The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  The building was a warren of sections. The impoverished groups that protested against brutality from right-wing governments, left-wing regimes, state-sponsored torture, the exploitation of migrant labour and the international arms trade had to work cheek by jowl. It was rare, though, for one group to seek advice from another. Megs Behan broke a habit.

  On the floor above there was an overspill office used by the Peace Brigade.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you? That you’re just a clerk, a paper-pusher? How’s that for a start?’

  The organisations in the building were, of course, fiercely independent. They guarded their territory jealously.

  ‘You’re hardly going to hit their heights with a few media releases. You do stands at political conferences, you brief administrators, a few junior ministers know your names, and it all seems like the centre of the universe. We’re not on those tracks.’

  She had had a bad night. She’d smoked through half of it, had been up twice and into the little communal kitchen for coffee the first time, then herbal tea, her self-esteem battered by the sense that her efforts were useless – her family’s assessment of her work. Her father was a senior hospital administrator, her mother a High Court judge. One brother was a partner in an accountancy business and the other a CEO in pharmaceuticals. She went home at Christmas, endured their patronising remarks about her ‘good works’ and left as soon as public transport was running again, but permitted little wads of banknotes to be dropped into her handbag. Last year, when she’d heard of their triumphs and survival in the downturn she’d still felt some degree of worth, but not last night, so she had climbed the stairs and bearded one of the Peace Brigade people.

  ‘We’re in Colombia, Salvador, Nicaragua and particularly Guatemala. We’re not in Westminster. We’re alongside potential victims – the writers, the free-press journalists, trade unionists, priests who won’t be cowed. We’re walking with them, living in their homes. We are – almost – a moral shield. Where are you, Megs?’

  He had the tan to prove where he had been and there were scabs on his neck that she thought were from a vast mosquito in some horrible jungle.

  ‘If I cause offence, so be it and I won’t apologise. The arms trade is wrong. End of story. It’s responsible for deaths on a criminal scale. It’s an area of quite colossal greed. So, get off your bum, Megs, do something that’s noticed. That message on board?’

  She bobbed her head, bit her lip and headed for his door. ‘Do they know who you are, Megs, the brokers of arms? Do they know you exist? Are you a pain in the arse to them?’

  She stamped down the stairs and back to her cubicle.

  She was almost at the check-in desk, lifting her bag, when a mobile rang. Not hers, Asif’s. The girl at the desk was waiting to take the printout that Travel Section’s computers had spewed, then had turned away to her screen and gesticulated at the conveyor-belt beside her. Penny Laing dropped her bag on to it. Asif was talking quietly and she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The sticker was fastened to her bag’s handle and it was gone; she was passed her boarding card. He was still talking and the girl heaved an impatient sigh. A man from the queue pushed him, and a woman coughed noisily.

  He stepped out of the queue, and the man elbowed Penny clear of the desk. Asif’s head was bowed and she sensed anguish. The woman nudged her further aside. She might have flared up. She was tired, ready to flop down on a seat. Flying, since she had joined HMRC, had been limited – the DRC, Kinshasa via Brussels, Dublin a few times and the red-eye flights to Málaga and all points on the Costa where traffickers lived in the sun. It was in Gibraltar that she had met Paul …

  ‘I’ll be there, darling. I’m on my way.’

  In her mind, this was a good assignment, potentially rewarding. It had the footprint on it of Harvey Gillot. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘It’s my wife. There’s a complication and—’

  ‘When’s it due?’ She knew little about the vagaries of childbirth.

  ‘About a month. If I’m not travelling, can you cope? I mean …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘She sounded pretty low.’

  Penny was crisp. ‘Just get to her. Call the office in your car and let them know. I’ll be fine. Now, I’ve got the files. All you have is the contact list in Zagreb, the embassy lowlife, and we’ll hardly be camping at their door.’

  ‘I don’t have any option.’

  ‘On your way.’ She was decisive enough to wipe the doubt off his forehead: he would not be blowing an interesting investigation out of the water. It didn’t cross her mind that she shouldn’t travel because Asif Khan’s wife had a pregnancy complication. They were supposed to be in pairs when abroad – wouldn’t happen unless she was beefed up when she got there. ‘No problem.’

