The Outsiders (2 page)

Kneeling over him, they would have used a pocket knife or a short-blade sheath knife, and butchered their way through the flesh, veins and sinews, then worked apart the bones at a joint. He might have been – pray to God he was – already dead.

When she turned away, the policeman began to wind up the tape. The rain was heavy enough to have washed away the last of the blood. She thought the statue good, a fine headstone for him.

Precious little dignity was left to Damian Fenby. She pulled the sheet back over him. She could visualise him in her office. Polite as always, with a grin that was his own, his sexuality kept for life outside Thames House; utterly professional, a young man whose company she had valued and whose sense of fun had been infectious.

Winnie Monks’s nails ground into her palms. There had been a conversation with the local intelligence man: what business had Damian Fenby and Caroline Watson had on Hungarian territory? Why had there not been contact with the authorities in Budapest prior to a visit by UK agents? Why had Caroline Watson insisted that her colleague’s body be repatriated the same day? Why had Damian Fenby been alone at the citadel in darkness? Who had he gone to meet?

Winnie Monks had remarked on the weather, the beauty of the view from the viewing platform, and had spoken of the help that British security officers had given their Hungarian counterparts when the KGB yoke had been ditched. She had asked whether he still had the hammer and sickle embroidered on his underpants. Behind her, Dottie murmured that a hearse had arrived. The intelligence man had accepted that his questions were necessary, that the answers were predictable. He had eyed Winnie Monks, had grinned at his failure to extract information, and had offered her a cigarette – probably smuggled, brought in from Belarus. She’d accepted it. They’d caught a sandwich from a fast-food counter and come on to the morgue. He had said that no witnesses had been identified and no evidence discovered at the crime scene. He doubted that a successful conclusion to any investigation was likely.

Lying bastard. Only a Russian-based organised-crime group would have killed the boy in that way. The city was riddled with such people – the country was a chokepoint for them – and the older spooks were unreconstructed: they had been comfortable with their former masters. He had grimaced, and they’d been silent for the remainder of the journey to the morgue.

She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘Get him loaded up.’

A plain coffin, chipboard, was wheeled in, and Kenny came forward with a body-bag. Winnie Monks, Kenny and Dottie lifted the boy and slid him into it. He was light. They did it easily. Dottie, bloody useful kid, would have done the basic paperwork for bringing him home.

The attendant produced a clear plastic sack of Damian Fenby’s clothes. Inside it, Winnie Monks made out his wallet and the mobile phone he would have used on the mission. She laid it on the bag, and watched as the coffin lid was screwed down. The trolley’s wheels screamed under the weight. The light was failing as they brought him out, and wheeled him to the hearse, a van with tinted windows. Dottie said she’d ride with him.

They headed for the airport.

‘They’re so arrogant, those fucking people. They think they’re untouchable,’ Winnie Monks muttered.

They swept out of the morgue’s yard into the traffic. The driver hit the buttons for a siren and for the lights to flash. The staffer was behind, and Caro Watson was with him. He’d see them up the steps, watch their boy go through the cargo hatch and think it was good riddance. He’d hope fervently never to see them again. His headlights came through the back window and bounced on Kenny’s head.

Quietly Kenny said, ‘They believe they’re untouchable, Boss, because they aren’t often touched.’

She spoke with a rich, distinctive accent, from a South Wales valley in one-time mining country. ‘My promise to him, Kenny. I’ll nail those who did it. Believe me, I will. As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’

She did not make idle threats. She mouthed it again, sealing the guarantee she had given Damian Fenby: ‘As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’

1

‘Jonno, your mother’s on the phone for you.’

He was carrying a
latte
back into the open-plan work area from the dispenser in the corridor, and he might have blushed. Dessie, at the desk to the right of his, held up the telephone for him. On the other side of his work space, Chloë had twisted in her seat, had a grin, ear to ear – maybe his mother was ringing to check he’d put on clean socks that morning. Might have been worse – he might have been ignored and his desk phone left to ring unanswered. He gave them the finger and was rewarded with laughter. He could have been like Tracey or Chris, who sat on the far side and worked alone, ate their sandwiches alone and went home alone in the evenings.

