They had dominated Sparky’s world. There had been ‘officers’ in Social Services: they had controlled the care orders that put him in foster homes; more of them had denied the child the right to meet, or know, his blood parents. They had decreed where he lived and what schools he went to.
‘All hell breaks loose when it’s an officer.’
The fingers worked at his shoulders and had started loosening the muscles . . . There were court officers, probation officers and prison officers. If one was struck – the equivalent of a killing in combat – the storm squad would come. The beating would be beyond sight of the cameras and would leave no marks.
‘In the Vietnam war, and the first time down in the Gulf, the Americans fragged officers – that’s dropping a fragmentation grenade beside an officer when he was asleep, if he was too keen to get the guys out into the jungle or the dunes. They wanted to stay alive – armies are made up of survivors, not heroes. The guy who does the courier run or who cleans the latrine or cooks, he’s easy to kill. A big officer is on a different level. Understand?’
She didn’t answer. Her fingers kneaded the muscles, softening them.
Patsy had tried to do the same but had been governed by the sympathy cult, like he was an animal with a thorn in its paw. There had been officers in his parachute battalion, a Sunray who had backed him and whom he would have followed halfway to Hell. There were officers on the other side, but they were Arabs and Pashtuns. They didn’t have badges of rank and could only be identified by the ‘Greenfly’ pictures, which came from the intelligence people. Their officers were vermin and didn’t have the same weight as his own officers. The man on the lawn with the dog had proper rank. Her fingers stayed on his shoulders.
‘It would be wickedness.’
Sparky had not known about wickedness before he’d come to the gardens. The target had the status and presence of a senior man. Sparky had been on parades and in the combat units when a big man had arrived to inspect or be briefed. They did not need to swagger or shout. They were usually quiet and didn’t wave their arms about. They might not be tall or imposing, but those around them clung to their words. The villa owner had cash and a fine home, but was rubbish.
‘You don’t want to hear what I tell you. Believe me. Killing with this rifle is wickedness.’
She kept at the work. She had soft fingers, but he thought her breathing had quickened. He thought she didn’t hear him, had no wish to. She manipulated, was better at it than Jonno, who had been the shoulder for him.
‘It’s addictive – you might as well be on coke or brown. A sniper’s no different from a teenager high on pills. A sniper’s set apart from others because he has the ‘‘power’’. So many go after it, and think afterwards they’ll just drop it on the carpet beside the bed, like the book they’re reading. Doesn’t happen. We get to think we can live with it, switch it on and off. We can do the bit where we look through the sight and see the man who has authority or is lowest on the ladder, the cook or the shit-hole digger, or the dicker whose role in the war is to sit under a tree and hold his kerchief to his face when the patrol goes by and pretend to sneeze. We can see them all – and we think then that we can get on the big freedom bird, fly home and it’s all forgotten. You know what they do on the way back, Posie?’
Her fingers stayed at his shoulders and the movements were not harder or softer.
‘They stop in Cyprus for what they call ‘‘decompression’’. Cold drinks, sport, films, air-conditioning. They’re given thirty-six hours. Six months of killing, and watching mates get put in bags for shipping out, and the boys get a day and a half of a good time. The powers-that-be do that, in their wisdom, because it might stop a few beating shite out of their women or breaking up the local pub. Back home they don’t understand, don’t care, about the business of killing. It’s in us all, the hunger for the power it brings, and it breeds wickedness. Believe me? It’s dressed up. Killing in Afghanistan secures our way of life in the UK. It’s fine. It’s duty, it’s in the service of our country. Not to worry, guys, because it’s all legal. Posie, it is wickedness. Go down that route, and you’ll never be the same person. You want that?’
Easier for him if she’d answered. She did not.
‘I don’t talk about this. I hide it, try to forget it. But it’s back. The guys I work with don’t know it – no reason they should. You’ve given it life.’
Simple when the boy, Jonno, had harassed him and roused his temper to breaking point.
‘I promise you, Posie, once done, it’s never undone.’
