8

An atmosphere that a knife could have cut, dense and threatening.

‘Is it real or not, Mr Roscoe?’

The look Gillot flashed at her – his wife – was savage. Roscoe assumed that he had told her his own opinion as to whether or not it was real. She, however, deliberately posed the question again and would reckon to belittle him that way. Roscoe didn’t do marriage guidance, seldom attempted any degree of conciliation. He had had a good drive down – had started early enough for the road to be clear – and had walked into a snake-pit with no serum.

‘It’s a simple enough question, Mr Roscoe. Is this a serious threat to us or is it merely gossip from the bazaar?’

Another look from Gillot. Roscoe thought it would have halted a charging buffalo in its tracks, but it had no effect on the wife. He had sensed that Gillot had anticipated their meeting would be one on one, man to man: he had been walking Roscoe from the hall towards the open door of what seemed an office when she had come out of the kitchen and hijacked him. Gillot was not going to tell his wife to ‘eff off’ in front of a stranger. Roscoe had been led out on to the patio: a view that didn’t have a price. Cliffs, rock promontories, an expanse of sea, a great open mass of sky and a distant shoreline stretching away to the east, the bright sails of yachts… There were loungers and, thank God, an upright chair, which he had snaffled, and a parasol that threw shade. Gillot had sat on the end of a lounger, scowling. The wife was stretched out on another, but with the back raised, in shorts and a loose, long-sleeved blouse. He thought she looked well-cared-for. He did not, of course, know what Gillot had told her and wondered if he was walking towards a minefield. Anyway, he didn’t know whether the threat was serious or not. He couldn’t fathom whether Harvey Gillot had told his wife it was actual or a piece of mythology passed down from an ill-informed height. He had been given gassy water to drink.

‘You see, Mr Roscoe, this isn’t just about my husband. It’s also about me and my daughter, who comes home from school next week. And it’s about my home…’

He did this talk most often with serious players in organised crime. If the player dealt in cocaine shipments, had reneged and was under threat, Roscoe would have been in an office, in a Kent mansion, and the woman would have been in her fifty-thousand-pound kitchen and would have stayed there. He wasn’t used to dealing with wives who demanded answers. Neither was he used to having the husband sagging on the end of a lounger, the sun full on his face, cheeks unshaven and shirt not changed from the previous day. It was a big debate area in SCD7: how much detail could be given out concerning a contract threat? Give no information and mount surveillance: end up with a grandstand view of the hitman slotting the intended victim before the armed police could intervene and everybody finishing up in the high court on a duty-of-care action. Give too much information: the potential victim might identify the threat coming his way, preempt the process and do the shooting himself. It was a fine line.

‘What if I happen – God forbid – to be beside him when a shot is fired? What if there’s a bomb under the car, and they don’t know which car I drive and which is his? And I have a fifteen-year-old daughter – it’s her home as much as mine. Can I have, please, Mr Roscoe, some answers?’

Roscoe had brought Bill and Suzie with him. Bill would be padding round the garden, checking out the boundaries of the property, and Suzie would be in the village, learning about the community and routes into it. It was, indeed, a minefield. The Flying Squad liked to put the people in place, then wait for a hit or a snatch to be just about there, in good clear view in front of them, before they intervened. Then they ended up with the proper charges, not a conspiracy offence, but it made for difficult judgements and frayed nerves. He came clean, about as clean as he could.

‘Your husband – as I am sure he’s told you – was involved with people in Croatia in 1991. The degree of involvement, and what happened, he has chosen not to confide to us, but he has let us understand that a disputed matter lies between the parties – himself and a village in the east of the country. We don’t yet know why the matter has been resurrected after nearly two decades. If your husband, Mrs Gillot, has been perceived as a cheat, and this community has identified him – maybe located him – we have no reason to doubt their motivation to move on him and, perhaps, you, your daughter and your home. I see no reason not to take such a threat seriously.’

Breath hissed through Gillot’s lips. Roscoe realised the man had side-stepped from spilling it to his wife. Since he had arrived he had not heard them exchange a word, and there had been precious little eye-contact.

‘“Take such a threat seriously”. That is what you said?’

‘It’s the initial assessment. There are indications we should take seriously-’

‘Indications? That’s a pretty bland word when we’re discussing my daughter’s and my life, and the security of my home.’

‘And, of course, Mrs Gillot, we’re also discussing your husband’s life, and “indications” of a “threat” to it.’