For as long as he could remember he had been Jonno: there were documents – passport, employment contract with the department-store chain, Inland Revenue – where he was recorded as Jonathan, but everywhere else he was Jonno. People seemed to like him and he wasn’t short of company in the evenings. He would have said life was good to him and . . . He slapped the coffee beaker beside his mouse mat and took the phone from Dessie. Chloë rolled her eyes.

Jonno said, ‘Hi, Ma – I’m surrounded here by doughnuts and donkeys. Did you hear manic laughter and think you were through to a nuthouse? Before you ask, I’m wearing clean underpants—’

His mother coughed, her annoyance clear.

‘What’s the problem, Ma?’

He was told. Not a problem, more of a miracle. His mind worked at flywheel speed as he identified the difficulties; then thought through the lies he needed to dump on the sour-faced woman who oversaw holiday entitlement in Human Resources. She said it again, as if she believed her son, aged twenty-six but still regarded as a child, had failed to grasp what was on offer and why.

‘Have you written down the dates?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘Stansted would be best – that’s where the cheapest go from. Jonno?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘Your dad and I, we’ve just too much on. Don’t ask me to run through it all but the diary’s full, and your father won’t fly, anyway. It’s not so much for your uncle Geoff as for your aunt Fran. They just want someone there, peace of mind, that sort of thing. Enough on their plate without worrying about the cat. It was premature of me but I sort of volunteered you. I think we’re talking about two weeks. It’s important, Jonno.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

‘You could take a friend. The cat matters to them.’

He sat at his desk and faced his screen. If he had scrolled up or down he would have stayed with the statistics of the company’s home-delivery vans, their mileage and routes from the three depots in the south and south-west of England, their annual fuel consumption and the price of the fuel. It was Jonno’s job to drive down the consumption and the cost. Dessie did the drivers’ wages, and worked out how to get more from their man-hours, while Chloë watched the transit of goods from warehouse to depots. They reckoned, all three of them, that they could have done the business with their eyes closed, but corporate discipline demanded enthusiasm. They both questioned him: had he won the lottery, or had his father done a runner? He smiled, then gave a little snort as if his mind was made up. He left the
latte
on his desk, with the mileage, consumption and tonnage, and let a sharp smile settle on his face.

He went out through the doors, past the coffee outlet and the cabinet that held the sandwiches, past the notice-boards displaying photographs of employees, the times of aerobics classes, the office choir’s practice sessions, and an entry form for a charity half-marathon. It was neither exciting work nor an inspirational setting, but it was a job. His parents lived in a village between Bath and Chippenham, a mile off the old A4 trunk road, near to Corsham. He went home once a month and heard a regular litany: which of their neighbours’ kids were on a scrap heap – temporary or permanent – having failed to find work. Truth to tell, enough of his friends from university were out of a job, pounding the streets, or stacking shelves and looking at dead-ends. He went down one floor in the lift.

How would he have described himself? Better: how would others have described him? Average. Conventional. Normal. A decent sort of guy. He made way for the director who oversaw that floor, and was rewarded with a manufactured smile. He wondered if the guy had the faintest idea who he was and what he did. It was the first week of November, a week when temperatures dropped, evenings closed in, leaves made a mess and rain was forecast every day – not the best time to go waltzing into Human Resources and demand time in the sunshine.

Jonno knocked on a glass door. He saw a face look up, a frown form, and matched it with a smile, a sad one. The frown softened. He was beckoned inside.

He was economical.

Jonno said Spain, but did not emphasise that he was talking about the Costa del Sol and the slopes above the coast that were sheltered by the foothills of the Sierra Blanca. A relative was leaving his home to travel to England for a life-threatening operation – he did not say it was a routine hip resurfacing with a high success rate. Neither did he say that the ‘relative’ was merely a long-standing friend of the family, nor that he had never met the ‘relative’ in question, Flight Lieutenant (Ret’d) Geoff Walsh, or his wife, Fran. He knew they sent a card each Christmas to his parents – not a robin in the snow but an aircraft, a fighter, a bomber or a transport C130, of the sort that used to fly out of the RAF base at Lyneham. The last had shown a jet lifting off a runway and had been sold in support of the Royal Air Force Association. He had never even seen a photograph of them. But a distress call had come.

