The Outsiders (44 page)

16

Jonno didn’t consider himself a seasoned traveller. He was rarely at railway stations to see family or friends on their way; and had never taken anyone to an airport and watched them disappear into Departures. Perhaps if he had been a regular at waving people off he would have known that travellers never had much time for those left behind. They hadn’t looked at him. They had left him as if he was history in their lives.

As she’d settled into the back seat she’d been introduced to the driver, the man who had dropped off the rifle; Jonno had seen his smile and hers, their handshake, and then the door had shut on her. They’d gone fast. She had been wrenched from him.

He’d been to the mini-mart and bought bread, cheese and beer from Russia, ham, salad and more milk. He’d driven back up the hill.

He carried the plastic bags into the kitchen. He called upstairs. No answer. He unpacked the bags: the fridge gaped empty. They had taken everything that was theirs and Posie’s. He called again. The surfaces and the floor shone. The quiet clung around him. He slammed the fridge door, went to the radio, found a music station and turned up the sound, then killed it.

He went upstairs.

Everything was perfect, scrubbed and polished. The rifle was clean and its surfaces glowed. The lens of the sight winked at him.

There was a rucksack against the wall at the bottom of the bed, and on it lay an airline ticket, a printout. He listened but there was silence. He felt sweat rising on his neck.

The wind brushed the trees’ upper branches, and the dog barked beyond the wall.

Jonno had thought he’d be greeted by Sparky in the hall and thanked for sticking by him. He reached down. He let his hands rest on the rifle, then tightened his fingers and lifted it. He had never been challenged. Sparky had, and Snapper was challenged on most of his working days, as was Loy. Jonno had never been challenged beyond school exams and an interview with an assessment board for a university place in the days when they took anyone they could pull in off the street. He could have said it was a bigger challenge to pull Posie, because she was brighter and prettier than the girls who were usually on offer. He put the rifle to his shoulder, and his eye to the lens.

Through the sight, Jonno raked the length of the garden at the Villa del Aguila. He saw the small area of front driveway going to the main door, and the side where pot plants were bright beside a path. He saw the shimmer of the patio doors and part of the pool. The sight was quality, as good as the kit the twitchers brought to the bird sanctuaries at Chew and Blagdon. He went with the lens up the cliff face and could just make out the steps he’d used. Then he saw another range of indentations, minuscule ledges and jutting stones, and realised they led to the cave and descended to a point beyond the hut where the chipper was. He tracked back, and focused on the dog. Until his hand shook and he lost the moment, he could almost peer down into its ear cavity. He could see the saliva at its jaws, and could have counted the studs on its broad collar. He was close to it courtesy of the sight mounted on the rifle.

He eased his tunnel view back up the garden and went to the chipper. He stood stock still and waited for a rat to appear. One came. His arms ached from the weight of the rifle. He had to fight to keep his finger on the guard, not let it find the trigger. The rat he followed was the smaller and fatter of the pair, perhaps pregnant and well fed from the inside of the chipper, the flesh the hose had not washed through. He had a bead on it, where the shoulder and neck came together. He lost the aim, had to shift the weight.

Sparky said, ‘It weighs a fraction over twelve pounds, with the sight and the ammunition. You shouldn’t be holding it.’

Jonno froze.

‘I’d be grateful if you’d put it down. Gently.’

‘I was very careful.’

‘Did you touch the safety bar?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know where it is but you know you didn’t touch it. Keep your finger away from the trigger and put it down.’

Jonno didn’t. It would have been easy to lay it on the table, where Snapper had left his camera, and where Loy’s notebook had been. Sparky was watching him. Jonno had heard no door close, no footsteps on the stairs – a cat couldn’t have gone quieter. It riled him. He tossed the Dragunov rifle to Sparky, the aim pointing at Sparky’s waist. He didn’t know if it was loaded or if it was safe. He didn’t know if it would be caught. It was.

Most would have sworn at him, and Snapper would have ripped into him.

Sparky said, ‘Thank you.’

