The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  First he had shot the man, one bullet, through the kneecap. The pain had been sufficient to persuade him that paying up was sensible. There had been a trail of blood across the carpet as the man had clung for support to furniture before getting to the safe and extracting the necessary cash. But that had dealt only with the debt. Robbie had then settled the matter of respect. If he hadn’t laughed and spat, the man would still have been walking, awkwardly, down a Bermondsey street. But he had, so there was a handgun in his face. Nobody in the block had heard, seen or knew anything. The police had called it a ‘wall of silence’. A few knew who had collected a debt and killed, and word spread among those who regarded it necessary to have a guy of cool nerve on the edge of the payroll.

  Robbie’s second target was an Albanian trying to muscle into the cocaine trade at Canada Water where the City people had their apartments: a nightclub owner had hired him to take out a rival who interfered in profit margins. Since then, four years in the trade, the numbers had ticked up and a reputation had been established.

  He was dropped off outside a mini-mart. He was being cautious. He went through and out at the side entrance. The rain was easing. He had a mile to walk and he blended well.

  He went past the house and saw the car parked in the driveway. He checked his watch and was satisfied.

  Between them, his father and grandfather – Jerry Cairns and Granddad Cairns – took the contracts, evaluated them, put a price on them and slipped the necessary information to Robbie. He didn’t need to know the customer, just as he didn’t need detail on the personal life of the target. If his father or grandfather thought the money was right, Robbie Cairns sent his sister to the quartermaster they used, took out the weapon, passed it and …

  Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson ambled along the pavement and the last drips of the shower made the pavement glisten in the lights.

  Robbie didn’t need to know anything about him.

  Robbie swivelled and looked behind himself, left and into the café, right and across the street, then far ahead of him and over the shoulder of Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson. He didn’t see a policeman on foot, on a bicycle, or in a patrol car. He stepped into the target’s path.

  Maybe three or four seconds before his life was curtailed, Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson realised the mortal danger confronting him. The expressions on his face did a slide-show of emotions: astonishment, disbelief, then the aggression that might have had a chance – small – of saving him. The Baikal was out, safety lever off, and aiming for the head. The man tried to duck and to lunge. Robbie fired once. A hell of a shot, a class shot. The target had been moving and weaving, and the one shot had taken him clean through the front of the skull, just above deep lines over the forehead. The man crumpled. The life of Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson was extinguished about halfway between the café and the newsagent’s.

  The blood had not spread far on the pavement – hadn’t reached the kerb and the gutter – before Robbie Cairns was away. Didn’t run: to run was to attract attention. He just walked briskly. Went past the café, down the side alley, into the car park, saw the car as it edged forward to meet him, and he was gone. It was like another notch for him. He had done it well but, then, he always did.

  Back over the river, the Baikal would go to Leanne. His sister would move the weapon back to the armourer, clear his clothing, and dispose of it beyond the reach of the forensics people.

  If he was in high demand, his price would rise. Maybe he was the best. He felt good, confident, and the car wasn’t yet at any of the bridges that would take them south over the river and on to their own ground. Outside the newsagent’s the blood had not had time to congeal.

  It was not territory they normally worked on: vacation leave had eroded the teams based nearer to this murder site in Tottenham.

  Bill said, ‘That’s one shot, professional – a man who knows his business. That is top grade.’

  There was white tenting behind the police tapes. A photographer worked inside it and a scenes-of-crime technician had bent to make a chalk mark on the wet paving that circled the single discharged cartridge case. The flap was lifted by a local detective and the young woman had pride of place at the front. Mark Roscoe was at her shoulder, and the Yorkshireman craned behind him.

  Suzie said, ‘The target isn’t some innocent. Wilson’s record goes back twenty-eight of his forty-five years. He was a hustler, ducked and wove. There’ll be a deal in the immediate background where he’s come up short or welshed. He’ll have known where he shouldn’t be, where he was threatened. On his own patch he must have felt secure.’

