point behind him and his fingers brushed her arm, only a trifling contact.
They walked on a path of caked mud, cracked, dusty and rutted from a tractor’s wheels. Penny had left the car outside the cafe, had been careful to lock it and make sure nothing was left on show inside. She had realised then that the boy was on the veranda, watching her, with a slight mocking smile and that the chance of anyone stealing from the vehicle was unthinkable to him. Her security measures were almost offensive. She’d murmured, flushing, that it was ‘force of habit’, ‘London’, and ‘sort of goes with the job’. Then he’d greeted her formally, very passable English, repeated what she’d said the previous evening about wanting to see the Cornfield Road – he’d called it the Kukuruzni Put. He’d told her the villagers had named it the ‘Way of Rescue’, and that he and she would go on foot.
He wore jeans that were tight around his waist and hips and a loose-fitting T-shirt of a band from Zagreb who had played a concert the previous summer in Osijek. He had a mass of hair that reached his shoulders, was perhaps an inch more than six foot, slim, muscled and tanned. Not quite the looks of a Greek god, but not far short, Penny thought.
They had gone past the cemetery, where she had seen the four mounds of earth. Now they were on the path. She thought it, at first, insignificant but quite pretty. One side of where they walked was given over to a crop of sunflowers, some as big as soup plates, drooping beneath the weight, nearly ready for harvesting. On the other side of the path corn grew thick and dense. The sun beat on her mercilessly. The first time he had touched her was when he had turned and pointed back at the great bowl of the water tower. She had squinted against the sun and made out the bright colours of the flag that topped it.
She was in her thirtieth year – and he had said outside the cemetery that his mother had been among the first to be buried there after her body had been exhumed from a battlefield grave: she had died in the crypt under the church from his birth’s complications. So, no calculator needed, he was eighteen, would turn nineteen in the autumn. That morning in the hotel, she had chosen a pair of lightweight dark brown slacks, a sober grey blouse, with the upper buttons unfastened – it was bloody hot – and lace-up walking shoes that were comfortable but made her look like a schoolmarm. She had swept her hair back into a ponytail and wore no makeup. She should have used the sunscreen but it was still in her handbag’s pouch… No, not in a relationship currently… Too busy on Alpha to worry about the absence of a guy in her life… No, not fussed that in the team the men would have thought of her as ‘proper’ and maybe ‘priggish’. No, she had not gone on a bounce after the break-up with Paul, and it was a full two months since she’d had a postcard from Antigua. No, she didn’t feel she was ‘missing out’ or ‘going short’. If Asif had not backed out on her at Heathrow, she would have let him walk ahead with the boy, would have kept a haughty distance and used her notebook to jot things. He wasn’t there.
The second time he had touched her was when she had paused to look at the horizon and they had been level with the end of the sunflower strip where a monster bloom sagged over the path. She had taken its weight and marvelled at the detail of the pointed orange petals, the core of ochre where bees fed. A spider – tiny, delicate – had come on to the back of her hand and scuttled towards her wrist. She would, at any other time and in any other place, have flicked it away, and would have done so there if he had not taken her hand and guided the spider to his palm, then freed the spider on the upper petals.
He had talked of the death of his mother, and her reburial in the new cemetery, had described to Penny where defence positions had been dug and she had seen what were now shallow trenches, little more than ditches. He had called the Kukuruzni Put the lifeblood route of the village, and had spoken of Marinci, Bogdanovci, and of the town behind them where the water tower was.
He had dropped his voice when they came to a newly ploughed strip that was above a gully in which a river flowed. There were many tyre marks, a flattened area that might have been under a tent and a pit some four feet deep, seven feet long and four feet across. He had told her of the death of four men, three of his age and the schoolteacher who had taught his father, then of a great betrayal. She had said Harvey Gillot’s name.
He looked hard into her eyes. Her older colleagues and line manager said she had doggedness, commitment and focus. Before they had reached the cemetery she’d shown her ID and put a card into his hand, which he’d pocketed without a glance.
He asked, simply, ‘Have you come to preserve the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘No.’
‘You deny that you have come here to save the life of Harvey Gillot?’
‘I deny it,’ she said boldly. Penny Laing had made a remark that would have been greeted in the Alpha office with disbelief and astonishment. Bleaker: ‘I’m part of a team that regards him as a target for a criminal investigation.’
‘Did you hear of a contract?’
‘I did.’
‘Is the contract investigated?’
‘Not by me.’
Silence hung. He told her she stood where the men from the village had waited in the dark hours for the shipment to come through. Here they would have taken delivery. He told the story simply and well. She could almost feel the blast of the artillery shells and mortars, almost see the flash of the knives taken from sheaths, and experience the fear of those waiting for death, the pain before it. She almost understood the weight of the betrayal. She must have turned, as if she was preparing to sit down on the path, perhaps better to share what had happened at this place. He stripped off his T-shirt and laid it on the ground. She blushed scarlet and thought that to refuse was to offend. She sat on it and got out the sunscreen. He took it.
The third time the boy touched her was when he rubbed the white cream on her hands and lower arms, on her cheeks, chin, nose and forehead, and she allowed it.
To learn more, he said, she must talk to his father.
He had his hand on the butt, inlaid plastic, of the Baikal pistol. Not tight or frantic, just resting there. To keep his hand on it seemed to drain the tension and help him to relax. Always important to be calm, have the breathing steady. He waited and watched the gates. He could picture how it would be. He had seen it enough times. Late, very late, the target was aware that someone was close to him and had entered the protective circle that men imagined was around them. Might be defiance or fear, or just a stunned moment of shock that stopped the function of legs and arms – because the target had seen the pistol. Sometimes, if the target froze, Robbie would do the double tap of two head shots. If the man had fight in him – could be a rolled newspaper, a plastic bag of shopping or a coat on his arm as he came out of a club or a pub, or a glass in his hand if he was still inside, then Robbie did a chest shot to drop him and a head shot to finish him.
The wasps were worse than they had been earlier and he was surprised that the gates hadn’t yet opened, that the target hadn’t come out with the dog. More walkers had used the path but he was still and wasn’t seen. Once he’d had to allow two wasps to crawl on his face because he couldn’t swat the little bastards while people went by…
Never anything to show from a chest shot other than the hole in the clothing that a schoolkid’s pencil would slip into. It might have a trace of burn round it, a scorch, but that was hard to see. The head shot also made a hole where a pencil could slot. The blood didn’t come out of the chest or the head until the target was down and dead – not that Robbie had seen the bleeding: he was gone by the time the dribble started. Didn’t run – important to walk.
His dad, Jerry, had done a stretch when Robbie was a youngster: his mum had said that after a snatch at a jeweller’s had gone wrong – a shop assistant ignored the raised cosh and slung an adding machine, then her shoe at the lead guy in through the door – his dad had run till his lungs half burst. Everyone on the street had noticed him and yelled to the police which way he’d gone. The old fool had still had a balaclava tight in his hand when they found him sagged against a lamppost.
He thought the dog must have crossed legs and almost chuckled, but the bastard wasps hadn’t left him. He watched the gates and waited.
The phone call ended. It had been a long one – and no coffee to go with it because she was in the kitchen: he wasn’t going to carry his notepad, pen and the phone in there and keep talking while the kettle boiled. His friend from Marbella had rung back to say that 82mm mortar shells and RG-42 hand grenades could be included in the package. Did they not have enough of that gear already in Baghdad? No, because the Yanks had blown up arms stores the length and breadth of the country. Did the Iraqi police need mortar shells designed for use at battalion level and in an infantry assault? They could be persuaded. Did they need hand grenades with burst-radius of up to
