Petar drove his Massey Ferguson. The tractor was pulling a trailer that might have been loaded with manure, corn or logs. The evening before, he had been out in his yard, using a power hose on the wheels, chassis and cab of the tractor, then the trailer. Both shone in the morning light. The trailer bore four coffins, each with the country’s flag spread over it.
The four hearses had come from the hospital in Vukovar and had stopped at the village’s outskirts where, nineteen years before, there had been an anti-tank ditch, a roadblock, a felled oak and trenches for machine-guns. Tomislav would have been there with the Malyutka missiles, and would have had a good field of fire. From the hearses, the coffins had been lifted on to the trailer and Petar had pulled them to the part-rebuilt church that was on the village’s crossroads. A service had been held there, taken by a bishop who had travelled from Osijek and assured the congregation that these men were never to be forgotten as guardians of freedom. Hymns had been sung and prayers said; politicians from the region and from Vukovar had attended.
Tomislav thought the singing had been subdued, that there had been little celebration of the lives lost. The local priest, who came every third week and whom they shared with other villages, walked briskly in front of the tractor. Tomislav was behind the trailer, in the front rank, a small terrier skipping beside him, held close on a length of baling twine. Alongside him were Petar’s wife, Andrija and the Widow. It was unusual for women to walk immediately behind the coffin of a loved one, but she had demanded it. There were no flowers on the trailer, not even a simple posy.
He had wondered if his wife would come, if any of the other three children – now adults – that she had taken with her would want to be there. He had had no contact with any of them since they had left. His eldest boy had stood beside him as they walked away, a broad arm around his shoulders. Tomislav walked with a firm stride behind the coffin that carried the fleshless bones of his son. He was pleased his wife had not come.
During the siege, he would have been regarded as the weapons expert. He was given control of the RPG-7 grenades – only eleven of them – that could be used at close range against armour. He would have had charge of the Malyutka missiles if they had been brought to the village. He had been a career soldier in the Yugoslav National Army, expert in warfare against tank and personnel-carrier attack, with the rank of senior sergeant, stariji vodnik. He had married a Serb girl, and when the war had started the years of marriage had meant nothing. He would have been able to use the Malyutka, the armour would have been kept back, the Cornfield Road would have stayed open and…
The wheels of Petar’s trailer were clean but not oiled and they screeched. It was Tomislav who had persuaded the schoolteacher that the Malyutka would give the village and its untrained volunteers an edge in combat. Often, after the dog had arrived at his home, a tiny puppy licking his hand, he had told it why he had wanted the Malyutka and what he could have achieved with it. The dog had been told of the weight of the warhead, the range it could fly, how the line-of-sight command cable unravelled from the spool as it carried the handler’s signals, how far from the handler the ‘dead zone’ stretched, and the killing accuracy of manual command to line-of-sight control.
At the pace the tractor went it would take them twenty minutes to get from the church to the new cemetery that was just short of where farmland fell to the river; the edge of the water-meadow was marked with signs, the red triangle and skull-and-crossbones symbol. He knew what had been done to his boy and Petar’s, to Andrija’s cousin and the teacher. All of those who mourned had been told. It was right that his wife and younger children had not come. The Serbs around the village in those ten weeks – the irregulars of Arkan’s scum – had known that the defence had been organised by a former senior sergeant in the regular army: Tomislav. Maybe his wife had told them – told her own – when she had reached their lines. And he was taunted at night with megaphones. Shouts boomed over the village that Tomislav’s wife opened her legs to a warrant officer, a zastavnik, each night and a queue was waiting to service her. When the warrant officers had tired of her, the sergeants would take their place, then the corporals. They named one, a desetar, and yelled into the night that she would enjoy it when his turn came. Tomislav heard it, as did his eldest son. He could remember the night his son had smeared his face with mud for camouflage, had hugged him and disappeared into the night, dragging the handcart. He remembered the long wait and the reverberations of the explosions along the track through the corn as dawn was coming. He and others had been to the place the next evening, had found the crushed stems where many men had been, the cartridge cases and cigarette ends, the blood that the rain had not obliterated, but not the bodies.
They came towards the cemetery.
The whole village, every man, woman and child, walked with him – except Petar, who drove the tractor. Petar’s wife had come to Tomislav’s home last night, rooted in a drawer and found a shirt. She had brought it back an hour later, ironed and smart. He had been, as a senior sergeant, the best turned out in the regiment, and after he had left the military, to work as a car mechanic, he had always worn clean overalls. He had no best trousers now, no best jacket, no shoes that were not scuffed, and he had not shaved for three days. Little had remained for him to aim towards and hope for – but now he had a target for his hatred.
Tomislav thought the killing of Harvey Gillot could go a small way towards lessening the pain that racked his mind. He had told his dog so. He yearned for news of a death.
The tractor stopped beyond the gate, and men came forward to lift down the coffins. At the far end of the cemetery there were four heaps of fresh-turned earth. Tears ran down Tomislav’s face.
Steyn said, ‘The one at the front is interesting.’
‘Which?’ Anders queried.