  The body lay awkward and angled, a leg bent under the weight of the stomach, an impossible contortion for a living man. The colour had already drained from the hands and ankles and from the face, except where the hole was. Very neat, precise. Could have dropped a pencil into it.

  Roscoe scratched his chin. The sight of death seldom fazed him. ‘There’s a shooter right in front of his face.’

  ‘Not a man who freezes.’ Suzie had confidence and gave her opinion, as if it was expected of her.

  They had come up to north London because there was little to detain them in their office, and the failed air-conditioning was an incentive to be clear of their workspace. The word, immediate, on the team screens was that the killing had been simple and ruthless, that the hitman should be of interest.

  Bill said, ‘Would have taken evasive action. It’s right in his face, his life on the line.’

  Suzie said, ‘But only one shot discharged. It’s a quality hit, boss.’

  Bill said, ‘About as good as it gets.’

  Roscoe grimaced, then turned on his heel. His own girl, Chrissie, did scenes-of-crime: funny thing, but he’d never met up with her inside a tent she shared with a cadaver. Back at their flat, he wouldn’t tell her about the killing of Wilson – a tosser who must have overstepped whatever line was drawn in front of him – and she wouldn’t tell him where she’d been and what bodies she’d sidled towards with her box of tricks and kit. They both did need-to-know, took the principle to the limits and had little to talk about. They relied on sex, hiking on Welsh, Cumbrian and Scottish mountains – anything and anywhere that challenged – and movies, when one or both would be asleep within half an hour. He liked her a lot, was comfortable with her, but they didn’t seem – either of them – to fancy commitment.

  He walked away. Bill followed and Suzie skipped to keep up. He hadn’t spoken to Chrissie that morning – she’d been gone when he’d woken, her half of the bed empty; he hadn’t spoken to her the night before because there had been a briefing on developments from the cache, and by the time he came back she’d already been in bed, light out, regular breathing that said ‘sleep’. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her. They might get some time at the weekend, and might not.

  Bill was another seldom disturbed by corpses and violent death. He said cheerfully. ‘What I’d think, boss, is—’

  ‘What would you think?’ Not usual for Roscoe to be scratchy, sour.

  ‘Forget it, boss.’

  ‘Sorry … was playing the pig. What would you say?’

  ‘I’d think that would be a good player to put in the cage, boss. All right, off our usual ground, but he’s a man who’ll move and won’t just be local. We’re late on the scene, it’s already happened and the remit is to be proactive, but what I think, boss, is the joker’s a good guy to put away.’

  Suzie said, breathy, ‘He’d come at a price and he’d be in demand.’

  They were at the car. Roscoe wondered how it would be to look into the face of a man who held a handgun, had no shake in his hands, had certainty in his eyes – wondered how it would be to see the finger tighten on the trigger bar … didn’t know.

  The hospital in Vukovar was a fifteen-minute drive from the village. It was a pleasant site, with space left among the buildings for lawns, trees and flowers. On one of the larger and more expansive areas of grass a white canvas marquee had been ere
cted and next to it was parked a refrigerated trailer. A diesel-powered generator throbbed between them.

  The hospital had history – and William Anders had helped to put it on the lists of genocidal war crimes.

  His work now, courtesy of business-class travel and a reasonable degree of comfort, took him to the places where atrocities had blackened a name. He was back and felt good. Vukovar and the hospital had been early among his achievements; a large part of his reputation as a forensic scientist had been built on the excavation of the murdered corpses of men who had been brought from the hospital by the victors of the battle, driven from the town to the farm, then slaughtered, dumped in a pit and buried. Anders had been in the second wave of experts to descend on Vukovar and – he would say it himself – his work had been of the highest quality. That day, he had four bodies in the marquee and the trailer, skeletons with clothing still clinging to them.

