When they came round the corner, the woman had started up. Quite a good soul, actually – nice, funny, warm. She’d spent part of the night with Suzie in the car, stretched out on the back seat – practically a hanging offence, as far as Metropolitan Police Service regulations went. He had no quarrel with her – none of them did – and she’d made them laugh with good anecdotes of protest lines. They’d done a trade-off: Megs Behan would have part of the back seat, and she’d close down on the slogans so they could doze. And she was up Harvey Giliot’s nose – no call to pick a quarrel with her. He knew the saying, might have been Arabic or Chinese, that went ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’
The door was open behind him. He was called back on the
mobile and was given his instructions. He was too tired to bitch and said what time he thought they’d be in London. He went to Megs Behan and she lowered her bullhorn. He’d thought, from the last blast – not that it mattered now – that the battery was flattening.
Mark Roscoe committed a worse offence than allowing an unauthorised civilian to snooze in the car, but the discipline culture had never burrowed into his guts. He told her where Gillot was travelling to and saw her face lighten. He didn’t tell her the schedule.
Then he waited.
Harvey Gillot wolfed another chocolate biscuit. He had removed the hard drives from his computers in the office, had made the bed neatly in the spare room where he had slept, had left the carpet rolled back in the principal bedroom so that it was easy to see the floor safe was open and empty, had poured some dog meal into the tin bowl, then had hitched up the rucksack of his clothes and what little he would journey with. There was a mirror in the hallway and he checked himself. Clean clothes, the dirty ones dumped in the bin, good shoes for offroad walking. He was well-shaven, no cuts, his hair was combed and he had dabbed on a little aftershave. Larger, of course, heavier in the chest and the upper stomach. A few who were familiar with him would have thought Harvey Gillot had binged – maybe food, maybe alcohol, maybe steroids. He wore a blue shirt, a silk tie and a lightweight jacket.
In his mind was the list of things he had to do: the dog, the travel agent, the solicitor, the school … and the text. He sent it. A last look at the mirror. Was satisfied, lifting the dog’s lead down from the hook, when the call came.
Charles, the sales manager, how was he? ‘Doing very nicely, thank you. All looks pretty sunny from where I stand. What can I do for you, Charles?’
Did he remember what they had talked about? ‘Remember it very well, Charles. You about to tell me that the tailgate on the lorry wasn’t fastened properly?’
Did he not know of the global ravages of the credit crunch? Cancellations, had he not heard of them? ‘I think I’d be interested – at a decent price.’
Charles told him. ‘We might have to do a bit better than that, Charles. Difficult times and all that.’
They haggled. The sales manager flogging military communications equipment, suitable for a brigade-sized force in the field and with total encryption, came down two per cent, and Harvey Gillot came up one per cent. It was a nice little deal. He could put out of his mind the dog, the travel agent, the solicitor and the school, and focus on brokering. Already his head was filled with the possibilities of where that equipment would be wanted – where conflict was about to flare, where there was money and demand. He did a little dance, a few steps, then called the dog.
He waved to the horse. He thought the garden was too destroyed to be repaired for the rest of the summer. The lawn would have been in better shape if it hadn’t been for the automatic sprinkler system fitted the previous year: it had softened the grass table so the hoof indentations were deeper. The flowerbeds were buggered and … It was a vigorous wave for the horse.
He took the Audi out of the garage, drove up to the gates and zapped them, then went out into the lane. Some coats and a couple of dresses would have gone under the wheels. Gillot didn’t acknowledge his onlookers. The woman with the bullhorn wasn’t there but the three detectives were close to their car, the engine running and the doors open. He left his own turning over and walked back to the dog, closed the gates on the horse, then crouched down and ruffled the fur at the dog’s collar. He said some quiet things and got his ear washed by the tongue that had been scooping up shit on the walk. He walked the dog, on the lead, to Denton’s house, pretty as a postcard with climbing roses, opened the gate to the front path, pushed the dog in, dropped the food bag beside it and bawled, towards an open window, that Josie would be along soon. He had gone before the door opened.
