They stood in front of the church.
‘It is on the site of the old building. Under the nave there were steps down into the crypt. It was used as a refuge for the wounded and the sick, and it was where my wife was brought when she was in labour. There were complications in the delivery of my son. He was in vigorous health, but my wife deteriorated. The Cornfield Road was too dangerous for a sick woman to journey over. She died there, and we buried her in the night. We call those missiles by their Russian name, Malyutka, and with them we could have kept open the way across the fields. We had paid for them but they were not delivered. The road was cut and our village could not survive, nor Bogdanovci – our neighbour. It was the death of Vukovar. We remember well what was done to us – especially what was done to us for our own good.’
They walked on. Occasionally a building was still damaged, left with weeds sprouting in the cavities and saplings growing through the old floor. Simun murmured they had been the homes of Serbs who had lived in the village before the fighting and would never come back. She thought the shop, from its window display, was pitifully stocked, and wondered what horizons were left here … after the killing of Harvey Gillot. There was a larger house, grander, and a full-sized Madonna, carved from wood, and Simun whispered that it was the work of the fighter who had led the resistance in Bogdanovci. It was Mladen’s house. Simun pointed to the storks that nested on a chimney at the back – huge bodies and wings, tapering necks and pencil legs – and said that they had stayed right through the siege.
His father coughed, then spoke. ‘I doubt, Miss Penny, that you have fought for anything, suffered for anything. We have. We understand what it is to fight and to suffer. Most of all, Miss Penny, we believe in trust, and we are as loyal to the dead as we are to the living. He took our money and all that was valuable to us. He was given everything we had, and we trusted him. Do you seek to interfere?’
Penny Laing stood in a backwater of eastern Slavonia, in a far corner of Croatia, at the extremity of old Catholic Europe. She was far from London and the mores of her office. ‘I do not seek to interfere but to learn.’
‘It would be bad for you, Miss Penny, if our trust in you were not justified.’ There was no cloud in the sky but she was chilled. She had crossed a line, and could not have explained it to those who shared her work on the Alpha team. Neither could she have made sense of it to a weapons officer on a frigate hunting drugs smugglers in the Caribbean. She only knew Harvey Gillot from a photograph, and felt shrunken and almost insignificant. Perhaps she had paled, but Simun’s hand was on her elbow as if she needed to be supported. She thought the death of that man was now inevitable.
The call came from an apartment, one of the most sought-after in the capital city, that overlooked a grand square. The sun shone with late-afternoon brilliance on the grass, the statues and the monument to a great leader of a previous century.
‘You, Josip? … There is news. No, no, leave the cork … Josip, the news from London is that an attempt was made and failed … For fuck’s sake, Josip, how would I know? I’m in Zagreb. I have had a message, not a half-hour conversation. It failed … What happens now? I wasn’t told … Don’t treat me like an idiot. It’s accepted that you paid … It’s on your head. You advised, suggested, you began it … You’re vulnerable, that too I accept … What do you tell your villagers? You tell them it failed, and you tell them that the money they paid will be earned. Tell them many people in a long chain will demand it.’
12
He brought the last load of clothes out through the gates. He had dropped a few bits and left them in a trail from the wardrobes, into the corridor, across the hall and scattered on the gravel. The shoes were already out, in three bin-bags, the handbags in another, stacked on top of the suitcases that the police had repacked.
Harvey Gillot moved Josie’s possessions with a sort of manic precision – he would have brought the same degree of concentration to the preparation of a big deal. There was no Military List for his wife’s clothing and accessories, and he needed no end-user certificate to deliver them to the front gate, but his mind kept an inventory of what he had shifted and what was yet to come.
The parked car was in front of him.
Roscoe was sprawled half in and half out of the open front passenger door. The girl was perched on the bonnet. The burly one with the northern accent was up the lane a few paces, hunkered on a stone at the side of it. He thought they waited for instructions, perhaps to pull out and leave him to whatever Hades’ devils had in store, or move in and set up a defensive perimeter. The compromise, while they waited, was to be outside the gates. He couldn’t see Roscoe’s gun. The girl’s Glock protruded from her handbag. The heavy fellow was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief – the action swung aside his jacket giving a clear view of his weapon in its holster. In a different world, Harvey would have brought them a tray with a teapot, mugs, a jug of milk and a plate of biscuits. They were not friends, not allies, and he knew they disliked him.
