The Dealer and the Dead (12 page)

In gaol, he had earned respect and gratitude. He wrote letters for fellow prisoners, advised on the best securities in which their money could be invested; he counselled on legal argument and was a champion of convicts’ rights. He was protected. The son of the older man with whom he sat at Ilok had been in the adjacent cell for thirteen months of Josip’s sentence. No one else in the village would have known how to insinuate a request for a contract into the ranks of Balkan organised crime.

‘We require a man in the killing trade.’

He received no guarantee. It was suggested that questions would be asked and a price considered. Then he would be told what was possible. He hugged the older man, whose son now languished in Belgrade’s central prison and would stay there for another seven years, and clasped the hand of the second. He did not think it peculiar that he, a Croat who had run from battle, should seek the aid of a Serb, whose people had butchered and raped, burned and destroyed his village. The worlds of Zagreb district gaol and smuggling across the Danube did not acknowledge ethnic divisions.

Josip said, ‘I am grateful for your time and and will be grateful for your help. It is necessary to us that Harvey Gillot is killed – and that before he dies he suffers, as we did. Please.’

*

‘What I’m saying, Harvey, is that the trough is getting smaller but the same number of snouts are looking for their share.’

‘Wouldn’t say I disagree, Charles.’

His guest was a sales manager at a prominent industrial company specialising in the manufacture of military equipment. The products, glossily depicted in colour brochures, did not include armour-plated vehicles, weapons or body armour, but were confined to two areas of electronics: communications and vision aids. Harvey Gillot did good business with these people. They were at a pleasant restaurant within walking distance of the Ministry of Defence, HM Revenue and Customs, Parliament and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – what might have been described, laughably, as the pulsebeat of the nation. He liked one-on-one lunches.

‘We’re cutting back on the Paris stand this year, halving the personnel we send to Dubai – and that’s a big shout, letting one in five of the sales team go … I mean, Harvey, it’s not just that money everywhere is tight, it’s also all the ethics crap. It’s becoming harder every day to get permission to export and an end-user certificate past the bloody bureaucrats down the road. Do they want factories closing, skilled production-line craftsmen chucked on the scrap heap? Look, Harvey, I’ve got EUCs, the Military List, the sanctions lists and delivery verification certificates half burying me. Those bastards with ridiculous pension schemes are looking after themselves and making it bloody hard for me to survive … Very good steak, Harvey. Am I ranting?’

No way. The man opposite Gillot, who ate a ten-ounce steak as if he was half starved and would have done a minimum of four lunches a week as a guest, regarded him as a friend. Not reciprocated. Harvey Gillot could be pleasant, might appear generous or to confide indiscretions, but he didn’t carry friendship in his backpack. It was another choice morsel of advice fed to him by Solly Lieberman: friends were for the pub and the bridge table, not for business. He had few friends and many acquaintances. He sensed already that Charles, looking at balance sheets in his sales-director office, studying cash-flow and
performance graphs, was under big pressure to keep turnover ticking. ‘Where are those on high looking favourably at the moment?’

‘Best for licences, on the current list, are Greece, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Oman, Saudi, Romania, Thailand – and you get a nice little pat on the head if it’s the United States of bloody America. Anything else, and it’s how the mood takes them.’

‘What about Georgia?’ His guest was not the only one looking at the twin contradictions of ‘income’ and ‘expenditure’; Harvey Gillot lived and entertained well. A good house, a good car, and an appearance of affluence. Customers had to believe that his stall in the marketplace was guaranteed by ongoing balance-sheet performance. He wore a good suit, a good shirt and a good tie. Solly Lieberman always said that customers and clients were to be impressed, not befriended.

‘My last mention of Georgia to a starched shirt was what I’d call “inconclusive”. Georgia would “be looked at and very closely”. Wasn’t a green light and wasn’t a big red one. If it’s balls-breakingly cold, we need Russian gas and Moscow hates Tbilisi, it would be the red light. If the sun’s shining, there’s a heatwave and we don’t need the gas, it might be a green one. I would have thought it’s tread carefully with Georgia … I wouldn’t want to know, Harvey.’

