15

Robbie Cairns was on the bench in the station and had been there through the night. The concourse had crawled with police and railway-security people. After midnight there had been light music over the loudspeakers and no train movements between one and four. He didn’t know what the great London stations – Waterloo, Victoria, King’s Cross, St Pancras or Euston – were like through the night, had never experienced them. One coffee outlet had remained open, and the toilets, but the place had been quiet.

After six, it had woken.

After seven, the pace of a new day was around him. The first commuters – suits, briefcases, severe skirts, laptop bags – powered past him. The food stalls were opening. Other than to go to the toilets, and take a fast shower, he had been on the bench. The loudspeakers bayed cheerful instructions – on train arrivals, he assumed, and departures: the big boards flickered new information. If Vern had been collecting him from the address in the short cul-de-sac street below the Albion Estate and they had been going to work, to a hit, then he would not have eaten or drunk anything. He thought food and drink before a hit would dull his sharpness.

Most of the night he’d had only his own company. Worse, then, because her face lived with him. Better later: a vagrant had sat near to him and indicated he wanted money. Robbie had gazed into the man’s unshaven, scarred face, and he had taken flight. After him, a stream of people had used the bench, sometimes crowded close to him and sometimes giving him space. He had learned, as the pace of the station quickened, that the trains came on time, to the minute. Nothing chaotic about the movements at Munich station. He saw which platform would be used by the train bringing in the sleeper traffic from Paris and knew where he would stand, and for how long he would wait after leaving the bench.

While he had had the bench to himself, when the area around him was deserted and there were gaps in the patrols, he’d kept the sports bag, Charlton Athletic, on his knee. He did it by touch, hands inside the bag. Robbie Cairns had screwed the silencer to the barrel, emptied one of the magazines into the bottom of the bag and refilled it. He had been told by the armourer that jams came from dirt and from bullets left too long in a magazine. Always, he had been drilled, he should empty a magazine, then reload it. He inserted it back into the Walther’s stock, looked again at the board, saw how long till the train came in and, finally, stood.

His legs were stiff so he stretched. His muscles cracked and his joints loosened.

He couldn’t avoid the cameras. A railway station would be covered by camera angles and lenses would have picked him up, discarded him, found him again, handed him on like postal baggage to the view of an adjacent lens. He was used to cameras, expected them. He walked to the news stand and bought a paper, the Suddeutsche Zeitung. He didn’t understand any of the words printed on the front page, or recognise any of the men photographed. He dropped it into the top of his bag. He was poorly equipped, and accepted it. He didn’t have overalls, gloves, lighter fuel and subsequent access to a wash-house. He didn’t have Leanne spotting for him or Vern to drive him away. He walked out of the station. Disjointed feelings of self-preservation were alive in him, and the whipcrack voice – hoarse, sneering and angry – of his grandfather shared space in his mind with the sight of her, the whiteness and the cold.

The instinct for self-preservation led him outside the station and he pressed himself into the angle of a great supporting buttress of stone. He shed his coat, stuffed it into the bag and took out the wide-brimmed baseball cap and dark glasses. He put them on, placed the Walther inside the folded newspaper and draped a shirt – seemingly carelessly – over the bag to hide its colour and logo. He was ready.

The crowds welled past him and he slipped among them and was almost propelled by the weight of movement into the station, on to the concourse. He checked again – last time – saw that the train was not delayed and noted again – last time – the platform it would come into. He sidled towards a doorway set back in a wall that would be level with the back of the engine. From the sign above it, he thought it was the entrance to the station’s chapel. From there, he could see up the tracks that merged, separated and came into the platforms.

He had the pistol gripped in his hand and hidden in the newspaper. He could find the safety and eased it off.

The big clock on the platform, digital figures, told him how long he must wait.

He had on a jacket, lightweight, from Bond Street, because it was easier to wear than to hold, and his shirt was outside his trousers and bulged. The train had slowed, now crawled.

He didn’t know exactly what he would do at his journey’s end but had an idea – couldn’t be certain because he had no comprehension of what he would find, except that a path had led through cornfields. Couldn’t say whether there was still a path and cornfields. Better to let his mind rest on other matters – the armoured cars for the great, the good and those who feared shadows. He had decided, after the train had pulled noisily clear of the siding and hammered through Augsburg, that Baghdad and Kabul would be awash with armoured-car salesmen and had determined that the better market was where careful men and women took precautions, what they called in the trade ‘event insurance’: a businessman in Ireland, an actress in Italy, a politician in Greece, anyone who could fork out the money in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala. No shortage of clients, and the prospects put jauntiness into his step. He could see the outskirts of the station, the marshalling yards, and did a final check around the cabin to make sure he had left nothing.

A shudder, a lurch. The train stopped.

