It had tried to lead him into the mines.
The sun was higher and beat on him. Far down a track that ran off through the corn he could see the movement of men and women, but they were hazed and indistinct. Sweat ran on him, and was in his eyes. It was the path, where the movement was, that his target would take.
He came off the road and ahead of him was the small, squat pillbox. In front of the pillbox was the shrine with the painted
statuette of the Virgin and behind it the pole. The flag fluttered dismally in the heat.
Harvey Gillot crested a small hill, dirt and dust skidding out from under his feet, and realised there had been no rain for many weeks: the ground was baked dry. He passed the flag, then the shrine, and assumed it to have been built as a memorial to those who had died using the Cornfield Road. On the pillbox he could see the marks of war and the exposed lengths of steel wire on to which the concrete had been poured long ago. The ground in front of the shrine was covered with white chippings and weeds grew freely among them. He wondered why – if the past lived so strong – a man or a woman did not come here with a hoe and tidy it. Then the flag, the pillbox and the shrine were behind him.
From the top of the slope, he looked forward. To his left, distant, was the water tower, which peeped above the corn crop. To his right, nearer, was a farmhouse among mature fruit trees. There was scaffolding on one of the walls as if an attempt was made to move on from the past. Ahead was an expanse of fields, corn and sunflowers, and above the corn, chimneys that were difficult to focus on in the bright sunlight. In places, between the corn stems, he glimpsed red-tiled roofs. It was the village that had paid him.
It was why he was there.
No reason to mess around. Time to step out and confront
it.
‘It’ was a gun, a balaclava, a hammer blow on his spine, then repeated. Could have hidden and flinched at his own shadow. Harvey Gillot started his walk.
The plastic bag, in his right hand, had little weight. The slight wind that blew on the open plain and was sucked down the path riffled it, making it flap against his leg. He wore a pair of creased lightweight trousers, should have been washed and pressed, and the shirt had been on his back since he had left the island. He was unshaven, which didn’t bother him. He had soft trainers on – he would have chosen them for a quiet day on the patio with his mobile for company. He hadn’t tidied his hair. He had dressed
fast, moving on tiptoe around the hotel room, hadn’t showered or washed or swilled his teeth, and had looked often at her, fully dressed, sleeping well, her face calm. He hadn’t woken her. He had written the note, had done the smile – the rueful one – then gone out of the door and closed it with care.
He murmured, ‘Well, Mr Lieberman, they say that if you’re stuck in a pit it’s best to stop digging, so I’ve dumped the shovel. I’m walking because your good chum, Mr Arbuthnot, offered that piece of advice. Would be grateful, Mr Lieberman, if you’d watch my back …’ Could have done with his dark glasses. It looked a long walk and he thought it would take him near to the red-tiled roofs, the jutting chimneys and maybe skirt a tree-line, but everything was indistinct: the light reflected up from the path and seemed to gouge at his eyes. He hadn’t gone far yet, and the path stretched ahead, the corn grew high, and a car door slammed, behind him, faint.
It would have slammed on the road near to the flag, the pillbox and the shrine.
The sound of the slam carried well and there was no noise on the path, other than that of leaves moving and songbirds. Up higher a buzzard soared – should have had his dog with him. If it had been a choice between the dark glasses to protect his eyes or the dog, head beside his knee, he would have chosen the dog. Had the dog noticed he’d gone? Always made a fuss when he came back, but he wouldn’t have bet good money on the dog’s loyalty if it were just a walk that was on offer. The dog would follow the food.
She
gave it food and it might turn down the chance of a walk in a cornfield that led to a village, a grave and … He heard the stamp of feet, running behind him. He quickened his step, thought of the gun, the balaclava. He didn’t know whether he should walk faster, trot, jog or sprint. The tread closed on him. Gillot didn’t want to turn. He could picture the slight, spare-shouldered shape of the man and thought, with that build, the man would be close enough to him to have the right range for a handgun. Twenty feet, a difficult shot; ten feet, a reasonable shot; five feet, certainty. Couldn’t stop or turn, and the sweat ran
on his back. The wind eddied in the bullet holes of his shirt and cooled the wet on his skin.
‘For God’s sake, Mr Gillot, can you just slow down?’
Gillot shouted at the corn on either side of the path: ‘Go away.’
