The Outsiders (19 page)

When he had closed down the computer he would take out the Nokia phone, tap in the password, open the directory, find the single entry and click on it. He would hear her clipped voice giving recorded instructions. Then he would speak into the void and say when he would arrive in Nouakchott. She had told him she would be there.

At the back of the garden there had once been a chicken-wire fence and a stile. The cat trailed him. The fence was now crushed by the weight of foliage and the stile had collapsed, its supports rotted.

Jonno found it.

They would talk about it later. The exchange last night had been brief. ‘I hate this place,’ she’d said.

‘It’s a cess-pit,’ he’d answered.

‘I could walk out tonight and go to the airport for the first flight out.’

‘Paradise, not lost but broken,’ he’d answered. They’d gone to bed, taken the bottle with them, a rough red Rioja. He’d held her until she fell asleep. All night Jonno had seen the gunman’s back, the spine of the Irish man who carried a pistol but had been vulnerable, and cursed himself.

She’d woken, still in his arms. ‘If it doesn’t get any worse . . .’

Jonno had said, ‘If it doesn’t get any worse, we’ll try and hack it.’

She had said, ‘Not any worse and we’ll stay . . . I thought we were dead.’ Jonno had slipped awkwardly out of the bed and gone to make the tea.

The sun was up and they’d had something to eat. She was going to try to remove the stains from the dress she’d worn last night. There was dried blood on her knees and elbows. He’d gone outside, and the cat had followed him.

At the back of the garden, where the stile was, the ground rose enough for him to see over the bungalow’s tiles. The vista took in the upper floors of the derelict hotel, an expanse of disappearing roofs, then the higher buildings along the coast. The mountains beyond showed up – Morocco, he reckoned. They could have been dead, or close to it. Instead they had dirty clothes, were grazed and bruised.

He understood the lay-out of the Villa Paraiso’s garden. It was narrow at the gate on to the track, as if the two large villas alongside it had wanted the best aspects. There was an angle in the boundaries that meant the Villa Paraiso’s grounds were wider round the bungalow’s sides and wider still behind the building’s back, which enclosed the garden, and it finally narrowed among scrub where the fence was. There was a pathway beyond it, and steep, rough steps that disappeared into the undergrowth.

The cat led him.

Jonno straddled the fence. What little weight he put on it brought down the posts and collapsed the remnants of the stile. He passed old heaps of grass cuttings, now mature compost, and vegetation that had once been cut back. The steps went higher.

He climbed and the cat was half a dozen footholds ahead.

Jonno thought that the lower steps were hand-made, perhaps the work of the retired flier when he’d had the strength, but they petered out and he found himself scrambling up what might have been a goat track, which hugged an almost sheer cliff. He should have turned back, but the cat drew him higher. He went on, dislodging stones that cascaded down the rockface to the ground.

The place he came to, where the cat waited, was hidden – he couldn’t have seen it from the garden of the Villa Paraiso. It was a small plateau with, behind it, a shallow cave, little more than a shadowed space under an overhang. He crawled inside . . . and found three black plastic bin-liners neatly stowed at the inner extremity. One was knotted less securely at the neck.

He opened the bag. He found a rucksack. Inside it there were clothes that he did not examine, a well-filled wallet, a passport, a torch and two mobile phones. He reknotted the bag and came back out into the sunlight. The cat had gone. From the plateau, he could see down into the garden of the villa beside the bungalow, its patio and a pool with a cover. The man who had brought the jump leads sat on a hardwood chair, with his back to the mountain. Jonno saw the snub barrel of the rifle lying across his thighs. He assumed another track climbed higher from the cave, and that he had found the escape kit for the three men. When he came down, he found an additional route that veered to his right and would lead to the Villa del Aguila’s garden.

When he got back, he saw that the cat was following him again.

‘What did you go up there for?’ she called, from the open kitchen door.

He shrugged.

‘I saw you climbing.’

‘I wondered where it went. There’s a path out of the garden.’

‘Where did it go?’

‘Nowhere,’ Jonno said.

‘Have you considered going to this elderly couple and asking them for access to their home?’

She looked at him scornfully.

‘I only asked, Winnie.’

‘Sorry, Chief. They live next door to a serious player in organised crime. If there’d been any trouble between them the old people would have been long gone. I’m not saying they cuddle up every Saturday night, but I’d reckon there’s a polite relationship. Are you worried?’

‘I don’t want a wheelbarrow-load of manure in my face.’

The bags were in the basement, the equipment in rucksacks, with flight tickets and the petty cash he had sanctioned. He had asked a few questions and been told a few half-truths. He would have swung for Winnie Monks.

‘I think we’ll be fine. The boys who are going in – that’ll be Snapper and Loy – are house-trained.’

‘Like no one was ever there.’

‘When the old people come back, they’ll not know anyone was in the property.’

‘Winnie, what should I hope for?’

‘Something along the lines of loose ends that need tying up. Happy?’ The Chief thought she cared more for this operation than any other she’d worked on. He stood, walked round his desk and planted a kiss on each of her cheeks. He wished her well, and hoped to God he’d be spared a middle-of-the-night call about a mission unravelling.

‘By the way, what’s it called?’

She hesitated before she answered him. ‘It’ll be Delta Foxtrot. The bastard won’t know what’s hit him.’

She was almost at the door.

‘Anything else I should know, Winnie? Anything else out of Madrid?’

‘We go for extradition, straightforward. That’s all.’

