Gillot shouted at the corn on either side of the path: ‘Go away.’
‘Can’t.’ The man heaved, panted, and the footfall thudded closer.
Gillot stopped, turned. He stood his full height and tried to claw together authority. He and spoke with a harsh growl: ‘Words of one syllable… Get lost.’
The sergeant was in front of him, dressed in a suit, collar buttoned, tie knotted. The polished shoes were now dust-coated, his hair was wrecked and the sweat ran in rivulets off his forehead. A gasp. ‘Can’t.’
‘I don’t want you.’
‘Put frankly, Mr Gillot, there’s a thousand places I’d rather be.’
‘Be there then, any of them.’ Harvey Gillot turned. No smile and no shrug. He did it like a dismissal – told the lamb to stop trailing and get back to its own field and flock. He walked, stretched his stride.
‘Can’t.’ He was followed.
‘Repetitive, boring. Get a handle on it. I have to do this on my own.’ He thought that reasonable. Only an idiot wouldn’t understand that the business of the day was personal to him. They were in, now, an avenue of corn that was densely sown and made a wall to either side of them. A man – a devil, a killer, a bastard – could be two yards into the corn and there would be no warning of his presence. He would only have to extend an arm and aim and…
The voice bored back at him, lapped at his shoulder. ‘Sorry. Whatever your personal preferences, Mr Gillot, I’m not able to turn away from you. It’s the job.’
‘Get behind me. Don’t crowd me,’ Gillot said quietly. He wanted this argument dead – wanted to know what was ahead of him and round the twist in the path, wanted to know what was beside him and two paces into the close corn.
‘Behind you, yes, but with you.’
He thought they played with words. To Gillot, ‘behind’ was fifty paces back and detached, merely there to observe, far enough away not to distract him from his own survival chances. To Gillot, ‘with you’ was a couple of steps off his shoulder and alongside him, too near to give him a cat in hell’s chance. He’d reckoned he’d solved a problem and had had it thrown straight and hard into his face. The sun beat into his eyes and the sweat stung there. Temper broke.
‘Are you looking for a fucking medal?’
‘That’s insulting.’
‘Get off your high horse, Sergeant, and stop moralising.’
‘It’s called duty of bloody care.’
He let his shoulders heave with derision, but the man hung in there. At school there had been kids who fancied cross-country running was a joy – panting and heaving and throwing up – and the teacher said that the lead kid had to drop the chasers or he’d not bloody win. He hadn’t dropped Roscoe.
‘Never heard of it. Doesn’t play big in any street I’ve lived in.’
‘And it hangs like a bloody millstone around my neck, but it’s there and I can’t lose it. That’s duty of care.’ What was new – anger. As if Roscoe had forgotten he was the policeman, the public servant. As if it was true: he’d rather be anywhere else and weighed down with the duty. He remembered the man in his living room, punctilious in his politeness, demonstrating neither sympathy nor personal involvement. He couldn’t offload the care.
‘I walk on my own.’
‘Correction. You walk with me behind you.’
‘You armed?’
‘No.’
‘You have a stick? Pepper spray? Mace? Do you have anything?’
‘No.’
A stork flew over, slow and ponderous, and Gillot told him what he thought. ‘Then you’re goddamn useless – useless. Leave me alone. I go about my business and you’re an obstruction to it. Lose yourself.’
‘You won’t be alone, no chance. They’ll be there. Got me? It’s like they’ve bought tickets for a Tyburn job, seats in the stands. Penny Laing of Revenue and Customs, she’s there – she tried to nail you with a prosecution but gave up on it. Megs Behan, the woman who blasted you out of your home with a bullhorn, is there. A local doctor, he’ll be there, but don’t regard him as useful because he didn’t bring the box of tricks him. I’m carrying it. The forensic scientist who exhumed the bodies – the deaths that put you in this shit – and found a phone number scribbled on paper in a pocket and shopped you, he’s down the track… with an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t. He’s there and has taken on the transport. He calls us all vultures, circling, watching and waiting for a corpse. You won’t be alone. Sorry about that.’
‘Back off.’
‘And the village’ll be there. They put up twenty thousand sterling. It’s a humble place and it lives off war pensions, with disability allowances well-milked, but that was a pile of money to them and they took it in bank loans. It was sliced off down the line as the contract was passed on, and the guy on the trigger gets ten out of the twenty.’
‘I don’t need to know – I’m not running. I have nowhere to run to.’
‘His name is Robbie Cairns. He’s from Rotherhithe, southeast London. Slotting is his work. He kills to make a living.’
‘I’ve seen him, faced him, smelt him.’
‘He’s waiting for you at the end of the path.’
‘Get back from me. I’ll look after myself.’
‘Stuck with you, and not from choice.’
It would not have been true to say that Harvey Gillot snapped. Truer to say that he had exhausted every other tactic for shedding himself of Roscoe’s shadow. He hit him. Surprised Roscoe and himself. A clenched fist, not the one that held the plastic bag, but a left-arm jab. He had never, in his entire life, hit anyone before – not at primary school or at the Royal Grammar School. He hadn’t thrown punches in the office-equipment trade or when he was trying to sell weapons. He had never hit Josie. The blow caused Roscoe to reel, but not to go down. Gillot watched, almost fascinated, as blood came from Roscoe’s nose and was wiped with a sleeve, and then more from a split upper lip. Roscoe stood, lifted his head and would – for a moment – have weighed whether or not to beat ten shades of hell out of Gillot. Gillot nearly laughed. It wouldn’t have fitted the duty of bloody care to return the punch.
