The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘He isn’t here already, watching us, is he?’

  ‘We don’t think so. Usually there’s quite a lengthy period of surveillance and reconnaissance. I’ll not gild it. A contract of this sort would be initiated with serious and careful people, not a cowboy who’ll charge in. They would look for an opportunity. As I say, you can pull out, Mrs Gillot, and let him turn up here. I’m not saying we’re lacking in the field of intelligence gathering but, I emphasise, we don’t have the resources for round-the-clock protection.’

  Vern was driving as they passed the 2012 Olympics site and came across the causeway. His sister was beside him and his brother slouched in the back.

  Vern thought of his sister as the ‘kid’, an afterthought between their parents, her conception timed after a lengthy spell his father had served in HMPs Wandsworth and Parkhurst. He thought of his brother as the ‘young ’un’. The difference? He would have called his sister ‘kid’ to her face, but he would never have addressed his brother disrespectfully. Leanne had a good temperament and could laugh not just at others but at herself. She was popular, and could drink in the pubs if she fancied it. Robbie, the young ’un, had no humour in his face, seldom laughed at others, never at himself, and didn’t drink.

  Vern had driven carefully from south-east London. Behind them, left there, was all they knew well. The route Vern had chosen had taken them past the yard where George Francis had been done by a hitman for losing Brinks Mat money he was minding; past the flat where a small-time villian had been killed and dismembered – later, the killer had sat in the back of a car taking the pieces out to the Essex marshes for dumping and waved a severed arm at motorists going the other way; past the armourer’s home, a little terraced house, anonymous, with a reinforced shed out the back; past pubs where a tout or an undercover wouldn’t have lasted long enough to buy a pint before he was busted; past the garages where the cars were fitted up for them; and past the Osprey Estate where a boy had been beaten and killed – a gang of kids had thought a ‘wall of silence’ would protect them but they were doing time because the wall had been holed by the police; and past the complex of housing-association homes where the Irish contract killer had shot a Brindle brother right under the sights of police guns. Vern had flicked a glance in the mirror to watch the young ’un’s reaction, and there had been none.

  Interesting that there was no reaction as they went down Needleman Street. Vern, like Leanne, their mum and dad, Granddad and Grandma Cairns, was supposed to know nothing of the woman kept there. Vern knew. He reckoned Leanne did – not that he’d told her. He reckoned the parents didn’t know, or the grandparents. He had seen, from a car, the young ’un come out of the block’s main entrance and pause on the pavement to look up. He’d followed the eyeline, stationary in a traffic foul-up, and had seen the woman, her little hand gesture at the window, and there had been a secretive response – a waft of the fingers – from his brother. He wouldn’t challenge him, or make a joke about it, wouldn’t mention what he knew. He never challenged Robbie. He was frightened of the young ’un, and he lived off the young ’un’s payroll. He had not asked if Leanne knew that Robbie had a woman in the block opposite the entrance to Christopher Court, just assumed she did.

  It was careful driving because a crash, an incident – even being pulled over by a bored cop for speeding – would have been a disaster, pretty big on any scale. Under the back seat, where Robbie sat – in a sealed package of bubble wrap – was the pistol, with a twelve-bore shotgun, its barrels sawn down. In the boot there were overalls, two sets of balaclavas, extra trainers, a canister of lighter fuel, and a bag of spare clothing, his, Robbie’s and hers jumbled in together, the tops in bright colours, and a wig for Leanne. Just before they had hit the causeway, Leanne had done the switches under the dash that played the scanner through the car radio and detected police broadcasts: it couldn’t decode the encrypted wavelengths of the specialist units, but it registered the squelch of ‘white noise’. This might be a reconnaissance trip and they’d go back to London. If they liked what they saw, they might hang around, wait for it to be that degree better – or move forward, no delay.

