The Dealer and the Dead (35 page)

A bit of fear would have helped Gillot’s cause, Roscoe reckoned. The last three cases he had done for his small wing of SCD7 had involved safeguarding an Albanian brothel owner, a cocaine dealer in west London and, most recently, a scrap-metal king who had minded the prime proceeds from a jewellery heist at Heathrow for ten years until the guys who had done the heist, and done time, wanted the sparkle back. All involving lowlife, all with a sense of humour and a degree of dignity, and all with respect for the job Roscoe had tried to do. The Albanian was now back in Pristina with his nephews and cousins and had dispersed his assets; he had offered the team the chance to meet some ‘nice clean girls and young’, and had sent a postcard via New Scotland Yard. The dealer had wisely returned to Jamaica, and the scrap-metal king had gone quiet, perhaps had been encouraged to find what he had minded. In the three cases there had been congratulations from on high, men had faced conspiracy-to-murder
charges, advice had been taken and shots not fired.

They were under the castle’s walls. Suzie said that the English Heritage website stated it had been built in the eleventh century, then fought over, repaired and strengthened over the next five hundred years. More important, there was a place where the weathered stone had been hacked away. Roscoe bent down while the others maintained a guard. He found the bullet, squashed and almost unrecognisable except to a trained eye, which lay at the side of the path. Further down, Gillot indicated where he had been as the second shot was fired and pointed to the gap in the undergrowth where the rotting apples and wasps were. They did the alignments and saw the mark on a branch where sap oozed and a bullet had lodged.

Roscoe noted the prettiness of the place and the beauty of the sea’s colours. Easy to imagine murder on the streets round the King’s Cross brothels, in the dealer’s estate territory or under the mountains of scrapped vehicles in the yard, but not here. Walkers came past and must have wondered why a man who was unshaven and sweat-streaked was with two well-turned-out younger men and an attractive girl, and why the two men wore jackets in the heat and the girl carried a big bag.

‘Have you seen enough?’ Gillot asked.

Roscoe said they had.

‘I shouldn’t have been left alive. If that’s the best they could dig out, they paid for a bum.’

Roscoe said he supposed killing wasn’t an exact science.

‘I was helpless, half down, had flipflops on – then nothing. He didn’t follow me. A
wasp
fazed him.’

Roscoe said, drily, that he imagined even contract killers had the occasional bad day at work.

‘You taking this seriously?’

He was, and tried to muster some sincerity.

They were walking back up the hill, the sea behind them, the sun hard on their heads.

A salesman’s smile cracked Gillot’s face. ‘Crap, he was.’

‘If you say so, Mr Gillot.’

They were at the front gate. Gillot walked through the clothing, as if it wasn’t there. A family had come down the lane, laden with beach kit and little fishing rods, and stepped through the mess. Bill and Suzie started to pick up and fold the clothing as best they could, then stacked it in the cases. Gillot didn’t help. He said he was not open to advice, was not going to run, was staying in his home.

Roscoe shrugged.

Gillot opened the gates, and the dog leaped at him with enthusiasm. ‘I doubt he’ll be back.’

‘Of course he will,’ Roscoe snapped. ‘He won’t have moved till he had confirmation that the money had been paid. He has to be back. It’s your privilege to reject advice.’

‘I suppose you think I was just lucky—’

Roscoe interrupted: ‘A man once said, “You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.” That was after he had failed to kill the prime minister. It’s a mantra of ours, Mr Gillot. We think it’s hard to be lucky all the time when he only has to be lucky once.’

He was alone, stretched out in a chair, the one he always sat in. Vern had dropped him off, and there had been a curl of contempt at his elder brother’s mouth that he hadn’t seen before. Another time, Robbie would have made a punchbag of Vern’s face. Another time, he would have telephoned the extension on the counter where Barbie was and demanded that she make an excuse and get back to Rotherhithe.

