7

A tongue washed him, slobbered over his cheeks, and he moved sharply. Then he heard the glass hit the floor and Harvey Gillot was awake. He swore. It had been good crystal and was chipped. A chip could bloody a lip and… He stood. Bright sunlight flooded into the room and the patio was bathed in clear colours from the flowers, the sea’s expanse and the skies. There was little wind to stir the bushes at the garden’s edge where the ground fell away to the cove, the castle and the ruined church. The dog crawled across him. It was responsible for chipping the glass and dislodging it from his grip. He pushed the animal away. The stink of Scotch was rank on his clothing and the chair. He headed for the kitchen to collect a cloth and realised it was the first time in years that he’d slept in an easy chair, clutching an unfinished measure of whisky. The dog wanted breakfast and had disturbed him to get fed. It probably wanted to go outside and pee and… He remembered why he had been in the chair, late at night, anaesthetised by Scotch.

He recalled what he’d intended to say.

But when he’d been ready to say it she hadn’t been there.

He found a cloth under the sink, in the bucket where it always was, padded back into the living room and rubbed it hard against the brocade. He heard quiet voices. Recognised hers, not his. He ditched the cloth and went to the bedroom door. It was ajar and he hovered. The room faced the front and the drive. He heard Josie’s laughter and imagined she was at an open window: the second voice was deeper, confident – the bloody gardener’s. He pushed the door wider. Nigel was – predictably – at the window. Josie was – expected – beside it and had her back to Harvey. She wore a sheer robe, the silky one, and had it tight at the waist. He didn’t know what she was wearing underneath or what was on offer to the gardener…

She turned away from the window. ‘God, you look a shambles, Harvey.’

‘What time did you get in?’

‘Don’t know, never looked. You were flat out.’

He couldn’t have said whether her answer was evasive or truthful. ‘You didn’t wake me.’

‘No, Harvey, I didn’t.’ She mocked him. ‘You weren’t a pretty sight, asleep, mouth open, snoring. You looked a bit pissed, actually. I thought you were better off where you were.’

The gardener was back at his van, unloading gear. Harvey thought his walk too confident and familiar, as if he thought he had rights on the territory, and perhaps he did. His wife had turned and the robe flounced. Her left leg was on show – knee and thigh, damn good – then the material fell back, closing off his view.

‘Pity you didn’t remove the glass.’

‘You haven’t – God, you haven’t spilled it on the chair? Or the carpet? I didn’t want to wake you – you didn’t look good company – so I left you holding it. Shit.’

‘And I broke the glass.’

‘Do I often go out? Did you need to sit up and wait for me?’ He thought, then, that she hit a button that summoned a minor rant. ‘God, Harvey, I sit here and you’re swanning round Europe. I’m not on the phone, ringing your room and demanding to know why you weren’t there to take my call earlier. It was just one evening.’

With the gardener? Maybe, maybe not. Had she wined and dined him? Had she taken her bit of rough to a pub on the mainland, talked him through the French bits on the menu, told him which wine to choose, then gone to one of the car parks by Redcliff Point or Ringstead Bay? She had paused to eyeball him.

‘Pity about the glass, but I expect the carpet and the chair’ll be fine.’

It had been a good marriage at the start. Harvey Gillot had been trading with the Sri Lankan military. The usual shopping bag: they had fire power but problems with communications and he’d been out to Colombo with the brochures. He had already inherited enough of Solly Lieberman’s contacts book to know who could supply at a decent price; it was a fat deal and would pay well. No complaints about the flight – business class and upgraded by the BA people at Bandaranaike International – and everything was rosy until his bag didn’t show up on the Heathrow carousel. A pretty girl had calmed him down, sorted the hassle and produced the bag after an hour. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-six, and they were married three months later. Some family and work friends had supported her, no one on his side – no friends, and his parents weren’t there because they hadn’t been invited and, anyway, he was halfway to losing touch with them. It had been pretty good in the early days, when the baby had arrived, he was high on the ladder and she was at his side. Then he had uprooted them, like fracturing a mirror, and taken them to Lulworth View on the Isle of Portland. Harvey Gillot could have said, to the day and the hour, when his marriage – already past the ‘fork in the road’ – had soured. A photograph retrieved from a drawer, of himself and Solly Lieberman in the Tribal Territories, when they were flogging off the Blowpipes. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken it. Yes, he talked too much about Solly Lieberman. She had looked at it and her mouth had curled at the sight of Solly, the crown of his head level with Harvey’s shoulder, and she’d said, ‘So that’s the poisonous creature I seem to live with.’ The death of a marriage – already terminally ill – and she hadn’t registered it. Harvey had.

