The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  A friend, reliable and trusted, worked out of Marbella. He was a bit Syrian, a bit Lebanese and a bit German, and he was talking with him. He wouldn’t, himself, go to Baghdad but the agent they all used – whose brother was in the inner clique and whose sister had married into influence – would travel, if the price was right, to Nicosia for contracts and payment details. The Albanians still had plenty, more than the Bulgarians, but Albanian stuff wouldn’t be good enough for a customer such as the Tbilisi government. He had thought – talking and punching keys on his calculator – that denial worked well—

  A bloody door slammed. The main bedroom’s. The dog stirred, then slumped again.

  He held his hand loosely over the receiver and shouted, ‘You don’t have to slam doors.’

  His friend – in faraway Marbella – asked what the hell had happened and was he all right? He said he was fine, never better, but the energy was draining out of him. Then the front door slammed. This time he didn’t cover the receiver. ‘See if I bloody care!’ Harvey Gillot yelled. ‘I don’t give a—’

  In his ear. ‘You sure you’re all right, Harvey?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Maybe another time is better, Harvey. You stay well.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Harvey, I don’t pry into people’s lives. We go back a long way – anything I should know?’

  ‘Well, since you come to mention it, maybe there is something I can share with you … I’m on a death list. The past came tripping up on me. I wasn’t looking and hadn’t filled any sandbags. Too busy selling every other tosser a crate of Kalashnikovs to look over my shoulder. According to the spooks, a shite-faced bastard has agreed what I’m worth. He may be waiting for it to have cleared into his account, or it’s already through and he’s hunting or sniffing – Christ, I don’t fucking know.’

  ‘Are you speaking, Harvey? I’m getting something. Is it disturbance on the line? Is there something, friend to friend, you should be telling me?’

  ‘Not a bed of roses, but nothing I can’t handle.’

  ‘I watched for you, Harvey, when Solly went … I wouldn’t want to think that you’re not telling me what I …’

  ‘I’m fine, friend. But I’ll call you back – give me some time.’

  He put the phone down on a friend and went to the window. He could see on to the drive, where she was scraping gull mess off the windscreen. They hadn’t spoken a word since the detective had left. When he had gone into the kitchen she had come out, and when he had left the kitchen after a sandwich, she had gone back in. He realised that, getting up to go to the window, he had kicked the dog’s water bowl and a damp stain had spread on the carpet.

  ‘You don’t have to slam doors,’ he shouted through the glass. ‘You can behave like a fucking adult.’

  His wife, his Josie, looked at him. Contempt rippled at her mouth. One of those choice moments, he thought, when she was not going to dignify his insult with a response. She was in the car, had gunned the engine and activated the gates. He wondered where she was going, and whether the gardener figured in her plan. She drove through the gates, which closed behind her.

  He sat at his desk again, the dog’s head on his lap, and went back to the costs of small arms, ammunition and RPG rounds. The columns seemed to bounce on the page, meaningless.

  A sort of fear, new experience, clung to him. Then he shook his head violently, slapped his hands on his desk – hard enough to hurt – and went back to denial. Couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t.

  Now sitting up, intent, Robbie watched from the back window and saw the landscape of the Isle of Portland for the second time. They did the circuit in reverse. Vern drove steadily and allowed other traffic – a few holidaymakers and an occasional delivery van – to pass them. He stayed silent, as Robbie did, and Leanne told them the names of the villages. Down Wide Street, on to Weston Road and through the housing estate – Robbie reckoned the place a dead dump – then into Southwell. Leaving the turn-off to the big hotel, they veered towards the Bill. He said they could stop. Neither his elder brother nor his sister would have demanded tea from the café or a visit to the toilets.

  They parked. He didn’t want tea or a toilet, and he stayed by the car, leaning against the bodywork, his elbows on the roof, and opened the envelope. It wasn’t strange for him to see Leanne emerge from the toilet at the side of the café with the wig in place, and she’d slipped off the yellow cotton cardigan. She always did that. Vern stirred his tea with a plastic stick but didn’t acknowledge her, nor she him, and they were strangers.

