4

Josip was always going to be on the periphery of the inner circle in the village. A moment in his history had determined that he was outside the dominant group. He did not try to scale the barriers. Instead, he ingratiated himself, was too useful to be rejected out of hand. The result? His opinions were canvassed and his advice was accepted.

‘That is what happened in 1991. Now, at last, we have his name.’

A few bends downstream from the town of Vukovar lay the sprawling village of Ilok – best known for the quality of the wine produced in the local vineyards. Ilok was an historic crossing point over the Danube, and a modern bridge linked Croatian and Serbian territory. For centuries trading had been part of the two communities’ lives and hatreds were brief, violent, then put to one side by those for whom trafficking was a way of life. Before Serb main battle tanks and armoured personnel carriers had crossed the bridge to wipe away resistance at Vukovar and the satellite villages, trading had been primarily in cigarettes coming from Turkey or Montenegro and destined for the German and Austrian markets. Once the inconvenience of full-scale war was removed and infant statelets were born, smuggling entered new dimensions: women, arms, class-A narcotics, computer chips and illegal immigrants were moved from Serbia to Croatia across the Danube, and the favourite route was east to west, where mature forests came down to the riverbanks and small inlets were not watched.

‘He stole what was paid to him. He betrayed the village. It is a matter of honour.’

Josip came to Ilok.

High on the hillside above the river there was a castle in a state of ongoing decay but government funds for restoration were exhausted. Other than the lawns and walls around a church on the site, it was pitiful and abandoned, but a good place for a rendezvous. He met two men and they sat together in the shade, smoked and shared a bottle of mineral water. The heat blistered down around them as they talked.

‘We cannot do it. We want to hire a man who can.’

The two men Josip met, who sat on the fallen masonry with him, featured prominently on the police computers in Belgrade and Zagreb, and the older one was listed on Europol’s Fifty Most Wanted, which circulated in European capitals. Alone of the villagers, Josip had contacts in organised crime, which now he tapped into.

There was a scrap of paper, preserved in a plastic wrapper. There was a name, a telephone number and the address of a hotel on Croatia’s northern Adriatic coast.

How to find a man who could be hired… how to find a man who would kill to order…

‘The village has condemned him. For us, there is no forgiveness. Harvey Gillot is dead.’

In the summer of 1991, Josip had been thirty-five, an insurance salesman able to practise successfully under the loose commercial constraints of Yugoslav Communism. He had opened offices in Vukovar, Osijek and Vinkovci; near the bus station in Vukovar, close to the town hall in Osijek, and with a view over the railway shunting yards in Vintovci. He lived in the village, was married, had two small boys and was held up in his community as an example of the virtues of thrift and hard work. Although three offices sounded grand, the rewards were solid rather than great and the future seemed secure. Anyone with an overview of his affairs, professional and domestic, would have realised that his commitment to the village was less than wholehearted. His wife was from north of Zagreb, where her parents lived.

In May 1991, a few kilometres from the village and close to the big shoe factory at Borevo Selo, twelve Croatian policemen had been killed by Cetnik paramilitaries; twenty more were wounded. A month later artillery shells fell regularly on Vukovar; the columns of smoke could be seen from the village and the communities prepared for full-scale fratricide – civil war between neighbours. Zoran, the teacher – who had taught Josip mathematics – led the village in a hectic programme of preparation: trenches were dug, the bunker was strengthened, drugs were stockpiled, ammunition and weapons distributed. Tomislav’s wife, a Serb, left with her younger children, but her eldest son stayed. Nobody in the village helped her as she walked past the fortifications, then over a wooden footbridge that spanned the Vuka and away along a track that would take her to Brsadin where her family were from. She took one suitcase and did not wave to her husband and eldest son.

That night Josip’s wife told him that she, too, would be leaving. She was a Catholic Croat. Their children were Catholic Croats. He was a Catholic Croat. The similarities between her and Tomislav’s wife were minimal. At four o’clock the following morning he had written a letter of abject apology, scrawled Zoran’s name on the envelope and left it sealed on the kitchen table. He had driven away at a few minutes after five, and the dog had run after them to the outer roadblock where there was a chicane between two felled tree trunks. The children had been sobbing, and the picket at the roadblock had caught the dog; they would have seen the cases, bags and bedding in the car, and would have known that a coward did not have the stomach to fight.