Gillot caught Roscoe’s eyes. For the first time there was a flash of light in them, as if he had found – about time – a friend. She looked away, didn’t accept the rebuke, and stared out to sea. Her shorts had ridden up. But Mark Roscoe was not Harvey Gillot’s friend. Work had pitched them together. There would be as much bonding – or as little – as if Harvey Gillot dealt class-A stuff in the sink estates of south-east London. The man was a gun-runner. He lived in a big property with a great view, had a degree of success dripping off him and was probably inside the legal limits of his trade most of the time, but he would get no more, no less, support than a drugs-trafficker. Roscoe would not have said that made him any sort of zealot, just that it was the way he operated – and she had reacted as if his remark was a swat on the nose.

‘Can we, at your convenience, start with some answers, Mr Roscoe?’

‘Because we take the threat seriously, and believe there are indications of the validity of the intelligence forwarded to us, we-’

‘Stop the bullshit, Mr Roscoe, and get to the point.’

He did. At times, in this scenario, he might have played it soft and sought to reassure, but he was at the point, and it was sharp.

‘There is no question of us providing an armed protection unit to move into your home.’

‘I assume that’s not for negotiation.’

‘Neither, because of the indications of a threat and our responsibility to our own personnel, will unarmed officers be deployed to your home. That means they’d have to go shopping with you, maybe attend your daughter’s school and social engagements.’

‘Understood.’

‘We would hardly be likely to request from the local force that they do anything more than maintain a sporadic watch on the road through the village. They might extend a normal patrol pattern and come by this way, but that’s difficult. Why difficult? We don’t encourage officers – unprotected, likely young and inexperienced – to approach a car in which an armed man may be doing surveillance of your home.’

‘Of course. And when we’ve finished listing all the health and safety involving your people and your lack of resources, what about me, my daughter and my home?’

‘Two options, Mrs Gillot.’

She gave a brittle laugh. ‘What are they?’

‘You can stay, and we’ll offer full advice on the installation of additional home-security equipment. You can take your chance and hope the intelligence was faulty. Of course, should you activate a panic button, police response will be governed by the availability of armed officers – it might not be immediate.’

‘Or?’

‘You can pull out, Mrs Gillot. You and your husband can move, go off the map. The next question is usually “For how long?” Don’t know, can’t estimate, open-ended. You disappear, maybe take on new identities. That, also, we can advise on. The hitman, if our intelligence is correct, turns up here, finds an empty house and-’

‘He isn’t here already, watching us, is he?’

‘We don’t think so. Usually there’s quite a lengthy period of surveillance and reconnaissance. I’ll not gild it. A contract of this sort would be initiated with serious and careful people, not a cowboy who’ll charge in. They would look for an opportunity. As I say, you can pull out, Mrs Gillot, and let him turn up here. I’m not saying we’re lacking in the field of intelligence gathering but, I emphasise, we don’t have the resources for round-the-clock protection.’

Vern was driving as they passed the 2012 Olympics site and came across the causeway. His sister was beside him and his brother slouched in the back.

Vern thought of his sister as the ‘kid’, an afterthought between their parents, her conception timed after a lengthy spell his father had served in HMPs Wandsworth and Parkhurst. He thought of his brother as the ‘young ’un’. The difference? He would have called his sister ‘kid’ to her face, but he would never have addressed his brother disrespectfully. Leanne had a good temperament and could laugh not just at others but at herself. She was popular, and could drink in the pubs if she fancied it. Robbie, the young ’un, had no humour in his face, seldom laughed at others, never at himself, and didn’t drink.

Vern had driven carefully from south-east London. Behind them, left there, was all they knew well. The route Vern had chosen had taken them past the yard where George Francis had been done by a hitman for losing Brinks Mat money he was minding; past the flat where a small-time villian had been killed and dismembered – later, the killer had sat in the back of a car taking the pieces out to the Essex marshes for dumping and waved a severed arm at motorists going the other way; past the armourer’s home, a little terraced house, anonymous, with a reinforced shed out the back; past pubs where a tout or an undercover wouldn’t have lasted long enough to buy a pint before he was busted; past the garages where the cars were fitted up for them; and past the Osprey Estate where a boy had been beaten and killed – a gang of kids had thought a ‘wall of silence’ would protect them but they were doing time because the wall had been holed by the police; and past the complex of housing-association homes where the Irish contract killer had shot a Brindle brother right under the sights of police guns. Vern had flicked a glance in the mirror to watch the young ’un’s reaction, and there had been none.

