He thought it would be quick and without pain. He thought it would end the misery. It was two years since Andrija had last tried to end his life. He had waited until his wife had gone down the village street to the shop, then had hobbled to the far end of the garden, put a pistol into his mouth and pressed the barrel to the roof. He had squeezed the trigger, depressed it, and… nothing had happened. He was not dead and he had wet himself.
His pistol had jammed. The malfunction in the mechanism would have resulted from inadequate maintenance, cleaning and care. He had allowed corrosion of the metal parts to spread internally.
Now Andrija was ready again.
He lived on the northern edge of the village, one of the last houses on the tarmac road towards Bogdanovci. He was now at the bottom of his garden, shielded from the house by a row of bean plants that had reached the top of the hazel poles. He could see the tip of the spire of the rebuilt church at Bogdanovci, and he could remember: they had gone from here. On a November night, in light rain and total darkness, the schoolteacher had led, Petar’s boy and Tomislav’s had followed, and his cousin had been at the back. They had taken with them the pram chassis, two wheelbarrows and the handcart from the farm. The guilt ate at him. It had grown more acute with each hour since the lone arm had been turned up by the plough, and had been agonising as the grave workers had excavated the sodden, shapeless corpses. He wanted it ended. This time, Andrija believed his wife was in a front room and wouldn’t have seen him go out of the open kitchen door at the back. She would know nothing until the explosion.
He laid his crutch on the grass, wet from the night’s dew. Soon, as the sun rose, the moisture would be taken from it. There was shade thrown by the beans, and the grass was fresh and cool. He bent his one knee and subsided; the right leg was off just above the joint. He had steadfastly refused a prosthetic limb. Getting down on to the grass jolted his spine, hurting him, and he winced. He reached into his jacket pocket and took from it an RG-42 hand grenade, the fragmentation type. The ring rattled the canister as he moved it. Inside its casing were – Andrija knew weapons and how to handle them – 118 grammes of high explosive. A similar amount, packed into an anti-personnel device, had all but severed his right leg.
In the breakout, the women and the wounded left in the cellar below the church, he had managed to get some two and a half kilometres clear of the village – a third of the distance to the safety of the forces round Nustar or Vinkovci – and then had triggered a POMZ-2 anti-personnel mine fastened to a stake, with a fine trip-wire in the long grass to activate it. He had already been in the corn for sixty hours and was dehydrated, famished, exhausted. He was alone, with no comrade to help him. He had made a tourniquet above the wound from the laces of the boot on his right foot, now useless, and had dragged himself a little more than five kilometres. It had taken two more days to reach the lines. He could remember the dawn breaking over the cornfields when the teacher, the boys and his cousin had not returned. He had lain in cover with his sniper’s rifle and waited for sounds of them approaching, ready to give covering fire…
The grenade had a delay on the fuse of four seconds from the pulling of the pin. He would not be the first of his village: two men had used a grenade in the last year to end the torment. There had been three from the other villages, more from the town. Two years before he had thought it would be easier with his handgun. He held the grenade in his hand, a big hand, the grenade snug in it. Before the war he had delivered post in the three villages, a good job that offered status, security and a uniform. He had not worked since they had come back to the village.
He heard his name called, three or four times, with rising impatience. His wife, Maria, had a strong voice, a short temper.
Since they had come back to the house, thirteen years ago, and rebuilt it, they had not slept together as man and wife. He had not penetrated her; she had not opened herself to him. She had never told him how many had raped her. A section? A platoon? Regular troops from the JNA? Cetniks of Arkan, the terrorist? In 1991, when the village had been held and then fallen, Andrija had been twenty-three, a star athlete and handsome, so women had said. Maria had been twenty-five, a beauty and raven-haired. Now he was crippled, disabled and destroyed, and she was haggard, her hair grey, without lustre, and cropped short. They were removed from each other, ate their meals in silence and slept so that they did not touch. Many in the village were scarred by the siege and the defeat.
He rolled on to his stomach. The grenade gouged into his belly and the index finger of his left hand was inside the ring. He could pull it. He could end it.
He considered what his life consisted of. There was no joy and everything was a burden. He ate with her, cleared the plates, then sat on the porch and watched cars and lorries go past. People who walked by would call to him but he would seldom answer, only sucking at a cigarette. In the middle of each morning he would head down the road to the cafe, swinging on the crutch. There, he would be with Tomislav and Mladen and they would fight again the battles on the different pinch points of the perimeter. They could take two hours to re-create the moments when the last RPG-7 round had been fired against a slow-moving tank, and two more hours to chew on the killing, with the Dragunov sniper rifle, of a major whose death had stalled an infantry advance. They took a minimum of two hours to talk over the bayonet battle at close quarters on the far side of the village when twelve had stopped forty in their tracks. They were never defeated, never found wanting in tactics or strategy as they sat in the cafe, toyed with the coffee and smoked. Always they were betrayed – by the government, which had not allocated resources and fresh men, and had not broken the siege of the town and the villages – but they had also suffered the treachery of the weapons paid for but not delivered. Betrayal. Treachery. Every day in the cafe they blamed defeat on the two evils.
Her voice was sharper, demanding to know where in the garden he was.
