The Outsiders (11 page)

There was Kenny, taciturn and awkward, with few words to contribute. He sifted expenses dockets on the third floor, and would nod to her in the canteen but would not come to sit with her. He would, likely, have given his life to save hers.

She rang Xavier, who now did liaison between Thames House and the Metropolitan Police; he was also a link to the Anti-terrorist Command. He was a thorough and exact investigator but had let it be known that the winding up and dispersal of the talent had been a crime. He sent flowers to his former Boss each year on her birthday.

They were the key building bricks. She might need others later, but it was a start. She reckoned she had already breathed new life into her Graveyard Team. What pleased her most was that Dottie, Kenny and Xavier had let her know they would be walking out of the door of whatever office they now occupied and demanding reassignment. Winnie Monks reflected that it was many months since she had last preached her creed: that the threat to her country of international terrorism was minimal compared to the dangers posed by organised crime. The first might splash blood and summon the headlines of outrage, but the other moved in darkness, evil and secrecy, contaminating all who came within its reach. She’d said it often enough. Terrorism scratched spectacular but superficial wounds; organised crime caused terminal and irreversible sickness. It was ever harder to find disciples.

She thought of where Caro Watson was. And of how much lay on the girl’s spare shoulders. Already parts of the operation had slipped from her grip – always had and always would. She sat at her desk, the phone beside her, and waited.

The muscle flying with Caro Watson had identified themselves as Barry and David, which might have been their correct names and might have been badges of convenience. David was beside her, fidgeting and nervy; he gave the impression of a man who felt undressed because he wasn’t carrying a 9mm Browning in his belt. Barry had been twice round the block, first left to right, then right to left. He’d done the usual crap in the greengrocery and the hardware store, looking and not buying. She would have expected the pair to identify a watcher. Their expertise was to find the trap, if one had been laid, or the meet-point compromised, and evaluate it.

She was late going to him.

It was a tactic. They taught on the training seminars that an agent should understand that meetings were at the convenience of the officer, and that officers did not come running. Officers were never
grateful
to agents.

He seemed fragile, sitting in the window of the café-bar. A TV was playing behind him, and games machines, and most of the tables near to the counter were taken. A wide-hipped woman moved around them with plates of food and refilled glasses. The photographs from Baku were a good enough likeness for her to recognise him and have no doubt. He had no weight to him, no strength, and gazed into the window. She thought she had allowed him to stew long enough. David said they were clear. If he had enough time to kick his heels, he’d be glad of the officer’s arrival. That was what the instructors said. He would spill more readily what he had to give.

She stared from a doorway at the sparse little sod in his second-day T-shirt with stubble on his cheeks, and said, ‘About time to get the show on the road.’

The head was in her mind, the bruises, contusions and wounds, as she had looked down at the figure on the trolley and put a name to it. Not many days went by when she did not see the face that had belonged to Damian Fenby.

She stepped out of the shadow.

A car slowed as she crossed the street and a cyclist swerved. The boy was looking at his watch.

She pushed open the door, felt the warmth and heard the music from the TV programme. She must dominate, and it must be on her terms.

She went from the door to the table. She sensed that all eyes were on her back. She smelt cigarette smoke, beer and strong coffee, and seemed to taste the sweat of the place. She saw the scrapes on his arm – they’d said in the signal from Baku that he had superficial injuries. One leg was stuck out from the table and the jeans were ripped at the knee. She managed a smile and sat down.

She did not apologise for being eleven minutes late, or reach out a hand to him. He was not her friend. She did not introduce herself but was brusque.

‘You’re Natan?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were in our embassy in Baku?’ She focused hard, caught his eyes. ‘You told them who you worked for, what you’d heard, and you demanded to speak to an intelligence officer. You offered, as a reason why we might travel across Europe to meet you, details of the death of a colleague in Budapest. Well, I’m here.’

She put her handbag between them and the woman with the big hips came forward. Caro Watson waved her away. She slid the bar on the pocket recorder in the bag. The light winked and a spool turned.

She took a deep breath. The boy seemed to shiver. Most did when the reality of a meeting confronted them. Then it gushed.

‘It was a great joke for them. It was a dummy and we were in the lay-by near to where the Major lives – his family is there – close to Pskov. There were the three of them. Him and his best guards. The dummy had been dumped and they found it and they kicked it. They did it until they lost interest but by then the dummy was broken, in pieces. The head could no longer be recognised as one from a dummy that you see in a clothes store. The Major is Petar Borsonov and . . .’

She could see the face of Damian Fenby as it had been when she identified him.

The taxi dropped them at the back of the derelict hotel where the road veered to the left, but the driver pointed to a gravel track.

‘I don’t think it’s very far,’ Jonno said.

They climbed the track, which was too rough for the wheels on the cases so he carried them. When they came to one of the zigzag bends, they saw the towering bluff of a small mountain with a sheer cliff and, below it, on a lower plateau, the façades of two villas. The tiled roofs peeped above the trees and undergrowth that covered the slopes. One was white and the other ochre, the colour merging with the ground. He pointed, and she paused to take in what he showed her. Sweat stained the armpits of her blouse. She carried the two plastic bags they’d filled in a mini-mart by the bus station – milk and bread, some pork fillet, potatoes, salad – a back-stop against the fridge being empty – four beers, a bottle of wine, and some sparkling water. He thought Posie didn’t often carry shopping bags. She was wearing little more than a pair of slippers on her feet, and would have been fine on a pavement but –

Posie trod on a sharp stone and started to limp. Jonno did the decent thing and took the shopping bags with the cases.

They went on up. Below them there were interminable holiday homes and apartment blocks, finished and unfinished, then Marbella’s parks and trees, which went down to the shore. He saw ships out to sea, and a distant landmass. They’d be isolated up here. No bar, no bistro, no dancing, and no late bus back.