Harvey Gillot had a restaurant routine: he would book a table and ask for one near the window, the door, the bar or the band, then arrive and say he had changed his mind: he wanted somewhere on the other side of the restaurant, so that if he was targeted and audio surveillance was aimed at the table, the listeners would have a chief financial officer chatting up his PA. He leaned forward, asked the question softly. ‘Things fall off lorries, don’t they?’

‘There have been errors in stock control. We do our damnedest to prevent such leakage – as, Harvey, you would expect.’

The booked table had been beside the window. The one at which they sat was in the centre of the room. ‘Top of my list, I think, would be communications gear. Enough for one brigade,
a crack one, something their opposition can’t break into. It would go down well with some people I’m cosy with.’

‘You a target at the moment, Harvey?’

‘Always a target, goes with the territory. Everyone wants the best communications, but the money isn’t in the bag like it was five years ago.’

‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. But we all have to pedal a damn sight harder now to stand still.’

All right? The mortgage went out on banker’s order, as did the school fees. Josie’s spending and housekeeping money were on more banker’s orders, and there was what she needed for the gardener each week … All right?

‘Yes, “all right”. I’m expecting to survive. Put it this way, Charles, the clouds up there are a little grey but not carrying thunderclaps. Sunny skies ahead, and the horizon’s pretty clear … but if a system came along on a dark night, good encryption and security, location friendly – if you don’t mind trade jargon – for a brigade-sized unit, I might just jump up and down and payment would be wherever … They do a very decent meal here.’

It was regular form. The sales director reached slowly for his inner pocket, but Harvey Gillot intercepted his arm before he could produce his wallet.

‘Thanks very much, Harvey.’

‘Really good to see you again, Charles. If anything comes my way that needs top-of-the-range comms stuff, your people will be my first port of call.’ He glanced at the bill, slipped his platinum card into the reader and tapped out his number. He stood. He was smiling, confident, and the cold wind of recession did not appear to buffet him.

‘Again, thank you, Harvey. Will I be seeing you at the fair next week? We’ll have some good stuff for the punters to paw.’

‘I don’t think so.’

They walked together out on to the street, up a road and past the armed police who guarded the back of the Security Service building and … He traded in firearms: he trafficked them,
brokered them, bought and sold them, and was surprised that the sight of those guns unsettled him. The sales director bent his ear with a joke.

A message went from Belgrade to the Slovakian city of Bratislava, and a question was asked. A man was named and a phone number given for a suburb of the Greek capital, Athens. The caller was told that this man was the best, supreme in his field of operations. An introduction would cost – but the price would not be exorbitant.

A man living in a fine villa with good coastal views out to the east of Athens, high on a gently sloping hill where only his extended family had won the town administration’s approval for development, took a call from a valued friend. An email exchange was arranged through a third party in an Internet café.

A man who was capable? There were many.

One from Ankara was mentioned. Another from Tirana had found employment in Sofia in a dispute between commercial entities. A third from Bucharest was thought to be expert, but perhaps too old … Where was the work to be found? In London.

The man in Athens hesitated. His fingers hovered over the keys, then rapped out a response:

For such work, and for a craftsman of the necessary expertise, I would not suggest employing a man, however skilled, from Turkey, Albania or Romania. Find a man nearer to the workplace for the contract.

The man in Bratislava was now beyond the scope of his contacts. Not so the man in Athens. Would a fee be applicable? It would, of course.

Robbie Cairns was stretched out on the sofa. Barbie would have been at work but for his phone call. He had rung and she had made an excuse to her supervisor – feeling faint, must be the
bug doing the rounds – and had come back from the Oxford Street store where she worked in women’s fragrances.

He dozed. It was early afternoon, and Robbie Cairns had nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, so he had phoned her and she had come, almost running, to Rotherhithe.