  He lost sight of her. There was wind on his face and it snatched at the aerial photographs of the house.

  A big ship loitered past, far out to sea, hardly seeming to move but was soon lost in a deepening heat haze. He memorised the photographs, then slipped them back into the envelope.

  Gulls shrieked above him. It wasn’t said, couldn’t be admitted, but Robbie Cairns depended on the skills of his elder brother and his sister. He needed his brother for the driving, fast, sure and accident-proof, and Leanne for the close-up reconnaissance of a target location. It was warm and the sun came through thickening cloud, burned on the roof, but there was an involuntary shiver in Robbie Cairns’s body. No concrete under his feet, no dense brickwork in his eyeline, just an open sky above him, without chimneys and TV aerials. The shiver was not from the wind blowing against him but his uncertainty at being away from the familiar. Had he known where he was going and what would be the ground, might he have turned down the work? He coughed and spat. Wouldn’t have. He tossed the envelope on to the front passenger seat, Leanne’s.

  He could see, beyond the car park, that a hawk had perched on a fence post. Robbie Cairns knew nothing about birds but that one interested him because it had a wickedly sharp, curved beak and he rated it as a killer. It was a fine-looking bird, with intricate markings on its chest. He would remember it – didn’t know what it was called – and describe it to Barbie when he was back in London. He hadn’t told her he’d be away, hadn’t volunteered information about schedules and movements. He’d just slipped away from the flat. He’d tell her about the bird. Then it flew.

  Great, fantastic. The bird hovered, dived, disappeared, then rose, and he could see the wriggle of the creature it held. It was back to the fence post, the beak hacking at what it had caught.

  Leanne was going back to the toilets.

  He didn’t like the wind on his face or the sun on his cheeks. Most of all, he didn’t like the emptiness of the place, the size of the fields and the open road. In his trade, the work he did was always at close quarters. He had never heard of a marksman’s weapon being used, a sniper’s. Might be fine for the military but not for Robbie. Always wanted to be near – almost standing on the target’s toes – and sure of a head shot with a handgun. In his trade there was no call for what the army in Afghanistan called improvised explosive devices – which the Irish had used and the Iraqis. Robbie knew nobody who had the skills to build a bomb that would go into a culvert or be locked by a magnet to a car’s chassis. On the London streets, he could materialise out of a car parked at a kerb or from among pedestrians on a pavement or dancers in a club or from an alleyway’s shadows. It was big money, not to be refused.

  Leanne was out of the toilets, wig off, yellow top on, and walked with Vern towards him. She said, ‘There are huts up here. Some are being used today but most aren’t. A guy was telling me they cost up to twenty-five grand. They’re just like a garden shed and you’re not allowed to sleep in them. A chatty guy. Told me which ones were still locked up and wouldn’t be used till the kids come off school, which is still a week away … As good as anywhere, I reckon.’

  They left the car park and went back down the road, away from the lighthouse, and towards the target’s home.

  She came back, parked the car, closed the gates and let herself in.

  He was in his office – she could hear the clatter of the keyboard.

  In the bedroom, she change
d from slacks and a blouse into a halter-top and shorts, took a book and went to a chair on the covered walkway outside the picture windows that overlooked the patio. Later, when it was cooler and the sun was further round, she would move to the lounger. She didn’t tell him she was back, ask if there had been calls, whether he needed feeding or a drink, or if a gunman had tried to take his life. Josie Gillot didn’t care much whether there had been any calls or whether he wanted something to eat, or whether … It wouldn’t be a detective, one who had made a piss-awful job of disguising his dislike of her husband and his trade, who told her when to leave her home.

