‘Worse now.’ Steyn saw the third coffin go down and the ropes come back up, flapping. The priest’s voice carried softly. Tomislav, big, strong and quivering with weakness, had crouched beside the pit, then stood up, clutching a handful of soil. He rocked, opened his hand and allowed it to cascade down.
‘How come?’
‘His purpose in life was to see the minefield cleared and have the body recovered.’
‘Some don’t want that. Some want to continue in a sort of vague hope. They don’t want the digging done.’ Anders grimaced.
‘Not here.’ Steyn shook his head hard. ‘They knew the area where the bodies were. Now they have them. The bodies go into the ground, a stone is put up and the grave becomes a challenge: what can they focus on now? I’ll tell you. Who is responsible? Who is to blame? Who can be punished? Christ, you know your husband or your cousin or your son – your
son –
was alive when he was castrated and was still alive when his mouth was prised open and his organs were shoved in.’
It was the Widow’s moment. Her lips moved but Steyn couldn’t hear what she said. Did she make a promise? He watched Tomislav, half a pace behind her. If he had had that man on the couch for a half-dozen sessions, opening his heart and baring his soul, he believed he would have been able to write a definitive paper on the long-term casualties of combat.
‘I repeat, Daniel, how is it worse?’
‘There cannot be peace until there is punishment of the individual responsible.’
‘Now I hear you.’
‘You played your part, Bill.’
‘I did.’ Anders was reflective.
‘You gave a name.’
‘Seemed the right thing to do.’
‘Maybe and maybe not.’ Steyn chuckled. They turned away – they wanted to be out of the cemetery before the villagers came through the gates. He said, flat, ‘But I doubt you’ll get the chance to ask him if it was right or wrong. Ask Harvey Gillot.’
He said the name often. He said it aloud, Harvey Gillot, whispered it or mouthed it silently. Once he shouted it, and the name reverberated around his home, part of which Tomislav had turned into a shrine in memory of his boy, the others who had died in
the siege and the men who had not survived the camps after capture. He kept the second bedroom, the hallway and the living room pristine and a candle always burned in the hallway. Pride of place went to his son, who had been allocated half of the living room. Photographs of him were there, portrait and childhood snaps, his sports teams; one showed him in khaki camouflage fatigues, with a cigarette lolling from his lower lip, an AK in one hand and his other arm draped around Petar’s son, his friend. When Tomislav had come back after the years in the refugee camp he had retrieved them from the biscuit tin he had buried in the garden during the last hours before the escape into the corn. There were many more photographs in the bedroom and the hall, with the remnants of the flag that had flown over the command bunker. It was ripped and scorched but Mladen had carried it in the final breakout. The sniper rifle that Andrija had used, the Dragunov, until a newer version had been recovered from a Cetnik’s corpse, was suspended from nails on a wall. Many weapons had been buried in the last hours and they had been retrieved now – rifles, a heavy machine-gun, pistols, deactivated hand grenades. All had been polished and the rust scoured off them. On the wall in the hallway he had the maps on which first Zoran and then Mladen had planned the village’s defence; there were charts of the Cornfield Road where it crossed the defence lines, and went south-west to Vinkovci and northeast to Vukovar. Tomislav’s map, with his proposals for where the Malyutka missiles could be fired from, was in the living room, beside the window, where he could see it from his chair. When he had shouted that name his eyes had been fixed on that chart.
A call was made by an SZUP official from a government building near to the centre of Zagreb. It was received by the station head in a back room at the British embassy in the new city to the south of the railway station. A meeting was arranged.
The official walked briskly from the building and went on past empty cafés and deserted boutiques. They were challenging times for his country, independent for less than two decades, in hock,
with unemployment rising and organised crime the only flourishing industry. Friends were needed. Knowledge – intelligence – was the oil for friendships in his trade. The days when Croatian officials and British officers sparred for territory – protecting suspected war criminals and hunting alleged barbarians – were over. Clandestine co-operation was the new order of the day.