He spoke of an elderly couple returning to the UK for surgery, might have implied ‘war hero’, and their fear of leaving their property unguarded, abandoned, while his uncle went under the surgeon’s knife. Jonno’s personal file was on her screen. There would have been commendations from his line manager, distant prospects of promotion, his allocation of days in lieu, the statutory bank holidays he had worked, and leave not yet taken. Against that were the pressures of November in the trading calendar.

She pondered. She played on it, miserable bitch, milking the moment. The arrogance of power.

It was done grudgingly. ‘I think that would be all right. Don’t make a habit of it. The compassion factor is big with the company, but it’s not to be abused. It’ll mean rejigging your holiday entitlement and we’ll probably call you in for the sales and through into the new-year holiday.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Where exactly was it you were going?’

‘Some dump down there – nothing too special. I’m grateful.’

The deceit had tripped easily off his tongue. It hurt him, denting his self-esteem. He would have liked to say, ‘I apologise for lying to you. I don’t know the man who’s having his hip chopped around, but the weather here is foul, the job’s dead boring, and it’s a chance to go to Marbella and stay in a villa. My mum says I can take my girlfriend, and we only have to find the air fares and money for food.’

He thanked her again, sounding, he hoped, as though he’d made a big sacrifice in agreeing to mind a villa in the hills on the Costa del Sol. What did he know about the place? Nothing.

Last year, Jonno and four friends had gone to the North Cape of Norway. The year before three of them had hired bicycles and pedalled round southern Ireland. Before that there had been a coach trip to a village near Chernobyl, in radioactive Ukraine, where a gang had tried to build a nursery for kids on the edge of the zone that had been contaminated by the nuclear-fuel explosion. Jonno liked to get up a sweat on his holiday, not lounge on a recliner.

He went back to his desk and his cold
latte
. He wriggled the mouse and recalled the figures, but the lines seemed utterly meaningless. He was thinking of a luxury villa with a garden and views to infinity. He considered the chance of Posie taking him up on the offer and . . . His mind darted. Chloë and Dessie were looking at him. An explanation was required.

Jonno said, ‘It’s a family problem. An old uncle needs an operation, but he and his wife need a house-sitter for the cat. I’ve drawn the short straw. HR were really helpful about me having some time out . . . Sorry, and all that, but you’re going to have to do without my sunshine lighting your lives for a while.’ He shrugged. No way he’d let either of them – or anyone else in the building – know that he was bound for a villa in Marbella, top-of-the-range on the Costa del Sol, or tongues would wag and the gossip run riot on texts, emails and tweets. He wore a sober expression, gave nothing away. Dessie and Chloë had their heads down, expressions to match, and murmured sympathetically. He wished, fervently, that he hadn’t had to bend the truth. He was asked where he was going. ‘Nowhere either of you would want to be.’

More important was what Posie would say. He went back to his charts and made a pig’s ear of it because his mind jerked him back to the Costa del Sol.

At the end of the first year, on the anniversary, Winnie Monks had told the Graveyard Team, ‘Always think of the woman, tailored jeans and green wellies, who walks an arthritic retriever in the woods. Focus on her.’

They’d been outside among the burial stones in the garden behind Thames House. The wind had whipped Winnie’s cigarillo smoke into their faces. An inventory of investigation avenues had been worked over. An FBI source, Polish, had named a Russian career criminal as the agent’s killer. Months had gone into tracking the bastard, and on the relevant dates he’d been having kidney stones extracted in a Volgograd clinic. A French asset had pointed to a flight leaving Budapest airport at the time they’d flown in on that grim morning. The airport cameras were said to have been wiped and excitement had risen, so they’d hacked into the Malev 100 passenger manifest and pushed the names to Six. Six station in Moscow had failed to identify anyone on the list with criminal links.