Gillot walked on. Reckoned he’d won space for himself.
They were squashed into the car. Dropping off Roscoe and giving his place in the front to the long-legged Anders had made little difference to the lack of comfort, but it had been bearable when they were on the decent road surface out of the town. He was guided by Penny Laing, who directed him at junctions where narrow roads branched off with no signposts. A quiet had fallen on them and Benjie Arbuthnot rated it an inappropriate time to lift the mood with humour. Now he drove the hire car off the road, on to a track, didn’t slow, and allowed the vehicle to bounce.
He followed Penny Laing’s directions. Through the village, with a brief commentary by Anders on the number of casualties suffered in the siege, past the church and the cemetery – he saw through the open gate the fresh graves. No one spoke and all were thrown about inside the car. He did not slacken his speed.
There were markers ahead.
He could see, as dust piled on to the windscreen, bobbing heads that wound in a slow-moving line above the tips of the crop. He had been once in South America when a pope had visited and could remember the huge crowds moving in crocodile formation towards the rendezvous where mass would be celebrated. He recalled taking his elder son to a music festival and, again, seeing trudging queues heading for campsites beside the Thames… Something magnificent and emotional about columns on the move in the early morning and a great event expected. The army ahead of him, however, wore neither the uniform of the faith nor their culture: the women were in black and carried hand weapons and the men were in camouflage fatigues, with firearms on their shoulders. They were strung out along the length of the track.
Anders said, ‘I don’t want to be a pooper, Arbuthnot, but I don’t see our presence being welcomed.’
Megs Behan said, ‘I cannot believe now in the rule of the mob. We have to go on.’
Penny Laing said, ‘We owe him nothing. We’re not in debt to Gillot.’
He made no reply. He could have tucked the car in behind them and crawled at their pace, could have dumped it, turfed out his passengers and walked. He heaved the wheel and went through the corn. The mass of green closed around the windows. He made a bypass, then swung back towards the track.
He saw that the village people formed little clusters ahead, and understood. Penny Laing murmured to him which was Tomislav, who had made a memorial of his home and would have fired the Malyutka missiles if delivery had been made, and which was Andrija, who had been the sniper and had lost his leg in the break-out when the women and wounded were left behind. She indicated Petar, who farmed this land, whose wife was deaf and whose son had died when the consignment had failed to come, and Mladen, who led the village, and his son, who had been carried out as a two-week-old baby through the cornfields. Always a witness, always an observer, Arbuthnot noted, and squirrelled away her blush and the tremor in her voice as she spoke of the boy – good-looking kid. He saw, ahead, that Steyn waved to him and beside him were two crow women.
He had seen enough, so he did a three-point turn that flattened more of the crop, and began his drop-off.
It was Megs Behan who asked the question. It would have been in all their minds but she posed it. ‘Can we save him?’
‘No, we cannot,’ Arbuthnot said. ‘But it’s possible he can save himself.’
Steyn was the first to see him.
He knew Maria, wife of an amputee. She had consulted him on a possible infection of the ovaries. He’d thought her a pitiless woman, but he knew what had been done to her when the village had fallen. He had seen, also once, the elderly widow, who played that part with enthusiasm, had painful arthritis and a great bagful of bitterness at the loss of her husband. He thought each lived in the days and nights of an autumn turning to winter when their lives had depended on the lottery of where a shell landed, or where a sniper aimed his bullet. He thought each lived through that day and night of an enemy unzipping his fatigues, lowering filthy underpants and tearing down knickers.
He stood by the women, and saw him come over a low hill. Crown of the head, the full face and then the shoulders. He knew well the history of the Kukuruzni Put, could imagine how it had been to sprint or crawl between the rotting crop rows. He saw that Gillot carried a white plastic bag in his right hand. He walked briskly but without bombast. No trace of a swagger or the hesitation of the intimidated. Daniel Steyn fancied himself a reasonably skilled and caring general practitioner of medicine, but more as a psychologist. The man did well, struck a good posture. Once an American special-forces officer had come to Vukovar to examine the ground and the strongpoints, and to learn of the battle. They had talked late, over whisky, about bluff. The officer, if the holding cells of the Lebanon hostages of the 1980s had been positively located, would have been on the rescue squad, and he had spoken of one, a Briton, who had successfully played the bluff game on visits to Beirut: simply by his bearing and understated confidence he had created a safety cocoon around him, until the bluff was called. Then he had had no battalions behind him, only a pistol pressed up under his chin. On the Cornfield Road bluff might play well and might not.
The policeman was behind Gillot. Fifteen or twenty paces. More opportunity for the psychologist: would have been duty-driven, would not have had the flawed personality to claim the right to a ten-hour break – many would – and hands washed of a problem. Steyn saw the dried, dark blood, the stains on the suit jacket, the smears on the shirt. Understood that, too. The bluff factor was not compatible with a bodyguard in tow.
Gillot closed on him.