She had collected everything of value in the village in a plastic shopping bag, and during the day, through the night, the quiet times and when the bombardment was fiercest, the people of their community had come to the kitchen of Andrija and Maria’s home and had brought with them everything of value they possessed – jewellery, ornaments, heirlooms, cash, insurance policies, house deeds. It had all gone into the bag and been transferred to the care of Zoran. Maria had stripped the villagers of all that was precious to them. It should have bought the weapons but had not.
The anguish was worse because a grave had been found. The American had been at Andrija’s house the last evening and had asked translated questions concerning the clothing his cousin had worn that night, nineteen years before. He was asked what colour undershirt and underpants, what pattern on the socks and what sort of boots. He had had no answers. He had sat in his chair and said he did not know. He thought his ignorance shamed him.
He had nothing to live for. Devils beset him. Only in death would he escape them.
He was kicked.
She stood over him.
His wife used the toe of her flat shoe to push him from his stomach on to his back and the grenade was exposed. It was Maria, a principal voice among the women in the refugee camp, who had demanded that each woman never replace her rings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches and earrings until the betrayal and treachery were answered. He closed his eyes. She bent over him and he felt her breath on his face. She did not kiss him – had not kissed him on the day they were reunited in the refugee camp of wood huts in the mud on the south side of Zagreb, or on any day since – and did not run her hand over the stubble on his cheeks or tousle his hair, but she took his hand. She prised the grenade away from him and he thought his finger would dislocate as she freed the pin.
So, it would go on. The misery and the anguish were on a conveyor-belt and he had no escape from them.
Andrija did not know how betrayal and treachery could be answered, and did not know how freedom could be regained. She walked away from him, with the grenade. Had he been prepared to pull the pin? Many had. He pushed himself on to his side, took his weight on his knee, then levered himself up with his crutch. He thought he would go to the cafe and fight again a day of the war.
He did not know how the evil done would be answered.
There had been a moment, for Robbie Cairns, of indecision. It had been overcast, sultry, that morning, on the south side of the river. His T-shirt had stuck to his chest and back when Vern had picked him up in the car. New number plates. They had crossed Southwark Bridge and gone north – had been close to the location when rain had spattered the windscreen. Rain mattered.
In rain, would Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson put on a raincoat or hoist an umbrella, then go down the street for his newspaper and a pot of tea? Would he say he could pick up the runners and riders later, skip the cafe and do without his walk? Robbie Cairns didn’t fancy hanging about between the electronic gates and the estate agent’s with the recessed doorway, or waiting opposite the newsagent on the other side of the street. He wore a lightweight windcheater, as unremarkable as everything else about him, but it had an inner pocket in which the Baikal pistol nestled. He would hardly want to be stuck out on a pavement, armed up, not knowing whether the target would come to him or stay in and watch breakfast TV or shag his missus while the rain hosed his windows. It wasn’t Robbie Cairns’s style to ask his elder brother for advice. Enough times in the past Vern had been driving him towards a target when Robbie had, abruptly, aborted. He only had to say it was ‘turn-round time’ and Vern would spin, cut across traffic lanes and be well gone. Vern was not one to debate – he did as he was told.
The indecision moment passed quickly. Some rubbish, plastic bags and a sheet of tabloid newspaper were blowing down the pavement, and a glance into the direction the wind was coming from showed that the rain was temporary.
They’d done all the talk.
No reason for him to do more explaining about where he would wait and where he would hit. He had done all of that the previous evening. Then he had put the detail of a killing out of his mind, and most of that evening he had been on the sofa with Barbie, watching TV, not thinking about being up close to a target and doing the hit between the eyes with a converted Baikal.
If he had wanted to abort he would have said so. Vern didn’t prompt.
The first time Robbie Cairns had taken a life was a week after his twenty-first birthday. He was doing debt collecting, going the rounds for a local man who dealt in tablets and skunk, and the joker at the door had told the fresh-faced lad who had come for the envelope to ‘Go piss yourself’. Then he had laughed and spat at Robbie’s feet. A little of the mess had gone on Robbie’s shoes. Robbie had not told the local man that his debt was as yet uncollected. He had gone into the family network, had hired the handgun and a half-dozen shells for the magazine. Three nights later he had been back at the door and was ringing the bell. Two issues to be resolved: unpaid debt and respect.
First he had shot the man, one bullet, through the kneecap. The pain had been sufficient to persuade him that paying up was sensible. There had been a trail of blood across the carpet as the man had clung for support to furniture before getting to the safe and extracting the necessary cash. But that had dealt only with the debt. Robbie had then settled the matter of respect. If he hadn’t laughed and spat, the man would still have been walking, awkwardly, down a Bermondsey street. But he had, so there was a handgun in his face. Nobody in the block had heard, seen or knew anything. The police had called it a ‘wall of silence’. A few knew who had collected a debt and killed, and word spread among those who regarded it necessary to have a guy of cool nerve on the edge of the payroll.
Robbie’s second target was an Albanian trying to muscle into the cocaine trade at Canada Water where the City people had their apartments: a nightclub owner had hired him to take out a rival who interfered in profit margins. Since then, four years in the trade, the numbers had ticked up and a reputation had been established.
