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 flicked 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, Cadiz 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 elite 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
