He was. He didn’t often have a big moment. Harry milked it and thought of it as one of his finest hours.
‘What happens really quick now are the airline searches. The Murder Squad, soon as they had a name, Robbie Cairns, would have tapped it into the ticket traces. Had a twenty-four-hour start – has he used his time? He flew to Munich. He was in Munich last night and thought himself clever because he paid for a ticket onward – one way – to Zagreb with cash, but his name’s on the ticket, and it has to be his name to match with the passport details. Taking that flight, he’s already down there, is loose in Zagreb. That’s about what I have.’
A silence, as if breath was held, but a clock on a wall ticked faintly. Phoebe Bermingham, Harry realised, would feel it necessary to say something.
‘Interesting, but hardly acceptable in the Central Criminal Court.’
He responded and had a grin, almost patronising, across his face. Different worlds, and they were cast from different moulds. ‘I like coincidence and circumstantial.’
‘I’ve already put Penny Laing on the ground,’ from the Alpha-team man.
And a sharp response, lest he be forgotten, from the detective inspector: ‘About now Mark Roscoe should be touching down. We’ve done the appropriate grovel and the dirty raincoats will meet him.’
‘When he’s there, what’s his job description?’ Phoebe Bermingham asked.
‘Nothing too specific, a watching brief. He asked, chippily, the same question, went on at length about not being a “bullet catcher”, not able to do a serious job, and I think he and his girl had something planned together, a hike along the Thames Path. That’s as maybe. I didn’t do a request. I ordered him on to the plane, pulled rank. And told him, repeated twice, that he shouldn’t stand too close, should merely observe and report back. Simple stuff and, of course, he understands that. I can’t see that he has a problem. I can see that we’ve fulfilled what would be expected of us, Ma’am, done what’s right for Gillot in his predicament. I don’t think, Ma’am – if this should end up as an inquest and an inquiry – that with our man on the ground, offering advice on personal safety and liaising with local enforcement, we can be found at fault and criticised. It was emphasised to Sergeant Roscoe – personally and forcibly – that he should not endanger his own life. That’s where we are.’
‘That’s very fair,’ she said. ‘Rather more than Gillot deserves.’
Granddad Cairns had his granddaughter monitor radio stations and the rolling television news bulletins, and she swore to him that if an Englishman had been shot dead in Munich it would be carried as breaking news or a newsflash. Nothing was reported. Until they knew the words by heart, from frequency and repetition, they heard of the new wave of fighting in southern Afghanistan, the falling level of the pound sterling, the rise in unemployment, the marriage of a party girl to a man three times her age, a cricket score and … Nothing came from Munich. Granddad Cairns said it would be like the death of the family when respect was lost, and she was at the radiogram, working through the stations.
He knew that two contact numbers had been given to Robbie, one for Munich and the other for Zagreb. He didn’t know which fuckin’ country Zagreb was in or where it was on a map, but he realised that Munich had failed because he was told so by the radio and the television. Neither he nor Leanne was facing the window on to the walkway so they were not aware of the crowd outside until the knocker was smacked. He turned sharply in his chair … More years than he could remember since the police had been mob-handed at his door.
It was a journey like no other in Harvey Gillot’s life. He was the man who had lived a dozen years on a rock promontory jutting out to sea, blessed with the majesty of stunning views. He hadn’t seen them. He found himself now to be locked to the window beside his seat as the train wound along a track sandwiched between gorge walls, cliffs, tumbling rivers, mountains and pastures.
He had been to Austria before, on flights into Vienna, and would have had his nose in papers, pamphlets and brochures that he needed to speed-read so that he was on a level field with a customer or supplier. Vienna was a fight, always, because the Germans had the bigger foothold, but he had most recently bought the Steyr AUG (Armee Universal Gewehr) 5.62mm assault rifle, direct from the factory, and had the end-user paperwork in place for shipment to Bolivia and Ecuador. He had sold vests to the Austrian police, which was a champion deal against the competition, and had once been close with a consignment of Brazilian-made sniper sights that undercut the German competition but was ultimately squeezed out. He had been near with a communications contract. Before, he had flown into the capital of an evening, done dinner meetings and breakfast meetings and been back on the airport train from the city centre by midmorning and in the air by noon.
