The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  The art of what Robbie Cairns did was to go in fast, hard, and be gone. He had walked on past and his feet would have been no more than a yard from the head of the target. He had not looked down but had carried his bag in one hand and the rolled newspaper in the other. He had not understood why there was no blood, only two holes, regular shape of a 7.65 calibre round. He had kept walking and had left the man on the platform. There should have been blood. When he had waited, by the doorway into the chapel, he had concerned himself with the chance of blood arcing up if he did a close-range head shot and of the bubbles landing on his face and clothes. Right up to the time that he had seen the target, one of the last off the train and from one of the furthest carriages, it had tossed in his mind – a head shot or a spine shot? The man had walked easily, had seemed unaware. Decision taken: a spine shot. He hadn’t looked round him or checked for a tail, had passed the doorway as if swept along in the flow, as Robbie had been when he slotted in behind, five feet back, no more than six. He had held the bag away from the rolled newspaper, had done the trigger squeeze, and no one had reacted as the target had stumbled and sagged. It had been a long time before he had understood why the target was not dead and did not bleed. He had stopped by the window of a travel agent, beside the Costa and Algarve posters, and gazed back at the platform. He had not seen a felled corpse and had known what he must do.

  In the travel agent’s, by the main entrance to the station, he had had to control his breathing, almost panted as if he had been running. Big, deep breaths, and it was the start of the day: a girl was free to hear his order. An air ticket from Munich to Zagreb, one way: he couldn’t get his head round where he would bug out to afterwards. He bought a ticket from Franz Josef Strauss to Pleso, and said he didn’t know what his plans were in the next few days. He paid cash for the ticket, which confused the girl, so he acted dumb and she did the transaction, but said next time he should use a credit card. Two items tracked a man: one was a credit card each time it was used, and the second was a mobile phone the whole time it was switched on.

  He had gone back to the edge of the concourse and stood close to the big bookshop and near the stall that had more sorts of buns and bread rolls than he’d known of, and he had looked away up the platform to confirm again what he already knew. He had known where to look because the sign for the chapel was high and easy to see. Nothing there – well, an old woman pushing a trolley. He had sufficient elevation, on tiptoe, to note that there was no blood. There should have been – and scene-of-crime tape, a cordon, a sheet with feet sticking out from under it – but there was only an old woman. He had gone to the taxi rank.

  The understanding hurt.

  He had never worn a vest, or shot a man who had worn one. He had never seen one demonstrated. It hurt because now he could recall that his target had seemed broader in the body, more solid and substantial, but he hadn’t registered it. There was a Burger King at the entrance near to where the taxis waited. Outside it were big industrial rubbish bins, the sort that were hoisted by lorries and tipped. It was a fast movement. The Walther PPK went in with the silencer still screwed in place and the spare magazine. He couldn’t have cleaned it enough to remove DNA, but he thought the rubbish would go to the tip and, if he was lucky, be buried. He didn’t know of an alternative.

  It was a new airport. Luxury. It had worked well – about all that had. A flight in ninety minutes to Zagreb. He couldn’t telephone Rotherhithe, the Albion Estate. Had no one to lean on. Robbie Cairns was pushed forward through Departures and towards the gate, was a driven man, pressured by failure. Almost, standing in the boarding queue, he had been about to congratulate himself on responding well to a second fuck-up, not recognising the bulk of a vest, but two women were in front of him, smartly clothed, smooth-skinned and smelling of scent, and he remembered.

  Because the women who worked on that counter in the department store were close-knit and subject to small confidences, Melody knew a little of the supposedly secretive domestic life of her friend and colleague, Barbara. She had come off the bus – her diversion would make her late into central London – had waited at the entrance of Barbara’s block until a resident had emerged, then used the opportunity to slip inside and beat the self-locking system. She had climbed the stairs and knocked firmly on a second-floor door.

  No answer.