‘The man with the dog.’
They stood inside the cemetery wall, backs against the brickwork, in clean shirts with ties, but no jackets. The sun seared them.
‘He’s the most interesting, and his son was cadaver number three – a tall boy.’
The four coffins, now, were carried on shoulders. They looked, to Daniel Steyn, to be light loads. Some of the pallbearers used hospital walking-sticks. He knew of these men, survivors of the siege, mostly from word of mouth. The one he pointed out, Tomislav, carried the third coffin in the line on his left shoulder and steadied it with his right hand; in his left he held the dog’s string leash.
‘What’s interesting?’
‘He’s one of those patients that eminent men would fight over. They’d all want him in a consulting room on a couch… It’s about what war does. It was eighty days of his life and now he’s in his sixties, and everything about him today is shaped by those eleven weeks. He lost his wife and young children. He lost his eldest child too. Now he has nothing. First the cameras leave, and the arc-lights, then the politicians with the silver bands, then the money for restitution. This one, Tomislav, should have been better equipped than most to handle it. Not so.’
‘Men of great heroism – and women – held the lines here, in the other villages and the town. Ordinary people, blessed with courage, determination.’
Steyn thought it appropriate that the Church, political and civic leaders had left, with a senior policeman from Vukovar and an army officer. They would not have been wanted in the cemetery. The local priest was a good source of information – anecdote or intelligence – over a small glass of Eagle Rare from the Buffalo Trace distillery in Kentucky, a hell of a drink and about the only luxury in Daniel Steyn’s life, shipped in by mail order. His friend, Anders, still had his cigar lit but cupped in his hand. The first of the coffins went down and dirt was thrown.
‘But the reward for the heroism and courage is the most acute form of clinical depression. Tomislav lives like a hermit – there’s no aftercare here. No acknowledgement of the symptoms. Suicide is not uncommon. They’re addicted to prescription benzodiazepines and alcohol abuse is so widespread as to be commonplace. Rakija is the home-brewed hooch. Putting it crudely, they need real help but it’s not available because no one gives a flying fuck about them.’
‘You’re not, Daniel, a sack of laughs.’
The second coffin was lowered on ropes into its pit. Sweat ran in rivulets down Steyn’s back. All his clothes hung loose because he was losing weight and hadn’t the money to buy smaller sizes that would fit him better. He didn’t have new clothes because the European charity that supported his work had cut back on its commitment to the town and villages. He had managed to rent a room in his semi-detached house to a confectionary salesman, and scraped by. He ate little and the Eagle Rare was meanly poured for himself and special guests, although dog meal was plentiful for the undisciplined Irish setter he kept and loved. He shrugged. ‘It’s a backwater of Europe. It had a little moment in the spotlamp that didn’t last.’
‘What can a guy in his position – hit that hard – hope for? Heh, has to be some degree of hope. You think you can make a difference. Me, I’m arrogant enough to know I deliver something of value. When I’m working in mud, with the stench of decomposition and barbarity around me, I can take comfort from the importance of what I do. What does he have?’
‘Worse now.’ Steyn saw the third coffin go down and the ropes come back up, flapping. The priest’s voice carried softly. Tomislav, big, strong and quivering with weakness, had crouched beside the pit, then stood up, clutching a handful of soil. He rocked, opened his hand and allowed it to cascade down.
‘How come?’
‘His purpose in life was to see the minefield cleared and have the body recovered.’
‘Some don’t want that. Some want to continue in a sort of vague hope. They don’t want the digging done.’ Anders grimaced.
‘Not here.’ Steyn shook his head hard. ‘They knew the area where the bodies were. Now they have them. The bodies go into the ground, a stone is put up and the grave becomes a challenge: what can they focus on now? I’ll tell you. Who is responsible? Who is to blame? Who can be punished? Christ, you know your husband or your cousin or your son – your son – was alive when he was castrated and was still alive when his mouth was prised open and his organs were shoved in.’
It was the Widow’s moment. Her lips moved but Steyn couldn’t hear what she said. Did she make a promise? He watched Tomislav, half a pace behind her. If he had had that man on the couch for a half-dozen sessions, opening his heart and baring his soul, he believed he would have been able to write a definitive paper on the long-term casualties of combat.
‘I repeat, Daniel, how is it worse?’
‘There cannot be peace until there is punishment of the individual responsible.’
‘Now I hear you.’
‘You played your part, Bill.’
‘I did.’ Anders was reflective.
‘You gave a name.’
‘Seemed the right thing to do.’
‘Maybe and maybe not.’ Steyn chuckled. They turned away – they wanted to be out of the cemetery before the villagers came through the gates. He said, flat, ‘But I doubt you’ll get the chance to ask him if it was right or wrong. Ask Harvey Gillot.’