  He gave her the embassy numbers and staffers’ names, then was lost in the crowds. She’d wait until she was airside before she called in and spoke to Dermot. And – useful precaution – she switched off her mobile and would leave it off until the flight was called.

  She had not done university, but a distant cousin of her team leader lectured at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies – a branch of London University. Dermot had telephoned the introduction and the guy had talked to her for half of the night. She had been with him till the Starbucks had closed and the disasters of that part of Europe had stacked up in her mind. So, Penny Laing didn’t know what she would find other than confusion and would have resisted fiercely if anyone had tried to block her.

  She waited for the flight call.

  The Gold Commander targeted him, stabbing at him with a pencil: ‘What’s Gillot expecting from us? What’s your assessment?’

  ‘I’m hoping, Ma’am, that we can decide what’s on offer, then give him that to digest.’

  It was a neat response, a trick based on experience. Throw it back: the gaudier the decorations on the epaulettes, the greater the responsibility. Bigger fish than Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe would decide on the ramifications of a risk assessment and what could be done for a Tango’s protection. He thought the woman at the end of the table, Phoebe Bermingham, glowered at him. He had gone through his notes of a conversation the previous afternoon with the Tango and had been heard. He was the junior at the table: responsibility was not going to land in his lap. Different times now. There was pre-Stockwell and post-Stockwell. Before the shooting dead of a harmless Brazilian painter-decorator in a London underground carriage he would have volunteered opinions, but too much shit had been heaped on the watchers and marksmen for him to do so now. A stenographer in the corner was writing busily.

  The Gold Commander turned, almost reluctantly, to the Intelligence representative. He was Harry, from SCD11. ‘I have nothing that tells me this threat is empty or real. I have tried Thames House and VBX for a little off-the-record guidance and had a door shut in my face, which probably means they don’t know. What advice for Gillot? In an ideal world he would up sticks and shift somewhere off the radar. Who would take such a contract? First, and we’re all agreed on this, it’s not a foreigner but a local man, most likely based in London. Our problem is that the men who would attract the sort of cash reward on offer are successful, with a carefully guarded reputation. There might be six in the capital. Do I have their names? No.’

  Steve was Covert Surveillance, SCD10, a dapper figure, recently off the road because of a knee-ligament problem and therefore condemned to Gold Group meetings. Few noticed him; many saw him. He could blend and seemed to resent the spotlight that came with Ma’am’s pencil-pointing. ‘First, we don’t know who the hitman will be so we can’t stake him. We move on … The potential target is not resident in the Metropolitan Police Service area but in remote Dorset. There is no possibility that the locals down there would have available sufficient specialists to mount twenty-four-seven surveillance of Gillot’s property. Were Gillot in London or the Home Counties, on the intelligence available, I doubt I’d support such a
manpower drain of my own people. But sending them down to the Dorset coastline isn’t on. If my people were there, with a realistic threat of an assassination attempt, who intervenes? What’s the back-up? We won’t be there.’

  The representative of Firearms, CO19, was Donny. He had put on weight since he’d slipped off the black overalls and left the H&K in the armoury. He was known as a gag-artist, and liked black humour. It was alleged that he had said – he fervently denied it – as he had aimed at an Afro-Caribbean on a wages-van heist: ‘Make my day, Sunshine,’ then fired, double-tap. Since Stockwell, he had gone by the book and his catechism was that his people would not be exposed. ‘I’ve spoken to Dorset. They have enough firearms-trained personnel to cope with existing priorities and emergencies. But there’s no question of them having the resources to mount a full-time protection operation on the Isle of Portland. They point out that it would be irresponsible to deploy unarmed officers at a property we believe will be attacked by an armed criminal – a killer. We have a duty of care, of course, to Mr Gillot – and a similar duty of care to any officers sent to protect him. We cannot have unarmed officers walking into a predicted life-threatening situation. Conclusions: protection is not feasible. There could only be an armed presence if Intelligence a predicted date, time and location for an attack, but not an indefinite sit-around. His life and his family’s safety are pretty much in his own hands.’