The beauty entranced him, and he had no one with whom to share it – no wife, no child, no best friend and no business partner. It had been the promise of Harvey Gillot, to himself, that he would use the quality time on the train to think through the problems of what he would do when the train bucked to a halt and he was pitched out on to a platform within a hire-car ride or a final train journey of his destination. The sights from the window distracted him, and he saw Toytown castles perched on sheer rock stumps, and heavy cattle in meadows where flowers bloomed. As if it was impossible to find an answer. Best put it off, and he did. Later, some time, he would work out the detail of the plan, what he would do and why.
But – and it nagged in him – would he fight? Shit, yes.
Would he roll on his back with his legs in the air and submit? Hell, no.
He was Harvey Gillot, the salesman with the smile. He walked his own road and made his own bed, nails and all. He would sort the problem.
Just didn’t know who would be waiting for him, what they would say to him when he stood within spitting range.
‘It was me who did it. I demanded it.’
Outside, at the front, a bare-chested boy mowed her grass. At the back, through the kitchen window, Penny Laing had seen a man, middle-aged, hoeing a vegetable plot.
‘The men didn’t know what they should do. I did.’
She was, again, at a kitchen table, and Simun was beside her, and behind her a woman ironed freshly washed black dresses, black skirts and black blouses.
‘The certificate of clearance for mines was given, and the men gathered to drink – as if they had reason for celebration. Too many times, too often, they find a reason to drink, or to take pills. I said to them that instead of drinking they should be searching. They disgusted me.’
The translation aped her – Simun almost spat with her. Penny thought her tiny. The woman might have been sixty, seventy or even eighty. Her face showed a fretwork of wrinkles and there was the walnut brown to her cheeks that meant, Penny had learned, a lifetime of exposure to the elements: weather, war and heartbreak.
‘We had found the body and the professor had given us a name. I told them, the men, that it was owed to those who had died – and to those who had suffered and survived, the defeated – to search for this man. Without me they would only have drunk more, taken their money from the government and talked. They would have done nothing.’
Should she curse Dermot, her line manager, for sending her? Should she shriek oaths at Asif’s wife, the woman whose natal complications had dictated Penny travelled alone, had done a two-night stand with a teenager and betrayed her work ethic? Here, easily, everything was certain. She was familiar with the worlds of criminality that flowed around the narcotics trade, and could stay aloof from it. Could remain detached, with the status of an observer, as a war in central Africa was played out within a day’s journey for a four-wheel drive. There, she had been part of the law-enforcement tribe. Here, Penny Laing was alone, and the boy’s voice bitched in her ear as he translated.
‘I said to them that the man who was responsible should remember my husband to whom he gave a promise. He, Harvey Gillot, should know of our agonies and should suffer punishment for them. The m
en in the village would have done nothing, but I refused to allow that.’
She felt as if a curse had been uttered, and sensed its force.
‘They found difficulties, which were excuses to do nothing … Difficulties and problems. I said we would buy a man. You tell me Gillot comes here. You tell me that the man we paid has failed twice but he will try once more, here. If he doesn’t earn the money we have given him, our men will do it. My husband died after torture. My husband – in this kitchen, on the floor under this table – told me he would trust his life to Harvey Gillot. He did, and lost his life. If the men will not do it, I will, and so will Maria and any woman who was here – who had her legs forced apart.’
Who back at Alpha would understand? Who would not criticise her? In her mind were the fading photographs of men and women long dead, abused and mutilated, now living only in pictures in a shrine made by a broken man. God, where were the old rules of her life? Gone. The woman’s voice was quieter now, almost matter-of-fact, and Simun’s tone reflected it. Penny could pass no more judgements, but could imagine the darkness, the noise of shellfire, and then the dawn coming, the men not back from the cornfield, the depth of the loss, the spectre of defeat … then the flight of the men, and the women staying because the wounded in the crypt could not be abandoned. The advance of an enemy who had taken many casualties. And the revenge. She wanted it over and stood up, but the crow woman would finish.
