The Dealer and the Dead (17 page)

The garden looked so neat at the front, and the beds off the patio were clear of weeds and well planted with colour, which would have been hot work out in the sun. He wouldn’t have thought much about it but the gardener – the prat, Nigel – had been to the house that day and he had seen the way Josie was with him. Nothing you could have brought into court, but
impressions.
They said, the impressions, that it was not the most straightforward of gardener–employer relationships.

The great quarries from which the famed Portland stone was extracted were behind him, as was the field where Fiona’s horse was kept. The sea swells were moderate and the break of waves on the rocks below him was gentle. He had not come here for the beauty, didn’t rate serenity, wasn’t attracted by postcard views. It was the isolation that appealed. There was a woman with another Labrador, also black, but she was more than half a mile ahead, and there had been a man behind with a toy dog but he had turned off the path near the track that led up to the Neolithic site. Far out in the Channel a warship cruised, a dark shadow against the lighter greys of the sea and the evening haze. He was secure here. So, was it a problem that a towelling robe was damp?

Did it compare with any of the problems stored up in the life of Solly Lieberman, his mentor, 1923–90? Solly Lieberman had no women trekking in his wake – well, only the one who typed for him, kept his office in minimal confusion and had no looks or apparent sentiments – and he had never seen him drift off late from the hotel bar with a hooker tailing him to the lift. His work guru would not have had a problem with evaluating the chances that his wife of nearly two decades, more, was shagging the gardener, Nigel, but only after she’d sent him to the spare bathroom for a clean-up shower – necessary with all the fucking work he’d done in the garden. And he, who paid all the goddamn bills, where was he? While they were shagging he’d been in Tbilisi, where there had been enough tarts in the hotel lobby to cope with an IBM convention. Solly hadn’t acknowledged such problems, and his own – as told to young Harvey – seemed far up the scale of catastrophe … like being a crewman on a landing barge off Utah Beach, on a June morning in 1944.

Maybe he didn’t care that much about the damp robe. The way Solly told it: ‘Shitting myself. Never heard as much noise in my life and never want to. I was in the right flank of the Higgins boats, the landing craft, and each carries thirty poor sods and they’re all sick as dogs and what’s in front of them is going to be
worse. What don’t they need on the final run in to the beach? They don’t need all those cartons. They have Lucky Strike and Camel, Philip Morris and Marlboro, every cigarette produced in American factories. They’re heaving up, their trousers are filling and they want to get the weight of their packs down so they ditch the cartons. I have a big plastic bag, and when we wave them on their way up the beach, I collect them. Twenty-four cartons. Do three runs on to Utah, taking guys off the big ships, ferrying them in and bringing out casualties. These guys – Second Battalion, Eighth Infantry, Fourth Division – the ones who survived, would have been short of cigarettes. And there were more left on other Higgins boats. It was the next evening that we brought the boat back to Portsmouth. I had two hundred and ninety-seven cartons of high-quality American cigarettes and bulk buyers in every bar. I was twenty-one and it was like a big door had been kicked open for me. God knows, it must have been a thousand cartons I liberated that week, and other Higgins boats were hit but mine never was. Ride your luck, young man, and go for it.’

The kestrel had left the post now, flying and hunting. The dog stayed close to him. He liked the dog and the dog liked him, especially when he put the food into its bowl. Once he had liked Josie, and once she had liked him. He had married her two years after Solly Lieberman’s death. Then she had not minded the stories. Now she walked out of the room if he tried to tell one.

If an agony aunt had summarised the marriage of Harvey and Josie Gillot she would have written of ‘a fork in the road’. It had been a fine partnership for many years, and a loving one. That they had drifted on to ever-separating tracks was as inevitable as it was unintended. They had mislaid the ability to talk, or the requirement for conversation. He was confused by this, didn’t know how to resolve it, or whether he could be bothered to. He was not familiar with grovelling. It had happened he dealt in weapons and munitions. He didn’t blame himself. Before, Josie had acted as his personal assistant, but his targeting by HMRC – the vermin – meant that little now was consigned to paper and email was rarely used on ‘sensitive’ deals. There was less for her
to file and those cabinets were emptier: old contents had gone into the incinerator. She was removed from his work, had the money to be comfortable and had probably lost the hunger for success that had caused them, as a partnership, to tilt hard at targets and flatten them.

