‘No, Mr Gillot, I’m not suggesting you dig a bunker under the table … That’s uncalled for, sir, and I would remind you that you were offered advice and chose to reject it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I can get off the phone and start driving.’
He put down the receiver and grimaced. Bill twirled the car keys and Suzie gazed at him with a degree of annoyance as if it was too obvious he’d been taking abuse from the bloody man and hadn’t slapped him down. What did Mark Roscoe think? Not repeatable in company, but something along the lines –
watered down – that the world might have been a better place if the contract man had aimed a bit straighter and earned his money. He would never consider saying to a superior that the Tango didn’t deserve the care put into safeguarding a miserable second-rate life but he could think it. They’d made their bloody bed and they, husband and wife, could bloody lie on it.
They hit the road.
Coming out of the first turning, the junction at the lights, Bill turned to him. ‘Boss, don’t take any shit from Gillot. Don’t.’
‘Don’t embarrass me, Mr Gillot, don’t go near her.’
‘Big talk for a bloody gardener – or am I just the last to be told?’
‘Just keep out of the way, Mr Gillot, and nobody gets upset.’
‘As long as we understand that for all your hard work this morning, and your duties as protector and baggage carrier for my wife, it’ll be she who pays you, not me.’
‘Cheap, Mr Gillot. I think she’s coming now so, please, don’t interfere.’
Did he want a fight? Nearly did. The front door was open. Also open were the driver’s door and boot of her car, parked on the driveway. Beside it, loaded with the wheelbarrow and the rest of Nigel’s paraphernalia, was his pick-up. They would leave, he assumed, in convoy from the Portland front line, the Lulworth View salient. The gardener had inserted himself between Harvey Gillot and the front door. It was an hour since she’d said she would go. He had not begged. There had been none of the bent-knee-and-welling-eyes stuff about his inability to see ‘this’ through without her.
He heard the small but shrill squeal of the suitcase wheels.
The cartridge cases had rolled on the kitchen table, which had been sufficient to start them off.
She
was not hanging about to have her head blown off by a gunman who might just, next time, get to aim straighter, with her alongside him.
He
was not about to miss her, and did she want some help with her packing?
She
was not considering setting down shallow roots in a god-awful ‘safe-house’ that was vetted by policemen.
He
had no intention of bugging out, as rats did.
She
had done nothing, but
he had brought this on himself, through deceit.
He
had worked damn hard to put clothes on her back, and food on her table.
She
had called him a ‘cheat’ who’d reneged on a done deal.
He
had tried to laugh with irony, but made a poor fist of it, and had called her the cheat, the deal reneged on her marriage vows … which had concluded the shouting match. He noticed that the gardener had – step by step – positioned himself so that he could intervene if his employer had come at her with a knife from the kitchen block.
She carried one case and pulled another.
That left a dilemma for the gardener. He could do polite manners, pick up her bag and lug it to the car, leaving her without defence against her husband’s potential violence, or leave her to shift it. Harvey revelled in the moment. He reached past the gardener, took the bag she carried and murmured something about ‘always here to give a helping hand’.
His wife, Josie, started it again: ‘It was your greed that did it, and you ripped off those people. You deserve what’s coming to you.’
‘As long as you’re happy – and safe – I have no other concern.’
‘Don’t you realise what a shit you’ve become, Harvey?’
‘Having gained that stunning insight, I’m surprised you lasted so long with me.’
‘And don’t go near my daughter.’
‘Your daughter? Of course, never in doubt.’ They were at her car. He could have flared into a response about the payment of school fees, the cost of holidays, the rent for the field where the horse was kept and so much else, but he couldn’t be bothered. Nor could he be bothered to get snide about the gardener’s ability to keep a woman used to comforts. He forced a smile. ‘You look after yourself.’
‘I’ll be back for more of my clothes.’
‘You do that.’ Nothing about needing a removals van for the job. ‘I think you’re doing the right thing, and I’ll make it as easy for you as I possibly can.’
He congratulated himself that his voice sounded so reasonable.