Josip was well regarded by the two Serbs he now met – and that was history.

‘We will pay well,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

He had sat out the war in Zagreb. The village had fallen. A little more than a week later, he had heard of the death throes of Vukovar from the Radio Croatia reporter, Sinisa Glavasevi . He had gone out that night, drunk himself insensible and slept for half a morning under bushes in front of the railway station. He had not known that while he was drinking and stumbling between bars Glavasevi was being beaten and clubbed; a few hours later he was shot and dumped in a pit on farmland. Josip had come back to the apartment he had rented to find it empty. His wife and the children had gone to her own family. He had started to build a business in the capital city and to gather in clients.

‘A professional killer, not an amateur. That is what my village demands.’

He would see his wife on the last Friday in each month and hand over an envelope filled with banknotes. He had done that through ’92 and ’93, and until 1996 when he was arrested. The book was thrown at him: fraud, embezzlement, illegal use of clients’ money. In the spring of ’97, a judge at the county court had sentenced Josip to thirty months.

In gaol, he had earned respect and gratitude. He wrote letters for fellow prisoners, advised on the best securities in which their money could be invested; he counselled on legal argument and was a champion of convicts’ rights. He was protected. The son of the older man with whom he sat at Ilok had been in the adjacent cell for thirteen months of Josip’s sentence. No one else in the village would have known how to insinuate a request for a contract into the ranks of Balkan organised crime.

‘We require a man in the killing trade.’

He received no guarantee. It was suggested that questions would be asked and a price considered. Then he would be told what was possible. He hugged the older man, whose son now languished in Belgrade’s central prison and would stay there for another seven years, and clasped the hand of the second. He did not think it peculiar that he, a Croat who had run from battle, should seek the aid of a Serb, whose people had butchered and raped, burned and destroyed his village. The worlds of Zagreb district gaol and smuggling across the Danube did not acknowledge ethnic divisions.

Josip said, ‘I am grateful for your time and and will be grateful for your help. It is necessary to us that Harvey Gillot is killed – and that before he dies he suffers, as we did. Please.’

*

‘What I’m saying, Harvey, is that the trough is getting smaller but the same number of snouts are looking for their share.’

‘Wouldn’t say I disagree, Charles.’

His guest was a sales manager at a prominent industrial company specialising in the manufacture of military equipment. The products, glossily depicted in colour brochures, did not include armour-plated vehicles, weapons or body armour, but were confined to two areas of electronics: communications and vision aids. Harvey Gillot did good business with these people. They were at a pleasant restaurant within walking distance of the Ministry of Defence, HM Revenue and Customs, Parliament and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – what might have been described, laughably, as the pulsebeat of the nation. He liked one-on-one lunches.

‘We’re cutting back on the Paris stand this year, halving the personnel we send to Dubai – and that’s a big shout, letting one in five of the sales team go… I mean, Harvey, it’s not just that money everywhere is tight, it’s also all the ethics crap. It’s becoming harder every day to get permission to export and an end-user certificate past the bloody bureaucrats down the road. Do they want factories closing, skilled production-line craftsmen chucked on the scrap heap? Look, Harvey, I’ve got EUCs, the Military List, the sanctions lists and delivery verification certificates half burying me. Those bastards with ridiculous pension schemes are looking after themselves and making it bloody hard for me to survive… Very good steak, Harvey. Am I ranting?’

No way. The man opposite Gillot, who ate a ten-ounce steak as if he was half starved and would have done a minimum of four lunches a week as a guest, regarded him as a friend. Not reciprocated. Harvey Gillot could be pleasant, might appear generous or to confide indiscretions, but he didn’t carry friendship in his backpack. It was another choice morsel of advice fed to him by Solly Lieberman: friends were for the pub and the bridge table, not for business. He had few friends and many acquaintances. He sensed already that Charles, looking at balance sheets in his sales-director office, studying cash-flow and performance graphs, was under big pressure to keep turnover ticking. ‘Where are those on high looking favourably at the moment?’

‘Best for licences, on the current list, are Greece, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Oman, Saudi, Romania, Thailand – and you get a nice little pat on the head if it’s the United States of bloody America. Anything else, and it’s how the mood takes them.’