He was turning his back on her and the dog was whining at the door.

She challenged him: ‘Why did the police want you? Too many speeding points? You’d think they’d better things to do than-’

‘I’m taking the dog out. It’ll keep until I get back.’

She would have realised he’d lied – too offhand. ‘What’s the matter? Phone bust and email gone down?’

‘I’m taking the dog out, and when I’m back from my walk then I’ll tell you what happened at the police station.’

He and his dog went out together – he checked the outer gate, every tree that might have been a potential hiding-place and the bushes alongside the coastal path, while the dog bounded ahead.

Feet apart, arms extended, the Baikal held firm in both hands, the blast of the firing was in his ears and the recoil kicked up the barrel. No smile on his face as the skull shape disintegrated. Robbie Cairns had not used a silencer or worn ear-protectors. The 9mm bullet he had fired into the skull was soft nose, the hollow-point variety, first developed in the Dumdum armaments factory of Calcutta. It expanded on impact and created the greatest damage to any part of a human body; it was a man-stopper.

He gazed at what he had achieved.

The right side of the head was intact but the left had shattered. It was the third weapon he had tested. Robbie Cairns would have said it was like trying on a new pair of shoes. The feel was right or it wasn’t. The third of the Baikal IZH-79 pistols was the one that seemed good to him, better than the other two. They had come off the same production line, had been converted from discharging tear-gas pellets to firing killing bullets by the same Lithuanian craftsmen, but the way the weight lay in his hands and the grip of his fingers on the butt seemed different.

He was the best customer the armourer had. Robbie Cairns believed in the total discretion of the man who sat a mile away in a car park and didn’t watch him shoot with the three pistols at the shop-window dummy. The armourer would take the secrets of his customer base to the grave. If he didn’t, the grave would welcome him earlier. Blood pulsed in Robbie’s veins, always did when he fired live rounds. Crazy thing, but the elation was no greater when he shot at a walking, screaming, falling target than when he aimed at a plastic head that might have been in a display at the store where Barbie worked.

Now he was careful. His hands were in sensitive rubber gloves. The two rejected weapons went into the briefcase in which they had been delivered. The one he would use, now that a contract rate had been agreed and a deal done, was dropped into a small holdall with the ammunition. A supermarket bag held the remnants of the two plastic heads already demolished, and he knelt to pick up the fragments of the third. The bullets would have been squashed beyond recognition and were spent somewhere among the trees.

He had had no training in handling weapons. His grandfather wouldn’t have them in the flat, said he hated the damn things. He had also said that firearms hanged men. His father had never had a gun on a raid. Only one man had urged Robbie Cairns to get serious firearms expertise: an officer at Feltham – not the one who had told him he could have a better life than traipsing in and out of courtrooms – had urged him to go for the regular army on his release, had told him it was possible for a teenager’s criminal record to be ignored. Robbie had dismissed it out of hand. Nobody would give orders to him once the gates at Feltham had closed behind him.

But he had met a man – might have been a tinker – on Rainham marshes who was shooting pigeons. He’d had decoys pegged out and had made himself a hide of camouflage netting. The man had told him about shotguns, rifles and handguns – he might once have been in uniform and booted out. Late in the day, evening coming on, the geese had flown in. The man had shot one, then passed the weapon to Robbie and left it to him. Beginner’s luck or natural talent? A Canada goose had been hit, in flight, had feathered to the marshland and flapped, crippled. Robbie had walked to it and – two turns – wrung its neck. Why had he been on Rainham marshes? To bury a metal-lipped cosh that had been used on a man at a club in Southwark; the guy was hospitalised so the cosh was hot and needed to disappear. Never saw the tinker again, but had learned about posture, breathing, and to respect what his hands held. He had taken the goose home, and his mum had thrown half a fit and gone apoplectic and said it was for the rubbish. Granddad Cairns, round the corner, had plucked and cleaned it. Grandma Cairns had cooked it. A good bird but stringy: it had flown hundreds of miles before landing on Rainham marshes.

