Vagabond (58 page)

‘And the girl, and the agent.’

‘She’s not Vagabond. She can look after herself. Fierce little thing and she’s competent. She’ll come through and climb – but won’t go the extra mile. That never held back any individual with ambition. The agent? A liar and deceiver, as they all are. They make their beds and can lie on them. I can justify the needs of a strategic policy that disrupts the flow of arms to revolutionary groupings – Ireland, north Africa, Middle East, Yemen and Somalia – and snipping the trade at source, with the safety and prosperity of our informant. Sink or swim? His problem. Gaby will look after herself. She won’t push herself into ultimate danger.’

‘But Vagabond called back?’

‘I often talk about him. I sit in our daughter’s room and tell her about him in a conversational way, as if she might be interested, but I’m speaking to an empty bed with a teddy bear on it – bought twenty-eight years ago from Hamleys – and I get no answer. I tell everyone who needs to know about Vagabond, who will go to the end of the road, if asked, and a bit beyond.’

She passed him a handkerchief. ‘Is there long to wait, Matthew?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Long enough for another bottle.’

She poured the dregs into the glass and stood up, then was lost in the throng. There were protests and curses from Home Office and Defra as she headed for the counter. She barely knew Vagabond, but had begun to care.

The feet, clear of the bed, turned slowly. The toes were against the wall, then the heels. His legs were short, stubby and tanned from the summer sunshine of his Balkan home. One leg of his trousers was around his neck and the other was inserted in the space behind a window fastening. His lips were blue and his eyes bulged. His hands showed no sign of having scrabbled in his last moments to free himself from the self-tied noose. An alarm bell shrilled, boots pounded the corridor outside and an interrogator screamed in frustration.

Dusty Miller reckoned he deserved it. He was astride the stool that was usually Desperate’s. The Dickens Bar was open late on a Friday, a concession to the end of the week, and the
patron
had asked where Daniel was. Dusty could say only that he was away but would be home soon. Every Friday. Desperate was in the Dickens Bar on the rue Basse, and every Saturday, but earlier, and every Sunday lunchtime before he left to rendezvous with the next batch of tourists at Dunkirk. It had been a busy and useful summer and the work had been continuous, the routine set in concrete, from before the anniversary and right through the day, 6 June, the celebration of the D Day landings seven decades before. Interest had held up over the next three months: they were now into September and there was no slackening.

There would be a new broom. He didn’t know whether he would be driving out of Caen on the coming Sunday or if Desperate would be back. He thought it likely he would. He was not supposed to call him. He’d been tempted, but had not. He knew that Desperate had his mobile with him. Well, he might call tomorrow about arrangements for Sunday. He would break a rule, risk a curse, call the next morning. He had to know. But it wouldn’t be for much longer that Desperate headed off to Dunkirk on a Sunday and did his stalk through Honfleur, following the woman with the ash-blonde hair and sea-blue eyes, the strong walk and the perpetual sadness in her face. There would be the new broom because the painting, a coast-scape, was on its way and had been, almost, commissioned by Dusty, his little bit of match-making.

For what he had done, he deserved a few beers in the Dickens. He’d had his supper – the women looked after him well and would continue after Desperate had gone. Gone where? To the north, where it was bloody cold and where cod was on the menu most nights. They’d look after him. He deserved his beers, and could suppose that he might just have brought a cup of happiness to two lonely souls. There was no hurry on the Saturday morning to get the group back on the minibus to Calais, and he’d be able to stay long enough in Caen to see the picture, her work from the dunes, arrive safely. He could, and did, congratulate himself.

Another beer, yes, and for the
patron
too.

The visitors were at their dinner, across the bassin Saint-Pierre from the hotel. It was too cool to be outside and serenaded by the shrill rattle of metal masts in the marina. The guide would be with them and would have relaxed, having stepped down from the plinth of knowledge. He was now ‘one of the gang’. The talk flowed and, with it, the wine.

‘Glad I’ve done it. Sort of puts it on the back burner. It was something I’d meant to do for years. Not a bundle of laughs, though.’

‘I’d say it’s about respect for those lads on the sands – whether at Dunkirk, hoping to be lifted off before the tide came in and drowned them, or Dieppe or on Sword and Omaha. It’s a gesture of respect.’

‘We’ve been here, Dorothy and I, to learn about sacrifice. A hard lesson, but this is the classroom for it.’

‘What confuses me is how those young lads came through it, the survivors. We didn’t hear anything about “stress” and “trauma”, not like after Afghanistan and Iraq. I suppose people then just had to get on with it. It’s what made them special.’

‘I thought it might all get technical and end up repetitive and rather boring. How wrong I was. We have to come here because it’s telling the dead that they’re not forgotten. We’re here to remember them.’

A place at the table in the restaurant was empty. Usually it would have been filled by the minibus driver. On this occasion, the guide had said that the usual man had been called away and his stand-in had declined the invitation to join them. The meal slipped down, the inhibitions of strangers loosened, and the spare place was cleared away by a waiter to give them more room to spread themselves.

‘Don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t think I’d consider coming again. The place might get under your skin, into your blood. All those great empty beaches, and the quiet of the cemeteries. It’s hard to break away from them.’

‘Any more in that bottle down there?’

The text reached Matthew Bentinick. Jocelyn craned forward to read it. The second bottle was well started.