At the next corner he saw high retaining walls, with wire on them, and wooden gates. A surveillance camera had picked them up and moved as it followed them. Brilliant: they were on TV. He wondered who was watching them.

There was a pad with keys on it and grille for speaking into. The sign identified it as the Villa del Aguila. He looked up the track to where it ended: another set of gates, more cameras, wire and retaining walls. He noted the gap in the two walls. He and Posie trudged forward and he muttered to her that they were nearly there. Between the walls there was an opening that was little more than the width needed for a car to get through. The gates had been painted once but the deep green colour had faded. There was a chipped, peeling sign and Jonno bent close to it: Villa Paraiso. He said they had reached Paradise.

He pushed open the gates and they went through. He heard her struggle to close them. There was a path with steps that went  through a garden that needed care. A cat snarled at them, then bolted. Old pines dominated the house, which was small. First impressions? Call for a bulldozer. It was not a luxury villa. Shit. He would have liked to hold Posie’s hand as they went up the steps to the front door but he couldn’t because he carried the cases and bags. There were plant pots by the door, and he used his toe to move them. The key was revealed. He had beers and a bottle of wine and the sun was shining and he wasn’t in the bloody office doing distribution drivers’ flow charts to show fuel consumption. He dumped his load. He used the key to open the door. He murmured something about an adventure, picked her up and carried her inside. A smell of decay wafted at them, of soft dirt and old rugs.

She said, ‘Jonno, this is a bit different from what’s usually peddled as Paradise.’

‘We’ll be fine. It’ll be good,’ Jonno said. ‘I promise. The fun starts now.’

4

‘It’s a dump.’

He blinked – the sun was pouring in. They had slept in the spare room – neither of them had liked the look of the vintage double in the master bedroom.

‘Sorry and all that, but it’s a dump,’ Posie said again.

Jonno pushed himself up, let his elbows take the weight. ‘It’s not our offices and we’ve a guidebook, cash . . . Whether it’s a dump or not, it’s where we are.’

‘Yes – it’s where we are.’ She seemed to mock him. Couldn’t blame her. The picture he’d painted was of a villa in upmarket Marbella, the rich kids’ playground on the Costa del Sol where the stars and celebrities had their homes. He and Posie would have the freedom of it for two weeks . . . She sat on the side of the bed. The front of her pyjamas was buttoned, every last one, and the drawstring on the trousers was tied tight. He’d realised before they went to bed that a not-in-the-mood night stretched ahead. He felt crushed.

He’d drunk the beers and she’d killed the wine, they’d had a snack from what they’d bought, fed the cat, before it bolted back outside, and done some cleaning. His mother would have warmed to Posie.

They had started in the hallway, behind the front door, and done the old tiled floor and the woodwork. They had wiped down the walls and the pictures of a little man standing cheerfully alongside his aircraft. They’d taken off the hooks the wooden squadron shields and dusted them, then the ornaments. The shrine to a husband’s career, long gone, had continued in the living room where there were rugs to be vacuumed, with a machine out of the Ark, and windows to be scoured. There were no satellite television channels – a news programme in Spanish, a game show in Spanish, an opera in Spanish, and a football match from Barcelona with Spanish commentary. The furniture, curtains, rugs, décor and tiled fireplace were all of a bygone age, and hideous.

He’d said, after an hour, with their supper on the kitchen table, ‘There was a president in the US who said, “The slogan ‘Press on’ has solved and always will the problems of the human race.” I’m taking his advice.’

Jonno had reckoned that unless the bungalow was cleaned Posie would be heading down the hill in the morning. He’d seen the curl in her lip and the exaggerated flutter of her eyelashes.

The kitchen had been the worst. He’d expected to see a cockroach dart out from a cupboard where the saucepans were, and was almost disappointed not to. The wonder was that the old folks hadn’t pegged an age ago from acute food poisoning.

They’d exhausted the hot water and boiled kettles for more scouring. Jonno had never had to scrub a place in his life. When he’d first left home and gone to college, his mother had come up with buckets and mops.

There were stairs to an attic in the roof. Its door was closed at the top of the flight – they hadn’t bothered to explore it.

In the conservatory he’d stood on a wooden table to reach its glass ceiling. She’d done the floor and the side windows. The night had been black around them. There’d been little moon, the garden was a dark mass and the outline of the mountain huge. An owl had been calling, but otherwise there was silence. It was as if, Jonno thought, they were alone in a wilderness.

She said, ‘It’s a dump and it’s in the back of nowhere.’

‘Right and wrong.’

‘What does that mean?’ She turned over to face him.

Jonno said, ‘A dump is right. You’re wrong that it’s nowhere. We’re in Marbella, on the Costa del Sol. It’s not London, it’s not raining, and we’re not packed like sardines on a train going to work.’

A weak smile was his reward.

‘Make the best of it. The old boy’s under the knife today, and it would be good to get the place habitable. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Quiet and emptiness can’t hurt. Posie, please, lighten up.’

She grinned. He kissed her lightly on the back of the neck and went to the bathroom to see if he could crack the plumbing and run the shower.

There were times when Caro Watson struggled to understand what he said. His voice was soft, and he completed few of his sentences. He was hunched forward, his elbows on the table. The coffee in front of him had long gone cold. She had to sit close to him to hear what he said.

Neither of her minders had followed her inside. If Natan exploded at her, had a knife, a cosh or a firearm, her immediate defence was in her own hands. They were outside: one would have the door under observation; the other would be stalking the main street and doing surveillance at the back. She couldn’t have said why the kid might turn on her: there was a desperate intensity in the way he spoke – his sentences were staccato, like star bursts – and she formed a picture.