He unlocked and opened his door. The corridor was filled with the Americans, the floor space wedged high with their luggage. He had more than ninety minutes until his connection and would get some coffee to pass the time. Harvey Gillot had been here once, flying into the old airport, had carried bags for Solly Lieberman. The old American had met up with Germans of his own age and they had talked in that language, which cut out the young guy, and later – past four in the morning when the veterans were showing no sign of exhaustion and Harvey’s head was lolling – he had been given numbers to note on the pad, and hands had been shaken. He had hoped for bed, but it was denied. A car had taken them to a shapeless modern block of flats and the sign had said Connollystrasse. The Germans and his mentor had lectured him on the attack by Palestinians in 1972 at the Olympic-fest, and had pointed out the Israeli house. They had walked past it, and he had ceased to understand the significance. They had been brought to the airport – no sleep – for the day’s first flight, and Solly Lieberman had chirped: They allowed others to take responsibility for their security: mistake. A lesson in life, young man, is that you look after yourself: no one else will. The Israelis died because of that mistake and faith had been put in the Germans who fucked up, fucked up big. In your own hands, remember it. He’d slept all the way back on the flight to Heathrow but reckoned Solly Lieberman had done checks on balance sheets.

The train was halted and the excitement of the young people round him was infectious. None of them had time, or inclination, to look at the sturdy man among them and wonder what was his business and why he travelled.

Harvey Gillot was the last off his carriage. Far ahead of him stretched the lines of marching passengers as they headed down the platform for the centre of the station.

He had forgotten Solly Lieberman, and pretty much the question of which brand of armoured car was suitable for which damn market. He had almost forgotten where he was and why when he seemed to see his dog.

He missed it. He’d been gone twenty-four hours – a day and a night – and already he missed the dog and its wet tongue. His bag swung loosely on his shoulder and in it was what he had brought from the floor safe under the living-room carpet and the solicitor’s strong room. Yes, he missed the dog, and maybe – already – the open land of the island, the bare brown fields, the shallow cliffs, the storms on the rocks and… There was a board ahead of him, but it was too early for his connection to have reached the display.

He would get the Herald Tribune and maybe Time, and they would see him through. He would have nine hours on the EuroCity Mimara to work at the detail of the village and the people, to remember Zagreb, a man he had met there, and the start of what Benjie Arbuthnot called ‘Blowback’ and- An announcement was in mid-stream: the platform from which the ICE express to Berlin would leave. He walked briskly, not because he needed to hurry but because of the crowd in front of and behind him. Squadrons of wheeled bags snagged at his ankles and – he nearly fell.

A blow struck him. He had an image of a metal pipe, heavy, against his back on the line of his spine. It caught Harvey Gillot unawares and he spiralled forward, staggering. He flailed to keep his balance.

The second impact hit him, again in the back, lower than the first, and a little to the left where he knew his kidneys lodged. A huge blow and a massive impact. He felt himself collapsing and realised he had been shot, twice. He tried to get hold of a woman’s shoulder but she swatted him away. He was going down faster, had lost control at the knees.

He scrabbled for a grip on a case pulled along on its wheels, but its owner, wearing a fine suit and polished shoes, glanced at him and jerked it forward.

He was sprawled on the platform.

They didn’t break their stride. They went to the right of him and to the left. They charged past him. No hand reached down to help him. Two women came out of a door that had a cross above it, would have been the station’s chapel, but neither paused to bend over him.

Did they think he was drunk or had overdosed?

He was prone and helpless. He waited for the third shot… and waited.

Shock first made numbess, then pain in his spine and over his kidneys. He could do sums: a pistol bullet had a muzzle velocity when fired of around 800 feet per second. Maybe the two shots had been fired at a range of five feet. He had heard nothing above the sound of a woman’s voice telling him in what cities, towns, the ICE express to Berlin would stop. It was the Helene Weigel and he heard when it would reach Nuremberg and Leipzig… and the gears of his mind crashed at a bullet taking 0.00125 – madness, fucking madness – of a second to go from the barrel and impact into the bulletproof vest.

It didn’t come.

He was helpless, on the ground, his eyes closed.

It wasn’t that people laughed or swore at him. They fucking ignored him. They didn’t disapprove of, criticise or mock him. They didn’t fucking see him.

He didn’t hear the beat of feet and the squeal of little wheels pass his head – and the announcer had given the arrival time in Berlin, Zoologischer Garten, and was quiet. Harvey Gillot felt a moment of emptiness and dared to look.

He saw nothing except the closed door to what would be the chapel and the emptiness ahead. He dragged himself to his knees.

He turned his head slowly, expecting that a man, with or without a balaclava, slight built, would come into his peripheral vision and take a firing stance.

There was no man and no pistol.

