Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

The Tango was washing a car. ‘Tango’ meant ‘target’ in SCD7 jargon, and grated with Mark Roscoe, but the culture of the unit was too considerable for one foot-slogger to fight. The man had a hose running – they could have done him for breaching a hosepipe ban but preferred him cuffed and facing charges relating to firearms and conspiracy to murder. His name had come up from the address they had raided and the arms cache they had found. The man and the woman with Roscoe were dedicated surveillance experts, bland. It meant little to them, was just another day. It was never ‘just another day’ for him. Didn’t have that sort of mind-set… but he could be patient. He was coiled but not overwound. Two streets back there was an entrance to a public park and a maintenance corner where the gardeners parked their pick-ups. Two police wagons were alongside them, with firearms and an entry team. The easiest way to cock up was to lose patience and go too early… That was irrelevant, though, while the Tango was washing his car and the water flowed in a river down his drive into the gutter.

This was bread-and-butter work – no life on the line. The real stress stretcher was when a stake-out was in place, watching a potential victim and not knowing when the hit would come or from which direction. That was nerve-jangling Flying Squad stuff. The cash-delivery van, or the wages van, about to do a drop had been the training ground for what he did now, when the employer might or might not have been taken inside the magic circle of confidentiality. The guys who did the delivery – on the minimum wage – were not. They didn’t know the probability existed of firearms in their faces, pickaxe handles across their arms and legs, the cavalry coming from nowhere and gunfire – good guys against bad. Could be up against a mean-minded psycho who would take a security man with him to the mortuary. Could be that a guard had a heart-attack in the crisis moment. It was what Mark Roscoe was trained for, where he’d been. He watched the man washing his car, and wondered how long it would be before the contact showed up to justify the resources committed.

The thing he couldn’t cope with happened.

The woman didn’t make eye-contact with him, just passed him the binoculars. There was no modesty and no apology. Some of the surveillance vans had privacy corners but most did not. She took the lid off, then was over the bucket, her baggy black trousers down. Her black knickers had ‘Serious Crime Directory’ printed on them in gold. She peed, hoisted herself up, dragged the underwear and trousers back to her waist and took back the binoculars. If Mark Roscoe had been in a van with Suzie he would have crossed his legs, let his bladder burst if there was no privacy screen.

As if it hadn’t happened, she said, a whisper, ‘Boss, the car’s clean – fit for the Queen to ride in – and he’s gone back inside… Oh, that’s good… brilliant.’

He crawled forward. She eased back, made room for him at the drilled spyhole.

‘What’s good?’

‘The cat crapped in the flowerbed, then scratched earth over what it had done. Look at the cat, boss.’

The cat strode, as if it owned the territory, across the washed car’s roof and left a footprint trail. It went back and forth and made a proper job of screwing up the shiny clean paintwork.

He sagged back. There was nowhere else he should be, and nothing better he should be doing. He had the patience and could wait… The certainty that it would come was lifeblood to Mark Roscoe.

The German was met and walked out of the arrivals hall. If he had not known the man he talked with – from a heroin-importation deal – he would not have entertained such a conversation.

‘A village wants a man killed – apparently the whole village. Maybe even the priest. Maybe even the schoolmistress. They will pay, and it is in London. I am being paid for running errands, and you will be paid.’

‘Leave it with me.’

An hour after he had landed, the German was in the air, heading back to Hamburg.

The receptionist gave the document-size envelope to Penny Laing. She looked at it, front and back. Her own name was written over a white sticker, which covered an original address, and the envelope was franked – it had been through the postal system. Nothing on the reverse side. ‘Who brought it?’

‘Didn’t leave a name, just handed it over and asked that you be told to come down for it. A woman. Could have done with a bath.’

In theory, if the state of alert was ratcheted above Amber and heading for Red, she could have demanded that Security come out of their cubbyhole behind Reception to run the package through the scanner. Might call in the Bomb Squad. Might wake the sniffer dog and deploy it. Might evacuate half the building. She inserted the nail of her forefinger, right hand, under the sticker, scratched it clear and saw that it had previously been sent to Ms Megs Behan, Planet Protection. She remembered a dreary street and a coffee shop and wondered who was doing the buying right now. She loosed the Sellotape fastening the envelope. Paper cascaded out – how in God’s name had so much been inserted into one tired envelope and not split it? It pulled her up, as if there was a choke chain round her neck and the leash had been tugged sharply. At Planet Protection they would have a stationery budget that verged on parsimony, and little or nothing to sustain them beyond their commitment to the cause… Right. End of self-inflicted lecture.

She thanked the receptionist.

Wondered which was cheaper – whether Megs Behan had used a bus or the tube to get from that dreary street north of the City to sun-soaked Whitehall at the centre of power, influence, talent and self-serving shit. She was having a bad, confusing day, and what she had seen of the papers sent to her told her that the rest might get a little worse and a little more confusing.

Her line manager had said: Remember the downturn, the crisis, the crunch. She walked up the wide staircase from the lobby, made a grand exit on a stage that had seen the splendour of imperial power. She went past offices where young men and women, shirtsleeves and lightweight blouses, struggled to confront the economic darkness. She thought a low point was reached when a scruffy envelope contained more evidential material than she could hope for from her own official sources. She flicked pages as she went, lips pursed in concentration and annoyance.

And he had said: Also remember we’re somewhat of a luxury. She was spoken of as state-of-the-art material, had done the minimum of uniform drudgery, had been noted, fast-tracked and recruited into the Investigation Division. Top stuff, real work. She had jumped because it gave her the chance to run, bloody fast and bloody far, from the ‘relationship’ with the married man who ran a department of the security-vetting programme. It had been a waste of time for her but had enhanced the bastard’s ego. Couldn’t quite believe she’d allowed it. She’d been taken on by the codename Golf team. Cocaine. Not grammes or kilos, but tonnes shipped in from Venezuela. The cargoes were usually transferred via the Atlantic coast of Spain so she had trips down there, to Huelva, Cadiz and Gibraltar. She had done time with the Irish, too, because the other main drop-off point was in the ocean, south of County Cork. She had felt wanted then, and important, but the transfer to Alpha had been sold as a step into an elite world. On Gibraltar she had met and fallen, pretty fast and pretty far, for a navy lieutenant who served on a frigate. It had been good, the best.

And through the sweet smile Dermot had said: We’re a natural target for budget-slicing. There were photographs of Harvey Gillot. There were travel itineraries of Harvey Gillot. There were biographical details of Harvey Gillot. She imagined sad, unwashed Megs Behan beavering all the hours the good Lord gave, feeling privileged to dish the dirt on the devil figure, Harvey Gillot. There were lists of private-charter cargo airlines flying into and out of Ostend airport, who owned and administered them, when Harvey Gillot had been there and how long he had spent with the owner of an ageing Boeing 707, a veteran DC8, a TriStar, an Ilyushin or an Antonov that might just limp into a remote, unlit corner of the Middle East and drop on to a rolled-sand runway. It was laid out before her, most of it typed but some in the copperplate writing that had been taught in convent schools. She wandered past her line manager, who was chewing gum and didn’t notice her, and sat at her desk.