The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

‘It’ll be worthwhile or we sink, Dermot. Are we serious people or do we just shuffle paper? He’s a good target, as good as any. We need to push our investigation into Gillot’s past, dig there with a bloody pickaxe. We can keep the expense to a minimum. Come on, Dermot, go for it.’

  ‘A successful prosecution – I won’t argue, we need that.’ He tilted back his chair, and would have been aware that the others in the team, nine of them, had abandoned their screens to watch him. Penny thought he liked an audience. His hands came up, palms together – in prayer pose. His words were now slightly muffled, but still distinct. ‘Contracts to kill, in my experience, arise when a debt is not paid, an agreement is broken, one party reneges. Each gangland killing in Manchester, Glasgow, London or down on the Costa is less about territory and more about retribution for a deal not honoured. I venture that Harvey Gillot is believed by the people of this village to have broken a deal. I suppose we have to hope that the hitman – if he exists – moves at a steady, snail-like pace towards the target, and that we might just gather enough evidence to warrant an arrest. Brilliant.’

  Penny Laing basked. She imagined a beleaguered garrison, a dependence on weapons coming through, the resupply of ammunition, a deal done and … She had seen, on field trips out of Kinshasa, the aftermath of combat.

  Her team leader let his eyes float over the others around the big central table. He would have been weighing whose work was important and whose could go on to a back-burner. He gestured. ‘Asif, would you please go with Penny? First thing tomorrow … Yes, I know the problem, but it’ll be less than a week away. Make arrangements, please, Penny, to turn over the embers of that village. Skewer him, please. Skewer Harvey Gillot.’

  He sat in an easy chair. A table light in the hall and the porch lights were on, but in the living room he preferred darkness and the curtains were open at the picture windows. Harvey Gillot nursed a cut-class tumbler that had been refilled twice. He could see out over the east shoreline of the island.

  Much of his life passed through his mind. There was moonlight on the sea and enough wind for tiny white scrapes to be whipped up. The dog slept near his feet. Below him the waves rippled on the rocks at either side of the narrow Church Ope Cove, but he couldn’t see them. Away to his left, just visible, was the ruined tower of Rufus Castle. Shards of light fell on old scaffolding. Childhood? Hardly worth thinking about. Only kid in the road who had won entry to the Royal Grammar School. Shunned by most in his class because his Stoughton accent clashed with those from Merrow, Shalford or Wonersh. Didn’t embrace the middle-class attitudes of the herd, but also rejected the pride, obstinacy, of his father’s blue-collar roots: the post office supervisor who wore a tie and a white shirt to work after twenty years’ service. No hobbies. Where had he been happiest? Happiness, as he had known it, was in a café near the gates of the barracks. Squaddies came there and tolerated a twelve-year-old sitting near them, hanging on their words about weapons they test-fired. He’d read the Jane’s books on infantry weapons and armoured vehicles and was a walking encyclopedia on military gear. The squaddies had tolerated him enough to take him to one of the Aldershot ranges to watch live firing. That experience had been the thrill of his life. It had been a hell of a bad day when the barracks had closed, the soldiers had left and the café had shut its door.

  Had wanted work, not college. His first boss was Ray Bridge, who had chided him for lack of ambition in not furthering his education. That had been a week before he was sent with the catalogue of office gear to Solly Lieberman’s place. More thoughts drifted. There was a ferry, white-painted, the moon’s light latching on to it, ploughing at pace towards Weymouth, its cabins and passenger rooms ablaze with colour. Four months afterwards he had ditched his job selling stationery. He had sent Ray Bridge a postcard from Peshawar, North West Frontier, up in the hills from the Pakistan capital, Islamabad. Dear Ray, Thought you would like to know that I am getting on well. Many opportunities here for selling, but not much demand for stationery. All best wishes, Harvey (Herbert) Gillot. Had chuckled when he had posted it in the lobby of Green’s Hotel, and now managed a croak-laugh as he sipped his drink and watched the ferry glide on. Doubted that Ray Bridge – who would now be knocking on eighty if his toes hadn’t curled – would have equated ambition with a contract taken out.