He drove away. He fiddled with the dashboard, turned up the
air-conditioning but was still sweating. Who loved him? Nobody. Who was his friend? Nobody. There was a bus stop on the far side of the road to the museum and the woman was there – quite attractive if she did something about herself. He didn’t wave and didn’t consider offering her a lift. Roscoe and his people were behind him and further back a marked police car. Good riddance, they’d be thinking – saying.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
A teacher way back at the grammar school had told the class it was from Dickens. Ahead of him, immediately, was the travel shop, the lawyer’s place, Fee’s school and then … the unknown. Harvey Gillot had a good feeling. He always had it when he believed he had control of a sort, but didn’t know where Destiny would take him. He went past the top point of the island and the mainland vista stretched to far horizons. If he didn’t come back would anyone care? No.
She swore.
A bad morning, illusions broken, woken from a dream. Romance fled, not even lust remained. Swore loudly, and repeated it. With her suitcases, she had gone to the big hotel on the high point of the island and had endured a rotten night.
The Dentons were at the little wicket gate on the lane and had her dog on a lead. In front of her were the gates to her home and the debris he’d left.
She swore louder.
Nobody there. An empty lane. The lead was loosed, the dog freed. She opened the gates. Many justifications for her curses. The gardener hadn’t offered to drive her back that morning and she fancied he would be looking for fresh employment to fill the hours he had spent at Lulworth View, indoors and out. The clothing on the gate and on the lane, with tyre marks, was an act of crude vandalism. The horse came to her across the drive and she felt tears well. She had seen the state of her beloved, and expensive, garden.
A little regret, which fuelled curses. Too long on her own in the isolation of the island, and no one to know but the retired –
the traders she met had never had the guts to get off the place and find a life. She was too bored, too cut off from his work because he no longer seemed to need her support, and too lonely – hadn’t even been proper sex on the side. Had been garden-work sweat that Nigel had washed off in the shower, more was the pity, just a bit of touching and fondling, a quick dart inside and her saying she was on the pill and him recoiling at the mention of it. He’d gone soft on her – afterwards, not during – and followed her round with eyes that longed like the dog’s did when its food was due. Hadn’t even done it properly.
The telephone rang as she crossed the drive, but had stopped as she came through the door. She didn’t care.
Good reason for the oaths, curses, when she was inside. Josie went to the bedroom, where the open wardrobe doors mocked her. The carpet was turned back at a corner and the safe box had its lid off. Empty – the necklace he’d bought her in Riyadh after his first Saudi contract following the wedding, the ring from Jakarta that had celebrated a deal for a paramilitary police weapons update, the bracelet with the emeralds that had been the best thing in a Hanoi shop, amber from Lithuania, jade from Thailand and the gold chain from Johannesburg when he’d sold a pile of junk to the Mozambicans and … All of it had been bought by him and all of it had been given to her, sometimes in gift boxes with wrapping and ribbon, passed across a candlelit table, sometimes coming off a dawn flight and her still in bed, a neighbour taking Fee to nursery school before they moved and the wrapping stripped off as fast as his clothes … All gone. The bastard. There had always been cash there: dollars and euros and sterling. Empty. She took the ring off her finger, dropped it into the safe and put the lid back but didn’t fasten the lock, then kicked the carpet into place.
She went to the other safe, in his office, opened it with the combination and saw that her passport was there, not his, the insurance policies and his will. The computers had been opened and she assumed the hard drives were gone.
At the gates, when she was collecting armfuls of her clothes,
the Dentons came close, and she was told of armed police officers who had maintained a vigil on her home through the night and more police who had been at the top of the lane. She was told also of the inconvenience caused by a woman with a megaphone who had kept them awake till the small hours. The couple felt betrayed, they said, hadn’t known her husband dealt in arms. She stomped away with another armful of clothes, said not a word of apology or remorse, just bloody well ignored them.
Josie Gillot thought her life had been destroyed, as her husband’s had.