  She had a printout map from an Internet café and aerial photographs – one that covered the roofs of the house, another of the house and garden, and a third that showed the sea, a small beach, ruins, the gardens of other homes and the lane that led to where the target lived. He saw her study the photographs. Why did she do it? She had money like he did when Robbie worked. She hardly bought clothes and shoes, was smart but not special. She didn’t have a girlfriend to go with on holiday to Spain, didn’t have a boyfriend to sneak off with. Maybe loyalty to her brother kept her tight to him, but Vern couldn’t fathom it. When Robbie had the dark moods, though, black as hell, only his sister could lift him.

  In front of him was the towering heap of rock and its summit.

  On the wheel, Vern flexed his fingers. It was new ground for them. He felt the nerves. All of the drive down, he had felt a tightening of the knot in his stomach as the miles of countryside, yellow and ripened, grazed and bare, had slipped past.

  The sea shimmered beside the causeway.

  He knew the sea from trips to Margate, where his father had liked to take them when he was home, and Folkestone, which his mother preferred. He knew the sea also from the times his father had been in Parkhurst, and their mother had dragged them on to the ferry for the journey to the Isle of Wight. They came off the causeway. He sensed that Leanne had stiffened, but Robbie’s breathing was as steady as it had been on the rest of the journey.

  One way in, Vern thought, and therefore one way out.

  *

  ‘Are you saying, Mr Roscoe, that you’re prepared to get back into your car, drive away from here and leave us bare-arsed? What matters more? The budget and the resources available or my life and my daughter’s?’ She had pushed herself up on the lounger, facing the detective. She thought he showed a minimum of sympathy for her husband and none for her. Not familiar with a bitchy female? Did they not have any in the Serious Crime Directorate? The card he had produced with the pompous title was on the table by the water. Harvey – she had been married to him for long enough to read his moods – was beaten and didn’t contribute. The detective’s eyes had wandered from her thighs to her chest so she straightened her shoulders and pushed her hair off her face. He hadn’t taken off his jacket but she had seen that he wore – visible when he raised a handkerchief to mop his forehead – a shoulder holster with a weapon in it. She knew about weapons.

  ‘If you go, Mrs Gillot, with your husband, I can guarantee that protection will be in place from myself and two colleagues. I’ll have uniformed firearms officers on site, but only for today and only while you’re packing essential items. You will then drive to a hotel – location agreed with us – then my colleagues, the uniforms and I will pull out.’

  ‘After today?’

  ‘You would receive expert advice on how to conduct your life.’

  ‘And my daughter?’

  ‘Probably better if she takes a new identity and changes school. I should emphasise that I haven’t examined this fully, or referred it to senior colleagues.’

  ‘You don’t believe this is just a little blip?’

  ‘By your husband’s recollection a whole community has bought the contract. I don’t know how they’ll pursue it. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was alive for a decade. You’re different, but not wholly so. What I’m saying is that we may intercept one killer – but does the community have a production line? I wouldn’t assume that one success destabilises the scale of the threat.’

  She could put together the puzzle and see what had been the grit in the shoe of their relationship. In the Home Counties, with her baby and then her small daughter, she had known other mothers and had been at the centre of the business operations. Here, there was a fine house with a wonderful view and a life of unrelieved boredom. She knew no one, belonged to nothing, had little to look forward to. More
and more of Harvey’s work was done abroad and she had no role to play. More and more of his deals were conducted without a paper trail or an electronic footprint, and payments were made abroad, routed to the Caymans. She hated the house, the skyscape, the seascape and the quiet. She hated, too, the detective sergeant with the Glock in his holster who had marched into her home and was steadily dismantling her life. All right if she did it, but not if a well-rehearsed stranger performed the rites. Her husband wasn’t standing his corner.

  ‘It’s our lives.’

  ‘You could say that, Mrs Gillot, and you wouldn’t find people arguing with you.’

  She turned towards Harvey. ‘You stupid bastard.’ He was abject, pathetic. ‘All that shit about trust and you screwed up on a deal.’