When he was satisfied that nothing remained, he hitched up the briefcase, the duffel bag and the plastic one that held the broken head and the spent cases, put the decapitated dummy under his arm and started to tramp back along a narrow path. He headed for the car park where the armourer would be waiting, and in his hip pocket – always cash up-front – was what he would pay.

One worry nagged at him.

That day, Leanne was in an Internet cafe and would be doing the Google thing on aerial views of a stretch of coast; cliffs and quarries that might be working or were disused. It was easy to be on a pavement in Bermondsey or Rotherhithe, or up in Tottenham, merging with people. He had never worked out of London, had never been asked to do a hit in a wide-open space. He wondered which of his talents would count when the city was behind him. He didn’t know.

When he didn’t know, he worried.

Please, just tell me it’ll be your best effort. That day Vern would be making the last arrangements for the car, test-driving what the garages under the arches had on offer. He’d be going carefully because it was well known that they were flagged by the police and watched. And he worried because Leanne had said that the target’s house could only be reached and left by one road.

He didn’t like worrying, wasn’t used to it, but the contract was agreed – and his credibility did not permit Robbie Cairns to wriggle or do a weasel run.

They’d go down the next day to where the target lived and look.

The building was a warren of sections. The impoverished groups that protested against brutality from right-wing governments, left-wing regimes, state-sponsored torture, the exploitation of migrant labour and the international arms trade had to work cheek by jowl. It was rare, though, for one group to seek advice from another. Megs Behan broke a habit.

On the floor above there was an overspill office used by the Peace Brigade.

‘What do you want me to tell you? That you’re just a clerk, a paper-pusher? How’s that for a start?’

The organisations in the building were, of course, fiercely independent. They guarded their territory jealously.

‘You’re hardly going to hit their heights with a few media releases. You do stands at political conferences, you brief administrators, a few junior ministers know your names, and it all seems like the centre of the universe. We’re not on those tracks.’

She had had a bad night. She’d smoked through half of it, had been up twice and into the little communal kitchen for coffee the first time, then herbal tea, her self-esteem battered by the sense that her efforts were useless – her family’s assessment of her work. Her father was a senior hospital administrator, her mother a High Court judge. One brother was a partner in an accountancy business and the other a CEO in pharmaceuticals. She went home at Christmas, endured their patronising remarks about her ‘good works’ and left as soon as public transport was running again, but permitted little wads of banknotes to be dropped into her handbag. Last year, when she’d heard of their triumphs and survival in the downturn she’d still felt some degree of worth, but not last night, so she had climbed the stairs and bearded one of the Peace Brigade people.

‘We’re in Colombia, Salvador, Nicaragua and particularly Guatemala. We’re not in Westminster. We’re alongside potential victims – the writers, the free-press journalists, trade unionists, priests who won’t be cowed. We’re walking with them, living in their homes. We are – almost – a moral shield. Where are you, Megs?’

He had the tan to prove where he had been and there were scabs on his neck that she thought were from a vast mosquito in some horrible jungle.

‘If I cause offence, so be it and I won’t apologise. The arms trade is wrong. End of story. It’s responsible for deaths on a criminal scale. It’s an area of quite colossal greed. So, get off your bum, Megs, do something that’s noticed. That message on board?’

She bobbed her head, bit her lip and headed for his door. ‘Do they know who you are, Megs, the brokers of arms? Do they know you exist? Are you a pain in the arse to them?’

She stamped down the stairs and back to her cubicle.

She was almost at the check-in desk, lifting her bag, when a mobile rang. Not hers, Asif’s. The girl at the desk was waiting to take the printout that Travel Section’s computers had spewed, then had turned away to her screen and gesticulated at the conveyor-belt beside her. Penny Laing dropped her bag on to it. Asif was talking quietly and she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sticker was fastened to her bag’s handle and it was gone; she was passed her boarding card. He was still talking and the girl heaved an impatient sigh. A man from the queue pushed him, and a woman coughed noisily.

He stepped out of the queue, and the man elbowed Penny clear of the desk. Asif’s head was bowed and she sensed anguish. The woman nudged her further aside. She might have flared up. She was tired, ready to flop down on a seat. Flying, since she had joined HMRC, had been limited – the DRC, Kinshasa via Brussels, Dublin a few times and the red-eye flights to Malaga and all points on the Costa where traffickers lived in the sun. It was in Gibraltar that she had met Paul…

‘I’ll be there, darling. I’m on my way.’

