The Gun Seller

VIRGIL

Like all good things, and like all bad things too, it came to an end. The replica Solomons swept Sarah off towardsGrosvenor Square in one of their Rovers, and O’Neal ordered a taxi, which took far too long to arrive and gave him more time to sneer at my belongings. The real Solomon stayed behind to wash up the mugs, and then suggested that the two of us put ourselves outside a quantity of warm, nourishing beer.

It was only five-thirty, but the pubs were already groaning with young men in suits and misjudged moustaches, sounding off on the state of the world. We managed to find a table in the lounge bar of The Swan With Two Necks, where Solomon made a lavish production out of rootling for change in his pockets. I told him to put it on expenses, and he told me to take it out of my thirty thousand pounds. We tossed a coin, and I lost.

‘Obliged to you for your kindness, master.’

‘Cheers, David.’ We both took a long suck, and I lit a cigarette.

I was expecting Solomon to kick off with some observation about the events of the last twenty-four hours, but he seemed happy to just sit and listen while a nearby gang of estate agents discussed car alarm systems. He’d managed to make me feel as if our sitting there was my idea, and I wasn’t having that.

‘David.’

‘Sir.’

‘Is this social?’

‘Social?’

‘You were asked to take me out, weren’t you? Slap me on the back, get me drunk, find out whether I’m sleeping with Princess Margaret?’

It annoyed Solomon to hear the Royal family being taken in vain, which was why I’d done it.

‘I’m supposed to stay close, sir,’ he said eventually. ‘I thought it might be more fun if we sat at the same table, that’s all.’ He seemed to think that answered my question.

‘So what’s going on?’ I said. ‘Going on?’

‘David, if you’re going to just sit there, wide-eyed, repeating everything I say as if you’ve lived your whole life in a Wendy house, it’s going to be a pretty dull evening.’

There was a pause. ‘Pretty dull evening?’

‘Oh shut up. You know me, David.’

‘Indeed I have that privilege.’

‘I may be many things, but one of the things I am definitely not is an assassin.’

‘Long experience in these matters,’ he took another deep swallow of beer and smacked his lips, ‘has led me to the view, master, that everybody is definitely not an assassin, until they become one.’

I looked at him for a moment. ‘I’m going to swear now, David.’

‘As you wish, sir.’

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

The estate agents had moved on to the subject of women’s breasts, from which they were extracting much humour. Listening to them made me feel about a hundred and forty years old.

‘It’s like dog-owners,’ said Solomon. "‘My dog wouldn’t hurt anyone", they say. Until one day, they find themselves saying "well he’s never done that before".’ He looked at me and saw that I was frowning. ‘What I mean is, nobody can ever really know anybody. Anybody or any dog. Not really know them.’

I banged my glass down hard on the table.

‘Nobody can ever know anybody? That’s inspired. You mean in spite of us spending two years practically in each other’s pockets, you don’t know whether I’m capable of killing a man for money?’ I admit I was getting a little upset by this. And I don’t normally get upset.

‘Do you think I am?’ said Solomon. The jolly smile still hung round his mouth.

‘Do I think you could kill a man for money? No, I don’t.’

‘Sure of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re a clot, sir. I’ve killed one man and two women.’

I already knew that. I also knew how much it weighed on him.

‘But not for money,’ I said. ‘Not assassination.’

‘I am a servant of the Crown, master. The government pays my mortgage. Whichever way you look at it, and believe me I’ve looked at it lots of ways, the deaths of those three people put bread on my table. Another pint?’

Before I could say anything, he’d taken my glass and headed for the bar.

As I watched him carve a path through the estate agents, I found myself thinking back to the games of cowboys and Indians Solomon and I had played together inBelfast.

Happy days, dotted around some miserable months.

It was 1986, and Solomon had been drafted in, along with a dozen others from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, to supplement a temporarily buggered RUC. He’d quickly proved to be the only one of his group worth the air-ticket, so, at the end of his stint, some extremely hard-to-please Ulstermen had asked him to stay on and try his hand at the loyalist paramilitary target, which he did.

Half-a-mile away, in a couple of rooms above the Freedom Travel Agency, I was serving out the last of my eight years in the army on attachment to the snappily-titled GR24, one of the many military intelligence units that used to compete for business in Northern Ireland, and probably still do. My brother officers being almost exclusively Old Etonians, who wore ties in the office and flew to Scottish grouse moors at the weekend, I’d found myself spending more and more time with Solomon, most of it waiting in cars with heaters that didn’t work.

But every now and then we got out and did something useful, and in the nine months we were together, I saw Solomon do a lot of brave and extraordinary things. He’d taken three lives, but he’d saved dozens more, mine included. The estate agents were sniggering at his brown raincoat.

