past came tripping up on me. I wasn’t looking and hadn’t filled any sandbags. Too busy selling every other tosser a crate of Kalashnikovs to look over my shoulder. According to the spooks, a shite-faced bastard has agreed what I’m worth. He may be waiting for it to have cleared into his account, or it’s already through and he’s hunting or sniffing – Christ, I don’t fucking know.’
‘Are you speaking, Harvey? I’m getting something. Is it disturbance on the line? Is there something, friend to friend, you should be telling me?’
‘Not a bed of roses, but nothing I can’t handle.’
‘I watched for you, Harvey, when Solly went… I wouldn’t want to think that you’re not telling me what I…’
‘I’m fine, friend. But I’ll call you back – give me some time.’
He put the phone down on a friend and went to the window. He could see on to the drive, where she was scraping gull mess off the windscreen. They hadn’t spoken a word since the detective had left. When he had gone into the kitchen she had come out, and when he had left the kitchen after a sandwich, she had gone back in. He realised that, getting up to go to the window, he had kicked the dog’s water bowl and a damp stain had spread on the carpet.
‘You don’t have to slam doors,’ he shouted through the glass. ‘You can behave like a fucking adult.’
His wife, his Josie, looked at him. Contempt rippled at her mouth. One of those choice moments, he thought, when she was not going to dignify his insult with a response. She was in the car, had gunned the engine and activated the gates. He wondered where she was going, and whether the gardener figured in her plan. She drove through the gates, which closed behind her.
He sat at his desk again, the dog’s head on his lap, and went back to the costs of small arms, ammunition and RPG rounds. The columns seemed to bounce on the page, meaningless.
A sort of fear, new experience, clung to him. Then he shook his head violently, slapped his hands on his desk – hard enough to hurt – and went back to denial. Couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t.
Now sitting up, intent, Robbie watched from the back window and saw the landscape of the Isle of Portland for the second time. They did the circuit in reverse. Vern drove steadily and allowed other traffic – a few holidaymakers and an occasional delivery van – to pass them. He stayed silent, as Robbie did, and Leanne told them the names of the villages. Down Wide Street, on to Weston Road and through the housing estate – Robbie reckoned the place a dead dump – then into Southwell. Leaving the turn-off to the big hotel, they veered towards the Bill. He said they could stop. Neither his elder brother nor his sister would have demanded tea from the cafe or a visit to the toilets.
They parked. He didn’t want tea or a toilet, and he stayed by the car, leaning against the bodywork, his elbows on the roof, and opened the envelope. It wasn’t strange for him to see Leanne emerge from the toilet at the side of the cafe with the wig in place, and she’d slipped off the yellow cotton cardigan. She always did that. Vern stirred his tea with a plastic stick but didn’t acknowledge her, nor she him, and they were strangers.
He lost sight of her. There was wind on his face and it snatched at the aerial photographs of the house.
A big ship loitered past, far out to sea, hardly seeming to move but was soon lost in a deepening heat haze. He memorised the photographs, then slipped them back into the envelope.
Gulls shrieked above him. It wasn’t said, couldn’t be admitted, but Robbie Cairns depended on the skills of his elder brother and his sister. He needed his brother for the driving, fast, sure and accident-proof, and Leanne for the close-up reconnaissance of a target location. It was warm and the sun came through thickening cloud, burned on the roof, but there was an involuntary shiver in Robbie Cairns’s body. No concrete under his feet, no dense brickwork in his eyeline, just an open sky above him, without chimneys and TV aerials. The shiver was not from the wind blowing against him but his uncertainty at being away from the familiar. Had he known where he was going and what would be the ground, might he have turned down the work? He coughed and spat. Wouldn’t have. He tossed the envelope on to the front passenger seat, Leanne’s.
He could see, beyond the car park, that a hawk had perched on a fence post. Robbie Cairns knew nothing about birds but that one interested him because it had a wickedly sharp, curved beak and he rated it as a killer. It was a fine-looking bird, with intricate markings on its chest. He would remember it – didn’t know what it was called – and describe it to Barbie when he was back in London. He hadn’t told her he’d be away, hadn’t volunteered information about schedules and movements. He’d just slipped away from the flat. He’d tell her about the bird. Then it flew.