She was in her car and zapped the gates. The gardener peered out and up the lane, and he thought of the old stories he used to hear – with Solly Lieberman in Peshawar – about the Soviet boys who had to drive their trucks through the mountain passes from Kabul to Jalalabad and didn’t know where the ambush would be.
‘This is all because of your cheating.’
‘Correct again, as you always were – are …’
She slammed the door.
‘… and will, no doubt, continue to be.’
She wouldn’t have heard. The car and the pick-up enveloped him in exhaust fumes. He didn’t hang around long enough to see whether they made it up the lane, or whether the mujahideen got had them in a blast of RPG fire. She must have done it because the gates closed.
The dog was in the kitchen. Dogs understood. It was under the kitchen table and looked cowed. Harvey realised that the moment the gates had closed he had lost a focus against which to fight. What to do? He paced the length of the house. All the rooms were on the ground floor with the exception of their daughter’s –
her
daughter’s – bedroom, which was built into the roof and reached by a spiral staircase. He trudged through the kitchen, the dining room, the snug where the TV was, their bedroom –
hers –
and into his office. On the work surface by the keyboard he saw his pencilled sums of the figures relevant to a contract with the Iraqi police. He did the grand tour once, then went to the kitchen sink, poured water into a glass and swigged it.
So damn quiet.
No sound from his feet on flooring that was parquet, vinyl or carpeted. He had anointed his feet with a salve and wore socks, hoping they would protect the wounds from dirt. He didn’t know now what he should do. He had never told Josie about meeting Arbuthnot on the dockside at Rijeka. It had seemed a minor matter and nothing to concern her. In the early days the marriage had pulsed with love and achievement. It hadn’t seemed necessary
to tell her of something small in which he had no pride … The silence weighed around him, and the emptiness.
He thought about the pain of walking, and the pair of 9mm cartridge cases that lay on the kitchen table. They were beside the day’s post, which Josie must have brought in – holiday brochures, a pack from a knitwear company and a telephone bill, everything addressed to
her.
He couldn’t escape the quiet. Without the pain and the cartridge cases it might not have happened.
She had said she would come back for more of her clothes, and he had said he would make it easy for her. He set off again, new purpose, for the bedroom.
He could recall the man, and had a lock-down picture in his mind of the gun. He knew it had been a Makharov or the Baikal imitation. He had sold Makharovs all over but not the Baikal. The man had seemed small, of almost insignificant build. He had not noticed the eyes behind the slits, or anything particular about the nose that had poked through a hole above the cut for the lips. When he had done business in old Eastern Europe or the Middle East and had negotiated with dealers, there had been bodyguards who floated in shadows, opened car doors and lounged in villa gardens. He would have regarded it as certain that any of them, any of a hundred, would have followed him down the track until he could run no further, then killed him.
If that was what the village had bought, they had not bought well.
‘I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this, Robbie, and I’m bloody sure you aren’t.’
A time had been arranged with his granddaughter for his grandson to stop on the journey back to London and call a phone booth at the bus and Jubilee Line station in Rotherhithe. At his age, Granddad Cairns still had presence, a sharp eye and a jaw that could be set firm. His voice rasped. Two minutes, or three, before the time scheduled for the call, he had looked at the woman in the booth he wanted and had asked her respectfully to terminate her call and vacate it. She’d effed him, then maybe
had a second glance at the jaw and eyes of the bowed old man who wanted the phone. She had hung up and gathered her shopping together. Funny thing, as he’d stood and looked at the silent phone, there had been a queue of punters behind him, but none had cared to hassle him. The phone had rung out to the half-minute of the time he’d demanded and he had lifted it.
The voice down the line was subdued and he had to strain to hear it against the voice of the man in the next booth to his.
‘What did you say?’
Better the second time: ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’
‘Robbie, I’m not concerned about you standing on a wasp hole, or about a target ducking, or about a wasp up your nose, or about how many you let off that missed. You want to know what I’m concerned about, do you?’
He wouldn’t have said his grandson was lippy. He was a kid who was alone, ran his own life to his own instructions … but he had phoned at almost the exact time he was required to, which told Granddad Cairns a fair amount. Himself, at that age, sent a message from a clapped-out has-been, told what to do and when to do it – with the weight of a foul-up on his back – he would have ignored the demand to make a phone call on schedule.