‘What about Georgia?’ His guest was not the only one looking at the twin contradictions of ‘income’ and ‘expenditure’; Harvey Gillot lived and entertained well. A good house, a good car, and an appearance of affluence. Customers had to believe that his stall in the marketplace was guaranteed by ongoing balance-sheet performance. He wore a good suit, a good shirt and a good tie. Solly Lieberman always said that customers and clients were to be impressed, not befriended.

‘My last mention of Georgia to a starched shirt was what I’d call “inconclusive”. Georgia would “be looked at and very closely”. Wasn’t a green light and wasn’t a big red one. If it’s balls-breakingly cold, we need Russian gas and Moscow hates Tbilisi, it would be the red light. If the sun’s shining, there’s a heatwave and we don’t need the gas, it might be a green one. I would have thought it’s tread carefully with Georgia… I wouldn’t want to know, Harvey.’

Harvey Gillot had a restaurant routine: he would book a table and ask for one near the window, the door, the bar or the band, then arrive and say he had changed his mind: he wanted somewhere on the other side of the restaurant, so that if he was targeted and audio surveillance was aimed at the table, the listeners would have a chief financial officer chatting up his PA. He leaned forward, asked the question softly. ‘Things fall off lorries, don’t they?’

‘There have been errors in stock control. We do our damnedest to prevent such leakage – as, Harvey, you would expect.’

The booked table had been beside the window. The one at which they sat was in the centre of the room. ‘Top of my list, I think, would be communications gear. Enough for one brigade, a crack one, something their opposition can’t break into. It would go down well with some people I’m cosy with.’

‘You a target at the moment, Harvey?’

‘Always a target, goes with the territory. Everyone wants the best communications, but the money isn’t in the bag like it was five years ago.’

‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. But we all have to pedal a damn sight harder now to stand still.’

All right? The mortgage went out on banker’s order, as did the school fees. Josie’s spending and housekeeping money were on more banker’s orders, and there was what she needed for the gardener each week… All right?

‘Yes, “all right”. I’m expecting to survive. Put it this way, Charles, the clouds up there are a little grey but not carrying thunderclaps. Sunny skies ahead, and the horizon’s pretty clear… but if a system came along on a dark night, good encryption and security, location friendly – if you don’t mind trade jargon – for a brigade-sized unit, I might just jump up and down and payment would be wherever… They do a very decent meal here.’

It was regular form. The sales director reached slowly for his inner pocket, but Harvey Gillot intercepted his arm before he could produce his wallet.

‘Thanks very much, Harvey.’

‘Really good to see you again, Charles. If anything comes my way that needs top-of-the-range comms stuff, your people will be my first port of call.’ He glanced at the bill, slipped his platinum card into the reader and tapped out his number. He stood. He was smiling, confident, and the cold wind of recession did not appear to buffet him.

‘Again, thank you, Harvey. Will I be seeing you at the fair next week? We’ll have some good stuff for the punters to paw.’

‘I don’t think so.’

They walked together out on to the street, up a road and past the armed police who guarded the back of the Security Service building and

… He traded in firearms: he trafficked them, brokered them, bought and sold them, and was surprised that the sight of those guns unsettled him. The sales director bent his ear with a joke.

A message went from Belgrade to the Slovakian city of Bratislava, and a question was asked. A man was named and a phone number given for a suburb of the Greek capital, Athens. The caller was told that this man was the best, supreme in his field of operations. An introduction would cost – but the price would not be exorbitant.

A man living in a fine villa with good coastal views out to the east of Athens, high on a gently sloping hill where only his extended family had won the town administration’s approval for development, took a call from a valued friend. An email exchange was arranged through a third party in an Internet cafe.

A man who was capable? There were many.

One from Ankara was mentioned. Another from Tirana had found employment in Sofia in a dispute between commercial entities. A third from Bucharest was thought to be expert, but perhaps too old… Where was the work to be found? In London.

The man in Athens hesitated. His fingers hovered over the keys, then rapped out a response: For such work, and for a craftsman of the necessary expertise, I would not suggest employing a man, however skilled, from Turkey, Albania or Romania. Find a man nearer to the workplace for the contract.

The man in Bratislava was now beyond the scope of his contacts. Not so the man in Athens. Would a fee be applicable? It would, of course.