Sparky made coffee. He took a tray of plastic mugs to the little cluster of cigarette and cigarillo ends. While he had been in his hut and the kettle had boiled, more had come. She handed mugs to Kenny, Dottie, Xavier, Caro Watson, and then to the latest to arrive. She did the introductions. They were Snapper and Loy, and he was Sparky – he’d travel with them and mind their backs. When they were alone in the garden, Winnie smoking, he would pause in tending a bed, while she told him his black days were over, that he was, always would be, a Para, one of the best . . . He had packed, and beside her seat on the bench there was a small rucksack with his boots tied to it. The evening was closing round them, and the group around her was listening, rapt. At the end she slid from a file the photograph of the young man, Damian Fenby. The mission was Delta Foxtrot, she said, and told them to ‘fuck off and get on with it’.

She’d said she was coming with a driver and would already have eaten. She’d want to sleep on the floor and would be gone before first light.

Bill and Aggie Fenby split the necessary preparations. She made sandwiches and put on the coffee to warm. He had brought out a malt, the glasses, some blankets from the cupboard at the top of the stairs and had checked the twin beds in what had been their son’s room.

They had not been asked whether it was convenient for Winnie Monks to visit late at night, or whether they wanted the latest information – that a killer had been identified.

She would power into their lives, as she had done five years before and every year on the anniversary. She stayed for no more than thirty minutes, assured them that Damian was not forgotten, that the investigation was not closed, drank a cup of tea and ate a biscuit or a slice of cake, then left chaos in their minds and was driven away. That evening they expected a development. Aggie worked part-time in an antiques shop a couple of miles away. Her husband lectured on the Palaeolithic period at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford. They worked and had – as neighbours remarked – ‘kicked on’ with their lives. His room was not a shrine.

Bill Fenby would have said that the visit was not for their benefit, but for Winnie Monks’s sense of duty; he had not voiced the opinion. And Aggie might have said, but didn’t, that Winnie Monks was coming because she was burdened with guilt.

There was a grave in the churchyard off Manor Lane on the outskirts of the village. They went to it each week but they had not understood the world in which their son had worked. He had never confided in them what he did. They knew nothing of the world inhabited, today, by Winnie Monks.

There was a pile of plastic sacks, supermarket bags and holdalls in the hallway and spilling into the living room at Mikey and Myrtle Fanning’s apartment.

‘It was a bloody bad day when he came out here,’ Mikey said.

Myrtle wrinkled her nose. ‘The room still smells of him and his slag.’

‘He’s not living here, not over my dead body he isn’t.’

‘It’s your family, not mine.’

‘We’ve nowhere to store all that crap.’

‘Maybe put it out on the street for the binmen.’

‘I can’t because he’s family, fuck him.’

It wasn’t often that Myrtle softened, but now she touched his arm and felt the sweat. His chin seemed to tremble and she dreaded another ‘turn’: he’d been out that afternoon and had walked too far. The sweat had been coming off him in rivers – his clothes were in the washing-machine.

‘Come on, Mikey,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to ship you off to Alicante, not just yet.’

She laughed, and he joined her. It was the first time either had laughed since the rap on the door the previous evening when they were thinking about bed. The door was on the chain – that was recent, needing a chain in San Pedro. She’d had it a little open and had seen Mikey’s nephew: not panic on his face but near to it.

She’d undone the chain and he’d blundered in, the girl after him. He’d brought in the bags, and had told the story. An Irishman had been shot dead on the pavement in front of a cafe in Puerto Banus and the radio’s English-language station said it was a feud about territory for the supply of drugs. It was where Tommy King did business. He said he’d been fired at, two shots missing, and a man stumbling away. He’d bugged out of his place, packed all that was important and put the key through the letterbox. He needed a bed. The room smelt because Tommy King had slept on the sofa with the girl.

In the morning, Tommy and his slag had gone through the fridge and bloody nearly emptied it: then the biggest insult of all: he’d put a fifty-euro note on the table for what they’d eaten. He’d left, murmuring something about ‘lying low till my ship comes in. I’ll be all right then, you too, Mikey, but that’s for today.’ He’d driven away with the girl beside him. The bags were where they had been left.

Mikey Fanning pointed at the bags, upped the eyebrows and said, ‘I’d like to think there was a drink in that for me, but I don’t think so.’

‘It’s about that ship, right?’

‘About that ship coming in, and the good days starting . . .’ He sipped some water.

She went into the kitchen to empty the washing-machine. The little bubble she and Mikey lived in was shrinking. Only Izzy Jacobs was left of the old crowd. Some had died, some had moved on to Thailand, Costa Rica or Montenegro, and some had gone down the A7 to Málaga, walked into the consulate, asked for the drugs liaison officer and surrendered. They’d said a spell in the Scrubs, Long Lartin or Belmarsh was preferable to withering in the Costa sunshine. Mikey and Myrtle didn’t mix – they couldn’t have done. They didn’t do the Rotary, the golf club or the Legion, and early on, they’d been happy enough with others on the run or below the radar. Now, though, there was only Izzy Jacobs, who fenced a bit, did some pawn stuff – he’d been cautious with his money.

The new men were like Mikey’s nephew, who had no style and wouldn’t always be lucky: a trip on a kerbstone was a one-time escape. They were like the Russian man up on the hill, or they were Serbs and Albanians, Italians and Colombians. She and Mikey had no contact with them, and knew no Spaniards, other than the people behind the counter in the post office or the bank, the mini-mart or the local bar. They had no language and little knowledge of the two couples on their staircase, one of whom was likely to be wearing a bus driver’s uniform if they passed him. The others went to work before she and Mikey were up. They were trapped. She came past him with the plastic basket and went on to the balcony, stepping over the bags left for them to mind.

Mikey said, ‘Whether you have money or you don’t, it’s the same. The life here is ruined. But we’re too old to quit. Pity the Irishman didn’t shoot the bastard.’

She hung the clothes on the line, and the night was warm but Mikey was still shivering. The marksman should have aimed better when he pointed his bloody gun at Tommy King. None of her family, back in Bermondsey, would have missed, but she didn’t say that.