End it.’
‘I say to you I cannot.’
‘The cry is for leadership.’ It was the last card of the deck. He seemed to slap it down on green baize as if he was with Deirdre in Shropshire and among other dinosaur friends, not here. The shouting was deafening and they came close. The hip flask was rammed back into his hand.
‘You are wrong, sir. The cry is for blood. If I do not give them blood I am not the leader. The whiskey is good. Thank you, sir.’
As the purveyor of a trade where deceit, obfuscation, half-truths, half-lies and deceptions were praised he found rank honesty interesting when it was shown him. Almost deflating. He couldn’t disagree with the man.
Level with him, not half a dozen feet away, Gillot staggered, seemed to pause, and reached down into the waist of his trousers. He dragged out a lightly filled plastic bag – it would have come from any high-street supermarket – and threw it at Benjie. The old spy scrabbled for it, dropped the flask and had to crouch to pick it up. He saw the engraved skull and the crossed bones, the words from the cap-badge, ‘Or Glory’. He might have said: Fuck all glory here, my old cocker. It might have been Anders who grabbed him, or Steyn, but his eyes had misted. He clutched the plastic bag and was swept along with the herd.
Had he been recognised? He didn’t know – no greeting had been offered him. He had expected none. He had said that Gillot must face and confront, and he now did so. At a cost.
*
They came together. A trip, a push from the side, a knife brandished in his face, and a woman’s spit on his cheek. He lost his balance. Harvey Gillot went down. Darkness closed around him and the brightness of the sun went. So many of them, pressing, shoving, knees jabbed into his chest and elbows. No room for them to swing their fists or use their feet. He tried to curl up, protect his privates and face. The bedlam above him was indistinct… and he heard Roscoe.
As if Roscoe took control. A little pool of light first. It lit faces and he saw the beards on the men, the gaps of missing teeth, and smelt the breath. He saw the lines at the mouths of old women and the crows’ feet, and Roscoe’s hands had hold of his shirt and the back of his trousers, at the belt. He was lifted. More light came. Was in his eyes. His phone, deep in his pocket, rang its chimes. Might be Charles or Monty or the good guy in Marbella, or his wife and daughter. Might be long-distance international from seaside Bulgaria or Tbilisi – or might be someone who sold armoured saloon cars. Wouldn’t be a salesman from a personal-injury insurance company, peddling.
He stood. Might have been down for five seconds, no more than ten. The phone stopped.
Gillot kicked out his right leg to make the first step and go forward. His eyes squinted and were wet. He had taken that first step, then cannoned into a man and damn near bounced back off Roscoe. He tried to pull Roscoe away and hadn’t the strength. Abused him – ‘Don’t want you, don’t need you.’
Saw, up ahead, the gunman. Near to him a cross was strewn with ornaments and pennants, planted in a ploughed stretch of field. Behind it were green grass and a tree-line. Roscoe had his arm and used his other hand to push men and women back. He sensed, but didn’t turn, Megs Behan behind him, the doctor who had driven him and Benjie Arbuthnot. There were others who meant nothing to him. Roscoe had hold of him, shepherded him and half- shielded him. He didn’t know what he meant, but he shouted, ‘I can do this myself.’
Almost a sneer: ‘Right now, you can’t even piss on your own.’
‘Don’t want, need-’
‘You’ve got me.’
‘And the great plan, you got that?’
A hesitation, a pang of uncertainty. ‘Working on it.’
Which meant – and Harvey Gillot’s dulled mind saw it – that Mark Roscoe, the detective who had come to his home to plead a future life in a safe-house with a panic button beside the bed and been rejected – now had nothing more in his knapsack than the thought of walking in front of him, acting out the part of a fairground coconut. Would he have survived if he’d stayed down on the path and the crowd’s hands and boots had been at him, with the knives and rocks that were about to follow? Probably not. Would he have survived if Roscoe had not pulled him upright? Possibly not. He was now in debt to the detective.
‘I owe you nothing.’
‘Just keep walking. Walk right on past him.’
‘And what do I do?’
‘You walk. He’s mine.’
Robbie Cairns watched them come. Gillot, the target, was at the front, looking like a derelict who slept rough in Southwark Park on the far side of Lower Road. He didn’t think the target could have walked if he hadn’t been held up – by a policeman. The man would have had to spend a couple of hours being made up and costumed to disguise himself. Obvious he was a policeman.
They were coming closer to him. He stood with his legs a little apart, his weight on his toes, and the sunlight was across him, not in his face. The policeman wore a suit but had been on the ground and was dusty: there was mud on his face, his shirt was messy and his tie askew. The target, Robbie Cairns saw very clearly, tried to free himself from the policeman’s grip and wriggled, was a fucking eel, which rucked up the suit jacket. If a shoulder holster had been worn, Robbie Cairns would have seen it. If there had been a pancake version on the belt, he would have seen it.
They were fifty or sixty paces from him, and he saw now that the great crowd behind and alongside had thinned and that most of the people, whether they were in fatigues or wore black, had drifted into the corn and trampled it but they gave him space.
There was a knot – ordinary clothes and ordinary people except one idiot in a straw hat with a bright handkerchief half out of his jacket pocket – of two women and three men, a couple of paces behind the policeman and the target. He had the pistol out of his jacket pocket and had been satisfied with his shooting early that morning of the fox. He could justify it as a test firing and he had almost forgotten the eyes of the animal, the mouth and its tongue.
The man, the idiot, broke clear of the people who followed and split off into the corn. He had, a moment, a sight of the hat, then lost it, and his eyes were back on the track. They were going to fucking bluff it. Not many did. A few thought they could walk past, as if he wasn’t there, as if the pistol wasn’t aimed at them – not many. He cocked it, and the bullet went up into the breech.
Robbie Cairns thought that maybe he would have to shoot a policeman, unarmed, and didn’t feel it mattered to him. He had shot a fox and that mattered more, and had strangled his girl with the hands that held the pistol and that mattered most… They came on and walked at him.
20
Curious, but he felt a sort of calm. Almost as if he was at peace. He smiled.
He walked better now, no longer fighting against the detective’s hand on his arm. He didn’t try to squirm clear of him. Maybe another twenty steps and they would be close enough for a hired man to shoot. Maybe another twenty steps beyond that and they would be clear of him and out of his range… Forty steps to walk. Best foot forward, Harvey. And when he was clear, he was free. When he was free, it was over… Start of the ‘sunlit uplands’, Harvey boy, new world, a new life, forty steps away. No more looking over his shoulder, chasing shadows, running because the wind hit the roof or a tree cracked above a pavement. What stood in the way of the forty steps was the slight-built man, short and forward on his toes, like a boxer ready to fight. In the way was the gun in his hand. He kept the smile. He recognised the gun as one from the factories of Israeli Military Industries but couldn’t recall whether it was the Desert Eagle or the Jericho 941, which seemed to matter to him. They were fast thoughts, a drowning man’s views of life, and took him through three or four steps.
Roscoe murmured, ‘You keep walking. I lead and you’re covered by me. Just go on by him.’
‘Not your fight.’
‘Just fucking douse it.’
‘Why are you here?’ Time for one more question and time, perhaps, for one more answer.
‘Not for you. Don’t go getting an ego surge on that. My badge. My job. Enough?’