  ‘I appreciate these are difficult issues, but you have to come to a decision and we don’t want to crowd you. You should think of a short-term response and take a longer view.’ The detective had a soft voice, which he would have learned on a course: How to Handle a Hysterical Woman Who Is Being Turfed Out of Her Home. The same course that bailiffs went on. He moved back, was off his chair and sidling towards his colleagues who had come into her garden.

  She said bitterly to her husband, ‘Spill. What sort of place was it where you fucked up on trust?’

  It was one of those mornings that she had, thankfully, become unused to. Now, about bloody time too, Penny Laing faced a chance of progress.

  She couldn’t complain about the hotel – a decent room and a half-decent meal in a near-deserted dining room the night before, with a half-bottle of local wine – and there was no one in London to whom she had to make a phone call: ‘Yes, I’m missing you, too … Yes, I’m fine … Yes, and did you find your supper in the fridge? … Yes, I’ll pay the council tax when I get back …’ There had not been anyone to call late once the relationship with Paul had petered out.

  She’d been in Ireland, and his ship had been on its way to the Caribbean when they’d called it a day – done it by text on their mobiles. She’d known it was on a downhill slope when she’d gone with him to his parents for Sunday lunch; they hadn’t grilled her for her life story, which meant they didn’t regard her as a potential daughter-in-law but as the present girlfriend before the ship sailed for a half-year’s duty. It had been good, the best of her affairs, but she wasn’t going to pack in Revenue and Customs to be a naval wife and he wasn’t going to jack in the Royal Navy to move into civilian life. They’d exchanged postcards …

  She’d run through the files and not absorbed much, had slept, woken, gazed out of a window and seen a swimming-pool, a courtyard with tables and awnings, a monument of white stone in the form of a cross and the wide river. She’d had breakfast, had been given a fold-over map of the town by Reception and had set off from the hotel in search of … not quite certain. Had had the sheet of contact names and addresses on the car seat beside her.

  It had probably been a little joke cooked up by the first secretary and the spook at the embassy. They had given her an address, off a wide, tree-lined main road, and it was indeed the headquarters office of the security police. Her HMRC pass had been examined at the desk, and she had sat on a hard chair for an hour. Then an English speaker had come with a disarming smile and said that any arrangement for a meeting would be co-ordinated through the embassy, not on the doorstep, but the police might be able to help. She had found the police station on her hotel map, had driven there, and the man whose name she had been given was on holiday. No one else on duty had more than a smattering of English … but the hospital was identified on her map.

  Back across the town, at the hospital, she had discovered English speakers, had been taken down into a basement area and shown a museum to an atrocity, and had been given another name, American or north European, and another address had been scratched on her map. A short distance from the hospital, at a semi-detached house, she had met a man, emaciated, with a seriousness in his eyes that marked obsession and isolation. He had been on his way out for the day, heading for Osijek, and was already late … but another cross was placed on the map at the far extremity of the page.

  She sat on a bench in shade, with a rectangular block of ebony stone in front of her. It was twice her height, a foot thick, with a flying dove sculpted on it. From where she was, at that angle, she could see through the stone, and the blue skies were in the dove’s form. A little away from it, there was a square garden. Small clipped evergreens grew from a base of white stone chippings, and on a slab beside them stood jars of red glass for candles, with a cross, no more than a metre high, close to them. The arms of the cross were covered with chains and strings of beads from which hung crucifixes and medals from the army, football and basketball clubs. There were identity cards, too, preserved in laminate pouches. It was very quiet. She had heard a buzzard cry as it circled above, and the low pitch of a tractor that pulled a sprayer. To her left, she could see a knot of youngsters working with equipment inside corridors marked by white tape.

  The lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies had told her about Ovcara. She knew that the wounded had been taken from the basement of the hospital, where the museum was, brought to this site and butchered. When the bodies had been exhumed medical equipment was still attached to them … The sun came up hard from the ground, burning her. It was one thing, she reflected, to be told about a place of mass murder in a London library, another to be there. The cross draped with the little mementoes scratched hardest at her, the symbols of the living, and the light flickered brightly on the beads and chains that wind and rain had polished. She had been told that the man was in the field and would come when it was convenient to him.