He was dropped off outside a mini-mart. He was being cautious. He went through and out at the side entrance. The rain was easing. He had a mile to walk and he blended well.
He went past the house and saw the car parked in the driveway. He checked his watch and was satisfied.
Between them, his father and grandfather – Jerry Cairns and Granddad Cairns – took the contracts, evaluated them, put a price on them and slipped the necessary information to Robbie. He didn’t need to know the customer, just as he didn’t need detail on the personal life of the target. If his father or grandfather thought the money was right, Robbie Cairns sent his sister to the quartermaster they used, took out the weapon, passed it and…
Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson ambled along the pavement and the last drips of the shower made the pavement glisten in the lights.
Robbie didn’t need to know anything about him.
Robbie swivelled and looked behind himself, left and into the cafe, right and across the street, then far ahead of him and over the shoulder of Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson. He didn’t see a policeman on foot, on a bicycle, or in a patrol car. He stepped into the target’s path.
Maybe three or four seconds before his life was curtailed, Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson realised the mortal danger confronting him. The expressions on his face did a slide-show of emotions: astonishment, disbelief, then the aggression that might have had a chance – small – of saving him. The Baikal was out, safety lever off, and aiming for the head. The man tried to duck and to lunge. Robbie fired once. A hell of a shot, a class shot. The target had been moving and weaving, and the one shot had taken him clean through the front of the skull, just above deep lines over the forehead. The man crumpled. The life of Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson was extinguished about halfway between the cafe and the newsagent’s.
The blood had not spread far on the pavement – hadn’t reached the kerb and the gutter – before Robbie Cairns was away. Didn’t run: to run was to attract attention. He just walked briskly. Went past the cafe, down the side alley, into the car park, saw the car as it edged forward to meet him, and he was gone. It was like another notch for him. He had done it well but, then, he always did.
Back over the river, the Baikal would go to Leanne. His sister would move the weapon back to the armourer, clear his clothing, and dispose of it beyond the reach of the forensics people.
If he was in high demand, his price would rise. Maybe he was the best. He felt good, confident, and the car wasn’t yet at any of the bridges that would take them south over the river and on to their own ground. Outside the newsagent’s the blood had not had time to congeal.
It was not territory they normally worked on: vacation leave had eroded the teams based nearer to this murder site in Tottenham.
Bill said, ‘That’s one shot, professional – a man who knows his business. That is top grade.’
There was white tenting behind the police tapes. A photographer worked inside it and a scenes-of-crime technician had bent to make a chalk mark on the wet paving that circled the single discharged cartridge case. The flap was lifted by a local detective and the young woman had pride of place at the front. Mark Roscoe was at her shoulder, and the Yorkshireman craned behind him.
Suzie said, ‘The target isn’t some innocent. Wilson’s record goes back twenty-eight of his forty-five years. He was a hustler, ducked and wove. There’ll be a deal in the immediate background where he’s come up short or welshed. He’ll have known where he shouldn’t be, where he was threatened. On his own patch he must have felt secure.’
The body lay awkward and angled, a leg bent under the weight of the stomach, an impossible contortion for a living man. The colour had already drained from the hands and ankles and from the face, except where the hole was. Very neat, precise. Could have dropped a pencil into it.
Roscoe scratched his chin. The sight of death seldom fazed him. ‘There’s a shooter right in front of his face.’
‘Not a man who freezes.’ Suzie had confidence and gave her opinion, as if it was expected of her.
They had come up to north London because there was little to detain them in their office, and the failed air-conditioning was an incentive to be clear of their workspace. The word, immediate, on the team screens was that the killing had been simple and ruthless, that the hitman should be of interest.
Bill said, ‘Would have taken evasive action. It’s right in his face, his life on the line.’
Suzie said, ‘But only one shot discharged. It’s a quality hit, boss.’
Bill said, ‘About as good as it gets.’
Roscoe grimaced, then turned on his heel. His own girl, Chrissie, did scenes-of-crime: funny thing, but he’d never met up with her inside a tent she shared with a cadaver. Back at their flat, he wouldn’t tell her about the killing of Wilson – a tosser who must have overstepped whatever line was drawn in front of him – and she wouldn’t tell him where she’d been and what bodies she’d sidled towards with her box of tricks and kit. They both did need-to-know, took the principle to the limits and had little to talk about. They relied on sex, hiking on Welsh, Cumbrian and Scottish mountains – anything and anywhere that challenged – and movies, when one or both would be asleep within half an hour. He liked her a lot, was comfortable with her, but they didn’t seem – either of them – to fancy commitment.
He walked away. Bill followed and Suzie skipped to keep up. He hadn’t spoken to Chrissie that morning – she’d been gone when he’d woken, her half of the bed empty; he hadn’t spoken to her the night before because there had been a briefing on developments from the cache, and by the time he came back she’d already been in bed, light out, regular breathing that said ‘sleep’. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her. They might get some time at the weekend, and might not.
Bill was another seldom disturbed by corpses and violent death. He said cheerfully. ‘What I’d think, boss, is-’
‘What would you think?’ Not usual for Roscoe to be scratchy, sour.
‘Forget it, boss.’