No eye contact, nothing resigned, nothing fearful and nothing confident – no recognition.
The women were in the middle of the track and the corn grew high at either side of them. The widow had her stick and Maria a grenade bulging in a pocket, a knife in her hand. He thought it the sort of a knife that would be used to cut up a slaughtered pig in a shed behind a village home. They blocked Gillot’s way.
Genius. He reached them and stopped. He looked into the faces, would have seen the emotions that could kill him. He did that little smile, apologetic, but without a cringe. He offered no defiance and stepped to the side. Perhaps they expected argument, might have expected explanation or gushing apology. He was past them. Cleverly done.
At a price. The stick was thrown after him, which must have hurt the widow because the arthritis ravaged her. It caught Gillot on the back of the head, but he rode it. Then Maria hurled a stone, which hit Gillot square in the back, by the bullet holes in his shirt. He staggered but didn’t go down. Steyn thought that if he had he would be gone. He would not have risen again. More stones and earth clods rained on Gillot, but he stayed upright.
Steyn walked with Roscoe.
In front, where the path bent, he saw his old friend, Bill Anders, who was – maybe – the architect of the whole damn thing, and in the group with him was Tomislav, who held an RPG-7. His wife had quit before the heavy fighting had started and gone to the enemy. He understood the hate.
A stone cut the back of Gillot’s head and blood matted his hair.
Roscoe could not have put himself into Gillot’s mind. He thought he should have been on one side of the Tango and the doctor on the other. They should have walked beside him, but the stinging ache in his nose and the swelled lip told him where he was wanted and where denied. The women were behind him. There were shouts, curses… Sometimes the doctor, almost with embarrassment, translated what was yelled at Gillot.
So, Roscoe broke ranks. He jogged a few paces and came near to Gillot’s shoulder. One stone jarred his back, low down, while another hit Gillot and glanced off the angle of his neck.
He did it from the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t want you. I don’t need you. You have no place here. You’re not a party to this argument. Get back. I don’t ask you-’
Gillot didn’t have to finish.
It would have been a stone that a plough had turned up, too heavy for the old woman to lift and throw, so it must have been the younger woman who had hurled it. A good aim. It hit the detective somewhere at the back of the head, then bounced on to the track and corkscrewed into the corn. Roscoe yelped, then took two more steps, or three, and subsided. Gillot left him. There would have been another tedious, futile debate: Gillot’s needs against the other man’s sense of obligation.
He didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have helped him to see the detective. He didn’t want to know whether the man was stunned, out cold, or had merely gone down and then pushed himself to his feet again. He went forward.
What he did and how he acted made, curiously, good sense to Harvey Gillot. Certainly he would not look back and probably not to the side. His focus was in front of him. The corn was an aisle. Further on, ahead, he heard a rumble of voices but they were indistinct and he understood only a choir chorus of hostility.
He heard a cry, croaked: ‘For fuck’s sake, Gillot, turn round and let’s get the hell out.’
He did not. Of course not. He could have turned on the island when two shots were fired, or at the Hauptbahnhof and any time in Zagreb after he had gone to the rendezvous cafe and revisited where he had met the schoolteacher. He could have turned at the hotel that morning when he’d settled his bill. Best bloody foot forward.
It was a bigger group that was waiting for him. They had trampled down some of the corn and he saw the rusted frame of a harrow or a plough, abandoned. The thin, sculpted shape of an RPG-7, held high, a grenade loaded, poked above the heads of the women and the shoulders of the men. How many of those had he sold? Good one. Harvey Gillot began the mental arithmetic of the numbers of RPG-7s he had flogged. He started with the Middle East and the ones that had gone to Lebanon for use by the army against Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions up in Tripoli and… a load had gone to Cyprus for a paramilitary crowd, and the Jordanians had had some, and the Syrians had stockpiled more. Anywhere that had no oil had had RPG-7s from him. He didn’t do many contracts with oil-producing countries because they could, more easily, buy government to government with brown envelopes attached. They had gone to Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, all the fledgling places that were UN newcomers and had broken free from the old Soviet Union. He was doing well, counting high, beyond hundreds and into thousands and- Shit.
They were baying. He thought they looked for blood.
He saw women bend and pick up clods or stones. Some waved knives, rifles were pointed. Then the launcher was lowered, rested on a shoulder and aimed at him. Right. An RPG-7, at close quarters. He knew it had, at two hundred metres, the ability to penetrate 240mm of armour. He was inside that zone – and some – and had no armour of any thickness, just a vest and a shirt that was already holed. The RPG could splatter him. There were AKs too, and the pitch he would have used said that AK-4 assault rifles could kill at damn near half a mile, and a granny could hit with a 7.62mm bullet at less than two hundred metres.
He tried to hold his stride.
No escape. Who, in this world, did Harvey Gillot trust? Would have been, twenty years before, Solly Lieberman, but a bear had had him when he’d gone for a comfort break. Now, only Benjamin Arbuthnot: he had caught a glimpse of his head – hair a little longer, voice a little louder, shoulders a little lower – in the bar when he had checked in at the hotel. Roscoe had referred to ‘an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t’. He set himself that target. Arbuthnot would be along the track, maybe a mile away, maybe five, and if he could reach him he would be… He had faith. About all he bloody did have. He had not come to do penance, most certainly had not come to die. He had come to get the weight of the contract off his back.