He could see the garden, where the dog sat patiently, waiting for the target to come back into the night air. Perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps he would cheat them – Posie and Jonno – and stay inside until the time they had to quit or face a closed window. He didn’t know if he could fight her for long enough.
‘They’re sort of vague, Boss. Nobody I could find offered any sensible explanation.’
‘Is the pilot drunk?’
‘If he is, they’re not admitting to it.’ Kenny was back from his second failure at fact-finding.
‘Is the fucking plane falling apart?’
‘The best I can get, Boss, is that the delay is for “operational reasons”.’
‘You can see it from here.’ She gestured extravagantly towards the windows. The aircraft in BA livery was on the apron and the steps were in place. There was no fuel tanker beside it, no platform for an engineer to climb on and no one in white overalls hurrying up and down the steps with a toolbox. ‘Looks fine, and we’re stuck.’
Dottie said drily, ‘Makes you feel like one of those apes, Boss, marooned here – perhaps for ever.’
Normally Dottie could lighten her mood. Not tonight. She sat in the lounge, Dottie on her left and Kenny on her right.
Winnie Monks said, ‘Sort of sums it up. A total fucking foul-up. Sorry and all that, guys.’
‘I think we’ll manage one more cigarette, Izzy.’
‘One more, Myrtle, a slow one, and then we’re on our way.’
Dismissed, Jonno slipped out into the night.
He had lost the stomach to fight her. He could have sat in the kitchen and listened to Spanish radio music, or in the lounge and watched the TV, maybe found some football.
He went out through the kitchen door and skirted the grass, hugging the shadows. He went quietly to the back of the garden. He’d had no training and his silence pleased him. He went through the old gate, leaving it ajar, and passed into the line of trees and scrub. He used one hand to locate branches that hung across the path, and weighed each footfall for dried leaves and dead twigs. He climbed where the cat had shown him.
He had to feel for a niche on every ledge, then test each move and hope it would hold his weight. The moon was not yet over the rim of the cliff, and the lights of the garden at the Villa del Aguilla were masked by the conifers around the boundary. His face hurt, and his pride was damaged.
Twice, Jonno caused little cascades of stones. He believed he had missed the main route traversing the cliff face, and didn’t know whether he was too far to the left or the right of it. The muscles in his hands and ankles ached. Once upon a time he would have given up and gone down, but now he was on the cliff without an escape route and no knowledge of how much further he had to go. A nightmare came into his head.
He might miss the ledge where the cave was. He might end up perched on the cliff throughout the night, reliant on the strength of his fingers and toes to stop him falling. In his mind he saw the rockface, the boulders and jagged splintered stone at the base. He went on.
Did it matter to him if a shot was fired behind him? Jonno didn’t know. He went on up the cliff. The pain was worse and he slowed.
19
Jonno sat cross-legged on the ledge.
There were no birds wheeling above him, breaking the pattern of the stars, or calling in the trees below. There was no cat’s howl or radio playing within earshot, and no car engine powering up the hill to
wards the villas. The wind had dropped. The last leaves, fading and brittle, didn’t rustle below him. The perfect silence ebbed around him, except when he was tearing paper. He had a fine view of the garden.
But for the dog, it was deserted. Was a glass half full or half empty? Jonno would have supposed that by nature he was an optimist. He was most likely to believe in good things around each corner – he didn’t mind going to work; he didn’t moan about a cold or flu because it would be gone by the end of the week; the money in his bank account would last, somehow, until the next pay day. Usually he smiled. Perched on the ledge, with an uninterrupted view of the stage set below, he felt the nag of the pessimist. It was hunter-and-prey stuff, except that the prey lurked inside the building and might not emerge, and the clock was ticking: a window would open and close. The hunter was maimed, had lost the will.
It was cold and sometimes Jonno shivered. There was no wind to carry away the paper he tore up. The pieces were scattered close to him. He would have liked them to float away, silhouetted against the arc lights around the garden. Beyond it was Marbella – a disappointment.