  In Peshawar, with Solly Lieberman, he had learned how to move on Blowpipe ground-to-air missiles and get them into the hands of the hairy bastards, our best friends of the day, who were fighting the Russians, our best enemies of the day. Some were bought by Saudis, others by Pakistani intelligence people, and more had been neither bought nor sold but were the property of Benjie Arbuthnot, who was deniable, a station officer, God incarnate, the possessor of the biggest short-wave radio Harvey Gillot had ever seen and limitless supplies of Black Bush. Solly Lieberman had organised the traffic of those MANPADS so that the big man had clean hands. The money was good and it was irrelevant that the man-portable air defence system of the Blowpipe was next to useless, that the mujahideen couldn’t score hits with it – they were hardly going to when, two years earlier, the guys down in the South Atlantic had let off ninety and achieved two strikes, one of which was a friendly. He’d never seen a man drink what Benjie Arbuthnot put away. And Harvey Gillot was being paid good money. He carried Solly Lieberman’s bags and ran his laundry for him – and might just have wiped his butt if he’d been asked to. Those had been the start of the good days.

  Yes, it had been his intention to tell Josie that evening about a problem, what he had told the policeman was an issue. Couldn’t.

  There had been a message on the answerphone. She’d be late. There was a supper dish in the freezer and it would microwave. No explanation of where she was, why she was out late, who, if anyone, she was with. Would he see that the horse had its nutrients? He had no close friend on the Isle of Portland, no one to sit with and pour a share of the Scotch or Irish. Harvey Gillot was not well-read. He knew nothing of Thomas More and his fate half a millennium before, but he knew of the words that that saintly man had written in the year before his execution at the hands of an axeman. Perhaps the intelligence was flawed. Perhaps there was no contract, and no hitman had been hired. Perhaps no shadows wavered beyond the throw of the porch lights. More had written: A drowning man will catch at straws. He filled his glass again. The wind had come up and whipped the branches. He heard the clatter of a plant pot falling outside on the patio and rolling.

  He expected he would need to refill the glass a third or a fourth time, rare for him. He listened for, but didn’t hear, the crunch of her car’s tyres on the gravel of the drive and cursed her for not being there.

  Harvey Gillot could remember it all so well. He understood why a contract was taken and a man would be paid to kill. He didn’t know if he would sleep.

  7

  A tongue washed him, slobbered over his cheeks, and he moved sharply. Then he heard the glass hit the floor and Harvey Gillot was awake. He swore. It had been good crystal and was chipped. A chip could bloody a lip and … He stood. Bright sunlight flooded into the room and the patio was bathed in clear colours from the flowers, the sea’s expanse and the skies. There was little wind to stir the bushes at the garden’s edge where the ground fell away to the cove, the castle and the ruined church. The dog crawled across him. It was responsible for chipping the glass and dislodging it from his grip. He pushed the animal away. The stink of Scotch was rank on his clothing and the chair. He headed for the kitchen to collect a cloth and realised it was the first time in years that he’d slept in an easy chair, clutching an unfinished measure of whisky. The dog wanted breakfast and had disturbed him to get fed. It probably wanted to go outside and pee and … He remembered why he had been in the chair, late at night, anaesthetised by Scotch.

  He recalled what he’d intended to say.

  But when he’d been ready to say it she hadn’t been there.

  He found a cloth under the sink, in the bucket where it always was, padded back into the
living room and rubbed it hard against the brocade. He heard quiet voices. Recognised hers, not his. He ditched the cloth and went to the bedroom door. It was ajar and he hovered. The room faced the front and the drive. He heard Josie’s laughter and imagined she was at an open window: the second voice was deeper, confident – the bloody gardener’s. He pushed the door wider. Nigel was – predictably – at the window. Josie was – expected – beside it and had her back to Harvey. She wore a sheer robe, the silky one, and had it tight at the waist. He didn’t know what she was wearing underneath or what was on offer to the gardener …

  She turned away from the window. ‘God, you look a shambles, Harvey.’

  ‘What time did you get in?’

  ‘Don’t know, never looked. You were flat out.’