He was in no mood to placate them as he carried out the last of his wife’s clothes on their hangers. He made a line of them along the gates, to give the effect of a football stadium where the fans had hooked their flags on to the railings.
Harvey Gillot wasn’t a man to change his mind or compromise. He didn’t consider whether Josie might come back to Lulworth View when she had calmed down. He knew her well enough to assess that she would not.
They held memories, those clothes. A dress she had worn, a sort of Mediterranean blue, when they had entertained a brigadier of the Sri Lankan Army; another, scarlet, close-fitting at the waist and flaring out at the hem, had gone with a cutaway white jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, her choice for a hospitality lounge at Cheltenham when the guests had been from the procurement section of the Kuwait defence ministry. A Thai-silk two-piece for when they had entertained a gang of guys from Belarus who had raped her with their eyes, but had agreed the sale of gear that had gone to Lima, Peru. They were clothes from the ‘old days’ when Harvey and Josie had been a team that tilted at impossible targets and hit most of them. Too bloody long ago … The two skirts he had bought her in Milan where they had been for a fair to show off Italian Air Force surplus … The winter coat, with the fur collar, purchased in Helsinki where there had been an exhibition of body armour. What he did was an act of spite. All the clothing he liked had been bought before they moved to the Isle of Portland – before he had isolated them from the world in a place where he had felt safe.
They watched him.
Free country. Couldn’t stop them.
He hummed, as he lifted the last of the hangers, his anthem: Nobody Loves Us and We Don’t Care. He knew a little of the style and ethics of protection officers. Perhaps once a year he would be in central London, taking a client to dinner at the Ritz or Claridge’s, busting open the expense account in the hope of rich reward, and the guest would have them swarming on the pavement and in the lobby. Roscoe, the girl and the big fellow would have had the training. Something bordering on arrogance enveloped anyone with a Glock, who rode in a car with a compartment for a Heckler & Koch machine pistol, vests and gas in the boot, and a list in the front of blood groups, religious affiliations and the nearest hospitals. He knew these three weren’t bullet-catchers. He doubted they reckoned it their duty to put their lives on the line if it went hard for him.
There were cardboard boxes in the garage and a stack of old newspapers in the tool shed. He would go back in and start on the ornaments – glass, pottery, china vases – that she had accumulated over the years. They’d be wrapped, put in the boxes and come out of the front door, across the drive and up to the gates. He turned away from the watchers and went back inside.
He hadn’t thought through the matter of his daughter – Fiona – but he’d likely lump her with her mother and the horse. If he did, her room would be next on the list for clearing.
She saw the door close, heard the latch fasten and his tread fade.
S
he was short of a friend. There were women at work with whom, occasionally, Barbie went for coffee – even a drink – and a movie, but not many. The visit to the show, in the West End, was rare but anticipated with warm pleasure. There was nobody at the store in whom she would confide, not even the girls she would be with tomorrow evening. It made for an enduring loneliness. There was family – an elder sister lived with two children, no husband, in Lincolnshire, and was close to their parents, but Barbie wouldn’t bare her soul to any of them.
First she thought she would finish some ironing, then wash up what was in the sink, but she wasn’t sure which to attack first.
Her only friend, doubling as lover and keeper, was Robbie Cairns. He had wolfed a sandwich, then had walked, naked, into the bathroom. She had heard the shower run and he had gone into their bedroom. She had put his clothing into the machine and had turned the dial so that the wash would be thorough. While it went through the system and then into the dryer he had slept on their bed, under the coverlet. A couple of times she’d tiptoed to the door and peeped in. There had been a sort of calm on his face.
She didn’t start with the ironing or the washing-up but went into the bedroom to straighten the sheets and bang the pillows.