There was an old town with some tenth-century Moorish fortifications at one end and bars, cafés and boutiques, but he had been through the little streets only once. There was a nightclub with good music, but any atmosphere seemed drained out of the place. There was a pavement outside the club, and a high kerb where a man’s foot had caught and he’d tripped. There was a street in the next resort, where people had put flowers among a bar’s tables. There were empty restaurants, Irish pubs with no punters, deserted beaches, and apartment blocks festooned with for-sale and to-let signs. He recalled the bus ride from Málaga International and the Jonah who had talked gloom until Posie was destroyed and he had lost his temper. Men in the house. A rifle delivered to him. Threats. His girlfriend shagged. What made least sense to Jonno was that he had signed up for the conspiracy. Posie too. It was like, he thought, a torch had been handed to him and he held it with Posie. All the bastards who should have been running with the damned thing had gone, leaving it with them.
He glanced again at his watch. He would never come back here.
He worked feverishly to clear the bags from the cave of their contents, destroying what he found. No shot would be fired that night. He thought they would go through the window and have it slam shut behind them. The weapon would lie where the leaves would cover it and might not be found for a year or a decade. He thought that they would go back – him, Posie and Sparky – to different and flawed lives. The retired flight lieutenant, on his crutches, would return with Fran Walsh and they’d find their home scrubbed clean, and a note left about the cat’s death, natural causes, and sympathy. They might talk at the gate with the owner of the next property. and might hear the chipper start up for the destruction of tree branches lopped with a chain saw. Long after he had left the ledge, a wind would get up. It would blow hard, gusting against the rockface above Marbella. The paper pieces would be lifted to scatter and drop. They would be like confetti – and as valueless. He was a driven man, working fast. He did the passports and the wads of cash alternately. He had found another bag deeper in the cave.
They would discover, when the wind blew, that the garden had a light coating of torn pages from the passports. He didn’t know which documents carried the photos of the Russian and his men. Perhaps one of them would come next week to check that damp had not seeped into the knotted bags inside the bin-liners, and would find the debris. That would be a pity. Jonno liked the picture of the torn squares floating down to mess up the lawn. He might have done ten passports and many thousands of notes, in various denominations, American dollars and euros. His fingers ached. He did the passport pages one at a time, the notes in small bundles.
Jonno thought he had reached way beyond his capabilities. He had made a man his target – but had been cheated.
The muscles had softened. Her fingers still worked on them. Her reward was the quiet. The magazine, in his hands, no longer rattled.
He said quietly, ‘I told a psychiatrist what I’d done, my military trade, and the sheer bloody pleasure I took from it. Told him that others in the Company were jealous of me because of what I did. He said there was an opera, that a man called Faust had made a pact with the devil. He was given all he wanted. Faust had everything and was above ordinary people – like I was, like Jonno wants to be, like maybe you do. It’s good while it lasts, but it’s not for ever. The psychiatrist said the pact allowed the devil to call in the debt. Faust is taken by the devil to Hell. It’s the danger of the pact, Posie. The rest copped out. Do we? What do you want, and Jonno? It costs to go with the pact, and the debt will be called in. A time bomb in you. That’s its price.’
She didn’t interrupt.
Posie could have picked up the rifle and taken it from him. She had no doubt about it. She could have slid her right hand forward from his shoulder and down his arm. Then she’d have lifted the fingers that held the rifle and let the hand drop to the table. She’d have worked her own fingers up the barrel to his other hand and moved it. She could easily have taken the rifle from him.
Then?
She had no idea what she would do then. She had not handled a rifle.
None of her friends had.
Her fingers strayed only as far as the top of his back.
She had beaten him, was certain of it. But time moved on. She didn’t speak because she wasn’t ready to break the spell she had cast. The garden stayed empty, except for the dog, and she had no target . . . Wickedness? Posie had never played to high stakes.
There was no target.
‘I suppose it’s that time, Myrtle. Time to be off our backsides and on the move.’
‘Likely it is, Izzy.’