  He couldn’t have said whether her answer was evasive or truthful. ‘You didn’t wake me.’

  ‘No, Harvey, I didn’t.’ She mocked him. ‘You weren’t a pretty sight, asleep, mouth open, snoring. You looked a bit pissed, actually. I thought you were better off where you were.’

  The gardener was back at his van, unloading gear. Harvey thought his walk too confident and familiar, as if he thought he had rights on the territory, and perhaps he did. His wife had turned and the robe flounced. Her left leg was on show – knee and thigh, damn good – then the material fell back, closing off his view.

  ‘Pity you didn’t remove the glass.’

  ‘You haven’t – God, you haven’t spilled it on the chair? Or the carpet? I didn’t want to wake you – you didn’t look good company – so I left you holding it. Shit.’

  ‘And I broke the glass.’

  ‘Do I often go out? Did you need to sit up and wait for me?’ He thought, then, that she hit a button that summoned a minor rant. ‘God, Harvey, I sit here and you’re swanning round Europe. I’m not on the phone, ringing your room and demanding to know why you weren’t there to take my call earlier. It was just one evening.’

  With the gardener? Maybe, maybe not. Had she wined and dined him? Had she taken her bit of rough to a pub on the mainland, talked him through the French bits on the menu, told him which wine to choose, then gone to one of the car parks by Redcliff Point or Ringstead Bay? She had paused to eyeball him.

  ‘Pity about the glass, but I expect the carpet and the chair’ll be fine.’

  It had been a good marriage at the start. Harvey Gillot had been trading with the Sri Lankan military. The usual shopping bag: they had fire power but problems with communications and he’d been out to Colombo with the brochures. He had already inherited enough of Solly Lieberman’s contacts book to know who could supply at a decent price; it was a fat deal and would pay well. No complaints about the flight – business class and upgraded by the BA people at Bandaranaike International – and everything was rosy until his bag didn’t show up on the Heathrow carousel. A pretty girl had calmed him down, sorted the hassle and produced the bag after an hour. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-six, and they were married three months later. Some family and work friends had supported her, no one on his side – no friends, and his parents weren’t there because they hadn’t been invited and, anyway, he was halfway to losing touch with them. It had been pretty good in the early days, when the baby had arrived, he was high on the ladder and she was at his side. Then he had uprooted them, like fracturing a mirror, and taken them to Lulworth View on the Isle of Portland. Harvey Gillot could have said, to the day and the hour, when his marriage – already past the ‘fork in the road’ – had soured. A photograph retrieved from a drawer, of himself and Solly Lieberman in the Tribal Territories, when they were flogging off the Blowpipes. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken it. Yes, he talked too much about Solly Lieberman. She had looked at it and her mouth had curled at the sight of Solly, the crown of his head level with Harvey’s shoulder, and she’d said, ‘So that’s the poisonous creature I seem to live with.’ The death of a marriage – already terminally ill – and she hadn’t registered it. Harvey had.

  He was turning his back on her and the dog was whining at the door.

  She challenged him: ‘Why did the police want you? Too many speeding points? You’d think they’d better things to do than—’

  ‘I’m taking the dog out. It’ll keep until I get back.’

  She would have realised he’d lied – too offhand. ‘What’s the matter? Phone bust and email gone down?’

  ‘I’m taking the dog out, and when I’m back from my walk then I’ll tell you what happened at the police station.’

  He and his dog went out together – he checked the outer gate, every tree that might have been a potential hiding-place and the bushes alongside the coastal path, while the dog bounded ahead.

  Feet apart, arms extended, the Baikal held firm in both hands, the blast of the firing was in his ears and the recoil kicked up the barrel. No smile on his face as the skull shape disintegrated. Robbie Cairns had not used a silencer or worn ear-protectors. The 9mm bullet he had fired into the skull was soft nose, the hollow-point variety, first developed in the Dumdum armaments factory of Calcutta. It expanded on impact and created the greatest damage to any part of a human body; it was a man-stopper.

  He gazed at what he had achieved.