  While she had waited for someone to leave the building she had checked the postbox set into the wall beside her friend’s name. Without the key, she couldn’t get at the post, but could ascertain that the box had not been cleared the previous day … Not at work, not at the theatre, habits of reliability broken. So unlike her colleague to stand them up and waste a ticket for Les Misérables. The little she knew of Barbara’s life was the past – an old home, long left behind, old relationships long discarded, old parents and … There was no possibility that Barbara, from Fragrances, could make her salary stretch to a flat on the second floor of this block on Canada Water. Even the ‘downturn’ or the ‘crunch’ had not abseiled the prices of properties that far and that fast. She knocked again, harder, then put her finger on a bell and heard it ring behind the door.

  Across the landing a baby had started to cry.

  She tried there. The baby’s cry came closer and a door was unfastened, a chain removed. A woman accused Melody: ‘It’s taken me two hours to get him to sleep and my husband does nights and you’ve woken him, and—’

  Melody said, ‘It’s my friend.’

  ‘Her across there?’

  ‘Didn’t come to work yesterday. No explanation. I’m sorry I woke your baby and your husband.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just not like her.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘She’s not there.’ The two women and the baby walked across the landing. Melody rapped at the door and the mother pressed the bell. There was an echo from the interior.

  ‘I didn’t hear her all yesterday. I’m sensitive to noise, my husband being on nights. He does the computers for one of the newspapers across the river. Has to be there all night, every night, but it’s work and it pays and he’s dead on his feet when he comes home and it’s a sod when he can’t sleep. I didn’t hear her, but he left yesterday morning.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘The boyfriend – it’s his place. She lives there and he visits, don’t know his name. He left yesterday morning and I heard the door, but I didn’t see her.’

  Melody apologised. She went out of the block. She walked purposefully and skirted the bus station, where there was also the Underground, either of which would have taken her into central London, but she went on. She took the sharp left turn into Lower Road and reached the police station. Melody was not a woman who took lightly such a course of action, but she was anxious for her colleague and it irritated her that Barbara had never talked about her boyfriend.

  She was sharp with the desk officer, to the point, and indicated that she wanted reassurance.

  Retirement, and the decanter set with the crystal glasses, didn’t dull the awareness of an officer with thirty years in the Service. It was a complaint of Deirdre’s that when they took holidays, flew on budget lines, he had a persistent – near irritating – tendency to create biographies for their fellow travellers. More often than not, if the people he had stripped bare were staying at the same hotel – the Italian lakes or under the Swiss Matterhorn – she would find he had been pretty damn right in his assessments. Not that he ever received an apology for her criticism of his habit, or for the doubts expressed. But she wasn’t with him, and he could feel free.

  They were up, they had climbed, they cruised.

  She had taken him, hours before, to the early train. Driving there, he had called VBX, a privileged number, and spoken briefly to Alastair Watson. At the station, on the platform, she had asked triumphantly what he had forgotten. Damned if he’d known what he’d left behind. She had produced then, from a cavern of a handbag, his pen, the one from Pakistan and the Frontier, and they had chuckled, then hugged. She had
n’t waited for his train to arrive, saying the dogs would be needing their walk, just squeezed his hand, an apology for tenderness, and muttered something about ‘Take care of yourself and do nothing daft’, and gone. He had acquired the pen, manufactured in a back alley of the village of Darra Adam Khel, some thirty miles to the south of Peshawar, when he had supervised, with Solly Lieberman, the delivery of the Blowpipes, and had met young Gillot.

  He had selected two passengers as being of interest; they would, like him, have made late bookings. The woman was across the aisle from him, in a gangway seat, as he was, and the man three rows in front of where he sat. Boarding had been uneventful; the pen had gone into the little tray of loose change, with the rheumatism bracelet and his house keys, and had aroused no suspicion. He had noted the two at the security checks – didn’t need the insight of the Baker Street fellow. He reckoned the last-minute flyers were dumped in the same section of the aircraft, nearest the engines, the noise, the toilets and the smell.