They had smoked three ‘last’ cigarettes. A little heap of the squashed ends lay at their feet. He rooted in his pocket and she wondered if he was about to take the pistol out. He didn’t. It was a long time since the man with Myrtle Fanning had carried a shooter, not since the days of south-east London and Mikey slipping out through the back door, crossing the yard, unlatching the gate, and turning to give her his wink. She’d had the wink a couple of hours before the Flying Squad had shot him in the leg. Bloody lucky for him that they hadn’t seen the imitation Browning or the detectives would have fired for his chest and head, double tap.
He took a small plastic bag from his pocket. He struck his lighter, and gestured for her to shield the flame with her hands. He was bent low off their stone seat, carefully picking up each of their fag ends and slipping them into the bag. The effort of bending double affected his chest and he spluttered.
‘Force of habit, Myrtle. Enough fine men have been done on a chucked-away fag end.’
He knotted the end of the bag and put it in his pocket. She approved. There was much about Izzy Jacobs of which she thought well. He put out his hand, reached under her arm and took the elbow to help her upright. The cold had come on. In her part of London, the women might have done the reconnaissance, or taken a message from one housing block to another, but they did not go out on a blag. The men would be juiced up, sweaty and excited. It was good that Izzy understood about not leaving DNA at a crime scene, and it would be a crime scene. Next out of his pocket was the hip flask.
When he’d opened the screw top, he used a clean handkerchief to wipe the chrome rim, then passed it her.
She thought that gentlemanly, and took a decent swig. She felt better, and warmer, for it. He followed. The handkerchief went into his pocket, with the flask. The plastic gloves came out, and were pulled on, then the pistol.
‘You happy with that, Izzy?’
‘Where it’s come from, yes.’
A little light from the moon found the barrel of the Jericho 941, and there was the rasp as he armed it. He said they wouldn’t be hurrying because it was a steep climb. She knew what had been done in the villa at the top of the hill because the girl had told her. Nice girl, pretty little thing. She’d have been a go
od witness for the prosecution, at the Central Criminal Court, or out at Snaresbrook, because she told a story without embroidery. Myrtle Fanning would not have heard from anyone else in such clarity what had happened to her Mikey, or to the rat who was Mikey’s nephew. She knew the girl had had, damn near, a foot on the aircraft steps but had turned round and come back. There was a boy there too. The girl hadn’t explained what she and the boy had done, or were going to do, in the property next to the Villa del Aguila. Not her place to ask questions, Myrtle had thought, but she reckoned herself blessed that she knew what had been done to Mikey.
Izzy said that they would take their time because he didn’t want to be too out of breath when they came to the gate. The girl had said what was there, and where the cameras were. Funny that she hadn’t asked why they were sitting on the rock. Not the esplanade at bloody Ramsgate, was it? They started out.
He had hold of her arm with one hand, and the pistol in the other.
They didn’t speak. Nothing particular to say. It was a nice evening, Myrtle reflected, with little chance of rain.
They’d take their time, but they’d get to the top of the track where the villa was, too bloody right they would, and it was good to feel his hand on her arm and to know he carried the Jericho 941.
The voice was close to his ear.
Ivanov’s people were up from the table and taking the pork from the oven. The Major’s warrant officer and master sergeant had cleared the table of the soup – potato, carrot, turnip, onion, cucumber, sour cream, which had been as good as his wife had made in Pskov. He was at the head of the table, a place of honour, and he thought it showed respect.
The Major listened. He strained to hear. Old combat missions had long ago damaged his hearing.
‘They would never come with you. The people at home, that’s a different matter. You’d lose the protection of your men. They would leave you because you would no longer offer them benefit. I’m domesticated now, and my boys have families. We’re fat. We dealt with the two who insulted me as we would years ago, but we couldn’t do it every day. Your men would leave you. They’d go home and breathe poison into any ear that wished to hear it. Why are mine here? They have nowhere else to go – except to The Hague or the court in Belgrade. If you settled here, my friend, you would be alone and without protection. You would have no roof. I thought I envied you, and I believe you’re a little jealous of me. We were both wrong.’
The Outsiders Page 38