The Outsiders (47 page)

She listened, kicked the radiator again.

‘I’m assuming he’s trekking along after them, going to the airport. No, I have no communications linking him to me. It was an unforeseeable situation and my contact was via Xavier and with the photographer – who, by the by, may travel with a reputation but won’t work with me again . . . I’m not in a position to talk to him. It’s not anyone’s fault, just the way fortune fell . . . For fuck’s sake, listen to me. It didn’t work out, and I have to live with that . . . I’ll see you tomorrow . . . Sorry. Did I catch you right? The whole story? Was that the question? . . . Enough, Chief, for now. Stay safe.’

She rang off.

And hesitated. Winnie Monks did not know at that moment whether to shout or scream, or kick the radiator hard enough to bring it off the wall. Or whether she should sit in a corner and sulk. All of those around her looked to her for leadership. She couldn’t offer anything. Kenny and Dottie didn’t meet her eye. It was like a dream had died.

She said, ‘I’d hoped to leave here with trumpets playing, not in bloody sackcloth.’

‘Who is she? The woman in the photograph, does she own you?’

The head stayed motionless and there was no response, but the hands shook.

‘Are you here because of her?’ The shadows were longer, the air cooler and in the garden the dog slept.

‘They’ve all gone, the ones who ought to be here and backing you. Was it her instruction that you stayed?’ He strained to hear the sounds of an approaching car.

‘Did she send you the rifle because she knew you were her lap-dog?’ He supposed he wanted an endorsement. It was their mission – he was signed up for it. If he had volunteered for an office sales gathering at a weekend, or a brainstorming session staying late on a mid-week evening, Jonno would have expected a pep-talk at the start, a wind-up oration. He was told nothing.

‘Have you considered that when he comes you might bottle out? Do you wonder if you’re sick? Does
she
manipulate you? Sparky, is this what you want?’

No answer.

‘Christ, Sparky. I stayed. No one else did. They all walked over you, like you were useless. I listened. I heard what the target had done and I signed up for it. Don’t I get thanked?’

The gulls wheeled high and called. The dog moved, might have been chilled because the sun was off the garden now. Its walk set off the arc lights on the back of the villa and made the shadows stronger, flatter.

They waited.

The ammunition and the weapon were in a brown-paper bag of the sort that a fruit and vegetable stall used, strong enough for a kilo of apples and another of potatoes. It wouldn’t fall apart under the weight of three magazines – ‘What you off to do, Izzy? Start a bloody war?’ – and a Jericho 941, from Israeli Weapons Industries in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv. The pistol had been spoken well of after trials in a European police shooting contest, and twice every year Izzy went with its owner up into the hills and loosed off a dozen rounds – ‘Even an old man should keep his hand in.’ It was only seven inches long and weighed two and a half pounds. It comforted him to know that the handgun had been manufactured in Israel, built by Jewish production-line workers – like a gift from a distant corner of family. He brought it back to his apartment.

What Izzy Jacobs liked about Myrtle Fanning – had long admired – was her stoicism in the face of adversity. She had endured a marriage to Mikey Fanning – whom Izzy thought of as a brother but who had been wasteful, now a failure, poor with money and a shell of his old self. He had never heard Myrtle Fanning complain or resort to self pity. She took what life threw at her and shrugged it away. He had never declared himself. Before he had met his own wife, Izzy had fenced Mikey’s nicked goods and wished Myrtle’s smile had settled on him. After Beryl’s death, alone in the environs of San Pedro, a little of him had hoped that illness would make a widow of Myrtle. She never whined. She was brusque, fierce and strong.

He let himself in and put the paper bag on the kitchen table.

Myrtle told him she had switched on the TV. On the television there had been pictures from a beach down the coast, near Fuengirola: a police officer had been carrying a bin-bag with the same reverence as if she’d been carting the waste from an abattoir. There were, the TV reported, severed legs in the bag and an officer reckoned a criminal gang war was being fought out.

She said, dry eyes, controlled, ‘Later they freshened up the report. They put some shoes on the TV. They were Mikey’s best, what he always wore at funerals. Then they said that a car had been found burned out in a quarry up beyond Fuengirola on the Sierra de Mijas, and there was a body in it. They said the body had no legs. I switched the TV off.’