‘Sorry… was playing the pig. What would you say?’
‘I’d think that would be a good player to put in the cage, boss. All right, off our usual ground, but he’s a man who’ll move and won’t just be local. We’re late on the scene, it’s already happened and the remit is to be proactive, but what I think, boss, is the joker’s a good guy to put away.’
Suzie said, breathy, ‘He’d come at a price and he’d be in demand.’
They were at the car. Roscoe wondered how it would be to look into the face of a man who held a handgun, had no shake in his hands, had certainty in his eyes – wondered how it would be to see the finger tighten on the trigger bar… didn’t know.
The hospital in Vukovar was a fifteen-minute drive from the village. It was a pleasant site, with space left among the buildings for lawns, trees and flowers. On one of the larger and more expansive areas of grass a white canvas marquee had been erected and next to it was parked a refrigerated trailer. A diesel-powered generator throbbed between them.
The hospital had history – and William Anders had helped to put it on the lists of genocidal war crimes.
His work now, courtesy of business-class travel and a reasonable degree of comfort, took him to the places where atrocities had blackened a name. He was back and felt good. Vukovar and the hospital had been early among his achievements; a large part of his reputation as a forensic scientist had been built on the excavation of the murdered corpses of men who had been brought from the hospital by the victors of the battle, driven from the town to the farm, then slaughtered, dumped in a pit and buried. Anders had been in the second wave of experts to descend on Vukovar and – he would say it himself – his work had been of the highest quality. That day, he had four bodies in the marquee and the trailer, skeletons with clothing still clinging to them.
He had only the names. Dental and medical records had been lost in the firestorms when the town had suffered artillery bombardment and bombing. There were no rings on the fingers, no silver or gold crucifixes hanging from chains, but he had height approximations and descriptions of clothing from two parents and a widow. He had done the boys first. The father of one was the farmer whose land had been mined and whose plough had exposed the grave site; the other father lived alone and kept his home as a shrine. The interpreter had told Anders, behind a hand, that the mother had been Serb and had run with the younger children. Scraps of clothing were sufficient for identification and estimates of size, stature. The third, the cousin, was decided by elimination – there was always a problem with the results thrown up by his painstaking examinations.
With his small brush, a spatula and a trowel – much smaller than his wife would use on her geranium pots in faraway San Diego – he had the skills to say how a victim had been put to death. With each corpse he had found bullet and shrapnel scars on bones, then holes and rents in the surviving clothing, but he had also removed the remnants of decayed gristle from the mouths. Usually he maintained total honesty in conversation with victims’ loved ones, and in his detailed reports to investigating magistrates and law-enforcement agencies. He knew of the mutilation of the three young men, and now turned to the last.
He had the shape of an older man from the construction of the pelvic bones, and could imagine the weight from the tread of the boots worn that night. Therefore he had a name. As background, he had been informed by a policeman, and it was corroborated by a hospital official, that a small group had been in the cornfields, waiting for a munitions delivery. They had stayed too long and had disappeared – until the plough had found them. The smell was foul. It was extraordinary, even to this forensic scientist, how the stench of the long-dead could penetrate his plastic gown to his skin and was hard to remove even with intense scrubbing. He started to work through the pockets of a battlefield camouflage tunic.
Coins, the fragments of a cigarette packet, a lighter, a handkerchief, still folded, a smooth pebble that might have been a keepsake, a comb – but this was a man of authority in the community and Anders understood the necessity of appearance, even in a goddamn life-and-death military scenario – lightweight gloves, a little torch and a small can of boot polish. He assumed it was for smearing on the face by a man who couldn’t tolerate bending to pick up mud and wipe that on his cheeks. There was also a wad of folded paper.
In the pit that had been gouged for the four bodies, this corpse was the last to be lifted clear. It had been first in, the deepest, and was the best preserved. There was more flesh on the bones, and the clothing had lasted, as had the boots and the folded paper.
It was the only piece of paper he had found on any of them.
He asked an assistant for clean gloves and another pair of tweezers, similar to those his wife used on her eyebrows. When he had what he had requested, and the clean gloves were on his hands, he used his own tweezers and those brought to him to open the closely folded sheet.
The preservation was remarkable but that didn’t surprise William Anders. Neither did the clarity of the writing, letters and numbers.
It started as half the size of a postage stamp. Opened out, the single sheet of paper, discoloured and crossed with the folding lines, was a little larger than the packet of twenty Marlboro Lite cigarettes that was already bagged.
He used a magnifying-glass to read.
There were moments on all the digs and autopsies when he was able to insinuate himself into the lives of the dead – in Srebrenica, Rwanda, East Timor, by an excavated pit outside Baghdad, and the place where a husband had buried his wife, then play-acted anguish for local TV stations – when he had called back a truth from the past. He didn’t know the significance of what he read but he sensed a moment of importance. The blood rushed into his face.
With the magnifying-glass covering the smoothed paper, he could make out the name and the individual numbers.
