The Dealer and the Dead (24 page)

‘What if I happen – God forbid – to be beside him when a shot is fired? What if there’s a bomb under the car, and they don’t know which car I drive and which is his? And I have a fifteen-year-old daughter – it’s her home as much as mine. Can I have,
please,
Mr Roscoe, some answers?’

Roscoe had brought Bill and Suzie with him. Bill would be padding round the garden, checking out the boundaries of the property, and Suzie would be in the village, learning about the community and routes into it. It was, indeed, a minefield. The Flying Squad liked to put the people in place, then wait for a hit or a snatch to be just about there, in good clear view in front of them, before they intervened. Then they ended up with the
proper charges, not a conspiracy offence, but it made for difficult judgements and frayed nerves. He came clean, about as clean as he could.

‘Your husband – as I am sure he’s told you – was involved with people in Croatia in 1991. The degree of involvement, and what happened, he has chosen not to confide to us, but he has let us understand that a disputed matter lies between the parties – himself and a village in the east of the country. We don’t yet know why the matter has been resurrected after nearly two decades. If your husband, Mrs Gillot, has been perceived as a cheat, and this community has identified him – maybe located him – we have no reason to doubt their motivation to move on him and, perhaps, you, your daughter and your home. I see no reason not to take such a threat seriously.’

Breath hissed through Gillot’s lips. Roscoe realised the man had side-stepped from spilling it to his wife. Since he had arrived he had not heard them exchange a word, and there had been precious little eye-contact.

‘“Take such a threat seriously”. That is what you said?’

‘It’s the initial assessment. There are indications we should take seriously—’

‘Indications? That’s a pretty bland word when we’re discussing my daughter’s and my life, and the security of my home.’

‘And, of course, Mrs Gillot, we’re also discussing your husband’s life, and “indications” of a “threat” to it.’

Gillot caught Roscoe’s eyes. For the first time there was a flash of light in them, as if he had found – about time – a friend. She looked away, didn’t accept the rebuke, and stared out to sea. Her shorts had ridden up. But Mark Roscoe was not Harvey Gillot’s friend. Work had pitched them together. There would be as much bonding – or as little – as if Harvey Gillot dealt class-A stuff in the sink estates of south-east London. The man was a gun-runner. He lived in a big property with a great view, had a degree of success dripping off him and was probably inside the legal limits of his trade most of the time, but he would get no more, no less, support than a drugs-trafficker. Roscoe would not have said that
made him any sort of zealot, just that it was the way he operated – and she had reacted as if his remark was a swat on the nose.

‘Can we, at your convenience, start with some answers, Mr Roscoe?’

‘Because we take the threat seriously, and believe there are indications of the validity of the intelligence forwarded to us, we—’

‘Stop the bullshit, Mr Roscoe, and get to the point.’

He did. At times, in this scenario, he might have played it soft and sought to reassure, but he was at the point, and it was sharp.

‘There is no question of us providing an armed protection unit to move into your home.’

‘I assume that’s not for negotiation.’

‘Neither, because of the indications of a threat and our responsibility to our own personnel, will unarmed officers be deployed to your home. That means they’d have to go shopping with you, maybe attend your daughter’s school and social engagements.’

‘Understood.’

‘We would hardly be likely to request from the local force that they do anything more than maintain a sporadic watch on the road through the village. They might extend a normal patrol pattern and come by this way, but that’s difficult. Why difficult? We don’t encourage officers – unprotected, likely young and inexperienced – to approach a car in which an armed man may be doing surveillance of your home.’

‘Of course. And when we’ve finished listing all the health and safety involving your people and your lack of resources, what about me, my daughter and my home?’

‘Two options, Mrs Gillot.’

She gave a brittle laugh. ‘What are they?’

‘You can stay, and we’ll offer full advice on the installation of additional home-security equipment. You can take your chance and hope the intelligence was faulty. Of course, should you activate a panic button, police response will be governed by the availability of armed officers – it might not be immediate.’

‘Or?’