‘Can’t.’ The man heaved, panted, and the footfall thudded closer.
Gillot stopped, turned. He stood his full height and tried to claw together authority. He and spoke with a harsh growl: ‘Words of one syllable … Get lost.’
The sergeant was in front of him, dressed in a suit, collar buttoned, tie knotted. The polished shoes were now dust-coated, his hair was wrecked and the sweat ran in rivulets off his forehead. A gasp. ‘Can’t.’
‘I don’t want you.’
‘Put frankly, Mr Gillot, there’s a thousand places I’d rather be.’
‘Be there then, any of them.’ Harvey Gillot turned. No smile and no shrug. He did it like a dismissal – told the lamb to stop trailing and get back to its own field and flock. He walked, stretched his stride.
‘Can’t.’ He was followed.
‘Repetitive, boring. Get a handle on it. I have to do this on my own.’ He thought that reasonable. Only an idiot wouldn’t understand that the business of the day was personal to him. They were in, now, an avenue of corn that was densely sown and made a wall to either side of them. A man – a devil, a killer, a bastard – could be two yards into the corn and there would be no warning of his presence. He would only have to extend an arm and aim and …
The voice bored back at him, lapped at his shoulder. ‘Sorry. Whatever your personal preferences, Mr Gillot, I’m not able to turn away from you. It’s the job.’
‘Get behind me. Don’t crowd me,’ Gillot said quietly. He wanted this argument dead – wanted to know what was ahead of him and round the twist in the path, wanted to know what was beside him and two paces into the close corn.
‘Behind you, yes, but with you.’
He thought they played with words. To Gillot, ‘behind’ was fifty paces back and detached, merely there to observe, far enough away not to distract him from his own survival chances. To Gillot, ‘with you’ was a couple of steps off his shoulder and alongside him, too near to give him a cat in hell’s chance. He’d reckoned he’d solved a problem and had had it thrown straight and hard into his face. The sun beat into his eyes and the sweat stung there. Temper broke.
‘Are you looking for a fucking medal?’
‘That’s insulting.’
‘Get off your high horse, Sergeant, and stop moralising.’
‘It’s called duty of bloody care.’
He let his shoulders heave with derision, but the man hung in there. At school there had been kids who fancied cross-country running was a joy – panting and heaving and throwing up – and the teacher said that the lead kid had to drop the chasers or he’d not bloody win. He hadn’t dropped Roscoe.
‘Never heard of it. Doesn’t play big in any street I’ve lived in.’
‘And it hangs like a bloody millstone around my neck, but it’s there and I can’t lose it. That’s duty of care.’ What was new – anger. As if Roscoe had forgotten he was the policeman, the public servant. As if it was true: he’d rather be anywhere else and weighed down with the duty. He remembered the man in his living room, punctilious in his politeness, demonstrating neither sympathy nor personal involvement. He couldn’t offload the care.
‘I walk on my own.’
‘Correction. You walk with me behind you.’
‘You armed?’
‘No.’
‘You have a stick? Pepper spray? Mace? Do you have anything?’
‘No.’
A stork flew over, slow and ponderous, and Gillot told him what he thought. ‘Then you’re goddamn useless –
useless.
Leave me alone. I go about my business and you’re an obstruction to it. Lose yourself.’
‘You won’t be alone, no chance. They’ll be there. Got me? It’s like they’ve bought tickets for a Tyburn job, seats in the stands. Penny Laing of Revenue and Customs, she’s there – she tried to nail you with a prosecution but gave up on it. Megs Behan, the woman who blasted you out of your home with a bullhorn, is there. A local doctor, he’ll be there, but don’t regard him as useful because he didn’t bring the box of tricks him. I’m carrying it. The forensic scientist who exhumed the bodies – the deaths that put you in this shit – and found a phone number scribbled on paper in a pocket and shopped you, he’s down the track … with an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t. He’s there and has taken on the transport. He calls us all vultures, circling, watching and waiting for a corpse. You won’t be alone. Sorry about that.’
‘Back off.’
‘And the village’ll be there. They put up twenty thousand sterling. It’s a humble place and it lives off war pensions, with disability allowances well-milked, but that was a pile of money to them and they took it in bank loans. It was sliced off down the line as the contract was passed on, and the guy on the trigger gets ten out of the twenty.’