  It was towards late afternoon that Mark Roscoe hit the button and despatched the beast. He eased himself out of his chair, and Suzie pushed the wheels of hers back towards her own workspace. Bill was already out on the fire escape and would be lighting up. Suzie had typed and Roscoe had dictated. Then he had taken over the keys and done a polish. It had his name under it, and he signed it off. The small matter of the paper trail and the responsibilities that lay with it itched inside him. He wasn’t used to having his professional advice chucked back in his face. He hadn’t reported that the potential target, their Tango, was abusive, foul-mouthed, sneering, or the boast of connections with Defence and Intelligence. To have slagged off Gillot would have laid Roscoe open to charges of insensitivity and possible bullying, and if the paper trail was followed at a later stage – after Gillot was dead in a gutter with a 9mm bullet lodged in his brain – and scapegoats were looked for, he wouldn’t be holding up his hands. When Suzie had moved aside and he had tidied up, it was a brief document, spare of colour, emotion and detail. It said little more than that the offer of advice had been made, that a temporary safe-house would have been available, and the Tango had ‘declined’ the suggestions put to him. The report would go to the Gold Commander, Covert Surveillance, Intelligence, and Firearms, and would have reached the Alpha crowd. Also on the list was the big man with the smart epaulettes at the Weymouth police station.

  He stood, stretched, and didn’t know what else he could have done.

  They had been, the three of them, pretty subdued when they’d driven away from Gillot’s house.

  What else? He couldn’t have said, in contradiction of all orders and laid-down procedures, that he would put up a tent by the front gate and sleep there with his Glock in his hand, or make a bivouac under the kitchen table. Neither could he suggest that Bill and Suzie join him to sleep rough in the car at the end of the lane and beside the museum front door. He couldn’t have put Gillot in handcuffs and his wife in a headlock, then shoved them into the boot and driven them to a hotel at the back end of nowhere, like the Shetlands or the Orkneys.

  The itch – coming on worse and needing a scratch – was from feeling he had failed in a basic task. The job had been to get the Tango out of the line of fire: he hadn’t succeeded. There was a good old story – hoary and therefore worth remembering – of a protection officer who had done time with the Viceroy, Mountbatten, in the end days of the Indian Raj. The greys and wrinklies who had done secretary-of-state security details in Belfast, during the choice days, liked to tell it.

  Mountbatten, it was said, had announced one morning that he wanted, first thing after breakfast, to visit the bazaar and go walkabout. His man had refused to consider it. The Viceroy, God Almighty on earth, said he was going, no argument, and was again turned down flat. Miffed, Mountbatten had pulled his immense rank and insisted. No: the officer was adamant. He was quizzed, and had answered: ‘Sir, I’m not overly concerned about your safety, but am most concerned with the preservation of my professional reputation.’ Mountbatten had not visited the bazaar to show the flag. It was the area in which Mark Roscoe felt uneasy.

  They had left a sullen household. Might have left two people who were scared shitless. When they were going the dog had woken in the kitchen and whined. Probably wanted its food.

  His boss had wandered close. ‘You look, Mark, as if you’re carrying the cares of the world.’

  He didn’t answer, just handed over a printout of the report.

  Roscoe couldn’t have said that he had acquired any degree of affection for Gillot. He didn’t admire or sympathise with his wife. He had found both of them unattractive to deal with … but it had gone beyond neutrality. He disliked Harvey and Josie Gillot because both, in equal amounts, threatened him. Inquiries would be convened, inquests would be launched, and the teams of hindsight merchants would be crawling over him if double-tap time came and Gillot was down, bleeding like a stuck pig. But his boss slipped an arm round his shoulders. ‘Be it on his own head. I don’t see what alternatives were open to you.’

  Roscoe didn’t believe a word of the saccharine stuff, but was marginally grateful.

  His boss said, ‘We’re needing to be mob-handed in Wandsworth – are you sitting on your hands or are you coming?’

  He said he’d come – with Suzie and Bill – and was thankful for a distraction: a jewellery shop in Armoury Way that a chis had said was a target. Might just save him scratching the itch till it bled.

