‘Nothing.’
‘I helped to make the debt. I’m part of it.’
‘The little rat can sort it,’ she said.
‘How? It’s millions of euros! We live in this dump, he’s sleeping in a car.’
‘He goes to the man and tells him.’
‘Goes to that man?’ Mikey threw his arms wide.
‘He has to face it out.’
‘You know what you’re saying, Myrtle?’
‘He has to face it out – he’s not our responsibility.’
‘Myrtle, he’s family. All right, mine, not yours, but family.’
‘He can’t run from those people.’ She was decisive.
He conceded. ‘I’ll tell him.’
Loy had brought more coffee.
‘Have you it in your head, is it registered? We’re not going.’ From Snapper, there was now no pretence of friendliness.
‘Mess with me and I can blow you out of the water.’ Jonno could hardly believe he’d said it.
Loy was making a list on a notepad, but Jonno couldn’t read it. Posie had not drunk her latest mug of coffee, and now had her hands over her ears.
Snapper smiled contemptuously. ‘I speak a bit of Spanish – used to come down here more often than now. Lo dicho, dicho esta. Since you know so much, young man, you’ll be aware that that’s about the folly of opening your big mouth, then wishing you could swallow your tongue. Explain. How will you blow me out of the water? I want to hear.’
Jonno looked at the faces. He thought Posie was pleading with him, wanted an end to it. In Sparky’s he saw a sort of aloof neutrality. Loy’s features betrayed amusement. Snapper peered at him. Jonno could back off. Anything that was sensible demanded a shrug, a grunt, a raising of the eyebrows. Some remark about ‘not worth the candle’. Who would have said that Jonno had the streak of bloody-minded obstinacy, and pig-headed contrariness – and something that was about doing, first time in his damned life, something awkward but right? No one. Not even his mother.
An engine started up outside.
Loy lifted the camera off the table and passed it to Snapper. Then, he pushed his notepad aside and picked up the big one. The engine beat steadied, and Snapper had the camera to his eye. He held it rock steady, and did focus turns on the lens.
Jonno said, ‘You have no concern for Geoff and Fran. You’ll use them and chuck them out like an empty fag packet. They’ll not be able to live here. If he’s Russian, let the Russians take him. If his crimes are in Spain, let the people here do the work. You have no authority. What’s so important that you have to come here and destroy the lives of two old people? How do I blow you out of the water? I have a mobile, and there’s a landline in the house. There’s a police station down the road, someone in there who’ll speak fair English. I can go down the stairs, outside, ring the bell next door and speak into their gate system.’
The shutter was going.
Snapper said, quiet and matter of fact, for Loy’s log, ‘That’s it, cat by the tail, cat held over the chipper funnel, cat gone.’
Loy wrote. Posie gave a low moan. The camera went back on the table.
Snapper turned to Jonno. ‘Didn’t catch the last bit, young man. I was watching them put the cat in the chipper. Something about going out? Loy’s made a shopping list, bits and pieces we need. We’ve a float for what it’ll cost, but a receipt would help. Can I give you some advice?’
He was handed the list.
‘What?’
‘Do the shopping. Relax a bit, and look after the lady. Go with the flow. You’re on holiday, here to look after their cat. Enjoy your time in the sunshine. Most days I’m working in people’s homes. We get to be part of the furniture, barely noticed. I hate threatening people, but just consider what I might do, or those I work for, what might happen if you disrupt what we’re at. Use your imagination . . . ‘
Jonno bit his lip and gouged his finger nails into his palms or he might have hit the man.
9
Jonno and Posie had stayed. Neither had checked the flights out, or the bus times from Marbella.
Jonno hadn’t used his mobile or the house phone. A day’s argument had gone unresolved. An atmosphere of armed truce separated them: he and Posie were on the ground floor; they were up stairs and allowed access to the kitchen and bathroom.
He had the shopping list, and Posie said she’d suffocate if she didn’t get out of the bungalow.
