The Outsiders (17 page)

She said quietly, so that he had to listen carefully, ‘I’m not going to brawl with you over the importance to us of this. He was our man and he died in the field. I will not have it from you that we’re interfering in your sovereign territory and should go home with our tails between our legs for using up your valuable time. Fuck you, Dawson. I want to hear about non-co-operation from a local and I expect you to fix it. Get on your phone, please.’

Dawson laughed. ‘Of course. There’s a lesson I’ve learned here, Winnie. To find a solution to a problem you don’t sit on your hands and wait for it to come to you . . .’

‘. . . you chase after it.’

His fingers went into an inner pocket. He did not bring out his mobile but produced a single sheet of folded paper and passed it her. Then he walked away. Winnie read. The bloody man had played with her. His guy had been on the coast, had done the leg work, had reported in. Dawson had kept it back until the end.

She folded the paper, shoved it into her bag. She called Caro at Thames House and told her what she wanted done.

Dawson came back to her as a jogger lurched past clutching a water-bottle. He said they could meet a man the next morning. She’d manage that, but would be out by the afternoon.

How would she kill the time till then? He didn’t offer to show her the sights or take her to a restaurant.

Winnie said she’d start by tramping the Gran Via, and spoke of a boy called Emrys, from a mining town up a valley, born ninety-five years ago. She had his interest. There would have been something in her face that exuded the confidence, the leadership, that Kenny and Xavier, Caro Watson, Dottie, the camp followers, ‘occasionals’ and ‘associates’ treasured.

‘We all knew about him at school. He was Emrys the Brigade. He was almost nineteen when he left the town – he’d been down the pit for four years then. He left his home in the Merthyr road and half the town were at the station to wave to him and wish him well. He went to Spain, joined up with the British part of the International Brigade as a soldier against Fascism. He would have received fuck-all training but plenty of lecturing in Marxist-Leninism. It was when the Madrid front was under pressure. The first troops of the International Brigade were the only reserve left. They were a rag-tag army, not all of them had rifles, and this boy was with them. They went up the Gran Via and people lined that street to cheer them. They went straight into the line at the Caso del Campo and pushed the Fascists back. The city was saved. We learned that at primary school. I knew it before I was six. Emrys the Brigade died that night. I’ll walk up the Gran Via for a start, and hope to get the rest in tomorrow, around the meeting.’

‘Maybe.’

‘It was November 1936, and my town gave Emrys to this place. Call me when you’ve set up the details of a meeting.’

She walked away from him, her mind racing. She thought that little parts had begun to mesh.

She turned and called back to him, ‘It’s easy enough to sit on your hands. He didn’t, Emrys the Brigade. I don’t like to.’

They moved out with discretion. Snapper did the packing and checked that everything was accounted for, and Loy did the lifting. By the time Snapper had closed the bedroom door, and Loy was on his second trip down the stairs, it would have been hard to know that the room with the window facing the home of the lecturer, the target, had ever been a forward base for photographic surveillance.

The hit had been postponed twice. Sometimes, from a vantage-point, they stayed to watch the armed cordon spill round a property and the guys with the battering rams cave in the front door. Usually they were out and gone before the swoop.

This time a call had come and they’d be going a few hours early, but all the links were in place, the photos had been taken and the associates marked down. Their work would be a jigsaw piece in getting the target a twenty-year stretch.

He’d said they were pulling out because of a call from Winnie’s people.

Loy had grimaced.

Already Loy had brought the small white van, with the name of a jobbing electrician on the side, to the back entry. It was always, as Snapper knew, a tense and difficult time for the householder. All right when two active-service police were in the house and protection was on hand if a target had wind of how the house was contributing to a criminal caseload; different when they were gone and there was no longer the reassurance of those footfalls upstairs. Snapper was fond of this lady and grateful for her hospitality. She’d be vulnerable now, and alone. The chance of her having a panic button fitted had been lessened by the cut-backs. He’d try to get back, before any trial, and bring some flowers or a box of decent chocolates.

