The Dealer and the Dead

by Gerald Seymour

  Maybe, later in the afternoon, after they’d eaten what she was preparing for him, they’d go to bed. Maybe they wouldn’t. If they did, afterwards he’d shower and then he’d slip away. He never stayed the whole night. Did she know what he did for a living? He hadn’t told her and she had never asked. After a hit, he’d come to the flat and turn on the local London news to hear what the detectives were saying and see the people in white suits crawling over the street scene, but she never asked why he watched, so intense.

  Robbie Cairns had a real affection for his Barbie, couldn’t match it for anyone else. She soothed him and kept him calm. She was the only person – man or woman – he needed … and he waited for the next call-out, for the next time his father was satisfied with a deal and gave it a green light …

  *

  A link in Lublin, south-eastern Poland, threw up the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile, one of thousands being manoeuvred, virtually untraceable, around northern Europe.

  A call was made to the number. Gulls howled and fought as they dived for fish scraps. A German stood on a quayside close to the old fish market in Hamburg and said that if work was to be done in London a local man should do it.

  Would a fee be paid? Most certainly. The German made a trifling remark about the purchaser and was told that it was not ‘he’ but ‘they’. A village had gone forward with the contract, would buy a man. A village? Where was it? He was told that his caller had no idea. The German knew a man in London. Would he be paid for his time? A guarantee.

  The German called London. Said when he was arriving and into which terminal he would come.

  The van was an oven. Inside, behind the empty driver’s cab, there was sufficient room, barely, for two men and a woman to be squashed together; at any time two could observe through the drilled holes and hold a camera to either. On the outside, the van carried the name and logo of a company that repaired gas pipes.

  The Tango was washing a car. ‘Tango’ meant ‘target’ in SCD7 jargon, and grated with Mark Roscoe, but the culture of the unit was too considerable for one foot-slogger to fight. The man had a hose running – they could have done him for breaching a hosepipe ban but preferred him cuffed and facing charges relating to firearms and conspiracy to murder. His name had come up from the address they had raided and the arms cache they had found. The man and the woman with Roscoe were dedicated surveillance experts, bland. It meant little to them, was just another day. It was never ‘just another day’ for him. Didn’t have that sort of mind-set … but he could be patient. He was coiled but not overwound. Two streets back there was an entrance to a public park and a maintenance corner where the gardeners parked their pick-ups. Two police wagons were alongside them, with firearms and an entry team. The easiest way to cock up was to lose patience and go too early … That was irrelevant, though, while the Tango was washing his car and the water flowed in a river down his drive into the gutter.

  This was bread-and-butter work – no life on the line. The real stress stretcher was when a stake-out was in place, watching a potential victim and not knowing when the hit would come or from which direction. That was nerve-jangling Flying Squad stuff. The cash-delivery van, or the wages van, about to do a drop had been the training ground for what he did now, when the employer might or might not have been taken inside the magic circle of confidentiality. The guys who did the delivery – on the minimum wage – were not. They didn’t know the probability existed of firearms in their faces, pickaxe handles across their arms and legs, the cavalry coming from nowhere and gunfire – good guys against bad. Could be up against a mean-minded psycho who would take a security man with him to the mortuary. Could be that a guard had a heart-attack in the crisis moment. It was what Mark Roscoe was trained for, where he’d been. He watched the man washing his car, and wondered how long it would be before the contact showed up to justify the resources committed.

  The thing he couldn’t cope with happened.

  The woman didn’t make eye-contact with him, just passed him the binoculars. There was no modesty and no apology. Some of the surveillance vans had privacy corners but most did not. She took the lid off, then was over the bucket, her baggy black trousers down. Her black knickers had ‘Serious Crime Directory’ printed on them in gold. She peed, hoisted herself up, dragged the underwear and trousers back to her waist and took back the binoculars. If Mark Roscoe had been in a van with Suzie he would have crossed his legs, let his bladder burst if there was no privacy screen.

  As if it hadn’t happened, she said, a whisper, ‘Boss, the car’s clean – fit for the Queen to ride in – and he’s gone back inside … Oh, that’s good … brilliant.’

  He crawled forward. She eased back, made room for him at the drilled spyhole.

  ‘What’s good?’

  ‘The cat crapped in the flowerbed, then scratched earth over what it had done. Look at the cat, boss.’

  The cat strode, as if it owned the territory, across the washed car’s roof and left a footprint trail. It went back and forth and made a proper job of screwing up the shiny clean paintwork.

  He sagged back. There was nowhere else he should be, and nothing better he should be doing. He had the patience and could wait … The certainty that it would come was lifeblood to Mark Roscoe.

  The German was met and walked out of the arrivals hall. If he had not known the man he talked with – from a heroin-importation deal – he would not have entertained such a conversation.

  ‘A village wants a man killed – apparently the whole village. Maybe even the priest. Maybe even the schoolmistress. They will pay, and it is in London. I am being paid for running errands, and you will be paid.’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  An hour after he had landed, the German was in the air, heading back to Hamburg.

