Gerald Seymour - The Dealer and the Dead

Megs Behan went back to her room to shower, change and face the day. She didn’t know what it would bring and – under the deluge of hot water – she cursed the uncertainties that teased her.

The brush of whiskers against his hand woke Robbie Cairns and, as he opened his eyes, a tongue licked nervously, exploring, at his fingers. He jerked upright and the fox backed away. Perhaps it had watched him half the night and now had come close enough to learn about him. Any other time, any other place, Robbie would have shouted to frighten the animal, would next have scrabbled for a stone and flung it, and hoping for a yelp of pain. Not at any other time and not in any other place.

Robbie had been on his side, his body hunched, his head resting on an outstretched arm, his hand, almost, flung clear of him. That hand had been the one the fox had nuzzled before it licked him. He sat, straight-backed. Very slowly, he folded his legs tight together with the knees sticking out, and looked into the fox’s face. He could smell its breath: foul, like air from a sewer. He had nothing to give it as a bribe in the hope it would come closer to him. It breathed hard, almost panting, and he realised it was near famished – he could see its ribcage, the mange on the back legs and at the base of the tail. He thought the fox was as hungry as he was.

When he had fished in Kent, on the banks of the old military canal, any fox passing by would have skirted him, regarding him as an enemy. He thought this one was young, hungry and alone. He wanted it to come back, to feel again the whiskers and the tongue on his hand. He thought it had a face of beauty, would like to have touched it, feel the texture of the fur. He was hungry and thirsty, cold from the night and shivering. There was damp on his clothes from the dew. The fox might not have eaten for days, but it could drink.

It looked at him, deep brown eyes, and the mouth was slightly open. There were scars in the fur and old wound lines, as if creatures had hacked with their back legs to break the killing hold of the jaws. It was thin but the teeth were clean and polished – they would rip apart a prey when it had killed.

He needed a drink. He felt a surge of anger at the people who had treated him with such disrespect: he had been dumped in a bloody ploughed field, without food, water or a blanket… The anger was muted by the sight of the fox, which watched him. Past it was the wooden cross, and beyond it the grass and the trees. Beyond the trees was the water. It read him, the fox did. It stretched and coughed, then turned its mangy end towards him and went towards the trees and the river.

Robbie Cairns pushed himself up. He wouldn’t have known what ‘delirious’ meant, and wouldn’t have understood the story of the Pied Piper from Hamelin. He would have been outraged at the suggestion that his mind was blown by a fox. The fox had gone into the trees and he saw a slight trail, as if it had made a narrow track, and walked towards it.

The yell was an order. ‘Stop! Stop right there.’

He did. He heard the thud of heavy shoes behind him and began to turn. The man had shouted at him in English, with only a light accent, as if he was educated. A big man, overweight, with a pallid face. Far behind him there was a car, with a door open, and now he could hear the quiet throb of the engine. The man carried a plastic bag.

Robbie said emptily – as if he needed to justify himself, ‘I was going for water.’

The man came close to him. ‘Do you like to gamble?’

‘What the fuck’s that got to do with anything? I don’t gamble. You left me without food or water.’

‘It would have been a gamble to go for water, high odds. If it’s roulette, the gamble begins when the wheel spins – and when you take a first step off the field into the undergrowth… Do you not have landmines, anti-personnel mines, where you come from?’

He understood he was laughed at. He bit his lip and hung his head. The man squatted and said his name, then opened the plastic bag, took out a Thermos, a beaker, sandwiches made with thick bread, and an apple. He gestured to Robbie that they were for him.

He wolfed the sandwiches, ham, salad and tomato, gulped the hot sweetened coffee, and was told why he had been about to gamble.

‘This corner of the field was mined. The Cetniks would have put down the mines after they’d killed four of our people and buried them here. The four were those who waited for the missiles Gillot had taken money and valuables for – that is why you were paid to kill Gillot. He took the money and did not deliver. Only very recently did this small village receive enough priority for a mine-clearance man to make this part of a field safe. It was done, we have the certificate, and the farmer – Petar – ploughed it for the first time in nineteen years. The bodies were found. Where you are now is clean.’

‘If I had gone down to the water…’ He spoke through a mouthful and crumbs dropped from his lips.

‘You would have gambled. The priority for the clearance was the field, not the banks. Perhaps there are mines there, perhaps not.’

He had trusted the fox. It would have led him down the bank and gone light-footed to the pool where the water – from where Robbie had seen it – seemed fresh and without pollution. The fox would have killed him and he had given it his friendship…

He was told that his target would be driven along the Cornfield Road to this place, would be herded here. The man spoke of the hunters going after wild boar and how they beat the beasts into the path of the guns. There would be no police in the fields or the village. He was told that here, by the cross, he would earn the money already paid to him.

‘And what happens if…’

‘You fail? If you fail? I believe you to be an intelligent man so you know very well what will happen if you fail. Don’t fail.’

He said he would be there and ready. The man walked away from him. Where else would he be? If the fox came back, Robbie would kill it: it would have led him down a riverbank where there were mines. When the target came, he would shoot him. He stamped his feet on the earth, made dust puffs and slapped his arms on his chest to get warmth into his body. He would shoot him, then start to live again.

He had run away before and could again. He turned once, near to his car, and saw that the man paid to kill had taken the firing posture and would not have realised he was watched. Josip no longer wanted to be a part of it. Before coming to the field, he had moved his car to the side of his house. The back door into the kitchen was not overlooked, and he had stripped his home of all that was important to him, had loaded the boot and the back seat, and his dog was in the front. He assumed that the corpse of Cairns would go into the same pit as would be dug for Harvey Gillot, and that the secret of that grave would remain inside the village. All those years before he had run from the fight, and could run again.

In the car, he ruffled the dog’s neck, eased the ignition key, bumped along the track that led to the metalled road and turned away from the village. He thought it a place of death, condemned, and wanted no part in its future. The dawn was coming quickly and it would be a fine day, warm.

There were defining days in Mark Roscoe’s life. Some he had recognised as the dawn had advanced, others had been flung without warning into his lap – not many – and they had shaped him. On the most recent – twice – he had been a voyeur, like a pavement gawper. A stake-out in west London, in Chiswick: the firearms had been in place and the bad guys on the pavement, about to go into the building society, but one must have had a decent enough ‘villain’s nose’ to sense the trap about to be sprung. He had grabbed a woman, held a handgun to her head and backed all the way to the van. She – and he – would have been in the marksmen’s telescopic sights so they hadn’t fired. The woman had been thrown aside as the gang had piled into the van and disappeared round a street corner in a scream of tyres. All had been taken into custody three hours later. A defining moment? When not to shoot, when to be patient, when to wait for a better opportunity. Another such moment was outside a high-street bank in a nothing little town in the northern suburbs of Southampton. Roscoe had been with the gun team in the public lavatories when the gang had hit. A cash-delivery guard was looking down the barrel of a handgun, and the team had thought it right to fire, had done so, had taken the life of a serial robber, Nunes, killing him outright, with an accomplice. A defining moment? When it was right to shoot, and extinguish a life at ruthless speed.