The Dealer and the Dead (30 page)

‘A couple of things I need.’ What did he need? ‘Can you get your hands quick on a BPV supplier?’ Yes, Monty had a stock of bulletproof vests in his own warehouse, but were they talking of the ones proof against gunfire or merely knives?

‘Bulletproof.’

Not a problem. And what quantity? A hundred? Two hundred, three? And what delivery date?

‘Bulletproof. Quantity of one only.’ Only
one?
Delivery tomorrow.
He had the address. Obviously a discount for bulk orders – was Harvey aware of the price for a single item? It would be six hundred sterling, but for a long-standing friend it could be five hundred. It would be handgun-proof, but not, obviously, high velocity. Where was he going? Kandahar? Bogotá? Gaza?

He said grimly, ‘It’s for going out here, the Isle of bloody Portland, Dorset, and walking the dog on the coastal path, but that is not, please, for shouting off the rooftops. What about sprays?’ There was US-made Mace bear pepper spray, recommended for campers up-country in Montana or Oregon and frowned on in the UK, about twenty-five sterling a canister. What was legal throughout the UK was a spray that let off a vile stench and marked clothes beyond the capability of household washing-machines at about thirteen pounds.

‘Whatever you have. Delivery tomorrow. I’m grateful, Monty.’

He rang off, and told the dog that – give or take five minutes – they would go for a walk.

He was alone now. Robbie thought this time, minutes but could be hours, was the hardest.

He waited and watched the gates.

He had told them, back at the hut at first light, that he wouldn’t attempt to scale the walls because there was too much ground that was dead to him, unseen, and he didn’t know what the alarm system was or where the cameras and beams were. He had said he would be close to the gates and would wait for the target to come out.

Vern had queried him – he didn’t often. ‘The gates are electronic and he’ll come out in his car. Where are you and what do you do?’

‘He won’t. He’ll be walking.’

Leanne had challenged him: ‘How can you say, Robbie, that he’ll walk out of the gates?’

‘Because of the dog.’

Both had looked at him, confused. ‘Because of the dog? You sure of that, Robbie?’

‘He has a nice garden, very pretty. He spends time and money on it. He doesn’t want dog shit all over it. He’ll take the dog out and walk to where the dog can shit and he doesn’t have to clear it up.’ It had satisfied them.

The decision he had made was that the target would come out of the gates, swing to his right, go past the castle wall and the main building, then keep going that way till he had dropped down to the graveyard and where the church had been. From there he might go right or left, but the coastal path was closed in with rough brambles and gorse, enough for Robbie to get close to him. He had worked it through, always did. He wore overalls, had the balaclava in his left pocket, and was squatted in a gap in the scrub where the people from a house between the lane and the gates dumped their grass cuttings and garden rubbish. It was a useful place, but for all of its good points there was the bad one: he was hanging around, would stand out and … No other way. He stayed stock still when two men came past him on the path. They didn’t see him but one of their dogs yapped at him.

The Baikal pistol was in the right side pocket of the overalls. It was loaded.

Normally he slept well, in the house in Clack Street he shared with Vern and Leanne and in the apartment where he kept Barbie. He had slept all right when he was with his grandparents on the first floor of the block on the Albion Estate, and when he was in Feltham. He didn’t lose sleep on the night before a hit.

He’d tossed all night in the hut. Nothing to do with the floor, or the cushions he’d taken off the bench where Leanne was, and nothing to do with Vern in the easy chair, feet on the table. He hadn’t slept because his foot hurt. The pain was a reminder that he had reacted to a yob-kid, had allowed himself to be riled. He didn’t feel right.

They hadn’t argued with him, never did. They accepted that the man, the target, would come out of the gates and would be walking his dog: they had to accept it because that was what Robbie had said would happen.

He was hot in the overalls and his hands were tacky inside the lightweight rubber gloves.

He couldn’t speak to Vern or Leanne. Their mobiles had been switched off since they’d been on the ring-road motorway south of London before they had headed to the coast. Idiots left their mobiles switched on when they went to work – a phone could be tracked as sure as a bug under the car. His father, Jerry, might have left his mobile switched on: he was in HMP Wandsworth because he was an idiot. Vern would have the car parked up the street from the museum and the pub, and would be sitting somewhere, killing time, waiting. Leanne would be on the bench on the open ground, grassed, on the far side of the street to the museum and the entrance to the lane, and would have the wig on.