  The receptionist gave the document-size envelope to Penny Laing. She looked at it, front and back. Her own name was written over a white sticker, which covered an original address, and the envelope was franked – it had been through the postal system. Nothing on the reverse side. ‘Who brought it?’

  ‘Didn’t leave a name, just handed it over and asked that you be told to come down for it. A woman. Could have done with a bath.’

  In theory, if the state of alert was ratcheted above Amber and heading for Red, she could have demanded that Security come out of their cubbyhole behind Reception to run the package through the scanner. Might call in the Bomb Squad. Might wake the sniffer dog and deploy it. Might evacuate half the building. She inserted the nail of her forefinger, right hand, under the sticker, scratched it clear and saw that it had previously been sent to Ms Megs Behan, Planet Protection. She remembered a dreary street and a coffee shop and wondered who was doing the buying right now. She loosed the Sellotape fastening the envelope. Paper cascaded out – how in God’s name had so much been inserted into one tired envelope and not split it? It pulled her up, as if there was a choke chain round her neck and the leash had been tugged sharply. At Planet Protection they would have a stationery budget that verged on parsimony, and little or nothing to sustain them beyond their commitment to the cause … Right. End of self-inflicted lecture.

  She thanked the receptionist.

  Wondered which was cheaper – whether Megs Behan had used a bus or the tube to get from that dreary street north of the City to sun-soaked Whitehall at the centre of power, influence, talent and self-serving shit. She was having a bad, confusing day, and what she had seen of the papers sent to her told her that the rest might get a little worse and a little more confusing.

  Her line manager had said: Remember the downturn, the crisis, the crunch. She walked up the wide staircase from the lobby, made a grand exit on a stage that had seen the splendour of imperial power. She went past offices where young men and women, shirtsleeves and lightweight blouses, struggled to confront the economic darkness. She thought a low point was reached when a scruffy envelope contained more evidential material than she could hope for from her own official sources. She flick
ed pages as she went, lips pursed in concentration and annoyance.

  And he had said: Also remember we’re somewhat of a luxury. She was spoken of as state-of-the-art material, had done the minimum of uniform drudgery, had been noted, fast-tracked and recruited into the Investigation Division. Top stuff, real work. She had jumped because it gave her the chance to run, bloody fast and bloody far, from the ‘relationship’ with the married man who ran a department of the security-vetting programme. It had been a waste of time for her but had enhanced the bastard’s ego. Couldn’t quite believe she’d allowed it. She’d been taken on by the codename Golf team. Cocaine. Not grammes or kilos, but tonnes shipped in from Venezuela. The cargoes were usually transferred via the Atlantic coast of Spain so she had trips down there, to Huelva, Cádiz and Gibraltar. She had done time with the Irish, too, because the other main drop-off point was in the ocean, south of County Cork. She had felt wanted then, and important, but the transfer to Alpha had been sold as a step into an élite world. On Gibraltar she had met and fallen, pretty fast and pretty far, for a navy lieutenant who served on a frigate. It had been good, the best.

  And through the sweet smile Dermot had said: We’re a natural target for budget-slicing. There were photographs of Harvey Gillot. There were travel itineraries of Harvey Gillot. There were biographical details of Harvey Gillot. She imagined sad, unwashed Megs Behan beavering all the hours the good Lord gave, feeling privileged to dish the dirt on the devil figure, Harvey Gillot. There were lists of private-charter cargo airlines flying into and out of Ostend airport, who owned and administered them, when Harvey Gillot had been there and how long he had spent with the owner of an ageing Boeing 707, a veteran DC8, a TriStar, an Ilyushin or an Antonov that might just limp into a remote, unlit corner of the Middle East and drop on to a rolled-sand runway. It was laid out before her, most of it typed but some in the copperplate writing that had been taught in convent schools. She wandered past her line manager, who was chewing gum and didn’t notice her, and sat at her desk.

  What was in front of her seemed almost to bring the bloody man alive. She had learned the theory of arms brokerage, legal and illegal, from that office with a view over the inner courtyard of the Treasury building. The practical classroom had been her three-month attachment to the embassy in the DRC. Stinking heat and stinking smells. Life expectancy was forty-three years. One in five kids did not reach a fifth birthday. More than a million people were displaced, driven from their homes by the internal warfare that had claimed the lives of four million. Big HIV-Aids, big poverty, big despair, big business – the arms trade into DRC. Landing strips that a clapped-out bulldozer had flattened were – give or take a hundred metres – long enough for one of those old aircraft based at Ostend to put down on. There would be, spilling off the tailgate, boxes of grenades, crates of ammunition, bundles of AKs and machine-guns.

  She had worked from the UN offices in the capital – could have gone to bed with the Dutch administrator of UNHCR operations when they had both drunk a bit, were almost maudlin and playing lonely, but she’d been dead on her feet from the heat, had pleaded tiredness and wasn’t that bothered to have missed out. She had learned in those three months in the embassy, the UN compound and from trips up-country, what the arms trade did, and she had seen close-up the casualties and the kids who paraded the Kalashnikovs that the planes brought in. There was nothing stereotypically feminine or soft about Penny Laing but she knew about the arms trade and thought it a disgrace that Britons were a part of it. She thought it an almost bigger disgrace that the Alpha team were reliant to some degree on hand-to-mouth charity and the diligence of Megs Behan. She would work late that night.