The holiday huts were close to him now, wood, bright-painted. People rented or owned them. They were used in the summer months and cost in excess of twenty-five thousand but they couldn’t be slept in. He could, of course, have confronted Josie and demanded answers: ‘Are you shagging the gardener? If you are, can we regularise the situation? Will you be leaving home and setting up residence with Nigel, his wife and four children, assuming there’s room in his attic for you to bed down alongside the water tank?’ Days had gone by since he’d found the damp bathrobe and the questions had not been put. He wasn’t frightened, he told himself. Maybe he didn’t care. Solly Lieberman had had enough problems, and if they’d not been resolved he’d have been heading for the stockade.

Army of occupation, the American Zone. Shortage of penicillin, shortage of morphine. Shortage of almost everything … and jewellery was as good a currency as any. Would have been a big sentence in the stockade. A bigger sentence for the disposal of weapons caches. Solly liked to tell that one – he’d have a cigar clamped and would talk through it. ‘There were arms dumps all over the place. Go into any forest area, follow wheel tracks, and there was a dump. Supposed to be there for the final great stand, all the resistance-to-the-last-man shit. Find it, load it, get a clever guy to do the artwork on the papers. 1947. Who’s bothered with scanning papers at frontiers in the dead of night? Every little official on a border just wants a pay-off. Send trucks to Trieste, simple as hell. More cash into back pockets, the dock gates open, the freighters are there and the crane drivers. I’m telling you, young man, that the infant state of Israel survived on German weapons – the Karabiner, the Mauser, the Schmeisser, the MG42 machine-gun, the potato-masher grenade, even the old Panzerfaust for hitting armour. They went to Israel. Good times, young man.’
That put the damp robe, in terms of problems, into perspective.

When he reached the Pulpit Rock, a huge stone column around which the sea surged – must weigh hundreds of tonnes, prime, unshaped rock – it was dark enough for the light to come on behind him. It swept across his back and … His mobile rang. He called the dog to his side, then answered it.

‘Yes?’

The caller introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe, and remarked that Mrs Gillot had kindly provided the mobile number.

‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’

The policeman said he was from SCD7, that was Serious Crime Directorate 7, and said they should meet the next day in Weymouth police station and—

‘Well, I’m sorry but I’ve quite a busy day tomorrow. I’m clearer later in the week.’

He was told the meeting would be the next day, at two thirty p.m., that the police station was on Radipole Lane and that he did not need to bring a solicitor or his wife. The time and venue were confirmed and the call was cut. He had not been asked if it was convenient. That was an inkling of a real problem.

Tomislav was sitting on his porch, in the darkness, the dog across his lap, when Josip found him.

He was told the deal Josip had agreed. Twenty thousand euros was the cost to the village of a killing. Tomislav said a trifle of that amount would have bought the fifty Malyutka they had needed. Did Josip think it reasonable? Josip explained that he had spoken three times to the middle men and had dragged down the price but it could go no lower. If he and Mladen accepted it, the village must raise twenty thousand euros.

Tomislav said, ‘It is cheap for what we ask. We want him dead.’ Josip said, ‘The man we will buy, I am assured, is the best quality.’

A rap on the table indicated she was ready. Mark Roscoe didn’t know her, and his detective inspector said that Phoebe Bermingham, rank of chief superintendent and uniform, was a novice – or, from behind his hand, a ‘virgin’ – at playing Gold Commander. She, ‘Ma’am’, was at the head of the table, Roscoe and his boss at the far end, and between them were representatives from Surveillance, and Firearms, and Intelligence. Hers was the only uniform on show. Roscoe had been late: Chrissie had come back from work at three that morning, had woken him and wanted to talk. He’d hardly slept till five and then had missed his wake-up call. It had been a stampede to get into Scotland Yard by seven thirty, and he was dressed badly, half shaven, his hair a mess. He had missed the croissants and coffee, and his boss had given him a foul look. Surveillance wore a suit and Firearms was smart-casual. He had a pain in his head and … She chaired briskly and he thought a paper must have been written on the conduct of a Gold Group meeting.

Did the intelligence have provenance?

