The Outsiders (26 page)

A twenty-euro note fell from the man’s hand into the basket, and again he pointed to the beer. Clear enough: Jonno was his guest.

He was gone. Posie looked back to their list.

He was on the other aisle, close to the freezer section, and checked his list again. He saw her each time he lifted his eye from the list to look at the shelves. She seemed not to notice that he was so close.

The girl was frightened of him.

Did she know he had seen her while they were playing with the hose? His wife said he was an animal, and obsessed with what he had done long ago. She had told him he was a changed man – Alex’s wife said the same of her man – since they had gone away to fight. The Tractor had found them in Prague. Marko had been twenty-one, Alex two years older, when they had joined the irregular force, and had cleansed the villages and towns of Croatia, then moved into Bosnia. They had been on the forward lines at Sarajevo and at Gorazde, but one afternoon – his wife said – had wrought the change in him.

The girl had good legs and a good arse. He knew because he had seen all of her. There had been women that afternoon who were old and ugly. One had bitten his lip and bloodied it; another had been heavily pregnant. The prettiest one, a virgin, had fought, using her nails, teeth and knees. She had screamed loudly enough to bring a crowd around them. The cheering had risen to a crescendo when he had punched the fight out of her, then entered her.

His wife and Alex’s had come to their village on a summer camp in their mid-teens. They were inseparable, and had found good company with the two farm boys. There had been kissing, hay barns and rules. They had married on the same day, in the same church, and gone to the same seaside hostel in Montenegro. On that afternoon, they had been in the cattle byre where the women had been brought. Alex had been in the next stall to him – he couldn’t see him but could hear him, and the shrieks his women had made, then the silences broken only by his grunts.

They had left that village, burned it and put the women on the road after the men were bulldozed into the pit. Their wives knew they had been with the enemy’s women. They knew that defiling them was the ultimate humiliation for that enemy so they did not criticise. His wife had said he was a changed man when the ceasefire was called and the men came home – for a day. It had been said on TV, by an American with the United Nations Police, that ‘war criminals’ would be hunted down so that they faced justice. He and Alex had fled. They had done close protection for a Ukrainian, then had had a better offer from a Russian. Then, as a favour from a lesser man to a bigger, they had been drafted to the Tractor. They had been with him in Hamburg, Marseille and Warsaw, than had come to Marbella and would never go home.

He was at the checkout, paying, when the boy joined the queue. The girl would not stand beside him. When Marko had paid, he waved, and made a drinking gesture, then went out into the sunshine and wondered . . . He was late, and hurried away.

Xavier thought both parties careless.

He had the photographs. The one of Jonno had been taken from the upstairs window: he was near to the back of the garden and the telephoto lens showed each blemish on his skin, as well as the boy’s angst. The girl was shown at the washing line, hanging things out to dry. She was suffering, clearly, conscious of the intrusion, and made sure her underwear was masked by blouses and jeans. He also had photos of the goons who protected Pavel Ivanov. The call from Snapper, scrambled, had been brief.

‘I’ll handle this. He’s only a kid.’

‘If you were to ask me to call the Boss on it, what is she going to do?’

‘Nothing. I’ll field it. I wouldn’t normally but I belted him verbally. Gave him something to think about. The girl’s not a problem. I reckon my Loy will sort her out. But I wanted you to know where we were. Cast an eye over them.’

Xavier – gaunt and spare, with close-cut greying hair – had done undercover before Thames House and the Graveyard Team. He understood the art of moving on streets and on transport, being seen but not remembered. He had been in through the shop door.

He knew that the meeting between the shelves had not been pre-planned: the girl had backed off, as if she’d been hit, and the boy had looked ill at ease. Xavier had hovered and sucked in the necessary information – they had met before, reason unknown, but neither had anticipated meeting there. From watching, inside and out, he had enough, he thought, to calm Snapper.

