speak about God’s will, God’s work and God’s love, but no one wanted comfort.
Petar stood with his wife. She was a stout woman with heavy legs and a drooping bosom. She wore no cosmetics and never had in the thirty-nine years of their marriage. A few of the wives had gone before the trap snapped shut on the village, but she had not. She had been beside him for the two and a half hours since he had pushed himself from kneeling close to the arm and the others had come forward. They had made a ring of stamped earth around the arm. He and his wife did not speak or touch. She had been profoundly deaf since the howitzer shell had come through the wall of their son’s room, scattering molten shrapnel in the corridor, down the stairs and across the hallway. She had been in the kitchen – should have been in the cellar – and he had dug her out with his bare hands, moving bricks and timbers, and done it alone because every other man was required in the slit trenches and the women were with the wounded in the church crypt. Now they communicated by slate board and sticks of chalk but the board and the chalk were in their house. His hands hung slackly at his sides and her arms were folded over her chest. One finger still showed where she had once worn the wedding ring he had given her.
The Croat officer had told Mladen that a forensic specialist was on his way to the field, a man of expertise and experience. In their circle they waited, with the arm, the clawed bone fingers and the shreds of camouflage uniform. A small songbird flew over their shoulders, might have perched on the bones but Andrija’s wife threw a fistful of soil at it, and it was gone. The Croat officer said it might be another hour before the forensic specialist reached them, but they did not break the vigil.
*
‘Well, I’m not exactly top of his Christmas card list,’ Megs snorted theatrically, then shrugged.
‘But you know him?’
‘That’s what I said. More specifically, I know of him and about him. Is that clear enough? And, after a fashion, Harvey Gillot knows me – but, thank God, not as well as I know him. So, what’s on your shopping list?’
She was a regular. For Megs Behan, the coffee shop was her third space and she used it three or four times a week. She took the leather sofa and the low table in front of it in Starbucks just north of the City and came early in the morning. She didn’t move out until the under-manager rolled his eyes at her when the place was filling up with the lunch trade. The other two potential spaces were her flat – one poky bedroom and a decent-sized sitting room, which she shared with two others on the same floor – and her office. Security requirements dictated that the building had a keypad for admission and that visitors were not permitted on the third-floor landing from which Planet Protection worked. The coffee shop was comfortable, reasonably confidential, and the guests for whom she held court were expected to provide a relay of Fair Trade coffee and organic cakes – she never paid, would always make some faux -annoyed grunt and confess to having come out without the purse. Megs could not have afforded Starbucks prices on three or more mornings a week.
‘I said I was at HM Revenue and Customs.’
‘I took that on board – I assume the Alpha team. You’re Penny Laing and your point of interest is Harvey Gillot. So, let’s push on.’
‘I am Alpha team and it is Harvey Gillot.’ Penny Laing allowed herself a short sharp shock of a smile.
Megs Behan worked full time as a researcher for the nongovernmental organisation known as Planet Protection. They monitored the arms trade, lobbied for national and international curbs on the shipment of weapons by Western administrations to third-world conflict zones, and could summon up a network of similar enthusiasts and campaigners across the continent. She had not met the woman opposite her, who sat on a hard-backed chair, leaned forward over the low table between them and boasted a cleavage that was on a different Richter scale from Megs Behan’s. In the nine years she had been with Planet Protection she had met others from HMRC, but Penny Laing was new to her. ‘Are you going in after him?’
‘Can I call you Megs?… Thanks. We’re looking to update our files. Somebody must have said you were a good source. We’re looking at what I suppose we would call the first division of brokers – maybe that’s a dozen. I’ve come to see you. A colleague goes to Amnesty and Oxfam – we’re trawling. Please, Megs, don’t bridle, we all-’
She must have frowned, had probably narrowed her lips and might have let the light blaze in her eyes. The suggestion of collusion had got up Megs’s nose. True, of course, but not welcome. The woman opposite her did not do tact.
