the notes of what she had learned. Interesting that chance had thrown her into the path of the man who might have condemned Harvey Gillot and didn’t seem fazed by it.
Penny Laing wasn’t big with words – she was inadequate at describing places, people who might have affected others. Working in Kinshasa had been an experience, but had not affected her. This town might, and outside Vukovar there was a village, and past the village a track that had led through fields of rotting corn.
‘We’re staying.’
They had been together for an hour, might have been more. There had been blurted conversations and lingering silences. Harvey had paced on the patio and she had sat on her lounger, sometimes reading the paper or working on her nails, contributing the same lifeless, monosyllabic sentences. The final exchange:
Him: ‘I’m fucked if I’m quitting to make it convenient for those bastards.’
Her: ‘Sounds as if, from what those bastards have to say, that we’re fucked anyway.’
Him: ‘It’s my home and I’ll not be put out of it because the bloody police are cutting back on their bloody resources.’
Her: ‘It’s our home – perhaps you hadn’t noticed, and I’m backing him, if he comes, to shoot straight.’
He reckoned she must have read the paper twice, some bits three times, and that her nails were down to the quick. Then he had turned and waved them forward. They had been in a small group, lounged against a low wall that separated the principal garden – where bloody Nigel had the flowers that always seemed to need weeding – from the drop-through undergrowth to the ruined chapel and the graveyard. They had finished drawing plans of the garden and had done the survey of the house. They had been there, the men half astride the wall, the girl perched on it, with the insolence that comes from waiting for a decision that was likely to be obvious to an imbecile.
‘Say that again, please, Mr Gillot.’
‘A bit hard of hearing, are we, Mr Roscoe? Wax in the ears? I said,’ Harvey lifted his voice and barked, ‘we’re staying.’
Crisply, ‘Are you happy with that decision, Mrs Gillot?’
Harvey didn’t know whether she would stand with or against him and sensed the detective expected her to break ranks. She said drily, ‘If I were to leave my husband and my home, Detective Sergeant, it would be because I’ve decided to, not you.’
Impassive: ‘Right, so be it.’
There was a small sharp smile on Harvey’s lips, as if he had won something. ‘You, Mr Roscoe, don’t approve of our decision. You’d have had us run, bloody rats in the night, to a safe-house. I pay my taxes. You could say, Mr Roscoe, that I pay your salary. You could also say – I doubt you will – that the accumulation of taxes I’ve paid entitles me to a degree of support from the police.’
‘I neither approve nor disapprove of your decision, Mr Gillot. I’ve explained the options and you’ve rejected advice given, which is your right. There are enough of us here to verify your statement that you’re staying, and that you understand you won’t receive armed protection in the face of a threat to your life. That’s all pretty simple, and we’ll leave a pamphlet on security precautions in the hall for you to read through, basic stuff.’
Harvey said, ‘I think you should know, Mr Roscoe, that in a lifetime of business I’ve accumulated influential customers – the Ministry of Defence, the Secret Intelligence Service and…’
A glint lightened the policeman’s eyes. ‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. But if you’re confident of them whistling up a platoon of the Parachute Regiment and sending them down here…’
‘I have friends.’
‘Pleased to hear it, sir. Any time you need me, just call. Good afternoon, Mrs Gillot. Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Friends, and don’t forget it.’
No answer. The group had already turned their backs on the patio and were on the driveway, going to their car.
She had never been inside the halls where the fair was staged. Organised by Defence Systems and Equipment International, it was a closed, demonised place for Megs Behan.
She was in the front row. Those who had penetrated the place in previous years – by forging passes or conning a naive exhibitor into verifying an application – were the elite on the barrier. It had been an early start, a little after seven thirty, and she was almost alone. Another hour to go before the first of the exhibitors were pitching up. It was now early afternoon and visitors were drifting away, but she hadn’t seen the bastard. What had shocked her most was that two policemen, one younger and one older than herself, had offered her a sip from their plastic coffee cups and turned the cup round for hygiene. One had called her ‘sunshine’ and the other ‘love’.
