phoned her and she had come, almost running, to Rotherhithe.
He did not own the apartment that was on the second floor of a big new block, across the road from Christopher Close and up from the Jubilee Line station: he rented it for her. She was installed. He might come in the evening, or early in the morning, and he would telephone her if she was already at work. He expected her, if he rang, to pack in work, stop shopping or walk out of a hairdressing salon. She was nine years older than him. That didn’t bother Robbie, and he wasn’t the subject of gossip for having a girlfriend who was near middle-aged when he was not far out of his teens. There was no behind-the-hand sniggering about his relationship because he kept her secret from his family.
He could see her in the kitchenette – she would be preparing the salad to go with his favourite Stilton cheese omelette.
Barbie was not as pretty as his sister, Leanne: she had stouter ankles, a thicker waist, her chest drooped, and there were grey strands in her hair that the bottle had missed. She dressed severely: straight black or navy skirt and blouse. She wore no rings – she was seven years divorced and Robbie had never taken her to a jeweller’s and let her choose a ring that would have cost a few thousand. She had no bracelets, necklaces or gold pendants.
What, then?
He didn’t know. He could see her moving quietly from the sink to the work surface to the fridge. Her legs were bare and she wore no shoes. Her back was to him. He didn’t know why she had agreed to move into the flat or why she accepted the relationship. He was not fond, particularly, of Grandma Cairns, or of his other grandmother, Mum Davies. He had no affection for Dot Cairns, his mother, who had moved away from the Albion Estate and lived now in a bungalow in Kent, on the edge of a village between Meopham and Snodland. Barbie didn’t boss him. She didn’t challenge him.
He had never been asked what he brought to her life. They had been together – in this distanced way – for eight months. He had been up in the West End, in Oxford Street, in the department store, and he and Leanne had been together, joshing. She had wanted perfume and they had found Fragrances. He had sent Leanne back to Lingerie and said he would surprise her. Then, Robbie Cairns, hitman and pride of a notorious Rotherhithe family, had met a divorcee from the West Midlands, who knew nothing of south-east London, the heritage and history of its big names. She had sprayed her wrists with sample after sample, letting him smell the scents with a little mocking mischief in her eyes. He had bought a bottle of Yves St Laurent for Leanne, and had gone back the next day. He had waited on a bench until her shift had finished, then done it twice more the next week. She had agreed to go for a coffee with him. He could have been with the quality girls of other families in Walworth, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, Peckham or Southwark, the great lookers, and an alliance would have been forged, but he had chosen Barbie from Fragrances in a department store. Couldn’t explain it. His brother and sister, his parents and grandparents didn’t need to know.
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
