The Outsiders (42 page)

Alex drove back.

It was obvious to Pavel Ivanov that he had revisited an old world. They headed for Marbella. He would have confessed, had he a confidant, that his life as a laundered businessman was likely to be over. The businessman he had aped did not feed impertinent young men into chippers or instruct his minders to take a chain saw to an old fool who believed extortion was a quick route to wealth. It was as if he had taken a narcotic, which had reactivated an old addiction. There was a McDonald’s off the road and they pulled in. They bought three large burgers and fries, then drove on.

It was unlikely that the police or the fire brigade would turn out for a torched car, and equally unlikely that anyone would be walking on the beach with a dog in the dark. The gulls would have a full feed before the legs were discovered. Alex drove fast back to the villa, unwilling to let the burgers grow cold.

Xavier spoke to Winnie.

‘For fuck’s sake – you know what time it is?’

‘Yes, Boss.’

His voice had held an edge that quietened her.

‘Spit.’

She had been asleep, but now her light was on and she was scrabbling for a pencil and paper.

‘You comfortable, Boss?’

Usually Winnie Monks enjoyed Xavier’s dry dispassion. ‘Do me a favour, get on with it.’

‘The package went through as we expected. The young guy who took it off me was clever, aware. He could have showed out because his neighbour was shopping on the street, but he was bright enough not to foul up.’

‘You didn’t ring at this God-forgotten hour to tell me that?’

‘No. The package contents were seen, which caused a shock wave on top of the turbulence about the extradition call. It was starting to heap up. It was going nowhere, then a weapon was introduced. It gets worse.’

‘I’m a big girl.’

‘An old guy visited the target. We’d had the chipper before. They killed him, then took his legs off with a chain saw in the garden. It’s a triple shock. Got me, Boss? Another killing on the doorstep.’

‘Give it to me, no saccharine.’

‘The Snapper team’s pulling out.’

She hesitated. Her mind churned. God, she missed Dawson – missed having him beside her and his bloody calm. ‘What’s with Sparky?’

‘Unclear, Boss.’

‘You know what I’m thinking about.’

‘I saw the photographs. I know what was done to a colleague. It was a long time ago.’

‘Thanks for fuck-all, but thank you.’

‘It’ll be clearer in the morning. Good night, Boss.’

She cut the call. Winnie Monks did not do tears or frustration. She went to the window, heaved it open, lit a cigarillo and gazed out over the cemetery. She wondered, now, if it had all been for nothing. She began to dress.

It was predictable that Dottie would hear her.

None of them spoke.

They were waved forward. The Major had nothing to say to the warrant officer, who had nothing to say to the master sergeant.

Days ago it had seemed a decent idea to go across the strait to Europe. Not that evening. They went down the beach, crossed a strip of dry sand and stepped over the rubbish thrown up by the waves. The Major knew the strait was thirteen kilometres across at the narrowest point, that the current and wind were easterly. The Gecko had told him. The boat waiting for them was low in the water with the weight of the cigarettes. They had watched as the boxes were loaded and seen how the craft bucked, how difficult it was to negotiate the pontoon.

It might end for them in a lost speedboat. Their bodies might float for a while, sink and resurface. In the Lubyanka they’d need to find another team to do the dirty jobs – to shift the money out of the
apparatchiks’
wall safes and into foreign banks. He doubted his wife would shed tears when the phone call came from Moscow. The wind carved at the skin on his scalp, and his coat, zipped tight, billowed. Once, he stumbled and clutched at Grigoriy’s shoulder. Weakness.

On the walk over the beach and on to the swaying pontoon, the Major thought himself too old. A torch guided him – without it he might have gone over the edge. It led him to the boat. The two big outboards, 150 horse-power each, were turning over and he could smell slopped fuel. A hand reached up for him and he was on the low deck. They had been told, hours before, that it was a good night to cross because the weather would interfere with the radar of the British at Gibraltar and of the Spaniards on the hill above the Tarifa ferry port.

