She let it ride. What he had said had hurt but the translation was in the flat monotone interpreters always used. Simun had not allowed emotion to affect his tone or the message he gave, but his fingers had been soft on her skin and…
They stood in front of the church.
‘It is on the site of the old building. Under the nave there were steps down into the crypt. It was used as a refuge for the wounded and the sick, and it was where my wife was brought when she was in labour. There were complications in the delivery of my son. He was in vigorous health, but my wife deteriorated. The Cornfield Road was too dangerous for a sick woman to journey over. She died there, and we buried her in the night. We call those missiles by their Russian name, Malyutka, and with them we could have kept open the way across the fields. We had paid for them but they were not delivered. The road was cut and our village could not survive, nor Bogdanovci – our neighbour. It was the death of Vukovar. We remember well what was done to us – especially what was done to us for our own good.’
They walked on. Occasionally a building was still damaged, left with weeds sprouting in the cavities and saplings growing through the old floor. Simun murmured they had been the homes of Serbs who had lived in the village before the fighting and would never come back. She thought the shop, from its window display, was pitifully stocked, and wondered what horizons were left here… after the killing of Harvey Gillot. There was a larger house, grander, and a full-sized Madonna, carved from wood, and Simun whispered that it was the work of the fighter who had led the resistance in Bogdanovci. It was Mladen’s house. Simun pointed to the storks that nested on a chimney at the back – huge bodies and wings, tapering necks and pencil legs – and said that they had stayed right through the siege.
His father coughed, then spoke. ‘I doubt, Miss Penny, that you have fought for anything, suffered for anything. We have. We understand what it is to fight and to suffer. Most of all, Miss Penny, we believe in trust, and we are as loyal to the dead as we are to the living. He took our money and all that was valuable to us. He was given everything we had, and we trusted him. Do you seek to interfere?’
Penny Laing stood in a backwater of eastern Slavonia, in a far corner of Croatia, at the extremity of old Catholic Europe. She was far from London and the mores of her office. ‘I do not seek to interfere but to learn.’
‘It would be bad for you, Miss Penny, if our trust in you were not justified.’ There was no cloud in the sky but she was chilled. She had crossed a line, and could not have explained it to those who shared her work on the Alpha team. Neither could she have made sense of it to a weapons officer on a frigate hunting drugs smugglers in the Caribbean. She only knew Harvey Gillot from a photograph, and felt shrunken and almost insignificant. Perhaps she had paled, but Simun’s hand was on her elbow as if she needed to be supported. She thought the death of that man was now inevitable.
The call came from an apartment, one of the most sought-after in the capital city, that overlooked a grand square. The sun shone with late-afternoon brilliance on the grass, the statues and the monument to a great leader of a previous century.
‘You, Josip?… There is news. No, no, leave the cork… Josip, the news from London is that an attempt was made and failed… For fuck’s sake, Josip, how would I know? I’m in Zagreb. I have had a message, not a half-hour conversation. It failed… What happens now? I wasn’t told… Don’t treat me like an idiot. It’s accepted that you paid… It’s on your head. You advised, suggested, you began it… You’re vulnerable, that too I accept… What do you tell your villagers? You tell them it failed, and you tell them that the money they paid will be earned. Tell them many people in a long chain will demand it.’