the path ahead and behind was deserted. A clean wind came off the sea from the west, but where he walked the rocks were sheltered, the swell was slight and sea birds circled over him. A kestrel perched on a fence post and the day was cool now. It should have been perfect, but there was a damp bathrobe.
A receptionist had given the all-clear – following a lavishly expensive dinner he had hosted at the Berlin Marriott – for him to take, gratis, the robe. He’d rather liked it, and the towelling was heavy duty, so he had brought it home. Josie had said it was vulgar, on a par with nicking hotel soap and shower hats, and it had been left in the spare bathroom. Fiona had her own en-suite, as did the bedroom he shared with Josie. He had only gone into the spare bathroom on his return from Heathrow because he thought the corner of the landing was hot and a window needed opening. He’d seen the robe hanging heavily, touched it and felt the damp.
The garden looked so neat at the front, and the beds off the patio were clear of weeds and well planted with colour, which would have been hot work out in the sun. He wouldn’t have thought much about it but the gardener – the prat, Nigel – had been to the house that day and he had seen the way Josie was with him. Nothing you could have brought into court, but impressions. They said, the impressions, that it was not the most straightforward of gardener-employer relationships.
The great quarries from which the famed Portland stone was extracted were behind him, as was the field where Fiona’s horse was kept. The sea swells were moderate and the break of waves on the rocks below him was gentle. He had not come here for the beauty, didn’t rate serenity, wasn’t attracted by postcard views. It was the isolation that appealed. There was a woman with another Labrador, also black, but she was more than half a mile ahead, and there had been a man behind with a toy dog but he had turned off the path near the track that led up to the Neolithic site. Far out in the Channel a warship cruised, a dark shadow against the lighter greys of the sea and the evening haze. He was secure here. So, was it a problem that a towelling robe was damp?
Did it compare with any of the problems stored up in the life of Solly Lieberman, his mentor, 1923-90? Solly Lieberman had no women trekking in his wake – well, only the one who typed for him, kept his office in minimal confusion and had no looks or apparent sentiments – and he had never seen him drift off late from the hotel bar with a hooker tailing him to the lift. His work guru would not have had a problem with evaluating the chances that his wife of nearly two decades, more, was shagging the gardener, Nigel, but only after she’d sent him to the spare bathroom for a clean-up shower – necessary with all the fucking work he’d done in the garden. And he, who paid all the goddamn bills, where was he? While they were shagging he’d been in Tbilisi, where there had been enough tarts in the hotel lobby to cope with an IBM convention. Solly hadn’t acknowledged such problems, and his own – as told to young Harvey – seemed far up the scale of catastrophe… like being a crewman on a landing barge off Utah Beach, on a June morning in 1944.
Maybe he didn’t care that much about the damp robe. The way Solly told it: ‘Shitting myself. Never heard as much noise in my life and never want to. I was in the right flank of the Higgins boats, the landing craft, and each carries thirty poor sods and they’re all sick as dogs and what’s in front of them is going to be worse. What don’t they need on the final run in to the beach? They don’t need all those cartons. They have Lucky Strike and Camel, Philip Morris and Marlboro, every cigarette produced in American factories. They’re heaving up, their trousers are filling and they want to get the weight of their packs down so they ditch the cartons. I have a big plastic bag, and when we wave them on their way up the beach, I collect them. Twenty-four cartons. Do three runs on to Utah, taking guys off the big ships, ferrying them in and bringing out casualties. These guys – Second Battalion, Eighth Infantry, Fourth Division – the ones who survived, would have been short of cigarettes. And there were more left on other Higgins boats. It was the next evening that we brought the boat back to Portsmouth. I had two hundred and ninety-seven cartons of high-quality American cigarettes and bulk buyers in every bar. I was twenty-one and it was like a big door had been kicked open for me. God knows, it must have been a thousand cartons I liberated that week, and other Higgins boats were hit but mine never was. Ride your luck, young man, and go for it.’
The kestrel had left the post now, flying and hunting. The dog stayed close to him. He liked the dog and the dog liked him, especially when he put the food into its bowl. Once he had liked Josie, and once she had liked him. He had married her two years after Solly Lieberman’s death. Then she had not minded the stories. Now she walked out of the room if he tried to tell one.