  The woman’s bag had the Planet Protection logo.

  Benjie Arbuthnot did not know shyness and stared at her with frank interest. A rather pretty woman, might have been elegant or beautiful if she’d patronised a hair salon and a decent boutique. He had no complaint: rather liked the rawness of clothing, skin and eyes. He knew of Planet Protection. The organisation had figured briefly on that list of NGOs that was fed to embassies in the globe’s odder corners so that station officers could – under the usual cover of second secretary, trade – sidle up in a bar, buy large gins and lubricate a tongue if its owner had been upcountry or had met an elusive personality. Those NGOs were regarded as friendly, and were in receipt of central government funding. He doubted that another passenger in the cabin had heard of Planet Protection, and no chance that any would know what they did. It was the arms trade. He didn’t need to be Holmes, or require the prompting of Watson, to marry up Harvey Gillot and the woman, whose name was on a tag attached to the strap of the bag with the logo.

  He assessed Megs Behan. A love of the cause and therefore no man with whom to share the tedium of fighting an unwinnable war. A woman with devotion and maternal love, but all channelled towards some dreary little bolt-hole in a building that should have been condemned and … Was Benjie Arbuthnot a cruel, warped old warrior? He wouldn’t have admitted to such charges. He would have said that the glory of the cause would dull and she would become a barren, lonely and boring old trout. She had good bones in her face, strong at the cheeks and the chin, and he liked the way she sat, upright. Good, too, that she wore no cosmetics and there was only a fine gold chain at her throat and studs in her ears – good studs, which told him they would have been a present, perhaps for her twenty-first, from a family of affluence.

  So, Megs Behan had rejected the comfortable and conventional and had opted for the loneliness of the protest line, but her redeeming feature was – he identified – a feisty glint in the eyes. He enjoyed, always had, the company of women who ‘had balls, big ones’, and believed that might be true of this weapons-trade campaigner. Interesting that she knew Harvey Gillot, the condemned wretch, was heading for the corn-and-sunflower country inland from Vukovar, was on a bucket flight to be there as a witness, perhaps as a tricoteuse … He played the game, and had kept as good a piece as he possessed to the last. She had pale skin. Going through the security checks she had caught the eye of the man, and both had looked sharply away, but Megs Behan had blushed. They had not glanced at each other since, were in avoidance mode. He had much to reflect on.

  The trolley went past, and he smiled at the cabin girl, took three small plastic beakers from her, and smiled again – old and sweet and not to be argued with. He poured from the hip flask he carried, a nip for each beaker.

  Up from his seat, he passed one across the aisle, saw the shock and ducked his head as a form of greeting, then went forward three rows, and when the man looked up he was handed the second beaker. It was done and he was gone, back in his seat and had fastened his belt. Megs Behan and the man looked at him – was he a bore who couldn’t mind his own business? Someone they should know? An avuncular smile and he ignored them, downed his own drink – ten-year-old Talisker – and refilled.

  The man? Another who travelled to be a spectator when Harvey Gillot confronted his past and perhaps was killed by it.

  A policeman: he had shown his warrant card at the security check before boarding. He had a policeman’s haircut, a detective’s. Severe, but not the bald chicken’s-arse effect. Tidy, presentable in any company. A suit that was standard dress, grey and quiet, a decent shirt and tie. A serious face. It had looked up at him when he had put the beaker on the tray and now twisted to glance back up the aisle, but Benjie offered nothing and didn’t meet the eyes. Not a senior policeman – too young for that. A foot soldier. His judgement: over and above the appearance of seriousness, the policeman displayed a sort of solid determination, which in matters of life and of death was always valuable. Not a barrel of laughs. He remembered the first call, coming through on the phone consigned to his grandson, and a scared voice: There’s a contract out. The people who were buying the gear have raised the money. And he had answered, loud and comforting, Harvey, take care and good luck. He had ended with the sort of thing Deirdre said when he was off to London for a day and taking a guest to the Special Forces Club. The detective would be the right sort of age, with the right lack of seniority, to brief the man on what waited in a shadow, was behind him and always would be.