In her mind, this was a good assignment, potentially rewarding. It had the footprint on it of Harvey Gillot. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked sharply.

‘It’s my wife. There’s a complication and-’

‘When’s it due?’ She knew little about the vagaries of childbirth.

‘About a month. If I’m not travelling, can you cope? I mean…’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘She sounded pretty low.’

Penny was crisp. ‘Just get to her. Call the office in your car and let them know. I’ll be fine. Now, I’ve got the files. All you have is the contact list in Zagreb, the embassy lowlife, and we’ll hardly be camping at their door.’

‘I don’t have any option.’

‘On your way.’ She was decisive enough to wipe the doubt off his forehead: he would not be blowing an interesting investigation out of the water. It didn’t cross her mind that she shouldn’t travel because Asif Khan’s wife had a pregnancy complication. They were supposed to be in pairs when abroad – wouldn’t happen unless she was beefed up when she got there. ‘No problem.’

He gave her the embassy numbers and staffers’ names, then was lost in the crowds. She’d wait until she was airside before she called in and spoke to Dermot. And – useful precaution – she switched off her mobile and would leave it off until the flight was called.

She had not done university, but a distant cousin of her team leader lectured at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies – a branch of London University. Dermot had telephoned the introduction and the guy had talked to her for half of the night. She had been with him till the Starbucks had closed and the disasters of that part of Europe had stacked up in her mind. So, Penny Laing didn’t know what she would find other than confusion and would have resisted fiercely if anyone had tried to block her.

She waited for the flight call.

The Gold Commander targeted him, stabbing at him with a pencil: ‘What’s Gillot expecting from us? What’s your assessment?’

‘I’m hoping, Ma’am, that we can decide what’s on offer, then give him that to digest.’

It was a neat response, a trick based on experience. Throw it back: the gaudier the decorations on the epaulettes, the greater the responsibility. Bigger fish than Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe would decide on the ramifications of a risk assessment and what could be done for a Tango’s protection. He thought the woman at the end of the table, Phoebe Bermingham, glowered at him. He had gone through his notes of a conversation the previous afternoon with the Tango and had been heard. He was the junior at the table: responsibility was not going to land in his lap. Different times now. There was pre-Stockwell and post-Stockwell. Before the shooting dead of a harmless Brazilian painter-decorator in a London underground carriage he would have volunteered opinions, but too much shit had been heaped on the watchers and marksmen for him to do so now. A stenographer in the corner was writing busily.

The Gold Commander turned, almost reluctantly, to the Intelligence representative. He was Harry, from SCD11. ‘I have nothing that tells me this threat is empty or real. I have tried Thames House and VBX for a little off-the-record guidance and had a door shut in my face, which probably means they don’t know. What advice for Gillot? In an ideal world he would up sticks and shift somewhere off the radar. Who would take such a contract? First, and we’re all agreed on this, it’s not a foreigner but a local man, most likely based in London. Our problem is that the men who would attract the sort of cash reward on offer are successful, with a carefully guarded reputation. There might be six in the capital. Do I have their names? No.’

Steve was Covert Surveillance, SCD10, a dapper figure, recently off the road because of a knee-ligament problem and therefore condemned to Gold Group meetings. Few noticed him; many saw him. He could blend and seemed to resent the spotlight that came with Ma’am’s pencil-pointing. ‘First, we don’t know who the hitman will be so we can’t stake him. We move on… The potential target is not resident in the Metropolitan Police Service area but in remote Dorset. There is no possibility that the locals down there would have available sufficient specialists to mount twenty-four-seven surveillance of Gillot’s property. Were Gillot in London or the Home Counties, on the intelligence available, I doubt I’d support such a manpower drain of my own people. But sending them down to the Dorset coastline isn’t on. If my people were there, with a realistic threat of an assassination attempt, who intervenes? What’s the back-up? We won’t be there.’

