After breakfast, bloody bran, and skimmed milk in the coffee, he attacked it with his scissors and tipped out the contents. He checked them: six ties and four headscarves.
A flash of mischief from Deirdre: ‘I suppose, Benjie, you’re going to play that silly game of yours.’
‘I am indeed.’ The ties went on to one pile on the kitchen table, and the scarves on to another. Between the piles were more padded envelopes, and his notebook of jottings and addresses. He saw his wife’s face screw up in mock-disapproval. ‘What’s the matter with them?’
‘Only that they’re hideous. But, then, vultures aren’t wonderfully pretty.’
‘Tough, my old darling, because I’ll wear the tie and I hope you’ll wear the scarf, because you’re sort of an ex officio member.’
‘So, the daft game can begin.’
He wore, that morning, because it was balls-breakingly cold in the cottage, a thick sweater and a heavy twill shirt with a curled collar, but he slung the tie round his throat and knotted it loosely. The main body of it hung down across the knitwear and the representation of the vulture was big, bold and pretty bloody ugly. The head was large, grotesque and done in a scarlet stitch over the blue of summer skies. His wife had her scarf on her shoulders so both of the vulture heads were well displayed. The game – daft – was an old favourite of Benjie Arbuthnot. He would meet people at a local drinks evening, in London, on a train or on holiday, chat with them for a few minutes and draw them out, because that was a talent. Afterwards he would play the game of creating lifestyles, histories and a future existence for them. He did it sometimes with dry wit, and others with a fortune-teller’s sadness at predicting pestilence and famine. He could be a conjuror, bewitching children so they didn’t know if they watched sleight-of-hand or true magic. Few who heard his game played out would believe his guarantee that his insights came from imagination, not fact.
‘Right. One each for us, no envelope needed. Don’t know about you
… I see a Cold War veteran and a man long dispensed with but who – one last time – punched high above his weight, was given favours by younger colleagues and returned a small measure of them, but is now at grass. His usefulness is exhausted beyond the ability to teach his grandson how to shoot and fish. He’s unlikely to be invited by any future director general to take a drink and chew over old times. Took too much and gave back too little… pretty clapped out. But it’s my club, and its attraction is that the membership is made up of ordinary people. No celebrity is allowed to join and we discourage the puddles of light that the high and mighty like to walk in. We were there and we walked the bloody path. We’re blessed, a happy few. I enjoyed the company of that man when he was young and I was still on the road. They were good times, but they’re gone… I never want to hear Gillot’s name again after today.’
He had addresses and poste restante locations. He would give her each name and she would write on the envelope, then slip inside either a tie or a scarf with Benjie’s visiting card. She wrote Daniel Steyn MD and the name of a shop behind the Ku’damm in Berlin.
‘He was involved. To stay in Vukovar he would have needed a profile as low as a lizard’s. He stood up at the end to be counted, and too many loathed him there because of his innate ability to speak truths that were not wanted – reconciliation, rehabilitation. He gave them the excuse to turn a difficult life, his, into an intolerable one. I think he had a cat and I’m assuming that when he’d found a decent billet for it he would have loaded his car and driven away. I imagine he now practises medicine on behalf of immigrant groups on the fringe of the city, earning a pittance and living in poverty. But he wasn’t a Pharisee and didn’t cross to the far side of the road that day. He’ll wear it with pride, but he lost because he moved away from the one place where he believed his work was valuable. Everyone touched by Gillot in this business is scarred by him. A rogue with a smile and he sucked people in, burdened them with involvement. The sole purpose in Steyn’s life was to be in that community, to work damned hard there. Gillot broke it.’
An envelope was loaded and sealed. The next name she wrote in the bold copperplate hand taught in convent education was Professor William Anders, Department of Forensic Pathology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. She reached for a tie and her husband’s card.
