‘Are you still pissed? Harvey, you’re talking rubbish. What happened? What’s in the past?’ Her lips formed a derisive smile. ‘I know – an affair. Harvey had an affair, or maybe just a one-nighter, and now there’s a big strapping teenage boy and-’
‘Shut up, and fucking listen.’ He’d yelled it. The gardener had swung round and was holding a little hand fork as if it was a weapon. His raised voice would have been heard on the beach, by the ruins of the chapel and on the path against Rufus Castle. ‘And you, please, fuck off.’
A look at Josie. As if she had to give her permission. She said, ‘I’m all right, Nigel. He’s all bark and no bite.’
The gardener sloped away with his fork to the wheelbarrow, which he pushed off the patio. Harvey had never sworn at her before. He thought her face had flushed and he imagined it a Rubicon moment. Another deep breath.
‘The detective I met yesterday, he’s coming down again tomorrow from London. Why? Because there is perhaps a possibility of a threat against my life.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘The detective, his name is Roscoe – quite decent and, I think, efficient – is the liaison officer. He’s from a squad that specialises in proactive operations against contract killers. They have word there’s a price on my life.’
‘Where from?’
‘The Balkans, specifically Croatia, a village there.’
‘How much is your life worth? What’s the cost of the contract?’
‘I don’t know.’
She sat up and the T-shirt rucked. He realised she was wearing no underwear beneath it. From the patio, she would have been able to see along the coastal path, calculate his progress and estimate when he would be back at their home from his walk.
‘What did you do?’ There was an acid calm in her voice. ‘I mean, it can’t be every day that a gang of people from central Europe have a whip-round to hire a killer.’
The sun burned on his face and the reflection of the sea was in his eyes. ‘It was a deal that didn’t happen.’
‘You always talk about trust. Did you break someone’s?’
He squirmed. ‘It was a long time ago. It wasn’t straightforward.’
‘You either had a deal or you didn’t… Before my time, nearly twenty years ago? Pops up now so it must have festered, gone rancid. Was it a double cross?’
‘There was stuff. It was-’
‘You’re sounding pathetic and evasive. What happens to me? Am I included in the contract? Is that an extra, a supplement on the price? What about Fiona – home next week? Because of your stuff do I have to look under the car? Does she have to hide under her bed? Are Fiona and I on the ticket with you?’
‘The detective will tell us tomorrow.’
She stood, the newspaper crumpled in her fist. He thought she was struggling for the ultimate riposte, something that would leave him in rags. She couldn’t find it. The ferry was going out on the crossing to one of the Channel Islands or St Malo and the yachts were dwarfed by it. A tanker was far out on the horizon. She asked, ‘Do you expect me and Fiona to join you in a bunker?’
He didn’t answer her, just went inside. Nobody Loves Us and We Don’t Care. The anthem was loud in his head.
A heat haze hung over the town. It was clear because there were no high industrial chimneys in Vukovar, and the Bata shoe factory at Borovo, up-river, had closed.
A few fishermen were on the low platform just above the river’s water-line, the wash from a wide-beamed, flat-bottomed tourist boat that powered downstream slapping near their feet. It was one of the ‘white boats’ that used the river as a slow transport from Vienna or Budapest to the Black Sea in the southeast. Most of the travellers were on the decks, crowding the starboard side of the boat, and a guide was telling them about what they saw and its significance – he had started work at the shoe factory, and would devote nearly fifteen minutes to a description of the events at Vukovar in the autumn of 1991. He spoke of the quality and craftsmanship of the shoes manufactured at Borovo, but not of the divisions in the labour force once conflict had erupted, how former Serb employees had bayed for the blood of former Croat employees who had once worked and sat in the canteen beside them.
He did not point out the roofs of the village near the river where Croat police recruits had been massacred by Serb paramilitaries and mutilated, or the Trpinjska road – which could have been identified by the church tower above the trees – where there had been a killing ground for tanks, and Marko Babi , alone, was credited with the destruction of fifteen T-55s and their Serb crews, and Blago Zadro had co-ordinated the tactics, making himself a national hero in an infant country. And he did not show them the tall building with the new tiled roof: behind it was the entrance to the command bunker of 204 Brigade from which Mile Dedakovic, the Hawk, had directed the defence of the town.
The guide had to mention the memorial, on a jutting strip of land that protected a marina: a great cross of white stone, ten metres high, four across, commemorated the lives of a thousand of the town’s defenders, those from the villages on the Cornfield Road, and at least another thousand civilians trapped inside the shrinking perimeter. He would have pointed to the new-laid square, the glass frontages of modern banks and the flags flying in the light breeze. He could speak of the imposing Franciscan monastery, high on a cliff, with yellowish-ochre walls, but he would steer away from the desecration of graves in the vaults when victorious troops had swarmed through the building.
Impossible to ignore the water tower to the west of Vukovar. The flag flew well on it that morning, and little murmurs rippled among the passengers hugging the rails on the upper deck, passing binoculars among them. With the magnification the tourists could identify the gaping holes in the brickwork of the bowl where water had been stored for the maintenance of pipe pressure. The guide allowed himself a short reference to the ‘Homeland War’ and deep divisions, but left it implicit that peace had returned to this little corner of eastern Slavonia.
Just beyond the town – no sign and therefore no need to identify the site of the Ovcara massacre and the formal graves of the bodies exhumed from a killing pit – the guide could enthuse because now the boat slipped past the elevated ground, thirty or forty metres above the river level, where the Vu edol village had been dug and explored. He spoke with passion of a community existing there before the birth of Christ, its skill in processing copper and alloys. He did not tell them that the archaeological work was now abandoned through lack of funds.
It was gone. Vukovar was behind the chugging boat and only a failing wash showed its brief presence, and a floating cigarette carton that had been accidentally dropped.
The guide knew his customers. Fifteen minutes – from a twelve-day river cruise – was the maximum that people on holiday, Germans, Austrians, Americans, French, Italians and British, wished to spend on contemplation of an atrocity and a town’s misery. The guide likened passing Vukovar to attending a funeral, and sought to lighten the mood. When he had finished talking he arranged, always, for cheerful music to replace him on the loudspeakers. Who would remember what they had seen? Few. Would the photographs taken from the deck jog memories in years to come? Unlikely.
The tourist boat had sailed on downstream and rounded a bend. For a little while there had been the wake but that, too, was now dispersed. Simun had watched it. He was enrolled as a student at the college in Vinkovci, which taught a variety of builders’ skills: plumbing, electrical, brick-laying and plastering. Simun was also on the list of local people designated ‘disabled’. His birth, his childhood and the circumstances of his adolescence combined to offer him a short-cut to avoiding the need to find employment or purpose.
He sat on a bench, watched the river and kept a vague eye on the anglers. He would have been excited if a rod had arched as he had seen the boat go by. It had broken into his small world, had been a part of it for a few minutes, and had gone. His disabled status, which a psychiatrist in Osijek confirmed each year after an examination conducted by telephone, gave him a small allowance from the state. It was as if Simun, two and a half weeks old when the village fell, was himself a veteran of the battle.
That morning Simun had not taken the bus to the college in Vinkovci, but had come to Vukovar to go to the new boutique on Strossmeyer and buy a shirt. He had seen it after leaving the bank yesterday with his father and
