He was Robbie Cairns, one of a dynasty. The face was above him, grinning manically, and the light caught the blade. Kids in Rotherhithe carried knives, scraped the paintwork on cars, had fun – and had the wit to recognise a member of the Cairns family. No one would have kicked the door and scraped the car of a Cairns. He pushed himself up, had to wrench the door away to extricate his leg. He reckoned that the skin on his shin was broken and perhaps there was a blood smear inside his jeans. He was five feet eight or nine – hadn’t been measured since he was in Feltham Young Offenders. Not more than twelve stone, or hadn’t been then. No spare flesh on him. The kid had a knife and a stocky build; he hadn’t looked into Robbie’s eyes.
The knee came into the kid’s groin. As he jack-knifed and subsided, a trainer toe followed where the knee had been and he gasped. The knife flew – lodged in the grass of the verge. More kicks went in. None to the face. The hands that tried to cover and protect the kid were battered aside. Done fast and clean. There was the receding clatter of the other two kids as they ran.
He had stopped before Vern reached him. Didn’t need Vern to tell him he was an idiot to fight in the street – draw attention, get noticed. Not that Vern would have criticised him to his face. His right hand slipped up and the forefinger rested on the left side of his chin, against his lower jaw. The tip could be inserted, just, into a tiny indentation that most would not have noticed and had healed well. A big kid, pervert, had gone after him in the showers at Feltham. When told to leave off he had struck out and his ring had cut Robbie’s face. It was said in the block that night – and he’d heard it was said in the prison officers’ mess – that it was doubtful the big kid would ever make babies, but his face was unmarked. He looked down at a local wannabe hero, and heard him choke, vomit and whimper with pain.
He took the bag with the fish and chips and laid it on his knees as Vern pulled away from the kerb. What would the kid do? Nothing. What had he to show for it? Not a mark on his face or his upper body, and he was hardly going to go down to Accident and Emergency, peel down his boxers and show a nurse that his balls were black and blue.
Should have let the car get a scratch from a blade down the side.
Should have stepped back. Shouldn’t have come to the country and the big open spaces. Robbie didn’t feel good, but he said nothing, gave Vern no explanation. His foot hurt. They’d go for it tomorrow, in the morning, because he had seen the dog.
His supper had been put on the dining-room table. The television played loud in the snug. He had eaten his supper, something from the freezer and the microwave, had loaded the plate into the dishwasher and gone back to his office. When the television had been switched off, the doors had opened and closed, and a light had shone under the main bedroom door. Wherever he went in the house, every room, he was followed by the dog, which stayed close.
When he was ready to put the animal out, Harvey switched off the lights in the living room and eased the patio doors open, making certain he was not silhouetted against anything bright. The silence beat around the walls, no voices, no clatter of a weapon being armed. He heard the sea and thought it restless, almost unforgiving. When the dog came in, he closed the outer doors, locked them and drew the curtains, then went methodically around the house, checking each door and window except those leading out from the main bedroom. Should he have gone into that room, knelt beside the bed, taken Josie’s head in his arms and … ? He didn’t. He kicked off his shoes and dropped on to the settee in the living room. Best to be in denial. The dog had settled on the rug near him. Harvey Gillot didn’t know who Samuel Johnson was, but he did knew what he had said: Nothing concentrates one’s mind so much as the realisation that one is going to be hanged in the morning. He lay on his back on the cushions and the dog snored. The wind, from the south and west, beat at the roof. He thought the waves were fiercer against the rocks at either end of the cove and there were all those gravestones down there, broken and toppled. They lay beside the ruins of the church, and the ruins of Rufus Castle were close by. Bloody ruins. He reckoned his mind was concentrated, and not even denial could block out his anxiety about the morning. He didn’t know if he would sleep.
10
Harvey woke. There was no rope round his neck, but he massaged the skin of his throat as he blinked and tried to get clarity. She stood in the door, had a silky gown round her, held loosely at the waist. He thought, a bad moment, that she had Pierrepoint’s posture – a couple of years back he’d seen a biopic about the executioner – but when she saw he had woken, she turned away and was gone. He hadn’t focused quickly enough to read her face.