The master sergeant was on a hard bench seat, no padding, and the warrant officer was between two mountains of boxes. The mooring ropes were thrown off. The bow lifted and cannoned into an onrushing wave. Spray splattered them. When the engines hit full power the noise deafened him.

They went beyond the headland against the force of a gale.

The lighthouse lamp threw the beam that rafted over them. The wind came hard off the water and the two women were huddled close.

They had left the base, passing a monument to Sikorski, the Polish patriot of the Second World War – he’d been lost in a plane crash over which controversy still hung. There was a garden under a rock face and Dottie angled the vehicle so that the area beyond the railings was lit. Two sailors who had been wounded at Trafalgar had been brought ashore for treatment but had died and were buried there. Dottie knew the batteries and the barracks, and that the banks were discreet with money. It was past three a.m. when they had driven past the mosque with the tall minaret – Dottie said it had been built with money given by the Saudi royal family. They had driven to a point beyond the white-painted, stubby lighthouse.

Dottie said that eighty thousand ships used the Strait of Gibraltar every year. They did some mental arithmetic to liven their minds: 219, from super-tankers to coastal rust buckets, in a day, so nine would pass in the next hour.

Winnie Monks swallowed and took a deep breath. ‘What’s to be done?’

‘I had an uncle, died a couple of years ago. He had a favourite mug for his tea. It had a slogan, Second World War,
Make Do and Mend
.’

‘Is that an answer?’

‘Best you’ll get, Boss.’

She had been slipping into the Slough of Despond, where Christian had been in
Pilgrim’s Progress
. She had started to count the moving lights that traversed in front of her, east to west and the other way – red, green and white. Would she hit the mean figure or fall short? Dottie had lifted her. She was no longer in control. She must rely on those she had chosen. Snapper and Loy were dead in the water, and the eraser would take them off her lists. Xavier? He was one of hers. He wouldn’t get on a flight and leave with questions to be answered. Sparky? She thought she’d thrown him a rope. It didn’t cross her mind that she might be criticised for abusing trust.

‘I’d thought they’d stay, Snapper and Loy, and spot for Sparky. My mistake – one of a growing fucking number.’

‘Not their fight, Boss.’

She gazed at the water and, when the moon came from between hurrying clouds, she saw the white wave crests, which belted the rocks below.

‘They won’t come in a ferry to Algeciras or Tarifa, or in a gin-palace yacht. They wouldn’t risk a light aircraft because the airfields are monitored. It’s a smuggling route.’

‘Has been for ever, Boss.’

‘He’ll come in a smuggler’s boat, with a smuggler’s cargo.’

‘He’ll have a bad crossing.  . . Are we going to bring him down, Boss?’

‘Give me the fucking keys.’

Dottie held them. Winnie Monks snatched at them. Both women had a hold on the vehicle’s keys. Winnie Monks hissed, ‘I have to go there and spot for him. I have to be with Sparky. I have to fucking drive there and hold his hand. Give me the keys.’

The light swept over them. Winnie Monks’s fingers went at Dottie’s eyes. She lashed back, catching the Boss on the upper cheek. It was a hard blow. Winnie’s fist opened and released the keys. Dottie put them into her bag.

Winnie Monks’s head had dropped. ‘Thanks for that.’

‘For nothing, Boss.’

‘I’m so cold.
Make do
sounds good.
And Mend
sounds better. Are we going to bring him down? It’s in the hands of others, not mine.’

The Major couldn’t swim. The warrant officer might have managed a width of a hotel pool. The master sergeant could have done some twenty metres in a river or lake.

There was a soft-drink tin, a canvas bag and a baseball cap that advertised a hotel in Tangier. They used them to scoop out the water that sloshed among the cigarette cartons. It was almost at their knees and spray fell on them continuously. The bastards who ferried them seemed unconcerned – perhaps relaxed about meeting up with their God. They went down into deep troughs, then were flung up and balanced on the crests before tumbling again. At the summit, he could see faint, blurred lights – far away.