He hadn’t thought it could happen here. He hadn’t reckoned on danger beyond the island and his home – had thought himself rid of it when he’d left the armed police and strode off to get the Eurostar. He hadn’t believed that danger had survived while he travelled. He had to use all his strength to prevent himself subsiding on to the dirt left by thousands of shoes.

His target was a trolley. He reached and hung on to it. At first, from each shot, there had been the sledge-hammer shock wave and the numbness. The pain racked him.

He moved, unseen and unwatched, along the remaining length of the platform, using the trolley, twice, to turn the full three-sixty and look for the man. He failed to find him. He pushed the trolley far to the left on the concourse, past the row of platforms and past the great trains, and saw the white-painted ICE express nudge from its berth and start on the run to Berlin. Ahead a flight of steps led down to the toilets. He had to leave the trolley.

There was a handrail to cling to. He went down the steps. He gave the attendant money and saw the guy look curiously at him, but he would have been a Turk or an Albanian and wouldn’t push his interest to impertinence.

He went into a cubicle – couldn’t imagine that the goddamn head with or without the balaclava would poke over the door – and sagged on to the seat. It was agony to get the coat off, then the shirt. There were holes in the coat, two, neat but for the mess of singed material round them. He put his index finger through each one, waggled the tip and was almost stupefied, then did the same with the shirt. The holes were the same size as those in the jacket but had no burn marks. He undid the stays that held the bulletproof vest close and shrugged out of it. So heavy, and so strong: there were two deep dents in the material that held the plates in place and he could see where the soft-heads had disintegrated, sending the shock waves that the plates had absorbed. The worst pain was when he twisted his hand behind him and groped for the places where the strikes had come. He felt bruising but there was no blood.

He was hunched on the seat.

In his mind Harvey Gillot began to compose a text message. He wouldn’t send it on his own mobile, but would find a pay-phone in the station. Hi, Monty – Think u shd know that bpv fantastic, brill. Have tested amp; no angst. Works. What chance me for franchise? Best Harv

Had lost the pain, and had the salesman’s smile, felt the patter melting on his tongue. ‘Would I try to sell you something, sir, that is crap? I know about this product and I can tell you, with utter sincerity, that it does the business. Look, sir, at this jacket – now look at this shirt. Neither washed from the day it happened. I never saw him but I estimate the range was five feet, and he used a silencer. Now look at the vest. Damaged but not holed… Can’t say the same about old Titanic, can we, sir? I was wearing it. Believe me? Nearly knocked me over but I wasn’t punctured. What I’m saying, sir, I’m not one of those flash lads in a West End security company who knows damn-all about a real situation. I’ve been there. The bruising has gone, but I can strip off, if you like, and show you how it was worn and you can see for yourself that I wasn’t punctured. Frankly, sir, if I was in a situation of possible or potential danger to life and limb – or if any of my employees were – I would, with complete confidence, recommend this model. New, we’re talking about a range between five hundred and six hundred sterling. Second-hand, police castoffs, would be a hundred sterling – but I don’t believe, sir, that this is an area where used items are appropriate. I think my life’s worth a fair bit, sir, and yours is worth a great deal more. Not a matter you’d want to hang about on, sir, and you’ve seen the evidence and met a man who can vouch for this product. I look forward to hearing from you.’ He was laughing, couldn’t help it.

Harvey Gillot dressed again, and reckoned he hacked the pain. He put the damn thing back on, let himself out, walked awkwardly but reached the steps, and went in search of a coffee.

He needed them and didn’t have them. There was no elder brother or younger sister. But he reckoned he’d done well and hadn’t panicked. Could have done, too damn easy. It was only afterwards that he had understood. The taxi dropped him at Departures. All the time, during the journey, walking into the travel agent and out and going to the taxi rank, he had waited to hear sirens, then a command in a language he didn’t know but which would have its authority big in the shout, and to see guns pointed. There had been no noise and no aimed weapons

… but there had been no blood.

The target had stumbled, almost fallen, and the drilled hole was in his jacket, and his head was ducked, as if his chin was against his chest, and the double tap had had to be into the back. He had fired the second time and the impact had pushed the target forward and prone – but there had been no blood. The target had not screamed, writhed, twitched, but had lain still. There had been a babble from the big speakers and crowds hurrying, coming from behind and surging away, and they’d seemed not to notice the target… maybe because there was no blood.

