The boy’s voice was quiet in her ear. ‘You wanted us dead. There was a United Nations embargo on weapons. Your government was an architect of it. It decided what was best for people in Croatia. It made decisions on whether we should survive or whether we should be butchered and go to hidden graves. If you had succeeded in the embargo, my village and I would not be here.’
‘I don’t follow you.’ She was flushed, but not by the sun – the cream had been smeared on her arms, neck, forehead and cheeks. People didn’t challenge her work in chasing down arms dealers, searching out crevices in their activities, exploiting them and bringing them to court.
‘You are intelligent. Of course you follow me. There, look there
…’ His thin arm reached out and the long fingers, bright with artist’s oil colours, jabbed to their right. Between two homes, with flowers in window-boxes, there was a low, squat concrete shape, an entry-hole gaping in its side. His son translated. ‘That was the command post. It was where Zoran, our schoolteacher, led the defence of our village and I was beside him. We defended the village with rifles, grenades and a few bombs for the antitank launcher, the RPG, most of those items bought in Hungary by Zoran before the fighting. We had very little from the police because Vukovar, and Vinkovci, was more important. Marinci and Bogdanovci were like us. We defended ourselves and we kept open the Cornfield Road. After Zoran was dead, I directed the defence from that bunker. Harvey Gillot would have been a criminal to you, but to us he was an angel. But the weapons did not come.’
‘It was thought at the time that-’
‘You knew, Miss Penny, what was best for us. You were very clever people and we were only simple peasants. You knew it was best for us not to have the weapons that would keep back the Cetniks. I think, perhaps, you thought it best for our homes and our land to be given to the Cetniks, and for us to go quietly to refugee camps and not to make a bad smell in the sophistication of Europe. There, Miss Penny, you see the church.’
The walls were concrete blocks and panels. The tower beside the porch at the front was as high as the roof, but the metal spikes that would reinforce poured concrete protruded upwards. She was still stung by the blunt sarcasm with which she had been put down. Should she ask why the church was still being rebuilt some nineteen years after the siege of the village and twelve after its liberation? She let it ride. What he had said had hurt but the translation was in the flat monotone interpreters always used. Simun had not allowed emotion to affect his tone or the message he gave, but his fingers had been soft on her skin and…
They stood in front of the church.
‘It is on the site of the old building. Under the nave there were steps down into the crypt. It was used as a refuge for the wounded and the sick, and it was where my wife was brought when she was in labour. There were complications in the delivery of my son. He was in vigorous health, but my wife deteriorated. The Cornfield Road was too dangerous for a sick woman to journey over. She died there, and we buried her in the night. We call those missiles by their Russian name, Malyutka, and with them we could have kept open the way across the fields. We had paid for them but they were not delivered. The road was cut and our village could not survive, nor Bogdanovci – our neighbour. It was the death of Vukovar. We remember well what was done to us – especially what was done to us for our own good.’
They walked on. Occasionally a building was still damaged, left with weeds sprouting in the cavities and saplings growing through the old floor. Simun murmured they had been the homes of Serbs who had lived in the village before the fighting and would never come back. She thought the shop, from its window display, was pitifully stocked, and wondered what horizons were left here… after the killing of Harvey Gillot. There was a larger house, grander, and a full-sized Madonna, carved from wood, and Simun whispered that it was the work of the fighter who had led the resistance in Bogdanovci. It was Mladen’s house. Simun pointed to the storks that nested on a chimney at the back – huge bodies and wings, tapering necks and pencil legs – and said that they had stayed right through the siege.
His father coughed, then spoke. ‘I doubt, Miss Penny, that you have fought for anything, suffered for anything. We have. We understand what it is to fight and to suffer. Most of all, Miss Penny, we believe in trust, and we are as loyal to the dead as we are to the living. He took our money and all that was valuable to us. He was given everything we had, and we trusted him. Do you seek to interfere?’