He felt exhausted, and had not before. On each occasion that he had fired at a man and seen him crumple, he had known only calm satisfaction. Then the feelings of power had gushed. Now he had fired and a man hadn’t crumpled. There was no calm satisfaction and no … It played, as if it was on a loop, in his mind and he couldn’t escape it. A man walking, a dog running, wasps around him, the man stumbling, the shot fired and hitting a stone wall. A man down, the shot lined up, the wasps in the face mask and the shot gone high. A flipflop thrown at him. The man running … Hadn’t missed before – had once shot at twice that distance and done two hits, head and upper chest. He didn’t know why he hadn’t run down the track after the target – and the target was barefoot, the track rough stone – caught him and killed him. He remembered when a steer had broken out of a wagon transporting animals to a slaughterhouse, had kicked out of the tail flap when it stopped at the lights on Jamaica Road. They hadn’t just let the thing go, but had gone after it and killed it with a rifle shot. The eleven-year-old Robbie Cairns had seen it all.

And with the images were the words spoken by his grandfather on the telephone. His eyes were tight shut and the sunlight didn’t penetrate. He held the pistol in his hand, couldn’t stop the trembling. Maybe, for failing, they would put him in the concrete while he was still alive, and it would come up over his knees, his gut, his chest and his head. He held the pistol tight, his knuckles white and— He heard the key in the door, slipped the weapon into his waist band and covered the bulge with his shirt tail.

A light kiss – how was he? Fine.

A little hug – had his day been good? Yes.

Where had he been? Just around, nowhere special.

Fingers on his face, gentle – would he like some tea? He would.

She had dumped her bag, was in the kitchen. She never asked why he didn’t make tea for himself if he wanted it. And, she didn’t question how he spent his time. And the fingers had made a little pattern on his cheeks, the hands had held his shoulders when she’d hugged him and, almost, he could taste the kiss she had put on his lips. It was important to him, more important than he could tell her. He peeled off the clothes he had worn under the overalls that morning, and put the Baikal pistol under a cushion on the chair he always used.

She was at the kitchen door. ‘You smell, Robbie – mind me saying that? No offence.’

‘Want you to wash these.’

He didn’t pick up the T-shirt, the trousers, the vest, underpants and socks, let her. When he was naked she didn’t touch him. She bent and gathered up the clothes. ‘What was it I smelt, Robbie?’

‘I spilled some lighter fuel on my arm. Maybe I’ll take a shower.’

She went back to the kitchen and he heard her load the washing-machine. Then it rumbled and the kettle whistled. She knew nothing. He’d wait for the tea, then take the shower. Uppermost in his mind were the people who had paid for his
failure
and how they’d be.

‘Why, in London, should you be interested now in us and our village?’ The boy, Simun, translated the question put by his father.

Penny Laing answered him: ‘There were regulations in place, British laws, and we believe that Harvey Gillot conspired to breach them. We have a strict policy in our country for the suppression of illegal trading in weapons and ammunition. Harvey Gillot is a target of the agency I work for, and we wish to build a picture of his operations, so we begin here.’

Penny had often spoken through a third party and understood the pace she should set and the gaps she should leave. They walked on the main road through the village, leaving the café behind them. In front she could see the church, the crossroads, the shop and little else. If she had been a holidaymaker, driving between two points, she would have gone through it in half a minute and registered nothing.

The man, Mladen, waved an arm expansively. ‘You would have wanted us all dead.’

‘A question or an opinion? I haven’t said I wanted you all dead.’

The boy’s voice was quiet in her ear. ‘You wanted us dead. There was a United Nations embargo on weapons. Your government was an architect of it. It decided what was best for people in Croatia. It made decisions on whether we should survive or whether we should be butchered and go to hidden graves. If you had succeeded in the embargo, my village and I would not be here.’

‘I don’t follow you.’ She was flushed, but not by the sun – the
cream had been smeared on her arms, neck, forehead and cheeks. People didn’t challenge her work in chasing down arms dealers, searching out crevices in their activities, exploiting them and bringing them to court.

‘You are intelligent. Of course you follow me. There, look there …’ His thin arm reached out and the long fingers, bright with artist’s oil colours, jabbed to their right. Between two homes, with flowers in window-boxes, there was a low, squat concrete shape, an entry-hole gaping in its side. His son translated. ‘That was the command post. It was where Zoran, our schoolteacher, led the defence of our village and I was beside him. We defended the village with rifles, grenades and a few bombs for the antitank launcher, the RPG, most of those items bought in Hungary by Zoran before the fighting. We had very little from the police because Vukovar, and Vinkovci, was more important. Marinci and Bogdanovci were like us. We defended ourselves and we kept open the Cornfield Road. After Zoran was dead, I directed the defence from that bunker. Harvey Gillot would have been a criminal to you, but to us he was an angel. But the weapons did not come.’