The art of what Robbie Cairns did was to go in fast, hard, and be gone. He had walked on past and his feet would have been no more than a yard from the head of the target. He had not looked down but had carried his bag in one hand and the rolled newspaper in the other. He had not understood why there was no blood, only two holes, regular shape of a 7.65 calibre round. He had kept walking and had left the man on the platform. There should have been blood. When he had waited, by the doorway into the chapel, he had concerned himself with the chance of blood arcing up if he did a close-range head shot and of the bubbles landing on his face and clothes. Right up to the time that he had seen the target, one of the last off the train and from one of the furthest carriages, it had tossed in his mind – a head shot or a spine shot? The man had walked easily, had seemed unaware. Decision taken: a spine shot. He hadn’t looked round him or checked for a tail, had passed the doorway as if swept along in the flow, as Robbie had been when he slotted in behind, five feet back, no more than six. He had held the bag away from the rolled newspaper, had done the trigger squeeze, and no one had reacted as the target had stumbled and sagged. It had been a long time before he had understood why the target was not dead and did not bleed. He had stopped by the window of a travel agent, beside the Costa and Algarve posters, and gazed back at the platform. He had not seen a felled corpse and had known what he must do.

In the travel agent’s, by the main entrance to the station, he had had to control his breathing, almost panted as if he had been running. Big, deep breaths, and it was the start of the day: a girl was free to hear his order. An air ticket from Munich to Zagreb, one way: he couldn’t get his head round where he would bug out to afterwards. He bought a ticket from Franz Josef Strauss to Pleso, and said he didn’t know what his plans were in the next few days. He paid cash for the ticket, which confused the girl, so he acted dumb and she did the transaction, but said next time he should use a credit card. Two items tracked a man: one was a credit card each time it was used, and the second was a mobile phone the whole time it was switched on.

He had gone back to the edge of the concourse and stood close to the big bookshop and near the stall that had more sorts of buns and bread rolls than he’d known of, and he had looked away up the platform to confirm again what he already knew. He had known where to look because the sign for the chapel was high and easy to see. Nothing there – well, an old woman pushing a trolley. He had sufficient elevation, on tiptoe, to note that there was no blood. There should have been – and scene-of-crime tape, a cordon, a sheet with feet sticking out from under it – but there was only an old woman. He had gone to the taxi rank.

The understanding hurt.

He had never worn a vest, or shot a man who had worn one. He had never seen one demonstrated. It hurt because now he could recall that his target had seemed broader in the body, more solid and substantial, but he hadn’t registered it. There was a Burger King at the entrance near to where the taxis waited. Outside it were big industrial rubbish bins, the sort that were hoisted by lorries and tipped. It was a fast movement. The Walther PPK went in with the silencer still screwed in place and the spare magazine. He couldn’t have cleaned it enough to remove DNA, but he thought the rubbish would go to the tip and, if he was lucky, be buried. He didn’t know of an alternative.

It was a new airport. Luxury. It had worked well – about all that had. A flight in ninety minutes to Zagreb. He couldn’t telephone Rotherhithe, the Albion Estate. Had no one to lean on. Robbie Cairns was pushed forward through Departures and towards the gate, was a driven man, pressured by failure. Almost, standing in the boarding queue, he had been about to congratulate himself on responding well to a second fuck-up, not recognising the bulk of a vest, but two women were in front of him, smartly clothed, smooth-skinned and smelling of scent, and he remembered.

Because the women who worked on that counter in the department store were close-knit and subject to small confidences, Melody knew a little of the supposedly secretive domestic life of her friend and colleague, Barbara. She had come off the bus – her diversion would make her late into central London – had waited at the entrance of Barbara’s block until a resident had emerged, then used the opportunity to slip inside and beat the self-locking system. She had climbed the stairs and knocked firmly on a second-floor door.

No answer.

While she had waited for someone to leave the building she had checked the postbox set into the wall beside her friend’s name. Without the key, she couldn’t get at the post, but could ascertain that the box had not been cleared the previous day… Not at work, not at the theatre, habits of reliability broken. So unlike her colleague to stand them up and waste a ticket for Les Miserables. The little she knew of Barbara’s life was the past – an old home, long left behind, old relationships long discarded, old parents and… There was no possibility that Barbara, from Fragrances, could make her salary stretch to a flat on the second floor of this block on Canada Water. Even the ‘downturn’ or the ‘crunch’ had not abseiled the prices of properties that far and that fast. She knocked again, harder, then put her finger on a bell and heard it ring behind the door.

Across the landing a baby had started to cry.

She tried there. The baby’s cry came closer and a door was unfastened, a chain removed. A woman accused Melody: ‘It’s taken me two hours to get him to sleep and my husband does nights and you’ve woken him, and-’

Melody said, ‘It’s my friend.’

‘Her across there?’

‘Didn’t come to work yesterday. No explanation. I’m sorry I woke your baby and your husband.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just not like her.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘She’s not there.’ The two women and the baby walked across the landing. Melody rapped at the door and the mother pressed the bell. There was an echo from the interior.

