Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

Roscoe called in from the airport – he’d found a quiet corner of the car park.

He was finishing his report to the Gold Group’s secretary. ‘I can’t say who shot Robbie Cairns. After I’d gone for him, and he’d belted me and after he’d fired point-blank at Gillot – well, I’ve told you all that – and I’m half out and down, well, there’s a shot and Cairns is slotted. Don’t know where it came from – not sure it matters. If you’re looking for an investigation you’ll be whistling in the dark and get nowhere. I’ve the impression, before dark tonight, that Cairns will have been buried off that path through the cornfields. There’ll be no cross and no shrine, but a minefield warning sign might be plonked on top of him. As I see it, that means we won’t have to endure one of those mawkish bad boys’ funerals, black horses and all that crap. As far as I’m concerned, for officialese, I know nothing, saw nothing and heard nothing. That’s about it. They’re calling us.’

Roscoe joined the queue at the departure gate. He stood with Megs Behan, Penny Laing, William Anders and the preposterous Benjie Arbuthnot, all members of a club for which he fancied he had life membership.

Mladen, his son and Tomislav had each shouldered a heavy spade, what they would have used to clear out a blocked ditch, and set off along the Kukuruzni Put to dig a hole. The burning sun was high above them, minimising their shadows. Ahead was the rumble of machinery as Petar started to bring in the harvest and scalp the fields of the corn. For the rest of the summer, autumn, winter and spring, the landscape around the village would have changed. Far behind them, a plastic bag flapped in the light wind from the railings in front of the church, untouched.

It was the start of a day of fierce sleet, as predicted by the forecaster, and the post van came warily up the drive to the cottage where they lived. They had to be woken by the doorbell because the package required a signature as proof of delivery. Benjie Arbuthnot wished his postman well, offered him a nip against the weather, which was declined, and carried the padded envelope into the kitchen.

After breakfast, bloody bran, and skimmed milk in the coffee, he attacked it with his scissors and tipped out the contents. He checked them: six ties and four headscarves.

A flash of mischief from Deirdre: ‘I suppose, Benjie, you’re going to play that silly game of yours.’

‘I am indeed.’ The ties went on to one pile on the kitchen table, and the scarves on to another. Between the piles were more padded envelopes, and his notebook of jottings and addresses. He saw his wife’s face screw up in mock-disapproval. ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘Only that they’re hideous. But, then, vultures aren’t wonderfully pretty.’

‘Tough, my old darling, because I’ll wear the tie and I hope you’ll wear the scarf, because you’re sort of an ex officio member.’

‘So, the daft game can begin.’

He wore, that morning, because it was balls-breakingly cold in the cottage, a thick sweater and a heavy twill shirt with a curled collar, but he slung the tie round his throat and knotted it loosely. The main body of it hung down across the knitwear and the representation of the vulture was big, bold and pretty bloody ugly. The head was large, grotesque and done in a scarlet stitch over the blue of summer skies. His wife had her scarf on her shoulders so both of the vulture heads were well displayed. The game – daft – was an old favourite of Benjie Arbuthnot. He would meet people at a local drinks evening, in London, on a train or on holiday, chat with them for a few minutes and draw them out, because that was a talent. Afterwards he would play the game of creating lifestyles, histories and a future existence for them. He did it sometimes with dry wit, and others with a fortune-teller’s sadness at predicting pestilence and famine. He could be a conjuror, bewitching children so they didn’t know if they watched sleight-of-hand or true magic. Few who heard his game played out would believe his guarantee that his insights came from imagination, not fact.

‘Right. One each for us, no envelope needed. Don’t know about you

… I see a Cold War veteran and a man long dispensed with but who – one last time – punched high above his weight, was given favours by younger colleagues and returned a small measure of them, but is now at grass. His usefulness is exhausted beyond the ability to teach his grandson how to shoot and fish. He’s unlikely to be invited by any future director general to take a drink and chew over old times. Took too much and gave back too little… pretty clapped out. But it’s my club, and its attraction is that the membership is made up of ordinary people. No celebrity is allowed to join and we discourage the puddles of light that the high and mighty like to walk in. We were there and we walked the bloody path. We’re blessed, a happy few. I enjoyed the company of that man when he was young and I was still on the road. They were good times, but they’re gone… I never want to hear Gillot’s name again after today.’

He had addresses and poste restante locations. He would give her each name and she would write on the envelope, then slip inside either a tie or a scarf with Benjie’s visiting card. She wrote Daniel Steyn MD and the name of a shop behind the Ku’damm in Berlin.

‘He was involved. To stay in Vukovar he would have needed a profile as low as a lizard’s. He stood up at the end to be counted, and too many loathed him there because of his innate ability to speak truths that were not wanted – reconciliation, rehabilitation. He gave them the excuse to turn a difficult life, his, into an intolerable one. I think he had a cat and I’m assuming that when he’d found a decent billet for it he would have loaded his car and driven away. I imagine he now practises medicine on behalf of immigrant groups on the fringe of the city, earning a pittance and living in poverty. But he wasn’t a Pharisee and didn’t cross to the far side of the road that day. He’ll wear it with pride, but he lost because he moved away from the one place where he believed his work was valuable. Everyone touched by Gillot in this business is scarred by him. A rogue with a smile and he sucked people in, burdened them with involvement. The sole purpose in Steyn’s life was to be in that community, to work damned hard there. Gillot broke it.’

An envelope was loaded and sealed. The next name she wrote in the bold copperplate hand taught in convent education was Professor William Anders, Department of Forensic Pathology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. She reached for a tie and her husband’s card.

‘A man of importance and stature, used to being heeded. He was confronted with a situation that he had been central to creating but which then had a momentum of its own. He became an ignored nonentity. I believe he will not return in the summer to Vukovar but will permit “pressure of work” in Angola, Rwanda, Congo or Mozambique – anywhere – as an excuse for his absence. That aura of conceit, almost that of the bully, is off him – a plucked cock turkey – and he will never have spoken of the events of that morning in the cornfield. He was a loser, stripped of the certainties of his life. At the very end he was a useless passenger – for him, that means he was, which will have hurt, a major loser. Another – and there are more – who carries the scrapes on his skin of contact with Gillot. A pillar of his life has been snatched away.’

She pushed that filled, closed envelope across the table and took another, a tie and a card, wrote another name and address – Det. Sgt Mark Roscoe, MPS, Great Victoria Street, London. He seemed far away from her, gazing at a whitened, frozen landscape through the window.