They found two Tesco carrier bags in a kitchen cupboard. He supposed it was a mark of trust that he and Posie were permitted to leave by the front door. Or perhaps, they regarded him as incapable of backing his words with actions.
He took the car down to the gates and Posie opened them. He went through and she shut them after him. They passed the big gates, the high walls, the wire and the cameras, and went down the hill.
It was another warm morning, the temperature high for November . . . and the holiday was buggered. He knew it and assumed she did. He drove carefully into the built-up zone. He passed the bus station where he could have bought tickets for Málaga International. When he and Posie had had supper the previous night, an omelette with everything thrown in from the salad box, Loy had come in, pleading a shortage of butter, and apologised for disturbing them. He’d said it was a pleasant evening, not too warm; he hadn’t spoken about targets, or cats that tripped alarms, or about a two-way exchange of threats. When they were clearing breakfast, Sparky had knocked on the kitchen door. He’d brought plastic plates and mugs and asked if he could, please, wash them in the sink. In the hallway, looking for the car keys on the table, he had met Snapper.
‘Morning, Jonno.’
Grudging, ‘Morning.’
‘Seems a nice one.’
‘In case there could be a misunderstanding, I’m standing by what I said yesterday. Your agenda doesn’t include the welfare of Geoff and Fran Walsh. I told you what I thought, and I’m considering what to do.’
‘Know them well, do you, the flight lieutenant and his wife?’
‘Well enough to argue their corner.’
‘See them often?’
He’d thought then that a man-trap yawned in front of him. ‘You know the answer?’
‘I’m assuming you’ve not been here before and that you don’t know them.’
Jonno had bridled. ‘I know what’s right for them.’
‘I’d say that, for an opinionated young man, you know very little – safe, middle-class, privileged and protected, with a meaningless job that does nothing for anyone, and a girl friend to shag which passes the time. You know nothing so I’m trying to teach you that nasty things can happen if important matters are blocked on the whim of a nobody. I’m sure common sense will win through. I hope so.’
There had been a little smile.
They had gone past the bus station and the box-shaped white building that was the police headquarters.
She had seen the sign for the supermarket and pointed, and he’d found the car park. They were like any other couple – he carried the bags and she had the list. The woman on the checkout was blonde and spoke to a customer in Russian. There were papers, books and videos from Russia, curry sauces and cooking oil with Russian characters printed on them. They started on the list.
It seemed obvious to him that police doing surveillance from a home endangered the householder, and obvious also that a conviction came higher up the pecking order than the householders. He was rather proud of his anger – not much of it had been cosmetic. It was a relief to have the shopping to do. School reports had had Jonno as ‘average’, as had university lecturers. No one rated him as a man prepared to make waves. Well, he had . . . and it made him feel good. He studied the shelves. Alternatives? If he hadn’t been shopping, he would have wrestled with the problem. The difficulty for Jonno was that he didn’t doubt himself.
They were all Russians in the shop. The kids made a racetrack of the aisles and had their small fists on the shelves. There was laughter. The world of a long-l
ens camera and the chugging of the chipper’s engine was far off. He didn’t doubt that he was right and that his obligation was to safeguard the Walshes’ interests. They had no reality for him other than as pictures on the walls. He had no way of knowing whether they were good company or God-awful bores. He saw them coming home from London, the man trying to manage with his crutches or walking sticks; there would be police, maybe a consular official, to explain that their property had been used. They would be under armed guard and would have to throw clothes into old suitcases. Then a van would take them away. Later a removals lorry would come. Their lives would be broken. He didn’t know what he could do.
The wire basket jerked down. He had the Tesco bags in one hand and the basket in the other. The weight wrenched his arm.
Posie was in front of him. He turned.
It was the one who had done the jump leads, Marko. He had also shot the cat. Now he grinned and pointed to the new weight in the wire basket: a four-pack of beer. He said, ‘In Moscow, many drink Stary Melnik, but it is not as good as Baltika. Baltika is St Petersburg. The big man, for us, is from St Petersburg. You try our beer. It is the gold, not strong, so you will not sleep all night. You will be able . . .’ He seemed to strip Posie, peel off her dress.
