‘I won’t be in tomorrow.’
‘Where will you be?’
‘Probably refuelling at Astana or Anchorage, and likely sitting on the wing at take-off. I’m using days in lieu.’
‘Goodnight, Megs, and close the door after you.’
She went out. The end of the world? Well, there was an account. She had promised herself she wouldn’t chip into her aunt’s bequest. It seemed important enough to break rules to be there, but she
couldn’t explain why. She just had to go. She had to see how it played out. In part, she was responsible for the chaos now sitting in Harvey Gillot’s lap. Didn’t mean she was sorry for what she’d done, but perhaps she had a stake in it, like she wanted to see a horse run when she’d cleared her purse to back it.
Sympathy?
Of course not.
She closed the door, went to her cubicle and started to surf for flights and deals.
‘You’ll need something for your head. It’ll be up in the nineties there.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘The linen or the straw?’
‘I think the straw is more suitable.’
It was a ritual played out between Benjie and Deirdre Arbuthnot. She always supervised his laying out of clothing and necessary items before they were packed into his scarred leather travelling bag. The bag had history, had been beside him in circumstances of luxury and extreme hardship. He couldn’t have imagined being away without its reassuring presence at the foot of a bed or beside a sleeping-bag. The label, hanging by a frayed strap to the handle, named him as ‘Benjamin C. Arbuthnot, Consultant Engineer’. There had probably been a team working for a week on the Service pay-roll specifically to discover what employment cover gave the greatest protection in the field. He had never met a suspicious official, when working in covert mode, who had thought it necessary to quiz him on dam building or bridge construction. The straw hat went on the bed in the spare room beside his washbag and pyjamas, the socks and underwear.
‘You’ll want some good shoes.’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘The pair you had in Spain.’
‘I think they’ll be suitable, yes.’
He
had
worn them last year in Spain, walking a little and watching for eagles, oxpeckers and vultures in the Parque Nacional de Doñana, but had broken them in, new, in the Hindu Kush
foothills when the mujahideen had been supplied with the wretched Blowpipes. Each time he wore them and brought them home, he’d clean and polish them, then insert the shoe trees; they had kept their shape since the days he had spent with the perspiring Solly Lieberman and the young Harvey Gillot. He felt linked to the past.
‘It’s all about policy. You can’t have strategy if you don’t have a policy aim,’ he said, almost wistfully.
‘Of course, Benjie … I’m concerned about the mosquito repellent. Four years beyond the sell-by date.’
‘Worked in that park, will work again. Men such as Lieberman, and little men such as Gillot, only survive because of policy requirements.’
‘You have to decide which jacket to take. The cotton is probably best.’
‘Right, the cream one. That sort of person isn’t going to exist, let alone prosper, unless it suits the policy aims of those at the top table. Pretty much every deal that’s done has an assumed advantage to us, or Solly and little Gillot would have been stamped on at birth. People at Revenue and Customs don’t understand the requirements of policy.’
‘Will four shirts be enough? It’s only two or three days, isn’t it? Four shirts, two slacks …’
She ticked off items, collected the clothing from drawers and wardrobes and spread it beside the bag. He could reflect that, under a ferocious exterior, she cared for his safety. She could have echoed what he’d said about policy. He needed – in his mind and, perhaps, his soul – to justify the events that had taken place many years before on the quayside at Rijeka. Advice given, only
advice.
His own business done, he had driven hard for Ljubljana through torrential rain that his wipers had barely coped with. He had managed a late flight out. And Gillot in recent years? Had heard along the extended communication lines so prized by the Service that other officers had been able to use him to advantage before he had slipped under the radar. Didn’t mean that afterwards little Gillot had been a loose cannon, a
rogue, whatever, but that he didn’t fill a useful slot in the policy requirements of the day.
She folded the items briskly and packed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want to take your library book – you’ve gone quiet, Benjie. Not an attack of the dreaded
ethics,
I hope?’
‘I was reflecting on the creed of “deniability”.’
She laughed, a little growled chuckle, and touched his arm briefly. ‘I think that we’ve thought of about everything.’