His back hurt, had stiffened. He felt the craving of the addiction and wasn’t inclined to fight it. He dropped the paper into a plastic sleeve, called a halt and told the assistant they would break for lunch – a sandwich, whatever. He was never put off eating by handling decomposing bodies and the smell that settled in the pores of his skin, never put off a drink and a smoke. He shrugged out of the robe, moved the face mask high on to his forehead, kicked off the plastic boots and shed the gloves. He pushed open the plastic sheets draped over an airlock entry to the marquee and stepped outside.
Each morning before he went to work, on whatever death site on whichever continent, he topped up his hip flask with Irish whiskey and loaded the leather cigar case to capacity.
There had been an Anglicised name and a phone number. A different ballpoint had been used to write the name of a hotel.
He took a serious gulp from the hip flask and felt the glow swill down his throat. Then he used the cutter to trim the end of a cigar and lit it. He wondered who Harvey Gillott was, and in what town or city he could find the Hotel Continental – Setaliste Andrije Kacica Mosica 1.
‘I was told you were back in town so I called by.’
Anders turned. It was the one man he knew in Vukovar and could call a friend, a wiry little runt. He held the cigar between his teeth and let the grin spread.
It was a mark of affection, Daniel Steyn reckoned. He didn’t think too many others had been offered three swigs from the thimble-sized screw cap at the mouth of the hip flask. Good stuff. There was an Irish bar further down Zupanijska, opposite the site of the command bunker for the 204 Vukovarske Brigade, but the prices were beyond his budget. He had been offered a cigar, which he had declined. Instead he lit another cigarette – they were cheap, brought across the Danube by smugglers from Serbia, usually using the area downriver near Ilok.
Steyn said, ‘It’s become legend – not in the mythical sense because it happened. Believe me. The teacher, extraordinarily, had a line into a weapons broker and concluded a deal. Cut out government, bypassed the defence ministry, kept the local military in complete ignorance. The teacher said – and would have been about right – that they’d commandeer any hardware. Government and ministry had given up on Vukovar and would have shipped it into the front line protecting Zagreb, while the local military would have tried to get it into Vukovar, rather than the villages, where a thousand fighters were on their last legs and their weapons were useless for lack of resupply.’
‘I never heard that before, not in all the times I’ve been here.’
Steyn dragged hard on his cigarette, then flipped it on to the grass, which in 1991, on 18 November, had been covered with bodies.
‘On the night the weapons were supposed to arrive, the teacher and three other men went into the cornfields – a damn hazardous route – and towards Vukovar along the fragile lifeline they called the Cornfield Road. They were caught in the open at dawn and the stuff they’d paid for never came. You got them in there?’
Anders gestured towards the tenting and the small refrigerated truck. He and Steyn were from different disciplines. The forensic scientist dealt with the fatal injuries caused by mass execution, major bomb blasts, such as Oklahoma City, or murder where time should have ravaged the potential clues left by a killer. Daniel Steyn was a general practitioner of medicine, but with a bent towards a meld of psychology and psychiatry. His father ran a hardware store in small-town upstate New York so he had paid his own way through university at Madison’s medical faculty. He had practised for a few years in the city and pitched up seventeen years ago in Vukovar, where he had thought there would be a job worth doing. He was now part of the fabric of society there, loathed by local politicians and despised by the town’s doctors, but he hung on and spoke unpleasant truths. He rejoiced when a friend turned up.
Another cigarette was lit and another ring of ash fell from the cigar. The thimble cup of the hip flask was filled again and passed. Steyn asked, in a harsh east-coast grating accent, ‘You find anything on the bodies – rings, jewellery, religious gear?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There’s a big blame culture here. They’re quality at chucking blame – but not at themselves. They’re always victims. Right now, there are two targets for a shit bucket of blame. First, the government that abandoned them. That was treachery. Second, the man with whom a deal was supposedly done and left them standing unprotected in a field of dead corn. That was betrayal. They’d paid up front – that was where the legend was born.’
‘Keep going. I have until my smoke is completed.’
Steyn jabbed a finger in emphasis. ‘The legend is about a collection. A price was agreed for the munitions, and I don’t know exactly what they were but they would have been important for the defence of that community, and expensive. Everything that anyone owned of value in that village, which was under siege, shelled, mortared and bombed, was dropped into a bag and used as currency for the purchase. It went down the drain. The weapons drop was never made. That is betrayal in my book. Only the teacher had the name of the seller, and he didn’t share it. You with me? The living don’t know who betrayed them. Did it jump out at you?’
The cigar was nearly finished and guttered in his fingers. Anders said, ‘No woman I saw wore even the cheapest earrings, and there wasn’t a brooch or bracelet in sight, not even a trinket you’d get out of a cracker at a kids’ party.’
‘Because a pulse beats in the place that no woman will wear so much as a wedding ring to replace what they put into the bag, until revenge has been taken on whoever sold them short. They live in the past – more so than any other community here that suffered, and plenty did. That village and community are trapped… Heh, it makes for clients – I could do a year’s work on that one village and not have seen half of them.’