Penny Laing stood in a backwater of eastern Slavonia, in a far corner of Croatia, at the extremity of old Catholic Europe. She was far from London and the mores of her office. ‘I do not seek to interfere but to learn.’
‘It would be bad for you, Miss Penny, if our trust in you were not justified.’ There was no cloud in the sky but she was chilled. She had crossed a line, and could not have explained it to those who shared her work on the Alpha team. Neither could she have made sense of it to a weapons officer on a frigate hunting drugs smugglers in the Caribbean. She only knew Harvey Gillot from a photograph, and felt shrunken and almost insignificant. Perhaps she had paled, but Simun’s hand was on her elbow as if she needed to be supported. She thought the death of that man was now inevitable.
The call came from an apartment, one of the most sought-after in the capital city, that overlooked a grand square. The sun shone with late-afternoon brilliance on the grass, the statues and the monument to a great leader of a previous century.
‘You, Josip?… There is news. No, no, leave the cork… Josip, the news from London is that an attempt was made and failed… For fuck’s sake, Josip, how would I know? I’m in Zagreb. I have had a message, not a half-hour conversation. It failed… What happens now? I wasn’t told… Don’t treat me like an idiot. It’s accepted that you paid… It’s on your head. You advised, suggested, you began it… You’re vulnerable, that too I accept… What do you tell your villagers? You tell them it failed, and you tell them that the money they paid will be earned. Tell them many people in a long chain will demand it.’
12
He brought the last load of clothes out through the gates. He had dropped a few bits and left them in a trail from the wardrobes, into the corridor, across the hall and scattered on the gravel. The shoes were already out, in three bin-bags, the handbags in another, stacked on top of the suitcases that the police had repacked.
Harvey Gillot moved Josie’s possessions with a sort of manic precision – he would have brought the same degree of concentration to the preparation of a big deal. There was no Military List for his wife’s clothing and accessories, and he needed no end-user certificate to deliver them to the front gate, but his mind kept an inventory of what he had shifted and what was yet to come.
The parked car was in front of him.
Roscoe was sprawled half in and half out of the open front passenger door. The girl was perched on the bonnet. The burly one with the northern accent was up the lane a few paces, hunkered on a stone at the side of it. He thought they waited for instructions, perhaps to pull out and leave him to whatever Hades’ devils had in store, or move in and set up a defensive perimeter. The compromise, while they waited, was to be outside the gates. He couldn’t see Roscoe’s gun. The girl’s Glock protruded from her handbag. The heavy fellow was mopping his forehead with a handkerchief – the action swung aside his jacket giving a clear view of his weapon in its holster. In a different world, Harvey would have brought them a tray with a teapot, mugs, a jug of milk and a plate of biscuits. They were not friends, not allies, and he knew they disliked him.
He was in no mood to placate them as he carried out the last of his wife’s clothes on their hangers. He made a line of them along the gates, to give the effect of a football stadium where the fans had hooked their flags on to the railings.
Harvey Gillot wasn’t a man to change his mind or compromise. He didn’t consider whether Josie might come back to Lulworth View when she had calmed down. He knew her well enough to assess that she would not.
They held memories, those clothes. A dress she had worn, a sort of Mediterranean blue, when they had entertained a brigadier of the Sri Lankan Army; another, scarlet, close-fitting at the waist and flaring out at the hem, had gone with a cutaway white jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, her choice for a hospitality lounge at Cheltenham when the guests had been from the procurement section of the Kuwait defence ministry. A Thai-silk two-piece for when they had entertained a gang of guys from Belarus who had raped her with their eyes, but had agreed the sale of gear that had gone to Lima, Peru. They were clothes from the ‘old days’ when Harvey and Josie had been a team that tilted at impossible targets and hit most of them. Too bloody long ago… The two skirts he had bought her in Milan where they had been for a fair to show off Italian Air Force surplus… The winter coat, with