He went towards the cluster of men and women. The voices rose in hate chants, the rifles stayed aimed at him and the RPG-7, but he thought they teased him and tried to break him. He walked into the range of the best-thrown rocks and clods.
He was in the avenue, couldn’t divert – and wouldn’t while he had the so-small chance of walking clear.
All the places that William Anders went to work, where he supervised the digging, there were men like the guy who carried the rocket launcher. No colour in his face, and the past sat across his shoulders like a lead weight, the launcher acting as a nudge to the memory. He would not fire, but it was the gesture – and the second was in the military tunic that seemed two sizes too large. Anders reckoned it would have been the guy’s own, that his body had shrunk over the years. The investigator girl had identified him as Tomislav and had said he would have directed the Malyutka missiles. He knew about them. He had flown into Cairo more than thirty years ago, a rookie in his trade, and had been in the Sinai where the Egyptians had started well with them, but the operatives had been massacred when the Israeli Defence Force had mastered a tactic to employ against them: they’d called them ‘Saggers’. Anders had heard then it was not easy kit to use… Not important now. He appreciated that his old friend, the spy, who had shared many of his stamping grounds, might just have done enough to save the life of a long-term asset and might not. In the gods’ laps. With each step he took, Anders despised himself more for being there, booking a ticket to watch a man die.
He walked well.
They had stones, rocks and clods as solid as bricks and chucked, threw, heaved them at Gillot.
Anders realised well enough the need for release. Understood the torture a community would have endured after nineteen years without a scapegoat to skewer. Bombarding the man with stones might be sufficient to ease that long pain – and it might not. Might be the knives that did it. Did he care? William Anders, professor of forensic pathology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a feted expert witness at international criminal courts. From the witness stand he had, frequently enough, given the testimony that would consign a mass murderer to a lifetime behind bars. An arms dealer was no friend of his. But…
He could nod in grudging admiration – admiration that was not freely given. The man walked well, had touched all of them, a chancer, and had manipulated them. He despised himself for being there – would not have been anyplace else for a sack of gold coins.
There was now blood on Gillot’s face, and bruises, and mud had disintegrated on the front of his shirt. Some of the blood scars were from grazes and others from skin punctures. He seemed to ride the impact of what was thrown at him, but didn’t do a boxer’s ducks and weaves. If the aim was good, he was hit; if it was poor, the stone went past him. Anders thought he went slower, that the injuries were sapping him. He passed them.
Anders looked into his face, and read nothing from it. Not defiance or remorse but deadness.
The one with the launcher, Tomislav, spat. A good, accurate aim. The spittle was on Gillot’s cheek and- He didn’t see who threw the next stone – a glancing blow on the forehead and Gillot dropped.
Down for a count?
No.
He was on his knees, then up. In the moment he was down the crowd around the guy with the launcher had surged, then swayed unsteadily and held an unmarked line around Gillot. It was as if a perimeter would not be crossed if he stayed upright. Their discipline held.
Anders joined his friend, Steyn, and the detective, and the three of them were behind him.
‘Not a pretty sight, is it? A vigilante mob is damn near as ugly as it comes. You kind of forget, maybe too easily, what bred the blood lust. He walks well.’
There was no pain. Neither were there thoughts of home and green fields, warm beer and safety. He was past pain. He didn’t think of his wife and daughter, or his dog. He didn’t think of the gulls that wheeled above the lighthouse at the tip of the island or the kestrels that hovered over the scrub. There was numbness in his body and his mind. He didn’t think of friends in the trade, the men he had worked with, those he had settled deals with, or the pilots who had shipped his cargoes, the freighter skippers who had ferried his containers. He did think of old Solly Lieberman.
What they threw that hit him buffeted but there was no pain.
He could just about manufacture a picture of Solly Lieberman, mentor, not in the decrepit office, in the day heat of the Peshawar bazaar, the air-conditioned cool of the bar or in any bloody place they had been together. He saw Solly Lieberman, veteran of the Normandy landings, survivor of the black-market gang feuds in occupied Germany, the guy who had walked away from the risk of covert assassination, condemned for selling firepower to the Arabs or weaponry to the Jews. He saw Solly Lieberman – maybe already had his pants down when the goddamn bear had had him. He didn’t think he would have felt pain, just the numbness. What an idiot place to die, the one Solly Lieberman had chosen: the tundra forests. What an idiot place to go to: a cornfield path in east Slavonia.
He was on his feet and went forward. He held the plastic bag tightly – fucked if he would back off, and fucked if he’d be anything other than stubborn pig-stupid. He clung to the belief that Benjie Arbuthnot had planted in him, that this was the only way he might live.
He was hit more often, but he didn’t go down again. There was sweat in his eyes and maybe blood. It was hard to see. The launcher was now behind him, gone. New voices were close, a cacophony, deafening, and he was trapped inside the avenue made by the corn. A man held a sniper rifle, and the woman was beside him. The good old Dragunov – could do a good price on a hundred SVD Dragunov 7.62mm sniper rifles and a better price if a PSO-1 telescopic sight was included with each weapon, 6deg. field of vision and integral rangefinder. Good kit and 50 per cent hit chance at 800 metres. He could have rustled up a warehouse full from Bulgaria, Romania or… Who fucking cared?