The cigar butt was thrown down. Two hundred and sixty people had been taken from the underground bomb-proof shelter of the hospital, the wounded and the staff who cared for them, and butchered. Two hundred bodies had been taken from the ground and identified by William Anders and many colleagues. Sixty remained hidden, buried. Steyn knew his friend would keep coming back until the last grave was found. They’d have dinner together one night. His housekeeper would cook. He had little money, but the woman did miracles with what he could give her. On the refrigerator in his kitchen he had stuck postcards Anders had sent him from corners of the world where graves had been uncovered. God, he valued the man’s company. He clasped his friend’s shoulder and saw a car pull up, a Mercedes 300 series saloon. Daniel Steyn had not treated the village leader but knew him and his history. The door was slammed. He was acknowledged. A question was asked. Steyn translated: ‘Do you have the identifications?’
‘I do.’
‘He asks whether anything of significance has been found.’
He watched Anders’ raw, weathered face. He saw little lines form in it, as if a matter was worthy of consideration. Then an answer: ‘Not for me to censor. Hell, this isn’t a business in which we suppress. We throw light – we shine the beam into dark places.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Tell him to wait right here.’
William Anders pocketed the hip flask, strode back to the marquee and through the flaps that kept the internal air chilled.
The man – he knew him as Mladen – told Steyn that one of the veterans had that morning come near to suicide, but his wife had found him and a hand grenade was now back in the box beside the Dragunov rifle that a sniper had once used. Which man? He was given a name. He knew the man with the crudely chopped-off leg – surgeons under pressure had done their best with minimal time and skill.
Anders was behind him. ‘Translate this. There was a piece of paper in the teacher’s pocket, folded close enough for writing to survive. There’s a name, Harvey Gillot, and a phone number. In a different ink, and therefore written later, there’s the name of a hotel, too.’ Anders passed him a sheet of paper on which he had written the name, the number and the address. Daniel Steyn didn’t know whether he would have done that – probably not – but, hell, it was nineteen years ago and any trail would have chilled.
Mladen took the paper. He said softly, ‘Harvey Gillot… Harvey Gillot… Harvey Gillot…’
‘Does she have anything interesting or marginally relevant on Harvey Gillot?’ Her line manager put the question without looking up from his laptop.
Penny Laing thought it blatant rudeness not to make eye contact. She feigned indifference. ‘I sent it over to you. Do you want it sent again?’
His head was still lowered. She wondered what he was reading that so captivated him – maybe the new guidelines on safeguards required by human-rights legislation for intrusive surveillance, maybe the runners tomorrow at Doncaster, maybe the revised pension estimates for HMRC. She stood, waited, made silent complaint.
He said, ‘I didn’t learn whether you thought she was worth going to, following, sticking with. That’s what I’m asking.’ She ground a fingernail into her palm and let the pain remind her that sourness was the fast track back to VAT work or worse. ‘Yes, she was. But – am I allowed to say it? The whole scenario got right up my nose. I did time in the Democratic Republic of Congo and-’
Now the line manager interrupted with a sweet smile to match his voice: ‘And I’ve worked in Halifax, Glasgow and Plymouth. Why is Megs Behan worth sticking with?’
‘Can I be blunt?’
‘Blunt will do.’
‘Because she has better assets than I do. Because she’s better informed than I can ever be. She knows where Gillot is, what deals he’s doing, when he’s in Ostend and what charters are then flying out and – are you getting me? It’s humiliating to be traipsing to an organisation like that when we don’t have the resources to do a proper job. Stick with her, yes.’
‘Remember the downturn, the crisis, the crunch.’
‘I do, with my corn flakes each morning.’
‘Also remember we’re somewhat of a luxury. A good conscience appeaser for legislators, the Church and the pink brigade. We’re a natural target for budget-slicing. To survive we need collars felt, court cases convened and sentences passed. Sorry and all that. Please, regular reports on Harvey Gillot – who is likely to be a right little shite.’
He was back at his laptop.
Penny Laing headed for her desk and wondered whether he was indeed an enemy. She swigged water and thought a thunderstorm was brewing – wondered if the target was touchable. The photograph in the file showed what she would have called a chancer’s face.
‘Harvey Gillot, oh, yes. Bloody hell, I’d nearly lost him.’
‘Who, Benjie?’
‘Harvey Gillot’s the name, Deirdre. Little man I used to know – and know no longer. One place for him.’
He had been known as Benjie since he was sent as a boarder to preparatory school sixty-one years before. By christening, he was Benjamin Cumberland Arbuthnot. He and his wife, Deirdre, lived in a small, damp-ridden corner of her family seat, handed down on a line of inheritance for some two and a half centuries. He was now on the move. It was his seventieth year, so their son and daughter-in-law were giving them the push from the west wing, two floors of it, and consigning them to a cottage beyond the chapel adjacent to the pets’ cemetery. Clear-out time.
He might have been arrested, banged up in a cell without his tie, belt and shoelaces, if Special Branch had done a search and found the caches of classified papers – tea chests of them – he had accumulated during his time as an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service.
There was a brochure for a hotel in a Croatian coastal town, fastened with a paperclip to a three-page typewritten report – SECRET stamped in red on each page. He tossed it into the scorched oil drum that acted as an incinerator. More on that trip, and more stamped pages, than all the files from Peshawar – he was a magpie, unable to help himself, had always needed to take copies home. Always forgot to send them to Archive or an official shredder.
‘I don’t remember that name.’
‘You never met him, Deirdre.’
‘Did we never have him for a gin in Peshawar?’