Robbie Cairns was stretched out on the sofa. Barbie would have been at work but for his phone call. He had rung and she had made an excuse to her supervisor – feeling faint, must be the bug doing the rounds – and had come back from the Oxford Street store where she worked in women’s fragrances.

He dozed. It was early afternoon, and Robbie Cairns had nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, so he had phoned her and she had come, almost running, to Rotherhithe.

He did not own the apartment that was on the second floor of a big new block, across the road from Christopher Close and up from the Jubilee Line station: he rented it for her. She was installed. He might come in the evening, or early in the morning, and he would telephone her if she was already at work. He expected her, if he rang, to pack in work, stop shopping or walk out of a hairdressing salon. She was nine years older than him. That didn’t bother Robbie, and he wasn’t the subject of gossip for having a girlfriend who was near middle-aged when he was not far out of his teens. There was no behind-the-hand sniggering about his relationship because he kept her secret from his family.

He could see her in the kitchenette – she would be preparing the salad to go with his favourite Stilton cheese omelette.

Barbie was not as pretty as his sister, Leanne: she had stouter ankles, a thicker waist, her chest drooped, and there were grey strands in her hair that the bottle had missed. She dressed severely: straight black or navy skirt and blouse. She wore no rings – she was seven years divorced and Robbie had never taken her to a jeweller’s and let her choose a ring that would have cost a few thousand. She had no bracelets, necklaces or gold pendants.

What, then?

He didn’t know. He could see her moving quietly from the sink to the work surface to the fridge. Her legs were bare and she wore no shoes. Her back was to him. He didn’t know why she had agreed to move into the flat or why she accepted the relationship. He was not fond, particularly, of Grandma Cairns, or of his other grandmother, Mum Davies. He had no affection for Dot Cairns, his mother, who had moved away from the Albion Estate and lived now in a bungalow in Kent, on the edge of a village between Meopham and Snodland. Barbie didn’t boss him. She didn’t challenge him.

He had never been asked what he brought to her life. They had been together – in this distanced way – for eight months. He had been up in the West End, in Oxford Street, in the department store, and he and Leanne had been together, joshing. She had wanted perfume and they had found Fragrances. He had sent Leanne back to Lingerie and said he would surprise her. Then, Robbie Cairns, hitman and pride of a notorious Rotherhithe family, had met a divorcee from the West Midlands, who knew nothing of south-east London, the heritage and history of its big names. She had sprayed her wrists with sample after sample, letting him smell the scents with a little mocking mischief in her eyes. He had bought a bottle of Yves St Laurent for Leanne, and had gone back the next day. He had waited on a bench until her shift had finished, then done it twice more the next week. She had agreed to go for a coffee with him. He could have been with the quality girls of other families in Walworth, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, Peckham or Southwark, the great lookers, and an alliance would have been forged, but he had chosen Barbie from Fragrances in a department store. Couldn’t explain it. His brother and sister, his parents and grandparents didn’t need to know.

Maybe, later in the afternoon, after they’d eaten what she was preparing for him, they’d go to bed. Maybe they wouldn’t. If they did, afterwards he’d shower and then he’d slip away. He never stayed the whole night. Did she know what he did for a living? He hadn’t told her and she had never asked. After a hit, he’d come to the flat and turn on the local London news to hear what the detectives were saying and see the people in white suits crawling over the street scene, but she never asked why he watched, so intense.

Robbie Cairns had a real affection for his Barbie, couldn’t match it for anyone else. She soothed him and kept him calm. She was the only person – man or woman – he needed… and he waited for the next call-out, for the next time his father was satisfied with a deal and gave it a green light…

*

A link in Lublin, south-eastern Poland, threw up the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile, one of thousands being manoeuvred, virtually untraceable, around northern Europe.

A call was made to the number. Gulls howled and fought as they dived for fish scraps. A German stood on a quayside close to the old fish market in Hamburg and said that if work was to be done in London a local man should do it.

Would a fee be paid? Most certainly. The German made a trifling remark about the purchaser and was told that it was not ‘he’ but ‘they’. A village had gone forward with the contract, would buy a man. A village? Where was it? He was told that his caller had no idea. The German knew a man in London. Would he be paid for his time? A guarantee.

The German called London. Said when he was arriving and into which terminal he would come.