Marko said, ‘We have a good beer in Serbia, but I cannot get it here. You enjoy.’
Posie’s shoulder hit a shelf and milk cartons fell to the floor. Jonno looked at the man. He might have said, ‘Police from Great Britain have forced their way into Geoff and Fran’s home and are using the upstairs attic room as an observation post to watch your villa. They expect a criminal to come and will seek to have him arrested, then extradited to stand trial in our country. Geoff and Fran are in no way responsible for our police being there and spying on you. They are not, in any way, to blame.’
There was a silence, awkward. Then Posie, Jonno and the man were picking up the milk cartons and slotting them back on the shelf. He thought Posie looked terrified, wide-eyed and pale.
The floor was cleared.
Jonno stammered, ‘Thanks for that. I’m really grateful for the suggestion.’
A twenty-euro note fell from the man’s hand into the basket, and again he pointed to the beer. Clear enough: Jonno was his guest.
He was gone. Posie looked back to their list.
He was on the other aisle, close to the freezer section, and checked his list again. He saw her each time he lifted his eye from the list to look at the shelves. She seemed not to notice that he was so close.
The girl was frightened of him.
Did she know he had seen her while they were playing with the hose? His wife said he was an animal, and obsessed with what he had done long ago. She had told him he was a changed man – Alex’s wife said the same of her man – since they had gone away to fight. The Tractor had found them in Prague. Marko had been twenty-one, Alex two years older, when they had joined the irregular force, and had cleansed the villages and towns of Croatia, then moved into Bosnia. They had been on the forward lines at Sarajevo and at Gorazde, but one afternoon – his wife said – had wrought the change in him.
The girl had good legs and a good arse. He knew because he had seen all of her. There had been women that afternoon who were old and ugly. One had bitten his lip and bloodied it; another had been heavily pregnant. The prettiest one, a virgin, had fought, using her nails, teeth and knees. She had screamed loudly enough to bring a crowd around them. The cheering had risen to a crescendo when he had punched the fight out of her, then entered her.
His wife and Alex’s had come to their village on a summer camp in their mid-teens. They were inseparable, and had found good company with the two farm boys. There had been kissing, hay barns and rules. They had married on the same day, in the same church, and gone to the same seaside hostel in Montenegro. On that afternoon, they had been in the cattle byre where the women had been brought. Alex had been in the next stall to him – he couldn’t see him but could hear him, and the shrieks his women had made, then the silences broken only by his grunts.
They had left that village, burned it and put the women on the road after the men were bulldozed into the pit. Their wives knew they had been with the enemy’s women. They knew that defiling them was the ultimate humiliation for that enemy so they did not criticise. His wife had said he was a changed man when the ceasefire was called and the men came home – for a day. It had been said on TV, by an American with the United Nations Police, that ‘war criminals’ would be hunted down so that they faced justice. He and Alex had fled. They had done close protection for a Ukrainian, then had had a better offer from a Russian. Then, as a favour from a lesser man to a bigger, they had been drafted to the Tractor. They had been with him in Hamburg, Marseille and Warsaw, than had come to Marbella and would never go home.
He was at the checkout, paying, when the boy joined the queue. The girl would not stand beside him. When Marko had paid, he waved, and made a drinking gesture, then went out into the sunshine and wondered . . . He was late, and hurried away.
Xavier thought both parties careless.
He had the photographs. The one of Jonno had been taken from the upstairs window: he was near to the back of the garden and the telephoto lens showed each blemish on his skin, as well as the boy’s angst. The girl was shown at the washing line, hanging things out to dry. She was suffering, clearly, conscious of the intrusion, and made sure her underwear was masked by blouses and jeans. He also had photos of the goons who protected Pavel Ivanov. The call from Snapper, scrambled, had been brief.
‘I’ll handle this. He’s only a kid.’
‘If you were to ask me to call the Boss on it, what is she going to do?’
