‘Yes,’ she said.
‘She sounded pretty low.’
Penny was crisp. ‘Just get to her. Call the office in your car and let them know. I’ll be fine. Now, I’ve got the files. All you have is the contact list in Zagreb, the embassy lowlife, and we’ll hardly be camping at their door.’
‘I don’t have any option.’
‘On your way.’ She was decisive enough to wipe the doubt off his forehead: he would not be blowing an interesting investigation out of the water. It didn’t cross her mind that she shouldn’t travel because Asif Khan’s wife had a pregnancy complication. They were supposed to be in pairs when abroad – wouldn’t happen unless she was beefed up when she got there. ‘No problem.’
He gave her the embassy numbers and staffers’ names, then was lost in the crowds. She’d wait until she was airside before she called in and spoke to Dermot. And – useful precaution – she switched off her mobile and would leave it off until the flight was called.
She had not done university, but a distant cousin of her team leader lectured at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies – a branch of London University. Dermot had telephoned the introduction and the guy had talked to her for half of the night. She had been with him till the Starbucks had closed and the disasters of that part of Europe had stacked up in her mind. So, Penny Laing didn’t know what she would find other than confusion and would have resisted fiercely if anyone had tried to block her.
She waited for the flight call.
The Gold Commander targeted him, stabbing at him with a pencil: ‘What’s Gillot expecting from us? What’s your assessment?’
‘I’m hoping, Ma’am, that we can decide what’s on offer, then give him that to digest.’
It was a neat response, a trick based on experience. Throw it back: the gaudier the decorations on the epaulettes, the greater the responsibility. Bigger fish than Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe would decide on the ramifications of a risk assessment and what could be done for a Tango’s protection. He thought the woman at the end of the table, Phoebe Bermingham, glowered at him. He had gone through his notes of a conversation the previous afternoon with the Tango and had been heard. He was the junior at the table: responsibility was not going to land in his lap. Different times now. There was pre-Stockwell and post-Stockwell. Before the shooting dead of a harmless Brazilian painter-decorator in a London underground carriage he would have volunteered opinions, but too much shit had been heaped on the watchers and marksmen for him to do so now. A stenographer in the corner was writing busily.
The Gold Commander turned, almost reluctantly, to the Intelligence representative. He was Harry, from SCD11. ‘I have nothing that tells me this threat is empty or real. I have tried Thames House and VBX for a little off- the-record guidance and had a door shut in my face, which probably means they don’t know. What advice for Gillot? In an ideal world he would up sticks and shift somewhere off the radar. Who would take such a contract? First, and we’re all agreed on this, it’s not a foreigner but a local man, most likely based in London. Our problem is that the men who would attract the sort of cash reward on offer are successful, with a carefully guarded reputation. There might be six in the capital. Do I have their names? No.’
Steve was Covert Surveillance, SCD10, a dapper figure, recently off the road because of a knee-ligament problem and therefore condemned to Gold Group meetings. Few noticed him; many saw him. He could blend and seemed to resent the spotlight that came with Ma’am’s pencil-pointing. ‘First, we don’t know who the hitman will be so we can’t stake him. We move on… The potential target is not resident in the Metropolitan Police Service area but in remote Dorset. There is no possibility that the locals down there would have available sufficient specialists to mount twenty-four-seven surveillance of Gillot’s property. Were Gillot in London or the Home Counties, on the intelligence available, I doubt I’d support such a manpower drain of my own people. But sending them down to the Dorset coastline isn’t on. If my people were there, with a realistic threat of an assassination attempt, who intervenes? What’s the back-up? We won’t be there.’