He should have been kicked from one end of the room to the other. It was a fair assumption that if Sparky hadn’t caught it the jolt might have activated the firing mechanism and let a bullet go. He remembered what he’d been told of muzzle velocity and range. The rifle’s safety lever was checked.

He had felt, looking at the dog’s head and the shoulder of the rat, that he was a king. He was in fact a kid who had abused trust. Sparky laid the rifle on the table, and said, ‘You don’t want your hands on it – and another thing.’

‘What?’

‘You should have gone with them. You’ll be a burden on me.’

‘I thought a sniper needed a spotter.’

‘A spotter is trained, has the same level of skill as a sniper. Touch it and your hand’ll be filthy. It’s for dirty work.’

‘Are yours?’

‘Obvious, and you’ve seen it. Touching it, you’re sucked in. It gets a hold on you. You’re not the same man afterwards. It makes you think you’re set aside from others – and that’s right because you’re not fit company for decent people. It’s for killing with. You’re altered by it.’

Jonno said softly, ‘I think I am already. I wouldn’t leave you here alone – God knows why, but that’s how it is. We’ll go out of here together.’

‘It’s barely my quarrel. It’s nothing of yours.’

‘That’s not important. I repeat it – “out of here together”. I’ll make some coffee.’

The Blue Bottle bar had few takers at midday, but the Latvian policeman was escorting a Slovenian broadcaster, who claimed he was unable to work in the afternoons without a beer at lunchtime.

The Latvian policeman said, ‘It would be good to think, but naïve, that we can dismantle an organised-crime group and so affect the marketplace. We can’t. I’ll be frank. If there’s a real triumph during the day, then that evening you can’t get into this bar. Only very occasionally do we have cause for celebration – proper interference with trade and a shortage at street level. On such a day, Josip, you wouldn’t want to be here. You wouldn’t be able to fight your way to the bar.’

They gulped their drinks and walked to the next appointment.

Myrtle Fanning would have been loath to call herself an expert on the fashions of interior decoration, but she knew what she liked. Izzy Jacobs’s furnishings were hideous. A potentially light room was darkened by mauve velour curtains, and the furniture was from Ikea in Málaga.

‘If I’d gone back, Myrtle, I’d be spending my last years in the Scrubs, Wandsworth or Pentonville. I wouldn’t get a place in an open gaol because all those politicians and accountants have taken the beds. They’d catch up with me, bang me up and leave me to rot. I’m not going anywhere. And this place is shot to shit.’

His place was hurt to her eyes, and Izzy Jacobs was no beauty. He was shrunken with age, had loose, lined skin on his face and clawlike hands. His scalp was blotched with sun damage, and his clothes hung loose on him. That day his socks didn’t match. But he had the smile of an angel.

‘Of course he should have called you. Of course, my dear, you’re right to be concerned. We’ll go together. We’ll go when I’ve made a call and taken delivery of a small item of gear from a friend. The advantage of this trade is that I have many friends with many items of gear.’

‘I’m not snitching.’

‘I wouldn’t expect it of you.’

‘My family’s never snitched, never turned anyone in. I don’t expect to see my Mikey, and I’ve never had wet eyes. But we don’t forgive and we don’t forget.’

‘I’ll be with you, just as soon as I’ve that item of gear. We’re old and we stick together. It’s about all we’ve left because the place is shot to shit. It was once so good.’

‘We were blessed, so many famous people rubbing shoulders on any street.’

‘Now? Go to the Rotary, go to the Lions, and you’ve people putting it about that they were celebrities. They say, “Do you know who I used to be?” Miffed if you haven’t any idea. What I said, Myrtle, shot to shit, and so much that’s second rate.’

‘Like the light’s gone out. Go and get that bit of gear, Izzy.’

He was gone. She looked at a magazine, property for sale on the Costa. She did the TV zapper. Turned some more pages of advertisements for discounted villas and apartments. On the screen she saw the beach and the police, the sack a woman officer carried. She knew enough of the language and didn’t bother with the subtitles they flashed up. A senior man said that it was likely to be a feud between foreign criminals, but he was surprised that the legs they’d found indicated an elderly victim.