  They were bound together, on that flight, the three of them.

  He loosed the belt again and leaned across to replace the earlier tot in her beaker, then went forward to do the same, and never spoke a word.

  Then he dozed. He thought it would be a good show, and also that he was obligated to be there and to give the occasion his best effort. He was thankful that Deirdre had not forgotten the Pakistan pen. Above all, it would be a show not to be missed by a man playing the idiot.

  Seemed to see a man’s back, sharp corners and dark shadows … and death had a smell that clung to his nose. Maybe he had wanted friendships, maybe his work had denied them to him.

  She stood back. There were two police officers – an older woman and a youngster – and they had brought with them a maintenance man who had a mass of keys on a ring, screwdrivers in a box and a drill.

  Prohibitively priced apartments, Melody thought, but the locks on the doors were crap. The man did it with the keys and didn’t need his tools.

  It opened. There was a light on in the hall. Melody sensed stillness.

  The woman with the baby said defiantly, as if she believed her word was challenged, ‘I always hear her when she goes out, but I didn’t yesterday. I only heard him when he left.’

  The policewoman shrugged and went inside.

  *

  The floor at the Gold Group belonged to SCD11, Intelligence. Harry said, ‘Sometimes these things move fast and sometimes it’s tortoise speed. This one’s fast. A Caucasian female is found in a second-floor flat in a new block, Canada Wharf area. She’s been manually strangled – the cause of death is not yet confirmed, but it was obvious to the officers who attended. No sign of sexual assault or interference, fully clothed, no evidence of burglary, forcible entry. The indication would be that we’re dealing with a domestic. So far so good.’

  He had his audience, hooked as if he used a barbed treble in a pike’s mouth.

  ‘We have a name because the complainant who reported her away from work was present at the location. The victim works at a department store in central London. A neighbour says she moved in thirteen months ago. The property is in the name of Robert Cairns.’

  The interventions of Intelligence were rare in Gold Group meetings, and sometimes there was scepticism at his conclusions. Not in that session. He was heard in silence.

  ‘We’re at a basic and very early stage of an investigation. There were traces of oil on the victim’s hands. Also, there are similar marks, oil again, on the uphol
stery of a chair in the living room. We infer that she handled an object that had been hidden from view under the chair’s cushion. Not yet confirmed in laboratory conditions, of course, but the first response of an experienced forensics man is that the characteristics are of anti-corrosive silicone gun oil. We’re saying that there exists a probability that a handgun was in that chair, later ending up in the hands of a woman who was subsequently strangled. We’re getting there.’

  All of them – Firearms, Surveillance, SCD7 and HMRC’s investigation unit – acknowledged the importance of intelligence-gathered material and knew that in its absence they were buffalo, blundering in the undergrowth.

  ‘It’s all coming in – I repeat myself, no apologies – very fast. It’s the pedigree of Robbie – Robert – Cairns that interests me. His father, Jerry Cairns, is an old “blagger” – you know what I mean, Ma’am? Of course. Armed robber – with an arm’s length of convictions. His grandfather, the first of the dynasty, was a villain – a thief – but is now too old for serious playing. Robbie has an elder brother with convictions for robbery, car theft, fencing. They’re a criminal family.’

  On sheets of paper laid on the table or in personal notebooks, pencils, pens and ballpoints wrote Cairns. Harry saw recognition flicker on the face of the detective inspector, like memory stirred.

  ‘Things fall into place. They go into the big machines and stuff spews out. First, no one in that family works in a legitimate trade, or has since the Ark grounded. But the only one who has achieved a serious degree of wealth is Robbie, aged twenty-five. A chis says that Robbie Cairns will kill for a fee. The chis might be lying through his front, back and side teeth, but it now has better relevance. Two more items of interest, if I’m holding you.’