The Long Firm
Page 35
Puerto Banus Marina. It was nearly dawn. Giles was loading his yacht. He nodded at Harry’s suitcase.
‘Is that all you’re taking?’ he asked.
‘It’s all I’ll need,’ Harry replied.
I was still shaking a bit. I chain smoked bitter Spanish cigarettes and paced up and down the quayside. Harry came over. He was carrying a holdall that he had been using for hand luggage.
‘The bullets in Mooney will match the ones in Jock. Same forensic. They’ve already pinned McCluskey on me, so I’ll be in the frame for Mooney and all.’
I nodded blankly, then suddenly thought about what Harry was saying. He was going to take the blame. My blame. He handed me the holdall.
‘There’s stuff in there for Manny,’ he said. ‘And something for you.’
I unzipped the bag and peered inside. There was a sheaf of papers and a few bundles of cash.
‘Your cut,’ Harry explained. ‘Be careful taking that back home.’
‘Where will you go?’ I asked him.
He shrugged.
‘Tangiers, I guess. Still got a few contacts there. Some of Billy Hill’s old mob.’
The sky was getting lighter in degrees of purple. The morning star burned low in the sky. My mind was calm. Horrible clarity. I was a murderer. I would go back to England and carry on with my unremarkable life. Happy enough as a boring academic. No one would suspect a thing. The dreadful knowledge of it would sometimes haunt me amidst empty theorising about social taboos and individual transgressions. A hidden pathological self. A guilty secret. I was one of the Guilty Men now. But Harry would take the blame. I would become the type of criminal that criminologists never study. The ones that get away with it.
Harry jumped down onto the deck of the boat. Giles started up the outboard.
‘See you,’ Harry called as they chugged slowly out of the mooring. ‘Be lucky.’
I stood and watched them sail out into the bay. There was a faint phosphorescence in the wake of the yacht. Like a silvery snail trail. A trace. Soon the water washed over it leaving only a homeopathic mark: the trace of a trace. But unlike me, Harry would leave some sort of imprint on the world. Most of us will vanish, leaving no real signs that we ever really existed. A fugitive leaves behind some clues. They disappear from view but leave evidence of their flight. A desired trail. They are wanted men.
A red blob of sun strained against the horizon. I lost sight of the boat. That was the last I ever saw or heard of Harry directly. But in time a whole series of rumours and stories emerged. He was an unsolved mystery. A regular feature in ‘true crime’ books or articles about the ‘underworld’. He was in Morocco, running a huge drugs cartel. He was seen in the Congo, organising a treasure hunt for millions of dollars of gold buried by mercenaries in the jungle south of Brazzaville. He was running mercenaries himself for UNITA in Angola. He was running guns from Libya to Southern Ireland. He was the real brains behind the Brinks Mat robbery. I somehow knew that he was the source for at least some of these stories, not just to confuse the scent but also because he loved their smell.