rifles, for distance, and you don’t know nothing about bombs, for under cars. What you know about is a pistol, close-up, in a face. He’ll be protected, and he’ll be moved, and then fuckin’ hell knows how you find him. You blew it, kid. Do I go down the bank, order up a draft, take it round to Lenny Grewcock’s, give it him back and tell him our kid’s shit?’
He thought his sister might have stood in his corner, but she did not.
‘Tell him our kid’s frightened of a fuckin’ wasp up his nose? It’s a proud name is ours in Rotherhithe. It’s not fuckin’ laughed at. It will be… I reckon there are three questions for you. Listening?’
He stared across the little room. Beyond the kitchen door, a little open, his grandmother would be cooking supper. Mostly it was stew, the beef cut small for Granddad Cairns’s teeth. Nothing in this room had changed since his first memories of it. The same picture, over the gas fire, of hills in Scotland, bits of china, plastic flowers, photographs of a man in military uniform who had been his great-grandfather and was not a Great War hero, but had spent most of it in the Glasshouse, the military detention centre at Aldershot.
‘Three: you tell me to pay the money back. I die of shame, your grandmother and your father won’t know you, nor Leanne and Vern, and you don’t show your face in Rotherhithe. Two: you fetch the pistol, bring it to me and I go and do it because you’re not capable. I go down where there’s guns – never fired one in my life – and I try to do it. One: you finish it. You go to the end of the fuckin’ world but you do it. So?’
He said, ‘He’s done, Gillot is. He’s dead.’
Robbie saw the light come back to Leanne’s eyes, and colour flushed her face. Breath whistled from between his grandfather’s teeth, as if it had been trapped there and could now be freed.
He let himself out through the front door and kicked it shut after him. He didn’t know who had paid for the contract, where the money had been raised, couldn’t see it in his mind – not the people or the houses. But he had made his call, no stepping back: He’s done, Gillot is. He’s dead.
She stood in the centre of the room and gazed around her. The boy translated and Penny listened.
The man was named Tomislav and she thought him a prisoner of the eighty-day siege that had ended nineteen years before. Simun’s voice was gentle in her ear and seemed to massage the words he used. There were photographs of faces, some from weddings, some snapshots and others the staring type from official identification cards: the boy pointed to them individually or gestured to groups.
‘Those three, they had been at the school together, lived in the same road in the village, worked in the same factory at Vinkovci and died together. The bunker was at the edge of the village on the little road to Marinci and it took a direct hit, a mortar. They all died there… The woman was going between the crypt under the church and her home when a shell from a tank landed in the street and decapitated her. They had a marksman on the Bogdanovci side of the village – good but not as good as Andrija – and he killed those four men. Good men, brave men. His wife was raped after the surrender. When they had finished with her she went to her home – her husband had made for the cornfields but was found and shot – and into the roof where there were still grenades. She held one against her bosom and took the pin free
…’
Penny knew where fourteen men and three women had died in the village’s defence, and she knew the names and occupations of the nine who had perished from disease, abuse and torture in the concentration camps. She saw the weapons of the village people and their attackers; rifles were pointed to and she was told who had used them. There were small mortars, a machine-gun, many grenades and an RPG-7 launcher.
Then she was led towards the maps. With the same gentleness in his voice, the boy eased her forward, back or to the side and turned her, his fingers careful on her elbow. At the maps she understood why the contract had been taken out, why Harvey Gillot was condemned.
‘Tomislav would have fired the Malyutka missiles that the schoolteacher had bought. He had the training from the regular army. He persuaded Zoran that the village would survive and the Kukuruzni Put would stay open if we had the Malyutkas. He was the expert. He said the village could be saved. They would have changed the battle. With the Malyutkas, the village would have been saved. Tomislav’s wife is in Serbia and he does not know where are his children, and he does not work. He has only this house and these rooms and these memories.’
She felt weakened by the dried-out heat in the room, the dust that had long settled, the weapons and shrapnel, the greyness of the paper on which the maps were printed. They were near to the door. She sensed that the light dropped beyond it, dusk coming, and the end was near of a day unlike any other in her life. More portrait photographs confronted her. An older man, wearing a teacher’s gown, in a formal half-profile pose, and three youngsters.
‘He was a fine and honest man. He believed Harvey Gillot would keep his word. That one, the second picture, he is Tomislav’s boy. He was killed when they waited for the Malyutkas to come. They took off his testicles and put them in his mouth but we do not know if that was before he died or after, the same with Andrija’s cousin and Petar’s son. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Do you wish to see more, hear more?’
‘I have seen and heard enough.’
Very gravely, Penny Laing shook Tomislav’s hand. It had a steely strength, and the lack of flesh on the fingers seemed to dig into her skin. She felt, almost, that he thanked her for her interest. There was no life in the house and the door was not closed after them. They left behind them silence – the sound of the dead. The darkness was coming fast.
The boy still held her arm, though she did not need guiding once she had come down the veranda’s steps. She saw no vehicle headlights, no streetlights, but at the far end of the village the half-built church was illuminated and the cafe showed.
He asked her whether she would like to go to one of the forward positions that Tomislav had marked on the map for the Malyutkas.
Back in the Alpha-team office, on Whitehall in faraway London, they would still be at work, with their time difference, and wouldn’t comprehend what it was to visit a shrine to men and women killed brutally, to walk in a field of ripened corn where a grave had been dug up by a ploughshare, and to look down into a hole in the ground dug nineteen years before. Well… they weren’t there and they knew nothing.
‘Yes, I’d like to,’ she said very quietly.
There was a farm with low light over a cattle shed and tractors that threw the last shadows from the sun, a field of sunflowers and a warm breeze. He pointed to the defensive position from which a missile might have been fired against a tank. She could hardly see her feet, let alone a damn hole – and his breath tasted of chewing gum when they kissed.
She held tight to him, felt him against her, wanted to kiss and be kissed. And she understood why Harvey Gillot would die. Her breath slackened, and she felt his tongue and those gentle fingers smoothed back her hair, touching her neck where the cream had gone. In her mind were images of the young who had died here, of the gaunt Tomislav who would have been crouching in what was little more than a shallow ditch, and would have directed a bloody great missile against armour, and of Harvey Gillot.
He whistled and the dog was at heel, close to his leg. He went out through the gates. It must have been the jolt of opening it or pushing it shut, but a trouser suit and a summer dress slid down and into the lane. He didn’t stop.
Harvey didn’t acknowledge them. The one from the car, Roscoe, jack-knifed clear of the door, the girl slid down from the bonnet, and the big fellow pushed himself up off the stone. Harvey saw that Roscoe’s hand hovered inside his jacket, the girl’s was over the zip of her handbag, and the big fellow’s jacket was hitched back, giving a good view of the holster.
He didn’t make eye contact as he walked past the car, but he heard a stifled curse – Roscoe’s.
He didn’t look back, walked briskly, and the dog, too, ignored them.
‘Excuse me, Mr Gillot.’
He didn’t turn his head but answered, ‘What?’
‘I’m feeling like a spare bollock, sir. It’s not how my colleagues or I should be treated.’
‘Your sensitivities are pretty much bottom of my list.’
He took a left-hand fork, which would lead him towards the coastal path that went south. Going that way, he would not pass the place where the rotten apples had been dumped beside the track. He supposed he had achieved a sort of liberation. Didn’t know how long it would last and whether, once it had been lost, he would be able to