‘I don’t need to know – I’m not running. I have nowhere to run to.’
‘His name is Robbie Cairns. He’s from Rotherhithe, southeast London. Slotting is his work. He kills to make a living.’
‘I’ve seen him, faced him, smelt him.’
‘He’s waiting for you at the end of the path.’
‘Get back from me. I’ll look after myself.’
‘Stuck with you, and not from choice.’
It would not have been true to say that Harvey Gillot snapped. Truer to say that he had exhausted every other tactic for shedding
himself of Roscoe’s shadow. He hit him. Surprised Roscoe and himself. A clenched fist, not the one that held the plastic bag, but a left-arm jab. He had never, in his entire life, hit anyone before – not at primary school or at the Royal Grammar School. He hadn’t thrown punches in the office-equipment trade or when he was trying to sell weapons. He had never hit Josie. The blow caused Roscoe to reel, but not to go down. Gillot watched, almost fascinated, as blood came from Roscoe’s nose and was wiped with a sleeve, and then more from a split upper lip. Roscoe stood, lifted his head and would – for a moment – have weighed whether or not to beat ten shades of hell out of Gillot. Gillot nearly laughed. It wouldn’t have fitted the duty of bloody care to return the punch.
Gillot walked on. Reckoned he’d won space for himself.
They were squashed into the car. Dropping off Roscoe and giving his place in the front to the long-legged Anders had made little difference to the lack of comfort, but it had been bearable when they were on the decent road surface out of the town. He was guided by Penny Laing, who directed him at junctions where narrow roads branched off with no signposts. A quiet had fallen on them and Benjie Arbuthnot rated it an inappropriate time to lift the mood with humour. Now he drove the hire car off the road, on to a track, didn’t slow, and allowed the vehicle to bounce.
He followed Penny Laing’s directions. Through the village, with a brief commentary by Anders on the number of casualties suffered in the siege, past the church and the cemetery – he saw through the open gate the fresh graves. No one spoke and all were thrown about inside the car. He did not slacken his speed.
There were markers ahead.
He could see, as dust piled on to the windscreen, bobbing heads that wound in a slow-moving line above the tips of the crop. He had been once in South America when a pope had visited and could remember the huge crowds moving in crocodile formation towards the rendezvous where mass would be celebrated. He recalled taking his elder son to a music festival
and, again, seeing trudging queues heading for campsites beside the Thames … Something magnificent and emotional about columns on the move in the early morning and a great event expected. The army ahead of him, however, wore neither the uniform of the faith nor their culture: the women were in black and carried hand weapons and the men were in camouflage fatigues, with firearms on their shoulders. They were strung out along the length of the track.
Anders said, ‘I don’t want to be a pooper, Arbuthnot, but I don’t see our presence being welcomed.’
Megs Behan said, ‘I cannot believe now in the rule of the mob. We have to go on.’
Penny Laing said, ‘We owe him nothing. We’re not in debt to Gillot.’
He made no reply. He could have tucked the car in behind them and crawled at their pace, could have dumped it, turfed out his passengers and walked. He heaved the wheel and went through the corn. The mass of green closed around the windows. He made a bypass, then swung back towards the track.
He saw that the village people formed little clusters ahead, and understood. Penny Laing murmured to him which was Tomislav, who had made a memorial of his home and would have fired the Malyutka missiles if delivery had been made, and which was Andrija, who had been the sniper and had lost his leg in the break-out when the women and wounded were left behind. She indicated Petar, who farmed this land, whose wife was deaf and whose son had died when the consignment had failed to come, and Mladen, who led the village, and his son, who had been carried out as a two-week-old baby through the cornfields. Always a witness, always an observer, Arbuthnot noted, and squirrelled away her blush and the tremor in her voice as she spoke of the boy – good-looking kid. He saw, ahead, that Steyn waved to him and beside him were two crow women.
He had seen enough, so he did a three-point turn that flattened more of the crop, and began his drop-off.
It was Megs Behan who asked the question. It would have been in all their minds but she posed it. ‘Can we save him?’
‘No,
we
cannot,’ Arbuthnot said. ‘But it’s possible he can save himself.’
Steyn was the first to see him.