‘Nothing. I’ll field it. I wouldn’t normally but I belted him verbally. Gave him something to think about. The girl’s not a problem. I reckon my Loy will sort her out. But I wanted you to know where we were. Cast an eye over them.’
Xavier – gaunt and spare, with close-cut greying hair – had done undercover before Thames House and the Graveyard Team. He understood the art of moving on streets and on transport, being seen but not remembered. He had been in through the shop door.
He knew that the meeting between the shelves had not been pre-planned: the girl had backed off, as if she’d been hit, and the boy had looked ill at ease. Xavier had hovered and sucked in the necessary information – they had met before, reason unknown, but neither had anticipated meeting there. From watching, inside and out, he had enough, he thought, to calm Snapper.
The Mercedes had been parked on that street, Avenida Arias de Velasco, near to a motorcycle business. The second guard was in the driver’s seat, smoking, and hadn’t used his mirrors. As a young detective constable, Xavier had infiltrated crime groups, had played the small-time dealer or the hood who was trying to break into a bigger league. From what he could remember, they all feared – the big players – they would be tracked. Not by the police – they expected police tails – but by their own. They faced more danger from being targeted by other criminals than by the police. Were they complacent? Stupid? Or unprofessional? If Xavier had shown out to the one coming out of the store with his shopping or the one in the car, he would have considered retiring and begging his wife to let him help at her florist business in north London. And the kids?
Jonno and Posie knew nothing. Snapper had told him of the stress and the arguing. In his hire car he had picked them up when they’d driven past the crumbling hotel, followed them and seen where they’d parked. He’d eased out of his vehicle and done some window-staring at the motorbike shop. He’d used a couple of the old tricks that surveillance people did and villains practised when they were checking for watchers. First he’d stood on the pavement and made a pretence of answering his phone. He put it to his ear, then swivelled and spun because that was what people did when they talked on the phone. That way he’d had the best view of the bad guy’s car and the front of the shop. When he had come out he had gone to the back of his Seat and lifted the
boot, which masked his face, to watch the Mercedes leave and the kids coming out into the street. He had their faces in view, and would have bet his shirt that they had made no call while he couldn’t see them. The atmosphere between them was unhappy, as Xavier read it.
He told Snapper that the kids wouldn’t give him hassle, and that the bodyguards were flaky – they had lost the art of suspicion: they might have forgotten who they were, where they’d come from and what their reputation had been.
She was shop-soiled. Tommy King couldn’t claim she had had ‘one careful owner’. And there was the problem of her eye, but makeup could camouflage the bruising. He was selling his girl. During the night, when he had been dozing in the car and had thought she was asleep, the interior light had come on because she had opened the door. He’d had the back of the convertible, and she was in the front passenger seat. She’d bloody near done a runner.
He had left his normal haunts and hit the road for Mijas. A track had snaked off to his right, then gone through a forest of close-planted pines to a cul-de-sac of villas. Tommy King had heard that the Albanian who lived there had bought it dirt cheap off an Irishman, who was now in HMP Belmarsh and unlikely to be wanting it any time soon. Two or three years ago the property would have fetched more than two million euros but the market had plummeted. It was still worth good money, though. It had high granite walls, with coiled wire on top, and a camera tracked him to the gates. Dogs barked. He’d told the girl that if she tried another walkabout he’d mash her face – do it seriously, not just a slap.
She’d perked up when she’d seen the size of the gates and the height of the wall – might have thought she’d landed on her feet, not her back. She was smoothing her hair while Tommy King was speaking into the intercom, and she was straightening her dress when the gate opened enough for them to walk through. The villa was white stucco. Flowers sprouted from pots and there wasn’t a leaf on the patio. Two Mercedes were parked at the front, one low-slung, which showed it was armour-plated. That meant the Albanian’s brothel chain was holding up well in the hard times. He thought that until they were ready to put her in the marketplace in Fuengirola, or Benalmadena or Calahonda, she’d be in a shed out the back, near the kennels.
The Outsiders Page 19