She had no friend. Had there been one, questions would have been asked. Who was he? What did he do? Where did the money come from? When was he going to ‘out’ her as his girlfriend? And what confused her as much as her lack of knowledge about him was his apparent indifference to her past. Her age? He had never asked. Neither had he shown any interest in her family. He didn’t want to know what men she had been with before he had found her in Fragrances. She had been married – her eighteen, him nineteen, a junior maintenance fitter at the air-force base at Scampton. It had lasted a week less than six months, and the divorce had been through years ago. She had no contact.
Coming from the bedroom, crossing the living room, she paused by the window, parted the lace curtains and saw him coming off the pavement and going into the road. His hands were deep in his pockets, his head was down and there was no spring in the step. He went through the traffic and she lost him.
She had pretty much given up on being close to a man until this one had wandered into her life. He had come with certainty, had never seemed to consider that he might not be welcome. There was little conversation, and he might go almost an entire evening and not speak a dozen words. He would nod, the basics of gratitude, when she’d cooked and he’d cleared the plate. No shouting in sex, and he didn’t expect a grunt chorus from her. Most often it was television, and he chose what to watch – nature, angling, endurance. All the bills were paid. Each week a hundred pounds, in notes, was left in a plain brown envelope and she was expected to shop with it. She wouldn’t have called him generous or tight. Had there been a friend, and had honesty ruled between them, Barbie would have been hard placed to acknowledge why Robbie Cairns needed her in the apartment. The meals were infrequent, the sex was indifferent and occasional, the conversation was halting, but she wasn’t a fool and she understood that he could not have found elsewhere the peace she had seen on his face as he slept.
She paused in the middle of the room and frowned. Her nostrils twitched. Petrol, paraffin. He’d called it lighter fuel. She never criticised him – she wouldn’t give him lip for making the room smell, and the furniture.
Who was he? A criminal, probably. Maybe a fence who received stolen goods and passed them on, or a money-launderer. The smell annoyed her and the cushions in the chair were rucked up.
What did he do? Nothing legal, but also nothing that hurt because she couldn’t believe him capable of that. There had been peace on his face on the bed, and the same peace when he slept against her, his head on her breast – then he was like a child. She reached for the cushions to smooth them.
Where did the money come from? Money from pills, money from car radios that were taken but covered by insurance. Well, not everyone was white as the driven snow, and she had never had a place as nice and … She lifted a cushion.
The light was dropping outside, and heavy shadows were thrown across the room.
Its handle was black, the grip manufactured with a roughness that would make it easier to hold. The trigger lever seemed huge, and the hammer was depressed. Barbie knew little about pistols, except that … For God’s sake, the local paper in Rotherhithe was full of gang shootings. Most were black on black. Most were targeted. The material of the chair was cream and the weapon an ugly intruder.
Should Barbie have been shocked? She was the mistress of Robbie Cairns, who had never explained what he did. She was the workhorse of Robbie Cairns who didn’t tell her where the money came from that furnished the flat and bought the food. The handgun had shocked her, like a blow to the stomach … where his hand rested when he was still.
She bent. She allowed her fingers to run on the smooth metal shape, and she could see the faint discoloration of the gun oil.
Her knees weakened. The cushions were on the floor. She sank down and laid the pistol her lap. It was a moment of enormity, beyond anything she had known in her life before. If a man had a pistol – not a kid but a man – he owned it for a purpose. Her manager had said in her last annual assessment that she was an employee of loyalty and intelligence. Did she owe loyalty to Robbie Cairns who had a handgun, when the purpose of a handgun was to kill? She was trembling, and couldn’t prize her hands off the gun. The light failed around her. She didn’t know when he would come back or what she should do.
Leanne stood behind her grandfather, her hands resting on his bony shoulders.
Granddad Cairns said, ‘Your sister was there, lad, when the police came, but not uniform. What your sister saw was London people, and that’s most likely the Squad. They had jackets on, and it’s hot enough to be stripped on the beach. So, there’s guns, and the Squad carry guns … When you was there, Robbie, there was no detectives, no Squad people, no guns – but there was fuckin’ wasps.’