  They each had their role. Vern would now be looking for the lie-up where he could stay unobserved with the car. Leanne would have the wig on again, the pullover off, and would be holding the folder that contained the brochures on double-glazing and plastic window-frame opportunities – she was good at chatting on doorsteps. Vern would not be noticed, but Leanne would be remembered as the pretty girl with the dark hair, the glasses and a blouse. Robbie had come down the track that led from the tarmac-surfaced lane and was beside a high wall, the boundary of the target’s property that ran on to block off the location of the ruined castle, an English Heritage site.

  There was a gate off the lane. The name beside it was Lulworth View, and next to the sign was a speech grille.

  He couldn’t see over the wall into the garden, or the shape of the house. He knew the size of the garden from the aerial pictures but that was different from spying out the ground for himself, second best or third. He went on down the lane, leaving Gillot’s home behind and above him. There was the shell of an old church, and graves, and further down the sea and a stony beach. A couple watched him now from the shore and kids threw stones into the water. He tracked along the sand, following a worn path, and by now they would have lost sight of him behind their windbreak. Another woman watched him, wearing a well-filled swimsuit. He had no towel, no camera, no child in tow: what was his business? He realised he had no reason to be on the beach and didn’t fit any pattern. No streets, no pavements, no alleys, no shadows. He quickened his step and then was gone, among fallen gravestones, and had started to climb again from the far end of the beach. He hadn’t yet seen the house but he had shown himself.

  Enough stories of the ‘old days’ tripped off Granddad Cairns’s tongue. Never any point in telling his grandfather that he had heard them before. A favourite was about Leatherslade Farm, near to Aylesbury, out in deep countryside. Granddad Cairns had been twenty-two when the gang had hit the big-time and robbed the Royal Mail train coming south overnight from Scotland. He’d been on remand on a conspiracy-to-burgle charge, and could remember the draught of excitement when news of a two-and-three-quarter-million-pound heist had spread along the corridors of HMP Brixton (Remand), and also – the bit he enjoyed most – the ridicule at the gang’s cock-up. Should have gone straight back to London, to their roots and homes, and stashed the cash in a warehouse or lock-up garage.

  Instead they’d holed up at Leatherslade Farm in a remote corner of the countryside, reckoning that they wouldn’t be seen among all the quiet fields and hedgerows, their presence not noted. Wrong. They were down a long lane that wasn’t made up and they’d thought no one in the whole wide world would dream anyone was there. Wrong enough to get thirty years each. It would have been the rope if the driver had pegged a few weeks earlier from the head injuries they’d done him. A man was supposed to come along afterwards and fire the place, but he hadn’t and the fingerprints were over eve
rything and convicted them … That man was thought to be holding up a flyover pillar on the motorway at Chiswick. But, truth was, locals were queuing up to tell the police of goings-on at Leatherslade Farm. Granddad Cairns used to say, finishing up, ‘I hate the countryside. Had my way, I’d cement everywhere that’s green. Go and look over a town house before doing some business there and no one sees anything. Go and look at a country house and half a village has seen you. Cement’s what’s needed.’ Robbie came up a trodden track and now he could look across the gully that ran down to the ruins, the graveyard and the beach.

  Through the trees, he could make out most of the house, and the patio, but none of it clearly because of the branches.

  Couldn’t see whether there were cameras, or an alarm system.

  There was a woman on a lounger at the edge of the patio – he hadn’t seen her before – and then a dog bounded close to her.

  He had seen what he needed to: a dog.

  By the time he reached the lane again, having cut through a caravan park, he had established that the house didn’t have a back exit on to the path below.

  At the top of the lane, opposite the museum, there was a bench and Leanne was sitting on it. She had the wig on, the cardigan off and the brochures under her arm.

  She asked him, as they strolled up the hill, how it had gone.

  He said it had gone all right.

  She said she’d done the rounds and gossiped while two couples had looked at her double-glazing and the plastics. The people in Lulworth View, she was told, weren’t worth a call because ‘they keep to themselves’ and ‘they’ve hardly a word for anyone’, but she tried the speech grille on the gate and a man had answered. She’d explained and he’d said she could shove … He hadn’t finished.