‘We all know that your extremely efficiently managed NGO is supported by charitable funds – bring and buy, car-boot jobs, jumble collections – that meet some twenty per cent or, being generous, twenty-five per cent of operating costs, and that the rest of the budget is funded by the taxpayer. It’s from us, Foreign and Commonwealth and Overseas Development. So, please, shall we hack on?’
Megs could have added that Special Branch backsides had sat on the leather sofa or the chair opposite, and spooks. Another truth, and one that Penny Laing would not have appreciated, was that humble little NGOs had better research facilities in the field than the Secret Intelligence Service, the counter-terrorist police, the civil servants of Overseas Development, the diplomats of the FCO, and the investigators of HMRC’s Alpha team, who specialised in arms trafficking and potential breaches of legislation. Megs had heard it said charity workers in East and Central Africa were the best sources for the specifics of what plane had landed at what airstrip and offloaded what cargo into the hands of what rebel group or gang of drunk militia.
‘You’ve been given Harvey Gillot?’
‘It goes without saying, if we sniff any illegality we’ll follow it. We’re looking at Harvey Gillot, but that’s not to say we already have evidence against him. I suppose you could say he’s an individual we regard as having potential.’
Almost with innocence, Megs asked, ‘Do you have experience of the arms trade?’
‘I have some, should be enough for me to be excused patronising shit. I did time in the Congo, the Kinshasa office, attached to the embassy. I haven’t just come from Luton airport and duty-free allowances.’
Megs slapped her own wrist and grinned: her little gesture of guilt. ‘So, Harvey Gillot. Funny thing, and just chance, but we had a girl from a sister group in Paris and she was out yesterday at Charles de Gaulle. Anyway, Harvey Gillot walked right past her, had come off a flight from Burgas and-’
‘Where’s that?’
She reverted back to the theatrical. ‘Where’s that? It’s a Black Sea port city in Bulgaria. Ukraine, for second- hand stuff, is about played out, and Bulgaria is the best source of last-generation weapons for the independent dealers. She identified the flight – before you ask – because he came through with a wedge of passengers who had that place’s tags on their bags, and it was the only flight down at that time. Satisfied? Harvey Gillot is alive and well and hasn’t retired to put his feet up. If he’s just been to Bulgaria, he’s buying.’
‘Big or little fish?’
‘What my kid brother would have called “specimen” size.’ Megs Behan had always enjoyed a captive audience – it seemed to her pretty pathetic that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Alpha team, were tapping her for intelligence again. Again. She savoured it, then pointedly finished her coffee. She was brought another mug and another biscuit. ‘How long have you got?’
‘However long it takes for your insights.’
‘He was born in 1963, in Guildford, Surrey. His dad was a post-office sorting supervisor and his mother worked as a contract office cleaner. They named him Herbert but he didn’t fancy that. He did grammar school but not university and was taken on in an office equipment and stationery business, then picked up by Solomon Lieberman – American, resident in UK, big-time and amoral. That was where he learned the trade. Lieberman died in 1990 and Harvey Gillot took on the business. Company records show that the deal was for a knock-down. He’s done business since then all over except – big except – Central Africa. I’d say his prime areas are the Middle East, with interest in South East Asia. Tends to handle surplus. It wouldn’t be conscience or altruism that’s kept him off Central Africa, just that it’s a crowded market and there are other dark corners where the going’s easier…’
She talked for half an hour. She might, she reflected, be underselling the commercial capabilities of Harvey Gillot. Couldn’t quite bring herself to describe a winning smile, manners and charm, little courtesies. To describe him as good at his job would have been similar, she reckoned, to talking up the communication skills of a grooming paedophile. She said he gave an impression of affluence: he drove a big car, his suits and shirts were good. How did she know so much? She gathered trifles of information from any quarter. It was what the spooks, the Branch, the government offices and HMRC’s Alpha team could have learned, but it would have been time-consuming and they’d have pleaded ‘lack of resources’. She wound up.
‘He has a wife and a teenage kid. He lives on the south coast, on Portland, but I’ve not been there. You see, he is – nothing gilded – a trader in death, misery or destruction. The arms trade is a filthy business and an arms