He said the name often. He said it aloud, Harvey Gillot, whispered it or mouthed it silently. Once he shouted it, and the name reverberated around his home, part of which Tomislav had turned into a shrine in memory of his boy, the others who had died in the siege and the men who had not survived the camps after capture. He kept the second bedroom, the hallway and the living room pristine and a candle always burned in the hallway. Pride of place went to his son, who had been allocated half of the living room. Photographs of him were there, portrait and childhood snaps, his sports teams; one showed him in khaki camouflage fatigues, with a cigarette lolling from his lower lip, an AK in one hand and his other arm draped around Petar’s son, his friend. When Tomislav had come back after the years in the refugee camp he had retrieved them from the biscuit tin he had buried in the garden during the last hours before the escape into the corn. There were many more photographs in the bedroom and the hall, with the remnants of the flag that had flown over the command bunker. It was ripped and scorched but Mladen had carried it in the final breakout. The sniper rifle that Andrija had used, the Dragunov, until a newer version had been recovered from a Cetnik’s corpse, was suspended from nails on a wall. Many weapons had been buried in the last hours and they had been retrieved now – rifles, a heavy machine-gun, pistols, deactivated hand grenades. All had been polished and the rust scoured off them. On the wall in the hallway he had the maps on which first Zoran and then Mladen had planned the village’s defence; there were charts of the Cornfield Road where it crossed the defence lines, and went south-west to Vinkovci and northeast to Vukovar. Tomislav’s map, with his proposals for where the Malyutka missiles could be fired from, was in the living room, beside the window, where he could see it from his chair. When he had shouted that name his eyes had been fixed on that chart.
A call was made by an SZUP official from a government building near to the centre of Zagreb. It was received by the station head in a back room at the British embassy in the new city to the south of the railway station. A meeting was arranged.
The official walked briskly from the building and went on past empty cafes and deserted boutiques. They were challenging times for his country, independent for less than two decades, in hock, with unemployment rising and organised crime the only flourishing industry. Friends were needed. Knowledge – intelligence – was the oil for friendships in his trade. The days when Croatian officials and British officers sparred for territory – protecting suspected war criminals and hunting alleged barbarians – were over. Clandestine co-operation was the new order of the day.
They met in a coffee shop beside the embassy. It was only vague information, the official stressed, unconfirmed, not corroborated, chaff in the air… It was the currency in which the agencies dealt. Because of events that had taken place nineteen years previously, a criminal contract had been taken out on the life of a British citizen. Of course, intelligence was an inexact science, but the name of the target was Harvey Gillot.
The Briton wrote briefly in his notepad, pocketed it, thanked the official, was thanked in turn for buying the coffee, and they parted.
‘What’s the money going to be?’
‘Can’t answer that, lad.’
‘I’m saying, Pop, that our kid doesn’t step out through his front door unless the money’s right and half up-front.’
They sat in the prison’s temporary visiting room – refurbishment had closed the hall that was normally used. The ‘kid’ was Robbie Cairns, ‘lad’ was his father, Jerry, and ‘Pop’ his grandfather. Every Monday, the elder Cairns of the dynasty travelled from Rotherhithe in south-east London by tube and bus to visit his son. Both had a history of success and failure as armed robbers; both were familiar with the visiting suites and conditions inside them; both were aware conversations were recorded on audio bugs. They sat in the centre of the area, with families all around them, encouraging the brats to bawl and yell as they talked quietly.
‘We consider very carefully any offer that comes through because of who pushed it our way.’
Neither father nor son had delusions of importance. The affluence they craved had eluded them – never as much in a wages van or a safe as they’d been told there would be. And there had been the cock-ups, fiascos, like when the getaway wheels’ engine had stalled on the Strand, which was Jerry’s closest shave with the ‘big one’, and his father being grassed up, then intercepted on the way to the snatch. Tales of ill luck littered their stories. Neither had ever been major league, but Lenny Grewcock was: he had a villa in Spain, a block of time shares outside Cannes, a casino in Bratislava and three restaurants on the Thames, the Bermondsey stretch. ‘Yes, Pop, we don’t piss him about.’
The surprise to father and son was that the ‘kid’ – little Robbie, no weight, no muscle, only those horrible piercing eyes – had been headhunted by a man with the prestige of Lenny Grewcock.
‘I tell you this, lad, for nothing. There was never anyone in our family before like Robbie.’
‘Fuck knows where he came from ’cause he scares me. Vern doesn’t, nor Leanne, and I’d swear on any Bible that Dot never touched another bloke, but fuck knows where the kid comes from.’
‘I’ll jack the money, squeeze what I can – but it’ll be Lenny Grewcock I’m squeezing. With me? The kid’ll do it well, and it’ll place us handily, having Lenny Grewcock a satisfied punter.’
‘Nice one, Pop.’
They talked some more. Jerry Cairns had trouble getting his head round the news that a village was buying the services of his son. What did he know about Croatia? Not a lot. Asked who the target was. His father tapped his nose – not the sort of information to be murmured over the table of the visitor’s room. ‘It’ll be a nice earner, lad.’
‘Because our kid’ll do a good clean job – always does.’