The Mercedes had been parked on that street, Avenida Arias de Velasco, near to a motorcycle business. The second guard was in the driver’s seat, smoking, and hadn’t used his mirrors. As a young detective constable, Xavier had infiltrated crime groups, had played the small-time dealer or the hood who was trying to break into a bigger league. From what he could remember, they all feared – the big players – they would be tracked. Not by the police – they expected police tails – but by their own. They faced more danger from being targeted by other criminals than by the police. Were they complacent? Stupid? Or unprofessional? If Xavier had shown out to the one coming out of the store with his shopping or the one in the car, he would have considered retiring and begging his wife to let him help at her florist business in north London. And the kids?

Jonno and Posie knew nothing. Snapper had told him of the stress and the arguing. In his hire car he had picked them up when they’d driven past the crumbling hotel, followed them and seen where they’d parked. He’d eased out of his vehicle and done some window-staring at the motorbike shop. He’d used a couple of the old tricks that surveillance people did and villains practised when they were checking for watchers. First he’d stood on the pavement and made a pretence of answering his phone. He put it to his ear, then swivelled and spun because that was what people did when they talked on the phone. That way he’d had the best view of the bad guy’s car and the front of the shop. When he had come out he had gone to the back of his Seat and lifted the boot, which masked his face, to watch the Mercedes leave and the kids coming out into the street. He had their faces in view, and would have bet his shirt that they had made no call while he couldn’t see them. The atmosphere between them was unhappy, as Xavier read it.

He told Snapper that the kids wouldn’t give him hassle, and that the bodyguards were flaky – they had lost the art of suspicion: they might have forgotten who they were, where they’d come from and what their reputation had been.

She was shop-soiled. Tommy King couldn’t claim she had had ‘one careful owner’. And there was the problem of her eye, but makeup could camouflage the bruising. He was selling his girl. During the night, when he had been dozing in the car and had thought she was asleep, the interior light had come on because she had opened the door. He’d had the back of the convertible, and she was in the front passenger seat. She’d bloody near done a runner.

He had left his normal haunts and hit the road for Mijas. A track had snaked off to his right, then gone through a forest of close-planted pines to a cul-de-sac of villas. Tommy King had heard that the Albanian who lived there had bought it dirt cheap off an Irishman, who was now in HMP Belmarsh and unlikely to be wanting it any time soon. Two or three years ago the property would have fetched more than two million euros but the market had plummeted. It was still worth good money, though. It had high granite walls, with coiled wire on top, and a camera tracked him to the gates. Dogs barked. He’d told the girl that if she tried another walkabout he’d mash her face – do it seriously, not just a slap.

She’d perked up when she’d seen the size of the gates and the height of the wall – might have thought she’d landed on her feet, not her back. She was smoothing her hair while Tommy King was speaking into the intercom, and she was straightening her dress when the gate opened enough for them to walk through. The villa was white stucco. Flowers sprouted from pots and there wasn’t a leaf on the patio. Two Mercedes were parked at the front, one low-slung, which showed it was armour-plated. That meant the Albanian’s brothel chain was holding up well in the hard times. He thought that until they were ready to put her in the marketplace in Fuengirola, or Benalmadena or Calahonda, she’d be in a shed out the back, near the kennels.

If it had not been for her age, still young, the Albanian wouldn’t have entertained buying her. The bitch had a nerve – she walked ahead of him swinging her hips. He carried her bag with what she owned. Two men stood at the side of the patio, their eyes on her. They might have been at a meat market. Actually, Tommy King would be sorry to see the back of her – he’d become fond of her. With a drink in her she went like a fucking rattlesnake. He’d take what he could get and had no bargaining chips. He was broke, near destitute, and there was a contract out on him. The radio had said that a boat was being escorted into the port of Cádiz. His wallet was empty, and the ATMs all spat back his cards. He dropped her bag. One of them took him aside.

Notes were peeled off a wad. He did the shrug that queried, but the amount was not topped up. There was only the car now.

He walked away. Her clothes were on her bag. Without a stitch on, she was in the pool, swimming, and the other man was watching her. Perhaps they’d keep her at the villa for a week or so before moving her to the clubs on the coast.