‘If he is still alive, if he comes, Gillot shouldn’t think he can smooth us with good words. We don’t listen to talk. If he comes, it is to die here. They, our dead, demand it and so do we … He will never leave here, I promise that.’
The train ground out the kilometres beyond Salzburg, carrying Harvey Gillot towards fields where the harvest had not yet been gathered, and where graves had been unearthed.
16
He had settled into the rhythm of the train. There would have been, any other day, the sense that his time was wasted, that he should have flown. Not today. Harvey Gillot was satisfied with his smooth, slow progress through the Austrian mountains, the vistas exposed to him, castles and valleys and little communities on hillsides, surrounded by sloping meadows.
He could acknowledge the failure.
As he had frittered each hour, he had promised himself that when the next one started, he would begin the process of examining prospects, options … what he would do, why he would do it, when he would do it and where he would make the gesture that had brought him this far. Difficult to find answers when the train rolled, rocked, almost made a lullaby sound, the windows were sealed and the air-conditioning was set for comfort. The effect was soporific: he could have snoozed, could have forgotten his destination.
Hours slipping away and distance covered. He spoke to no one, not even the polite ticket attendant, and when he went through to the restaurant carriage he ordered with his finger, jabbing at the menu. He remained aloof and alone, as if he was not a part of the life and times of any other person on the train.
No man, woman or child was the same as Harvey Gillot. He could have gone to any high-street bookie in England and put a hundred pounds and his shirt on the bet, with good odds, that no other passenger on the EuroCity Mimara express was under sentence of death from a community that had taken out a contract. If that shirt had been put with the cash stake there would have been two neat bullet holes in the back to prove his case. He could have gone into any Square Mile casino, put a thousand in notes and one dented vest on the table, and wagered that no one on the great train could share with him: ‘Know how you feel, Harvey. In the same boat.’ So he kept his silence, ignored the slow pace of life around him and failed to answer the questions posed by his presence on the train.
He had forgotten now about deals, the buying and selling of weapons, ammunition and communications equipment. He no longer considered whether the Mercedes or the Jaguar was better value as an armoured car. Harvey Gillot sat in his seat, the sun beating against the tinted window, in the bulletproof vest and the holed shirt. If he came through this, if … He had not done games at school unless he had been subject to a three-line whip, and it was only by an accident that he had once strayed into a sports pavilion and seen faded shirts in display cases, worn by kids who had been picked for a national schoolboys’ rugby team and donated them … If he was still standing, walking, hadn’t had his head holed, his guts torn open, his lungs sliced and his bones splintered, he would take that shirt, a sort of soft lavender blue, to one of those trophy places off Piccadilly and ask for a case of polished wood to be made with a velvet background and his shirt pinned inside so that the bullet holes were on view. He’d have a little silver plaque screwed to the woodwork: Herbert (Harvey) Gillot, pupil 1974–80, later arms dealer and survivor. Might take the thing, swathed in bubble-wrap, down there himself and dump it at the head teacher’s door so that the cocky little buggers, who thought a rugger pitch was big-time, could marvel at it and wonder where the blood was. But he didn’t know whether the old boy would return to the Royal Grammar School. Then again there might be another message on the little strip of silver, Herbert (Harvey) Gillot, pupil 1974-80, later arms dealer and loser, and there would be blood on the shirt, which would make it more interesting. He had no music to listen to, he had read the magazine and the Herald Tribune, and he never did crosswords or brain teasers.
He could gaze through the window, see the sights and rush past people who waited at level crossings, worked in fields, were in cars on country roads or waited on platforms where there was no stop, and know that nothing and nobody was relevant to him. He was separated from them and had a rendezvous to keep.