If the spooks had been invited, they hadn’t shown. Most likely they hadn’t been invited because it was certain they wouldn’t attend. There was a knock on the door and a young woman half fell through it. She looked as if she’d rather be anywhere else and had a pillar-box blush as she stammered a name. Penny something. Revenue and Customs, Alpha team. Grovelling. A bus not turning up. Had walked two miles. She had a file under her arm, heavy. She dropped into the chair between Firearms and Roscoe’s boss.

Ma’am did it all again. Wasn’t pleased. Started at the beginning. Should the intelligence be believed?

Same answer. Couldn’t say, and the people who could had stayed away.

Moved on. Who was Harvey Gillot?

Roscoe’s boss said he’d been through criminal records and had drawn the big blank, except that the joker dealt in arms. Legitimate? A shrug, didn’t know. A silence. Ma’am looked at the young woman, Penny something, and gestured to her with a well-sharpened pencil.

And Penny something, in Roscoe’s opinion, gave it a good fist. ‘He’s one of the top ten independent arms dealers in the UK. To stay legal, the arms dealer, or broker, must remain inside the strictures of the Military List – it governs what weapons may be sent to which countries. Where transactions are authorised he must provide an end-user certificate that lists the items being sold, their origin and destination. Our rationale is that we don’t want our enemy in the field to be well armed, particularly if we have made those arms and sold them. So, export permission wouldn’t be given for sale to – say – Somalia, North Korea, Burma. Harvery Gillot is a big player and a target of ours. Can I summarise? We don’t want weapons bought in Minsk, shipped to a Baltic port, then transported to the Gulf, moved on to Karachi, then into the Tribal Territories and finally to Helmand where they kill a nineteen-year-old lance corporal from Leeds. All these characters in the top ten stay on the right side of legislation until a mouthwatering deal drops into their lap. Then they break the law. As I said, Harvey Gillot is a target of ours. As yet we don’t have the dirt.’

What was the significance of Croatia? Ma’am asked.

His boss queried whether they’d had a war there, maybe twenty years back, but Surveillance said that was Bosnia. His boss countered that there had been war-crimes stuff there, but Firearms chipped in that the war crime was at Srebrenica and also in Bosnia. Roscoe remembered Torvill and Dean and the
Bolero
music, the gold medal for skating at a Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

Penny something coughed sharply as if to kill the blundering. She said quietly, with authority, ‘There was a United Nations
embargo on the selling of weapons to all parties when Yugoslavia broke up. Under a resolution passed in September ’ninety-one it was illegal to supply Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia with weapons, and it was ignored. There was a feeding frenzy for the sale of weapons. The dealers, brokers, never had it so good. We have no record on our files of Gillot being involved.’

Was Gillot in place and selling at that time? Ma’am questioned.

‘According to our records he was taken on to the staff of an old-time dealer, Solly Lieberman, in 1984. Lieberman died in Russia in 1990, and we understand that the business and goodwill were passed to Gillot without cost. He has been on his own since then. If he was in Croatia in 1991 it would have been one of his early ventures as an independent, at only twenty-eight.’

Would she, Ma’am requested, paint a picture?

‘Well, I’ve never met him, so this is all third hand. Very clever, and verges on cunning. I’m not talking intellectual, academic. At heart, he’s a salesman – that’s his driving force. Doing deals, pushing the limits, winning through – all those matter to him. He would be cautious, suspicious, and expect us to be targeting him. Formidable, I’d say. Something else. Self-sufficient. Lives on the Isle of Portland and I have no perception of social life there, but he will stay clear of commitments, involvements, and will most certainly not want it spread about that he sells tanks, hand grenades or landmines. If it were known, he would be a pariah in the community so he’d make certain it wasn’t. But I’d expect him to be charming – sort of goes with the territory. But the business is loathsome.’

Ma’am looked at her, a stiletto glance, then launched: ‘We don’t often have the luxury of choosing who we consider
worth
protecting and who we don’t. Anyone, be they a convicted and released paedophile or a drugs-trafficker who has reneged on a deal with his supplier, is entitled to an efficient service. We will be mindful in this case, as in every case, of the “duty of care” owed to Mr Gillot, and his human rights as laid down by statute. We are not here to approve or disapprove of his commercial activities. We are here to prevent the very considerable crime of
murder being committed and him becoming a target for a murderer.’