animosity, a blaze of enmity – stiffened. He said, ‘Slowing down, are we? Can’t have that. In the rulebook the Vulture Club keeps going all night before a killing and a feed.’
He clapped his hands above his head and the waiter scurried to him.
When he came away from the desk, his key in one hand, plastic bag in the other, a town map squashed under his arm, he saw the waiter going to a group. No eye contact, but he recognised Roscoe. Didn’t remember meeting the taller and smarter-dressed of the women but, of course, he hadn’t forgotten the maniac, the obsessive, the crusader with the bullhorn. There were two older men, who peered at him as if captivated by his appearance. And he saw Benjie Arbuthnot – recognisable, unforgettable from years back – make a half-turn in his chair, and reach up to scribble on the receipt pad that the waiter had brought with the bottle. Couldn’t have said that he’d expected him to be there. The big man was obviously holding court and in control. He grimaced and left the desk.
He gave no sign of recognition to Arbuthnot, nor was rewarded with one. So, all of them in place and a few other camp followers tucked in for company. He thought, across the bar space and the lobby, that Roscoe tried to ‘touch’ him. He gave nothing back. And no response to Megs Behan, the bullhorn woman, but there was hostility in her and triumphalism. None of them could have said he had gone towards them with arrogance or something craven. To go to the stairs he needed to turn his back on the group. Good move, brilliant. He went slowly, took time with each step. They would all have seen the drilled holes in the jacket, over his spine. He recalled that he had been told he couldn’t sit around, make funeral arrangements and check his will. He went up the stairs. He’d been told he’d be a fugitive for the rest of his days unless he travelled. He came out on to the first-floor corridor. The alternative was looking over his shoulder for the rest of his days He checked the rooms’ numbers and kept walking. The instruction had been that he should face and confront it. He found the door, put in the key and turned the lock. He thought a promise had been kept. He had asked Benjie Arbuthnot where he would be. Not too far behind you, for my sins, there and thereabouts. One promise made and another kept. He closed the door behind him. The only one he would trust was Benjie Arbuthnot, no one else. He didn’t know if, in the morning, he would be pickled and hung- over or sober and clear-headed – there was no one else he could trust.
The curtains were open and the moon’s wash flecked the river. The ripples – from its current – made silver threads. In a direct line from his window to the river, a land spit divided the marina of pleasure boats from the tributary that flowed into the Danube, and at its end was the white cross of carved stone. Maybe it had been a private quarrel. Maybe he had no business there. Maybe the wrong was too great for penance. He dumped his jacket on the chair, stripped off his shirt and threw it over the jacket. The holes looked big and black. He slipped the Velcro straps and shrugged out of the vest, letting it fall at his feet. He thought it had done him well, had brought him there. His body ran with sweat from the day in the train, the walk in the city and the ride to the town. He slipped out of his underwear and kicked off his shoes and socks.
He flopped on to the bed. He didn’t know where else he should have been. He hardly knew the place. From the taxi’s windows, he had seen a high water tower, with holes in its brickwork, and a few collapsed homes, but had gained no sense of life here nineteen years before, nor had wanted to.
Near to midnight. A small breeze came through the window, touched the curtain drapes and played on his skin.
He shivered. They showed contempt for him. He had been brought to where the cross was, rough wood planks, nailed together, no craftsmanship. Beads on strings, chains, ID cards and football pennant flags hung from it, and photographs in sealed frames that might have been waterproof. It had been made clear to him that this was where he should wait. He had subsided onto the ground, recently ploughed. He still sat there, had not moved except to shiver.
It was not the cold that made Robbie Cairns shiver. He was near the tree-line and could hear running water, the swirl of a slow-moving river rounding snagged tree-trunks. The shivering was from what else he heard – not the river: the owls shrieked. It had started with one, which had been joined by a throatier bird, then a third. One had flown past him, low and big and silent, and had been within a few feet of him. He’d flinched and flung up his arms to cover his face. The fox had come near.