The representative of Firearms, CO19, was Donny. He had put on weight since he’d slipped off the black overalls and left the H amp;K in the armoury. He was known as a gag-artist, and liked black humour. It was alleged that he had said – he fervently denied it – as he had aimed at an Afro-Caribbean on a wages-van heist: ‘Make my day, Sunshine,’ then fired, double-tap. Since Stockwell, he had gone by the book and his catechism was that his people would not be exposed. ‘I’ve spoken to Dorset. They have enough firearms-trained personnel to cope with existing priorities and emergencies. But there’s no question of them having the resources to mount a full-time protection operation on the Isle of Portland. They point out that it would be irresponsible to deploy unarmed officers at a property we believe will be attacked by an armed criminal – a killer. We have a duty of care, of course, to Mr Gillot – and a similar duty of care to any officers sent to protect him. We cannot have unarmed officers walking into a predicted life-threatening situation. Conclusions: protection is not feasible. There could only be an armed presence if Intelligence a predicted date, time and location for an attack, but not an indefinite sit-around. His life and his family’s safety are pretty much in his own hands.’

In its journey round the table, Ma’am’s pencil point rested on the team leader, the cuckoo in their midst. Roscoe thought the man from HMRC’s Alpha team seemed aloof from the practicalities expressed. He started impishly: ‘Well, what a difficult furrow we have to plough – and inconvenient. Anyway, Harvey Gillot is a top-ten-listed arms broker. We would assume that he’s ninety-something per cent legal and five plus something per cent not. If we could gain enough evidence to nail him in court, he’d be a good scalp for my crowd. The assumption is that he was involved in a sanctions-busting deal in 1991, at which time Croatia was fighting for its existence, then pulled the carpet from under whatever he’d agreed with the “village” Mr Roscoe talked of. We’re now on our way to Vukovar and hope to have detail on the transaction that failed. We have no doubt that Gillot broke faith with whoever he dealt with, which has led to the contract on his life. I would offer you one thought. We’re used to principal players in international drugs-trafficking feeling they’ve been cheated or disrespected and employing a gunman to right a wrong, very cold and brutal people who don’t tolerate broken faith or disrespect. My one thought, an aggrieved citizen of the Balkans would be a serious enemy for Mr Gillot to have made. Nothing else to add.’

Five minutes later, after Ma’am had summarised, Mark Roscoe was on the phone.

The telephone had been ringing when Harvey Gillot had come to the kitchen door so he had gone inside and answered the call. The dog had followed him and would now be in the hall, the dust of the coast path would be on the carpet and… Didn’t matter too much what the carpet in the hall looked like.

She was on the patio, to the right of the kitchen window, with a breathtaking view of the seascape. She had the newspaper, some coffee and her iPod in her ears. The gardener was working near to her. He laid the telephone back in the cradle.

When he appeared on the patio, she glanced at him. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt. She’d kept herself well. Languid eyes and a lazy voice: ‘You did give the horse that stuff last night?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘For God’s sake, Harvey, I asked you to.’

‘You did indeed and – to tell you the truth – I couldn’t be bothered to tramp out there, measure whatever it is the brute eats and-’

‘So you just did the piss-artist act.’

‘Something like that. If the horse needs pills, try feeding it yourself.’

They argued rarely, and never before the move to Portland. Then he had closed down the office, inherited from Solly Lieberman, and paid off the old secretary. At first Josie had managed the baby and had done the accounts, which showed what was suitable of his earnings. They had been a team, and the money had rolled in. Now he did his books and kept his files. He knew what to shred or burn and what to keep. The gardener was hunched over a flowerbed but Harvey Gillot was fucked if he could see anything that resembled a weed.

‘Am I allowed to ask?’ She did the aggrieved bit well. ‘Am I entitled to know why your mood is so foul, why the horse goes unfed?’

Maybe.

He said quietly, his voice falling away, ‘Something happened yesterday and…’

She had turned away from him and the gardener had twisted to face her, shirt undone, sweat in the hair on his chest. He thought she was showing him a crossword clue. He said something Harvey couldn’t hear, and she wrote on the paper. Then she looked at her husband. ‘Oh, something happened? You were awarded three more speeding points? Nobody wants any howitzers? Share, Harvey. What happened yesterday?’

He breathed hard, tried. ‘The past came back. It had been dead for nineteen years, but it’s alive now.’