He wished her luck and held her hand a little longer than was necessary, then was on his way. He sometimes accused himself and Loy of bringing innocent people into the line of fire, exposing them to acute danger. Now his head was cluttered with thoughts of Winnie Monks: the best.

‘You can’t credit it,’ Posie had said.

‘Pretty grim, pretty bleak,’ Jonno had said.

He’d driven them carefully down the track and past the cameras. They had passed a huge hotel complex: abandoned, left as derelict, its grounds overwhelmed with weeds.

They had left the mountain behind them and reached a road. They had passed the Calle Padre Paco Ostas, a shallow slope, and on its right side a line of apartment buildings – except that they had no walls. No one was working there.

‘How could that be allowed to happen?’ she had asked.

‘Someone went bust.’

‘Who’d want to come here, and be miles from any action? The beach is an age away, and you’d have to sit on the roof to see the sea.’

Jonno had wanted to give the car a run and let the battery top itself so he’d turned on to the main road and gone west. He’d come off at San Pedro. The place had nothing. It was satellite dishes, handkerchief-sized balconies and English signs. Old Brits were walking with little plastic bags of shopping, using sticks. There was a place where two old men sat and talked, wearing wide-brimmed sunhats and nursing small beers. They came back through a maze of lanes flanked by homes where rubbish had been blown against the gates. Notices proclaimed twenty-four-hour security and warned of guard dogs. Everywhere was ‘for sale’ or ‘to let’. A car went by, a BMW convertible but an old model with tired paintwork. The driver flicked a cigarette out and had a girl cuddled close to him who was young enough to be his daughter, with Slav cheeks and bottle-blonde hair. They saw flowers on a pavement that were already wilting in the heat. Jonno wondered who had died there and why. They nudged along a waterfront road, past cafés that sold fish and chips, and yachts tied up in a harbour. There was an Irish pub and football from England that night.

‘It must have been pretty once,’ she’d said. ‘Then they screwed it. Why?’

‘I can’t get my head round what’s been done.’

They had come back to Marbella, gone north from Puerto Banus and were on a main road. There were, either side of them, closed shops and restaurants, empty showroom windows and apartments. It was as if the world had moved on. In Marbella, they found a supermarket and Jonno was brave enough to switch off the car’s engine. They bought what they had to and fled.

They drove back up the hill, the mountain towering above them, dwarfing the empty hotel.

She said, ‘It’s skin deep, the affluence. Nothing attractive. It’s a sham.’

He said they’d find somewhere to dance that night, because he’d promised.

6

The club was off the Paseo Maritimo, which divided the town of Marbella from the beach. The harbour area had restaurants and moorings – the music drew Jonno and Posie.

There was a car park but it was full so Jonno had parked a couple of blocks away from the shore. The approach to the club was poorly lit. He paused on the far side of the road and waited for the traffic to let them cross. Some cars were parked on the far side of the road: one was a blue BMW convertible. He had Posie’s arm and thought she looked pretty good, in a short dress, low-cut.

As they waited to cross, her hips started to move. She was chattering and giggling as if she had put the disappointments behind her. He noted the BMW, its colour – memory stirred – and that it was parked close to the walkway going down to the club.

Because of the dim lighting, Jonno didn’t notice that one kerbstone was proud of the others – it had not settled well in its grouting. There was movement at the club’s entrance and the doors swung open, letting out a blast of high-octane music. He felt Posie’s hip bounce off his own.

A man came out, exchanged words with the bouncers and started up the walkway. Jonno remembered him: he was the man who had flicked the cigarette out of the blue BMW convertible. He was with the same girl. She had on a gold halter top, with nothing underneath, skimpy gold shorts and high heels. Jonno thought she was just over the age of consent. He felt Posie flinch. Perhaps the man who had come past her had elbowed her. They were about to cross the road, but the man was already halfway over. He was going towards a shadowed place where the gutter, the kerb and the pavement were hard to see. He was reaching behind him, his light leather jacket hitched up, feeling in the waistband at the small of his back.