Interesting that there was no reaction as they went down Needleman Street. Vern, like Leanne, their mum and dad, Granddad and Grandma Cairns, was supposed to know nothing of the woman kept there. Vern knew. He reckoned Leanne did – not that he’d told her. He reckoned the parents didn’t know, or the grandparents. He had seen, from a car, the young ’un come out of the block’s main entrance and pause on the pavement to look up. He’d followed the eyeline, stationary in a traffic foul-up, and had seen the woman, her little hand gesture at the window, and there had been a secretive response – a waft of the fingers – from his brother. He wouldn’t challenge him, or make a joke about it, wouldn’t mention what he knew. He never challenged Robbie. He was frightened of the young ’un, and he lived off the young ’un’s payroll. He had not asked if Leanne knew that Robbie had a woman in the block opposite the entrance to Christopher Court, just assumed she did.

It was careful driving because a crash, an incident – even being pulled over by a bored cop for speeding – would have been a disaster, pretty big on any scale. Under the back seat, where Robbie sat – in a sealed package of bubble wrap – was the pistol, with a twelve-bore shotgun, its barrels sawn down. In the boot there were overalls, two sets of balaclavas, extra trainers, a canister of lighter fuel, and a bag of spare clothing, his, Robbie’s and hers jumbled in together, the tops in bright colours, and a wig for Leanne. Just before they had hit the causeway, Leanne had done the switches under the dash that played the scanner through the car radio and detected police broadcasts: it couldn’t decode the encrypted wavelengths of the specialist units, but it registered the squelch of ‘white noise’. This might be a reconnaissance trip and they’d go back to London. If they liked what they saw, they might hang around, wait for it to be that degree better – or move forward, no delay.

She had a printout map from an Internet cafe and aerial photographs – one that covered the roofs of the house, another of the house and garden, and a third that showed the sea, a small beach, ruins, the gardens of other homes and the lane that led to where the target lived. He saw her study the photographs. Why did she do it? She had money like he did when Robbie worked. She hardly bought clothes and shoes, was smart but not special. She didn’t have a girlfriend to go with on holiday to Spain, didn’t have a boyfriend to sneak off with. Maybe loyalty to her brother kept her tight to him, but Vern couldn’t fathom it. When Robbie had the dark moods, though, black as hell, only his sister could lift him.

In front of him was the towering heap of rock and its summit.

On the wheel, Vern flexed his fingers. It was new ground for them. He felt the nerves. All of the drive down, he had felt a tightening of the knot in his stomach as the miles of countryside, yellow and ripened, grazed and bare, had slipped past.

The sea shimmered beside the causeway.

He knew the sea from trips to Margate, where his father had liked to take them when he was home, and Folkestone, which his mother preferred. He knew the sea also from the times his father had been in Parkhurst, and their mother had dragged them on to the ferry for the journey to the Isle of Wight. They came off the causeway. He sensed that Leanne had stiffened, but Robbie’s breathing was as steady as it had been on the rest of the journey.

One way in, Vern thought, and therefore one way out.

*

‘Are you saying, Mr Roscoe, that you’re prepared to get back into your car, drive away from here and leave us bare-arsed? What matters more? The budget and the resources available or my life and my daughter’s?’ She had pushed herself up on the lounger, facing the detective. She thought he showed a minimum of sympathy for her husband and none for her. Not familiar with a bitchy female? Did they not have any in the Serious Crime Directorate? The card he had produced with the pompous title was on the table by the water. Harvey – she had been married to him for long enough to read his moods – was beaten and didn’t contribute. The detective’s eyes had wandered from her thighs to her chest so she straightened her shoulders and pushed her hair off her face. He hadn’t taken off his jacket but she had seen that he wore – visible when he raised a handkerchief to mop his forehead – a shoulder holster with a weapon in it. She knew about weapons.

‘If you go, Mrs Gillot, with your husband, I can guarantee that protection will be in place from myself and two colleagues. I’ll have uniformed firearms officers on site, but only for today and only while you’re packing essential items. You will then drive to a hotel – location agreed with us – then my colleagues, the uniforms and I will pull out.’

‘After today?’

‘You would receive expert advice on how to conduct your life.’

‘And my daughter?’

‘Probably better if she takes a new identity and changes school. I should emphasise that I haven’t examined this fully, or referred it to senior colleagues.’

‘You don’t believe this is just a little blip?’

‘By your husband’s recollection a whole community has bought the contract. I don’t know how they’ll pursue it. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was alive for a decade. You’re different, but not wholly so. What I’m saying is that we may intercept one killer – but does the community have a production line? I wouldn’t assume that one success destabilises the scale of the threat.’

