Arms and the Women (13 page)

A couple of minor but lucrative European and near-East deals followed. But your ace-in-the hole, the 'biggie' which was going to make your retirement fortune was the cache of state-of-the-art guns and missiles you'd left buried somewhere deep in enemy country during that cross country trip which ended in the Liverpool fiasco.

We know now (and as usual with Popeye, we've got the bodies to prove it) that the chosen site was a remote and inaccessible spur of Kielder Forest on the English/Scottish border.

For this cache you wanted a customer with serious money.

What you found was PAL, the smallest but most extreme of the Colombian guerilla groups, fallen on hard times not so much because of the activities of the official counter-insurgency forces, but because its immodestly, though not altogether inaccurately, self-styled 'legendary' leader, Fidel Chiquillo, had managed to get up the noses of high command in both Fare and ELN, the two most powerful rebel organizations.

They set about squeezing PAL out of existence by drying up its source of arms in the Americas. Word was spread; you sell to PAL, you don't sell to us.

So here we have Chiquillo, desperate to re-establish himself on the Colombian scene, ready to go anywhere to do a deal. He has a contact in Europe, his negotiator, who sniffs out the deal with Popeye.

But even so far afield, deals are not easy for Chiquillo to make.

To get himself safe to the UK, to do the deal securely, then to get the shipment intact to South America, he needs allies powerful enough to ignore Fare, ELN, the drug barons and even the elected government itself.

So he turns to the
los Cojos,
that is
el Consejo Juridico,
the national security group whose operations are so clandestine they make the official secret police look like Dixon of Dock Green. Their
jefe supremo,
Colonel Gonzalo Solis (who lost a foot in a bomb attack in 1981, hence the nickname
cojo,
the lame one), knows where all the bodies are buried, which is not surprising as he has buried so many of them himself. Colombian politicians need to be nimble-footed indeed to satisfy the conflicting demands of such rapidly changing partners as the guerilla groups, the drug lords, the United Nations and their own electorate, and over many years, El Cojo has come to call the steps. He is the only man powerful enough to guarantee the deal, but even he hesitates before going up against the loose anti-PAL alliance which applies in the Americas.

But in the end the offer of a commission to be paid in Colombia's favourite currency, pure cocaine, equal to the amount required by Popeye for his weapons proves impossible to resist.

The PAL embargo back home, he decrees, does not apply to deals done in Europe.

And to those in both high and low places who are ready to protest against his decision, he offers a private reassurance that there is no risk of a PAL resurgence. Indeed, quite the contrary. Chiquillo must come personally to close the deal as El Cojo's guarantee of safe conduct applies only to the guerilla leader himself, not his negotiator. And once the deal is done, the Cojos' European chief, Jorge Casaravilla, a man so ruthlessly violent that the colonel likes to keep him several thousand miles of blue water away, has instructions to scoop up everything and everyone with extreme prejudice.

Chiquillo agrees to the terms and makes his payment to El Cojo. His negotiator makes the final arrangements, and at last, by ways and means undetectable even by the eagle eye of soaring Gaw and the strange magic of his Sibyl, Chiquillo arrives in the UK and goes with his two Cojos escorts to the rendezvous in Kielder.

Anyone familiar with Popeye Ducannon's track record might have forecast what happened next.

As always, chaos, catastrophe, corpses, and blood on the forest floor.

And, equally as always, when the gunsmoke settles, Popeye pops up out of the forest with nothing worse than a couple of flesh wounds, a crease along the side of his skull, and a bad headache.

All this and more he tells his one surviving colleague, Jimmy Amis, known as Amity James because of the friendly way he has with him when blowing off your kneecaps.

And all this and more Amity tells us when we pick him up and shake several credit cards under several names out of his pockets and point out that having qualified for early release under the Good Friday Agreement does not disqualify him from early return under the common law.

The
more
he tells us is that Popeye heard Chiquillo, the other survivor, telling someone on his mobile that he'd be with them at somewhere called the CP in two to three hours.

If he made it, that was. For according to Popeye, Chiquillo had taken a hit.

More importantly to Popeye, he'd taken both the weaponry and the bagful of coke which was payment for it.

Having worked all his life in a twilight world of deceit and betrayal, Popeye isn't much bothered by the whys and wherefores. All he wants is what he regards as his pension fund back. The only clue he has is what he knows about Chiquillo's negotiator. This, together with what the Cojos know about Chiquillo himself, might well lead them to both the man and the arms.

Alliances with Jorge Casaravilla are notoriously dangerous.

But so are alliances with Popeye Ducannon!

The last thing he said to Amity James was, 'I'm just off to see a man about a dog. Or maybe it's a dog about a man. Mind the shop while I'm gone, will you?'

Since then, absolute silence.

Except in our work as in nature there is no such thing.

Have you heard that silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?

There's always something piping.

And here I sit, Sibyl in her lonely cave, recording and replaying till finally I recognize the tune.

Piper, pipe that song again!

They're still here, that's what my sensors tell me and that's what Gaw wants to hear, those arms and the man who stole them, and the drug fortune he didn't pay for them, all still here hidden away somewhere connected with something contracted to CP. What does my
Word Search
give me?

Canadian Pacific
? It's a long way round to Colombia!

Cape Province
? As above only more so.

Central Park
? Worth checking which northern cities have a Central Park.

C.P. Snow
? Does anyone still read him, I wonder.