The van was an oven. Inside, behind the empty driver’s cab, there was sufficient room, barely, for two men and a woman to be squashed together; at any time two could observe through the drilled holes and hold a camera to either. On the outside, the van carried the name and logo of a company that repaired gas pipes.

The Tango was washing a car. ‘Tango’ meant ‘target’ in SCD7 jargon, and grated with Mark Roscoe, but the culture of the unit was too considerable for one foot-slogger to fight. The man had a hose running – they could have done him for breaching a hosepipe ban but preferred him cuffed and facing charges relating to firearms and conspiracy to murder. His name had come up from the address they had raided and the arms cache they had found. The man and the woman with Roscoe were dedicated surveillance experts, bland. It meant little to them, was just another day. It was never ‘just another day’ for him. Didn’t have that sort of mind-set… but he could be patient. He was coiled but not overwound. Two streets back there was an entrance to a public park and a maintenance corner where the gardeners parked their pick-ups. Two police wagons were alongside them, with firearms and an entry team. The easiest way to cock up was to lose patience and go too early… That was irrelevant, though, while the Tango was washing his car and the water flowed in a river down his drive into the gutter.

This was bread-and-butter work – no life on the line. The real stress stretcher was when a stake-out was in place, watching a potential victim and not knowing when the hit would come or from which direction. That was nerve-jangling Flying Squad stuff. The cash-delivery van, or the wages van, about to do a drop had been the training ground for what he did now, when the employer might or might not have been taken inside the magic circle of confidentiality. The guys who did the delivery – on the minimum wage – were not. They didn’t know the probability existed of firearms in their faces, pickaxe handles across their arms and legs, the cavalry coming from nowhere and gunfire – good guys against bad. Could be up against a mean-minded psycho who would take a security man with him to the mortuary. Could be that a guard had a heart-attack in the crisis moment. It was what Mark Roscoe was trained for, where he’d been. He watched the man washing his car, and wondered how long it would be before the contact showed up to justify the resources committed.

The thing he couldn’t cope with happened.

The woman didn’t make eye-contact with him, just passed him the binoculars. There was no modesty and no apology. Some of the surveillance vans had privacy corners but most did not. She took the lid off, then was over the bucket, her baggy black trousers down. Her black knickers had ‘Serious Crime Directory’ printed on them in gold. She peed, hoisted herself up, dragged the underwear and trousers back to her waist and took back the binoculars. If Mark Roscoe had been in a van with Suzie he would have crossed his legs, let his bladder burst if there was no privacy screen.

As if it hadn’t happened, she said, a whisper, ‘Boss, the car’s clean – fit for the Queen to ride in – and he’s gone back inside… Oh, that’s good… brilliant.’

He crawled forward. She eased back, made room for him at the drilled spyhole.

‘What’s good?’

‘The cat crapped in the flowerbed, then scratched earth over what it had done. Look at the cat, boss.’

The cat strode, as if it owned the territory, across the washed car’s roof and left a footprint trail. It went back and forth and made a proper job of screwing up the shiny clean paintwork.

He sagged back. There was nowhere else he should be, and nothing better he should be doing. He had the patience and could wait… The certainty that it would come was lifeblood to Mark Roscoe.

The German was met and walked out of the arrivals hall. If he had not known the man he talked with – from a heroin-importation deal – he would not have entertained such a conversation.

‘A village wants a man killed – apparently the whole village. Maybe even the priest. Maybe even the schoolmistress. They will pay, and it is in London. I am being paid for running errands, and you will be paid.’

‘Leave it with me.’

An hour after he had landed, the German was in the air, heading back to Hamburg.

The receptionist gave the document-size envelope to Penny Laing. She looked at it, front and back. Her own name was written over a white sticker, which covered an original address, and the envelope was franked – it had been through the postal system. Nothing on the reverse side. ‘Who brought it?’

‘Didn’t leave a name, just handed it over and asked that you be told to come down for it. A woman. Could have done with a bath.’