‘Are you still pissed? Harvey, you’re talking rubbish. What happened? What’s in the past?’ Her lips formed a derisive smile. ‘I know – an affair. Harvey had an affair, or maybe just a one-nighter, and now there’s a big strapping teenage boy and-’

‘Shut up, and fucking listen.’ He’d yelled it. The gardener had swung round and was holding a little hand fork as if it was a weapon. His raised voice would have been heard on the beach, by the ruins of the chapel and on the path against Rufus Castle. ‘And you, please, fuck off.’

A look at Josie. As if she had to give her permission. She said, ‘I’m all right, Nigel. He’s all bark and no bite.’

The gardener sloped away with his fork to the wheelbarrow, which he pushed off the patio. Harvey had never sworn at her before. He thought her face had flushed and he imagined it a Rubicon moment. Another deep breath.

‘The detective I met yesterday, he’s coming down again tomorrow from London. Why? Because there is perhaps a possibility of a threat against my life.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘The detective, his name is Roscoe – quite decent and, I think, efficient – is the liaison officer. He’s from a squad that specialises in proactive operations against contract killers. They have word there’s a price on my life.’

‘Where from?’

‘The Balkans, specifically Croatia, a village there.’

‘How much is your life worth? What’s the cost of the contract?’

‘I don’t know.’

She sat up and the T-shirt rucked. He realised she was wearing no underwear beneath it. From the patio, she would have been able to see along the coastal path, calculate his progress and estimate when he would be back at their home from his walk.

‘What did you do?’ There was an acid calm in her voice. ‘I mean, it can’t be every day that a gang of people from central Europe have a whip-round to hire a killer.’

The sun burned on his face and the reflection of the sea was in his eyes. ‘It was a deal that didn’t happen.’

‘You always talk about trust. Did you break someone’s?’

He squirmed. ‘It was a long time ago. It wasn’t straightforward.’

‘You either had a deal or you didn’t… Before my time, nearly twenty years ago? Pops up now so it must have festered, gone rancid. Was it a double cross?’

‘There was stuff. It was-’

‘You’re sounding pathetic and evasive. What happens to me? Am I included in the contract? Is that an extra, a supplement on the price? What about Fiona – home next week? Because of your stuff do I have to look under the car? Does she have to hide under her bed? Are Fiona and I on the ticket with you?’

‘The detective will tell us tomorrow.’

She stood, the newspaper crumpled in her fist. He thought she was struggling for the ultimate riposte, something that would leave him in rags. She couldn’t find it. The ferry was going out on the crossing to one of the Channel Islands or St Malo and the yachts were dwarfed by it. A tanker was far out on the horizon. She asked, ‘Do you expect me and Fiona to join you in a bunker?’

He didn’t answer her, just went inside. Nobody Loves Us and We Don’t Care. The anthem was loud in his head.

A heat haze hung over the town. It was clear because there were no high industrial chimneys in Vukovar, and the Bata shoe factory at Borovo, up-river, had closed.

A few fishermen were on the low platform just above the river’s water-line, the wash from a wide-beamed, flat-bottomed tourist boat that powered downstream slapping near their feet. It was one of the ‘white boats’ that used the river as a slow transport from Vienna or Budapest to the Black Sea in the southeast. Most of the travellers were on the decks, crowding the starboard side of the boat, and a guide was telling them about what they saw and its significance – he had started work at the shoe factory, and would devote nearly fifteen minutes to a description of the events at Vukovar in the autumn of 1991. He spoke of the quality and craftsmanship of the shoes manufactured at Borovo, but not of the divisions in the labour force once conflict had erupted, how former Serb employees had bayed for the blood of former Croat employees who had once worked and sat in the canteen beside them.

He did not point out the roofs of the village near the river where Croat police recruits had been massacred by Serb paramilitaries and mutilated, or the Trpinjska road – which could have been identified by the church tower above the trees – where there had been a killing ground for tanks, and Marko Babi , alone, was credited with the destruction of fifteen T-55s and their Serb crews, and Blago Zadro had co-ordinated the tactics, making himself a national hero in an infant country. And he did not show them the tall building with the new tiled roof: behind it was the entrance to the command bunker of 204 Brigade from which Mile Dedakovic, the Hawk, had directed the defence of the town.