They had a little cuddle, and a father left his son behind the walls of HMP Wandsworth. He was glad to be shot of the place. He’d been in there, doing four and a half years for a blag – Fireworks Day, November 1959 – when they’d topped a German for shooting a police sergeant. He’d heard the sounds of the great gaol as it went about the business of putting a bloke to death. Mostly had heard the silence. Never had liked HMP Wandsworth from that day.
Anyway… He headed for the bus stop – the rheumatism was a bastard – and thought it pretty good that his grandson was in such demand. He had, almost, a smile on his leathered face. Didn’t concern him who the target was, what the target had done, why the target was marked. He had, of course, known plenty of Maltese and Cypriots, and more recently a few Albanians – outside gaol and in – who pimped girls. Some ran a string, and others lived off one hard worker. Pimp: not a nice word… Probably what he was. Granddad Cairns and Jerry Cairns: two pimps, both living reasonably satisfactorily off the kid’s earnings.
‘What relationship should an officer have with his assets?’
Veins ran in scarlet cobwebs on Benjie Arbuthnot’s cheeks, and above his shaggy eyebrows there was a mop of straggling white hair. He wore a suit but it had not recently been pressed and his shirt looked to have been in a drawer for six months. He did not care about appearances. He had addressed a group of around twenty recently recruited entrants to the Secret Intelligence Service at the Vauxhall Bridge Cross behemoth. It had become a habit of the last two director generals to invite him back once a year and let him loose on the incomers: something about ‘They should know that beyond their comfort zones there’s a real world, Benjie, which will be good for a pampered generation that doesn’t know about rough edges. They’re pretty squeamish these days.’ He had told anecdotes, reported scrapes behind the Wall in Berlin, talked about time up in the dusty Radfan wilderness north of the Aden Protectorate, about life in south Armagh in the early days when the Service had owned intelligence primacy in the province. The young people embarking on careers had looked at him with astonishment, as if he were an extinct creature dumped on them from a mythical ark – or broken free from a showcase in the Natural History Museum – but he had earned their respect. He would take, now, a few questions. It was a young woman who’d raised her arm.
‘Certainly not a relationship that implies affection. You’ll live sometimes cheek by jowl with the asset – agent, source, or “jo” – and he or she will moan and complain and you’ll have to protect that fragile petal, morale. You may give an impression of genuine concern for their welfare, and you’ll make promises, but it will never be a relationship of equals. You use him or her. You do not blanch from exploiting whatever the asset brings to the table. And when the usefulness is finished you walk away. They disappear from your life. You may have coerced them into recruitment, but that is their problem and their difficulty, for them to sort out. We’re not a marriage-guidance council or a job centre for the unemployed and unemployable. Neither do we provide protection for an endangered species… but we might stretch to advice on personal security and push the asset in the right direction for that. God help him or her.’
As he spoke, Benjie thought of the men and women who had jumped ever higher over the hurdles he had set, and how he was always challenging them for better results – Arabs, Afghans, central Europeans on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He even thought of young Harvey Gillot, wet behind the ears, on the quayside at Rijeka. Looking at the faces in front of him, their owners hanging on his words and showing shock at the crude certainties of his message, he could be content that none believed he had put on a show to hold their attention. A man had his hand up, wore a corduroy jacket, no tie. He probably had a fine degree from a good university. Benjie had no degree but had been awarded a commission in a well-fancied cavalry unit before switching to the Service. He pointed to the man.
‘How do you work closely with an asset for whom you have little personal respect?’
‘Easily. It’s a job, not a popularity contest. We don’t only use the good eggs. It’s what they can achieve on our behalf, within the parameters of our interests, that matters to us. I’m not about to dub as a hero a junior cipher clerk in the KGB/FSB who volunteers to help us, a major in the Iranian Air Force or a Chinese foreign-ministry stenographer. We pay a good rate – not as much as the Americans but more than the Russians – we do the flattery well and massage an overworked ego. We always tell the asset we’ll help him get clear as soon as it gets hairy on the inside, but we’re never in a hurry to fulfil that guarantee. Always one more month, one more drop, one more
… Gentlemen, ladies, I’m hoping you didn’t join the Service to be social workers with responsibilities to assets. One more.’
‘No responsibilities?’ the young man persisted.
‘None.’
From a girl in a full burqa, spoken with spirit: ‘Who decides where the national interest and the asset’s interest conflict?’
‘I do, colleagues do, and very soon you do… Look, there are always going to be little people in the way and unless they get booted sharply they may trip you up. I summarise. The asset has his moment. The moment is exploited. The asset is forgotten. It’s a hard world out there, believe it. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep over the future prospects or survival of an asset. Thank you.’
He went to the table and drank from his glass, and the director who oversaw recruitment thanked him, but there was no applause. He thought he had introduced them to a career of moral uncertainties – as there had been in so many places, in Rijeka, and with so many assets. Funny how little Harvey Gillot was lodged in his mind, grit in a boot.
So many phone calls came to the small, crowded desk of Megs Behan. It was a big day for her: she was finishing off the press release, two months in preparation, had been up half the night and ‘Yes?’ She had snatched up the phone.
‘Is that Miss Behan?’
‘It is – yes.’