In theory, if the state of alert was ratcheted above Amber and heading for Red, she could have demanded that Security come out of their cubbyhole behind Reception to run the package through the scanner. Might call in the Bomb Squad. Might wake the sniffer dog and deploy it. Might evacuate half the building. She inserted the nail of her forefinger, right hand, under the sticker, scratched it clear and saw that it had previously been sent to Ms Megs Behan, Planet Protection. She remembered a dreary street and a coffee shop and wondered who was doing the buying right now. She loosed the Sellotape fastening the envelope. Paper cascaded out – how in God’s name had so much been inserted into one tired envelope and not split it? It pulled her up, as if there was a choke chain round her neck and the leash had been tugged sharply. At Planet Protection they would have a stationery budget that verged on parsimony, and little or nothing to sustain them beyond their commitment to the cause… Right. End of self-inflicted lecture.

She thanked the receptionist.

Wondered which was cheaper – whether Megs Behan had used a bus or the tube to get from that dreary street north of the City to sun-soaked Whitehall at the centre of power, influence, talent and self-serving shit. She was having a bad, confusing day, and what she had seen of the papers sent to her told her that the rest might get a little worse and a little more confusing.

Her line manager had said: Remember the downturn, the crisis, the crunch. She walked up the wide staircase from the lobby, made a grand exit on a stage that had seen the splendour of imperial power. She went past offices where young men and women, shirtsleeves and lightweight blouses, struggled to confront the economic darkness. She thought a low point was reached when a scruffy envelope contained more evidential material than she could hope for from her own official sources. She flicked pages as she went, lips pursed in concentration and annoyance.

And he had said: Also remember we’re somewhat of a luxury. She was spoken of as state-of-the-art material, had done the minimum of uniform drudgery, had been noted, fast-tracked and recruited into the Investigation Division. Top stuff, real work. She had jumped because it gave her the chance to run, bloody fast and bloody far, from the ‘relationship’ with the married man who ran a department of the security-vetting programme. It had been a waste of time for her but had enhanced the bastard’s ego. Couldn’t quite believe she’d allowed it. She’d been taken on by the codename Golf team. Cocaine. Not grammes or kilos, but tonnes shipped in from Venezuela. The cargoes were usually transferred via the Atlantic coast of Spain so she had trips down there, to Huelva, Cadiz and Gibraltar. She had done time with the Irish, too, because the other main drop-off point was in the ocean, south of County Cork. She had felt wanted then, and important, but the transfer to Alpha had been sold as a step into an elite world. On Gibraltar she had met and fallen, pretty fast and pretty far, for a navy lieutenant who served on a frigate. It had been good, the best.

And through the sweet smile Dermot had said: We’re a natural target for budget-slicing. There were photographs of Harvey Gillot. There were travel itineraries of Harvey Gillot. There were biographical details of Harvey Gillot. She imagined sad, unwashed Megs Behan beavering all the hours the good Lord gave, feeling privileged to dish the dirt on the devil figure, Harvey Gillot. There were lists of private-charter cargo airlines flying into and out of Ostend airport, who owned and administered them, when Harvey Gillot had been there and how long he had spent with the owner of an ageing Boeing 707, a veteran DC8, a TriStar, an Ilyushin or an Antonov that might just limp into a remote, unlit corner of the Middle East and drop on to a rolled-sand runway. It was laid out before her, most of it typed but some in the copperplate writing that had been taught in convent schools. She wandered past her line manager, who was chewing gum and didn’t notice her, and sat at her desk.

What was in front of her seemed almost to bring the bloody man alive. She had learned the theory of arms brokerage, legal and illegal, from that office with a view over the inner courtyard of the Treasury building. The practical classroom had been her three-month attachment to the embassy in the DRC. Stinking heat and stinking smells. Life expectancy was forty-three years. One in five kids did not reach a fifth birthday. More than a million people were displaced, driven from their homes by the internal warfare that had claimed the lives of four million. Big HIV-Aids, big poverty, big despair, big business – the arms trade into DRC. Landing strips that a clapped-out bulldozer had flattened were – give or take a hundred metres – long enough for one of those old aircraft based at Ostend to put down on. There would be, spilling off the tailgate, boxes of grenades, crates of ammunition, bundles of AKs and machine-guns.

She had worked from the UN offices in the capital – could have gone to bed with the Dutch administrator of UNHCR operations when they had both drunk a bit, were almost maudlin and playing lonely, but she’d been dead on her feet from the heat, had pleaded tiredness and wasn’t that bothered to have missed out. She had learned in those three months in the embassy, the UN compound and from trips up-country, what the arms trade did, and she had seen close-up the casualties and the kids who paraded the Kalashnikovs that the planes brought in. There was nothing stereotypically feminine or soft about Penny Laing but she knew about the arms trade and thought it a disgrace that Britons were a part of it. She thought it an almost bigger disgrace that the Alpha team were reliant to some degree on hand-to-mouth charity and the diligence of Megs Behan. She would work late that night.

