museum front door. He couldn’t have put Gillot in handcuffs and his wife in a headlock, then shoved them into the boot and driven them to a hotel at the back end of nowhere, like the Shetlands or the Orkneys.
The itch – coming on worse and needing a scratch – was from feeling he had failed in a basic task. The job had been to get the Tango out of the line of fire: he hadn’t succeeded. There was a good old story – hoary and therefore worth remembering – of a protection officer who had done time with the Viceroy, Mountbatten, in the end days of the Indian Raj. The greys and wrinklies who had done secretary-of-state security details in Belfast, during the choice days, liked to tell it.
Mountbatten, it was said, had announced one morning that he wanted, first thing after breakfast, to visit the bazaar and go walkabout. His man had refused to consider it. The Viceroy, God Almighty on earth, said he was going, no argument, and was again turned down flat. Miffed, Mountbatten had pulled his immense rank and insisted. No: the officer was adamant. He was quizzed, and had answered: ‘Sir, I’m not overly concerned about your safety, but am most concerned with the preservation of my professional reputation.’ Mountbatten had not visited the bazaar to show the flag. It was the area in which Mark Roscoe felt uneasy.
They had left a sullen household. Might have left two people who were scared shitless. When they were going the dog had woken in the kitchen and whined. Probably wanted its food.
His boss had wandered close. ‘You look, Mark, as if you’re carrying the cares of the world.’
He didn’t answer, just handed over a printout of the report.
Roscoe couldn’t have said that he had acquired any degree of affection for Gillot. He didn’t admire or sympathise with his wife. He had found both of them unattractive to deal with… but it had gone beyond neutrality. He disliked Harvey and Josie Gillot because both, in equal amounts, threatened him. Inquiries would be convened, inquests would be launched, and the teams of hindsight merchants would be crawling over him if double-tap time came and Gillot was down, bleeding like a stuck pig. But his boss slipped an arm round his shoulders. ‘Be it on his own head. I don’t see what alternatives were open to you.’
Roscoe didn’t believe a word of the saccharine stuff, but was marginally grateful.
His boss said, ‘We’re needing to be mob-handed in Wandsworth – are you sitting on your hands or are you coming?’
He said he’d come – with Suzie and Bill – and was thankful for a distraction: a jewellery shop in Armoury Way that a chis had said was a target. Might just save him scratching the itch till it bled.
They each had their role. Vern would now be looking for the lie-up where he could stay unobserved with the car. Leanne would have the wig on again, the pullover off, and would be holding the folder that contained the brochures on double-glazing and plastic window-frame opportunities – she was good at chatting on doorsteps. Vern would not be noticed, but Leanne would be remembered as the pretty girl with the dark hair, the glasses and a blouse. Robbie had come down the track that led from the tarmac-surfaced lane and was beside a high wall, the boundary of the target’s property that ran on to block off the location of the ruined castle, an English Heritage site.
There was a gate off the lane. The name beside it was Lulworth View, and next to the sign was a speech grille.
He couldn’t see over the wall into the garden, or the shape of the house. He knew the size of the garden from the aerial pictures but that was different from spying out the ground for himself, second best or third. He went on down the lane, leaving Gillot’s home behind and above him. There was the shell of an old church, and graves, and further down the sea and a stony beach. A couple watched him now from the shore and kids threw stones into the water. He tracked along the sand, following a worn path, and by now they would have lost sight of him behind their windbreak. Another woman watched him, wearing a well-filled swimsuit. He had no towel, no camera, no child in tow: what was his business? He realised he had no reason to be on the beach and didn’t fit any pattern. No streets, no pavements, no alleys, no shadows. He quickened his step and then was gone, among fallen gravestones, and had started to climb again from the far end of the beach. He hadn’t yet seen the house but he had shown himself.
Enough stories of the ‘old days’ tripped off Granddad Cairns’s tongue. Never any point in telling his grandfather that he had heard them before. A favourite was about Leatherslade Farm, near to Aylesbury, out in deep countryside. Granddad Cairns had been twenty-two when the gang had hit the big-time and robbed the Royal Mail train coming south overnight from Scotland. He’d been on remand on a conspiracy-to-burgle charge, and could remember the draught of excitement when news of a two-and-three-quarter-million-pound heist had spread along the corridors of HMP Brixton (Remand), and also – the bit he enjoyed most – the ridicule at the gang’s cock-up. Should have gone straight back to London, to their roots and homes, and stashed the cash in a warehouse or lock- up garage.
Instead they’d holed up at Leatherslade Farm in a remote corner of the countryside, reckoning that they wouldn’t be seen among all the quiet fields and hedgerows, their presence not noted. Wrong. They were down a long lane that wasn’t made up and they’d thought no one in the whole wide world would dream anyone was there. Wrong enough to get thirty years each. It would have been the rope if the driver had pegged a few weeks earlier from the head injuries they’d done him. A man was supposed to come along afterwards and fire the place, but he hadn’t and the fingerprints were over everything and convicted them… That man was thought to be holding up a flyover pillar on the motorway at Chiswick. But, truth was, locals were queuing up to tell the police of goings-on at Leatherslade Farm. Granddad Cairns used to say, finishing up, ‘I hate the countryside. Had my way, I’d cement everywhere that’s green. Go and look over a town house before doing some business there and no one sees anything. Go and look at a country house and half a village has seen you. Cement’s what’s needed.’ Robbie came up a trodden track and now he could look across the gully that ran down to the ruins, the graveyard and the beach.
Through the trees, he could make out most of the house, and the patio, but none of it clearly because of the branches.
Couldn’t see whether there were cameras, or an alarm system.
There was a woman on a lounger at the edge of the patio – he hadn’t seen her before – and then a dog bounded close to her.
He had seen what he needed to: a dog.
By the time he reached the lane again, having cut through a caravan park, he had established that the house didn’t have a back exit on to the path below.
At the top of the lane, opposite the museum, there was a bench and Leanne was sitting on it. She had the wig on, the cardigan off and the brochures under her arm.
She asked him, as they strolled up the hill, how it had gone.
He said it had gone all right.
She said she’d done the rounds and gossiped while two couples had looked at her double-glazing and the plastics. The people in Lulworth View, she was told, weren’t worth a call because ‘they keep to themselves’ and ‘they’ve hardly a word for anyone’, but she tried the speech grille on the gate and a man had answered. She’d explained and he’d said she could shove… He hadn’t finished.
Robbie Cairns said quietly, ‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is that he has a dog.’
‘How did it go?’
She peeled off her rucksack and dropped it. ‘It was pitiful,’ Megs Behan said.
Surprise. ‘How come?’
‘It’s like we were part of the scenery, like we’d be missed if we weren’t there. Another year and the police’ll be giving us biscuits, and DSEi will be sending out a trolley with coffee, tea or hot chocolate. We don’t even embarrass them, let alone get up their noses.’
Puzzlement at a sort of heresy. ‘Not joining the doubters, are you, Megs?’
She gazed at her project manager. She saw his concern. Others in the open-plan area at Planet Protection had their eyes fastened on their screens, but would have been wondering whether sunstroke or her period had caused such a dramatic loss of faith. She was Megs Behan and her commitment was legendary. Others had left to have babies or get work that paid better, and some had gone because their lives had moved on and the dedication had frayed. Not Megs Behan. ‘It was a complete waste of time being there.’
His resolve stiffened. ‘Perhaps you aren’t yourself, Megs. We have to be seen there, we have to…’
‘But we’re not seen. That’s the problem. No photographers. The bloody downturn, and who cares what British factories manufacture as long as the money’s coming in? Weapons of war are fine as long as the cheques don’t