‘You weren’t there.’ Quiet. ‘You don’t know.’
‘You said that once. Don’t need saying again.’ He had put grit into his tone. The kid was on his way back into London. He wanted the implications of what had happened that morning embedded in him. Wanted it to have swirled round the kid’s head before he reached London. He’d thought his grandson to be the best, had been proud of him, and it hurt to have the faith kicked aside … And it was too big a matter for him to give the kid a soft response. There had been a contract: the contract was fucked. ‘What I’m concerned about … He have a gun? Haven’t heard he did. All I hear is that he threw a flipflop at you, then ran barefoot away from you. Why couldn’t you catch him up? Why didn’t you go after him, finish him?’
‘I just didn’t.’
He would have put his shirt on his grandson. He would have
bet his last fag on the kid following it through. Wouldn’t have said he liked him, but had respect for him, and couldn’t have believed that a couple of wasps and a flipflop would screw him up.
‘I’m getting there, Robbie. You failed. Big word, “failed”, not a Cairns word. You’re supposed to be hot and people believed the bullshit. Nobody reckoned that fucking wasps and a flipflop could skewer your reputation … What hurts me? That you didn’t go in after him and finish him, whether it was ugly, messy – but a job done.’
‘Have you finished, Granddad?’
Maybe it was the end of another goddamn era, one of those changes in the Cairns family fortunes that were bloody volcanoes in their lives. Himself, it had been the ‘cleaning up’ of the Metropolitan Police – the end of knocking off wages vans and knowing that the squad cars were safely in the car parks behind the stations. His boy, Jerry, had faced his bloody brick wall when the cameras were introduced. Now you couldn’t blow your nose in London without it being seen, and the spread of the cameras had done for Jerry. For grandfather and father alike the happy days when hip pockets were well-filled and women wore big stones on their fingers were gone. The meal-ticket of today was the kid. In the family money was not saved, but spent when it came in. What Robbie did paid for Granddad Cairns’s groceries and helped with the electricity. Jerry and Dot lived off the kid’s earnings, Vern and Leanne too. It would have been easier for him if Robbie hadn’t rung in at all – near as easy for him if he’d been told to shut his face and bad-mouthed by his grandson. He didn’t understand why the kid had crumpled.
‘People put their faith in you and have been let down. Me and your dad, we’re pissed on. I like to say, in this world you have one chance. You’ve got to hope, kid, that you have two chances. One chance, you failed. Worst is that the money was paid.’
It was the kernel of what he had to say. Didn’t know why he’d taken so long getting there. He wouldn’t have considered going gentle on the kid because of family. In the world of Granddad
Cairns the most important factor was money. Men were paid, men did not deliver, men went into concrete and always had. Might be the flyover at Chiswick, or the foundations of the Dome, or the support towers of the new Olympics site. Money had been paid and lodged in an account, and he knew it because the paper slip from the cash machine had told him so. To be paid and to break faith on a deal was a death sentence, and to have to pay back the money was a humiliation he doubted he’d survive.
‘We were paid, we had their money. I have to tell people you failed. Also, I’m telling them you’re worth a second chance. Get it in your skull. Money was paid and needs earning. If it’s not, you’re in the gutter, Robbie, bleeding bad and—’
The call was cut. Might have been that the kid ran out of money, or that he put the phone down on him.
She sat on a bench, opposite the museum, and the lane in front of her ran down past the terraces of cottages. The gate to the house was out of sight. She could sit there – she was just a pretty young girl out in the sunshine.
She had assumed it was the wife who had left. Blonde, highlighted hair looking a mess through the windscreen, driving fast up the lane and turning on to the road without a glance to right or left. She’d not seen more of her because of the privacy tinting on the rear windows. A pick-up had followed. Leanne Cairns wasn’t a fool. Might have been – as her grandmother, Mum Davies, said – the brightest of the whole tribe. Wasn’t taxed. Leanne could register the scale of the catastrophe that had hit them down that lane. She wondered if by now, without her as a crutch, Robbie had dragged himself together.