The gate closed after him. He went to see his uncle.

‘What do you expect me to do for you?’

‘I’ve only enough cash for a month and I need more.’

‘Do what the rest of us do – go hungry,’ Mikey Fanning snapped.

‘And I need protection.’

How Edith Fanning had produced Tommy remained a mystery to Mikey, and there were none like him on Myrtle’s side. ‘We live like paupers. If we want something and we don’t have the cash, we do without. You face it – or are you too yellow?’

‘That’s not fucking called for.’

‘It’s the last time I’m saying it. You don’t want to listen, then you’re not welcome here. Don’t think you can run back to me and Myrtle, snivelling. Either get on a plane, or face it and deal with it.’

‘Nothing else to offer?’

‘You know what we call you, Izzy Jacobs and me?’

‘What?’

‘A gas-meter hood. You’d shoot me or stab Myrtle for a hundred quid. Your generation, you’re fucking animals, and you’ve ruined this place. You take my advice or you should start running and not stop.’

‘So what’s your advice?’

Mikey Fanning told his nephew what to do, where he should go, when (‘about as soon as he’ll see you’) and how (‘down on your bended knee and in your best suit, all humble’). He spelled out how it would be if Tommy King was not heading for Málaga International and a flight to Bangkok or Costa Rica. The kid went. He didn’t creep away, but sort of sauntered. The swagger hadn’t been scrubbed off him. Ought to have been with the size of his debt and who he owed.

He had had a coffee and had bought his nephew’s. The shit had passed the girl on and been paid for her. He would have had some banknotes in his pocket but he hadn’t offered to pay. That generation had screwed up Paradise. In their wake, the Russians, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians had arrived. Now there were Mexicans and Colombians too. The place was wrecked. There was nowhere for him to go, nowhere that would welcome back him and Myrtle, and nowhere new they could put down roots for the time left them. There was concrete all around him, more half-complete blocks than there had ever been, and more cranes that no longer swung. It had been wonderful, a dream. Myrtle’s people used to come out from Bermondsey and visit – quietly, with all the precautions taken against the crime squads tracking them – and they’d thought Mikey was top of the bloody tree and that Myrtle had fallen on her feet. They didn’t come now because they weren’t invited: the apartment was too small and he and Myrtle too proud to tell them that life had gone down the drain. His hip hurt this week but he didn’t let on because the painkillers came pricey.

He knew one thing and didn’t know another. Mikey knew that his nephew, Tommy King, was deep in the shit with his debt round his neck. He didn’t know how deep in the shit, with that debt, he was himself. He didn’t like to think about that.

‘What does “cabin fever” mean?’ Winnie asked.

Dottie didn’t look up from her screen. ‘Boredom, restlessness, irritability, Boss, and being generally foul-tempered.’

Kenny had his chair tilted back and balanced his feet on the rim of a wastepaper bin. ‘Or being stuck up a mountain in a tent above the cloud ceiling with no view, Boss, or shut in a room without a window.’

‘What’s the cure?’

‘Me staying in and you hitting the road, walking or riding,’ Dottie said.

She would go out with Kenny. She had used up the sights in the cemetery – a funeral party, a column of mourners, the team of gardeners and the old women, head to toe in black, who brought flowers. She had exhausted any interest in the occasional flights that came in or left. She had kept an eagle eye on the phones and on the screen of Dottie’s laptop but nothing had come in. No one, she thought, needed her.

‘That what you want to do, Boss?’

She nodded.

She liked Kenny for his loyalty, dedication and his ability to flicker an eyebrow when she was in danger of either pomposity or a rant. He was good for her. There were fewer of his type in the Service now because the Turks and Tyros – all graduates looking for career success – had squeezed out the old guard. His hair had already greyed and was thinning, his suit was shiny on the thighs and his plain green tie was frayed. She reckoned that when his time came he would be beating at the door of HR and demanding to stay on – she didn’t know of anything in his life that would compensate for working at Thames House. He never criticised her decisions in front of an audience but would do so in privacy.