He saw the man with the rifle, and Megs Behan was beside him.
He jostled her, then seemed to stumble, and Megs Behan, from instinct, reached out to steady him. She realised that the rubber-tipped end of the crutch had slipped and he’d lost its support, and the rifle barrel wavered in front of her face, then regained the aim.
They would not have understood. No one she knew – family, friend, work colleague, hack on the paper who had binned her press release – would have understood what it was like to stand on the crushed corn and witness a death march. She had no doubt that that was what it was. There was little spring in his walk, no smile – as if he had nothing left to sell. She didn’t know what was in his plastic bag. He had gone to sleep before her, and she had watched over him, had seen his back and the bruising, two impact points. She could have touched him and had not, could have held him and had not… could have woken him up, turned him over and suggested that he do the business for the last time – and had not.
She watched.
The crowd around him was now too close set for stones and clods to be thrown. He was no longer pelted, instead was jostled and bounced.
Fists reached out and snatched at the shirt on his right arm, on his left, and other hands pushed hard at him.
A woman, swathed in black, kicked his right shin, and a man tried to trip him. More spat. All jeered.
Under his nose was the barrel of the rifle with the big sight clamped to it. Megs Behan had seen photographs of similar weapons and they were in the hands of warlords, drugs barons and bodyguards around despots. It was the world of smoke and mirrors. She could remember, most clearly, standing at the gate of the house overlooking the coast, enjoying the tolerance of a police team, a seat in their car at night, and what she had yelled into her bullhorn with the volume switch at ‘Full’. Now her throat was dry, parched from the dust kicked up by many feet, and she had nothing to shout. They would not have understood. She supposed there would be – in half an hour or an hour – a rag doll of a body with more cuts on it than there were now and more bruising, that it would be flat out and the crowd would stand around it, as they did in the photographs when the mob had turned against yesterday’s man, Saddam, Ceau escu or any African ten-minute dictator. She would go back into the office, probably tomorrow, and they would gather around to quiz her, and she might just tell them to fuck off. Her bag was slung on her shoulder. Zipped inside an inner pouch was the note. She reckoned she’d go hungry that night.
Behind him were the detective, the American grave-digger and the doctor. They’d linked arms and forced their way through. Behind them was the crowd that had already had its turn at abusing, throwing, spitting.
His progress was ever more erratic, and the hands grasped his clothing tighter, but he did not retaliate or try to fight them off.
*
‘What are they shouting?’ Roscoe was between the American and the doctor, and they made a wedge to push forward. When necessary, they kicked to clear the way ahead and keep the contact with Gillot.
The doctor, Steyn, shouted into Roscoe’s face, ‘The one who had the launcher accused Gillot of killing his son, his eldest. Many of the others just babble hatred. The one with the rifle, the sniper who needs a crutch, accused Gillot of killing his cousin. His wife was raped. You want more?’
Roscoe demanded, ‘Is this real, not just manic theatre?’
‘Their lives were destroyed – death, torture, fear. The days of that autumn are as clear now as if the artillery was still firing on them, the knives were over their testicles, they were being herded into the cages and their women “entertaining” a platoon at a time. It is real enough to bring him to the end of the path.’
‘The hired gun, Robbie Cairns, is at the end of the path… if we get that far.’
One moment Megs Behan was among the crowd and beside the sniper, the crutch embedded in her stomach by the press around her, and the next Roscoe had taken her arm, yanked her free and she was among them. He saw tears on her face – and the clamour was greater, the violence more extreme and his body swayed as he was shaken. The bag was no longer at his hip but Gillot had wedged it under what remained of his shirt and behind his belt buckle.
Steyn said, ‘Nothing can be done. Get involved and he’s dead and we may be. A pace closer to him, with a degree of protection, and we end any minimal chance he has. To survive, small chance, he has to be alone.’
Roscoe didn’t know how the man stayed upright and walked. He couldn’t see the end of the path.
Steyn again: ‘They are even, in Croatia, appealing for Serbs – the enemy of centuries – to come here for holidays. Here, they beg the Serbs to come with the little they have. Money, at last, preaches rapprochement, so Gillot is precious. He makes a very decent target, which is rare for them. He’s convenient.’
*
Penny Laing was close to the wizened Petar, who had a shoulder holster across his chest. He smelt of manure and beside him was the deaf woman. She remembered a home that had been rebuilt piecemeal, without the help of craftsmen, and a door that had been boarded up on the first floor, the image of a son who had gone away into the night and not returned, and the devastation of a battle. She remembered being fucked in a barn, and could reconcile nothing of the last week with what her life had been before. A policeman she had met on a narcotics importation stake-out had talked about Northern Ireland and a local politician he had guarded from a Provo attack. The politician had come out of a meeting with military commanders: laundered uniforms, polished boots and certainties as to how their ‘war’ should be won. He had remarked, ‘Anyone who thinks he knows the answer to Northern Ireland’s problems is ill-informed.’ Bullseye. She would have said, on her back in the barn, that she knew the wrongdoing, criminality and worthlessness of Harvey Gillot, arms broker. She would have been ill-informed. She saw him. Pulled right and left, spit on his face, cuts and bruising, his shirt nearly off his shoulders and more cuts on his chest. She swallowed hard.
