neither bought nor sold but were the property of Benjie Arbuthnot, who was deniable, a station officer, God incarnate, the possessor of the biggest short-wave radio Harvey Gillot had ever seen and limitless supplies of Black Bush. Solly Lieberman had organised the traffic of those MANPADS so that the big man had clean hands. The money was good and it was irrelevant that the man-portable air defence system of the Blowpipe was next to useless, that the mujahideen couldn’t score hits with it – they were hardly going to when, two years earlier, the guys down in the South Atlantic had let off ninety and achieved two strikes, one of which was a friendly. He’d never seen a man drink what Benjie Arbuthnot put away. And Harvey Gillot was being paid good money. He carried Solly Lieberman’s bags and ran his laundry for him – and might just have wiped his butt if he’d been asked to. Those had been the start of the good days.
Yes, it had been his intention to tell Josie that evening about a problem, what he had told the policeman was an issue. Couldn’t.
There had been a message on the answerphone. She’d be late. There was a supper dish in the freezer and it would microwave. No explanation of where she was, why she was out late, who, if anyone, she was with. Would he see that the horse had its nutrients? He had no close friend on the Isle of Portland, no one to sit with and pour a share of the Scotch or Irish. Harvey Gillot was not well-read. He knew nothing of Thomas More and his fate half a millennium before, but he knew of the words that that saintly man had written in the year before his execution at the hands of an axeman. Perhaps the intelligence was flawed. Perhaps there was no contract, and no hitman had been hired. Perhaps no shadows wavered beyond the throw of the porch lights. More had written: A drowning man will catch at straws. He filled his glass again. The wind had come up and whipped the branches. He heard the clatter of a plant pot falling outside on the patio and rolling.
He expected he would need to refill the glass a third or a fourth time, rare for him. He listened for, but didn’t hear, the crunch of her car’s tyres on the gravel of the drive and cursed her for not being there.
Harvey Gillot could remember it all so well. He understood why a contract was taken and a man would be paid to kill. He didn’t know if he would sleep.
7
A tongue washed him, slobbered over his cheeks, and he moved sharply. Then he heard the glass hit the floor and Harvey Gillot was awake. He swore. It had been good crystal and was chipped. A chip could bloody a lip and… He stood. Bright sunlight flooded into the room and the patio was bathed in clear colours from the flowers, the sea’s expanse and the skies. There was little wind to stir the bushes at the garden’s edge where the ground fell away to the cove, the castle and the ruined church. The dog crawled across him. It was responsible for chipping the glass and dislodging it from his grip. He pushed the animal away. The stink of Scotch was rank on his clothing and the chair. He headed for the kitchen to collect a cloth and realised it was the first time in years that he’d slept in an easy chair, clutching an unfinished measure of whisky. The dog wanted breakfast and had disturbed him to get fed. It probably wanted to go outside and pee and… He remembered why he had been in the chair, late at night, anaesthetised by Scotch.
He recalled what he’d intended to say.
But when he’d been ready to say it she hadn’t been there.
He found a cloth under the sink, in the bucket where it always was, padded back into the living room and rubbed it hard against the brocade. He heard quiet voices. Recognised hers, not his. He ditched the cloth and went to the bedroom door. It was ajar and he hovered. The room faced the front and the drive. He heard Josie’s laughter and imagined she was at an open window: the second voice was deeper, confident – the bloody gardener’s. He pushed the door wider. Nigel was – predictably – at the window. Josie was – expected – beside it and had her back to Harvey. She wore a sheer robe, the silky one, and had it tight at the waist. He didn’t know what she was wearing underneath or what was on offer to the gardener…
She turned away from the window. ‘God, you look a shambles, Harvey.’
‘What time did you get in?’
‘Don’t know, never looked. You were flat out.’
He couldn’t have said whether her answer was evasive or truthful. ‘You didn’t wake me.’
‘No, Harvey, I didn’t.’ She mocked him. ‘You weren’t a pretty sight, asleep, mouth open, snoring. You looked a bit pissed, actually. I thought you were better off where you were.’
The gardener was back at his van, unloading gear. Harvey thought his walk too confident and familiar, as if he thought he had rights on the territory, and perhaps he did. His wife had turned and the robe flounced. Her left leg was on show – knee and thigh, damn good – then the material fell back, closing off his view.
‘Pity you didn’t remove the glass.’
‘You haven’t – God, you haven’t spilled it on the chair? Or the carpet? I didn’t want to wake you – you didn’t look good company – so I left you holding it. Shit.’
‘And I broke the glass.’
‘Do I often go out? Did you need to sit up and wait for me?’ He thought, then, that she hit a button that summoned a minor rant. ‘God, Harvey, I sit here and you’re swanning round Europe. I’m not on the phone, ringing your room and demanding to know why you weren’t there to take my call earlier. It was just one evening.’
With the gardener? Maybe, maybe not. Had she wined and dined him? Had she taken her bit of rough to a pub on the mainland, talked him through the French bits on the menu, told him which wine to choose, then gone to one of the car parks by Redcliff Point or Ringstead Bay? She had paused to eyeball him.
‘Pity about the glass, but I expect the carpet and the chair’ll be fine.’
It had been a good marriage at the start. Harvey Gillot had been trading with the Sri Lankan military. The usual shopping bag: they had fire power but problems with communications and he’d been out to Colombo with the brochures. He had already inherited enough of Solly Lieberman’s contacts book to know who could supply at a decent price; it was a fat deal and would pay well. No complaints about the flight – business class and upgraded by the BA people at Bandaranaike International – and everything was rosy until his bag didn’t show up on the Heathrow carousel. A pretty girl had calmed him down, sorted the hassle and produced the bag after an hour. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-six, and they were married three months later. Some family and work friends had supported her, no one on his side – no friends, and his parents weren’t there because they hadn’t been invited and, anyway, he was halfway to losing touch with them. It had been pretty good in the early days, when the baby had arrived, he was high on the ladder and she was at his side. Then he had uprooted them, like fracturing a mirror, and taken them to Lulworth View on the Isle of Portland. Harvey Gillot could have said, to the day and the hour, when his marriage – already past the ‘fork in the road’ – had soured. A photograph retrieved from a drawer, of himself and Solly Lieberman in the Tribal Territories, when they were flogging off the Blowpipes. Benjie Arbuthnot had taken it. Yes, he talked too much about Solly Lieberman. She had looked at it and her mouth had curled at the sight of Solly, the crown of his head level with Harvey’s shoulder, and she’d said, ‘So that’s the poisonous creature I seem to live with.’ The death of a marriage – already terminally ill – and she hadn’t registered it. Harvey had.
He was turning his back on her and the dog was whining at the door.
She challenged him: ‘Why did the police want you? Too many speeding points? You’d think they’d better things to do than-’
‘I’m taking the dog out. It’ll keep until I get back.’
She would have realised he’d lied – too offhand. ‘What’s the matter? Phone bust and email gone down?’
‘I’m taking the dog out, and when I’m back from my walk then I’ll tell you what happened at the police station.’
He and his dog went out together – he checked the outer gate, every tree that might have been a potential hiding-place and the bushes alongside the coastal path, while the dog bounded ahead.
Feet apart, arms extended, the Baikal held firm in both hands, the blast of the firing was in his ears and the recoil kicked up the barrel. No smile on his face as the skull shape disintegrated. Robbie Cairns had not used a silencer or worn ear-protectors. The 9mm bullet he had fired into the skull was soft nose, the hollow-point variety, first developed in the Dumdum armaments factory of Calcutta. It expanded on impact and created the greatest damage to any part of a human body; it was a man-stopper.
He gazed at what he had achieved.