‘Thank you. “Deniability” was always the key, agreed? Hardly worth doing if we’d had to own up and be in the public’s glare. It suited us so much better to have those damn missiles on Jordanian soil than shoved up-country in Croatia to some battlefield where the result was already determined. It was the equivalent of throwing good money after bad … but it was grand to get the stuff to Aqaba and no one the wiser on our involvement. Ethics? I’ll admit to short spasms of feeling responsible for what Denys called a Blowback, but more important will be the theatre. You with me, dear?’
‘Are you taking your pen?’
‘Of course … I fancy it will be spectacular.’
He closed the bag, buckled it and carried it, with the straw hat, out of the room. He took them downstairs and put them on an old chair close to the front door, covenient for carrying to the Land Rover in the morning and her driving him to the train station.
She called from the landing. ‘A whisky, I think, Benjie. You’ll be a
voyeur,
won’t you? Not going to clash with any scant sense of morality?’
He laughed with her. ‘Bugger the morals. I’m banking on a fine show.’
‘And, of course, you’ll play the universal idiot, and do it well.’
‘They’re the clothes I’m comfortable in.’
At the Gold Group meeting there was little enthusiasm for extending the session further into the late evening.
‘Bizarre circumstances, agreed, but not entirely unwelcome.’ From SCD10, Surveillance: ‘I would have to say, Ma’am, that
we were not happy with declining an invitation to mount the sort of job that was required. Just don’t have the people. If we were to have put in a covert rural observation point, we would have had to pull a very expert team off secondment to Box 500 or to one of the narcotics scenes, important, down on the south coast. We’re singing and dancing if the Tango’s done a runner.’
From CO19, Firearms: ‘We, too, have Box 500 commitments, but the whole VIP scene is a killer in resources. We have an obligation to the target to protect him, however obstinate and daft he wants to be. Him going gives us a chance to reassess – and hope he keeps moving and doesn’t turn round.’
From SCD11, Intelligence: ‘We don’t have a line on the identity of the guy who took the contract. It’ll sneak out – always does – but at this moment I have no idea who this village bought.’
From SCD7, the inspector: ‘I have Mark Roscoe back from the coast. He knows the Tango better than anyone … Yes, I am concerned about our duty-of-care obligations. My suggestion, while the Tango plods across Europe, we put Roscoe on a flight first thing in the morning. He can liaise in Zagreb, then go on to Vukovar. What he’ll do there I don’t know, but it’ll give our shoulder-blades some cover.’
From HMRC, a line manager: ‘We have there, already in place, Penny Laing and she’ll be able to brief Roscoe. She’s an experienced, highly capable operative and—’
The inspector flared, ‘My man, Roscoe, is quite capable of crossing a road on his own and will not need his hand held.’
The line manager said evenly, ‘I wouldn’t want heavy police boots blundering over the sensitive ground that our investigator is looking at.’
Time for Phoebe Bermingham to call a halt, and she did. It had always astonished her that separate departments went on to a war footing when co-operation was called for. The concept of a detective from the Flying Squad working with an investigator from HM Revenue and Customs was obviously built on shifting sands.
‘I’m sure they’ll do very well together and create complete
harmony in their professional relationship. The Tango’s gone and we should be thankful – whatever happens to him is to be laid squarely at his own door. Safe home, gentlemen.’ She shuffled her papers together, pushed back her chair. It was an afterthought and she had forgotten herself sufficiently for a puzzled frown to gouge her forehead. ‘I cannot imagine what he thinks he can achieve – and it’s all so long ago. I mean, do I look back to what happened in my life nineteen years ago and allow the past to dictate my present? Aren’t memories fogged by time? It’s Europe, the twenty-first century, and blood vendettas should be consigned to history classes. Is nothing ever forgotten?’
‘No, Ma’am,’ the Intelligence man said softly. ‘Never forgotten and never forgiven. He’ll probably get the top of his head blown off.’
Simun touched her arm to attract her attention, then pointed. ‘You see, Penny, no wedding ring. And there was no ring on the finger of Maria, the wife of Andrija, and my mother had no ring when she was buried. She has no ring, no gold chain with a crucifix, or any earrings. Everything she had went into the bag that was taken by Harvey Gillot.’
