The Outsiders

The Outsiders

Gerald Seymour

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2012

The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

eBook ISBN 978 1 848 94945 4

Book ISBN 978 1 444 70588 1

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

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London NW1 3BH

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For Gillian

Contents

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Prologue

It was an awful place – it hit her in the stomach as she went through the flapping rubber doors that screened the area from the corridor. The cold air of the morgue played on her skin – her cheeks, eyes and mouth. On any normal day, confronted with the damp, the squalor and the indifference of her escort, Winnie Monks would have gazed in front of her and let loose a volley of obscenities. She bottled them.

She heard the doors bluster shut, the sound die. The attendant stood silent – she noted his mournful bloodhound eyes and stained knee-length smock. Her muscle, the faithful Kenny, rattled keys or coins in his pocket. In the quiet, the dripping of water was loud, the tiled floor puddled. The iron window frames were flaking and the glass painted over for privacy.

To her left were the steel doors of the bays, on two levels. The attendant lifted his head, caught her eye, shrugged and pointed to a door far down the lower level. She nodded.

It was an awful place that the boy had been brought to, a fucking awful place. She assumed this was where the vagrants who died on doorsteps when the snow came were brought, or the suicides who had no hope, or the drug addicts who had overdosed . . . Maybe it was where the young guys shot down half a century before by the Soviet Army when Budapest was retaken had been dumped . . . The embassy had raised a collective eyebrow when told where he was.

The man dragged open the door of the bay. It squealed. Perhaps the resident dead weren’t worth a drop of oil. The name was written on a cardboard label attached with string to an ankle hidden under a sheet. She went forward. She tugged back the sheet. She gasped when she saw Damian Fenby’s features.

Behind her, Dottie gave a sob, and the breath hissed through Kenny’s teeth. She had been warned what to expect, but it was still hard to look at the boy’s face, what was left of it.

They had used Damian Fenby’s head as a football. His eyes were closed, but the flesh around them was bruised. There were abrasions on the cheeks, the ears had swelled and the lips were parted – she could see the gaps where his teeth had been.

That autumn, Winnie Monks – counter-intelligence at Five, in a steadily diminishing corner of Thames House – ran the Graveyard Team, the poor relation to everyone else in the building on the north side of the river, their remit Organised Crime Group investigations. Maybe by the end of the year – faced with the jihadist lobby that gorged on resources – the OCG would be as dead as Damian Fenby. He had gone to Budapest, with the rookie Caro Watson, on her instructions. She was answerable. She had known what to expect when she had eased the sheet off the boy’s face – he had been gentle and gay, with a good brain and total commitment – because she had been driven, with Dottie and Kenny, from the airport to where the bastards had found their football and played their game. The rain had been sluicing down. The local spook had stayed in the vehicle while they slid on the slopes and figured out, with Caro Watson’s help, the picture.

The side of her nose itched and she scratched it. She wore flat shoes, dulled by the rain. Her ankles were soaked, as was the hem of her skirt. Water still dribbled off her coat and the waxed cap perched on her red-gold hair. She wore no makeup. She took the sheet to tug it further down, steeling herself because she knew what she would see.

They had been met off the first flight of the day. It had been long after midnight that Caro Watson’s call had come through to a night duty officer. She had been near hysterical and making little sense, but she was patched through to Winnie Monks’s home.

The telephone had woken her. She had listened to the blurted information and rung off. She had thrown on clothes, splashed water on her face, gone into the kitchenette, taken a plastic bag from the roll and started to search for his things. Did anyone in Thames House, or in the Graveyard Team, know that Damian Fenby was dossing at the home of the Boss, Winnie Monks? No one. She could be open and she could be private. The boy was not a closet homosexual, had outed himself, and a relationship had developed between them. It was no one else’s business.

Nominally he was there while his own flat was redecorated. Liaisons did not have to be pigeon-holed or stereotyped, she had told him. He would have gone home when the decorator had finished, but no date had been set. He had left three days ago, taken a bus at dawn, and she’d cursed him softly for not waking her.

She had blundered through her flat, filling a bag with his clothes, clean, dirty, ironed or crumpled, his lotions, spare razor, two pairs of shoes, the old coat he’d have used for working alongside A Branch surveillance, a couple of books and a framed photograph of his parents. She had cleansed him from the flat, and it had seemed a betrayal. Last, she had snatched up his key-ring.

The taxi had taken her through the heart of London to a road behind one of the great railway termini. She’d gone inside his flat with the bag, and found the old actor there, asleep on a camp bed, surrounded by paint pots. He’d blinked in the light and gazed at her with hostility. No explanation. She’d dumped the bag in a wardrobe, said nothing, and gone back out into the night.