Chelsea pensioner
? At least it's vaguely military.

Command post
? So's this. Right place for arms, I suppose.

Common prostitute
? Hardly.

Communist Party
? An office? Do they still have offices since
glasnost?

Perhaps it was
sea
followed by something beginning with P?

Or maybe it was Spanish.
Si pez
? Yes fish.
Si pie?
Yes foot.

You're getting silly, girl.

Face it, you're not expected to work things out, just sit here and feed things in.

While the great giant Gaw is striding around out there, making sure he doesn't tell anyone, including me, more than they need to know.

Oh, there are things you need to know, Gaw, and one day soon I look forward to telling you them. Then perhaps you'll realize that walking over people is not a vocation for a true man, or even a grotesque imitation of one.

I'm Popeye the pop-up man

Let them hit me as hard as they can

I'll be here at the finish

'Cos I eat up my spinach

I'm Popeye, the pop-up man!

ix

bag lady on a bike

Shirley Novello lay back in the front seat of her Fiat Uno.

Well, maybe
lay back
was stretching it a bit, which was more than even a medium-sized woman like herself could comfortably manage in such a small car. At least she could drive it comfortably, which longer legs would have made difficult. Mind you, a bit of discomfort would have been a cheap price to pay for longer legs. She looked down at hers with a critical eye. Even with ninety-five per cent of them visible as they emerged from a leather skirt hardly broader than a lumberjack's belt, they couldn't be termed long. What they could be termed was muscular. And what the hell was wrong with muscular? Muscularity was a quality she greatly admired in men. She found it a turn-on, and saw no reason to bother with people who didn't return the compliment. Anyway, above the waist she could compete with anyone, she thought complacently, raising her eye's to the straining buttons of her sun top. Not many of those in a kilo ho ho, as the wet wankers in the canteen would say if they ever got wind of the battened-down bounty lurking beneath the sack-like muddy-brown T-shirts she favoured at work. These, plus a matching selection of baggy trousers, had dampened down awareness of her as a woman to the point where the sexist cracks were conventional rather than focused. A cop-out? Not really. A cop-in, more like it; meaning you sussed out the best way to permit yourself to function most efficiently as a cop. Like Sergeant Wield. There were still plenty of mutt-headed myopes around the station who didn't realize he was gay, and were ready to give you an argument about it.
How could anyone who looked like him and talked like him and put the fear of God into you like him be gay? Stands to reason.
Wankers!

It was because of Wield that she was here on duty now, dressed in play gear rather than her workaday drabs. She'd been clocking off at four when he'd grabbed her.

'Shirley, I need a body to spell Seymour watching Mrs Pascoe. Any chance?'

At least he framed it as a question.

She said, 'Sarge, I've got plans for tonight that it'll cost hearts to break. I can give you till eight if that's any good.'

'That'll do fine. Thanks,' he'd said.

So he was grateful which was nice. But was he trustworthy? She was due to meet a new boyfriend at a new club, both of which she had high hopes of, at eight thirty. Thirty minutes wasn't much to get home and changed in even if her relief turned up on time. So, working on the principle that she wasn't going to be under the gaze of the station neanderthals, she'd come on duty dressed for partying.

Privately she thought this watch on the Pascoe house was overkill. Chummy, who was probably this lad Roote, wasn't likely to come back for a third go. She'd dug up the case file and he sounded a real nut. It had been back when Pascoe was still an unmarried sergeant and La Pascoe was teaching at a college where the Principal had been topped. Roote had evidently assaulted both Pascoe and the Fat Man, breaking a bottle of Scotch over the latter's head. Just went to show there was good even in the worst of us! So, bang him up and fix for a patrol car to crawl past
maison Pascoe
every couple of hours!

Still, overtime was overtime. She turned on Radio One full blast and settled back to fantasize about the muscular young man who was her escort that night.

Then, just before seven, she saw the bag lady.

She was on a bicycle, but she was undoubtedly a bag lady. There were three plastic carriers dangling from the handlebars and another two either side of the saddle. The woman herself was something the far side of seventy, maybe the far side of eighty, with a round leathery face like an under-inflated football and wispy white hair escaping from beneath an unravelling straw hat whose brim looked like a horse had dined on it. Her ample body was draped in several layers of clothing that it would have taken an archaeologist to date. The bike itself was coeval with its rider, or perhaps a little older, its flaking khaki paint suggesting it might have seen service in the Great War.

Novello watched with mild amusement as this figure creaked towards her, then with heightened interest as the machine scraped to a halt, and finally with active alarm as the dismounted woman began to open the Pascoes' gate.

It was hard to leave the car with dignity, but practise had enabled her to emerge from it with speed. The woman saw her coming and paused by the open gate. It occurred to Novello that if any, or all, of the carriers contained a deadly weapon, she was presenting a pretty unmissable target. A low ornamental wall to her right offered the only real cover and she flinched towards it as the old woman dipped her hand into one of the bags. But all she came out with was a large magnifying glass which she raised to her eyes, the better to study the approaching DC.

'Excuse me, madam,' said Novello, pulling out her ID. 'Detective Constable Novello, Mid-Yorkshire CID. Do you mind telling me who you are and what you're doing here?'

'If you experience difficulty in answering these questions yourself, then perhaps you have strayed into the wrong employment, my girl,' said the woman, in a voice rich with the kind of orotundity Novello only ever heard when she chanced on some ancient actress being interviewed on the telly.