The representative of Firearms, CO19, was Donny. He had put on weight since he’d slipped off the black overalls and left the H amp;K in the armoury. He was known as a gag-artist, and liked black humour. It was alleged that he had said – he fervently denied it – as he had aimed at an Afro-Caribbean on a wages-van heist: ‘Make my day, Sunshine,’ then fired, double-tap. Since Stockwell, he had gone by the book and his catechism was that his people would not be exposed. ‘I’ve spoken to Dorset. They have enough firearms-trained personnel to cope with existing priorities and emergencies. But there’s no question of them having the resources to mount a full-time protection operation on the Isle of Portland. They point out that it would be irresponsible to deploy unarmed officers at a property we believe will be attacked by an armed criminal – a killer. We have a duty of care, of course, to Mr Gillot – and a similar duty of care to any officers sent to protect him. We cannot have unarmed officers walking into a predicted life-threatening situation. Conclusions: protection is not feasible. There could only be an armed presence if Intelligence a predicted date, time and location for an attack, but not an indefinite sit-around. His life and his family’s safety are pretty much in his own hands.’
In its journey round the table, Ma’am’s pencil point rested on the team leader, the cuckoo in their midst. Roscoe thought the man from HMRC’s Alpha team seemed aloof from the practicalities expressed. He started impishly: ‘Well, what a difficult furrow we have to plough – and inconvenient. Anyway, Harvey Gillot is a top-ten- listed arms broker. We would assume that he’s ninety-something per cent legal and five plus something per cent not. If we could gain enough evidence to nail him in court, he’d be a good scalp for my crowd. The assumption is that he was involved in a sanctions-busting deal in 1991, at which time Croatia was fighting for its existence, then pulled the carpet from under whatever he’d agreed with the “village” Mr Roscoe talked of. We’re now on our way to Vukovar and hope to have detail on the transaction that failed. We have no doubt that Gillot broke faith with whoever he dealt with, which has led to the contract on his life. I would offer you one thought. We’re used to principal players in international drugs-trafficking feeling they’ve been cheated or disrespected and employing a gunman to right a wrong, very cold and brutal people who don’t tolerate broken faith or disrespect. My one thought, an aggrieved citizen of the Balkans would be a serious enemy for Mr Gillot to have made. Nothing else to add.’
Five minutes later, after Ma’am had summarised, Mark Roscoe was on the phone.
The telephone had been ringing when Harvey Gillot had come to the kitchen door so he had gone inside and answered the call. The dog had followed him and would now be in the hall, the dust of the coast path would be on the carpet and… Didn’t matter too much what the carpet in the hall looked like.
She was on the patio, to the right of the kitchen window, with a breathtaking view of the seascape. She had the newspaper, some coffee and her iPod in her ears. The gardener was working near to her. He laid the telephone back in the cradle.
When he appeared on the patio, she glanced at him. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt. She’d kept herself well. Languid eyes and a lazy voice: ‘You did give the horse that stuff last night?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘For God’s sake, Harvey, I asked you to.’
‘You did indeed and – to tell you the truth – I couldn’t be bothered to tramp out there, measure whatever it is the brute eats and-’
‘So you just did the piss-artist act.’
‘Something like that. If the horse needs pills, try feeding it yourself.’
They argued rarely, and never before the move to Portland. Then he had closed down the office, inherited from Solly Lieberman, and paid off the old secretary. At first Josie had managed the baby and had done the accounts, which showed what was suitable of his earnings. They had been a team, and the money had rolled in. Now he did his books and kept his files. He knew what to shred or burn and what to keep. The gardener was hunched over a flowerbed but Harvey Gillot was fucked if he could see anything that resembled a weed.
‘Am I allowed to ask?’ She did the aggrieved bit well. ‘Am I entitled to know why your mood is so foul, why the horse goes unfed?’
Maybe.
He said quietly, his voice falling away, ‘Something happened yesterday and…’
She had turned away from him and the gardener had twisted to face her, shirt undone, sweat in the hair on his chest. He thought she was showing him a crossword clue. He said something Harvey couldn’t hear, and she wrote on the paper. Then she looked at her husband. ‘Oh, something happened? You were awarded three more speeding points? Nobody wants any howitzers? Share, Harvey. What happened yesterday?’
He breathed hard, tried. ‘The past came back. It had been dead for nineteen years, but it’s alive now.’