‘Woolf’s a bad lot, you know,’ he said.

We were into our third pint, and Solomon had undone his top button. I’d have done the same if I’d had one. The pub was emptier now, as people headed home to wives, or out to cinemas. I lit my too- manyethcigarette of the day.

‘Because of drugs?’

‘Because of drugs.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Does there need to be anything else?’

‘Well Yes.’ I looked across at Solomon. ‘There needs to be something else if all this isn’t going to be taken care of by the Drug Squad. What’s he got to do with your lot? Or is it just that business is slow at the moment, and you’re having to slum it?’

‘I never said a word of this.’

‘Course you didn’t.’

Solomon paused, weighing his words and apparently finding some of them a bit heavy.

‘A very rich man, an industrialist, comes to this country and says he wants to invest here. The Department of Trade and Industry give him a glass of sherry and some glossy brochures, and he sets to work. Tells them he’s going to manufacture a range of metal and plastic components and would it be all right if he built half a dozen factories inScotland and the north-east ofEngland? One or two people at the Board of Trade fall over with the excitement, and offer him two hundred million quid in grants and a residents’ parking permit inChelsea. I’m not sure which is worth more.’

Solomon sipped some beer and dried his mouth with the back of his hand. He was very angry.

‘Time passes. The cheque is cashed, factories are built, and a phone rings inWhitehall. It’s an international call, fromWashington,DC. Did we know that a rich industrialist who makes plastic things also deals in large quantities of opium fromAsia? Good heavens, no, we didn’t know that, thanks ever so much for letting us know, love to the wife and kids. Panic. Rich industrialist is now sitting on a large lump of our money and employing three thousand of our citizens.’

At this point, Solomon seemed to run out of energy, as if the effort of controlling his fury was too much for him. But I couldn’t wait.

‘So?’

‘So a committee of not particularly wise men and women put their fat heads together and decide on possible courses of action. The list includes doing nothing, doing nothing, doing nothing, or dialling 999 and asking for PC Plod. The only thing they are sure about is they do not like that last course.’

‘And O’Neal…?’

‘O’Neal gets the job. Surveillance. Containment. Damage Control. Give it any flipping name you like.’ For Solomon, ‘flipping’ constituted strong language. ‘None of this, of course, has anything whatsoever to do with Alexander Woolf.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Where is Woolf now?’ Solomon glanced at his watch.

‘At this moment, he is in seat number 6C on a British Airways 747 fromWashington toLondon. If he’s got any sense, he’ll have chosen the Beef Wellington. He may be a fish man, but I doubt it.’

‘And the film?’

‘While You Were Sleeping.’

‘I’m impressed,’ I said.

‘God is in the detail, master. Just because it’s a bad job doesn’t mean I have to do it badly.’

We supped some beer in a relaxed silence. But I had to ask him.

‘Now, David.’

‘Yours to command, master.’

‘Do you mind explaining where I come into all this?’ He looked at me with the beginnings of a ‘you tell me’ expression, so I hurried on. ‘I mean, who wants him dead, and why make it look as if I’m the killer?’

Solomon drained his glass.

‘Don’t know the why,’ he said. ‘As for the who, we rather think it might be the CIA.’

During the night I tossed a little, and turned a little more, and twice got up to record some idiotic monologues about the state of play on my tax-efficient dictaphone. There were things about the whole business that bothered me, and things that scared me, but it was Sarah Woolf who kept coming into my head and refusing to leave.

I was not in love with her, you understand. How could I be? After all, I’d only spent a couple of hours in her company, and none of those had been under very relaxing circumstances. No. I was definitely not in love with her. It takes more than a pair of bright grey eyes and pillows of dark-brown, wavy hair to get me going.

For God’s sake.

Atnine o’clock the next morning I was pulling on the Garrick tie and the under-buttoned blazer, and athalf past nine I was ringing the enquiries bell at the National Westminster Bank in Swiss Cottage. I had no clear plan of action in mind, but I thought it might be good for morale to look my bank manager in the eye for the first time in ten years, even if the money in my account wasn’t mine.

I was shown into a waiting-room outside the manager’s office, and given a plastic cup of plastic coffee which was far too hot to drink until, in the space of a hundredth of a second, it suddenly became far too cold. I was trying to get rid of it behind a rubber plant when a nine-year-old boy with ginger hair stuck his head out of the door, beckoned me in, and announced himself as Graham Halkerston, Branch Manager.

‘So, what can I do for you, Mr Lang?’ he said, settling himself behind a young, ginger-haired desk.