He came towards her, setting the pace. Behind him was the small group from the hotel – which the spy-buffoon had called the Vulture Club – linked, elbow to elbow. The girl from the NGO was in the centre and they took the pressure off his back, but he had to walk into the teeth of them. Some shook fists at him or waved knives and others jabbed him with rifle barrels. His shirt, once blue, seemed the only colour on show against the drab olive base of the army tunics and the women’s black. What had she wanted?
Easy enough.
She could have spelled it out before she had taken the plane. She knew where the house was, the lay-out of the garden, its size and position overlooking cliffs, coves and a seascape. She knew there was a wife, a teenage daughter at a private school. There would be a spoiled family dog and smug comfort. What had she wanted? She had wanted to exercise the power of the Alpha team, HMRC. Arrive at the outer gate at 05.55, count to a hundred while the cars were parked, break open the gate with a portable battering ram, then a brisk trot to the front door, count to ten, repeat with the battering ram, pour in, shout loudly and have the family spill from bedrooms. At 05.59 she would have wanted control of the house, could justify breaking down a gate and a door by the need to prevent the destruction of evidence. One guy, big laugh, had shredded his incriminating paperwork but they’d wanted to nail him badly enough to stick the shreds together and had won the conviction. The joy of it would have been him in shock, babbling, half asleep, the wife screaming, the kiddie sobbing and the dog whining. Then to a custody suite. Would have been brilliant. His jaw would have been slack and his dignity down the drain.
The chin was out, not ostentatiously, and she thought his dignity was intact.
Was she as big a casualty as him? Not in the same league, she told herself – but a casualty.
He came past her. She had to hold her hands clasped together or she would have reached for him and let her fingers brush his face. She thought his eyes were empty, as if nothing more could be done that would shock or hurt. Wrong. She was ill-informed because Robbie Cairns, who had taken the contract, was further down the path where it ended at the gravesite. Her wrist was caught, she struggled to free herself, then realised Anders had hold of her. He dragged her from the crowd into the bosom of the Vulture Club, and she was one side of Roscoe and Megs Behan was the other. They held the crowd back from pushing against Gillot, toppling and trampling him.
She saw, above all the heads, the straw hat perched rakishly. Past and above it was the tree-line by the river. It was close now, near to the end. The day was barely launched and the sun was still low.
‘I think – I begin to think – that he will walk through this.’ Across the Customs woman, the detective and the peacenik, Steyn said, ‘He’s unarmed. Back then, in 1991, him being unarmed wouldn’t have saved him – just made him easier to kill. Could be, today, that him being unarmed keeps him alive. I don’t know.’
‘Irrelevant.’ The word wheezed out of Anders’s mouth as a surge from behind knocked the breath out of him.
‘It’s like the sting has gone – now it’s parrot stuff.’
‘Could you prevent this, Daniel?’
‘No.’
‘Do I have the weight?’
‘Wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘I’m supposed to believe in the rule of law, not a rope chucked over a branch.’
‘Emotions run deep, Bill. You have no place but to hold your peace.’
‘If he broke and ran, went into the corn?’
‘Cut or shot to pieces within a minute. Is sympathy squeezing in your gut?’
‘He has balls.’
‘And a guy waits for him up the path. Heroics tend to finish with posthumous awards.’
Their voices lapsed and the crowd had swelled round them. Steyn saw Anders glance at his watch and reckoned he checked to see if he’d make the scheduled flight. Likely he would. Likely, also, he’d write a paper on this morning and read it to an august body. He was getting closer to the high straw hat, and beyond it was the hired gun.
They had come into Benjie Arbuthnot’s view. He had a clear sight of the scene, and that section of the path was straight. He thought Gillot had the position of fulcrum, was at the heart and centre of them, and his shirt showed up clear against the blur of the uniforms and the women’s weeds. There was a stork overhead, wings languid and flapping, but no vulture. Higher up, a buzzard rode the thermal. Two hundred yards from them the crowd advanced and Gillot led them. A haze of dust hovered and danced in the early-morning light. Very pretty… He turned. The path went on and the corn was close, making tight walls to it, and he could see the lone figure who waited there, but couldn’t make out the features as the sun was in his face. Even the brim of his hat couldn’t deflect its brightness.
Up to now they had barely spoken. Silence was a commodity Arbuthnot valued highly and he sensed that the man beside him – with the rifle and the old camouflage tunic – begged, in conversation, to be given the status of chief. He knew that the boy was Simun and that the man was Mladen, who had led the village in the last days of the siege and was the undisputed headman. He judged the moment right for the overture. From the inside pocket of his jacket, behind the pen, he produced his hip flask and passed it to him.
Thanks were translated, the response gruff and noncommittal. Arbuthnot said, ‘It’s ten-year-old Irish, Bushmills, a favourite of mine.’
A good swig was taken, then a dirty hand wiped the top and passed it back.
‘What is your purpose here, sir?’ The boy played interpreter for question and answer.
‘Just happened to be passing.’ He drank, sparingly, then pressed the flask again into the broad hand of the man and was refused. ‘I think it is enough.’