  The big buzz, as she knew it – better than sex, she promised herself – was the dawn hit: the crashing in of an expensive front door, the spread of shock on the faces of a man’s family as a team moved in, the click of handcuffs, the howl of children and the blathering of a wife: There must be some mistake … Of course, it never was a mistake. She stared down at the photograph – relaxed, calm, thinking himself in control – of Harvey Gillot. He walked past a crash barrier, a crowd baying at him and trying to push placards into his face, and she saw Megs Behan, monochrome, straining against the barrier, her face contorted, but he did not seem to notice her. It would be good to hit him at dawn on a winter morning.

  ‘Lenny, I don’t do bullshit talk. What I’m telling you is that the kid’s a good ’un.’

  Granddad Cairns wheezed, hacked a cough, then lit another cigarette. He had a bad shake in his hands that day, which was partly from arthritis. It had been worse since his five years at HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight where the damp sea fogs were a killer. He was – no lie – pretty pleased to have a man as prominent as Lenny Grewcock, king of south of the river, come to visit him.

  The big man said, ‘A German comes to see me, flies in and asks who I’d speak up for. He’s important to me and we do good business. He’s had a call from a friend. There are links with serious players. People all over Europe have been talking through this one, and pushing it on for a bit more expertise. What’s said, for a hit here you’ll need a local boy …’

  ‘Too right, Lenny, spot on.’

  ‘… and I put your kid in the frame.’

  ‘Good of you, Lenny.’

  ‘What I’m saying is that I’ve backed your boy, and I’d not want embarrassment.’

  ‘You won’t get it, Lenny, not from our kid.’

  ‘Subject to money. Don’t know yet what’s on offer. You don’t need to know much, except that it’s a funny old business. He’s a Brit, and the contract is being taken out by a village – yes, you heard me – on the other side of Europe. The money won’t be huge because they’re peasants, but it would be good for a friendship of mine with a German I like to do business with.’

  ‘I’ll talk it through with Jerry.’

  ‘Do that. I’ll be back to you.’

  Grandma Cairns had stayed in the kitchen, best place. Lenny Grewcock saw himself out and his minder was waiting on the walkway outside the front door. He could see from the window that Grewcock was hurrying and his minder scrambled to keep up with him. Granddad Cairns reckoned that Grewcock would have regarded this flat as shit: Lenny Grewcock lived in a mansion, Tudor style, completed four years back, in Kent. Granddad Cairns couldn’t abide the thought of leaving Rotherhithe … So, the kid had a future, a bright one if Lenny Grewcock had come looking for him with work. A ‘funny old business’, a village … but no chance his kid, a good ’un, would cause embarrassment.

  The Internet threw up little on Harvey Gillot, arms dealer. Nothing on a company registered to his name – although an orthopaedic surgeon of that name practised in Las Vegas. No website on what Gillot had to sell. An Australian rugby league forward had that name and his site carried fulsome media praise; he could be hired throughout Queensland for after-dinner speaking. But … anonymity could not be guaranteed … a trail existed, around his well-protected person. He could be found by a diligent searcher.

  The non-governmental organisation known as Planet Protection, funded by a Swiss billionaire and public donation, supposedly independent of all state agencies, had made a list of the ten primary weapons brokers in the United Kingdom. It was included in a long-released folder, and with it a quote from Megs Behan, researcher and overseas co-ordinator: ‘These men are evil and should be hounded out of existence. They shame us.’ A telephone number for those requiring additional information was provided.

  It was necessary, in Josip’s view, to keep all possible lines of communication open: a man never knew where to seek the best advantage.

  He sat beside the river where the bank was protected by a steeply sloping stone wall. Above him a track ran alongside the Danube, then a cliff face of sandstone and the symbol of the town: the Vukovar water tower. The sun was sinking. The water glistened and made soft pools of gold that rippled, and every item of the remaining brickwork on the bowl of the tower was caught and highlighted. The riv
er did not excite Josip. It had changed little in the last half-millennium – different boats and new stonework on the banks but the great meandering flow was the same. It might have been over many more than five centuries that nothing had changed: it might have remained the same since a tribe had settled a few kilometres to the west, at Vuedol, around six thousand years ago. Sometimes when he came to Vukovar he looked at the tower and witnessed again the devastation caused by tank and artillery shells. He saw the great gaps in the brick facing, and felt ashamed that he had fled the fighting with his family to the safety of the capital. But as evening approached and the light faded, he saw neither the glory of the river nor the pride of the water tower.

  He waited.

  The man would come as the shadows grew. He could justify what he prepared to do. He had, now, few loyalties. Below him a parapet ledge was half a metre above the water-line. Anglers were there, spaced out, giving each other at least fifty metres of bank. They would be hoping for catfish or perch, carp or pike, and at dusk the man would come on a scooter, choose a place close to where Josip sat and set up his tackle. Josip owed no allegiance, neither to a community nor an individual. When they could not be recognised or observed, the man would join him.