I struck what I thought was a big business pose in the chair opposite him, and straightened my tie.

‘Well, Mr Halkerston,’ I said, ‘I am concerned about a sum of money, recently transferred to my account.’

He glanced down at a computer print-out on the desk. ‘Would that be a remittance on the seventh of April?’

‘Seventh of April,’ I repeated carefully, trying hard not to muddle it up with other payments of thirty thousand pounds I’d received that month. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That sounds like the one.’

He nodded.

‘Twenty-nine thousand, four hundred and eleven pounds and seventy-six pence. Were you thinking of transferring the money, Mr Lang? Because we have a variety of high-yielding accounts that would suit your needs.’

‘My needs?’

‘Yes. Ease of access, high interest, sixty day bonus, it’s up to you.’

It seemed strange somehow, hearing a human being use phrases like that. Until that point in my life, I’d only ever seen them on advertising billboards.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Great. For the time being, Mr Halkerston, my needs are simply for you to keep the money in a room with a decent lock on the door.’ He stared back at me blankly. ‘I’m more interested to know the origins of this transfer.’ His face went from blank to highly blank. ‘Who gave me this money, Mr Halkerston?’

I could tell that unsolicited donations were not a regular feature of banking life, and it took a few more moments of blankness, followed by some paper-rustling, before Halkerston was back at the net.

‘The payment was made in cash,’ he said, ‘so I have no actual record of the origin. If you’ll hold on a second, I can get a copy of the credit slip.’ He pressed an intercom button and asked for Ginny, who duly trundled in bearing a folder. While Halkerston browsed through it, I had to wonder how Ginny could hold her head up under the weight of cosmetics smeared all over her face. Underneath it all, she may have been quite pretty. Or she may have been Dirk Bogarde. I will never know.

‘Here we are,’ said Halkerston. ‘The name of the payer has been left out, but there is a signature. Offer. Or possibly Offee. T Offee, that’s it.’

Paulie’s chambers were in theMiddleTemple, which I remembered him telling me was somewhere near Fleet Street, and I got there eventually with the help of a black cab. It’s not the way I usually travel, but while I was at the bank I decided there was no harm in withdrawing a couple of hundred pounds worth of my blood money for expenses.

Paulie himself was in court on a hit-and-run case, playing his part as a human brake-pad on the wheels of justice, so I had no special entree to the chambers of Milton Crowley Spencer. Instead, I had to submit to the clerk’s interrogation on the nature of my ‘problem’ and by the time he’d finished, I felt worse than I’ve ever done in any venereal clinic.

Not that I’ve been to a lot of venereal clinics.

Having passed the preliminary means test, I was then leftto cool my heels in a waiting-room filled with back numbers ofExpressions, the journal for American Express cardholders. So I sat there and read about bespoke trouser-makers in Jermyn Street, and sock-weavers in Northampton, and hat-growers in Panama, and how likely it was that Kerry Packer would win the Veuve Cliquot Polo Championship at Smith’s Lawn this year, and generally caught up on all the big stories happening behind the news, until the clerk came back and raised a pert couple of eyebrows at me.

I was ushered into a large, oak-panelled room, with shelves ofRegina versus The Rest Of The World on three walls, and a row of wooden filing cabinets along the fourth. There was a photograph on the desk of three teenage children, who looked as if they’d been bought from a catalogue, and next to it, a signed picture of Denis Thatcher. I was chewing on the peculiar fact that both these photographs were pointing outwards from the desk, when a connecting door opened, and I was suddenly in the presence of Spencer.

And quite a presence it was. He was a taller version of Rex Harrison, with greying hair, half-moon spectacles and a shirt so white it must have been running off the mains. I didn’t actually see him start the clock as he sat down.

‘Mr Fincham, sorry to keep you, do have a seat.’

He gestured around the room, as if inviting me to take my pick, but there was only one chair. I sat down, and immediately jumped to my feet again as the chair let out a scream of creaking, tearing wood. It was so loud, and so agonised, that I could picture people in the street outside stopping, and looking up at the window, and wondering about calling a policeman. Spencer didn’t seem to notice it.

‘Don’t think I’ve seen you at the club,’ he said, smiling expensively.

I sat down again, to another roar from the chair, and tried to find a position which might allow our conversation to be more or less audible above the howling woodwork.

‘Club?’ I said, and then looked down as he gestured at my tie. ‘Ah, you mean the Garrick?’

He nodded, still smiling.

‘No, well,’ I said, ‘I don’t get up to town as often as I’d like.’ I waved my hand in a way that implied a couple of thousand acres in Wiltshire and plenty of labradors. He nodded, as if he could picture the place exactly, and might pop over for a spot of lunch the next time he was in the neighbourhood.