In front, the BMW owner lit his cigarette. The glow from the Zippo illuminated thin lips and a pale complexion. His eyes were hidden by shades – Plonker, thought Jonno – and he tugged the girl’s arm to keep her moving.

Ahead of them, the man in the leather jacket had a pistol in his hand.

The breath choked in Jonno’s throat.

The hand kept the pistol hidden, pressed against a black shirt. Where had Jonno seen a pistol before? School, the Combined Cadet Force – some of the kids played at being soldiers and the ‘officers’, who came from the Territorials place in Bristol, had had pistols on lanyards. And he had seen a pistol in the belt of the man who had helped them with the car. This pistol was hidden from the owner of the BMW convertible, who walked briskly towards it.

His back was exposed to Jonno. It was unprotected. He heard Posie stutter something, as if she wanted to scream but couldn’t. She ducked her head and ground her face into Jonno’s shirt.

The man in front seemed to freeze, and the girl swayed on her heels. The gunman stepped across the gutter, the kerb and the pavement.

‘For you, you fecker, King.’

The pistol was up.

The man tripped. The man fired. Two shots. The BMW owner didn’t fall. It seemed to Jonno that he had tripped. The target went sideways. The girl was left. She must have flung back an arm – the movement had unhitched the shoulder strap on one side of her top. Jonno saw her breast, then looked for the target and saw only blackness.

The gunman spun.

They had eye contact. The pistol was in his hand. Jonno stood in the way that the man would flee, was an obstruction. The man had a pistol and likely had loaded it with more bullets than the two he’d already fired. Jonno grabbed Posie’s arm and pushed her down. She squealed as she hit the road, and Jonno went down like a lead weight on top of her. She was under him and hidden. He was no threat. He held his breath. One of the man’s feet was on his shoulder, then gone. There was traffic. Horns blasted, someone was yelling, and the two bouncers were bawling. He could smell the scent of gunfire. He let his weight shift to his knees and Posie half sat up. The target came out of the shadows, grabbed the girl and threw her into the BMW. Then he was into the driver’s seat, gunning the engine.

The car accelerated. The man was King. The gunman had been Irish. They said in the papers when there were street shootings that it had been the ‘work of a professional assassin’. It had been a crap effort, third grade, Jonno realised. Posie was shivering beside him, terrorised. Jonno remembered that there had been a moment when the gunman’s back was turned to him, and he could have intervened. He had not. His shoulder hurt where the foot had trodden, and the smell was still in his nose.

The BMW convertible had gone down the street.

Did he want to be a witness? Did he want to hang around? Jonno said, ‘Come on, Posie, let’s get the hell out.’

He had his arm round her as they turned their backs on the place and headed for the car.

It was a day of disruption in the life of Pavel Ivanov, once the Tractor.

It had begun in fine sunshine, the temperature twenty degrees. Warmth played up off the patio and the cover of the pool. Long ago he would have rearranged the face and body of any low-life guy seeking to mock him. Respect had followed him, and the few who despised him had stayed well clear. Different times. His day was disrupted because the wives of Alex and Marko were returning to Belgrade, with the children. The husbands – fathers – would drive them to Málaga airport, and he would be alone for three hours.

He waved from the door and the cars nudged forward. The windows were down and small hands waved. To them, he was not the Tractor but Uncle Pavel. They were gone and the gates closed. It was almost unthinkable that he would be without the protection of one of his minders. So many had died in Moscow and St Petersburg, in Perm, Ekaterinberg or Novosibirsk because they were big men and envied. Enough were in danger of kidnap here on the Costa from gangs of
criminals
, and of being dumped on the hillside. Now that Alex and Marko had gone, he would go down into the basement, unlock the steel-faced door and take out an assault rifle, with ammunition. He would sit on the patio, his back against a wall, with the weapon on his knee. He would glance often at his watch to see how much more of the three hours remained.