From the kitchen, she watched Nigel go past his pick-up and walk to the gates. He fiddled with the pad, and let them open just wide enough.
Harvey limped, might have been walking on coals. The dog bounded after him. His hair was dishevelled and his knees were scratched. Shock was etched on his face and his eyes were wild.
He came into the kitchen and winced as his feet left blood smears on the vinyl. He looked into her eyes and said nothing, but his right hand slipped into his pocket and he dropped on to the table, scrubbed oak planking, two empty cartridge cases. They bounced and rattled, then were still. He went on through the inner door and towards his office.
The sun, through the window, gleamed on the cartridge cases.
Leanne waited in the phone box, heard the ring tone and lifted the receiver. She had called a neighbour of her grandfather in the Albion Estate, had given the number of the box, and the neighbour would have hurried three doors down the walkway to bang on his door. The connection was now via two public phones and the chance of an intercept was minimal: it was a reasonable precaution because Granddad Cairns’s home phone was a possible target under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and its reference to ‘interception of communications’. She could not be placed on the Isle of Portland.
At the quarry down the road, long exhausted and with its tally of burned-out cars, a small fire would now be dying and all evidence of a firearm’s residue would have been eliminated from a set of overalls, a balaclava and lightweight plastic gloves. The lighter fuel had the dual purpose of speeding the conflagration and killing the remnants of the chemical discharge on firing from Robbie’s face and wrists. He had been led, half stripped, to a puddle where, without ceremony, his brother had scrubbed him.
Leanne had realised that the relationships had changed, that an old pecking order was broken. Her younger brother had given no further explanation and had not complained at the harsh way Vern handled him: she barely knew him.
Her grandfather was on the phone. She thought he might have been having his breakfast, working his way through the flat runners of the afternoon, when the neighbour had rapped at his door. He would have hurried down into the street and then, clutching a slip of paper with a number on it, gone to the station and found a phone that wasn’t broken. He would have dialled and expected the good news. She told it like it was. She didn’t shield her brother but relayed back what she had been told. A lie-up where there were rotting apples, wasps, a sudden duck as the first shot was fired, which had missed the target, a second shot, again off-target because of wasps in his face and a flipflop thrown. Twice she had had to repeat herself because Granddad Cairns had sworn and another time there had been a gasp of utter disbelief. One question: how was Robbie? She was succinct: ‘He’s bollocksed, on his knees.’
Leanne loved Granddad Cairns, and held him in devoted respect. He was in his eightieth year, had skin the colour of old parchments she’d seen as a kid in the library, was seldom without a fag hanging from his mouth and coughed in convulsions most mornings, but she reckoned his brain was keen. She and Vern, certainly Robbie, were unused to catastrophe. None of them had known how to react other than to shed the clothing and destroy it. She heard her grandfather out, listened and absorbed, rang off and went back to the car to tell them.
The voice was incoherent.
Roscoe interrupted: ‘But you’re all right? You’re not hurt?’
It had been a result, a brilliant one, the previous evening in Wandsworth. Three officers inserted into the shop via the backyard entrance and two builders’ vans out the front, well loaded with people, and the guns were in support. They had waited until the bad guys were on their way across the pavement, face masks on and pickaxe handles ready to knock out the display windows, and they’d done the ‘Go, go, go.’ Four on the pavement in custody and two drivers.
‘Yes, Mr Gillot… Of course I take this development most seriously. Two shots, yes? I confirm you’re unhurt.’
One of the bad guys had spun, a dancer’s pirouette, then sprinted for the far side of the street and tried to lose himself in the traffic. He had gone straight into the arms of Mark Roscoe, who had brought him down and sat on him. Four hours to write up the reports, and afterwards the pub.
‘My superior will be consulting with relevant parties, Mr Gillot… There is no need to shout at me, sir. A very unpleasant experience, yes. My colleagues and I will be on our way… No, I doubt very much that he’s sitting outside your gate. I imagine he’s legged it. Try to keep yourself secure in the meantime, Mr Gillot.’
The pub had gone on late. The minicab home had lost itself and he’d been asleep in the back, so he was into the bedroom later than… She wasn’t pleased. She’d not woken him when she’d gone to work. No note on the table but a box of Alka-Seltzer, and the windows were open, which meant that the room stank. He’d come in feeling fragile and was pottering, and his phone had rung.
‘No, Mr Gillot, I’m not suggesting you dig a bunker under the table… That’s uncalled for, sir, and I would remind you that you were offered advice and chose to reject it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I can get off the phone and start driving.’
He put down the receiver and grimaced. Bill twirled the car keys and Suzie gazed at him with a degree of annoyance as if it was too obvious he’d been taking abuse from the bloody man and hadn’t slapped him down. What did Mark Roscoe think? Not repeatable in company, but something along the lines -watered down – that the world might have been a better place if the contract man had aimed a bit straighter and earned his money. He would never consider saying to a superior that the Tango didn’t deserve the care put into safeguarding a miserable second-rate life but he could think it. They’d made their bloody bed and they, husband and wife, could bloody lie on it.
They hit the road.
Coming out of the first turning, the junction at the lights, Bill turned to him. ‘Boss, don’t take any shit from Gillot. Don’t.’
11
‘Don’t embarrass me, Mr Gillot, don’t go near her.’
‘Big talk for a bloody gardener – or am I just the last to be told?’
‘Just keep out of the way, Mr Gillot, and nobody gets upset.’
‘As long as we understand that for all your hard work this morning, and your duties as protector and baggage carrier for my wife, it’ll be she who pays you, not me.’
‘Cheap, Mr Gillot. I think she’s coming now so, please, don’t interfere.’
Did he want a fight? Nearly did. The front door was open. Also open were the driver’s door and boot of her car, parked on the driveway. Beside it, loaded with the wheelbarrow and the rest of Nigel’s paraphernalia, was his pick-up. They would leave, he assumed, in convoy from the Portland front line, the Lulworth View salient. The gardener had inserted himself between Harvey Gillot and the front door. It was an hour since she’d said she would go. He had not begged. There had been none of the bent-knee-and-welling-eyes stuff about his inability to see ‘this’ through without her.
He heard the small but shrill squeal of the suitcase wheels.
The cartridge cases had rolled on the kitchen table, which had been sufficient to start them off. She was not hanging about to have her head blown off by a gunman who might just, next time, get to aim straighter, with her alongside him. He was not about to miss her, and did she want some help with her packing? She was not considering setting down shallow roots in a god-awful ‘safe-house’ that was vetted by policemen. He had no intention of bugging out, as rats did. She had done nothing, but he had brought this on himself, through deceit. He had worked damn hard to put clothes on her back, and food on her table. She had called him a ‘cheat’ who’d reneged on a done deal. He had tried to laugh with irony, but made a poor fist of it, and had called her the cheat, the deal reneged on her marriage vows… which had concluded the shouting match. He noticed that the gardener had – step by step – positioned himself so that he could intervene if his employer had come at her with a knife from the kitchen block.
She carried one case and pulled another.
That left a dilemma for the gardener. He could do polite manners, pick up her bag and lug it to the car,