Did it hurt?
Might find out, and might not.
He didn’t know if it would hurt to be shot.
Might learn and might not. He was more frightened of the pain than of the black emptiness, supposed, of death. The option had been to live in the hole, to shudder at each shadow moving, each footfall behind his back, and never be free of it. Some things were clear in his mind. He wasn’t going to hide for the rest of his days. He would try to offload the issue of the cornfields. He would beg and plead. If the hair shirt had to be worn then it was for costume necessities, and if he had to show ‘penance’ it would be laid on with thick greasepaint. He was good on the big picture but, as a man had once said, the devil was in the detail. This was the only way he could think of to rid himself of the problem.
The train carried him on, and its wheels made a drumbeat, relentless, as they went over the joins in each section of rail, as if the end of the journey was inescapable.
A bus dropped him close to the railway station. The sun beat down on him, but he didn’t notice it. The girls walking past him were slim, wearing halter tops and shorts, but he didn’t see them. He went inside the station and found a phone booth.
Robbie Cairns had the scrap of paper in front of him. The number he had rung in Munich was scratched out. He dialled the one that remained and waited, dragging air into his lungs when he was answered. He gave his name and said where he was. He was told, English language, crisp and accented, that he should come out of the station, cross the road, go into the park, and where he should stand.
He walked. He was never alone in Rotherhithe. Anywhere between Albion Street and the disused docks of Canada Water he felt comfortable – not alone. No one would have caught his eye and smiled at him. It was his familiarity with the fabric of the place that meant he didn’t feel isolated there. Almost, he yearned to hear voices. Not the bloody automatic ones at the airport in Germany, not women’s voices barking at him in talk he didn’t understand. Like a hole in him he couldn’t fill – no Leanne, no Granddad Cairns, no Vern, whom he’d always treated as wet shit but who now he would have grovelled for, and no Barbie … It might be that the hole was Barbie, not to be called back. He walked the length of a path with lawns and trees flanking it. The buildings beyond were old and fine, had been renovated and had flowers on the balconies. He walked because he had been in
structed to. If a wasp had not gone up his nose, if Barbie was on her bloody counter, and if the fucking target hadn’t worn a vest, he would have told anyone where they should meet him.
Robbie Cairns didn’t know how he might find a friend.
He was in gardens now. Carved heads sat on squares of stone or pillars. He couldn’t have named a famous sculpture or sculptor. Birds sang from the trees.
So alone.
There was a narrow inner pathway between the mown grass and the hoed beds, and he walked round it. The first time: would they have found her? The second time: would she be on a slab in the mortuary at Guy’s? The third time: would the paper trail have dug up that the apartment where she lived was in the name of Robert Cairns? The fourth time: because of her was he now subject to a manhunt? The fifth time: because of her, was he now fucked, finished … and isolated?
‘It is Mr Cairns? Yes?’
He turned, saw a heavy-built man who wore a suit, had good hair and a tie. He thought himself tired and dirty. He nodded, could hardly speak.
The stranger – a friend – said, ‘Follow me, please, Mr Cairns.’
The journalist, Ivo, gathered his papers into his laptop bag, picked up his son, little more than a babe in arms, and kissed the small, almost hairless head, then hugged his wife.
‘You’ll be all right? You’ll be careful?’
Always, at these times, she asked the same questions when he went to work and always he gave the same answers.
‘I’ll be all right, and I’ll be careful.’
Better than her, he knew of the bombs, the shootings and the beatings that had targeted the Zagreb media, who didn’t write about the breast implants of wannabe movie stars, the girlfriends of TV game-show presenters or the Croatian footballers playing abroad but specialised in investigative reporting. He knew of the danger associated with exposing corruption in the political élite and the scale of organised crime in the capital city. Twice he had received a single bullet through the post at his magazine’s offices. The police, the special unit the prime minister had created, had assured him that discreet undercover protection would watch over him. He knew of no other life.
The Dealer and the Dead Page 37