Those who had been inside – top of the tree – reported variously. The big companies had major stands with videos blaring as they demonstrated their products, champagne flowing. The small firms were in the electronics world, did the titanium plating for an attack aircraft’s cockpit or the mounts for machine-guns in the hatches of helicopters. An American stand manager complained that his government’s tighter fist meant Mexican human- traffickers out of Tijuana had better scanners than the US Border Guard. A South African, on a stand exhibiting anything from an armoured personnel carrier to a sniper rifle, claimed that trade was flat but that the Middle East was still holding up well. A British officer in uniform was heard to say that equipment had become so sophisticated that it was easy to forget fighting was done by people and ‘the simplest thing in infantry is man against man’. Someone reported, ‘You don’t see a mention anywhere of killing. A mocked-up frontier post is manned by peace- keeping troops. The videos shout about fighting for peace.’ One justification – rejected out of hand by Megs Behan – was that a hundred and fifty thousand jobs depended on the ‘trade of murder’. She would have given a right arm, maybe even a right boob, to insinuate herself inside the ‘Death Supermarket’.
The bastard – Harvey Gillot – had not shown.
There had been good years when huge crowds had been penned back and police lines had bulged as they defended the entrance to the exhibition centre, when arrests had conferred a badge of honour – all gone. Then her ears would have been ringing with the abuse thrown at arriving guests, potential buyers and the likes of Harvey Gillot, and the police would have been doing gratuitous violence.
It was a mark of shame that the picket on the barrier was barely three deep and the placards were thin. It certainly hurt that the police were so goddamn friendly. She had, indeed, drunk their coffee. One had nearly made a pass at her, and had offered to open the barrier links so that she could get more easily to the DLR station if she was caught short.
A waste of time. She had thrown no paint bombs, had fired no ball-bearings from a catapult, hadn’t even chucked a shoe. There had been a few photographers an age earlier but they’d gone now.
And Harvey Gillot wasn’t there, so there was little point in vaulting the barrier and making an exhibition of herself if nobody had hung around to witness it. She thought the policemen would have been embarrassed for her if they’d had to haul her off to a van.
For herself, she felt almost ashamed. A reedy voice used a bullhorn to her right and squealed insults at the distant building, and the police were smiling. She was ashamed because she felt the betrayal of all those kids – alive and dead, scarred and traumatised, homeless and hungry – who were the victims, ‘collateral’ was the vogue word, of the arms trade: their photographs were neatly catalogued in her filing cabinet.
She had to learn Shock and Awe.
She had a rucksack at her feet, against the barrier, and bent to pick it up, then started the struggle to get her arms through the straps. Another policeman helped her. He was smiling. ‘Off home, then? Your crowd have been damn good today. Anyway, hope a few stay on – this is double bubble, a nice little earner. It isn’t like it used to be, proper scrap then. Have a safe journey.’
She headed off, humiliated, racking her mind for what might represent shock and awe and for something to lift her morale.
In a hide of camouflage netting, on the edge of a covert of birches, Benjie Arbuthnot let a shooting stick take his weight as he puffed a cigarillo. Beside him his grandson, a week back from boarding-school, aged fourteen and not yet in the fifth form, smoked a cigarette provided for him, and together they watched the field that had been harvested the day before. The target would be pretty much everything that breathed, kicked, flew or moved in any way. Benjie had, broken, a twelve-bore over and under from James Purdey – worth a fortune, his retirement present from Deirdre, and the sprog was armed with a single barrel four-ten of mongrel manufacture. A mobile rang.
He swore, had the shotgun under his arm so he used his free hand to tap his pockets and identify where the damn thing was. He produced his phone, realised it was silent and looked at his grandson. The blush spread crimson. The boy fumbled through his pockets and brought out his. It glowed from under its protective case. It was