The big buzz, as she knew it – better than sex, she promised herself – was the dawn hit: the crashing in of an expensive front door, the spread of shock on the faces of a man’s family as a team moved in, the click of handcuffs, the howl of children and the blathering of a wife: There must be some mistake… Of course, it never was a mistake. She stared down at the photograph – relaxed, calm, thinking himself in control – of Harvey Gillot. He walked past a crash barrier, a crowd baying at him and trying to push placards into his face, and she saw Megs Behan, monochrome, straining against the barrier, her face contorted, but he did not seem to notice her. It would be good to hit him at dawn on a winter morning.

‘Lenny, I don’t do bullshit talk. What I’m telling you is that the kid’s a good ’un.’

Granddad Cairns wheezed, hacked a cough, then lit another cigarette. He had a bad shake in his hands that day, which was partly from arthritis. It had been worse since his five years at HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight where the damp sea fogs were a killer. He was – no lie – pretty pleased to have a man as prominent as Lenny Grewcock, king of south of the river, come to visit him.

The big man said, ‘A German comes to see me, flies in and asks who I’d speak up for. He’s important to me and we do good business. He’s had a call from a friend. There are links with serious players. People all over Europe have been talking through this one, and pushing it on for a bit more expertise. What’s said, for a hit here you’ll need a local boy…’

‘Too right, Lenny, spot on.’

‘… and I put your kid in the frame.’

‘Good of you, Lenny.’

‘What I’m saying is that I’ve backed your boy, and I’d not want embarrassment.’

‘You won’t get it, Lenny, not from our kid.’

‘Subject to money. Don’t know yet what’s on offer. You don’t need to know much, except that it’s a funny old business. He’s a Brit, and the contract is being taken out by a village – yes, you heard me – on the other side of Europe. The money won’t be huge because they’re peasants, but it would be good for a friendship of mine with a German I like to do business with.’

‘I’ll talk it through with Jerry.’

‘Do that. I’ll be back to you.’

Grandma Cairns had stayed in the kitchen, best place. Lenny Grewcock saw himself out and his minder was waiting on the walkway outside the front door. He could see from the window that Grewcock was hurrying and his minder scrambled to keep up with him. Granddad Cairns reckoned that Grewcock would have regarded this flat as shit: Lenny Grewcock lived in a mansion, Tudor style, completed four years back, in Kent. Granddad Cairns couldn’t abide the thought of leaving Rotherhithe… So, the kid had a future, a bright one if Lenny Grewcock had come looking for him with work. A ‘funny old business’, a village

… but no chance his kid, a good ’un, would cause embarrassment.

The Internet threw up little on Harvey Gillot, arms dealer. Nothing on a company registered to his name – although an orthopaedic surgeon of that name practised in Las Vegas. No website on what Gillot had to sell. An Australian rugby league forward had that name and his site carried fulsome media praise; he could be hired throughout Queensland for after-dinner speaking. But… anonymity could not be guaranteed… a trail existed, around his well-protected person. He could be found by a diligent searcher.

The non-governmental organisation known as Planet Protection, funded by a Swiss billionaire and public donation, supposedly independent of all state agencies, had made a list of the ten primary weapons brokers in the United Kingdom. It was included in a long-released folder, and with it a quote from Megs Behan, researcher and overseas co-ordinator: ‘These men are evil and should be hounded out of existence. They shame us.’ A telephone number for those requiring additional information was provided.

It was necessary, in Josip’s view, to keep all possible lines of communication open: a man never knew where to seek the best advantage.

He sat beside the river where the bank was protected by a steeply sloping stone wall. Above him a track ran alongside the Danube, then a cliff face of sandstone and the symbol of the town: the Vukovar water tower. The sun was sinking. The water glistened and made soft pools of gold that rippled, and every item of the remaining brickwork on the bowl of the tower was caught and highlighted. The river did not excite Josip. It had changed little in the last half-millennium – different boats and new stonework on the banks but the great meandering flow was the same. It might have been over many more than five centuries that nothing had changed: it might have remained the same since a tribe had settled a few kilometres to the west, at Vu edol, around six thousand years ago. Sometimes when he came to Vukovar he looked at the tower and witnessed again the devastation caused by tank and artillery shells. He saw the great gaps in the brick facing, and felt ashamed that he had fled the fighting with his family to the safety of the capital. But as evening approached and the light faded, he saw neither the glory of the river nor the pride of the water tower.