The door closed, wasn’t slammed. It might have been another moment – if he’d been faster off his backside and crabbed quickly across the room – for him to take her in his arms and hold her close. He had not. The door was shut in his face.
He didn’t follow her. He went to the second bathroom and involuntarily touched the robe hanging from the door. It was, of course, dry. He considered then what made for a worse cocktail of poison. A contract on his life? Or the gardener shagging his wife? He ran the shower, letting it warm, then stepped under the spray. He wondered how his body stood up in comparison to Nigel’s. He wet-shaved with a plastic razor, there for a visitor who had stayed overnight without kit, but no one stayed over: they lived in isolation. He dried hard, didn’t use the robe, as if it was the personal property of another.
Ignoring the principal bedroom where there was a walk-in wardrobe that contained his best suits, good casuals and shirts, he dressed in yesterday’s clothes – but for the socks.
He put on flipflops. He wouldn’t go back into the bedroom to rifle in the wardrobe before hell froze over. He looked out of the window.
The sun was still low, peeping over the hills behind the Lulworth cliffs and throwing long ribbons of gold on to the water. The wind had died, and the ferry chugged across his view while a handful of yachts and launches hugged the inshore waters and went to sea. It was pretty damn normal. He stretched and coughed, then searched the trees behind the walls, the castle’s keep to the left and the rock promontories bordering the cove for sign of the threat. He saw nothing.
Like a child, chastened, he bent over the settee and straightened the cushions, smoothed them.
He looked for a friend. The dog still followed him as it had the previous day. When it had wolfed its food he picked up the bowl to wash it and found in the sink her mug with the dregs of tea. She had made some and not brought him any. It seemed important. He was reeling at the toxic nature of the dislike, distrust. He realised it would destroy him – more self-indulgence and self-pity.
He wouldn’t lie in a ditch and cower. He padded back to his office, and murmured to the dog that he needed a few minutes – tried to explain it was only a quick call that had to be made, asked for understanding, and found the dog reasonable. He flicked through his address book and dialled.
‘Monty?’
It was.
‘Harvey here – yes, Harvey Gillot. You good?’ Yes, Monty was good, but Monty was half in and half out of the shower and did Harvey know what time it was and how uncivilised a call was at—
‘A couple of things I need.’ What did he need? ‘Can you get your hands quick on a BPV supplier?’ Yes, Monty had a stock of bulletproof vests in his own warehouse, but were they talking of the ones proof against gunfire or merely knives?
‘Bulletproof.’
Not a problem. And what quantity? A hundred? Two hundred, three? And what delivery date?
‘Bulletproof. Quantity of one only.’ Only one? Delivery tomorrow. He had the address. Obviously a discount for bulk orders – was Harvey aware of the price for a single item? It would be six hundred sterling, but for a long-standing friend it could be five hundred. It would be handgun-proof, but not, obviously, high velocity. Where was he going? Kandahar? Bogotá? Gaza?
He said grimly, ‘It’s for going out here, the Isle of bloody Portland, Dorset, and walking the dog on the coastal pa
th, but that is not, please, for shouting off the rooftops. What about sprays?’ There was US-made Mace bear pepper spray, recommended for campers up-country in Montana or Oregon and frowned on in the UK, about twenty-five sterling a canister. What was legal throughout the UK was a spray that let off a vile stench and marked clothes beyond the capability of household washing-machines at about thirteen pounds.
‘Whatever you have. Delivery tomorrow. I’m grateful, Monty.’
He rang off, and told the dog that – give or take five minutes – they would go for a walk.
He was alone now. Robbie thought this time, minutes but could be hours, was the hardest.
He waited and watched the gates.
He had told them, back at the hut at first light, that he wouldn’t attempt to scale the walls because there was too much ground that was dead to him, unseen, and he didn’t know what the alarm system was or where the cameras and beams were. He had said he would be close to the gates and would wait for the target to come out.