‘It was thought at the time that—’

‘You knew, Miss Penny, what was best for us. You were very clever people and we were only simple peasants. You knew it was best for us not to have the weapons that would keep back the Cetniks. I think, perhaps, you thought it best for our homes and our land to be given to the Cetniks, and for us to go quietly to refugee camps and not to make a bad smell in the sophistication of Europe. There, Miss Penny, you see the church.’

The walls were concrete blocks and panels. The tower beside the porch at the front was as high as the roof, but the metal spikes that would reinforce poured concrete protruded upwards. She was still stung by the blunt sarcasm with which she had been put down. Should she ask why the church was still being rebuilt some nineteen years after the siege of the village and twelve after its liberation? She let it ride. What he had said had hurt but the translation was in the flat monotone interpreters always used.
Simun had not allowed emotion to affect his tone or the message he gave, but his fingers had been soft on her skin and …

They stood in front of the church.

‘It is on the site of the old building. Under the nave there were steps down into the crypt. It was used as a refuge for the wounded and the sick, and it was where my wife was brought when she was in labour. There were complications in the delivery of my son. He was in vigorous health, but my wife deteriorated. The Cornfield Road was too dangerous for a sick woman to journey over. She died there, and we buried her in the night. We call those missiles by their Russian name, Malyutka, and with them we could have kept open the way across the fields. We had paid for them but they were not delivered. The road was cut and our village could not survive, nor Bogdanovci – our neighbour. It was the death of Vukovar. We remember well what was done to us – especially what was done to us for our own good.’

They walked on. Occasionally a building was still damaged, left with weeds sprouting in the cavities and saplings growing through the old floor. Simun murmured they had been the homes of Serbs who had lived in the village before the fighting and would never come back. She thought the shop, from its window display, was pitifully stocked, and wondered what horizons were left here … after the killing of Harvey Gillot. There was a larger house, grander, and a full-sized Madonna, carved from wood, and Simun whispered that it was the work of the fighter who had led the resistance in Bogdanovci. It was Mladen’s house. Simun pointed to the storks that nested on a chimney at the back – huge bodies and wings, tapering necks and pencil legs – and said that they had stayed right through the siege.

His father coughed, then spoke. ‘I doubt, Miss Penny, that you have fought for anything, suffered for anything. We have. We understand what it is to fight and to suffer. Most of all, Miss Penny, we believe in trust, and we are as loyal to the dead as we are to the living. He took our money and all that was valuable to us. He was given everything we had, and we trusted him. Do you seek to interfere?’

Penny Laing stood in a backwater of eastern Slavonia, in a far corner of Croatia, at the extremity of old Catholic Europe. She was far from London and the mores of her office. ‘I do not seek to interfere but to learn.’

‘It would be bad for you, Miss Penny, if our trust in you were not justified.’ There was no cloud in the sky but she was chilled. She had crossed a line, and could not have explained it to those who shared her work on the Alpha team. Neither could she have made sense of it to a weapons officer on a frigate hunting drugs smugglers in the Caribbean. She only knew Harvey Gillot from a photograph, and felt shrunken and almost insignificant. Perhaps she had paled, but Simun’s hand was on her elbow as if she needed to be supported. She thought the death of that man was now inevitable.

The call came from an apartment, one of the most sought-after in the capital city, that overlooked a grand square. The sun shone with late-afternoon brilliance on the grass, the statues and the monument to a great leader of a previous century.

‘You, Josip? … There is news. No, no, leave the cork … Josip, the news from London is that an attempt was made and
failed …
For fuck’s sake, Josip, how would I know? I’m in Zagreb. I have had a message, not a half-hour conversation. It
failed …
What happens now? I wasn’t told … Don’t treat me like an idiot. It’s accepted that you paid … It’s on your head. You advised, suggested, you began it … You’re vulnerable, that too I accept … What do you tell your villagers? You tell them it failed, and you tell them that the money they paid will be earned. Tell them many people in a long chain will demand it.’