Hadn’t seen him, had he? Knew his name and age, had seen his wife and dog. Didn’t know what he looked like. Would shoot, wouldn’t he, a male aged forty-six who came out of the gates and had a dog with him? Understood why Vern and Leanne had queried, then challenged him. Was he rushing it?

He was never wrong, never had been.

The sun came up and clipped the treetops, and he realised there were apples, rotten and thrown out with the grass cuttings. The wasps found him.

As he swatted them away, he heard a telephone ring, far off.

Lunch awaited him at the Special Forces Club, and he had an appointment before that with the man who had overseen his hip’s resurfacing, but Benjie Arbuthnot had taken an early train that had dumped him with the commuter hordes at a London terminus. A taxi had brought him to Vauxhall Bridge Cross on the South Bank.

‘It was something or nothing, really. If it’s something, I’d say that Gillot’s on borrowed time. If it’s nothing, we just picked up the chaff of a few embittered old men who were doing some wishful thinking.’

Benjie and Deirdre had been guests at Alastair Watson’s wedding. When Benjie had run an obscure Middle East desk –
mercifully with no links to weapons of mass destruction – his last job before retirement, Watson had been his personal assistant. When they were not in London they were in the Gulf, putting rather brave men on to the dhows that sailed backwards and forwards between Dubai or Oman and Iranian harbours. They had enjoyed, Benjie reckoned, a good relationship.

‘As we understand it, the village had given their lead man everything they had. No item of even trifling value was overlooked. The whole lot went to paying for the MANPADS. It was thought they would ensure the successful defence of the village. Its location was important: it guaranteed that the track through the cornfields remained open – only at night and only at great risk, but the symbol was huge. Gillot, we gather, took delivery of the valuables, then went down to Rijeka, put the whole lot in safety deposit while he made arrangements with a shipping agent for the offloading of the cargo when it was brought ashore.’

Benjie had a rule and had adhered to it strictly since he’d handed in his swipe card: he never took access for granted. With extreme politeness, he had requested the previous afternoon that he be accorded a short and non-attributable briefing on the matter of a contract for Harvey Gillot. He assumed Watson had been permitted a glimpse of a résumé of the Zagreb contact, then sent down to an interview room to humour an old war horse – for whom, perhaps, the past had resurrected.

‘He did well. In a very few days he had located the merchandise, had it brought out of Poland, Gdansk, where there was Customs chaos. It was en route to Rijeka … where you showed up, Mr Arbuthnot. Well, no shipment was landed and nobody managed to get word to those expecting delivery. They stood in a cornfield, waiting, and were zapped. It appears that the bodies were treated badly – that is, badly by Balkan standards – and then the area was mined. Last week the mines were cleared, and a plough turned up a corpse who had the name of Harvey Gillot in his pocket. You’d know better than me, Mr Arbuthnot, that memories in that corner of Europe are long and hatreds don’t diminish. Our feeling – yes, he’ll be hit.’

The coffee had come from a machine, was almost undrinkable, but Benjie had emptied two sachets of sugar into it and swirled the dregs with a wooden spatula.

‘Does that help?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ He stood. He was about to ask after Watson’s parents and—

‘Why, Mr Arbuthnot, did you block the shipment?’

He drew breath and considered. He liked the young man, trusted him, and thought him owed some honesty. ‘Sanctions busting, wasn’t it? UN Security Council resolution and all that. Criminal stuff. I simply advised Gillot – a useful asset of the Service at that time – of the risks he was running and rather quietly nudged him towards the docks at Aqaba, a Jordanian arsenal … They might have gone to Israel, might have gone to Syria, might have gone to an outfit in Azerbaijan. You see, that place on the Danube was doomed. Only obstinacy and bloody-minded blindness prevented those people bugging out down that track and accepting the inevitable. They didn’t do the sensible thing, and there are graves to show for it. Well, thank you.’

‘But he reneged on the deal he’d done because of your intervention.’

‘A little black and white, Alastair, in a grey and murky situation.’

‘Nobody will put their hand up and admit to guilt, obviously… Is it because of us – sorry, you – that he’s in deep trouble?’

‘Difficult times … but I expect Gillot will come through. The blame game seldom helps towards a satisfactory conclusion, in my limited experience.’ He stood, and his bloody hip hurt.