Vern had queried him – he didn’t often. ‘The gates are electronic and he’ll come out in his car. Where are you and what do you do?’
‘He won’t. He’ll be walking.’
Leanne had challenged him: ‘How can you say, Robbie, that he’ll walk out of the gates?’
‘Because of the dog.’
Both had looked at him, confused. ‘Because of the dog? You sure of that, Robbie?’
‘He has a nice garden, very pretty. He spends time and money on it. He doesn’t want dog shit all over it. He’ll take the dog out and walk to where the dog can shit and he doesn’t have to clear it up.’ It had satisfied them.
The decision he had made was that the target would come out of the gates, swing to his right, go past the castle wall and the main building, then keep going that way till he had dropped down to the graveyard and where the church had been. From there he might go right or left, but the coastal path was closed in with rough brambles and gorse, enough for Robbie to get close to him. He had worked it through, always did. He wore overalls, had the balaclava in his left pocket, and was squatted in a gap in the scrub where the people from a house between the lane and the gates dumped their grass cuttings and garden rubbish. It was a useful place, but for all of its good points there was the bad one: he was hanging around, would stand out and … No other way. He stayed stock still when two men came past him on the path. They didn’t see him but one of their dogs yapped at him.
The Baikal pistol was in the right side pocket of the overalls. It was loaded.
Normally he slept well, in the house in Clack Street he shared with Vern and Leanne and in the apartment where he kept Barbie. He had slept all right when he was with his grandparents on the first floor of the block on the Albion Estate, and when he was in Feltham. He didn’t lose sleep on the night before a hit.
He’d tossed all night in the hut. Nothing to do with the floor, or the cushions he’d taken off the bench where Leanne was, and nothing to do with Vern in the easy chair, feet on the table. He hadn’t slept because his foot hurt. The pain was a reminder that he had reacted to a yob-kid, had allowed himself to be riled. He didn’t feel right.
They hadn’t argued with him, never did. They accepted that the man, the target, would come out of the gates and would be walking his dog: they had to accept it because that was what Robbie had said would happen.
He was hot in the overalls and his hands were tacky inside the lightweight rubber gloves.
He couldn’t speak to Vern or Leanne. Their mobiles had been switched off since they’d been on the ring-road motorway south of London before they had headed to the coast. Idiots left their mobiles switched on when they went to work – a phone could be tracked as sure as a bug under the car. His father, Jerry, might have left his mobile switched on: he was in HMP Wandsworth because he was an idiot. Vern would have the car parked up the street from the museum and the pub, and would be sitting somewhere, killing time, waiting. Leanne would be on the bench on the open ground, grassed, on the far side of the street to the museum and the entrance to the lane, and would have the wig on.
Hadn’t seen him, had he? Knew his name and age, had seen his wife and dog. Didn’t know what he looked like. Would shoot, wouldn’t he, a male aged forty-six who came out of the gates and had a dog with him? Understood why Vern and Leanne had queried, then challenged him. Was he rushing it?
He was never wrong, never had been.
The sun came up and clipped the treetops, and he realised there were apples, rotten and thrown out with the grass cuttings. The wasps found him.
As he swatted them away, he heard a telephone ring, far off.
Lunch awaited him at the Special Forces Club, and he had an appointment before that with the man who had overseen his hip’s resurfacing, but Benjie Arbuthnot had taken an early train that had dumped him with the commuter hordes at a London terminus. A taxi had brought him to Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the South Bank.
‘It was something or nothing, really. If it’s something, I’d say that Gillot’s on borrowed time. If it’s nothing, we just picked up the chaff of a few embittered old men who were doing some wishful thinking.’
Benjie and Deirdre had been guests at Alastair Watson’s wedding. When Benjie had run an obscure Middle East desk –mercifully with no links to weapons of mass destruction – his last job before retirement, Watson had been his personal assistant. When they were not in London they were in the Gulf, putting rather brave men on to the dhows that sailed backwards and forwards between Dubai or Oman and Iranian harbours. They had enjoyed, Benjie reckoned, a good relationship.