They met in a coffee shop beside the embassy. It was only vague information, the official stressed, unconfirmed, not corroborated, chaff in the air … It was the currency in which the agencies dealt. Because of events that had taken place nineteen years previously, a criminal contract had been taken out on the life of a British citizen. Of course, intelligence was an inexact science, but the name of the target was Harvey Gillot.
The Briton wrote briefly in his notepad, pocketed it, thanked the official, was thanked in turn for buying the coffee, and they parted.
‘What’s the money going to be?’
‘Can’t answer that, lad.’
‘I’m saying, Pop, that our kid doesn’t step out through his front door unless the money’s right and half up-front.’
They sat in the prison’s temporary visiting room – refurbishment had closed the hall that was normally used. The ‘kid’ was Robbie Cairns, ‘lad’ was his father, Jerry, and ‘Pop’ his grandfather. Every Monday, the elder Cairns of the dynasty travelled from Rotherhithe in south-east London by tube and bus to visit his son. Both had a history of success and failure as armed robbers; both were familiar with the visiting suites and conditions inside them; both were aware conversations were recorded on audio bugs. They sat in the centre of the area, with families all around them, encouraging the brats to bawl and yell as they talked quietly.
‘We consider very carefully any offer that comes through because of who pushed it our way.’
Neither father nor son had delusions of importance. The
affluence they craved had eluded them – never as much in a wages van or a safe as they’d been told there would be. And there had been the cock-ups, fiascos, like when the getaway wheels’ engine had stalled on the Strand, which was Jerry’s closest shave with the ‘big one’, and his father being grassed up, then intercepted on the way to the snatch. Tales of ill luck littered their stories. Neither had ever been major league, but Lenny Grewcock was: he had a villa in Spain, a block of time shares outside Cannes, a casino in Bratislava and three restaurants on the Thames, the Bermondsey stretch. ‘Yes, Pop, we don’t piss him about.’
The surprise to father and son was that the ‘kid’ – little Robbie, no weight, no muscle, only those horrible piercing eyes – had been headhunted by a man with the prestige of Lenny Grewcock.
‘I tell you this, lad, for nothing. There was never anyone in our family before like Robbie.’
‘Fuck knows where he came from ’cause he scares me. Vern doesn’t, nor Leanne, and I’d swear on any Bible that Dot never touched another bloke, but fuck knows where the kid comes from.’
‘I’ll jack the money, squeeze what I can – but it’ll be Lenny Grewcock I’m squeezing. With me? The kid’ll do it well, and it’ll place us handily, having Lenny Grewcock a satisfied punter.’
‘Nice one, Pop.’
They talked some more. Jerry Cairns had trouble getting his head round the news that a village was buying the services of his son. What did he know about Croatia? Not a lot. Asked who the target was. His father tapped his nose – not the sort of information to be murmured over the table of the visitor’s room. ‘It’ll be a nice earner, lad.’
‘Because our kid’ll do a good clean job – always does.’
They had a little cuddle, and a father left his son behind the walls of HMP Wandsworth. He was glad to be shot of the place. He’d been in there, doing four and a half years for a blag – Fireworks Day, November 1959 – when they’d topped a German for shooting a police sergeant. He’d heard the sounds of the great gaol as it went about the business of putting a bloke to death.
Mostly had heard the silence. Never had liked HMP Wandsworth from that day.
Anyway … He headed for the bus stop – the rheumatism was a bastard – and thought it pretty good that his grandson was in such demand. He had, almost, a smile on his leathered face. Didn’t concern him who the target was, what the target had done, why the target was marked. He had, of course, known plenty of Maltese and Cypriots, and more recently a few Albanians – outside gaol and in – who pimped girls. Some ran a string, and others lived off one hard worker. Pimp: not a nice word … Probably what he was. Granddad Cairns and Jerry Cairns: two pimps, both living reasonably satisfactorily off the kid’s earnings.
‘What relationship should an officer have with his assets?’
