Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

‘Never heard of it. Doesn’t play big in any street I’ve lived in.’

‘And it hangs like a bloody millstone around my neck, but it’s there and I can’t lose it. That’s duty of care.’ What was new – anger. As if Roscoe had forgotten he was the policeman, the public servant. As if it was true: he’d rather be anywhere else and weighed down with the duty. He remembered the man in his living room, punctilious in his politeness, demonstrating neither sympathy nor personal involvement. He couldn’t offload the care.

‘I walk on my own.’

‘Correction. You walk with me behind you.’

‘You armed?’

‘No.’

‘You have a stick? Pepper spray? Mace? Do you have anything?’

‘No.’

A stork flew over, slow and ponderous, and Gillot told him what he thought. ‘Then you’re goddamn useless – useless. Leave me alone. I go about my business and you’re an obstruction to it. Lose yourself.’

‘You won’t be alone, no chance. They’ll be there. Got me? It’s like they’ve bought tickets for a Tyburn job, seats in the stands. Penny Laing of Revenue and Customs, she’s there – she tried to nail you with a prosecution but gave up on it. Megs Behan, the woman who blasted you out of your home with a bullhorn, is there. A local doctor, he’ll be there, but don’t regard him as useful because he didn’t bring the box of tricks him. I’m carrying it. The forensic scientist who exhumed the bodies – the deaths that put you in this shit – and found a phone number scribbled on paper in a pocket and shopped you, he’s down the track… with an old spook who acts the fool and isn’t. He’s there and has taken on the transport. He calls us all vultures, circling, watching and waiting for a corpse. You won’t be alone. Sorry about that.’

‘Back off.’

‘And the village’ll be there. They put up twenty thousand sterling. It’s a humble place and it lives off war pensions, with disability allowances well-milked, but that was a pile of money to them and they took it in bank loans. It was sliced off down the line as the contract was passed on, and the guy on the trigger gets ten out of the twenty.’

‘I don’t need to know – I’m not running. I have nowhere to run to.’

‘His name is Robbie Cairns. He’s from Rotherhithe, southeast London. Slotting is his work. He kills to make a living.’

‘I’ve seen him, faced him, smelt him.’

‘He’s waiting for you at the end of the path.’

‘Get back from me. I’ll look after myself.’

‘Stuck with you, and not from choice.’

It would not have been true to say that Harvey Gillot snapped. Truer to say that he had exhausted every other tactic for shedding himself of Roscoe’s shadow. He hit him. Surprised Roscoe and himself. A clenched fist, not the one that held the plastic bag, but a left-arm jab. He had never, in his entire life, hit anyone before – not at primary school or at the Royal Grammar School. He hadn’t thrown punches in the office-equipment trade or when he was trying to sell weapons. He had never hit Josie. The blow caused Roscoe to reel, but not to go down. Gillot watched, almost fascinated, as blood came from Roscoe’s nose and was wiped with a sleeve, and then more from a split upper lip. Roscoe stood, lifted his head and would – for a moment – have weighed whether or not to beat ten shades of hell out of Gillot. Gillot nearly laughed. It wouldn’t have fitted the duty of bloody care to return the punch.

Gillot walked on. Reckoned he’d won space for himself.

They were squashed into the car. Dropping off Roscoe and giving his place in the front to the long-legged Anders had made little difference to the lack of comfort, but it had been bearable when they were on the decent road surface out of the town. He was guided by Penny Laing, who directed him at junctions where narrow roads branched off with no signposts. A quiet had fallen on them and Benjie Arbuthnot rated it an inappropriate time to lift the mood with humour. Now he drove the hire car off the road, on to a track, didn’t slow, and allowed the vehicle to bounce.

He followed Penny Laing’s directions. Through the village, with a brief commentary by Anders on the number of casualties suffered in the siege, past the church and the cemetery – he saw through the open gate the fresh graves. No one spoke and all were thrown about inside the car. He did not slacken his speed.

There were markers ahead.

He could see, as dust piled on to the windscreen, bobbing heads that wound in a slow-moving line above the tips of the crop. He had been once in South America when a pope had visited and could remember the huge crowds moving in crocodile formation towards the rendezvous where mass would be celebrated. He recalled taking his elder son to a music festival and, again, seeing trudging queues heading for campsites beside the Thames… Something magnificent and emotional about columns on the move in the early morning and a great event expected. The army ahead of him, however, wore neither the uniform of the faith nor their culture: the women were in black and carried hand weapons and the men were in camouflage fatigues, with firearms on their shoulders. They were strung out along the length of the track.

Anders said, ‘I don’t want to be a pooper, Arbuthnot, but I don’t see our presence being welcomed.’

Megs Behan said, ‘I cannot believe now in the rule of the mob. We have to go on.’

Penny Laing said, ‘We owe him nothing. We’re not in debt to Gillot.’

He made no reply. He could have tucked the car in behind them and crawled at their pace, could have dumped it, turfed out his passengers and walked. He heaved the wheel and went through the corn. The mass of green closed around the windows. He made a bypass, then swung back towards the track.

He saw that the village people formed little clusters ahead, and understood. Penny Laing murmured to him which was Tomislav, who had made a memorial of his home and would have fired the Malyutka missiles if delivery had been made, and which was Andrija, who had been the sniper and had lost his leg in the break-out when the women and wounded were left behind. She indicated Petar, who farmed this land, whose wife was deaf and whose son had died when the consignment had failed to come, and Mladen, who led the village, and his son, who had been carried out as a two-week-old baby through the cornfields. Always a witness, always an observer, Arbuthnot noted, and squirrelled away her blush and the tremor in her voice as she spoke of the boy – good-looking kid. He saw, ahead, that Steyn waved to him and beside him were two crow women.

He had seen enough, so he did a three-point turn that flattened more of the crop, and began his drop-off.

It was Megs Behan who asked the question. It would have been in all their minds but she posed it. ‘Can we save him?’

‘No, we cannot,’ Arbuthnot said. ‘But it’s possible he can save himself.’

Steyn was the first to see him.

He knew Maria, wife of an amputee. She had consulted him on a possible infection of the ovaries. He’d thought her a pitiless woman, but he knew what had been done to her when the village had fallen. He had seen, also once, the elderly widow, who played that part with enthusiasm, had painful arthritis and a great bagful of bitterness at the loss of her husband. He thought each lived in the days and nights of an autumn turning to winter when their lives had depended on the lottery of where a shell landed, or where a sniper aimed his bullet. He thought each lived through that day and night of an enemy unzipping his fatigues, lowering filthy underpants and tearing down knickers.

He stood by the women, and saw him come over a low hill. Crown of the head, the full face and then the shoulders. He knew well the history of the Kukuruzni Put, could imagine how it had been to sprint or crawl between the rotting crop rows. He saw that Gillot carried a white plastic bag in his right hand. He walked briskly but without bombast. No trace of a swagger or the hesitation of the intimidated. Daniel Steyn fancied himself a reasonably skilled and caring general practitioner of medicine, but more as a psychologist. The man did well, struck a good posture. Once an American special-forces officer had come to Vukovar to examine the ground and the strongpoints, and to learn of the battle. They had talked late, over whisky, about bluff. The officer, if the holding cells of the Lebanon hostages of the 1980s had been positively located, would have been on the rescue squad, and he had spoken of one, a Briton, who had successfully played the bluff game on visits to Beirut: simply by his bearing and understated confidence he had created a safety cocoon around him, until the bluff was called. Then he had had no battalions behind him, only a pistol pressed up under his chin. On the Cornfield Road bluff might play well and might not.