It would not be a hero’s death. He would be choking and clutching at the spray. It would be worse than the death of the Gecko, who had gone out of the plane and fallen. Terror gripped him.

He could hear them – the bed shrieked.

It might have been easier for Jonno if he had heard laughter too. Laughter would have meant fun. He didn’t hear either Posie or Loy, which told him it was serious. When she had been with him, she had made little noises and he’d thought she’d felt they were expected of her. It had been the night after the shooting that she had held him so tightly. Her fingertips had gone down his back and she’d been quiet.

The bed talked for them.

At first, Jonno had cringed. He’d wondered if he should play Neanderthal man, barge in and rip the bedding off them, grab her hair and drag her out, or just shout that he was trying to sleep and would they pack it in? That had been at first. It was different when they went at it again.

He could, almost, have thanked her. The second time, Jonno had wrapped himself in the future. The key to the future was the rifle. There had been a girl before Posie, Chrissie. She was a copywriter and had slept over a few times at his place. He and Chrissie had been careful not to jangle the bed’s springs.

The rifle was Jonno’s salvation. It was a robust piece of machinery that had come off a production line. It hadn’t been treated with reverence, as the flaking paint showed. Jonno wanted to hold it against his shoulder, look through the sight and learn about it. He wanted to understand the science of firing a bullet at long distance. When he’d been at university on the south coast, there had been the usual myriad of fringe societies but one of the most vocal was the Islamic one from the Caucasus countries denouncing Russian occupation: they’d handed out posters of troops in combat gear rounding up prisoners or standing over the dead, holding weapons like this one. Jonno had never given them more than a passing glance. He had imagined, when Sparky had talked of Afghanistan, that the rifle capable of dealing long-range death would be kept carefully away from dust or dirt in a bag. It wouldn’t have been dropped.

They came to the crescendo. If it had been in his house and the noise had come from Tommo’s room – or Gary’s – they’d have raised the dead – rung the front-door bell, turned up the TV in the front room, bashed on the ceiling or shouted up the stairs.

They might break the damn bed.

Now, for the first time, Loy shouted. Jonno looked at the ceiling and a little light had come in. The door opened across the hall – that would be Loy. The stairs creaked, and the upstairs door opened and closed. Jonno imagined Sparky sitting in the corner of the room with his back against the wall, the rifle across his lap. He probably hadn’t slept, and his head wouldn’t turn as Loy came in. Snapper would be pushing himself up, stretched out on the airbed, fully dressed: ‘All right, Loy?’

Loy might shrug a little and roll his eyes: ‘When it’s served up on a plate you don’t chuck it back at the cook. What’s happening?’

‘Nothing really, not that it matters.’ He kept staring at the ceiling, and heard her.

Was she going to the bathroom? No. She crossed the hall, came into the bedroom. Maybe she thought she’d left something in a drawer. No. She had a sheet draped round her. From what he could see of it, her face was vacant, as if she was lost and had nothing to hold on to. He eased across the bed and made room for her. Posie lay down beside him, her head in the crook of his arm. Tommo and Gary would have burst a bloody gasket – ‘You didn’t let her come in your bed, Jonno? How could you?’ He let her head lie on his arm, and thought only of the rifle.

Rafael was woken. Beside him, his wife stirred, edged away and hugged the pillow, then sagged and was asleep again.

The lawyer spoke all the languages he needed to use. He had clients who dealt in cargoes brought from north Africa, and his command of Moroccan Arabic was good. He spoke not only the dialects of lawyers in Rabat, Tangier and Marrakesh but that of the boatmen who ferried the cargoes.

He listened. He was given co-ordinates and a time. He scribbled the figures on a notepad. He had advised strongly against the meeting with these people, but he was a servant, not an equal. He was paid for advice that might not be taken. He had also expressed reservations about the investment, or loan, in the cargoes brought from Venezuela and loaded into containers on the deck of the MV
Santa Maria
, now riding at the dockside in Cádiz, the section used by Customs and the navy. He had not been listened to.