Great, fantastic. The bird hovered, dived, disappeared, then rose, and he could see the wriggle of the creature it held. It was back to the fence post, the beak hacking at what it had caught.
Leanne was going back to the toilets.
He didn’t like the wind on his face or the sun on his cheeks. Most of all, he didn’t like the emptiness of the place, the size of the fields and the open road. In his trade, the work he did was always at close quarters. He had never heard of a marksman’s weapon being used, a sniper’s. Might be fine for the military but not for Robbie. Always wanted to be near – almost standing on the target’s toes – and sure of a head shot with a handgun. In his trade there was no call for what the army in Afghanistan called improvised explosive devices – which the Irish had used and the Iraqis. Robbie knew nobody who had the skills to build a bomb that would go into a culvert or be locked by a magnet to a car’s chassis. On the London streets, he could materialise out of a car parked at a kerb or from among pedestrians on a pavement or dancers in a club or from an alleyway’s shadows. It was big money, not to be refused.
Leanne was out of the toilets, wig off, yellow top on, and walked with Vern towards him. She said, ‘There are huts up here. Some are being used today but most aren’t. A guy was telling me they cost up to twenty-five grand. They’re just like a garden shed and you’re not allowed to sleep in them. A chatty guy. Told me which ones were still locked up and wouldn’t be used till the kids come off school, which is still a week away… As good as anywhere, I reckon.’
They left the car park and went back down the road, away from the lighthouse, and towards the target’s home.
She came back, parked the car, closed the gates and let herself in.
He was in his office – she could hear the clatter of the keyboard.
In the bedroom, she changed from slacks and a blouse into a halter-top and shorts, took a book and went to a chair on the covered walkway outside the picture windows that overlooked the patio. Later, when it was cooler and the sun was further round, she would move to the lounger. She didn’t tell him she was back, ask if there had been calls, whether he needed feeding or a drink, or if a gunman had tried to take his life. Josie Gillot didn’t care much whether there had been any calls or whether he wanted something to eat, or whether… It wouldn’t be a detective, one who had made a piss-awful job of disguising his dislike of her husband and his trade, who told her when to leave her home.
It was towards late afternoon that Mark Roscoe hit the button and despatched the beast. He eased himself out of his chair, and Suzie pushed the wheels of hers back towards her own workspace. Bill was already out on the fire escape and would be lighting up. Suzie had typed and Roscoe had dictated. Then he had taken over the keys and done a polish. It had his name under it, and he signed it off. The small matter of the paper trail and the responsibilities that lay with it itched inside him. He wasn’t used to having his professional advice chucked back in his face. He hadn’t reported that the potential target, their Tango, was abusive, foul-mouthed, sneering, or the boast of connections with Defence and Intelligence. To have slagged off Gillot would have laid Roscoe open to charges of insensitivity and possible bullying, and if the paper trail was followed at a later stage – after Gillot was dead in a gutter with a 9mm bullet lodged in his brain – and scapegoats were looked for, he wouldn’t be holding up his hands. When Suzie had moved aside and he had tidied up, it was a brief document, spare of colour, emotion and detail. It said little more than that the offer of advice had been made, that a temporary safe-house would have been available, and the Tango had ‘declined’ the suggestions put to him. The report would go to the Gold Commander, Covert Surveillance, Intelligence, and Firearms, and would have reached the Alpha crowd. Also on the list was the big man with the smart epaulettes at the Weymouth police station.
He stood, stretched, and didn’t know what else he could have done.
They had been, the three of them, pretty subdued when they’d driven away from Gillot’s house.
What else? He couldn’t have said, in contradiction of all orders and laid-down procedures, that he would put up a tent by the front gate and sleep there with his Glock in his hand, or make a bivouac under the kitchen table. Neither could he suggest that Bill and Suzie join him to sleep rough in the car at the end of the lane and beside the