There had been a Scouts group at school in Rotherhithe, and the Cubs had met in a hall one evening a week. Twice a year for the Scouts and once for the Cubs, they went camping somewhere in Kent. He’d never gone near it, hadn’t envied the few who’d joined. He hadn’t slept outside, under the skies, clear or cloudy, in his life. When he was young and his dad wasn’t away, they had gone to a guest house on the south coast or to a caravan – depended on the family’s finances. He hadn’t liked the caravan and undressing where his brother, his dad or mum or Leanne might see him.
The fox had come within six feet of him, closer than the owl had flown, had been wary.
Robbie Cairns quivered. He was frightened. A stalking fox and a swooping owl were beyond his experience.
He could look back on the last days, hours, and recognise that the fear had been in him – to different degrees – since he had come out of the bedroom and seen her with the questions in her eyes and the Baikal pistol in her hands. He had been free of it only for those moments when he had been on a step to a high-rise apartment block, a whistle had sounded and the target had come.
What was left to him? Respect. He didn’t think he would ever walk again along Albion Street, Lower Road, Gunwale Street or Needleman Street, wouldn’t see again where Brindle had been shot by the hitman, where George Francis had been dropped or where… He wanted to be left with respect. They’d say in the pubs of Rotherhithe, Bermondsey and Southwark that Robbie Cairns had been a top man, had been chosen for a top job, with all the international links – big stuff for a big man. He’d followed his target half across the world and had done what he was paid for and- Didn’t imagine the end. Just did the talk in the streets he knew, and the respect he had earned there. He shivered… And Leanne would walk tall and be pointed out as his sister and she’d have pride in him because of respect. Nothing would stop the shivering, and then the fucking fox moved again. He thought of Leanne, clung to her.
She said to the detective, ‘That’s it, all the dates. That’s what he’s done.’ She pushed the paper across the table. A denunciation in her girlish uneducated handwriting.
‘Thank you, Leanne. Very sensible.’
‘He hurt a woman, didn’t he? Strangled her. He should be taken out to Epping and hung in a tree, slow so he’ll dance.’
Late on, past midnight, moths floundered against the cafe’s dimmed lights and the principals of the village determined the day ahead. They knew where Gillot would come from and where he would walk to, and expected that on the way he would attempt to smooth-talk them or bluster, because that was what the woman had told Simun. They knew where the hired man would be, had left him there.
To be decided: where they would be. Some sat, some stood, some paced in the street below the veranda. All would have recognised that the village faced a huge moment. Mladen was the leader but there were no bureaucrats to rubber-stamp what he told them. Each suggestion he made faced contradiction, dispute, argument, and he would let Maria’s opinions counter Tomislav’s. He would hear the grated complaints of the Widow, while Petar claimed that the spilled blood in the cornfield, his son’s, gave him precedence and…
Simun brought his father a bundle of paper – the order forms from the cafe’s wholesale supplier – and Petar tossed him a stubbed pencil. He wrote the words boldly: Kukuruzni Put. He drew sharp strokes, fast sketch lines, recalled old memories. The winding path of the river, the Vuka, and the village of Luza, which he did with a squiggle of house shapes. They had come off the street below the veranda, and the Widow, Maria and Petar’s wife had chairs at the table Mladen used. The rest crowded close to him, hemmed him in. His boy gave him a red-ink ballpoint.
The route was drawn. The Cornfield Road lived again, for all of them.
She said where she would be. Would she be able to walk that distance back? She demanded it. On the paper, Mladen drew a tiny square to mark the position of the sixty-five-year-old Wehrmacht bunker, the place where the track began, and wrote the name of Zoran’s widow. He drew the route, its angled turns and where it went close to the trees that had hidden the snipers – Andrija said he would be there – and past the house with no roof, where Maria would be. Tomislav chose a place close to her. The line went to the north of the scribbled shapes that were homes in Bogdanovci, indefensible once the village had been overwhelmed, and he found a place for Petar, who would be with his wife, and wrote their names. He took for himself the place where the hired man had been left, where the cross was planted. When the village principals had been allocated their places, he allowed others who pressed close to him to say where they wanted to be. Some jostled him, jogging his writing.