  The right side of the head was intact but the left had shattered. It was the third weapon he had tested. Robbie Cairns would have said it was like trying on a new pair of shoes. The feel was right or it wasn’t. The third of the Baikal IZH-79 pistols was the one that seemed good to him, better than the other two. They had come off the same production line, had been converted from discharging tear-gas pellets to firing killing bullets by the same Lithuanian craftsmen, but the way the weight lay in his hands and the grip of his fingers on the butt seemed different.

  He was the best customer the armourer had. Robbie Cairns believed in the total discretion of the man who sat a mile away in a car park and didn’t watch him shoot with the three pistols at the shop-window dummy. The armourer would take the secrets of his customer base to the grave. If he didn’t, the grave would welcome him earlier. Blood pulsed in Robbie’s veins, always did when he fired live rounds. Crazy thing, but the elation was no greater when he shot at a walking, screaming, falling target than when he aimed at a plastic head that might have been in a display at the store where Barbie worked.

  Now he was careful. His hands were in sensitive rubber gloves. The two rejected weapons went into the briefcase in which they had been delivered. The one he would use, now that a contract rate had been agreed and a deal done, was dropped into a small holdall with the ammunition. A supermarket bag held the remnants of the two plastic heads already demolished, and he knelt to pick up the fragments of the third. The bullets would have been squashed beyond recognition and were spent somewhere among the trees.

  He had had no training in handling weapons. His grandfather wouldn’t have them in the flat, said he hated the damn things. He had also said that firearms hanged men. His father had never had a gun on a raid. Only one man had urged Robbie Cairns to get serious firearms expertise: an officer at Feltham – not the one who had told him he could have a better life than traipsing in and out of courtrooms – had urged him to go for the regular army on his release, had told him it was possible for a teenager’s criminal record to be ignored. Robbie had dismissed it out of hand. Nobody would give orders to him once the gates at Feltham had closed behind him.

  But he had met a man – might have been a tinker – on Rainham marshes who was shooting pigeons. He’d had decoys pegged out and had made himself a hide of camouflage netting. The man had told him about shotguns, rifles and handguns – he might once have been in uniform and booted out. Late in the day, evening coming on, the geese had flown in. The man had shot one, then passed the weapon to Robbie and left it to him. Beginner’s luck or natural talent? A Canada goose had been hit, in flight, had feathered to the marshland and flapped, crippled. Robbie had walked to it and – two turns – wrung its neck. Why had he been on Rainham marshes? To bury a metal-lipped cosh th
at had been used on a man at a club in Southwark; the guy was hospitalised so the cosh was hot and needed to disappear. Never saw the tinker again, but had learned about posture, breathing, and to respect what his hands held. He had taken the goose home, and his mum had thrown half a fit and gone apoplectic and said it was for the rubbish. Granddad Cairns, round the corner, had plucked and cleaned it. Grandma Cairns had cooked it. A good bird but stringy: it had flown hundreds of miles before landing on Rainham marshes.

  When he was satisfied that nothing remained, he hitched up the briefcase, the duffel bag and the plastic one that held the broken head and the spent cases, put the decapitated dummy under his arm and started to tramp back along a narrow path. He headed for the car park where the armourer would be waiting, and in his hip pocket – always cash up-front – was what he would pay.

  One worry nagged at him.

  That day, Leanne was in an Internet café and would be doing the Google thing on aerial views of a stretch of coast; cliffs and quarries that might be working or were disused. It was easy to be on a pavement in Bermondsey or Rotherhithe, or up in Tottenham, merging with people. He had never worked out of London, had never been asked to do a hit in a wide-open space. He wondered which of his talents would count when the city was behind him. He didn’t know.

  When he didn’t know, he worried.

  Please, just tell me it’ll be your best effort. That day Vern would be making the last arrangements for the car, test-driving what the garages under the arches had on offer. He’d be going carefully because it was well known that they were flagged by the police and watched. And he worried because Leanne had said that the target’s house could only be reached and left by one road.

  He didn’t like worrying, wasn’t used to it, but the contract was agreed – and his credibility did not permit Robbie Cairns to wriggle or do a weasel run.

  They’d go down the next day to where the target lived and look.