She could put together the puzzle and see what had been the grit in the shoe of their relationship. In the Home Counties, with her baby and then her small daughter, she had known other mothers and had been at the centre of the business operations. Here, there was a fine house with a wonderful view and a life of unrelieved boredom. She knew no one, belonged to nothing, had little to look forward to. More and more of Harvey’s work was done abroad and she had no role to play. More and more of his deals were conducted without a paper trail or an electronic footprint, and payments were made abroad, routed to the Caymans. She hated the house, the skyscape, the seascape and the quiet. She hated, too, the detective sergeant with the Glock in his holster who had marched into her home and was steadily dismantling her life. All right if she did it, but not if a well-rehearsed stranger performed the rites. Her husband wasn’t standing his corner.

‘It’s our lives.’

‘You could say that, Mrs Gillot, and you wouldn’t find people arguing with you.’

She turned towards Harvey. ‘You stupid bastard.’ He was abject, pathetic. ‘All that shit about trust and you screwed up on a deal.’

‘I appreciate these are difficult issues, but you have to come to a decision and we don’t want to crowd you. You should think of a short-term response and take a longer view.’ The detective had a soft voice, which he would have learned on a course: How to Handle a Hysterical Woman Who Is Being Turfed Out of Her Home. The same course that bailiffs went on. He moved back, was off his chair and sidling towards his colleagues who had come into her garden.

She said bitterly to her husband, ‘Spill. What sort of place was it where you fucked up on trust?’

It was one of those mornings that she had, thankfully, become unused to. Now, about bloody time too, Penny Laing faced a chance of progress.

She couldn’t complain about the hotel – a decent room and a half-decent meal in a near-deserted dining room the night before, with a half-bottle of local wine – and there was no one in London to whom she had to make a phone call: ‘Yes, I’m missing you, too… Yes, I’m fine… Yes, and did you find your supper in the fridge?… Yes, I’ll pay the council tax when I get back…’ There had not been anyone to call late once the relationship with Paul had petered out.

She’d been in Ireland, and his ship had been on its way to the Caribbean when they’d called it a day – done it by text on their mobiles. She’d known it was on a downhill slope when she’d gone with him to his parents for Sunday lunch; they hadn’t grilled her for her life story, which meant they didn’t regard her as a potential daughter-in-law but as the present girlfriend before the ship sailed for a half-year’s duty. It had been good, the best of her affairs, but she wasn’t going to pack in Revenue and Customs to be a naval wife and he wasn’t going to jack in the Royal Navy to move into civilian life. They’d exchanged postcards…

She’d run through the files and not absorbed much, had slept, woken, gazed out of a window and seen a swimming-pool, a courtyard with tables and awnings, a monument of white stone in the form of a cross and the wide river. She’d had breakfast, had been given a fold-over map of the town by Reception and had set off from the hotel in search of… not quite certain. Had had the sheet of contact names and addresses on the car seat beside her.

It had probably been a little joke cooked up by the first secretary and the spook at the embassy. They had given her an address, off a wide, tree-lined main road, and it was indeed the headquarters office of the security police. Her HMRC pass had been examined at the desk, and she had sat on a hard chair for an hour. Then an English speaker had come with a disarming smile and said that any arrangement for a meeting would be co-ordinated through the embassy, not on the doorstep, but the police might be able to help. She had found the police station on her hotel map, had driven there, and the man whose name she had been given was on holiday. No one else on duty had more than a smattering of English… but the hospital was identified on her map.

Back across the town, at the hospital, she had discovered English speakers, had been taken down into a basement area and shown a museum to an atrocity, and had been given another name, American or north European, and another address had been scratched on her map. A short distance from the hospital, at a semi-detached house, she had met a man, emaciated, with a seriousness in his eyes that marked obsession and isolation. He had been on his way out for the day, heading for Osijek, and was already late… but another cross was placed on the map at the far extremity of the page.

She sat on a bench in shade, with a rectangular block of ebony stone in front of her. It was twice her height, a foot thick, with a flying dove sculpted on it. From where she was, at that angle, she could see through the stone, and the blue skies were in the dove’s form. A little away from it, there was a square garden. Small clipped evergreens grew from a base of white stone chippings, and on a slab beside them stood jars of red glass for candles, with a cross, no more than a metre high, close to them. The arms of the cross were covered with chains and strings of beads from which hung crucifixes and medals from the army, football and basketball clubs. There were identity cards, too, preserved in laminate pouches. It was very quiet. She had heard a buzzard cry as it circled above, and the low pitch of a tractor that pulled a sprayer. To her left, she could see a knot of youngsters working with equipment inside corridors marked by white tape.

The lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies had told her about Ovcara. She knew that the wounded had been taken from the basement of the hospital, where the museum was, brought to this site and butchered. When the bodies had been exhumed medical equipment was still attached to them… The sun came up hard from the ground, burning her. It was one thing, she reflected, to be told about a place of mass murder in a London library, another to be there. The cross draped with the little mementoes scratched hardest at her, the symbols of the living, and the light flickered brightly on the beads and chains that wind and rain had polished. She had been told that the man was in the field and would come when it was convenient to him.

First his shadow, then his voice: ‘Miss Laing, I hear you got the push-around and ended up with Danny Steyn. He pushed some more, and you were sent to me.’

She grimaced. ‘I seem to have bounced off a few walls.’

‘I’m William Anders. Danny called me. About the village, yes?’

‘About the village.’ She showed him her card.

‘You mentioned to Danny a man called Gillot.’

‘I did.’

‘It’s Harvey Gillot, yes?’ He had a lazy drawl, conversational but compelling, not to be ignored. ‘Why did you – I assume you’re a criminal investigator – mention that name to Danny?’

‘Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has an investigation division. The Alpha team, of which I’m a member, is tasked to look for the breaking of our country’s laws in the area of arms dealing.’

‘A noble calling, Miss Laing. I dig up bodies – those killed in acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and plain old murder – and I hope that the fruits of my labours will end up in a court of law. If The Hague and the International Criminal Court, or the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, hears evidence I have provided, I’m well pleased. Most especially in Africa, I see the results of unfettered arms-trafficking.’

‘Harvey Gillot is an Alpha-team target.’ She thought a slice of his confidence had seeped away: his eyes had narrowed and the wide smile was falser. ‘We have intelligence, also, that a village near to the town has collectively taken out a contract on his life…’

‘Do you?’ Sobered, reflective, and a cigar case came out of the pocket. ‘Do you now?’

‘I’ve been sent here to try to find out what Harvey Gillot did that, eighteen, nineteen years later, has caused a community to pay for a killer to assassinate him. That’s my brief.’

‘Is it?’ A cigar was clamped in the teeth and a big lighter threw up a flame. ‘Is it now?’

‘Do you have anything that takes me in the direction I’m looking at?’

Smoke from the cigar masked his face but Penny thought she saw, almost, regret in the eyes. He said, nearly a whisper, ‘I believe I’m responsible.’

‘Responsible for what?’

‘I believe I’m responsible for initiating that contract, Miss Laing.’

He thought a gleam had come into her face – always did when an investigator reckoned a key had been handed over that opened a long-locked door. She had a little notepad on her knee and a pencil stub.

The forensic scientist William Anders, a lion of his academic community on the Californian coast, a scourge of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, felt what his wife – an academic in European renaissance art, and back home with the kids – would have called a frisson of guilt. He asked how long she had.

Time enough.

He spoke of a call, of a journey to the edge of ploughed strip that had been declared clear of mines a couple of days previously, and of an arm raised: he said the arm was in the air like the one in the lake that was waiting for the great sword, Excalibur, to be heaved in its direction. He received, as a reward for the image, a wintry smile from Miss Penny Laing.

He told her that four bodies had been excavated. He explained that his examination of their pubic symphyses had identified approximate age and estimated height, and told her why dental records for the male cadavers were unavailable. He told her which one would have been the village schoolmaster, then what mutilations they had suffered. She murmured something about having been in the Democratic Republic of Congo and seen combat aftermath, its effect on civilians, and he reckoned she would have been useless at digging on site, squeamish and without the fibre it took.

Should he have done it? Was it a crime?

Was he not a professor of his discipline, a world authority? Did he give a fast fuck, or a slow one, about the life and future times of Harvey Gillot?

He described a piece of paper he had retrieved from the older man’s pocket. He had regained his composure. Normally he would have flirted with a young woman, teased her a little, joked and smiled, and maybe later he would have looked for a coy smile, perhaps a drop of the eyes, some fun. Didn’t see it in Penny Laing. He wondered if she was overwhelmed by the place, a front line in history. He didn’t flirt with her. He was graphic in picturing for her the level of decay, but also related why the women wore no wedding rings or other jewellery. ‘I’m getting there, Miss Laing.’

‘There’s nowhere else I have to be.’

‘A guy from a village came to the hospital and I met him while I took a break out of the mortuary and had a smoke. I was asked a simple question: had anything of significance been found? I gave a simple answer through Danny, who did the interpreting. The piece of paper had the name of a hotel and its address, somewhere on the Croatian coast, and the name of a man. You know what that name is. I gave it to the guy from the village. Should I have censored that information? I don’t like censors, Miss Laing.’