If she had been any other woman, Izzy Jacobs would have put an arm around her, and reckoned he risked having tears stain the cream cotton jacket he wore most days. He said he would put the kettle on and went towards the kitchen. He thought a cup of tea was called for, with a splash of Scotch it, but no hugging. There would be no tears. She followed him. He filled the kettle, put it on. He knew his kitchen was a palace compared to hers, and his apartment was double the size. He heard paper rustle.

He did not look round. ‘Take care, Myrtle.’

‘They were always around the house when I was a kid. My dad, brothers, uncles and cousins all had firearms practice out on Rainham marshes. I can handle a shooter. Can you, Izzy?’

He poured water into the pot, two bags when one would have done. He let his mind drift back fifty-six years, to when he had been nineteen and a conscript in the Service Corps. He was smart, his hair Brylcreemed, and his driving skills were excellent. He had been a colonel’s driver in Egypt and had worn a service revolver on his webbing belt. It was a Webley Mark lV, firing .38 bullets, and he’d used it on the range when the colonel had practice shooting. He’d been a chosen man and had done good deals because that was his talent. His colonel had eaten and drunk better than any contemporary in Ismailia. He’d loved the feel of the thing on his upper webbing, the weight of it and the pressure of the holster.

He said, ‘Enough experience to get by.’

He filled a mug for her and stirred in two sugars. He imagined her fighting for space in the kitchen of a terraced home in south-east London, down by Peckham railway station, scrabbling to get the weapons out of the hands of the young bucks and into her own fists. She aimed it at the window.

Izzy Jacobs said, ‘He was my best friend, Mikey was. If no one else will go after those bastards, I will. I’d swing for him.’

Her first half-turn on her heel had been on the far side of the gate. Snapper had grabbed her arm. He’d been on one side of her, Loy on the other, and the man who’d driven them from Marbella bus station was close behind her. His knees nudged the back of her thighs.

‘Just get your bloody passport out,’ Snapper mouthed.

‘Best do as he says,’ added Loy. ‘Have it ready.’

Posie hadn’t taken the passport from her bag. At the desk she’d shrugged clear of their hands and used her heel to kick the third man’s shin.

‘They don’t want you,’ Snapper hissed.

‘They’ll slam the door in your face,’ Loy spat. ‘You’ve burned your bridges.’

Snapper again: ‘Burned your boats.’

The man behind her said, ‘No going back, that’s ‘‘burned your boats’’. Fourteen hundred years ago, a Moor invaded this coast of Spain and brought twelve thousand troops ashore and ordered all their boats to be destroyed so there was no way of retreating.’

The queue had built behind them. Impatience surged.

Snapper had said sourly, ‘Please yourself. See if we care.’

‘Your call, Posie,’ Loy had said. ‘Not our shout.’

She’d gone.

One had shouted after her but she had not known which, and a flight was called. She’d had her backpack looped on her shoulders and had gone to the bus place. Within twenty minutes the coach had pulled up and she’d paid for the one-way journey back along the A7 highway.

She supposed it was a sort of madness.

There were stories in the papers, the tabloids, and on the news bulletins of people doing daft things, and being unable to explain themselves. She’d heard that sort of playing dumb called ‘riding the wind’. The wind was the coach that speared along the road, going west towards the door of the Villa Paraiso that might be  slammed in her face, and might not.

Nerves gripped her.

She climbed down off the coach.

He might not even open the door to her, let alone slam it in her face. And the rifle would be there, the magazines loaded in it. That was the degree of the madness. It had captured Jonno and now her.

She walked up the hill, felt the cool of evening and shivered.

It was over. The liaison officer from the RAF detachment still lingering in the Crown Colony had raised his eyebrows when she told him what she wanted, had stamped on the brake and had helped clear their gear from the Land Rover. They were dropped by the Shell garage. There were perfunctory handshakes and the officer said, with ill-disguised irony, ‘Hope it went well . . . whatever it was.’

Winnie led, Kenny and Dottie trailing after her on the narrow pavement.