‘As we understand it, the village had given their lead man everything they had. No item of even trifling value was overlooked. The whole lot went to paying for the MANPADS. It was thought they would ensure the successful defence of the village. Its location was important: it guaranteed that the track through the cornfields remained open – only at night and only at great risk, but the symbol was huge. Gillot, we gather, took delivery of the valuables, then went down to Rijeka, put the whole lot in safety deposit while he made arrangements with a shipping agent for the offloading of the cargo when it was brought ashore.’
Benjie had a rule and had adhered to it strictly since he’d handed in his swipe card: he never took access for granted. With extreme politeness, he had requested the previous afternoon that he be accorded a short and non-attributable briefing on the matter of a contract for Harvey Gillot. He assumed Watson had been permitted a glimpse of a résumé of the Zagreb contact, then sent down to an interview room to humour an old war horse – for whom, perhaps, the past had resurrected.
‘He did well. In a very few days he had located the merchandise, had it brought out of Poland, Gdansk, where there was Customs chaos. It was en route to Rijeka … where you showed up, Mr Arbuthnot. Well, no shipment was landed and nobody managed to get word to those expecting delivery. They stood in a cornfield, waiting, and were zapped. It appears that the bodies were treated badly – that is, badly by Balkan standards – and then the area was mined. Last week the mines were cleared, and a plough turned up a corpse who had the name of Harvey Gillot in his pocket. You’d know better than me, Mr Arbuthnot, that memories in that corner of Europe are long and hatreds don’t diminish. Our feeling – yes, he’ll be hit.’
The coffee had come from a machine, was almost undrinkable, but Benjie had emptied two sachets of sugar into it and swirled the dregs with a wooden spatula.
‘Does that help?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ He stood. He was about to ask after Watson’s parents and—
‘Why, Mr Arbuthnot, did you block the shipment?’
He drew breath and considered. He liked the young man, trusted him, and thought him owed some honesty. ‘Sanctions busting, wasn’t it? UN Security Council resolution and all that. Criminal stuff. I simply advised Gillot – a useful asset of the Service at that time – of the risks he was running and rather quietly nudged him towards the docks at Aqaba, a Jordanian
arsenal … They might have gone to Israel, might have gone to Syria, might have gone to an outfit in Azerbaijan. You see, that place on the Danube was doomed. Only obstinacy and bloody-minded blindness prevented those people bugging out down that track and accepting the inevitable. They didn’t do the sensible thing, and there are graves to show for it. Well, thank you.’
‘But he reneged on the deal he’d done because of your intervention.’
‘A little black and white, Alastair, in a grey and murky situation.’
‘Nobody will put their hand up and admit to guilt, obviously… Is it because of us – sorry, you – that he’s in deep trouble?’
‘Difficult times … but I expect Gillot will come through. The blame game seldom helps towards a satisfactory conclusion, in my limited experience.’ He stood, and his bloody hip hurt.
‘My regards to Mrs Arbuthnot.’
‘She’ll appreciate that. I’m grateful for your time.’
‘Need to know and all that.’
‘Of course.’
‘I haven’t asked how you were alerted to this matter, nor shall I. But you ought to know we’re told that the recommendations of a Gold Group have been chucked back in their collective faces. It was suggested to Gillot that he should move out and do a runner. He refused.’
‘Surely he’ll get a policeman on the door?’
‘Will not. I absolutely don’t mean to patronise but there’s health and safety to be considered. I mean, what we did in the Gulf or up on the border from the Basra station – well, I don’t remember you filing a risk assessment, Mr Arbuthnot. Who guards the policeman on the door? Who watches the posteriors of the back-up squad? And they’re twenty-four-seven, so cash registers ring. Anyway, that’s where he is, Gold Group have a headache and Gillot’s planning a George Custer moment. May I ask, were you fond of Gillot?’
He said stiffly, ‘I did not like or dislike him. He was an agent – damn you, dear boy, for asking. He was a useful asset. Do we in the Service now sign up to duty of care?’
The Dealer and the Dead Page 23