‘Hello, thanks for your time, Miss Behan. I much admire the work you do. First class. I saw on the net your top-ten piece, in which Harvey Gillot was named. I’m a freelancer and I want to do a piece, hope to challenge that man. Can you help me?’
‘I’ll try – I’m really pushed right now.’
‘Have you an address for him to get me started? Then I’ll be out of your hair.’
‘Can do.’ She flicked keys, slipped in an extra password to bypass security blocks, scrolled, then let the cursor rest. ‘It’s Lulworth View, Easton. That’s on Portland but-’
‘Thanks.’
The line was cut. What had Megs Behan forgotten to ask the caller? ‘But who am I speaking to, please?’ She gulped down a lungful of air. The woman had claimed to be a freelance hack, had spoken with a London accent. Wait, wait. It had been the address of Harvey Gillot: arms dealer, purveyor of death, misery-maker. Big deal? Hardly… Was she going to feel guilty for infringing Harvey Gillot’s privacy, or was she going to crack on with the last tidy-up of the press release?
She had it up on her screen. There was a shout from behind her. ‘Megs, I’m not a nagger, promise. When?’
‘Ten minutes, if you get off my back.’
And he wouldn’t have minded, Megs reckoned, if she’d been on her back and him on her… Oh, shit. She swivelled in her chair, giggled, and beaded on her project manager. So, he had the lecher look, so… She had rolled up her T-shirt at the waist and dragged it down at the throat because Planet Protection didn’t do air-conditioning and most of the windows were sealed – years of paint, rust and pigeon shit on the outside. Not a bad-looking bloke, but at least eight years younger than her and he’d been all clumsy and frantic. Didn’t matter. She’d heard them talking about her once, a guy and two of the girls. She hadn’t had her cubicle light on and she was reading, quiet, not keyboard bashing. All hearsay, of course, because she hadn’t bedded the guy, who was straight out of college and had a good brain to go with an acne problem. One of the girls had been with a man who had now left, so he must have been the top source. Well, Megs had shagged that man, and he must have done some pillow talk. The word from the other side of the partition was… the bullet points needed a run-over.
• The global arms trade is out of control and brings in more than thirty billion American dollars a year for manufacturers of weapons and munitions.
She looked good, but underneath the god-awful clothes she wore, she was sensational. Brilliant body, hell of a waist.
• Nine million more small arms are produced every year and are swallowed by an already satiated market. Five hundred thousand people are killed each year by small arms throughout the world.
She was great in bed – if she could be bothered – and made an art form of it.
• In excess of sixteen billion bullets come off factory production lines every twelve months: two are available for every man, woman and child on the planet.
Apparently the down-side of relationships with her was the post-coital behaviour. Stop grunting, sit up, have a laugh, reach out. Find the cigarette paper and the tobacco pouch, roll one, light it, puff without sharing, then start spouting, as if everybody was as fanatical as she was about the crime that was the arms trade.
• Half a million people, the huge majority of them civilians, are killed each year by conventional weapons, which is equal to one person dying of gunshot injuries every minute of the day and night.
Short, sweet – and not forgotten: the conclusion played in her ears.
• The United Kingdom, our country, our government to whom we pay our taxes, is the fourth largest exporter of weapons in the world.
She didn’t have a guy at the moment, didn’t have time for one, and wasn’t fussed.
Beyond the bullet points there were paragraphs of explanation, additional statistics and a little rhetoric. The scratch in her mind – the phone call, giving an address, not getting a name – slipped to a back place in her priority queue. She wondered if she should have done a section on child soldiers and scanned in a photograph of some little Rwandan mite holding an AK that was nearly as big as himself. Yes. Megs held up the whole process, and the bullet line was:
• Today there are three hundred thousand child soldiers involved in conflicts and all are armed by the international dealers in death, and they kill and are killed.
She thought it read pretty well, and would have loved to slip on to the balcony above the fire escape for a quick roll and a smoke.
She hit the buttons, sent it to him.
It came into the building when the day was winding down and landed on a chief inspector’s desk. Not much there, but enough for him to curse the timing, get off his chair and shout at his door for Mark Roscoe. He liked the young sergeant, although he suffered from problems of attitude and might not be a ninety-minute team player. He called him in because he had no option. Roscoe was the only one with the clout, experience and reputation to carry this – the others were out, had shipped off home or gone down the pub.
Roscoe peered over his shoulder as he tapped it up for him to look at.
‘Wouldn’t call them chatty, would you, Guv’nor?’
‘Spooks talking to lesser creatures – us. We’re honoured they even know of our existence,’ he said drily.
It had been passed from Vauxhall Bridge Cross to what they knew as Box 500, the Security Service, and from their headquarters overlooking the river it had come to this outpost of SCD7. Little explanation covered it. We understand you deal in such matters. Our sister agency informs us that sources known to them, and regarded as generally reliable, report a plot, believed still in the planning stages, for the killing of a British national, HERBERT DAVID GILLOT (now calling himself Harvey David Gillot), of Lulworth View, Easton, Isle of Portland. A contract has been taken out, we understand, for the assassination by a community in Croatia. Gillot’s occupation is self-employed dealer, broker in arms. No further details are available to us.