  In its journey round the table, Ma’am’s pencil point rested on the team leader, the cuckoo in their midst. Roscoe thought the man from HMRC’s Alpha team seemed aloof from the practicalities expressed. He started impishly: ‘Well, what a difficult furrow we have to plough – and inconvenient. Anyway, Harvey Gillot is a top-ten-listed arms broker. We would assume that he’s ninety-something per cent legal and five plus something per cent not. If we could gain enough evidence to nail him in court, he’d be a good scalp for my crowd. The assumption is that he was involved in a sanctions-busting deal in 1991, at which time Croatia was fighting for its existence, then pulled the carpet from under whatever he’d agreed with the “village” Mr Roscoe talked of. We’re now on our way to Vukovar and hope to have detail on the transaction that failed. We have no doubt that Gillot broke faith with whoever he dealt with, which has led to the contract on his life. I would offer you one thought. We’re used to principal players in international drugs-trafficking feeling they’ve been cheated or disrespected and employing a gunman to right a wrong, very cold and brutal people who don’t tolerate broken faith or disrespect. My one thought, an aggrieved citizen of the Balkans would be a serious enemy for Mr Gillot to have made. Nothing else to add.’

  Five minutes later, after Ma’am had summarised, Mark Roscoe was on the phone.

  The telephone had been ringing when Harvey Gillot had come to the kitchen door so he had gone inside and answered the call. The dog had followed him and would now be in the hall, the dust of the coast path would be on the carpet and … Didn’t matter too much what the carpet in the hall looked like.

  She was on the patio, to the right of the kitchen window, with a breathtaking view of the seascape. She had the newspaper, some coffee and her iPod in her ears. The gardener was working near to her. He laid the telephone back in the cradle.

  When he appeared on the patio, she glanced at him. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt. She’d kept herself well. Languid eyes and a lazy voice: ‘You did give the horse that stuff last night?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Harvey, I asked you to.’

  ‘You did indeed and – to tell you the truth – I couldn’t be bothered to tramp out there, measure whatever it is the brute eats and—’

  ‘So you just did the piss-artist act.’

  ‘Something like that. If the horse needs pills, try feeding it yourself.’

  They argued rarely, and never before the move to Portland. Then he had closed down the office, inherited from Solly Lieberman, and paid off the old secretary. At first Josie had managed the baby and had done the accounts, which showed what was suitable of his earnings. They had been a team, and the money had rolled in. Now he did his books and kept his files. He knew what to shred or burn and what to keep. The gardener was hunched over a flowerbed but Harvey Gillot was fucked if he could see anything that resembled a weed.

  ‘Am I allowed to ask?’ She did the aggrieved bit well. ‘Am I entitled to know why your mood is so foul, why the horse goes unfed?’

  Maybe.

  He said quietly, his voice falling away, ‘Something happened yesterday and …’

  She had turned away from him and the gardener had twisted to face her, shirt undone, sweat in the hair on his chest. He thought she was showing him a crossword clue. He said something Harvey couldn’t hear, and she wrote on the paper. Then she looked at her husband. ‘Oh, something happened? You were awarded three more speeding points? Nobody wants any howitzers? Share, Harvey. What happened yesterday?’

  He breathed hard, tried. ‘The past came back. It had been dead for nineteen years, but it’s alive now.’

  ‘Are you still pissed? Harvey, you’re talking rubbish. What happened? What’s in the past?’ Her lips formed a derisive smile. ‘I know – an affair. Harvey had an affair, or maybe just a one-nighter, and now there’s a big strapping teenage boy and—’

  ‘Shut up, and fucking listen.’ He’d yelled it. The gardener had swung round and was holding a little hand fork as if it was a weapon. His raised voice would have been heard on the beach, by the ruins of the chapel and on the path against Rufus Castle. ‘And you, please, fuck off.’

  A look at Josie. As if she had to give her permission. She said, ‘I’m all right, Nigel. He’s all bark and no bite.’