Three members of an Irish bomb team had died there, but there was no room for them in Winnie Monks’s mind. She would have been in her first year at university at the time; and politics, economics and international relations didn’t go with blood on the ground. She wanted to walk and taste the last of the Rock, which loomed behind her. The RAF cleaners would no doubt bitch that there had been smoking inside the building. She knew it was over. Behind her, they talked. Might have thought she wouldn’t hear, or that it didn’t matter if she did.

Kenny spoke of the backlog there would be in clearing the expenses claims he dealt with, which would be piled in his in-tray the next Monday morning. Dottie, then, would have gone back to A Branch to the rosters, the days-in-lieu and the requests from team leaders for foot-surveillance people. Kenny wondered if Caro Watson had already returned to the deputy director’s outer office. Dottie thought it likely that Xavier would have accumulated time off and would not be called into the Yard, and his liaison job, before the weekend.

They talked easily. The wheels on the trolley Kenny was pulling needed oil, which was mentioned, as was the awesome light on the rockface. They wondered whether the flight out would be on time. Dottie said she believed it was right that they were quitting, and Kenny said it was sensible because nothing remained here for them.

Winnie didn’t know if anything had ever been there for them. She trudged on and her feet hurt, but it was a last flavour of the place before the death moment. It would be the end of her Graveyard Team, the gatherings in the gardens behind Thames House, the burial of self-perpetuating élitism and the mantra that nobody appreciated them. She had reached the runway. The lights were green for vehicles and pedestrians, and the aircraft had not arrived on schedule. She kept to her brisk stride and ignored the ache in her swollen feet.

She could have talked to Dawson, but no one else.

Her Graveyard Team, fashioned when they had investigated organised crime, had been confident they were light years ahead of the Metropolitan Police. That might have been delusional, she reflected. In the corridors of the building where she worked there were corporate notice-boards. Perhaps the Graveyard gang were no more relevant than the Light Operatic Society, the tennis team, or the bloody Pilates crowd, who took over the gym on any early morning, then went sweaty to their desks. She remembered those evenings in the gardens, among the old stones of the graveyard where once the body-snatchers had skulked until night. They’d smoked, drunk coffee, eaten sandwiches and congratulated themselves on their abilities. A delusion. She had said to Kenny, taking the body out of central Budapest and
en route
to the airport, ‘. . . so arrogant, those fucking people. They think they’re untouchable.’

He had said, ‘They believe they’re untouchable, Boss, because they aren’t often touched.’ She had raised her voice in the car and made her declaration.

She said, over her shoulder, to Kenny, ‘You remember what I said when we were bringing that boy home. I said, ‘‘My promise to him. I’ll nail those who did it. Believe me, I will. As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’’ I failed to honour my word. Fucking hurts, Kenny.’

‘You did what you could, Boss. It’ll be the dagoes that field the blame – couldn’t stand up when we needed them to. Folded at the first whiff of grapeshot, like always. None of it’ll be at your door.’

Dottie said, ‘Can’t do more than your best, Boss.’

That the strength of her team was a delusion came hard to Winnie Monks.

‘I owed him more. When we get in we should damage a litre of something. Soften the pain. Sorry for the maudlin stuff.’

‘. . . but it was a long time ago. It has served me well and enhanced my reputation.’

The Major smiled thinly. He was relaxed and comfortable in the car and the lawyer drove smoothly. The man once known as the Tractor had coaxed from him the story of the missing fingers. He had told it factually, using the language of the military to describe the malfunction of the supposed recoilless weapon. He had grimaced when he added that the pain of a lost finger was as
nothing
in comparison to the pain if the position had been overrun by those savages – ‘Wonderful fighters, the best, heroic’ – and they had been taken alive. ‘I think what did me most good was what I said to the senior man. I was dosed with morphine, should have been on my back, and delayed shock had set in. I was told afterwards that my voice had dripped contempt. What I said to that idiot, with an army of juniors listening, cemented the legend about me. It’s the way of life. You have no idea what’s hidden behind a corner. I had no idea that I would bawl at a veteran commander and ridicule him.’