When she had cleared the gate, had picked up the coats and dresses, she swore some more and took the boxes of carriage clocks, ornaments and glassware back across the drive and into the house. Next she had to return the horse to its field … but before that a drink or three. Not mid-morning and ice cubes tinkled on crystal. Nobody helped her. The bastard – she didn’t know what he was doing or where he was, and didn’t care to.
He had been turned away. He had arrived at the school – had thought he was doing his daughter a favour – and gone down empty corridors, hearing the chirp of young voices from behind closed classroom doors. As he had reached the headmistress’ suite, a bell had clamoured. He had been made to wait, not offered coffee or a biscuit. ‘Your wife, Mr Gillot, came last night, saw Fiona and briefed us on the irregular situation in your life currently. She expressed an opinion that you were capable of quite irrational actions, so my colleagues and I have decided it better that you do not see your daughter. Please leave, Mr Gillot.’ He had been aware then of the male PE teacher in a tracksuit at the open door. Did he want to be grabbed and put in a headlock?
He had driven away. There had been girls limbering up for netball, tennis or athletics on a distant playing-field but he could not, as he drove, recognise his daughter among them. The escort car picked him up at the outer gates and tailed him back into town.
The dutiful father had done his best. He had the tickets from
the travel agent, and the envelope – given reluctantly and signed for in triplicate – from the solicitor, the senior partner. The suspicious beggar had asked if this had Mrs Gillot’s approval, then had stepped into an adjoining office and made a call that had not been answered. He had the tickets and the envelope, and what had been in the safe was in a plastic bag at his feet. He would have broiled if not for the air-conditioner.
The car followed him into town.
He parked at the station, in the short-stay bays. He didn’t know if he would be back, so the prospect of his car running up a bill and getting clamped or towed away seemed unimportant. He boarded the train. They didn’t come with him.
Before the train reached Poole, its schedule was dislocated. The announcement said there had been ‘an incident’ on the line, and the guard coming through the carriage during the half-hour delay said, ‘A guy topped himself off a bridge, jumped in front of a train on the down line.’ Sort of put things into perspective, Harvey thought. When the train started up and they inched forward at a place where the line ran through a cutting he found himself thinking about the village, where he had never been and what it had been like a long time ago.
She had been told the man’s name was Andrija, and then Simun whispered that he was ‘disturbed’: in the last week he had attempted to kill himself by lying on a hand grenade, but his wife had taken it from him.
Penny Laing had been given a stool to perch on, the boy sat cross-legged on the veranda and the woman, introduced as Maria, stood behind her husband and held the back of his solid chair. She was without expression, and wore shapeless drab grey and brown clothing. He had a wooden hospital crutch and propped it between his knees.
He talked, and his wife never interrupted or prompted. Simun translated. Penny learned of the raising of the payment that had been given to Harvey Gillot, how the wife had refused to accept excuses, and she imagined the woman gliding in darkness through
the village as shells exploded and there were skirmishes at the defence lines. Then, in a bunker or a cellar under a house or below the flagstones of the Catholic church, she had filled a bag with bagatelle ornaments, low-quality gold, rubbish jewellery and the deeds of properties that had no value. Everything that went into the bag was of the highest importance to those who gave it.
They did not know, in the village, the name of the dealer whom the schoolteacher had met in Zagreb, but Zoran had come back and reported a meeting ‘most satisfactory’ with a person of honour and integrity. The night they went to collect the weapons, they had thought they would meet the man of honour and integrity, maybe linger long enough with him for a cigarette, the glow shielded. There would have been the embrace of brothers, cheeks kissed, and he would have gone on his way as they ferried the missiles towards the village. Andrija’s cousin had come from Vinkovci, had not been pressured to fight but had done so – he was a lion. In the village they had heard, as they waited for the shadows dragging the cart and the pram from the corn, the sudden concentration of explosions, the rattle of the machine-gun.
Penny Laing wondered if the greater hatred was directed at Harvey Gillot, who had taken their possessions and welshed on a deal, or on the paramilitaries Simun called ‘Cetniks’, who had killed the four and had ultimately overrun the village.