He did not own the apartment that was on the second floor of a big new block, across the road from Christopher Close and up from the Jubilee Line station: he rented it for her. She was installed. He might come in the evening, or early in the morning, and he would telephone her if she was already at work. He expected her, if he rang, to pack in work, stop shopping or walk out of a hairdressing salon. She was nine years older than him. That didn’t bother Robbie, and he wasn’t the subject of gossip for having a girlfriend who was near middle-aged when he was not far out of his teens. There was no behind-the-hand sniggering about his relationship because he kept her secret from his family.

He could see her in the kitchenette – she would be preparing the salad to go with his favourite Stilton cheese omelette.

Barbie was not as pretty as his sister, Leanne: she had stouter ankles, a thicker waist, her chest drooped, and there were grey strands in her hair that the bottle had missed. She dressed severely: straight black or navy skirt and blouse. She wore no rings – she was seven years divorced and Robbie had never taken her to a jeweller’s and let her choose a ring that would have cost a few thousand. She had no bracelets, necklaces or gold pendants.

What, then?

He didn’t know. He could see her moving quietly from the sink to the work surface to the fridge. Her legs were bare and she wore no shoes. Her back was to him. He didn’t know why she had agreed to move into the flat or why she accepted the relationship. He was not fond, particularly, of Grandma Cairns, or of his other grandmother, Mum Davies. He had no affection for Dot Cairns, his mother, who had moved away from the Albion Estate and lived now in a bungalow in Kent, on the edge of a village between Meopham and Snodland. Barbie didn’t boss him. She didn’t challenge him.

He had never been asked what he brought to her life. They had been together – in this distanced way – for eight months. He had been up in the West End, in Oxford Street, in the department store, and he and Leanne had been together, joshing. She had wanted perfume and they had found Fragrances. He had sent Leanne back to Lingerie and said he would surprise her. Then, Robbie Cairns, hitman and pride of a notorious Rotherhithe family, had met a divorcee from the West Midlands, who knew nothing of south-east London, the heritage and history of its big names. She had sprayed her wrists with sample after sample, letting him smell the scents with a little mocking mischief in her eyes. He had bought a bottle of Yves St Laurent for Leanne, and had gone back the next day. He had waited on a bench until her shift had finished, then done it twice more the next week. She had agreed to go for a coffee with him. He could have been with the quality girls of other families in Walworth, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, Peckham or Southwark, the great lookers, and an alliance would have been forged, but he had chosen Barbie from Fragrances in a department store. Couldn’t explain it. His brother and sister, his parents and grandparents didn’t need to know.

Maybe, later in the afternoon, after they’d eaten what she was preparing for him, they’d go to bed. Maybe they wouldn’t. If they did, afterwards he’d shower and then he’d slip away. He never stayed the whole night. Did she know what he did for a living? He hadn’t told her and she had never asked. After a hit, he’d come to the flat and turn on the local London news to hear what the detectives were saying and see the people in white suits crawling over the street scene, but she never asked why he watched, so intense.

Robbie Cairns had a real affection for his Barbie, couldn’t match it for anyone else. She soothed him and kept him calm. She was the only person – man or woman – he needed … and he waited for the next call-out, for the next time his father was satisfied with a deal and gave it a green light …

*

A link in Lublin, south-eastern Poland, threw up the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile, one of thousands being manoeuvred, virtually untraceable, around northern Europe.

A call was made to the number. Gulls howled and fought as they dived for fish scraps. A German stood on a quayside close to the old fish market in Hamburg and said that if work was to be done in London a local man should do it.

Would a fee be paid? Most certainly. The German made a trifling remark about the purchaser and was told that it was not ‘he’ but ‘they’. A village had gone forward with the contract, would buy a man. A village? Where was it? He was told that his caller had no idea. The German knew a man in London. Would he be paid for his time? A guarantee.

The German called London. Said when he was arriving and into which terminal he would come.

The van was an oven. Inside, behind the empty driver’s cab, there was sufficient room, barely, for two men and a woman to be squashed together; at any time two could observe through the drilled holes and hold a camera to either. On the outside, the van carried the name and logo of a company that repaired gas pipes.