‘Can you tell me the history of the village?’

He threw down his cigar end and stamped on it. He told her she’d have to hang around because he had work to supervise. He hadn’t come halfway around the world to sit in the shade and talk. He walked away.

She called after him, ‘I think you’re right to take responsibility for the contract to kill Harvey Gillot.’

She had a starting point, and it was as if a weight had lifted off her. When he had come back from the field and his students had trudged to their tents, he had done sustained talking, and a picture had been unveiled for her.

Nineteen years later… some buildings new and glossily painted, others old and broken. A repaired town and a damaged town. Should have been a picture-postcard place, not one that tanks had rolled through. When they had, and when the fighter bombers had been overhead, Penny Laing had been ten. Weeds grew in the walls of the buildings that had missed out on repair, trees sprouted where there would have been TVs or easy chairs, and charred beams were crazily collapsed. She had been ten, worrying about going to a new school after her next birthday and glorying in the puppy her parents had bought. She had not known that shells and bombs had fallen on this town. She wondered if her parents had – and thought it none of their business. There had seemed a stillness about the streets. There was a degree of normality, in the banks, cafes, bars, a hospital with elderly patients outside the wards, dragging on cigarettes, young women with bulging bellies, policemen in a patrol car, men fishing by the bridge over the little river that joined the Danube. But abnormality, too, in the suppressed noise, as if people went on tiptoe, and the buildings that gaped open.

She thought she’d had enough for one day and drove back to the hotel. Later she would walk, then type up the notes of what she had learned. Interesting that chance had thrown her into the path of the man who might have condemned Harvey Gillot and didn’t seem fazed by it.

Penny Laing wasn’t big with words – she was inadequate at describing places, people who might have affected others. Working in Kinshasa had been an experience, but had not affected her. This town might, and outside Vukovar there was a village, and past the village a track that had led through fields of rotting corn.

‘We’re staying.’

They had been together for an hour, might have been more. There had been blurted conversations and lingering silences. Harvey had paced on the patio and she had sat on her lounger, sometimes reading the paper or working on her nails, contributing the same lifeless, monosyllabic sentences. The final exchange:

Him: ‘I’m fucked if I’m quitting to make it convenient for those bastards.’

Her: ‘Sounds as if, from what those bastards have to say, that we’re fucked anyway.’

Him: ‘It’s my home and I’ll not be put out of it because the bloody police are cutting back on their bloody resources.’

Her: ‘It’s our home – perhaps you hadn’t noticed, and I’m backing him, if he comes, to shoot straight.’

He reckoned she must have read the paper twice, some bits three times, and that her nails were down to the quick. Then he had turned and waved them forward. They had been in a small group, lounged against a low wall that separated the principal garden – where bloody Nigel had the flowers that always seemed to need weeding – from the drop-through undergrowth to the ruined chapel and the graveyard. They had finished drawing plans of the garden and had done the survey of the house. They had been there, the men half astride the wall, the girl perched on it, with the insolence that comes from waiting for a decision that was likely to be obvious to an imbecile.

‘Say that again, please, Mr Gillot.’

‘A bit hard of hearing, are we, Mr Roscoe? Wax in the ears? I said,’ Harvey lifted his voice and barked, ‘we’re staying.’

Crisply, ‘Are you happy with that decision, Mrs Gillot?’

Harvey didn’t know whether she would stand with or against him and sensed the detective expected her to break ranks. She said drily, ‘If I were to leave my husband and my home, Detective Sergeant, it would be because I’ve decided to, not you.’

Impassive: ‘Right, so be it.’

There was a small sharp smile on Harvey’s lips, as if he had won something. ‘You, Mr Roscoe, don’t approve of our decision. You’d have had us run, bloody rats in the night, to a safe-house. I pay my taxes. You could say, Mr Roscoe, that I pay your salary. You could also say – I doubt you will – that the accumulation of taxes I’ve paid entitles me to a degree of support from the police.’

‘I neither approve nor disapprove of your decision, Mr Gillot. I’ve explained the options and you’ve rejected advice given, which is your right. There are enough of us here to verify your statement that you’re staying, and that you understand you won’t receive armed protection in the face of a threat to your life. That’s all pretty simple, and we’ll leave a pamphlet on security precautions in the hall for you to read through, basic stuff.’