‘God, no, we did not.’
‘Careful, you silly ass. Benjie, are you trying to singe yourself?’
Flames leaped. It had to be done. Half his damn life there, in the chests, now going into the fire. The Balkans. The Afghan trafficking of weapons. Too many files from Buenos Aires in late 1984 when relations were being restored over gin and more gin with the Secretariat of State Intelligence. The Balkans and Afghanistan were now unrecognisable grey flakes of burned paper.
He said, ‘Harvey Gillot was just a little man who was useful for a brief window of time. Then we closed the window and drew the curtain. With a fire like this we can get rid of damn near everything, but whether I have any eyebrows left is a moot point.’
He had always seemed an idiot – could give a polished impression of imbecility and was clever at playing the fool. He chuckled as a flurry of seriously compromising documents spilled into the inferno.
‘A bit of a nobody who had his moment. Regarded me as God. Damn memory, I’d almost forgotten Harvey Gillot.’
‘Harvey Gillot – he betrayed us,’ Maria said.
‘Betrayed us and stole from us,’ the Widow said.
‘His word was worthless,’ the school-bus driver said.
‘We could have held back the tanks if we’d had the Little Baby that Harvey Gillot promised he would deliver to us, the 9K11 Malyutka. We had paid for it,’ said the man who had only one lung. He had lost the other to shrapnel and the surgeons had marvelled at his survival.
Andrija leaned against the inner door jamb. They were in his kitchen and only a single bulb, hanging from the ceiling, lit the table in the centre of the concrete floor. There was no linoleum or carpeting and no shade over the bulb. Some stood, some lounged against the kitchen units, but his wife and the Widow had taken the hard-backed chairs at the table. In front of them lay the slip of paper brought from the hospital. He had a pain in his abdomen from the kick she had given him. He offered them no alcohol, no coffee, but there was a filled water jug on the table and plastic glasses. She had been raped on the kitchen floor. Seven years later when they had returned, he had knelt on his one knee and she had gone to the far side of the kitchen. Together they had ripped up the flooring on which she had lain, dragged it outside and burned it. The scum had been drunk: she would not have alcohol in her home.
‘Now we can find him,’ Maria said.
‘It is owed to those who died, to those who suffered and survived, defeated, to search for him,’ the Widow said.
‘As one looks for a rat in a grain store.’ Maria again. Andrija thought he saw faint light in her eyes. She had not touched him when he had lain in the bed, after the amputation, and she had come to the hospital in the centre of Zagreb from the camp, nor when he had been discharged and she had brought him back to the camp, or years later, when they had returned to the village. Their front door had been ajar, and they had realised that a Serb family had left within the last twenty-four hours. For eighty days Andrija had been a key fighter in the village’s defence, creating terror in the enemy trenches, but she frightened him, and showed him no affection.
‘And one stamps on the rat and stamps again,’ the man who drove the cesspit tanker said.
‘It is owed to those who were in the corn, to those who were wounded, tortured and violated because the village fell.’ Simun, Mladen’s son, had been two weeks old when the defence of the village was broken.
‘I think Harvey Gillot will have forgotten about us, but he will remember,’ Maria spat.
The widow said, almost with a smile of pleasure: ‘He will remember my husband, to whom he gave a promise.’
Mladen, the village leader who had been an electrician and now drove a Mercedes saloon, said, ‘Everything we had, except our lives, was taken by Harvey Gillot. It was an act of treachery.’
Andrija made no contribution. He had taken no part on that long-ago evening of decision-taking. He had not been there to speak for or against the purchase of wire-guided anti-tank missiles. He had been in a culvert drain that ran under a track that went into the corn. There had been a bare, open strip, perhaps because the seed had been diseased when that batch was planted, to which he could slide on his stomach from the culvert to gain a clear view of the enemy lines some two hundred metres away. He had dropped an officer, a medical orderly and a stretcher-bearer. Such was the fear he caused in the enemy that the bodies were left to the elements… On his way back into the village he had used a sharp flint to scratch three more lines on the wooden butt of the rifle.
His wife had organised the collection of valuables that the teacher had demanded. Andrija’s opinion had not been required then either. In the darkness, men and women had come to his back door. He had seen the little items of jewellery and heard the clatter of rings as they were pulled from fingers and dropped on to the table. There had been envelopes that contained house deeds. His wife, Maria, had not thanked those who gave what they had – all that was precious to them – just tipped it into a shopping bag, which the teacher had taken, the next day, along the Cornfield Road.
Would the delivery of forty or fifty 9K11 Malyutka – the Little Baby – have made any difference to the outcome of the battle? Would the anti-tank weapons have held up the enemy’s advance on the village indefinitely? Would they have kept the Kukuruzni Put open for another two weeks, or a month? Andrija’s eyes roved the room. He noted who spoke and who did not: Petar and Tomislav had said nothing, and they had lost sons; neither had Josip.
‘We will find Harvey Gillot. When we search for him, he cannot hide,’ Maria said.
It was a small-wattage bulb, and shadows riddled his kitchen. Andrija knew what would be decided.
‘He should know of our agony and be punished for it.’ The Widow sniffed. She was the judge who passed sentence on a man, condemned him.