He said, ‘He’ll have heard of the arrest and will – forgive the vulgarity – have shat his pants. Then he’ll learn of the suicide. He’ll believe that a merciful God has silenced a possible accuser and that he’s safe. And he’ll be wrong, which will make it all the sweeter.’

She said, ‘It’ll be countdown time – wherever they bloody are.’

Quiet and darkness had fallen on the mountain and the flat lands.

Few cars were in the lanes to break the stillness, and the darkness was disturbed only by small pockets of light marking the communities. It would be the start of a hard day when dawn disturbed the quiet and the dark. Emotions would be scratched raw.

Bridie Riordan sat in front of a fire that she had allowed to burn out. She toyed with her accounts book for the haulage and heard the hacking cough of her son above her.

Attracta Donnelly and Siobhan Nugent drank coffee in the tout’s widow’s kitchen and talked softly of lives gone by, what might have been.

Pearse’s mother had sent her family to bed, stayed downstairs and ironed her black dress for the next day. The television was blaring but she didn’t know what programme was on.

Kevin’s mother was alone because her men were in the bar up the road and wouldn’t be back until later. She had washed her hair because she wanted to look her best for the service, and couldn’t have said why that was important.

Others pondered the day ahead, and more dismissed it as irrelevant.

Brennie Murphy played chess in his kitchen against himself, plotted attack and defence, and could congratulate himself: never a loser and always a winner.

It would be a slow night on the mountain and the flat lands the far side of the Pomeroy road.

‘I want to shoot.’

The brigadier answered, ‘Of course, but first it is for business. Then you may shoot.’

A restraining hand lay on his arm. He sulked. The grip was firm. There could be no argument. He could, of course, have shrugged it off and kicked the man’s shin, might have demanded the opportunity to fire first. He did not. The marksman was never far from his mind. Nothing could eradicate the disaster of the man’s failure. He sat in a cell block. Investigators would be queuing to interrogate him. He could stay silent and gaze at the ceiling or spill the dates of planned meetings and the name of his client. Would the ‘roof’ cover him if he was named? The matter gnawed at him.

He had shot here, at Milovice, on the small-arms range and been congratulated by the sergeant in charge. He had fired once in Africa – the last time they had flown in weapons’ crates. The village had been flattened, the civilians gone – except some women or girls who had been kept for comfort and kitchen work. A petrol drum had been near to the strip. He had emptied a whole magazine at it and been told that fewer than ten of the thirty-six bullets had struck the target. He had heard squeals of laughter, a cacophony.

If his name was in the newspapers and he were subject to a warrant, the ‘roof’ would not cover him. He would fight, he always did, but it nagged.

‘When do I shoot?’

‘When he has.’ The brigadier jerked a thumb towards the man who crouched over the boxes. ‘When he is satisfied.’

It was done with care: each weapon was lifted from the box, unwrapped and tested for safety. Barrel into the air, cocked, breech cleared. The man was what Timofey Simonov had never been: a fighter. Where was Ralph Exton, his friend? He looked for him – then saw him. His friend hung back in the shadows, his cigarette flaring as he dragged on it. He didn’t think that Ralph Exton would want to shoot. The darkness was total beyond the light thrown by the vehicles.

A mobile bleeped.

Behind him, the brigadier’s coat rustled as his hands went into his pockets. The brightness of a screen flashed. The phone was snapped shut. Denisov was at his shoulder. ‘He did the decent thing. The Serb hanged himself. He’s dead. Relax, and wait your turn to fire.’

He took his man in his arms and hugged him. He would have done the same to Ralph Exton but his friend was too far away.

A rifle was lifted, a magazine loaded. Timofey Simonov did a little jig of relief. He turned towards the brigadier, but couldn’t see him.

Danny Curnow was crouched, weight on one knee, clear of the light.

The weapons were counted, the ammunition checked. He saw the gestures. Satisfactory. He wondered what the route would be. A container shipped into Cork docks? A freighter drifting along the coast off Kerry, met by a couple of launches at night? A trawler coming from the Atlantic waters off the northern coast of Spain and making landfall off the west of Ireland where the coves were? It was none of his business.

His job had been to stiffen the agent, who was now ‘surplus to requirements’, as was Danny Curnow. He might as well have been with the tourists on a last night in Caen, then going home to read emails about the following week’s timetable. He watched.

Gaby Davies was behind him, close to Karol Pilar, and they spoke in whispers. The Czech had the camera. He needed to catch them together, same frame, Malachy Riordan, Timofey Simonov and the weapons. He didn’t know where Alpha, Bravo and Charlie were. He was a passenger now. A baton had been passed.

His tongue moved slowly across his lips. They were dry, as they always were in a moment of crisis. He had seen it once and Nikolai Denisov did not expect to see it again. A warning given once was as good as a warning given many times. For a second or two, he had seen the glint of polished glass. It might have been from a camera or a night-sight image intensifier. One or two seconds was enough. He stood very still and listened. An owl hooted and a dog fox barked; a light wind was in the trees, and there was the whine of an old door, with corroded hinges.

He heard everything. He had used an old trick, taught at the training colleges for middle-ranking officers of the GRU back in Soviet times. He kept the Siemens hearing-aid in a felt pouch in his pocket, had it with him more often than a firearm. The quality was good and the price was steep – he had paid 800 euros for it. He could hear whispering too. He couldn’t make out what was said, or in what language, but his straining ear picked up the voices. GRU instructors had advised the use of hearing-aids after they had been employed for covert patrols in the murderous wasteland of Chechnya.