‘Now then,’ he said, ‘how can I help?’

‘Well, this is rather delicate…’ I began.

‘Mr Fincham,’ he interrupted smoothly, ‘if the day ever comes when a client comes to me and says that the matter upon which he or she requires my advice is not delicate, I shall hang up my wig for good.’ From the look on his face, I could see that I was meant to take this as a witticism. All I could think was that it had probably cost me thirty quid.

‘Well, that’s very comforting,’ I said, acknowledging the joke. We smiled comfortably at each other. ‘The fact is,’ I went on, ‘that a friend of mine told me recently that you had been extremely helpful in introducing him to some people with unusual skills.’

There was a pause, as I’d rather suspected there might be. ‘I see,’ said Spencer. His smile faded slightly, the glasses came off, and the chin lifted five degrees. ‘Might I be favoured with the name of this friend of yours?’

‘I’d rather not say just at the moment. He told me that he needed… a sort of bodyguard, someone who would be prepared to carry out some fairly unorthodox duties, and that you furnished him with some names.’

Spencer leaned back in his chair and surveyed me. Head to toe. I could tell that the interview was already over, and that now he was just deciding on the most elegant way of telling me. After a while, he took in a slow breath through his finely wrought nose.

‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘that you have misunderstood the services we offer here, Mr Fincham. We are a firm of barristers. Advocates. We argue cases before the bench. That is our function. We are not, and this I think is where the confusion may have arisen, an employment agency. If your friend obtained satisfaction here, then I am glad. But I hope and believe that it had more to do with the legal advice we were able to offer than with any recommendations on the engagement of staff.’ In his mouth,‘staff’had a rather nasty sound to it. ‘Might it not be preferable for you to contact your friend in order to secure whatever information it is you require?’

‘Well that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘My friend has gone away.’ There was a pause, and Spencer blinked slowly. There is something strangely insulting about a slow blink. I know, because I use it myself.

‘You are welcome to use the telephone in the clerk’s office.’

‘He didn’t leave a number.’

‘Then, alas, Mr Fincham, you are in difficulty. Now, if you will excuse me…’ He slid the glasses back on to his nose and busied himself with some papers on his desk.

‘My friend wanted someone,’ I said, ‘who would be prepared to kill someone.’

Off came the glasses, up went the chin. ‘Indeed.’

A long pause.

‘Indeed,’ he said again. ‘That in itself being an unlawful act, it is highly improbable that he would have received any assistance from an employee of this firm, Mr Fincham…’

‘He assured me that you were most helpful…’

‘Mr Fincham, I shall be candid.’ The voice had stiffened considerably, and I realised that Spencer would be good fun to watch in court. ‘The suspicion has formed in my mind that you may be acting here in the capacity ofagent provocateur.’The French accent was confident and immaculate. He had a villa inProvence, natch. ‘From what motive, I cannot tell,’ he continued. ‘Nor am I particularly interested. I do, however, decline to say anything further to you.’

‘Unless you’re in the presence of a lawyer.’

‘Good day to you, Mr Fincham.’ Glasses on.

‘My friend also told me that you handled the payment of his new employee.’

No answer. I knew there weren’t going to be any more answers from Mr Spencer, but I thought I’d press on anyway. ‘My friend told me that you signed the credit slip yourself,’ I said. ‘In your own hand.’

‘I am rapidly tiring of news of your friend, Mr Fincham. I repeat, good day to you.’

I got to my feet and moved towards the door. The chair screamed its relief.

‘Does the offer of the telephone still stand?’ He didn’t even look up.

‘The cost of the call will be added to your bill.’

‘Bill for what?’ I said. ‘You haven’t given me anything.’

‘I have given you my time, Mr Fincham. If you have no desire to make use of it, that is entirely your concern.’

I opened the door.

‘Well, thanks anyway, Mr Spencer. By the way…’ I waited until he had looked up. ‘There’s some ugly talk at the Garrick that you cheat at bridge. I told the chaps that it was all rubbish and tommy-rot, but you know what these things are like. Chaps get an idea in their head. Thought you ought to know.’

Pathetic. But all I could think of at the time.

The clerk sensed that I was not a terriblygrata persona,and warned me, peevishly, to expect a bill for services in the next few days.

I thanked him for his kindness and turned towards the staircase. As I did so, I noticed that someone else was now treading my path through back numbers ofExpressions,the journal for American Express card-holders.

Short fat men in grey suits: this is a large category.

Short fat men in grey suits whose scrotums I have held in a hotel bar inAmsterdam: this is a very small category.

Tiny, in fact.

Five

Take a straw and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is.