‘Doesn’t exactly weigh us down with intelligence,’ Roscoe murmured.
‘Or with what authority the intelligence travels. But it’s logged, timed and dated, and if friend Gillot ends up in a box, my balls will probably be in it with him. Not to be ignored.’
‘No.’
‘What do you know about the arms trade?’
‘That it arouses powerful passions, is generally legitimate, is distasteful until British-based jobs are at stake, and then it’s in the national interest. I would imagine it falls into two categories. There’s government to friendly government and…’
‘… there’s the verminous creature who sells where he can find a marketplace, which is what I assume Gillot to be.’
He thought Roscoe hesitated, as if unsure of sharing a confidence. He prided himself on leading his team well and having time for them. He hid impatience, let it dribble.
A wry smile played on Roscoe’s face. ‘I was back home for a weekend with my parents in the spring – a couple of years ago they moved to the Lake District. They joined everything and are stalwarts in their village. Anyway, at the primary school they had a good-causes fair while I was up there, in aid of the church roof. My mother was doing cakes, buns and jam, but on the next stall to hers there was an Amnesty International girl. The way she talked it up, the arms trade is pretty vile. Believe me, Guv’nor, I’m not a crusader but I doubt there’s much difference between drugs-trafficking and moving illegal arms. That’s about the limit of what I know.’
‘But he’d have to be protected,’ the chief inspector said, a calculated throwaway.
‘Of course.’
The package had been deftly placed in the hands of his detective sergeant. Most of the small squad’s work involved intervention to prevent the murder of some of the more despicable men in the capital’s organised-crime world. He didn’t reckon that an arms dealer, self-employed, would be out of place in that company. It was part of the job description that his guys and girls had to put the same work ethic into saving the life of a bad guy as they would into ensuring that of a law-abiding citizen. There was a procedure to be followed, so he would drag in a superior to act as Gold Commander and head up the business, then call together the necessary agencies – not the spooks because they wouldn’t give him the time of day, and certainly wouldn’t admit to holding a file on Gillot if they had one. He suggested to Roscoe that he contact HM Revenue and Customs and ask for the Alpha team.
Not much to start with, but often they had less.
Penny Laing took a call. She had cleared her desk, closed down her screen and had been about to head for the underground. She’d thought, when she was home and it was cooler, that she’d jog, shower, eat and then… She had nothing to do that interfered with picking up her telephone. And the first five minutes of the conversation was taken up with her name. Yes, she was Penny Laing. Yes, her surname was pronounced as if it was spelled LA-N-E. Yes, she was called Penny, not Penelope, and it was because of the Beatles song. Her parents had met at a UK Hydrographic Office party and had first danced to that tune. Yes, she did know that Penny – after whom the Lane had been named – was an anti-abolitionist and confirmed friend of the slave trade, which was about as politically incorrect as a man or woman could be, and she’d almost been laughing. Yes, she knew who Harvey Gillot was, and had an address, could have a phone number in five minutes and would call back with it. She could come to a meeting chaired by a Gold Commander instead of breakfast in the morning.
But her caller had not said why a meeting to discuss Harvey Gillot had been called at some bloody awful time not much beyond dawn… she was intrigued.
She went to her team leader, who had changed into his Lycra and had his foldaway bicycle beside his desk. ‘Dermot, what in the Met does SCD7 do? You ever heard of them?’
He didn’t look up but continued tying the laces of his cutaway shoes. ‘Part of the Serious Crime Directorate. They are the Serious Organised Crime Agency and include the Flying Squad. They do hostage-taking, kidnaps, and they’re supposed to intercept contract killers moving towards a hit – all very need-to-know. What did they want?’
She was the cat with the cream. ‘They want to talk about Harvey Gillot.’
She heard him chuckle, and then his helmet was on and he was gone, into the labyrinth of the building’s wide corridors. She opened again the files and pulled them up on her screen, utterly intrigued. Intercept contract killers moving towards a hit, he had said.
Only Leanne was allowed to go with Robbie Cairns when he went fishing. They were on the Royal Military Canal, south of Ashford in Kent. There were road bridges about every fifteen hundred yards, and he insisted on walking with the gear to a point at which he was as far as possible from the car, and therefore from other anglers. He was in front of her, hunched low on his canvas stool, and around him were tackle boxes, bait trays and the landing net. That afternoon and evening, he had caught nothing. She was behind him, on a collapsible chair, and had brought sandwiches and a Thermos of weak tea. He didn’t turn to speak to her and she wouldn’t interrupt his quiet.
Leanne was pretty. She had a good, slight figure, a clear complexion, natural blonde hair and nice nails; she had no boyfriend. She was content to sit in the failing light on the canal bank, swat away flies and watch her brother’s unmoving float as his maggots squirmed. He hadn’t caught a single fish, not even one big enough for next door’s cat… He could go a whole session, hours of it, and the float never go under, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. She thought he needed her there – would have been difficult to put it in words, even tell her dad or her mum or the grandparents who lived close by in their flat on the Albion Estate, so she told no one.