‘He will be found, will suffer, and be killed – and he will know why.’ Maria was panting a little, as she once had when she touched him and he her.
The chorus chimed agreement, thirty men and five women. All except Josip had fought for the village; all had suffered loss, as Andrija had. He could not picture the man, Harvey Gillot, could not have guessed at his features.
Mladen returned them to reality: ‘How? We are here. Where do we go? I think he is British, but I have never been to Britain. We have to consider if-’
Andrija’s wife, Maria, slapped her hand on the table. ‘We will pay for a man.’
The Widow ran her tongue over dried, cracked lips, withered by the summer sun. ‘We will buy a man.’
Andrija watched their leader’s face, saw hesitation. It was, of course, inevitable that this course would be chosen and that none would speak against it. Since the start of the siege, the women had been most ferocious in their hatred of the enemy, the first to denounce traitors and accuse others of betrayal. They were merciless. Not one wounded man from the enemy’s ranks had survived a night abandoned by his colleagues in no man’s land in front of the village’s guns. The women had gone out with knives and ended the whimpering of conscript casualties. Who would deny them? At that moment, he almost sympathised with the leader’s dilemma: who do you pay? Where do you buy?
Josip spoke. ‘I know who you should pay.’
Harvey Gillot came home late. It was a tedious journey from Heathrow but the location suited him. The Isle of Portland, on the coast of Dorset, ticked his boxes. As usual, he had done the return leg in a devious and roundabout way: Tbilisi to Frankfurt, a change of aircraft and carrier to LHR, the shuttle bus to Reading, then the train to Weymouth and the long-stay car park at the station. He drove an Audi A6 saloon.
The ticked boxes did not include proximity to the cliff deposits of the Jurassic age, in which giant ammonites and even dinosaur bones were preserved as fossils, the wild beauty of the promontory that jutted out into the English Channel, or the extraordinary and unique Chesil Beach, constructed by nature from a hundred million tones of shingle, past which he now drove. Neither was he excited by the prospect of the yachting programme in the 2012 Olympiad, which would take place in the wide artificial bay to his left. The island lay in front of him, pocked with lights. The wedge of valued stone, the best quarried in the country, suitable for the solemnity of military graveyards, did not interest him.
He felt the warmth of coming home – not at returning to Josie, to whom he had been married for eighteen years, and his daughter, Fiona, who was now fifteen. He couldn’t remember whether it was school holidays still or half-term yet, whether she would be at home or not. There was the dog, incredibly, or stupidly, loyal to him. He didn’t know how long it would be before pretences were locked into a cupboard and the key chucked. The warmth he felt was not for his wife, daughter or dog but for the place itself.
The boxes were ticked more boldly when darkness blanketed the causeway. He had his privacy here. Isolation. Protection. Anonymity. There was only one road, along the causeway, linking the island to the mainland. Gillot liked that. The island was a place where strangers were noticed if they stepped off the few tourist paths and were away from the Bill on the southern tip where the lighthouse was. In the trade he practised, close to the edge of whatever goddamn legislation had most recently been enacted, he assumed he was under variable degrees of surveillance by the plodding HMRC Alpha team. And there were other risks – it was inevitable in the trade that toes would be trodden on and noses disjointed.
His security, and his family’s, had dictated the move to the island. He had not explained it frankly to Josie, had not told her of two warnings coming within a month. In Tel Aviv, an Israeli had told him, ‘You sell to the Jews. If the Arabs you deal with knew of your link to us it would go bad for you, as it would if you sold them items we had not first sanctioned. We, too, have a long arm.’ Four weeks later he had been walking across Martyrs Square in the heart of Damascus with his guide from the defence ministry. The man had waved expansively at the space and said, ‘This is where we executed the Israeli spy, Cohen, who betrayed us. It was, and is, the correct punishment for spies and betrayers.’ In his old home he had felt vulnerable, threatened. On his return from Syria he had slapped it on the market, gone in search of a remote property and had bought one with little reference to Josie. This was now his home and he powered the Audi through the narrow, winding streets of Lower Town and up towards Higher Town. He felt again the warmth of coming home. And, yes, he looked forward to seeing his dog.
He would have been there in daylight but for the meeting in Frankfurt. He lived within a network. Brokers came to him; he went to them; confidentiality and trust were guaranteed. A German dealer had access to the shipping – the rust-bucket freighter – that would sail from a Bulgarian port to a Georgian dockside. Trust was everything in the world he had inherited from his mentor, Solly Lieberman. His hand had been gripped by the German’s as the price was agreed, the dates of payment and of the cargo being loaded. Once, he would have talked to Josie about the deal and cracked open a bottle. A floodlight played on the war memorial, the highest point on the island. He swept past the hotel, then veered east towards the coast road. He would go past the gaols and then on to the wide old road that would take him home, to its warmth and security.
It was a hell of a good deal, worthy of celebration – and if Harvey Gillot had to celebrate alone that would not kill the pleasure.
The Audi’s lights raked the front gates of his property. He used his zapper, drove inside and parked.
She didn’t come to open the car door for him, but at least the dog was barking a welcome from inside. He was home, where all the boxes were ticked.