He had raked the leaves and cut the grass. He supposed there were other ways to prepare his mind for acting as a witness – co-conspirator – to a killing. He didn’t know them. Jonno had left Sparky upstairs. It was not Jonno’s business whether the grass was long or short, or that Villa Paraiso was now clean enough for a Tidy Homes competition. It was not his business to be involved as accessory to a murder. He had thought that the raking and mowing would give him an idea about the limits of his ‘business’. Now there was a heap of leaves beyond the cat’s grave, and the grass looked scalped. He would aid and abet in the death of a man he had never seen, whose name he didn’t know.

He came back in.

He took a mug of coffee upstairs to Sparky.

The rifle was across Sparky’s lap – he was sitting in Snapper’s old chair. It was further back now and Sparky was deeper in the room’s shadows than Snapper had been. He’d made the coffee as he knew Sparky liked it.

‘You shouldn’t have stayed. You’re a burden to me.’

‘I did the milk as you have it.’

‘You’ve no skills or training. You’re a waste of space. You’re not wanted – is that clear enough?’

‘And I put in the half-spoon of sugar.’

‘You’ve no reason to be here. You’re a nuisance and a liability. The best favour you could do me – if you’re so anxious to help – is to pack your stuff and get the hell out. You might catch the afternoon plane to Stansted.’

Sparky was reaching into his hip pocket. His wallet came out, leather scratched and old. He flipped it open. There was a picture of a woman. She sat on a bench in a small park and the trees above her were bare. One side of her face was blurred behind a cloud of exhaled smoke and she had a cheroot in her mouth. Sparky was dragging euro notes out of the wallet. ‘You need more than three hundred? More than that to get a plane out?’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You’re a burden because you can do nothing to help me. If I want coffee, I’ll make my own.’ The wallet was left on the table. A hand went to the mug, hooked it up, aimed it and threw it out of the window. Jonno heard it break on the slabs below. The money pulled out was beside the wallet. He saw veins prominent on Sparky’s forehead and his hands were clasped, which didn’t stop the shaking. ‘What do you think is going to happen when I fire? It’s an aimed shot, on one target. How many of them are there? Four, five, six? What will they do, less one? Wring their hands, administer first aid and say prayers? They’ll come hunting. It’ll be assault rifles, automatic weapons, maybe heavier stuff. Unless you’re extraordinarily lucky, and no reason why you should be – they’ll probably start up the chipper again. I can’t take down more than one or two, max. And they’ll come hunting. Why are you here?’

Anything that Jonno might have said would have sounded trite. He knew, far inside himself, that he was staying and would be there at the end. The next time he was asked he would struggle towards an answer. He went to make a sandwich, then to pick up the shards of the coffee mug. He had heard the chipper’s throbbing engine, the whine of the chain saw, and there had been the depth of trust shown him by a maimed cat. He was a changed man, and . . . he did not say why, on his Costa holiday, he would work to kill a man.

The Major gazed around him and absorbed what he was told. The Romans had founded the town where they had had lunch. Roman engineers had built the road on which they had driven from the town, and Roman legions had tramped past the lay-by where he stood. Those Romans would have seen a vista not greatly changed from the one confronting the Major. There was a valley of scrub, trees and low foothills that sloped gently up towards bluffs and escarpments of bare stone. The sun burned down on the landscape’s green shades that the rain had freshened. The lawyer talked and Ivanov translated.

‘It was an eco park, but there were what we call “negotiations” with local planning officials and the designation of the park was changed. We were able to insert the word “amenity” in our development proposal. The steering committee of the interested parties prepared for investment in the valley were confronted with supposed “difficulties” from protesters who challenged our proposals concerning water availability and the route of the rambling path – it goes from the Spanish coast to Greece, crossing the valley and the habitat of the Imperial Eagle. Many difficulties arose, but each one was removed when we had gained the friendship of a relevant official. It was an expensive process. The clearance is legal but we require capital.’