gear brought on the backs of mules through the Chechen mountains from Georgia because people wanted the “freedom” you take for granted. In your book, I suppose there are good guns and bad guns, justifiable bullets and murderous bullets. I don’t make such judgements. I don’t have a check list and tick off boxes because the newspapers, and your organisation, tell me that one side in each conflict is good and the other bad. The majority of the trading I do is in the interests and aims of HMG. Her Majesty’s Government uses taxpayers’ money to shift firepower around where it’s needed in the furtherance of policy. Didn’t you know that?’
She bridled. ‘You’re confusing me.’
‘Not difficult. I don’t think you’ve ever been to war. I think you’re just a keen paper-pusher, but I think also you’re too old to be messing with jargon, posters and placards. I think you know small things only, because from big things comes doubt.’
She finished the glass.
She stepped over the vest on the carpet and was close to him. He made no effort to cover himself. She thought she recognised fatigue, but the smile came through and lit his face. Of course, his responses were rubbish and insulting to her intelligence. Of course – without the Scotch – she could have stood her corner and argued him to the floor. What derailed her certainties was that he seemed so indifferent to her attacks and so relaxed in his answers. He didn’t fight her. And an image came into her mind. The man in her picture had dark hair, most likely dyed, and a warrior’s moustache. He wore a heavy black overcoat against the night cold, and was pushed forward by masked men until the noose came into the phone’s lens, voices were raised and abused him. That New Year’s Eve she had been in a Hackney pub, tanking with friends before a party. The television had blared the insults thrown at the fallen president as he was pushed on to the scaffold. She had choked at the sight of it and had looked away from the execution of Saddam Hussein. She had thought the transmission obscene and – frankly – it had buggered up for her the supposed night of celebration. The deposed dictator had not cringed, had not shown fear. She felt, then, ashamed. The idea of an argument on the evils of the international arms trade with a man who would die in the morning seemed to her to degrade… She could have argued and won, but… He would be bloodied, broken, battered, dead before the sun was high.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘I expect I’ll see you tomorrow, Miss Behan. It’s what I’m aiming towards.’
She didn’t understand, and didn’t know how to react. She could turn and head sharply for the door, slam it after her. She could sit on the bed beside him and talk the politics of universal disarmament. She could stand by the window and wait for the sunrise… Or she could have another drink, roll a cigarette and do the vigil.
She thought, then, that he slept.
She fetched red wine, vodka, gin and a tin of tonic, went back to the bed, took one side of it – careful not to wake him – and settled without touching him. She pondered which bottle she should open first as she made the cigarette and lit it.
They would kill him in the morning. Before they did so he wouldn’t beg or plead. She supposed it would be a release from the burden of being condemned. The drink slipped down well and he slept cleanly, his breath regular. She knew what time the phone would ring with the call, but thought dawn would be with her first.
It was still dark when the party broke up and the last stragglers headed for bed.
Back-slaps and minor hugging from William Anders for Benjie Arbuthnot.
Roscoe watched. He thought their embrace ostentatious and that they shouldn’t have behaved as if this was an alumnae reunion, but their talk had been heavy with nostalgia – where they had been, whom they had known, which warlord had slaughtered what community, and where the Soviets had fouled up. He thought the occasion had merited some solemnity. He had been told why the forensic pathologist was on site, but the matter of Arbuthnot’s appearance had not been dealt with. He couldn’t imagine what brought a retired spook to the backwater of Vukovar, but his time would come.
And Anders’s side-kick, Dan Steyn, had left an hour earlier in a pretty awful state – Roscoe had seen his headlights traverse the bar windows. He’d liked him, and thought the man gave a decent appraisal of the town and its atrocity, but it had been black-edged and without optimism.
The woman from Revenue and Customs had been late leaving them, but little Megs Behan had gone early. He rather envied her common sense in heading for bed before the others had hit the heavy drinking. Funny old world, but he reckoned Megs Behan was the pick of the bunch. She had a cause and made sacrifices for its integrity. He’d liked her; all that irked him was her blatant satisfaction at having booked a seat for the morning’s show. He had, almost, admired her one-woman stand at the house. Mark Roscoe would have claimed he could recognise a fraud at fifty paces and the honest people who had principles worth sticking with. He rated Megs Behan in that slot.
He didn’t know about Revenue and Customs. He had found her monosyllabic in her answers on the detail of the village, unhelpful. There was, obvious to him, some disaster in her recent past but he had neither time nor the inclination to probe and… He stood to shake Anders’s hand after the clinch had been broken, and wished the man well for whatever sleep was still available.
He refilled his glass with flat mineral water from a bottle. It was three hours, minimum, since he had drunk wine, and he thought Benjie Arbuthnot had shown similar abstinence, and done it cleverly: others’ glasses filled and him passing the bottle round but not topping his own.
They were alone.
Roscoe wondered how long it would be before a woman came round with a vacuum-cleaner and how long before the waiter, asleep on his arms at the bar, would shudder and wake. Roscoe was good at missing sleep, could survive on cat-naps, but he admired the older man’s stamina.
‘Should I know, Mr Arbuthnot, why you’re in Vukovar? I mean, all the crap about the Vulture Club, and the grandstanding, doesn’t tell me why a has-been from Spooksville is here.’ He had hoped that provocative rudeness would rile. It didn’t.
‘Tying loose ends.’ A shrug, a grin, a gesture of the hands that was a pro-consul’s bogus helplessness.
‘I’ve heard that before from you – it’s garbage. What should I assume?’
‘Sergeant, assume what you wish.’
‘For reasons best known to himself, Harvey Gillot will walk the Cornfield Road this morning. Will you be alongside him?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Then… when he welshed on the deal and the men who waited for him lost their lives, were you with him?’
‘Beyond your remit, Sergeant.’
‘Is he your stalking horse? Should you be doing the walking?’
‘This isn’t an interview room, Sergeant.’
Roscoe, for want of something better, mocked, ‘Will you walk in front of him and do something heroic?’
‘No.’
‘Not the man of the hour? Does “tying loose ends” not mean intervention?’
‘Listen to me for a few moments, Sergeant. My wife knows a girl who used to work – a Zoological Society grant kept her alive – on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Her expertise was with cheetahs. Wonderful animals in their natural habitat – can do a sprint of up to three hundred yards at seventy miles an hour. Magnificent. Plenty of them there but that doesn’t make their survival certain, they’re vulnerable. Lions come and eat their young. The girl my wife knows used to sit in her Land Rover and follow them. The adults would sprawl on the roof above her – tough if she had a call of nature – and the young ones had the names of chocolate bars, Dairy Milk or Fruit and Nut, which the girl used to dream of. But no matter how attached to them she felt, she lived by a rule that couldn’t be circumvented. She couldn’t intervene. She might have followed the life of a female cat through conception, gestation, birth of her cubs, then the upbringing of the little ones, them being taught to hunt, kill and survive, but the lion pride comes close and the young ones are doomed. She cannot charge the pride with her Land Rover or blast on the horn, she must sit and watch the massacre. It’s a rule in any jungle, any wilderness, that events must be permitted to take their course. Harvey Gillot looks after himself.’
‘Not good enough for me.’
‘Has to be, Sergeant.’
‘I have no jurisdiction here, no police liaison, no back-up and no weapon.’
‘Correct on all counts.’