It had been a good day.
It had been the kind of day when the world moved.
The water glimmered in her eyes from the dropping sunlight and a water bird was in the reeds opposite. In the car she had told him all the detail she had. The price their grandfather had agreed with Lenny Grewcock. The name of the target. Where the target lived. She’d laughed and nearly swerved on the outside lane of the motorway when she’d described how a silly cow at the other end of a telephone had bought the crap story about her being a freelance writer and… No response. She had told him what she had learned, and there had been one sharp nod.
She worked hard for her brother, Robbie. She had no job other than supporting him. A teacher at school had told her she was bright enough for third-stage education, could have gone to college. The teacher had known nothing. She was of the Cairns family, from Rotherhithe, and that wasn’t something from which she would ever consider walking away. No boyfriends, but she idolised her brother. She cooked and cleaned for him in Clack Street, which was under the big blocks of the Albion Estate. She reconnoitred ground for him, did ferrying for him, and knew where it would end.
A gutter. Not rainwater but blood.
A pavement. Not a black bin-bag stuffed with rubbish but a body.
She doubted that around Rotherhithe – in Lower Road or Albion Street, in Quays Road or Needleman Street – there would be a wet eye, other than hers, when he was bleeding in the gutter or splayed on the pavement.
It couldn’t end in any other way.
The bloody float never shifted.
She knew how it would be: the next day he would start to think around it. Other than that Gillot sold weapons, she knew nothing about him – only that he was, pretty much, already dead.
He walked. The dog caught his mood and stayed a half-pace behind him. He’d a problem. Could be a small problem, one of lapsed trust; could be a big problem, of volcanic proportions. The towelling robe in the second bathroom had been damp.
He was out towards the Bill and the day’s tourists had long gone. The lighthouse was not yet activated and the path ahead and behind was deserted. A clean wind came off the sea from the west, but where he walked the rocks were sheltered, the swell was slight and sea birds circled over him. A kestrel perched on a fence post and the day was cool now. It should have been perfect, but there was a damp bathrobe.
A receptionist had given the all-clear – following a lavishly expensive dinner he had hosted at the Berlin Marriott – for him to take, gratis, the robe. He’d rather liked it, and the towelling was heavy duty, so he had brought it home. Josie had said it was vulgar, on a par with nicking hotel soap and shower hats, and it had been left in the spare bathroom. Fiona had her own en-suite, as did the bedroom he shared with Josie. He had only gone into the spare bathroom on his return from Heathrow because he thought the corner of the landing was hot and a window needed opening. He’d seen the robe hanging heavily, touched it and felt the damp.
The garden looked so neat at the front, and the beds off the patio were clear of weeds and well planted with colour, which would have been hot work out in the sun. He wouldn’t have thought much about it but the gardener – the prat, Nigel – had been to the house that day and he had seen the way Josie was with him. Nothing you could have brought into court, but impressions. They said, the impressions, that it was not the most straightforward of gardener-employer relationships.
The great quarries from which the famed Portland stone was extracted were behind him, as was the field where Fiona’s horse was kept. The sea swells were moderate and the break of waves on the rocks below him was gentle. He had not come here for the beauty, didn’t rate serenity, wasn’t attracted by postcard views. It was the isolation that appealed. There was a woman with another Labrador, also black, but she was more than half a mile ahead, and there had been a man behind with a toy dog but he had turned off the path near the track that led up to the Neolithic site. Far out in the Channel a warship cruised, a dark shadow against the lighter greys of the sea and the evening haze. He was secure here. So, was it a problem that a towelling robe was damp?
Did it compare with any of the problems stored up in the life of Solly Lieberman, his mentor, 1923-90? Solly Lieberman had no women trekking in his wake – well, only the one who typed for him, kept his office in minimal confusion and had no looks or apparent sentiments – and he had never seen him drift off late from the hotel bar with a hooker tailing him to the lift. His work guru would not have had a problem with evaluating the chances that his wife of nearly two decades, more, was shagging the gardener, Nigel, but only after she’d sent him to the spare bathroom for a clean-up shower – necessary with all the fucking work he’d done in the garden. And he, who paid all the goddamn bills, where was he? While they were shagging he’d been in Tbilisi, where there had been enough tarts in the hotel lobby to cope with an IBM convention. Solly hadn’t acknowledged such problems, and his own – as told to young Harvey – seemed far up the scale of catastrophe… like being a crewman on a landing barge off Utah Beach, on a June morning in 1944.