‘A man of importance and stature, used to being heeded. He was confronted with a situation that he had been central to creating but which then had a momentum of its own. He became an ignored nonentity. I believe he will not return in the summer to Vukovar but will permit “pressure of work” in Angola, Rwanda, Congo or Mozambique – anywhere – as an excuse for his absence. That aura of conceit, almost that of the bully, is off him – a plucked cock turkey – and he will never have spoken of the events of that morning in the cornfield. He was a loser, stripped of the certainties of his life. At the very end he was a useless passenger – for him, that means he was, which will have hurt, a major loser. Another – and there are more – who carries the scrapes on his skin of contact with Gillot. A pillar of his life has been snatched away.’
She pushed that filled, closed envelope across the table and took another, a tie and a card, wrote another name and address – Det. Sgt Mark Roscoe, MPS, Great Victoria Street, London. He seemed far away from her, gazing at a whitened, frozen landscape through the window.
‘An epic, almost heroic, loser. A man of great honour and integrity, a foot-soldier with a backpack loaded down by a sense of obligation. He lost out. At first, submitting his reports, he would have been praised for his dedication and his response to the duty-of-care principle. Not for long… The bloody bureaucrats from Health and Safety would then have fastened talons into him. He went far beyond the remit of the job and was way outside the limits of his training – went to the extremes of mission creep. He never liked the target, which made his commitment all the more praiseworthy. Where now? Probably on a burglary squad in Hackney or Hounslow, or doing community liaison in Cricklewood or Camden. He actually put himself in the way of harm – they won’t have liked that. I would hope he’ll wear our tie and rejoice in the membership, that it won’t serve only to remind him of what he was in terms of his career: a loser. His disaster was the day he was assigned to Gillot. Most officers would not have been within a hundred yards of the target that morning on the Cornfield Road, and their careers would have survived intact. Not an ordinary man, and damaged by Gillot, but perhaps he discovered himself in those fields and is the better for it.’
They didn’t know the full name. She wrote Mladen, the village’s name and Vukovar, Croatia. Benjie Arbuthnot’s mood lightened.
‘He’s an old hooligan – knows how to milk the system to the full – and is also a lion of a man. He, and many like him, fought tooth and claw to save their village and bought time – whether intentionally or not is immaterial. The time could be used to rush weapons into the runt of Croatia – every arms dealer in Europe worth his salt was dealing… except that our illustrious government had a policy of non-supply and worked to prevent such shipments. I was an agent in the fulfilment of that policy… Regardless of our efforts, the state survived on the back of the sacrifices of that village and others, and of that town, and survived on the back of the profits of weapons brokers. He was, and is, a magnificent fighter and his community has an excess of fortitude and courage. I want to think they’ll have moved on. I want to believe that Gillot would have provided the spur, as he walked the Cornfield Road before he was shot, for that community, under Mladen’s leadership, to take a step forward and not always be going back into history or merely sideways. There was something extraordinary and emotive about the walk Gillot did. He faced a problem, confronted it, and made the village do the same, as if he dragged them out of their past and shamed them. I think, under that man’s influence, the village will now go forward. Not “forget” and not “forgive” but live without the aid of alcohol and pills. Of course, Gillot brought with him all the family valuables and the deeds of his home. We left them at the church. Where are they now? The church has cellars, where the wounded were treated, where Mladen’s son was born and where his wife died, and I believe they prised up a flagstone, cleared out some earth and made a space large enough to dump Gillot’s bag, then resealed the stone and would have grouted it in. Maybe, one day, we’ll go together and… He’ll come well out of Gillot. Not many others do. I’d like to take you there, and hope you’ll walk that road with me.’
Would have been his age. Not often that Benjie Arbuthnot was prone to emotion. He shook himself, a sort of shudder, then his voice boomed the next name, Penny Laing, and the address was in Yorkshire. She chose a scarf to go into the envelope with his card.
‘Loser. Sad but inevitable. Went native to the extent of putting on the warpaint and taking her clothes off. Huge-time loser, and it’s a merciless world. She had neither the training nor the coldness to confront it. She lost her place on her Alpha team and now works with a team dedicated to obstructing Value Added Tax carousel frauds, which is important for the national exchequer and about as dull as waiting for paint to dry. Her place of work is in the centre of the West Yorkshire town of Halifax and I have no doubt she cries herself to sleep each night. A nice girl, but the water was too deep. If Gillot’s file had never landed on her desk she would be a capable investigator