‘My regards to Mrs Arbuthnot.’

‘She’ll appreciate that. I’m grateful for your time.’

‘Need to know and all that.’

‘Of course.’

‘I haven’t asked how you were alerted to this matter, nor shall I. But you ought to know we’re told that the recommendations of a Gold Group have been chucked back in their collective faces. It was suggested to Gillot that he should move out and do a runner. He refused.’

‘Surely he’ll get a policeman on the door?’

‘Will not. I absolutely don’t mean to patronise but there’s health and safety to be considered. I mean, what we did in the Gulf or up on the border from the Basra station – well, I don’t remember you filing a risk assessment, Mr Arbuthnot. Who guards the policeman on the door? Who watches the posteriors of the back-up squad? And they’re twenty-four-seven, so cash registers ring. Anyway, that’s where he is, Gold Group have a headache and Gillot’s planning a George Custer moment. May I ask, were you fond of Gillot?’

He said stiffly, ‘I did not like or dislike him. He was an agent – damn you, dear boy, for asking. He was a useful asset. Do we in the Service now sign up to duty of care?’

‘A bit … Good to have seen you again, Mr Arbuthnot. We acknowledge duty of care today, but they were difficult times, and pretty bloody, I believe. I would have thought your man made staunch enemies.’

‘Quote me and I’ll deny it … Once he was almost a son. But we wanted that gear in Jordan. Do I care about some remote, murderous corner of outer Europe? Not a jot. Do I care about Harvey Gillot? Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Thank you for your time.’

He looked hard into her eyes … The first time they had touched was when the boy, Simun, turned sharply to point behind him and his fingers brushed her arm, only a trifling contact.

They walked on a path of caked mud, cracked, dusty and rutted from a tractor’s wheels. Penny had left the car outside the café, had been careful to lock it and make sure nothing was left on show inside. She had realised then that the boy was on the veranda, watching her, with a slight mocking smile and that the chance of anyone stealing from the vehicle was unthinkable to him. Her security measures were almost offensive. She’d murmured, flushing, that it was ‘force of habit’, ‘London’, and ‘sort of goes with the job’. Then he’d greeted her formally, very passable English, repeated what she’d said the previous evening about wanting to see the Cornfield Road – he’d called it the
Kukuruzni Put.
He’d told her the villagers had named it the ‘Way of Rescue’, and that he and she would go on foot.

He wore jeans that were tight around his waist and hips and a loose-fitting T-shirt of a band from Zagreb who had played a concert the previous summer in Osijek. He had a mass of hair that reached his shoulders, was perhaps an inch more than six foot, slim, muscled and tanned. Not quite the looks of a Greek god, but not far short, Penny thought.

They had gone past the cemetery, where she had seen the four mounds of earth. Now they were on the path. She thought it, at first, insignificant but quite pretty. One side of where they walked was given over to a crop of sunflowers, some as big as soup plates, drooping beneath the weight, nearly ready for harvesting. On the other side of the path corn grew thick and dense. The sun beat on her mercilessly. The first time he had touched her was when he had turned and pointed back at the great bowl of the water tower. She had squinted against the sun and made out the bright colours of the flag that topped it.

She was in her thirtieth year – and he had said outside the cemetery that his mother had been among the first to be buried there after her body had been exhumed from a battlefield grave: she had died in the crypt under the church from his birth’s complications. So, no calculator needed, he was eighteen, would turn nineteen in the autumn. That morning in the hotel, she had chosen a pair of lightweight dark brown slacks, a sober grey blouse, with the upper buttons unfastened – it was bloody hot – and lace-up walking shoes that were comfortable but made her look like a schoolmarm. She had swept her hair back into a ponytail and wore no makeup. She should have used the sunscreen but it was still in her handbag’s pouch … No, not in a relationship currently … Too busy on Alpha to worry about the absence of a guy in her life … No, not fussed that in the team the men would have thought of her as ‘proper’ and maybe ‘priggish’. No, she had not gone on a bounce after the break-up with Paul, and it was a full two months since she’d had a postcard from Antigua. No, she didn’t feel she was ‘missing out’ or ‘going short’. If Asif
had not backed out on her at Heathrow, she would have let him walk ahead with the boy, would have kept a haughty distance and used her notebook to jot things. He wasn’t there.