‘I didn’t hear her all yesterday. I’m sensitive to noise, my husband being on nights. He does the computers for one of the newspapers across the river. Has to be there all night, every night, but it’s work and it pays and he’s dead on his feet when he comes home and it’s a sod when he can’t sleep. I didn’t hear her, but he left yesterday morning.’

‘He?’

‘The boyfriend – it’s his place. She lives there and he visits, don’t know his name. He left yesterday morning and I heard the door, but I didn’t see her.’

Melody apologised. She went out of the block. She walked purposefully and skirted the bus station, where there was also the Underground, either of which would have taken her into central London, but she went on. She took the sharp left turn into Lower Road and reached the police station. Melody was not a woman who took lightly such a course of action, but she was anxious for her colleague and it irritated her that Barbara had never talked about her boyfriend.

She was sharp with the desk officer, to the point, and indicated that she wanted reassurance.

Retirement, and the decanter set with the crystal glasses, didn’t dull the awareness of an officer with thirty years in the Service. It was a complaint of Deirdre’s that when they took holidays, flew on budget lines, he had a persistent – near irritating – tendency to create biographies for their fellow travellers. More often than not, if the people he had stripped bare were staying at the same hotel – the Italian lakes or under the Swiss Matterhorn – she would find he had been pretty damn right in his assessments. Not that he ever received an apology for her criticism of his habit, or for the doubts expressed. But she wasn’t with him, and he could feel free.

They were up, they had climbed, they cruised.

She had taken him, hours before, to the early train. Driving there, he had called VBX, a privileged number, and spoken briefly to Alastair Watson. At the station, on the platform, she had asked triumphantly what he had forgotten. Damned if he’d known what he’d left behind. She had produced then, from a cavern of a handbag, his pen, the one from Pakistan and the Frontier, and they had chuckled, then hugged. She hadn’t waited for his train to arrive, saying the dogs would be needing their walk, just squeezed his hand, an apology for tenderness, and muttered something about ‘Take care of yourself and do nothing daft’, and gone. He had acquired the pen, manufactured in a back alley of the village of Darra Adam Khel, some thirty miles to the south of Peshawar, when he had supervised, with Solly Lieberman, the delivery of the Blowpipes, and had met young Gillot.

He had selected two passengers as being of interest; they would, like him, have made late bookings. The woman was across the aisle from him, in a gangway seat, as he was, and the man three rows in front of where he sat. Boarding had been uneventful; the pen had gone into the little tray of loose change, with the rheumatism bracelet and his house keys, and had aroused no suspicion. He had noted the two at the security checks – didn’t need the insight of the Baker Street fellow. He reckoned the last-minute flyers were dumped in the same section of the aircraft, nearest the engines, the noise, the toilets and the smell.

The woman’s bag had the Planet Protection logo.

Benjie Arbuthnot did not know shyness and stared at her with frank interest. A rather pretty woman, might have been elegant or beautiful if she’d patronised a hair salon and a decent boutique. He had no complaint: rather liked the rawness of clothing, skin and eyes. He knew of Planet Protection. The organisation had figured briefly on that list of NGOs that was fed to embassies in the globe’s odder corners so that station officers could – under the usual cover of second secretary, trade – sidle up in a bar, buy large gins and lubricate a tongue if its owner had been upcountry or had met an elusive personality. Those NGOs were regarded as friendly, and were in receipt of central government funding. He doubted that another passenger in the cabin had heard of Planet Protection, and no chance that any would know what they did. It was the arms trade. He didn’t need to be Holmes, or require the prompting of Watson, to marry up Harvey Gillot and the woman, whose name was on a tag attached to the strap of the bag with the logo.

He assessed Megs Behan. A love of the cause and therefore no man with whom to share the tedium of fighting an unwinnable war. A woman with devotion and maternal love, but all channelled towards some dreary little bolt-hole in a building that should have been condemned and… Was Benjie Arbuthnot a cruel, warped old warrior? He wouldn’t have admitted to such charges. He would have said that the glory of the cause would dull and she would become a barren, lonely and boring old trout. She had good bones in her face, strong at the cheeks and the chin, and he liked the way she sat, upright. Good, too, that she wore no cosmetics and there was only a fine gold chain at her throat and studs in her ears – good studs, which told him they would have been a present, perhaps for her twenty-first, from a family of affluence.

So, Megs Behan had rejected the comfortable and conventional and had opted for the loneliness of the protest line, but her redeeming feature was – he identified – a feisty glint in the eyes. He enjoyed, always had, the company of women who ‘had balls, big ones’, and believed that might be true of this weapons-trade campaigner. Interesting that she knew Harvey Gillot, the condemned wretch, was heading for the corn-and-sunflower country inland from Vukovar, was on a bucket flight to be there as a witness, perhaps as a tricoteuse… He played the game, and had kept as good a piece as he possessed to the last. She had pale skin. Going through the security checks she had caught the eye of the man, and both had looked sharply away, but Megs Behan had blushed. They had not glanced at each other since, were in avoidance mode. He had much to reflect on.