‘Yes.’
It was late. She had been brought to a farmhouse. She was sitting at the kitchen table, hewn wood, and the chair was old, its legs uneven. She had been offered, and had taken, a glass of tap water. The eyes of the woman opposite never left Penny’s face. She could see where the house had been rebuilt. The beams were exposed, some charred, and the walls were not plastered. In one there was a big hole, like a bite from an apple, filled with different bricks and newer mortar.
‘He went to the bank and took out a loan for five thousand euros. That was his share for the payment on the contract.’
‘Yes.’
‘Their boy went to the place where the Malyutkas were to be delivered. The delivery was not made and their boy was identified by his size and the scraps of his clothing that remained. His
testicles were in his mouth. They will not speak of the siege and the death of their son.’
She had been told that in the days between the loss of their son and the collapse of the village’s defences, their home had taken a direct hit from a tank shell. If the Malyutka missiles had arrived the tank would have been destroyed. Simun had said that their son’s room was sealed now, the window bricked up. The wife had been in the kitchen: if she had not been close to the table and able to crawl under it as the floors above collapsed, she would have died too. She had been unhurt except that her hearing had gone. She lived in silence. They were separated, Simun had told Penny. Her company was the quiet and his was the anger at what had been done to them. The focus, now, of the anger was Harvey Gillot – and it was as if a man crouched by a fire, blew on its embers and flames reared.
‘He farms a hundred hectares that he owns and another hundred and fifty that he rents. He could be rich, but is not. All the money that the farm makes goes to the association for the support of war veterans. He is a pauper. Look at his clothes, how she dresses. He is a fine farmer, but is now in his sixty-eighth year. Soon he will drop and his farm will be sold, maybe to businessmen in Zagreb or to expatriates living in America. For now he stays close to his son’s room. His son should have farmed this land and lived here. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
She was looking at her hands on the rough table and imagining the woman under it, the dust cascading with the beams and bricks, when her mobile rang. She answered it brusquely, was given a name, asked for it to be repeated, then spoke it aloud: ‘Mark Roscoe, sergeant, SCD7.’ She remembered him, sharp and abrasive. She had called him ‘patronising’ and had thought him stereotypical of the average specialised-unit policeman: he would have thought the sun shone from his backside and the rest of the world was second rate. She was given a travel itinerary, and rang off. Simun queried, but she shook her head and stood.
They went outside into the night.
She sensed, then, that time was short, that a world created for her in this village, with its history, would imminently fracture.
She thought that the son – who would now have been in his late thirties, with a wife and a clutch of kids – would have gone with a village girl to the barn behind the house where the winter fodder was stored. Perhaps the boy with her might have been there with a new generation of village girls. Penny Laing thought herself absorbed into the life of the village; the Alpha team and her bed-sit were almost blown away. They went towards the darkened hulk of the barn and she could hear animals – maybe pigs, goats, heifers – and a truth smacked across her face.
Had Harvey Gillot broken the law of his own country, flown in the teeth of a Security Council resolution, and supplied Malyutka missiles to this community, there would now be a statue in his honour in front of the church, and a street or the café would bear his name. She thought of the great and the good in Whitehall, and the Alpha team who made their policy decisions. They had not been here, had seen nothing and were ignorant. But Harvey Gillot had failed on the deal and was condemned.
They climbed bales. She helped him to strip, and felt the prickly warmth of hay against her skin. He had brought his own condom and was shy when he gave it to her. She split the packet and rolled it on to him, then arched, took him and felt a liberation – a cord cut, a link broken. She had never before belonged – not even with her naval man – and she clung to him. He cried out to his animal audience, gasped and sagged. She held him, clung tight. Into his ear, kissing him, she whispered, ‘When he comes here …’
‘Who?’
‘When Gillot comes here …’
‘Yes?’
‘… will he be killed?’
The boy slipped wetly out of her. ‘Why not? If he comes here, of course he will be killed.’
The train had halted and was lodged in a siding. He didn’t know
how far they had travelled, but he estimated from the time that they were outside Cologne. The long-distance trains, travelling overnight, needed places to park so that they would arrive at their destination after the world had woken.