Veins ran in scarlet cobwebs on Benjie Arbuthnot’s cheeks, and above his shaggy eyebrows there was a mop of straggling white hair. He wore a suit but it had not recently been pressed and his shirt looked to have been in a drawer for six months. He did not care about appearances. He had addressed a group of around twenty recently recruited entrants to the Secret Intelligence Service at the Vauxhall Bridge Cross behemoth. It had become a habit of the last two director generals to invite him back once a year and let him loose on the incomers: something about ‘They should know that beyond their comfort zones there’s a real world, Benjie, which will be good for a pampered generation that doesn’t know about rough edges. They’re pretty squeamish these days.’ He had told anecdotes, reported scrapes behind the Wall in Berlin, talked about time up in the dusty Radfan wilderness north of the Aden Protectorate, about life in south Armagh in the early days when the Service had owned intelligence primacy in the province. The young people embarking on careers had looked at him with astonishment, as if he were an extinct creature dumped on them from a mythical ark – or broken free from a showcase in the Natural History Museum – but he had earned their respect. He would take, now, a few questions. It was a young woman who’d raised her arm.
‘Certainly not a relationship that implies affection. You’ll live sometimes cheek by jowl with the asset – agent, source, or “jo” – and he or she will moan and complain and you’ll have to protect that fragile petal, morale. You may give an impression of genuine concern for their welfare, and you’ll make promises, but it will never be a relationship of equals. You use him or her. You do not blanch from exploiting whatever the asset brings to the table. And when the usefulness is finished you walk away. They disappear from your life. You may have coerced them into recruitment, but that is their problem and their difficulty, for them to sort out. We’re not a marriage-guidance council or a job centre for the unemployed and unemployable. Neither do we provide protection for an endangered species … but we might stretch to advice on personal security and push the asset in the right direction for that. God help him or her.’
As he spoke, Benjie thought of the men and women who had jumped ever higher over the hurdles he had set, and how he was always challenging them for better results – Arabs, Afghans, central Europeans on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He even thought of young Harvey Gillot, wet behind the ears, on the quayside at Rijeka. Looking at the faces in front of him, their owners hanging on his words and showing shock at the crude certainties of his message, he could be content that none believed he had put on a show to hold their attention. A man had his hand up, wore a corduroy jacket, no tie. He probably had a fine degree from a good university. Benjie had no degree but had been awarded a commission in a well-fancied cavalry unit before switching to the Service. He pointed to the man.
‘How do you work closely with an asset for whom you have little personal respect?’
‘Easily. It’s a job, not a popularity contest. We don’t only use the good eggs. It’s what they can achieve on our behalf, within the parameters of our interests, that matters to us. I’m not about to dub as a hero a junior cipher clerk in the KGB/FSB who volunteers to help us, a major in the Iranian Air Force or a Chinese foreign-ministry stenographer. We pay a good rate – not as much
as the Americans but more than the Russians – we do the flattery well and massage an overworked ego. We always tell the asset we’ll help him get clear as soon as it gets hairy on the inside, but we’re never in a hurry to fulfil that guarantee. Always one more month, one more drop, one more … Gentlemen, ladies, I’m hoping you didn’t join the Service to be social workers with responsibilities to assets. One more.’
‘No responsibilities?’ the young man persisted.
‘None.’
From a girl in a full
burqa,
spoken with spirit: ‘Who decides where the national interest and the asset’s interest conflict?’
‘I do, colleagues do, and very soon you do … Look, there are always going to be little people in the way and unless they get booted sharply they may trip you up. I summarise. The asset has his moment. The moment is exploited. The asset is forgotten. It’s a hard world out there, believe it. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep over the future prospects or survival of an asset. Thank you.’
He went to the table and drank from his glass, and the director who oversaw recruitment thanked him, but there was no applause. He thought he had introduced them to a career of moral uncertainties – as there had been in so many places, in Rijeka, and with so many assets. Funny how little Harvey Gillot was lodged in his mind, grit in a boot.
So many phone calls came to the small, crowded desk of Megs Behan. It was a big day for her: she was finishing off the press release, two months in preparation, had been up half the night and—
‘Yes?’ She had snatched up the phone.
‘Is that Miss Behan?’
‘It is – yes.’
‘Hello, thanks for your time, Miss Behan. I much admire the work you do. First class. I saw on the net your top-ten piece, in which Harvey Gillot was named. I’m a freelancer and I want to do a piece, hope to challenge that man. Can you help me?’