The trolley went past, and he smiled at the cabin girl, took three small plastic beakers from her, and smiled again – old and sweet and not to be argued with. He poured from the hip flask he carried, a nip for each beaker.

Up from his seat, he passed one across the aisle, saw the shock and ducked his head as a form of greeting, then went forward three rows, and when the man looked up he was handed the second beaker. It was done and he was gone, back in his seat and had fastened his belt. Megs Behan and the man looked at him – was he a bore who couldn’t mind his own business? Someone they should know? An avuncular smile and he ignored them, downed his own drink – ten-year-old Talisker – and refilled.

The man? Another who travelled to be a spectator when Harvey Gillot confronted his past and perhaps was killed by it.

A policeman: he had shown his warrant card at the security check before boarding. He had a policeman’s haircut, a detective’s. Severe, but not the bald chicken’s-arse effect. Tidy, presentable in any company. A suit that was standard dress, grey and quiet, a decent shirt and tie. A serious face. It had looked up at him when he had put the beaker on the tray and now twisted to glance back up the aisle, but Benjie offered nothing and didn’t meet the eyes. Not a senior policeman – too young for that. A foot soldier. His judgement: over and above the appearance of seriousness, the policeman displayed a sort of solid determination, which in matters of life and of death was always valuable. Not a barrel of laughs. He remembered the first call, coming through on the phone consigned to his grandson, and a scared voice: There’s a contract out. The people who were buying the gear have raised the money. And he had answered, loud and comforting, Harvey, take care and good luck. He had ended with the sort of thing Deirdre said when he was off to London for a day and taking a guest to the Special Forces Club. The detective would be the right sort of age, with the right lack of seniority, to brief the man on what waited in a shadow, was behind him and always would be.

They were bound together, on that flight, the three of them.

He loosed the belt again and leaned across to replace the earlier tot in her beaker, then went forward to do the same, and never spoke a word.

Then he dozed. He thought it would be a good show, and also that he was obligated to be there and to give the occasion his best effort. He was thankful that Deirdre had not forgotten the Pakistan pen. Above all, it would be a show not to be missed by a man playing the idiot.

Seemed to see a man’s back, sharp corners and dark shadows… and death had a smell that clung to his nose. Maybe he had wanted friendships, maybe his work had denied them to him.

She stood back. There were two police officers – an older woman and a youngster – and they had brought with them a maintenance man who had a mass of keys on a ring, screwdrivers in a box and a drill.

Prohibitively priced apartments, Melody thought, but the locks on the doors were crap. The man did it with the keys and didn’t need his tools.

It opened. There was a light on in the hall. Melody sensed stillness.

The woman with the baby said defiantly, as if she believed her word was challenged, ‘I always hear her when she goes out, but I didn’t yesterday. I only heard him when he left.’

The policewoman shrugged and went inside.

*

The floor at the Gold Group belonged to SCD11, Intelligence. Harry said, ‘Sometimes these things move fast and sometimes it’s tortoise speed. This one’s fast. A Caucasian female is found in a second-floor flat in a new block, Canada Wharf area. She’s been manually strangled – the cause of death is not yet confirmed, but it was obvious to the officers who attended. No sign of sexual assault or interference, fully clothed, no evidence of burglary, forcible entry. The indication would be that we’re dealing with a domestic. So far so good.’

He had his audience, hooked as if he used a barbed treble in a pike’s mouth.

‘We have a name because the complainant who reported her away from work was present at the location. The victim works at a department store in central London. A neighbour says she moved in thirteen months ago. The property is in the name of Robert Cairns.’

The interventions of Intelligence were rare in Gold Group meetings, and sometimes there was scepticism at his conclusions. Not in that session. He was heard in silence.

‘We’re at a basic and very early stage of an investigation. There were traces of oil on the victim’s hands. Also, there are similar marks, oil again, on the upholstery of a chair in the living room. We infer that she handled an object that had been hidden from view under the chair’s cushion. Not yet confirmed in laboratory conditions, of course, but the first response of an experienced forensics man is that the characteristics are of anti-corrosive silicone gun oil. We’re saying that there exists a probability that a handgun was in that chair, later ending up in the hands of a woman who was subsequently strangled. We’re getting there.’

All of them – Firearms, Surveillance, SCD7 and HMRC’s investigation unit – acknowledged the importance of intelligence-gathered material and knew that in its absence they were buffalo, blundering in the undergrowth.