Maybe he didn’t care that much about the damp robe. The way Solly told it: ‘Shitting myself. Never heard as much noise in my life and never want to. I was in the right flank of the Higgins boats, the landing craft, and each carries thirty poor sods and they’re all sick as dogs and what’s in front of them is going to be worse. What don’t they need on the final run in to the beach? They don’t need all those cartons. They have Lucky Strike and Camel, Philip Morris and Marlboro, every cigarette produced in American factories. They’re heaving up, their trousers are filling and they want to get the weight of their packs down so they ditch the cartons. I have a big plastic bag, and when we wave them on their way up the beach, I collect them. Twenty-four cartons. Do three runs on to Utah, taking guys off the big ships, ferrying them in and bringing out casualties. These guys – Second Battalion, Eighth Infantry, Fourth Division – the ones who survived, would have been short of cigarettes. And there were more left on other Higgins boats. It was the next evening that we brought the boat back to Portsmouth. I had two hundred and ninety-seven cartons of high-quality American cigarettes and bulk buyers in every bar. I was twenty-one and it was like a big door had been kicked open for me. God knows, it must have been a thousand cartons I liberated that week, and other Higgins boats were hit but mine never was. Ride your luck, young man, and go for it.’
The kestrel had left the post now, flying and hunting. The dog stayed close to him. He liked the dog and the dog liked him, especially when he put the food into its bowl. Once he had liked Josie, and once she had liked him. He had married her two years after Solly Lieberman’s death. Then she had not minded the stories. Now she walked out of the room if he tried to tell one.
If an agony aunt had summarised the marriage of Harvey and Josie Gillot she would have written of ‘a fork in the road’. It had been a fine partnership for many years, and a loving one. That they had drifted on to ever-separating tracks was as inevitable as it was unintended. They had mislaid the ability to talk, or the requirement for conversation. He was confused by this, didn’t know how to resolve it, or whether he could be bothered to. He was not familiar with grovelling. It had happened he dealt in weapons and munitions. He didn’t blame himself. Before, Josie had acted as his personal assistant, but his targeting by HMRC – the vermin – meant that little now was consigned to paper and email was rarely used on ‘sensitive’ deals. There was less for her to file and those cabinets were emptier: old contents had gone into the incinerator. She was removed from his work, had the money to be comfortable and had probably lost the hunger for success that had caused them, as a partnership, to tilt hard at targets and flatten them.
The holiday huts were close to him now, wood, bright-painted. People rented or owned them. They were used in the summer months and cost in excess of twenty-five thousand but they couldn’t be slept in. He could, of course, have confronted Josie and demanded answers: ‘Are you shagging the gardener? If you are, can we regularise the situation? Will you be leaving home and setting up residence with Nigel, his wife and four children, assuming there’s room in his attic for you to bed down alongside the water tank?’ Days had gone by since he’d found the damp bathrobe and the questions had not been put. He wasn’t frightened, he told himself. Maybe he didn’t care. Solly Lieberman had had enough problems, and if they’d not been resolved he’d have been heading for the stockade.
Army of occupation, the American Zone. Shortage of penicillin, shortage of morphine. Shortage of almost everything… and jewellery was as good a currency as any. Would have been a big sentence in the stockade. A bigger sentence for the disposal of weapons caches. Solly liked to tell that one – he’d have a cigar clamped and would talk through it. ‘There were arms dumps all over the place. Go into any forest area, follow wheel tracks, and there was a dump. Supposed to be there for the final great stand, all the resistance-to-the-last-man shit. Find it, load it, get a clever guy to do the artwork on the papers. 1947. Who’s bothered with scanning papers at frontiers in the dead of night? Every little official on a border just wants a pay-off. Send trucks to Trieste, simple as hell. More cash into back pockets, the dock gates open, the freighters are there and the crane drivers. I’m telling you, young man, that the infant state of Israel survived on German weapons – the Karabiner, the Mauser, the Schmeisser, the MG42 machine-gun, the potato-masher grenade, even the old Panzerfaust for hitting armour. They went to Israel. Good times, young man.’ That put the damp robe, in terms of problems, into perspective.
When he reached the Pulpit Rock, a huge stone column around which the sea surged – must weigh hundreds of tonnes, prime, unshaped rock – it was dark enough for the light to come on behind him. It swept across his back and… His mobile rang. He called the dog to his side, then answered it.
‘Yes?’
The caller introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe, and remarked that Mrs Gillot had kindly provided the mobile number.
‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’
The policeman said he was from SCD7, that was Serious Crime Directorate 7, and said they should meet the next day in Weymouth police station and ‘Well, I’m sorry but I’ve quite a busy day tomorrow. I’m clearer later in the week.’
He was told the meeting would be the next day, at two thirty p.m., that the police station was on Radipole Lane and that he did not need to bring a solicitor or his wife. The time and venue were confirmed and the call was cut. He had not been asked if it was convenient. That was an inkling of a real problem.
Tomislav was sitting on his porch, in the darkness, the dog across his lap, when Josip found him.
He was told the deal Josip had agreed. Twenty thousand euros was the cost to the village of a killing. Tomislav said a trifle of that amount would have bought the fifty Malyutka they had needed. Did Josip think it reasonable? Josip explained that he had spoken three times to the middle men and had dragged down the price but it could go no lower. If he and Mladen accepted it, the village must raise twenty thousand euros.
Tomislav said, ‘It is cheap for what we ask. We want him dead.’ Josip said, ‘The man we will buy, I am assured, is the best quality.’