Harvey said, ‘I think you should know, Mr Roscoe, that in a lifetime of business I’ve accumulated influential customers – the Ministry of Defence, the Secret Intelligence Service and…’

A glint lightened the policeman’s eyes. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. But if you’re confident of them whistling up a platoon of the Parachute Regiment and sending them down here…’

‘I have friends.’

‘Pleased to hear it, sir. Any time you need me, just call. Good afternoon, Mrs Gillot. Good afternoon, sir.’

‘Friends, and don’t forget it.’

No answer. The group had already turned their backs on the patio and were on the driveway, going to their car.

She had never been inside the halls where the fair was staged. Organised by Defence Systems and Equipment International, it was a closed, demonised place for Megs Behan.

She was in the front row. Those who had penetrated the place in previous years – by forging passes or conning a naive exhibitor into verifying an application – were the elite on the barrier. It had been an early start, a little after seven thirty, and she was almost alone. Another hour to go before the first of the exhibitors were pitching up. It was now early afternoon and visitors were drifting away, but she hadn’t seen the bastard. What had shocked her most was that two policemen, one younger and one older than herself, had offered her a sip from their plastic coffee cups and turned the cup round for hygiene. One had called her ‘sunshine’ and the other ‘love’.

Those who had been inside – top of the tree – reported variously. The big companies had major stands with videos blaring as they demonstrated their products, champagne flowing. The small firms were in the electronics world, did the titanium plating for an attack aircraft’s cockpit or the mounts for machine-guns in the hatches of helicopters. An American stand manager complained that his government’s tighter fist meant Mexican human-traffickers out of Tijuana had better scanners than the US Border Guard. A South African, on a stand exhibiting anything from an armoured personnel carrier to a sniper rifle, claimed that trade was flat but that the Middle East was still holding up well. A British officer in uniform was heard to say that equipment had become so sophisticated that it was easy to forget fighting was done by people and ‘the simplest thing in infantry is man against man’. Someone reported, ‘You don’t see a mention anywhere of killing. A mocked-up frontier post is manned by peace-keeping troops. The videos shout about fighting for peace.’ One justification – rejected out of hand by Megs Behan – was that a hundred and fifty thousand jobs depended on the ‘trade of murder’. She would have given a right arm, maybe even a right boob, to insinuate herself inside the ‘Death Supermarket’.

The bastard – Harvey Gillot – had not shown.

There had been good years when huge crowds had been penned back and police lines had bulged as they defended the entrance to the exhibition centre, when arrests had conferred a badge of honour – all gone. Then her ears would have been ringing with the abuse thrown at arriving guests, potential buyers and the likes of Harvey Gillot, and the police would have been doing gratuitous violence.

It was a mark of shame that the picket on the barrier was barely three deep and the placards were thin. It certainly hurt that the police were so goddamn friendly. She had, indeed, drunk their coffee. One had nearly made a pass at her, and had offered to open the barrier links so that she could get more easily to the DLR station if she was caught short.

A waste of time. She had thrown no paint bombs, had fired no ball-bearings from a catapult, hadn’t even chucked a shoe. There had been a few photographers an age earlier but they’d gone now.

And Harvey Gillot wasn’t there, so there was little point in vaulting the barrier and making an exhibition of herself if nobody had hung around to witness it. She thought the policemen would have been embarrassed for her if they’d had to haul her off to a van.

For herself, she felt almost ashamed. A reedy voice used a bullhorn to her right and squealed insults at the distant building, and the police were smiling. She was ashamed because she felt the betrayal of all those kids – alive and dead, scarred and traumatised, homeless and hungry – who were the victims, ‘collateral’ was the vogue word, of the arms trade: their photographs were neatly catalogued in her filing cabinet.

She had to learn Shock and Awe.

She had a rucksack at her feet, against the barrier, and bent to pick it up, then started the struggle to get her arms through the straps. Another policeman helped her. He was smiling. ‘Off home, then? Your crowd have been damn good today. Anyway, hope a few stay on – this is double bubble, a nice little earner. It isn’t like it used to be, proper scrap then. Have a safe journey.’

She headed off, humiliated, racking her mind for what might represent shock and awe and for something to lift her morale.

In a hide of camouflage netting, on the edge of a covert of birches, Benjie Arbuthnot let a shooting stick take his weight as he puffed a cigarillo. Beside him his grandson, a week back from boarding-school, aged fourteen and not yet in the fifth form, smoked a cigarette provided for him, and together they watched the field that had been harvested the day before. The target would be pretty much everything that breathed, kicked, flew or moved in any way. Benjie had, broken, a twelve-bore over and under from James Purdey – worth a fortune, his retirement present from Deirdre, and the sprog was armed with a single barrel four-ten of mongrel manufacture. A mobile rang.

