When she had cleared the gate, had picked up the coats and dresses, she swore some more and took the boxes of carriage clocks, ornaments and glassware back across the drive and into the house. Next she had to return the horse to its field… but before that a drink or three. Not mid-morning and ice cubes tinkled on crystal. Nobody helped her. The bastard – she didn’t know what he was doing or where he was, and didn’t care to.
He had been turned away. He had arrived at the school – had thought he was doing his daughter a favour – and gone down empty corridors, hearing the chirp of young voices from behind closed classroom doors. As he had reached the headmistress’ suite, a bell had clamoured. He had been made to wait, not offered coffee or a biscuit. ‘Your wife, Mr Gillot, came last night, saw Fiona and briefed us on the irregular situation in your life currently. She expressed an opinion that you were capable of quite irrational actions, so my colleagues and I have decided it better that you do not see your daughter. Please leave, Mr Gillot.’ He had been aware then of the male PE teacher in a tracksuit at the open door. Did he want to be grabbed and put in a headlock?
He had driven away. There had been girls limbering up for netball, tennis or athletics on a distant playing-field but he could not, as he drove, recognise his daughter among them. The escort car picked him up at the outer gates and tailed him back into town.
The dutiful father had done his best. He had the tickets from the travel agent, and the envelope – given reluctantly and signed for in triplicate – from the solicitor, the senior partner. The suspicious beggar had asked if this had Mrs Gillot’s approval, then had stepped into an adjoining office and made a call that had not been answered. He had the tickets and the envelope, and what had been in the safe was in a plastic bag at his feet. He would have broiled if not for the air-conditioner.
The car followed him into town.
He parked at the station, in the short-stay bays. He didn’t know if he would be back, so the prospect of his car running up a bill and getting clamped or towed away seemed unimportant. He boarded the train. They didn’t come with him.
Before the train reached Poole, its schedule was dislocated. The announcement said there had been ‘an incident’ on the line, and the guard coming through the carriage during the half-hour delay said, ‘A guy topped himself off a bridge, jumped in front of a train on the down line.’ Sort of put things into perspective, Harvey thought. When the train started up and they inched forward at a place where the line ran through a cutting he found himself thinking about the village, where he had never been and what it had been like a long time ago.
She had been told the man’s name was Andrija, and then Simun whispered that he was ‘disturbed’: in the last week he had attempted to kill himself by lying on a hand grenade, but his wife had taken it from him.
Penny Laing had been given a stool to perch on, the boy sat cross-legged on the veranda and the woman, introduced as Maria, stood behind her husband and held the back of his solid chair. She was without expression, and wore shapeless drab grey and brown clothing. He had a wooden hospital crutch and propped it between his knees.
He talked, and his wife never interrupted or prompted. Simun translated. Penny learned of the raising of the payment that had been given to Harvey Gillot, how the wife had refused to accept excuses, and she imagined the woman gliding in darkness through the village as shells exploded and there were skirmishes at the defence lines. Then, in a bunker or a cellar under a house or below the flagstones of the Catholic church, she had filled a bag with bagatelle ornaments, low-quality gold, rubbish jewellery and the deeds of properties that had no value. Everything that went into the bag was of the highest importance to those who gave it.
They did not know, in the village, the name of the dealer whom the schoolteacher had met in Zagreb, but Zoran had come back and reported a meeting ‘most satisfactory’ with a person of honour and integrity. The night they went to collect the weapons, they had thought they would meet the man of honour and integrity, maybe linger long enough with him for a cigarette, the glow shielded. There would have been the embrace of brothers, cheeks kissed, and he would have gone on his way as they ferried the missiles towards the village. Andrija’s cousin had come from Vinkovci, had not been pressured to fight but had done so – he was a lion. In the village they had heard, as they waited for the shadows dragging the cart and the pram from the corn, the sudden concentration of explosions, the rattle of the machine-gun.
Penny Laing wondered if the greater hatred was directed at Harvey Gillot, who had taken their possessions and welshed on a deal, or on the paramilitaries Simun called ‘Cetniks’, who had killed the four and had ultimately overrun the village.
The translation went on. Andrija was skilled as a sniper. He would have fired his Dragunov rifle to drive the enemy into bunkers and into armoured vehicles. Tomislav would have used the Malyutka missiles the village had bought. A Malyutka would destroy a personnel carrier, which might have fifteen Cetniks inside it. If the missiles had come, they would have held the village: it was said with certainty. She felt now that she was merely an intruder – and couldn’t read the boy well enough to know whether or not he still respected her.
No missiles, ammunition exhausted, and in the final hours Andrija had left his wife with the wounded in the crypt under the church, and gone into the corn. He had been twenty-three and his wife two years older. It was estimated he had killed twenty Cetniks during the siege, and had he been caught in the corn he would have died a slow death. On the second day, walking, crawling, alone, he had detonated an anti-personnel mine that had shattered his leg, virtually severing it. He had used a shirt sleeve to tie a tourniquet, then dragged himself on his stomach the last two kilometres, the limb pulled along after him by a thin weave of muscle, ligament and skin. His wife, Maria, had been taken from the church by the Cetniks and raped repeatedly. Before, she had had fine long black hair but by the second month in the refugee camp after repatriation it had turned grey and she had had it cut short. Simun said they had not had sex since they had been reunited. She would not have permitted it and he would not have wanted it.
Penny felt washed out and exhausted by what was said. Almost timidly, she asked a question. What did Harvey Gillot mean to Andrija?
He said, through Simun, that he had not had the will to live since he had recovered in the hospital ward because he was crippled. Life had so little meaning for him that he had refused to go for fitting and training in the use of prosthetic limbs. Now he wished to survive long enough to hear it announced by Mladen – on the cafe veranda – that Harvey Gillot had been killed. His wife was suddenly animated, nodded vigorously, and Penny saw savage beauty – as if a shadow had lifted.
‘Would you thank them, please, and tell them of my gratitude? What will happen to Harvey Gillot should he come here?’
She could see it in their eyes. No answer was necessary. The same death that had awaited Andrija if he’d been captured in the corn, slow and hard.
He was met at the terminal. He had not known it but he reckoned then that he had been tailed off the train from the coast and shadowed across London. An officer, plainclothes, introduced himself as Mark Roscoe’s senior. He decided the sergeant had snitched on him because there was dislike at the man’s mouth and in the eyes. The others were uniform and carried machine pistols. He was escorted through the checks and past Immigration, people staring at him because of the company he kept. Nobody spoke. Other than the first exchange at the introduction, the inspector did not have a word for him. He sat down in the coffee section, didn’t have long to wait because of his late arrival, and Roscoe’s chief stood, arms folded, a few paces away while the guns patrolled. He had coffee and a cake, then bought a newspaper. When the departure was called he hitched up his rucksack, walked to the travelator, the platform, and the allocated carriage. Harvey Gillot didn’t look back, and he thought they’d stay until the train had pulled away.
14
It was, Harvey Gillot accepted, an eccentric route to take. He had come to Paris, had walked from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est.
He had eaten at a fast-food joint, something tasteless but filling, and had drunk mineral water, ignoring the wines. He had sat on a bench among a small army of young American backpackers. There had been police on the station concourse but also patrols of armed troops, who carried low-slung automatic weapons. He had taken, in effect, a fugitive’s route. The onward ticket had been waiting for him at a booth, he had paid cash for it, and it was as though a link had been broken in a chain. He was used to it, practised it with frequency, skill, and would have
