and there had been a secretive response – a waft of the fingers – from his brother. He wouldn’t challenge him, or make a joke about it, wouldn’t mention what he knew. He never challenged Robbie. He was frightened of the young ’un, and he lived off the young ’un’s payroll. He had not asked if Leanne knew that Robbie had a woman in the block opposite the entrance to Christopher Court, just assumed she did.
It was careful driving because a crash, an incident – even being pulled over by a bored cop for speeding – would have been a disaster, pretty big on any scale. Under the back seat, where Robbie sat – in a sealed package of bubble wrap – was the pistol, with a twelve-bore shotgun, its barrels sawn down. In the boot there were overalls, two sets of balaclavas, extra trainers, a canister of lighter fuel, and a bag of spare clothing, his, Robbie’s and hers jumbled in together, the tops in bright colours, and a wig for Leanne. Just before they had hit the causeway, Leanne had done the switches under the dash that played the scanner through the car radio and detected police broadcasts: it couldn’t decode the encrypted wavelengths of the specialist units, but it registered the squelch of ‘white noise’. This might be a reconnaissance trip and they’d go back to London. If they liked what they saw, they might hang around, wait for it to be that degree better – or move forward, no delay.
She had a printout map from an Internet cafe and aerial photographs – one that covered the roofs of the house, another of the house and garden, and a third that showed the sea, a small beach, ruins, the gardens of other homes and the lane that led to where the target lived. He saw her study the photographs. Why did she do it? She had money like he did when Robbie worked. She hardly bought clothes and shoes, was smart but not special. She didn’t have a girlfriend to go with on holiday to Spain, didn’t have a boyfriend to sneak off with. Maybe loyalty to her brother kept her tight to him, but Vern couldn’t fathom it. When Robbie had the dark moods, though, black as hell, only his sister could lift him.
In front of him was the towering heap of rock and its summit.
On the wheel, Vern flexed his fingers. It was new ground for them. He felt the nerves. All of the drive down, he had felt a tightening of the knot in his stomach as the miles of countryside, yellow and ripened, grazed and bare, had slipped past.
The sea shimmered beside the causeway.
He knew the sea from trips to Margate, where his father had liked to take them when he was home, and Folkestone, which his mother preferred. He knew the sea also from the times his father had been in Parkhurst, and their mother had dragged them on to the ferry for the journey to the Isle of Wight. They came off the causeway. He sensed that Leanne had stiffened, but Robbie’s breathing was as steady as it had been on the rest of the journey.
One way in, Vern thought, and therefore one way out.
*
‘Are you saying, Mr Roscoe, that you’re prepared to get back into your car, drive away from here and leave us bare-arsed? What matters more? The budget and the resources available or my life and my daughter’s?’ She had pushed herself up on the lounger, facing the detective. She thought he showed a minimum of sympathy for her husband and none for her. Not familiar with a bitchy female? Did they not have any in the Serious Crime Directorate? The card he had produced with the pompous title was on the table by the water. Harvey – she had been married to him for long enough to read his moods – was beaten and didn’t contribute. The detective’s eyes had wandered from her thighs to her chest so she straightened her shoulders and pushed her hair off her face. He hadn’t taken off his jacket but she had seen that he wore – visible when he raised a handkerchief to mop his forehead – a shoulder holster with a weapon in it. She knew about weapons.
‘If you go, Mrs Gillot, with your husband, I can guarantee that protection will be in place from myself and two colleagues. I’ll have uniformed firearms officers on site, but only for today and only while you’re packing essential items. You will then drive to a hotel – location agreed with us – then my colleagues, the uniforms and I will pull out.’
‘After today?’
‘You would receive expert advice on how to conduct your life.’
‘And my daughter?’
‘Probably better if she takes a new identity and changes school. I should emphasise that I haven’t examined this fully, or referred it to senior colleagues.’
‘You don’t believe this is just a little blip?’
‘By your husband’s recollection a whole community has bought the contract. I don’t know how they’ll pursue it. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was alive for a decade. You’re different, but not wholly so. What I’m saying is that we may intercept one killer – but does the community have a production line? I wouldn’t assume that one success destabilises the scale of the threat.’
She could put together the puzzle and see what had been the grit in the shoe of their relationship. In the Home Counties, with her baby and then her small daughter, she had known other mothers and had been at the centre of the business operations. Here, there was a fine house with a wonderful view and a life of unrelieved boredom. She knew no one, belonged to nothing, had little to look forward to. More and more of Harvey’s work was done abroad and she had no role to play. More and more of his deals were conducted without a paper trail or an electronic footprint, and payments were made abroad, routed to the Caymans. She hated the house, the skyscape, the seascape and the quiet. She hated, too, the detective sergeant with the Glock in his holster who had marched into her home and was steadily dismantling her life. All right if she did it, but not if a well-rehearsed stranger performed the rites. Her husband wasn’t standing his corner.
‘It’s our lives.’
‘You could say that, Mrs Gillot, and you wouldn’t find people arguing with you.’
She turned towards Harvey. ‘You stupid bastard.’ He was abject, pathetic. ‘All that shit about trust and you screwed up on a deal.’
‘I appreciate these are difficult issues, but you have to come to a decision and we don’t want to crowd you. You should think of a short-term response and take a longer view.’ The detective had a soft voice, which he would have learned on a course: How to Handle a Hysterical Woman Who Is Being Turfed Out of Her Home. The same course that bailiffs went on. He moved back, was off his chair and sidling towards his colleagues who had come into her garden.
She said bitterly to her husband, ‘Spill. What sort of place was it where you fucked up on trust?’
It was one of those mornings that she had, thankfully, become unused to. Now, about bloody time too, Penny Laing faced a chance of progress.
She couldn’t complain about the hotel – a decent room and a half-decent meal in a near-deserted dining room the night before, with a half-bottle of local wine – and there was no one in London to whom she had to make a phone call: ‘Yes, I’m missing you, too… Yes, I’m fine… Yes, and did you find your supper in the fridge?… Yes, I’ll pay the council tax when I get back…’ There had not been anyone to call late once the relationship with Paul had petered out.
She’d been in Ireland, and his ship had been on its way to the Caribbean when they’d called it a day – done it by text on their mobiles. She’d known it was on a downhill slope when she’d gone with him to his parents for Sunday lunch; they hadn’t grilled her for her life story, which meant they didn’t regard her as a potential daughter- in-law but as the present girlfriend before the ship sailed for a half-year’s duty. It had been good, the best of her affairs, but she wasn’t going to pack in Revenue and Customs to be a naval wife and he wasn’t going to jack in the Royal Navy to move into civilian life. They’d exchanged postcards…
She’d run through the files and not absorbed much, had slept, woken, gazed out of a window and seen a swimming-pool, a courtyard with tables and awnings, a monument of white stone in the form of a cross and the wide river. She’d had breakfast, had been given a fold-over map of the town by Reception and had set off from the hotel in search of… not quite certain. Had had the sheet of contact names and addresses on the car seat beside her.
It had probably been a little joke cooked up by the first secretary and the spook at the embassy. They had given her an address, off a wide, tree-lined main road, and it was indeed the headquarters office of the security police. Her HMRC pass had been examined at the desk, and she had sat on a hard chair for an hour. Then an English speaker had come with a disarming smile and said that any arrangement for a meeting would be co- ordinated through the embassy, not on the doorstep, but the police might be able to help. She had found the police station on her hotel map, had driven there, and the man whose name she had been given was on holiday. No one else on duty had more than a smattering of English… but the hospital was identified on her map.