  First his shadow, then his voice: ‘Miss Laing, I hear you got the push-around and ended up with Danny Steyn. He pushed some more, and you were sent to me.’

  She grimaced. ‘I seem to have bounced off a few walls.’

  ‘I’m William Anders. Danny called me. About the village, yes?’

  ‘About the village.’ She showed him her card.

  ‘You mentioned to Danny a man called Gillot.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘It’s Harvey Gillot, yes?’ He had a lazy drawl, conversational but compelling, not to be ignored. ‘Why did you – I assume you’re a criminal investigator – mention that name to Danny?’

  ‘Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has an investigation division. The Alpha team, of which I’m a member, is tasked to look for the breaking of our country’s laws in the area of arms dealing.’

  ‘A noble calling, Miss Laing. I dig up bodies – those killed in acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and plain old murder – and I hope that the fruits of my labours will end up in a court of law. If The Hague and the International Criminal Court, or the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, hears evidence I have provided, I’m well pleased. Most especially in Africa, I see the results of unfettered arms-trafficking.’

  ‘Harvey Gillot is an Alpha-team target.’ She thought a slice of his confidence had seeped away: his eyes had narrowed and the wide smile was falser. ‘We have intelligence, also, that a village near to the town has collectively taken out a contract on his life …’

  ‘Do you?’ Sobered, reflective, and a cigar case came out of the pocket. ‘Do you now?’

  ‘I’ve been sent here to try to find out what Harvey Gillot did that, eighteen, nineteen years later, has caused a community to pay for a killer to assassinate him. That’s my brief.’

  ‘Is it?’ A cigar was clamped in the teeth and a big lighter threw up a flame. ‘Is it now?’

  ‘Do you have anything that takes me in the direction I’m looking at?’

  Smoke from the cigar masked his face but Penny thought she saw, almost, regret in the eyes. He said, nearly a whisper, ‘I believe I’m responsible.’

  ‘Responsible for what?’

  ‘I believe I’m responsible for initiating that contract, Miss Laing.’

  He thought a gleam had c
ome into her face – always did when an investigator reckoned a key had been handed over that opened a long-locked door. She had a little notepad on her knee and a pencil stub.

  The forensic scientist William Anders, a lion of his academic community on the Californian coast, a scourge of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, felt what his wife – an academic in European renaissance art, and back home with the kids – would have called a frisson of guilt. He asked how long she had.

  Time enough.

  He spoke of a call, of a journey to the edge of ploughed strip that had been declared clear of mines a couple of days previously, and of an arm raised: he said the arm was in the air like the one in the lake that was waiting for the great sword, Excalibur, to be heaved in its direction. He received, as a reward for the image, a wintry smile from Miss Penny Laing.

  He told her that four bodies had been excavated. He explained that his examination of their pubic symphyses had identified approximate age and estimated height, and told her why dental records for the male cadavers were unavailable. He told her which one would have been the village schoolmaster, then what mutilations they had suffered. She murmured something about having been in the Democratic Republic of Congo and seen combat aftermath, its effect on civilians, and he reckoned she would have been useless at digging on site, squeamish and without the fibre it took.

  Should he have done it? Was it a crime?

  Was he not a professor of his discipline, a world authority? Did he give a fast fuck, or a slow one, about the life and future times of Harvey Gillot?

  He described a piece of paper he had retrieved from the older man’s pocket. He had regained his composure. Normally he would have flirted with a young woman, teased her a little, joked and smiled, and maybe later he would have looked for a coy smile, perhaps a drop of the eyes, some fun. Didn’t see it in Penny Laing. He wondered if she was overwhelmed by the place, a front line in history. He didn’t flirt with her. He was graphic in picturing for her the level of decay, but also related why the women wore no wedding rings or other jewellery. ‘I’m getting there, Miss Laing.’