  He had only the names. Dental and medical records had been lost in the firestorms when the town had suffered artillery bombardment and bombing. There were no rings on the fingers, no silver or gold crucifixes hanging from chains, but he had height approximations and descriptions of clothing from two parents and a widow. He had done the boys first. The father of one was the farmer whose land had been mined and whose plough had exposed the grave site; the other father lived alone and kept his home as a shrine. The interpreter had told Anders, behind a hand, that the mother had been Serb and had run with the younger children. Scraps of clothing were sufficient for identification and estimates of size, stature. The third, the cousin, was decided by elimination – there was always a problem with the results thrown up by his painstaking examinations.

  With his small brush, a spatula and a trowel – much smaller than his wife would use on her geranium pots in faraway San Diego – he had the skills to say how a victim had been put to death. With each corpse he had found bullet and shrapnel scars on bones, then holes and rents in the surviving clothing, but he had also removed the remnants of decayed gristle from the mouths. Usually he maintained total honesty in conversation with victims’ loved ones, and in his detailed reports to investigating magistrates and law-enforcement agencies. He knew of the mutilation of the three young men, and now turned to the last.

  He had the shape of an older man from the construction of the pelvic bones, and could imagine the weight from the tread of the boots worn that night. Therefore he had a name. As background, he had been informed by a policeman, and it was corroborated by a hospital official, that a small group had been in the cornfields, waiting for a munitions delivery. They had stayed too long and had disappeared – until the plough had found them. The smell was foul. It was extraordinary, even to this forensic scientist, how the stench of the long-dead could penetrate his plastic gown to his skin and was hard to remove even with intense scrubbing. He started to work through the pockets of a battlefield camouflage tunic.

  Coins, the fragments of a cigarette packet, a lighter, a handkerchief, still folded, a smooth pebble that might have been a keepsake, a comb – but this was a man of authority in the community and Anders understood the necessity of appearance, even in a goddamn life-and-death military scenario – lightweight gloves, a little torch and a small can of boot polish. He assumed it was for smearing on the face by a man who couldn’t tolerate bending to pick up mud and wipe that on his cheeks. There was also a wad of folded paper.

  In the pit that had been gouged for the four bodies, this corpse was the last to be lifted clear. It had been first in, the deepest, and was the best preserved. There was more flesh on the bones, and the clothing had lasted, as had the boots and the folded paper.

  It was the only piece of paper he had found on any of them.

  He asked an assistant for clean gloves and another pair of tweezers, similar to those his wife used on her eyebrows. When he had what he had requested, and the clean gloves were on his hands, he used his own tweezers and those brought to him to open the closely folded sheet.

  The preservation was remarkable but that didn’t surprise William Anders. Neither did the clarity of the writing, letters and numbers.

  It started as half the size of a postage stamp. Opened out, the single sheet of paper, discoloured and crossed with the folding lines, was a little larger than the packet of twenty Marlboro Lite cigarettes that was already bagged.

  He used a magnifying-glass to read.

  There were moments on all the digs and autopsies when he was able to insinuate himself into the lives of the dead – in Srebrenica, Rwanda, East Timor, by an excavated pit outside Baghdad, and the place where a husband had buried his wife, then play-acted anguish for local TV stations – when he had called back a truth from the past. He didn’t know the significance of what he read but he sensed a moment of importance. The blood rushed into his face.

  With the magnifying-glass covering the smoothed paper, he could make out the name and the individual numbers.

  His back hurt, had stiffened. He felt the craving of the addiction and wasn’t inclined to fight it. He dropped the paper into a plastic sleeve, called a halt and told the assistant they would break for lunch – a sandwich, whatever. He was never put off eating by handling decomposing bodies and the smell that settled in the pores of his skin, never put off a drink and a smoke. He shrugged out of the robe, moved the face mask high on to his forehead, kicked off the plastic boots and shed the gloves. He pushed open the plastic sheets draped over an airlock entry to the marquee and stepped outside.

  Each morning before he went to work, on whatever death site on whichever continent, he topped up his hip flask with Irish whiskey and loaded the leather cigar case to capacity.

