The Dealer and the Dead (63 page)

One envelope remained on the table, propped against the marmalade jar, one scarf, one tie and one of Benjie Arbuthnot’s cards. He grinned, as if the years had dropped from his back. There was a flash of saucy mischief in his eyes. He told her the names of
Mrs Josie Gillot
and
Mr Harvey Gillot,
the name of the
pansion
and the street that led out through the historic old town of Sozopol that was a half-hour drive south of Burgas, and ended at the beach.

‘Happy as a pig in shit, I predict. Made his compromises and can live with them, but she has also. She let him set up shop, then came out to Bulgaria, found the Behan girl – status not quite explained – on site, and saw her off. I wouldn’t be surprised if she brought the dog in a crate to further her cause. I fancy that Gillot, wisely, avoided intruding into that cat fight. I’d imagine that, facing a woman who’d decided to stick with the joys of marriage – as you’d know, my dear – Miss Behan’s feet wouldn’t have touched the ground. She was out and on her neck. The Gillots run a bed-and-breakfast in that up-and-coming resort, and would have bought it dirt cheap. When the green shoots start to sprout it’ll be a good place to have invested in. His compromise: he looks after the laundry and the catering – and might sell communications equipment but nothing that goes off with a bang. His hands can stay clean while he’s a conduit for contacts in Bulgaria and Moldova, Belarus and Ukraine. Everything he does, from bookings to dinner orders
and
the paperwork of what he buys and sells, is bounced off her first … I’d say that Vauxhall Bridge Cross has limited contact with him, keeps him on a minimal payroll. The daughter is at an international school in Sofia and lodges mid-week with an
embassy family. Who’d have reckoned it? He’s alive and well and smiles with a winner’s confidence. She looks after him with something approaching devotion, and partnership. Funny the way it all works out.’

Did she believe a word he told her? She wrote his name on the back of each package and their Shropshire address code. The postman would be the proof of his game’s credibility. If no tie or scarf came back, Benjie Arbuthnot had read it well.

He said, ‘I’ve learned … things are seldom what they seem to be.’

She said, ‘Never are, and never will be.’

A bitter, chilled morning. Snow had fallen on the fields in the night and lay almost virgin around the wooden cross. There was peace and calm, and buzzards soared on the winds, clouds scudded and a pair of young foxes were wary as they padded past the cross, leaving trails of their paw prints. The wind, soon, would have covered the tracks with blown snow from the drifts, and already the signs of the path that ran close to the cross were gone. Smoke, from the burning of damp logs, climbed from the distant chimneys of the nearest village but no mourners came to this place, tramping through the impediment of the snow, to grieve and remember. The cross, its lengths of rough wood held together by nails, and the items hanging from it, placed there with love, protruded above the carpet blanketing the ground. Only the cross gave an indication that it was at this point Harvey Gillot had cheated death and Robbie Cairns had not, and that here a schoolteacher and three young men had waited too long for a rendezvous and been trapped in another winter’s first dawn light. A lonely place, cursed, where the dead and their ghosts kept uneasy company.

Gerald Seymour was a reporter at ITN for fifteen years. He covered events in Vietnam, Borneo, Aden, the Munich Olympics, Israel and Northern Ireland. He has been a full-time writer since 1978.

Seymour’s first novel was the acclaimed thriller
Harry’s Game
, set in Belfast, and since then six of his thrillers have been filmed for television in the UK and US.
The Dealer and the Dead
is Seymour’s twenty-seventh novel.