  The gardener sloped away with his fork to the wheelbarrow, which he pushed off the patio. Harvey had never sworn at her before. He thought her face had flushed and he imagined it a Rubicon moment. Another deep breath.

  ‘The detective I met yesterday, he’s coming down again tomorrow from London. Why? Because there is perhaps a possibility of a threat against my life.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘The detective, his name is Roscoe – quite decent and, I think, efficient – is the liaison officer. He’s from a squad that specialises in proactive operations against contract killers. They have word there’s a price on my life.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘The Balkans, specifically Croatia, a village there.’

  ‘How much is your life worth? What’s the cost of the contract?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She sat up and the T-shirt rucked. He realised she was wearing no underwear beneath it. From the patio, she would have been able to see along the coastal path, calculate his progress and estimate when he would be back at their home from his walk.

  ‘What did you do?’ There was an acid calm in her voice. ‘I mean, it can’t be every day that a gang of people from central Europe have a whip-round to hire a killer.’

  The sun burned on his face and the reflection of the sea was in his eyes. ‘It was a deal that didn’t happen.’

  ‘You always talk about trust. Did you break someone’s?’

  He squirmed. ‘It was a long time ago. It wasn’t straightforward.’

  ‘You either had a deal or you didn’t … Before my time, nearly twenty years ago? Pops up now so it must have festered, gone rancid. Was it a double cross?’

  ‘There was stuff. It was—’

  ‘You’re sounding pathetic and evasive. What happens to me? Am I included in the contract? Is that an extra, a supplement on the price? What about Fiona – home next week? Because of your stuff do I have to look under the car? Does she have to hide under her bed? Are Fiona and I on the ticket with you?’

  ‘The detective will tell us tomorrow.’

  She stood, the newspaper crumpled in her fist. He thought she was struggling for the ultimate riposte, something that would leave him in rags. She couldn’t find it. The ferry was going out on the cros
sing to one of the Channel Islands or St Malo and the yachts were dwarfed by it. A tanker was far out on the horizon. She asked, ‘Do you expect me and Fiona to join you in a bunker?’

  He didn’t answer her, just went inside. Nobody Loves Us and We Don’t Care. The anthem was loud in his head.

  A heat haze hung over the town. It was clear because there were no high industrial chimneys in Vukovar, and the Bata shoe factory at Borovo, up-river, had closed.

  A few fishermen were on the low platform just above the river’s water-line, the wash from a wide-beamed, flat-bottomed tourist boat that powered downstream slapping near their feet. It was one of the ‘white boats’ that used the river as a slow transport from Vienna or Budapest to the Black Sea in the southeast. Most of the travellers were on the decks, crowding the starboard side of the boat, and a guide was telling them about what they saw and its significance – he had started work at the shoe factory, and would devote nearly fifteen minutes to a description of the events at Vukovar in the autumn of 1991. He spoke of the quality and craftsmanship of the shoes manufactured at Borovo, but not of the divisions in the labour force once conflict had erupted, how former Serb employees had bayed for the blood of former Croat employees who had once worked and sat in the canteen beside them.

  He did not point out the roofs of the village near the river where Croat police recruits had been massacred by Serb paramilitaries and mutilated, or the Trpinjska road – which could have been identified by the church tower above the trees – where there had been a killing ground for tanks, and Marko Babi, alone, was credited with the destruction of fifteen T-55s and their Serb crews, and Blago Zadro had co-ordinated the tactics, making himself a national hero in an infant country. And he did not show them the tall building with the new tiled roof: behind it was the entrance to the command bunker of 204 Brigade from which Mile Dedakovic, the Hawk, had directed the defence of the town.

  The guide had to mention the memorial, on a jutting strip of land that protected a marina: a great cross of white stone, ten metres high, four across, commemorated the lives of a thousand of the town’s defenders, those from the villages on the Cornfield Road, and at least another thousand civilians trapped inside the shrinking perimeter. He would have pointed to the new-laid square, the glass frontages of modern banks and the flags flying in the light breeze. He could speak of the imposing Franciscan monastery, high on a cliff, with yellowish-ochre walls, but he would steer away from the desecration of graves in the vaults when victorious troops had swarmed through the building.