If an agony aunt had summarised the marriage of Harvey and Josie Gillot she would have written of ‘a fork in the road’. It had been a fine partnership for many years, and a loving one. That they had drifted on to ever- separating tracks was as inevitable as it was unintended. They had mislaid the ability to talk, or the requirement for conversation. He was confused by this, didn’t know how to resolve it, or whether he could be bothered to. He was not familiar with grovelling. It had happened he dealt in weapons and munitions. He didn’t blame himself. Before, Josie had acted as his personal assistant, but his targeting by HMRC – the vermin – meant that little now was consigned to paper and email was rarely used on ‘sensitive’ deals. There was less for her to file and those cabinets were emptier: old contents had gone into the incinerator. She was removed from his work, had the money to be comfortable and had probably lost the hunger for success that had caused them, as a partnership, to tilt hard at targets and flatten them.
The holiday huts were close to him now, wood, bright-painted. People rented or owned them. They were used in the summer months and cost in excess of twenty-five thousand but they couldn’t be slept in. He could, of course, have confronted Josie and demanded answers: ‘Are you shagging the gardener? If you are, can we regularise the situation? Will you be leaving home and setting up residence with Nigel, his wife and four children, assuming there’s room in his attic for you to bed down alongside the water tank?’ Days had gone by since he’d found the damp bathrobe and the questions had not been put. He wasn’t frightened, he told himself. Maybe he didn’t care. Solly Lieberman had had enough problems, and if they’d not been resolved he’d have been heading for the stockade.
Army of occupation, the American Zone. Shortage of penicillin, shortage of morphine. Shortage of almost everything… and jewellery was as good a currency as any. Would have been a big sentence in the stockade. A bigger sentence for the disposal of weapons caches. Solly liked to tell that one – he’d have a cigar clamped and would talk through it. ‘There were arms dumps all over the place. Go into any forest area, follow wheel tracks, and there was a dump. Supposed to be there for the final great stand, all the resistance-to-the-last-man shit. Find it, load it, get a clever guy to do the artwork on the papers. 1947. Who’s bothered with scanning papers at frontiers in the dead of night? Every little official on a border just wants a pay-off. Send trucks to Trieste, simple as hell. More cash into back pockets, the dock gates open, the freighters are there and the crane drivers. I’m telling you, young man, that the infant state of Israel survived on German weapons – the Karabiner, the Mauser, the Schmeisser, the MG42 machine-gun, the potato-masher grenade, even the old Panzerfaust for hitting armour. They went to Israel. Good times, young man.’ That put the damp robe, in terms of problems, into perspective.
When he reached the Pulpit Rock, a huge stone column around which the sea surged – must weigh hundreds of tonnes, prime, unshaped rock – it was dark enough for the light to come on behind him. It swept across his back and… His mobile rang. He called the dog to his side, then answered it.
‘Yes?’
The caller introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe, and remarked that Mrs Gillot had kindly provided the mobile number.
‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’
The policeman said he was from SCD7, that was Serious Crime Directorate 7, and said they should meet the next day in Weymouth police station and ‘Well, I’m sorry but I’ve quite a busy day tomorrow. I’m clearer later in the week.’
He was told the meeting would be the next day, at two thirty p.m., that the police station was on Radipole Lane and that he did not need to bring a solicitor or his wife. The time and venue were confirmed and the call was cut. He had not been asked if it was convenient. That was an inkling of a real problem.
Tomislav was sitting on his porch, in the darkness, the dog across his lap, when Josip found him.
He was told the deal Josip had agreed. Twenty thousand euros was the cost to the village of a killing. Tomislav said a trifle of that amount would have bought the fifty Malyutka they had needed. Did Josip think it reasonable? Josip explained that he had spoken three times to the middle men and had dragged down the price but it could go no lower. If he and Mladen accepted it, the village must raise twenty thousand euros.
Tomislav said, ‘It is cheap for what we ask. We want him dead.’ Josip said, ‘The man we will buy, I am assured, is the best quality.’