‘You can pull out, Mrs Gillot. You and your husband can move, go off the map. The next question is usually “For how long?” Don’t know, can’t estimate, open-ended. You disappear, maybe take on new identities. That, also, we can advise on. The hitman, if our intelligence is correct, turns up here, finds an empty house and—’

‘He isn’t here already, watching us, is he?’

‘We don’t think so. Usually there’s quite a lengthy period of surveillance and reconnaissance. I’ll not gild it. A contract of this sort would be initiated with serious and careful people, not a cowboy who’ll charge in. They would look for an opportunity. As I say, you can pull out, Mrs Gillot, and let him turn up here. I’m not saying we’re lacking in the field of intelligence gathering but, I emphasise, we don’t have the resources for round-the-clock protection.’

Vern was driving as they passed the 2012 Olympics site and came across the causeway. His sister was beside him and his brother slouched in the back.

Vern thought of his sister as the ‘kid’, an afterthought between their parents, her conception timed after a lengthy spell his father had served in HMPs Wandsworth and Parkhurst. He thought of his brother as the ‘young ’un’. The difference? He would have called his sister ‘kid’ to her face, but he would never have addressed his brother disrespectfully. Leanne had a good temperament and could laugh not just at others but at herself. She was popular, and could drink in the pubs if she fancied it. Robbie, the young ’un, had no humour in his face, seldom laughed at others, never at himself, and didn’t drink.

Vern had driven carefully from south-east London. Behind them, left there, was all they knew well. The route Vern had chosen had taken them past the yard where George Francis had been done by a hitman for losing Brinks Mat money he was minding; past the flat where a small-time villian had been killed and dismembered – later, the killer had sat in the back of a car taking
the pieces out to the Essex marshes for dumping and waved a severed arm at motorists going the other way; past the armourer’s home, a little terraced house, anonymous, with a reinforced shed out the back; past pubs where a tout or an undercover wouldn’t have lasted long enough to buy a pint before he was busted; past the garages where the cars were fitted up for them; and past the Osprey Estate where a boy had been beaten and killed – a gang of kids had thought a ‘wall of silence’ would protect them but they were doing time because the wall had been holed by the police; and past the complex of housing-association homes where the Irish contract killer had shot a Brindle brother right under the sights of police guns. Vern had flicked a glance in the mirror to watch the young ’un’s reaction, and there had been none.

Interesting that there was no reaction as they went down Needleman Street. Vern, like Leanne, their mum and dad, Granddad and Grandma Cairns, was supposed to know nothing of the woman kept there. Vern knew. He reckoned Leanne did – not that he’d told her. He reckoned the parents didn’t know, or the grandparents. He had seen, from a car, the young ’un come out of the block’s main entrance and pause on the pavement to look up. He’d followed the eyeline, stationary in a traffic foul-up, and had seen the woman, her little hand gesture at the window, and there had been a secretive response – a waft of the fingers – from his brother. He wouldn’t challenge him, or make a joke about it, wouldn’t mention what he knew. He never challenged Robbie. He was frightened of the young ’un, and he lived off the young ’un’s payroll. He had not asked if Leanne knew that Robbie had a woman in the block opposite the entrance to Christopher Court, just assumed she did.

It was careful driving because a crash, an incident – even being pulled over by a bored cop for speeding – would have been a disaster, pretty big on any scale. Under the back seat, where Robbie sat – in a sealed package of bubble wrap – was the pistol, with a twelve-bore shotgun, its barrels sawn down. In the boot there were overalls, two sets of balaclavas, extra trainers, a canister of lighter fuel, and a bag of spare clothing, his, Robbie’s and hers
jumbled in together, the tops in bright colours, and a wig for Leanne. Just before they had hit the causeway, Leanne had done the switches under the dash that played the scanner through the car radio and detected police broadcasts: it couldn’t decode the encrypted wavelengths of the specialist units, but it registered the squelch of ‘white noise’. This might be a reconnaissance trip and they’d go back to London. If they liked what they saw, they might hang around, wait for it to be that degree better – or move forward, no delay.

