Gerald Seymour: The Dealer and the Dead

It was sensible to let a day go slack when little jumped in his face. Wouldn’t last – could have bet his shirt on it. The information might come from a chis, or from an undercover officer, even a member of the public – an innocent who had seen or heard something and picked up the phone – or from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, or the spooks, or even from the listening superstars at GCHQ. When things moved, and the alarm bells clanged, it was usually at speed and without warning, what he called ‘straight out of a clear blue sky’, the worst sort of sky.

A man wasn’t going to be brought in to fix the air-conditioner because nobody would take responsibility to strip down the walls. Looking between the slats of the blinds, Mark Roscoe could see the great emptiness he loathed above the rooftops: the clear blue sky.

A police patrol car was parked back from the field as if to give space around the raised arm. A priest had come from Vukovar at the same time and his car was further down the Cornfield Road. Any of the villagers, or those who had lived in Bogdanovci or Marinci, or men and women of Croat origin from Vukovar, could tell which of the policemen was from their own ethnicity and which the Serb. Always now, in the police, a Croat and a Serb officer were together. Petar could tell which was the Serb because he had stayed in the patrol car, was reading a newspaper and did not make eye contact with the villagers. Perhaps he had an elder brother, a father or an uncle who had been here nineteen years before and… The priest moved among them and, in an officious way, tried to speak about God’s will, God’s work and God’s love, but no one wanted comfort.

Petar stood with his wife. She was a stout woman with heavy legs and a drooping bosom. She wore no cosmetics and never had in the thirty-nine years of their marriage. A few of the wives had gone before the trap snapped shut on the village, but she had not. She had been beside him for the two and a half hours since he had pushed himself from kneeling close to the arm and the others had come forward. They had made a ring of stamped earth around the arm. He and his wife did not speak or touch. She had been profoundly deaf since the howitzer shell had come through the wall of their son’s room, scattering molten shrapnel in the corridor, down the stairs and across the hallway. She had been in the kitchen – should have been in the cellar – and he had dug her out with his bare hands, moving bricks and timbers, and done it alone because every other man was required in the slit trenches and the women were with the wounded in the church crypt. Now they communicated by slate board and sticks of chalk but the board and the chalk were in their house. His hands hung slackly at his sides and her arms were folded over her chest. One finger still showed where she had once worn the wedding ring he had given her.

The Croat officer had told Mladen that a forensic specialist was on his way to the field, a man of expertise and experience. In their circle they waited, with the arm, the clawed bone fingers and the shreds of camouflage uniform. A small songbird flew over their shoulders, might have perched on the bones but Andrija’s wife threw a fistful of soil at it, and it was gone. The Croat officer said it might be another hour before the forensic specialist reached them, but they did not break the vigil.

*

‘Well, I’m not exactly top of his Christmas card list,’ Megs snorted theatrically, then shrugged.

‘But you know him?’

‘That’s what I said. More specifically, I know of him and about him. Is that clear enough? And, after a fashion, Harvey Gillot knows me – but, thank God, not as well as I know him. So, what’s on your shopping list?’

She was a regular. For Megs Behan, the coffee shop was her third space and she used it three or four times a week. She took the leather sofa and the low table in front of it in Starbucks just north of the City and came early in the morning. She didn’t move out until the under-manager rolled his eyes at her when the place was filling up with the lunch trade. The other two potential spaces were her flat – one poky bedroom and a decent-sized sitting room, which she shared with two others on the same floor – and her office. Security requirements dictated that the building had a keypad for admission and that visitors were not permitted on the third-floor landing from which Planet Protection worked. The coffee shop was comfortable, reasonably confidential, and the guests for whom she held court were expected to provide a relay of Fair Trade coffee and organic cakes – she never paid, would always make some faux -annoyed grunt and confess to having come out without the purse. Megs could not have afforded Starbucks prices on three or more mornings a week.

‘I said I was at HM Revenue and Customs.’

‘I took that on board – I assume the Alpha team. You’re Penny Laing and your point of interest is Harvey Gillot. So, let’s push on.’

‘I am Alpha team and it is Harvey Gillot.’ Penny Laing allowed herself a short sharp shock of a smile.

Megs Behan worked full time as a researcher for the nongovernmental organisation known as Planet Protection. They monitored the arms trade, lobbied for national and international curbs on the shipment of weapons by Western administrations to third-world conflict zones, and could summon up a network of similar enthusiasts and campaigners across the continent. She had not met the woman opposite her, who sat on a hard-backed chair, leaned forward over the low table between them and boasted a cleavage that was on a different Richter scale from Megs Behan’s. In the nine years she had been with Planet Protection she had met others from HMRC, but Penny Laing was new to her. ‘Are you going in after him?’

‘Can I call you Megs?… Thanks. We’re looking to update our files. Somebody must have said you were a good source. We’re looking at what I suppose we would call the first division of brokers – maybe that’s a dozen. I’ve come to see you. A colleague goes to Amnesty and Oxfam – we’re trawling. Please, Megs, don’t bridle, we all-’

She must have frowned, had probably narrowed her lips and might have let the light blaze in her eyes. The suggestion of collusion had got up Megs’s nose. True, of course, but not welcome. The woman opposite her did not do tact.

‘We all know that your extremely efficiently managed NGO is supported by charitable funds – bring and buy, car-boot jobs, jumble collections – that meet some twenty per cent or, being generous, twenty-five per cent of operating costs, and that the rest of the budget is funded by the taxpayer. It’s from us, Foreign and Commonwealth and Overseas Development. So, please, shall we hack on?’

Megs could have added that Special Branch backsides had sat on the leather sofa or the chair opposite, and spooks. Another truth, and one that Penny Laing would not have appreciated, was that humble little NGOs had better research facilities in the field than the Secret Intelligence Service, the counter-terrorist police, the civil servants of Overseas Development, the diplomats of the FCO, and the investigators of HMRC’s Alpha team, who specialised in arms trafficking and potential breaches of legislation. Megs had heard it said charity workers in East and Central Africa were the best sources for the specifics of what plane had landed at what airstrip and offloaded what cargo into the hands of what rebel group or gang of drunk militia.

‘You’ve been given Harvey Gillot?’

‘It goes without saying, if we sniff any illegality we’ll follow it. We’re looking at Harvey Gillot, but that’s not to say we already have evidence against him. I suppose you could say he’s an individual we regard as having potential.’

Almost with innocence, Megs asked, ‘Do you have experience of the arms trade?’