  There had been an Anglicised name and a phone number. A different ballpoint had been used to write the name of a hotel.

  He took a serious gulp from the hip flask and felt the glow swill down his throat. Then he used the cutter to trim the end of a cigar and lit it. He wondered who Harvey Gillott was, and in what town or city he could find the Hotel Continental – Setaliste Andrije Kacica Mosica 1.

  ‘I was told you were back in town so I called by.’

  Anders turned. It was the one man he knew in Vukovar and could call a friend, a wiry little runt. He held the cigar between his teeth and let the grin spread.

  It was a mark of affection, Daniel Steyn reckoned. He didn’t think too many others had been offered three swigs from the thimble-sized screw cap at the mouth of the hip flask. Good stuff. There was an Irish bar further down Zupanijska, opposite the site of the command bunker for the 204 Vukovarske Brigade, but the prices were beyond his budget. He had been offered a cigar, which he had declined. Instead he lit another cigarette – they were cheap, brought across the Danube by smugglers from Serbia, usually using the area downriver near Ilok.

  Steyn said, ‘It’s become legend – not in the mythical sense because it happened. Believe me. The teacher, extraordinarily, had a line into a weapons broker and concluded a deal. Cut out government, bypassed the defence ministry, kept the local military in complete ignorance. The teacher said – and would have been about right – that they’d commandeer any hardware. Government and ministry had given up on Vukovar and would have shipped it into the front line protecting Zagreb, while the local military would have tried to get it into Vukovar, rather than the villages, where a thousand fighters were on their last legs and their weapons were useless for lack of resupply.’

  ‘I never heard that before, not in all the times I’ve been here.’

  Steyn dragged hard on his cigarette, then flipped it on to the grass, which in 1991, on 18 November, had been covered with bodies.

  ‘On the night the weapons were supposed to arrive, the teacher and three other men went into the cornfields – a damn hazardous route – and towards Vukovar along the fragile lifeline they called the Cornfield Road. They were caught in the open at dawn and the stuff they’d paid for never came. You got them in there?’

  Anders gestured towards the tenting and the small refrigerated
truck. He and Steyn were from different disciplines. The forensic scientist dealt with the fatal injuries caused by mass execution, major bomb blasts, such as Oklahoma City, or murder where time should have ravaged the potential clues left by a killer. Daniel Steyn was a general practitioner of medicine, but with a bent towards a meld of psychology and psychiatry. His father ran a hardware store in small-town upstate New York so he had paid his own way through university at Madison’s medical faculty. He had practised for a few years in the city and pitched up seventeen years ago in Vukovar, where he had thought there would be a job worth doing. He was now part of the fabric of society there, loathed by local politicians and despised by the town’s doctors, but he hung on and spoke unpleasant truths. He rejoiced when a friend turned up.

  Another cigarette was lit and another ring of ash fell from the cigar. The thimble cup of the hip flask was filled again and passed. Steyn asked, in a harsh east-coast grating accent, ‘You find anything on the bodies – rings, jewellery, religious gear?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There’s a big blame culture here. They’re quality at chucking blame – but not at themselves. They’re always victims. Right now, there are two targets for a shit bucket of blame. First, the government that abandoned them. That was treachery. Second, the man with whom a deal was supposedly done and left them standing unprotected in a field of dead corn. That was betrayal. They’d paid up front – that was where the legend was born.’

  ‘Keep going. I have until my smoke is completed.’

  Steyn jabbed a finger in emphasis. ‘The legend is about a collection. A price was agreed for the munitions, and I don’t know exactly what they were but they would have been important for the defence of that community, and expensive. Everything that anyone owned of value in that village, which was under siege, shelled, mortared and bombed, was dropped into a bag and used as currency for the purchase. It went down the drain. The weapons drop was never made. That is betrayal in my book. Only the teacher had the name of the seller, and he didn’t share it. You with me? The living don’t know who betrayed them. Did it jump out at you?’