She had a printout map from an Internet café and aerial photographs – one that covered the roofs of the house, another of the house and garden, and a third that showed the sea, a small beach, ruins, the gardens of other homes and the lane that led to where the target lived. He saw her study the photographs. Why did she do it? She had money like he did when Robbie worked. She hardly bought clothes and shoes, was smart but not special. She didn’t have a girlfriend to go with on holiday to Spain, didn’t have a boyfriend to sneak off with. Maybe loyalty to her brother kept her tight to him, but Vern couldn’t fathom it. When Robbie had the dark moods, though, black as hell, only his sister could lift him.

In front of him was the towering heap of rock and its summit.

On the wheel, Vern flexed his fingers. It was new ground for them. He felt the nerves. All of the drive down, he had felt a tightening of the knot in his stomach as the miles of countryside, yellow and ripened, grazed and bare, had slipped past.

The sea shimmered beside the causeway.

He knew the sea from trips to Margate, where his father had liked to take them when he was home, and Folkestone, which his mother preferred. He knew the sea also from the times his father had been in Parkhurst, and their mother had dragged them on to the ferry for the journey to the Isle of Wight. They came off the causeway. He sensed that Leanne had stiffened, but Robbie’s breathing was as steady as it had been on the rest of the journey.

One way in, Vern thought, and therefore one way out.

*

‘Are you saying, Mr Roscoe, that you’re prepared to get back into your car, drive away from here and leave us bare-arsed? What matters more? The budget and the resources available or my life and my daughter’s?’ She had pushed herself up on the lounger, facing the detective. She thought he showed a minimum of sympathy for her husband and none for her. Not familiar with a bitchy female? Did they not have any in the Serious Crime Directorate? The card he had produced with the pompous title was on the table by the water. Harvey – she had been married to him for long enough to read his moods – was beaten and didn’t contribute. The detective’s eyes had wandered from her thighs to her chest so she straightened her shoulders and pushed her hair off her face. He hadn’t taken off his jacket but she had seen that he wore – visible when he raised a handkerchief to mop his forehead – a shoulder holster with a weapon in it. She knew about weapons.

‘If you go, Mrs Gillot, with your husband, I can guarantee that protection will be in place from myself and two colleagues. I’ll have uniformed firearms officers on site, but only for today and only while you’re packing essential items. You will then drive to a hotel – location agreed with us – then my colleagues, the uniforms and I will pull out.’

‘After today?’

‘You would receive expert advice on how to conduct your life.’

‘And my daughter?’

‘Probably better if she takes a new identity and changes school. I should emphasise that I haven’t examined this fully, or referred it to senior colleagues.’

‘You don’t believe this is just a little blip?’

‘By your husband’s recollection a whole community has bought the contract. I don’t know how they’ll pursue it. The
fatwa
against Salman Rushdie was alive for a decade. You’re different, but not wholly so. What I’m saying is that we may intercept one killer – but does the community have a production line? I wouldn’t assume that one success destabilises the scale of the threat.’

She could put together the puzzle and see what had been the
grit in the shoe of their relationship. In the Home Counties, with her baby and then her small daughter, she had known other mothers and had been at the centre of the business operations. Here, there was a fine house with a wonderful view and a life of unrelieved boredom. She knew no one, belonged to nothing, had little to look forward to. More and more of Harvey’s work was done abroad and she had no role to play. More and more of his deals were conducted without a paper trail or an electronic footprint, and payments were made abroad, routed to the Caymans. She hated the house, the skyscape, the seascape and the quiet. She hated, too, the detective sergeant with the Glock in his holster who had marched into her home and was steadily dismantling her life. All right if
she
did it, but not if a well-rehearsed stranger performed the rites. Her husband wasn’t standing his corner.

‘It’s our lives.’

‘You could say that, Mrs Gillot, and you wouldn’t find people arguing with you.’

She turned towards Harvey. ‘You stupid bastard.’ He was abject, pathetic. ‘All that shit about
trust
and you screwed up on a deal.’

‘I appreciate these are difficult issues, but you have to come to a decision and we don’t want to crowd you. You should think of a short-term response and take a longer view.’ The detective had a soft voice, which he would have learned on a course: How to Handle a Hysterical Woman Who Is Being Turfed Out of Her Home. The same course that bailiffs went on. He moved back, was off his chair and sidling towards his colleagues who had come into her garden.