The guide had to mention the memorial, on a jutting strip of land that protected a marina: a great cross of white stone, ten metres high, four across, commemorated the lives of a thousand of the town’s defenders, those from the villages on the Cornfield Road, and at least another thousand civilians trapped inside the shrinking perimeter. He would have pointed to the new-laid square, the glass frontages of modern banks and the flags flying in the light breeze. He could speak of the imposing Franciscan monastery, high on a cliff, with yellowish-ochre walls, but he would steer away from the desecration of graves in the vaults when victorious troops had swarmed through the building.

Impossible to ignore the water tower to the west of Vukovar. The flag flew well on it that morning, and little murmurs rippled among the passengers hugging the rails on the upper deck, passing binoculars among them. With the magnification the tourists could identify the gaping holes in the brickwork of the bowl where water had been stored for the maintenance of pipe pressure. The guide allowed himself a short reference to the ‘Homeland War’ and deep divisions, but left it implicit that peace had returned to this little corner of eastern Slavonia.

Just beyond the town – no sign and therefore no need to identify the site of the Ovcara massacre and the formal graves of the bodies exhumed from a killing pit – the guide could enthuse because now the boat slipped past the elevated ground, thirty or forty metres above the river level, where the Vu edol village had been dug and explored. He spoke with passion of a community existing there before the birth of Christ, its skill in processing copper and alloys. He did not tell them that the archaeological work was now abandoned through lack of funds.

It was gone. Vukovar was behind the chugging boat and only a failing wash showed its brief presence, and a floating cigarette carton that had been accidentally dropped.

The guide knew his customers. Fifteen minutes – from a twelve-day river cruise – was the maximum that people on holiday, Germans, Austrians, Americans, French, Italians and British, wished to spend on contemplation of an atrocity and a town’s misery. The guide likened passing Vukovar to attending a funeral, and sought to lighten the mood. When he had finished talking he arranged, always, for cheerful music to replace him on the loudspeakers. Who would remember what they had seen? Few. Would the photographs taken from the deck jog memories in years to come? Unlikely.

The tourist boat had sailed on downstream and rounded a bend. For a little while there had been the wake but that, too, was now dispersed. Simun had watched it. He was enrolled as a student at the college in Vinkovci, which taught a variety of builders’ skills: plumbing, electrical, brick-laying and plastering. Simun was also on the list of local people designated ‘disabled’. His birth, his childhood and the circumstances of his adolescence combined to offer him a short-cut to avoiding the need to find employment or purpose.

He sat on a bench, watched the river and kept a vague eye on the anglers. He would have been excited if a rod had arched as he had seen the boat go by. It had broken into his small world, had been a part of it for a few minutes, and had gone. His disabled status, which a psychiatrist in Osijek confirmed each year after an examination conducted by telephone, gave him a small allowance from the state. It was as if Simun, two and a half weeks old when the village fell, was himself a veteran of the battle.

That morning Simun had not taken the bus to the college in Vinkovci, but had come to Vukovar to go to the new boutique on Strossmeyer and buy a shirt. He had seen it after leaving the bank yesterday with his father and had thought it well-styled. He would have few opportunities to show it off – short-sleeved, button-down collar, soft blue with a light check – to an admiring audience because he was one of the few young people, beyond school age, who had remained in the village. They were scattered, but Simun would not leave his father. Others had gone; he had not. His story, often told by his father, made him unique.

On the last night, after his father had swaddled Simun to leave, the women had give them a cup of milk, taken from the cow two days before – the last cow. Petar had shot the rest because of their agony when he hadn’t had the opportunity to milk them – and two slices of old bread. Mladen had gone alone with his infant into the night, out past the last perimeter strongpoint and into the corn.

They had been, father and son, three days and nights in the corn. The baby had never cried, and the milk had been finished by the second day, the bread – softened in rainwater – by the second evening. On the first night, his father had realised that, after five hours’ walking, he had doubled back on himself and been within sight of the ruins of the church tower that the artillery had failed to bring down. He had had to start the journey again, and had detonated a mine, a POMZ-2 fragmentation stake mine. Simun knew its make, power and the spread of its blast because Tomislav had one in his shrine to the village. The mine had fallen half on its side and the blast was restricted but many pieces had lodged in his father’s leg and in the arms that had protected the baby. They had been saved from the Cetniks by a herd of cattle that had been close to the explosion: the animals had stampeded and there had been shouts in the darkness that one had snagged the trip-wire.