‘No, go on – something wonderfully refreshing about whiskey before breakfast. You were the commander here? I congratulate you. Those bastards in the ministry and the president’s office wrote you off, abandoned you. You fought as lions would. What was it at the end? Exhaustion?’ As the flask was returned to him, Arbuthnot shook his head, pushed it again towards Mladen’s chin.
An answer came through the boy. ‘Some of us, at the end, had not slept for four days and four nights.’
‘Ammunition was finished?’
‘We had none.’
‘You were a man of ability. A good leader – which you were – must also be able to recognise reality. See that?’ Arbuthnot pointed to the crest on the side of the hip flask, engraved in the silver. ‘That grinning skull with the crossed bones clamped in the teeth and the legend “Or Glory” was my crowd. The 17th/21st Lancers, light armour for reconnaissance. I did time in the mountains north of Aden, in a wretched corner of Ireland and, of course, Germany. A long time ago… Never faced anything of the intensity of the attack you withstood for so long. Proud to have met you, sir.’
He shook the hand offered him. He thought Gillot, at that speed, would reach them in a couple of minutes. Little of what Benjamin Arbuthnot did was casual or without the benefit of assessment, analysis, planning… Again he proffered the flask and murmured something about a presentation on his leaving the regiment. He said, ‘Of course, in the cavalry, with armour, we learned about the various weaponry on the market. This one, we called it Sagger, the NATO code name.’
A smile that was defrosting. ‘To us it was Malyutka.’
‘Very difficult to use. I think it was the decision of the schoolteacher to try to bring in the Malyutka weapon?’
He could hear the shouting and make out individual voices – the deeper harshness of the men, the shrill hatred of women. The knives flashed. God forbid, the thought came: it was not an arms dealer, an asset of the Secret Intelligence Service, but a Christian martyr being dragged to a death of barbarous cruelty. He thought, perhaps, he had used up a last vessel of goodwill at Vauxhall Bridge Cross. He had been given the medical pack and the rattling matchbox. He couldn’t expect to be welcomed back again, even into an anonymous interview room on the ground floor, and would not again be afforded the privilege of receiving help in any form. New men and new women, in slacks and shirtsleeves, trousers and severe blouses, would chime in chorus:
Only an arms dealer, wasn’t he? Only a one-time asset but now well past his sell-by date, isn’t he? What’s the big deal? History – who cares? Benjie Arbuthnot did.
‘One man wanted it. It had been successful in Vukovar, but they had no more. He told the teacher what he wanted.’
‘Friend, how many of your men had experience of using it?’
‘One.’
‘It is at best very difficult for a trained man to use, impossible for a novice. You did not have men with the skills to make it effective.’
‘We did not.’
‘It wouldn’t have saved you, not the village or the town.’
‘Perhaps. If I’d said that then I would not now be the leader.’
His wife, Deirdre, always remarked that her husband had the persistence of a polecat. She would have meant the persistence the murderous little creature showed when it was hungry and needing to feed young, stalking a rabbit or closing on a nest where there were fledglings. He thought this man both cunning and careful. A poor education, but the stature of one who would be followed. Arbuthnot had chosen his moment and had allowed the silences to build as the column had approached where they stood on the path between the corn. Now he played the final cards in his hand. Poor education, yes, but common sense and caution. The sort of man who would have risen easily in the British Army of Benjie’s day to the rank of senior sergeant and would have been trusted implicitly by any officer, depended upon.
‘And at Vinkovci or Nustar where the crates went on to the Cornfield Road, would the senior commanders have allowed a delivery of such importance to go to this village alone?’
‘It would have been a problem, but it was the teacher’s problem.’
‘Would they, in fact, have been taken by more senior commanders for more important sections of the defence of Vukovar? My friend, would any of the missiles have reached here?’
‘I do not think so. I never thought so… It cannot be said. The teacher promised it would come to us.’
In his shoulders, Arbuthnot mirrored sadness, and in his voice there was regret. ‘So it was for nothing? Collecting everything of value, sending young men with the teacher to the rendezvous? Believing in the weapons? You are a commander, proven in combat. You know it was for nothing.’
‘What I know, sir, and what I will say are not similar.’
‘My friend… No, not for me, you have it. Wonderful, yes? The Bushmills whiskey of Northern Ireland.’ The hip flask was again offered, and Arbuthnot again insisted. ‘Quite the best thing to come out of the place… What is happening is nonsense. You were the commander, you are the leader. End it.’
‘I cannot.’
‘It is barbaric, medieval. It drags you back when you should step forward. Look for the future, not the past. End it.’
‘I say to you I cannot.’
‘The cry is for leadership.’ It was the last card of the deck. He seemed to slap it down on green baize as if he was with Deirdre in Shropshire and among other dinosaur friends, not here. The shouting was deafening and they came close. The hip flask was rammed back into his hand.
‘You are wrong, sir. The cry is for blood. If I do not give them blood I am not the leader. The whiskey is good. Thank you, sir.’
As the purveyor of a trade where deceit, obfuscation, half-truths, half-lies and deceptions were praised he found rank honesty interesting when it was shown him. Almost deflating. He couldn’t disagree with the man.