He waited.

The man would come as the shadows grew. He could justify what he prepared to do. He had, now, few loyalties. Below him a parapet ledge was half a metre above the water-line. Anglers were there, spaced out, giving each other at least fifty metres of bank. They would be hoping for catfish or perch, carp or pike, and at dusk the man would come on a scooter, choose a place close to where Josip sat and set up his tackle. Josip owed no allegiance, neither to a community nor an individual. When they could not be recognised or observed, the man would join him.

That morning, he had asked Mladen to gather together the principals of the village, then had told them what had been fed back to him. They had heard him out in silence. Then, there had been a frantic round of applause. They had pumped his hand and slapped his shoulders, and the women had kissed his cheek. And none would have believed that Josip had no loyalties and owed no allegiance.

After his release from gaol – after hardened criminals had hugged him, thanked him, wished him well and alliances had been confirmed – Josip had walked to the bus station and taken a slow stopping ride to Vinkovci. Then he had trekked for three hours until he had reached the village. His home was among the better preserved. It had a roof, it had some of the furniture that he and his wife had abandoned, and the dog was there, old and arthritic but well fed – cared for first by Serbs, then by Croat neighbours. He had slept there that night on the bare mattress. The dog had warmed to him, seeming to forget or forgive its abandonment of seven years, and had slept beside him.

In the morning Josip had walked the length of the village, seen the wreckage of the battle, and had found Mladen. He had recognised a new authority, and had pledged that whatever skills he had were now at the village’s service. He wrote scores, literally, of letters to the telephone, electricity and water companies, requiring immediate reconnections. He bombarded the Zagreb and Osijek authorities with ferocious demands for every kuna of resettlement funding available. He became expert in extracting the most generous pension terms for those men who could justify entitlement as veterans, and understood the small print on the disability claim forms.

Many in the village had despised him initially but had reluctantly changed their minds. Man for man, woman for woman, child for child, the village did better than its neighbours in Bogdanovci and Marinci, better even than the martyr city of Vukovar. Josip was a man of importance in the village, but he had learned in his cell block that he should not push himself forward. He had become an almost indispensable part of the village. He lived alone now, had not replaced the dog after its death, and he had never brought the mistress he kept in Vinkovci to the village. He lived off a percentage of the pensions and grants he had negotiated.

If he had described himself, and not sold himself short, Josip would have said he was good-looking. He had a mane of thick grey hair that he wore long, a nose that seemed hawkish and good skin. He did not have the paunch of many in the village. He was not, as many were, a manic depressive, addicted to temperament-calming drugs or an alcoholic. He lived in the village because he could think of no better place where he – and his past – would be accepted.

And he nurtured secrets. His grandfather had been a policeman in Split in the Ustase days of the Second World War and had died hanging upside-down from a lamppost, his throat slit by partisans. His great-uncle had been a guard at the Jasenovac concentration and extermination camp and had fled via Trieste. He was thought to have gone to Paraguay but had never been heard of since.

The angler came.

His car had Osijek plates, but he would change them once a month, and his old Opel saloon every third month. The angler was an officer in the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order. With its recent past, and the ever-present threat of communal violence in Vukovar – Serb on Croat, Croat on Serb – the Sluzba Za Zastitu Ustavnog Poretka retained an officer dedicated to clandestine surveillance of the community on the bend of the Danube. Josip had been recruited while he was still in gaol.

There had been an Englishman in the gaol, sentenced for trafficking class-A drugs. He had shown Josip how to play two sides – had spoken of ‘hunting with the hare and the hounds’. In the name of Christ, the government had betrayed the town and the villages. He did not feel he did wrong and it was important, always, to have a protecting friend.

Josip said softly to the officer of the SZUP – and did not see himself as Judas: ‘His name was Harvey Gillot. I do not have detailed knowledge. In payment of the debt, a contract has been taken and…’

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