‘It’s all coming in – I repeat myself, no apologies – very fast. It’s the pedigree of Robbie – Robert – Cairns that interests me. His father, Jerry Cairns, is an old “blagger” – you know what I mean, Ma’am? Of course. Armed robber – with an arm’s length of convictions. His grandfather, the first of the dynasty, was a villain – a thief – but is now too old for serious playing. Robbie has an elder brother with convictions for robbery, car theft, fencing. They’re a criminal family.’

On sheets of paper laid on the table or in personal notebooks, pencils, pens and ballpoints wrote Cairns. Harry saw recognition flicker on the face of the detective inspector, like memory stirred.

‘Things fall into place. They go into the big machines and stuff spews out. First, no one in that family works in a legitimate trade, or has since the Ark grounded. But the only one who has achieved a serious degree of wealth is Robbie, aged twenty-five. A chis says that Robbie Cairns will kill for a fee. The chis might be lying through his front, back and side teeth, but it now has better relevance. Two more items of interest, if I’m holding you.’

He was. He didn’t often have a big moment. Harry milked it and thought of it as one of his finest hours.

‘What happens really quick now are the airline searches. The Murder Squad, soon as they had a name, Robbie Cairns, would have tapped it into the ticket traces. Had a twenty-four-hour start – has he used his time? He flew to Munich. He was in Munich last night and thought himself clever because he paid for a ticket onward – one way – to Zagreb with cash, but his name’s on the ticket, and it has to be his name to match with the passport details. Taking that flight, he’s already down there, is loose in Zagreb. That’s about what I have.’

A silence, as if breath was held, but a clock on a wall ticked faintly. Phoebe Bermingham, Harry realised, would feel it necessary to say something.

‘Interesting, but hardly acceptable in the Central Criminal Court.’

He responded and had a grin, almost patronising, across his face. Different worlds, and they were cast from different moulds. ‘I like coincidence and circumstantial.’

‘I’ve already put Penny Laing on the ground,’ from the Alpha-team man.

And a sharp response, lest he be forgotten, from the detective inspector: ‘About now Mark Roscoe should be touching down. We’ve done the appropriate grovel and the dirty raincoats will meet him.’

‘When he’s there, what’s his job description?’ Phoebe Bermingham asked.

‘Nothing too specific, a watching brief. He asked, chippily, the same question, went on at length about not being a “bullet catcher”, not able to do a serious job, and I think he and his girl had something planned together, a hike along the Thames Path. That’s as maybe. I didn’t do a request. I ordered him on to the plane, pulled rank. And told him, repeated twice, that he shouldn’t stand too close, should merely observe and report back. Simple stuff and, of course, he understands that. I can’t see that he has a problem. I can see that we’ve fulfilled what would be expected of us, Ma’am, done what’s right for Gillot in his predicament. I don’t think, Ma’am – if this should end up as an inquest and an inquiry – that with our man on the ground, offering advice on personal safety and liaising with local enforcement, we can be found at fault and criticised. It was emphasised to Sergeant Roscoe – personally and forcibly – that he should not endanger his own life. That’s where we are.’

‘That’s very fair,’ she said. ‘Rather more than Gillot deserves.’

Granddad Cairns had his granddaughter monitor radio stations and the rolling television news bulletins, and she swore to him that if an Englishman had been shot dead in Munich it would be carried as breaking news or a newsflash. Nothing was reported. Until they knew the words by heart, from frequency and repetition, they heard of the new wave of fighting in southern Afghanistan, the falling level of the pound sterling, the rise in unemployment, the marriage of a party girl to a man three times her age, a cricket score and… Nothing came from Munich. Granddad Cairns said it would be like the death of the family when respect was lost, and she was at the radiogram, working through the stations.

He knew that two contact numbers had been given to Robbie, one for Munich and the other for Zagreb. He didn’t know which fuckin’ country Zagreb was in or where it was on a map, but he realised that Munich had failed because he was told so by the radio and the television. Neither he nor Leanne was facing the window on to the walkway so they were not aware of the crowd outside until the knocker was smacked. He turned sharply in his chair… More years than he could remember since the police had been mob-handed at his door.

It was a journey like no other in Harvey Gillot’s life. He was the man who had lived a dozen years on a rock promontory jutting out to sea, blessed with the majesty of stunning views. He hadn’t seen them. He found himself now to be locked to the window beside his seat as the train wound along a track sandwiched between gorge walls, cliffs, tumbling rivers, mountains and pastures.