Robbie stayed silent.
‘For that information, your sister had to hang round the street, then take a fuckin’ bus and a train. Had to show balls, and she did. Good money was paid. A good chance of a hit was there – but fuckin’ wasps was in the way, and the good chance went. What about the good money, Robbie?’
He didn’t answer, wasn’t expected to.
‘A man on the other side of the continent, Robbie, speaks to a good friend and makes a request of him, and it’s passed on. Came to rest with Lenny Grewcock, and he’d heard of you so he came to us. You get chosen, the deal comes to us and the money’s paid. What do I do, Robbie? Tell the big men that our kid’s no good if there’s wasps?’
Robbie would have half killed Vern if he’d spoken to him with such contempt, would have bloody near broken his father’s neck. He heard out his grandfather, and his sister saw his humiliation.
‘They have a crowd at the Yard, part of the Squad, supposed to protect men threatened by a contract. What’ll they do? They’ll move him. There was a chance but it’s like the door’s slammed. You don’t know nothing about rifles, for distance, and you don’t know nothing about bombs, for under cars. What you know about is a pistol, close-up, in a face. He’ll be protected, and he’ll be moved, and then fuckin’ hell knows how you find him. You blew it, kid. Do I go down the bank, order up a draft, take it round to Lenny Grewcock’s, give it him back and tell him our kid’s shit?’
He thought his sister might have stood in his corner, but she did not.
‘Tell him our kid’s frightened of a fuckin’ wasp up his nose? It’s a proud name is ours in Rotherhithe. It’s not fuckin’ laughed at. It will be … I reckon there are three questions for you. Listening?’
He stared across the little room. Beyond the kitchen door, a little open, his grandmother would be cooking supper. Mostly it was stew, the beef cut small for Granddad Cairns’s teeth. Nothing in this room had changed since his first memories of it. The same picture, over the gas fire, of hills in Scotland, bits of chin
a, plastic flowers, photographs of a man in military uniform who had been his great-grandfather and was not a Great War hero, but had spent most of it in the Glasshouse, the military detention centre at Aldershot.
‘Three: you tell me to pay the money back. I die of shame, your grandmother and your father won’t know you, nor Leanne and Vern, and you don’t show your face in Rotherhithe. Two: you fetch the pistol, bring it to me and I go and do it because you’re not capable. I go down where there’s guns – never fired one in my life – and I try to do it. One: you finish it. You go to the end of the fuckin’ world but you do it. So?’
He said, ‘He’s done, Gillot is. He’s dead.’
Robbie saw the light come back to Leanne’s eyes, and colour flushed her face. Breath whistled from between his grandfather’s teeth, as if it had been trapped there and could now be freed.
He let himself out through the front door and kicked it shut after him. He didn’t know who had paid for the contract, where the money had been raised, couldn’t see it in his mind – not the people or the houses. But he had made his call, no stepping back: He’s done, Gillot is. He’s dead.
She stood in the centre of the room and gazed around her. The boy translated and Penny listened.
The man was named Tomislav and she thought him a prisoner of the eighty-day siege that had ended nineteen years before. Simun’s voice was gentle in her ear and seemed to massage the words he used. There were photographs of faces, some from weddings, some snapshots and others the staring type from official identification cards: the boy pointed to them individually or gestured to groups.
‘Those three, they had been at the school together, lived in the same road in the village, worked in the same factory at Vinkovci and died together. The bunker was at the edge of the village on the little road to Marinci and it took a direct hit, a mortar. They all died there … The woman was going between the crypt under the church and her home when a shell from a tank landed in the street and decapitated her. They had a marksman on the Bogdanovci side of the village – good but not as good as Andrija – and he killed those four men. Good men, brave men. His wife was raped after the surrender. When they had finished with her she went to her home – her husband had made for the cornfields but was found and shot – and into the roof where there were still grenades. She held one against her bosom and took the pin free …’
The Dealer and the Dead Page 28