Level with him, not half a dozen feet away, Gillot staggered, seemed to pause, and reached down into the waist of his trousers. He dragged out a lightly filled plastic bag – it would have come from any high-street supermarket – and threw it at Benjie. The old spy scrabbled for it, dropped the flask and had to crouch to pick it up. He saw the engraved skull and the crossed bones, the words from the cap-badge, ‘Or Glory’. He might have said: Fuck all glory here, my old cocker. It might have been Anders who grabbed him, or Steyn, but his eyes had misted. He clutched the plastic bag and was swept along with the herd.
Had he been recognised? He didn’t know – no greeting had been offered him. He had expected none. He had said that Gillot must face and confront, and he now did so. At a cost.
*
They came together. A trip, a push from the side, a knife brandished in his face, and a woman’s spit on his cheek. He lost his balance. Harvey Gillot went down. Darkness closed around him and the brightness of the sun went. So many of them, pressing, shoving, knees jabbed into his chest and elbows. No room for them to swing their fists or use their feet. He tried to curl up, protect his privates and face. The bedlam above him was indistinct… and he heard Roscoe.
As if Roscoe took control. A little pool of light first. It lit faces and he saw the beards on the men, the gaps of missing teeth, and smelt the breath. He saw the lines at the mouths of old women and the crows’ feet, and Roscoe’s hands had hold of his shirt and the back of his trousers, at the belt. He was lifted. More light came. Was in his eyes. His phone, deep in his pocket, rang its chimes. Might be Charles or Monty or the good guy in Marbella, or his wife and daughter. Might be long-distance international from seaside Bulgaria or Tbilisi – or might be someone who sold armoured saloon cars. Wouldn’t be a salesman from a personal-injury insurance company, peddling.
He stood. Might have been down for five seconds, no more than ten. The phone stopped.
Gillot kicked out his right leg to make the first step and go forward. His eyes squinted and were wet. He had taken that first step, then cannoned into a man and damn near bounced back off Roscoe. He tried to pull Roscoe away and hadn’t the strength. Abused him – ‘Don’t want you, don’t need you.’
Saw, up ahead, the gunman. Near to him a cross was strewn with ornaments and pennants, planted in a ploughed stretch of field. Behind it were green grass and a tree-line. Roscoe had his arm and used his other hand to push men and women back. He sensed, but didn’t turn, Megs Behan behind him, the doctor who had driven him and Benjie Arbuthnot. There were others who meant nothing to him. Roscoe had hold of him, shepherded him and half-shielded him. He didn’t know what he meant, but he shouted, ‘I can do this myself.’
Almost a sneer: ‘Right now, you can’t even piss on your own.’
‘Don’t want, need-’
‘You’ve got me.’
‘And the great plan, you got that?’
A hesitation, a pang of uncertainty. ‘Working on it.’
Which meant – and Harvey Gillot’s dulled mind saw it – that Mark Roscoe, the detective who had come to his home to plead a future life in a safe-house with a panic button beside the bed and been rejected – now had nothing more in his knapsack than the thought of walking in front of him, acting out the part of a fairground coconut. Would he have survived if he’d stayed down on the path and the crowd’s hands and boots had been at him, with the knives and rocks that were about to follow? Probably not. Would he have survived if Roscoe had not pulled him upright? Possibly not. He was now in debt to the detective.
‘I owe you nothing.’
‘Just keep walking. Walk right on past him.’
‘And what do I do?’
‘You walk. He’s mine.’
Robbie Cairns watched them come. Gillot, the target, was at the front, looking like a derelict who slept rough in Southwark Park on the far side of Lower Road. He didn’t think the target could have walked if he hadn’t been held up – by a policeman. The man would have had to spend a couple of hours being made up and costumed to disguise himself. Obvious he was a policeman.
They were coming closer to him. He stood with his legs a little apart, his weight on his toes, and the sunlight was across him, not in his face. The policeman wore a suit but had been on the ground and was dusty: there was mud on his face, his shirt was messy and his tie askew. The target, Robbie Cairns saw very clearly, tried to free himself from the policeman’s grip and wriggled, was a fucking eel, which rucked up the suit jacket. If a shoulder holster had been worn, Robbie Cairns would have seen it. If there had been a pancake version on the belt, he would have seen it.
They were fifty or sixty paces from him, and he saw now that the great crowd behind and alongside had thinned and that most of the people, whether they were in fatigues or wore black, had drifted into the corn and trampled it but they gave him space.
There was a knot – ordinary clothes and ordinary people except one idiot in a straw hat with a bright handkerchief half out of his jacket pocket – of two women and three men, a couple of paces behind the policeman and the target. He had the pistol out of his jacket pocket and had been satisfied with his shooting early that morning of the fox. He could justify it as a test firing and he had almost forgotten the eyes of the animal, the mouth and its tongue.
The man, the idiot, broke clear of the people who followed and split off into the corn. He had, a moment, a sight of the hat, then lost it, and his eyes were back on the track. They were going to fucking bluff it. Not many did. A few thought they could walk past, as if he wasn’t there, as if the pistol wasn’t aimed at them – not many. He cocked it, and the bullet went up into the breech.
Robbie Cairns thought that maybe he would have to shoot a policeman, unarmed, and didn’t feel it mattered to him. He had shot a fox and that mattered more, and had strangled his girl with the hands that held the pistol and that mattered most… They came on and walked at him.