The taxi had taken her on to the airport where she’d met the Graveyarders. It was no one’s business that Damian Fenby had lodged with Winnie Monks.

The rookie girl had been at Arrivals, with the embassy staffer and a local intelligence man. They had gone into the city, then up the hill through the trees and had emerged – knackered, because crisis seldom came at a convenient hour – in a tourist bus park. A uniformed policeman had come forward, the staffer had interpreted, and Caro Watson had murmured in her ear what she knew. Something of the picture was clear: near obsolete and surplus arms stocks behind the old Curtain were still being liberated from weapons and munitions dumps, and OCGs – with government approval, of course – were flogging them on. They might have been going to Somalia or Sudan, any of the shit-holes where life was cheap, or to the Irish splinter groups who called themselves Real or Continuity. A good source had suggested they were headed for County Fermanagh or County Armagh. A shipment was going through, it was said, from Budapest for onward loading on a Danube barge, then downstream to a drop-off point in Serbia or Bulgaria; the source had promised waybill documentation.

Damian Fenby, the way Caro Watson told it, must have received the alert that the source was headed for one of the kiosks up the hill from the buses. All were open that morning, except one. She’d seen the padlock on its shutter. Any other day or evening, it was used by the source’s brother-in-law, cousin or . . .

Damian Fenby and Caro Watson had adjoining rooms at the Hilton by the suburban railway station; the connecting door had not been locked, and the call had come to him. Caro Watson had been in the bathroom, stark naked and washing her hair. By the time she’d wrapped a towel round her he was gone – she could hardly chase him down the corridor to the lift and the lobby, and if she’d called him he would only have said there wasn’t a problem, he’d be fine on his own. Winnie Monks reckoned the girl would carry the guilt to her grave.

Now she brought the sheet further down. There was mud on his chest, mucus and bloodstains.

She knew that body. Winnie slept alone. The boy had bunked on the sofa. She’d seen most of his body when, a towel around him, he’d gone to the bathroom to shower. She knew it better from three nights before he’d gone. He was a Five man and could collate complicated detail, but he had to sleep with a light burning – he’d left on the strip over the bathroom basin. She’d needed to pee. In the sitting room, he’d thrown off the bedclothes and lay on his side. She saw his chest, back and stomach, the skin as smooth as brushed silk, no blemishes. She had stood and stared, and he hadn’t woken. She hadn’t known where the relationship would take them. Winnie Monks had felt a softness that none who knew her would have recognised. It would have taken them
somewhere
. She hadn’t touched him, and now wished she had.

His small steel case had been beside him, big enough for a Notepad but not for a full-size laptop. That case was Damian Fenby’s pride and joy, with its secure lock, and the chain integral to the handle that ran to a handcuff. It was like something a diplomatic corps courier might have used to carry classified documents. Often Damian Fenby had nothing inside the case when he came to work, other than high-energy soft drinks and the sandwiches he bought at the newsagent by his flat. He’d had the case with him. It would have been locked and the cuff fastened.

His arms lay alongside his body. She saw what she had been told she would see. The left hand was attached to the arm. The right hand had been placed near to the right arm. It seemed to Winnie Monks that it had been brutally sawn off; the fist was clenched, gripping mud and grass.

He had been in the citadel which overlooked the city. Most of Budapest was laid out below it and the river, with its bridges, the palaces, churches and the remaining glories of the long-gone Austro-Hungarian empire. The relic of another fallen era dominated the old fortress building: a towering statue of a robed goddess holding an evergreen wreath above her head: Liberty in the Soviet style. It commemorated the defeat of the Wehrmacht and the SS defenders. Behind the citadel, but overlooked by the statue, gardens ran wild around military strongpoints. Damian Fenby would have realised he was compromised, stalked. Not special forces-trained, he had carried no weapon, would have been inept at unarmed survival combat. Dottie had told her about the old actor – turned decorator – he grappled with, but that would have been the limit of his body-to-body combat. Perhaps near the kiosk – before or after the drop – he’d seen they had blocked his route back to the hire car outside the closed café, and he would have turned for the darkness and cover, but they’d caught him.

She studied the wounds on the arm and the detached hand, and wondered if Damian Fenby had still been alive when they had decided they couldn’t break the chain or open the locked case, and had severed it to free the cuff.

They would have knelt over him. He might have been in pain spasms or motionless, in a coma. If conscious, would he have called her name, Winnie Monks, or Denys Carthew’s? She hoped it had been hers, thought it likely.

The uniformed policeman had led them to a strip of leaf-strewn grass dominated by an oak. At the edge of the grass there was a bunker’s entrance, and under the tree a work of rare beauty: a sculptor had fashioned a foal, its shoulder level with the hip of a rough-cast, angular young woman. Close to it, scenes-of-crime tape marked where the body had been dumped, and the hand.