He swore, had the shotgun under his arm so he used his free hand to tap his pockets and identify where the damn thing was. He produced his phone, realised it was silent and looked at his grandson. The blush spread crimson. The boy fumbled through his pockets and brought out his. It glowed from under its protective case. It was old, almost a museum piece in the development of mobile phones. All thumbs, his grandson answered it. ‘Yes?’

A pause.

‘Yes. He’s with me. Who’s calling, please?’

‘Thank you very much. It’s Harvey Gillot.’

He heard the young voice say that it was a man with the name of Harvey Gillot, and then he heard the older, familiar tone, a vile oath and a cough. It was good to have the number of a marginally senior officer in the Secret Intelligence Service… A hotel in Kyrenia, the north coast of Cyprus. Bits and pieces going from Armenia to the Kurds in northern Iraq, in the Saddam days, long before the old boy had dropped through the trap. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken a call on a phone in the hotel lobby and had given the caller his mobile number, which had gone straight on to the skin of Harvey’s hand. Then he’d headed for the toilets, written the number on his notepad and scrubbed his skin clean. Just a number that he might want one day. ‘Yes? Benjie here. Gillot? What the hell are you calling this number for?’

‘I have a problem.’

‘Don’t we all? Prostate, Inland Revenue? It’s almost a vintage phone and it’s been in a drawer for ten years. I gave it to my grandson last week and now you call it. Won’t ask where you snitched the number from, but be assured the card and the number will be at the bottom of a dustbin within an hour. So, what’s the problem?’

‘Rijeka, the docks, a shipment and…’

‘Breaking up, Harvey, and you’re leaving me far behind. What’s the problem? Make it snappy – and it’s damn decent of me not to have stamped this thing to extinction.’

Harvey took a deep breath. He was on the patio, hadn’t moved off it or eaten anything. The container that carried the Malyutka MANPADS had been shipped out of Gdansk, and the cargo in the container was on a manifest as ‘agricultural equipment’. It was on the final approach to the harbour at Rijeka, Customs were squared, there was a lorry on the quayside and men up the line to take the stuff into the cornfields and up to a rendezvous. In his room at the hotel there was a plastic bag of rubbish jewellery, the deeds of homes that were getting the shit shelled out of them and wristwatches a street trader wouldn’t take. He had been able to see the ship, in a close November fog, coming near to the quay, and the big man had drifted close and used his given name.

Harvey Gillot hadn’t seen Benjie Arbuthnot for seven years – hadn’t set eyes on him since Green’s Hotel in Peshawar and the sending on of the Blowpipes, bloody useless things. A murmur, very soft for a big man, in his ear about ‘sanctions busting’ and a little lecture on the maximum and minimum sentences available to a criminal-court judge when a punter was found guilty of ignoring the will of the United Nations Security Council. An aside, barely audible, indicated a good market, a fatter fee, if the container went on to Aqaba, and the start of a very healthy relationship with the Jordanians. A little smile on Benjie Arbuthnot’s face, and a slap of encouragement on Harvey’s back. He had known by then that the jewellery and house deeds were valueless, and the deal would cost him so… He had stood the agent down, paid off the lorry, watched timber unloaded from the freighter, then seen it sail. He had dumped the bag in a wastebin behind the hotel kitchens, then fled fast to the north and into Slovenia. Had supposed it was an act of policy for Her Majesty’s Government to see that the Jordanian military had good equipment, and Russian-made stuff was always useful in the maze puzzle of the Middle East. The Jordanians had paid well then and later. It had been Harvey’s first big deal since Solly Lieberman’s death, and he had been, at the age of twenty-eight, an international arms broker and had the protection of the intelligence community. He exhaled, and spat it out.

‘The deal you made me cancel in Croatia, at Rijeka, it’s come back at me and-’

‘Did you say made, Harvey? I seem to recall offering advice.’

‘It’s come back at me. There’s a contract out. The people who were buying the gear have raised the money. I’m walking dead and-’

He had said, on his patio, I’ve accumulated influential customers

… I have friends. Christ. Now it had a hollow ring.

‘I’m out now, just another Whitehall warrior on a pension. If I have anything sensible to say, I’ll call you. If not you won’t hear from me. Oh, and, Harvey, always remember it’s swings and roundabouts, a bit bleak today but you had some good times off my prompting. A blame game and spouting about responsibility aren’t applicable. Take care and good luck.’

The call was cut. He counted to ten, then dialled the number again. It was unobtainable. Take care and good luck. He sagged back into a chair.

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