Then his father – bleeding – had swum the Vuka river on his back, with the baby tied to his chest, and had trudged the last kilometre to the lines at Nustar. A nun in the hospital at Vinkovci had said the baby’s survival was a miracle. A father had said that the child’s quiet while they were traversing the cornfields, where Cetniks searched for survivors from the village, was another. In the refugee camps Simun had been labelled ‘the miracle’.

His father was now undisputed leader of the community. Simun was the son of his father. No one in the village, not even the Widow, would criticise him. He was subsidised by his father, with the state disability pension, and he traded in pills. He had that monopoly in the community.

It did not concern Simun that for twelve years he had not been beyond Vinkovci or Osijek, or that he had never slept a night outside his village. His horizon was where the ripening corn met the skies. His experience of a world beyond the village was from the American programmes imported by Croatian TV, but he hardly watched them – and never the news bulletins – preferring to sit in the cafe or play pool in its back room. Simun knew the name of every fighter who had died in the defence of the village, where each man had died and how: by what weapon and its calibre. He knew because he had heard it in the cafe.

Nobody had ever lectured the miracle child, now nineteen, tall and well-presented, with his mother’s looks, on a life going to waste.

Penny Laing drove into the town, and was not sure how she had stayed on the road. She had been tired enough when she had flown into Zagreb. At the airport she had hired a small, slick Renault from Hertz, black-painted because the Investigation Division always used black cars: they didn’t stand out as primrose yellow or tangerine would.

She had been to the embassy. Might have been a hepatitis-B carrier for the welcome she’d had. No coffee, no lunch – certainly not a life-saving beer – but bottled water and some plain biscuits in an interview room. A first secretary had met her and another man had sat in a corner and not contributed. Sod him, Penny Laing had thought. She’d assumed that the interloper was the station officer, the source of the intelligence. There had been from the first secretary the predictable line about not offending the natives, going by the book and liaising at every step on her journey. She’d asked direct: ‘Are you the guy who kicked this off? Supposing you are, we’re concerned about what credence to give it. High or low? It would help to know.’ The spooks, in her experience from Kinshasa, and those who helped with more sophisticated bugging than HMRC could get their hands on always seemed to have a little mischief in their eyes and the faintest of smiles, and never answered a direct question. Her eyes had been on him and he had fixed his gaze on the ceiling, as if he was looking for cobwebs.

The first secretary had said, ‘It’s a backward part of a backward country, and it was seriously traumatised by warfare of the most vicious and merciless sort. Simple people, they make loyal friends and dedicated enemies. But you, Miss Laing, will be neither friend nor enemy. I would suggest trust few and believe little. Stay aware, Miss Laing.’

She had given the first secretary a curt handshake, but the other man had kept his hands firmly behind his back.

The road, a highway, had taken her to the outskirts of Nova Gradiska, then Slavonski Brod, where she had stopped for fuel, had had a leisurely cup of coffee and reflected on the lorries that seemed to deny her a space in either the fast or slow lane. She had been trembling as she held the polystyrene cup because of near misses and great beasts carving her up, forcing her to swerve or stamp on the brake. North of Zupanja, she had turned off the A3 and crossed a wide agricultural plain. The sun had been sinking when she skirted to the west of Vinkovci, and then there was Nustar and signs directing her to the outskirts of Vukovar.

There were no more lorries to force her out of their path, but there were big grain silos to her right. When the low sun caught them she saw the cavernous holes that artillery shells had blasted. She didn’t know what she might achieve.

It had seemed easier in London where there had been certainties. She no longer had them. There were ruined buildings on either side of her and trees grew through what had once been living rooms that fronted on to the street. She saw a sign for a hospital, a green cross on an illuminated white background – the lecturer had told her what had happened at a hospital in Vukovar.

Penny Laing took her left hand off the wheel and smacked her cheek, catching her nose. She had not come for a bloody history lesson. She had come to nail down Harvey Gillot, arms dealer, who had had an issue here.

He slept, like a baby, in the principal guest room. Harvey Gillot had worked all day – telephone and email – on a deal to replenish stocks of artillery and tank shells for use on army ranges.

Josie was in her own bed. She had cleaned, gone to the supermarket, cooked and put his food on the table, lunch and supper, but had not eaten with him. She had taken food to the horse and had watched a movie on TV.

Shadows bounced off the walls of the house, darkness nestled on it, and the wind rustled dead leaves.

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