He had been to Austria before, on flights into Vienna, and would have had his nose in papers, pamphlets and brochures that he needed to speed-read so that he was on a level field with a customer or supplier. Vienna was a fight, always, because the Germans had the bigger foothold, but he had most recently bought the Steyr AUG (Armee Universal Gewehr) 5.62mm assault rifle, direct from the factory, and had the end-user paperwork in place for shipment to Bolivia and Ecuador. He had sold vests to the Austrian police, which was a champion deal against the competition, and had once been close with a consignment of Brazilian-made sniper sights that undercut the German competition but was ultimately squeezed out. He had been near with a communications contract. Before, he had flown into the capital of an evening, done dinner meetings and breakfast meetings and been back on the airport train from the city centre by midmorning and in the air by noon.

The beauty entranced him, and he had no one with whom to share it – no wife, no child, no best friend and no business partner. It had been the promise of Harvey Gillot, to himself, that he would use the quality time on the train to think through the problems of what he would do when the train bucked to a halt and he was pitched out on to a platform within a hire-car ride or a final train journey of his destination. The sights from the window distracted him, and he saw Toytown castles perched on sheer rock stumps, and heavy cattle in meadows where flowers bloomed. As if it was impossible to find an answer. Best put it off, and he did. Later, some time, he would work out the detail of the plan, what he would do and why.

But – and it nagged in him – would he fight? Shit, yes.

Would he roll on his back with his legs in the air and submit? Hell, no.

He was Harvey Gillot, the salesman with the smile. He walked his own road and made his own bed, nails and all. He would sort the problem.

Just didn’t know who would be waiting for him, what they would say to him when he stood within spitting range.

‘It was me who did it. I demanded it.’

Outside, at the front, a bare-chested boy mowed her grass. At the back, through the kitchen window, Penny Laing had seen a man, middle-aged, hoeing a vegetable plot.

‘The men didn’t know what they should do. I did.’

She was, again, at a kitchen table, and Simun was beside her, and behind her a woman ironed freshly washed black dresses, black skirts and black blouses.

‘The certificate of clearance for mines was given, and the men gathered to drink – as if they had reason for celebration. Too many times, too often, they find a reason to drink, or to take pills. I said to them that instead of drinking they should be searching. They disgusted me.’

The translation aped her – Simun almost spat with her. Penny thought her tiny. The woman might have been sixty, seventy or even eighty. Her face showed a fretwork of wrinkles and there was the walnut brown to her cheeks that meant, Penny had learned, a lifetime of exposure to the elements: weather, war and heartbreak.

‘We had found the body and the professor had given us a name. I told them, the men, that it was owed to those who had died – and to those who had suffered and survived, the defeated – to search for this man. Without me they would only have drunk more, taken their money from the government and talked. They would have done nothing.’

Should she curse Dermot, her line manager, for sending her? Should she shriek oaths at Asif’s wife, the woman whose natal complications had dictated Penny travelled alone, had done a two-night stand with a teenager and betrayed her work ethic? Here, easily, everything was certain. She was familiar with the worlds of criminality that flowed around the narcotics trade, and could stay aloof from it. Could remain detached, with the status of an observer, as a war in central Africa was played out within a day’s journey for a four-wheel drive. There, she had been part of the law-enforcement tribe. Here, Penny Laing was alone, and the boy’s voice bitched in her ear as he translated.

‘I said to them that the man who was responsible should remember my husband to whom he gave a promise. He, Harvey Gillot, should know of our agonies and should suffer punishment for them. The men in the village would have done nothing, but I refused to allow that.’

She felt as if a curse had been uttered, and sensed its force.

‘They found difficulties, which were excuses to do nothing… Difficulties and problems. I said we would buy a man. You tell me Gillot comes here. You tell me that the man we paid has failed twice but he will try once more, here. If he doesn’t earn the money we have given him, our men will do it. My husband died after torture. My husband – in this kitchen, on the floor under this table – told me he would trust his life to Harvey Gillot. He did, and lost his life. If the men will not do it, I will, and so will Maria and any woman who was here – who had her legs forced apart.’

Who back at Alpha would understand? Who would not criticise her? In her mind were the fading photographs of men and women long dead, abused and mutilated, now living only in pictures in a shrine made by a broken man. God, where were the old rules of her life? Gone. The woman’s voice was quieter now, almost matter-of-fact, and Simun’s tone reflected it. Penny could pass no more judgements, but could imagine the darkness, the noise of shellfire, and then the dawn coming, the men not back from the cornfield, the depth of the loss, the spectre of defeat… then the flight of the men, and the women staying because the wounded in the crypt could not be abandoned. The advance of an enemy who had taken many casualties. And the revenge. She wanted it over and stood up, but the crow woman would finish.

‘If he is still alive, if he comes, Gillot shouldn’t think he can smooth us with good words. We don’t listen to talk. If he comes, it is to die here. They, our dead, demand it and so do we… He will never leave here, I promise that.’

The train ground out the kilometres beyond Salzburg, carrying Harvey Gillot towards fields where the harvest had not yet been gathered, and where graves had been unearthed.

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