The Outsiders (3 page)

Another source, in a harbourmaster’s office downstream at Csepel, had produced video from a security camera that showed three indistinct shadows boarding a launch late on the relevant night. They were poorly lit, backs to camera, and little was to be gained from forensic study, but that was the best they had. They had gnawed at it, hounds with marrow bones. But they had no name.

Winnie had said, ‘The woman in the woods with the dog always finds the body, or the clothing, or the school satchel, or the handbag. It can take a month or a year or a decade, but we’ll find it, identify him . . . We have to, because I promised.’

The policeman was Latvian, on contract to the Europol offices in the Dutch capital, The Hague. He briefed visitors – politicians, public servants, opinion formers. That afternoon a Czech foreign ministry functionary sat in front of a screen. The policeman used a zapper to put up his bullet points. The first showed a map of the European landmass, the zone of interest for the men and women co-ordinating the activities of disparate law and order agencies.

‘In our Organised Crime Threat Assessment we speak of “hubs”, each with heavy influence on the criminal dynamics of the European continent. With its huge wealth, Europe is centre stage: the consumers’ shopping mall. The north-west hub, the first of our five, is the Netherlands and Belgium and is based on Rotterdam. The second is the north-east hub and works around the Russian harbour of Kaliningrad in the Baltic. For the third, we take the south-east hub – currently a source of anxiety – on the Black Sea. A Romanian harbour is a centre for considerable smuggling activity . . . heroin, people-trafficking, illegal immigration, sex-industry workers. The southern hub is the one that we’re most familiar with, the Italian problem and the trading in and out of Naples – the familiar names of Cosa Nostra, Camorra and the OCGs of Calabria and Puglia. Our analysts believe the old Mafia clans are in slow but irreversible decline.’

The Latvian gave his presentation on at least three days in every working week. It took an hour, and afterwards individual officers would be assigned for more detailed explanations of the Europol targets. A few he talked to seemed interested in the threat assessment, but most came with the intention of ticking a box on the career ladder – not a prominent one. He ploughed on, comforted in the knowledge that when he had finished and the Czech had left, he would be able to slip into the building’s Blue Bottle bar and enjoy a
pils
or three with colleagues who likewise fought the unwinnable war.

‘Fifth, we have the south-west hub, the Iberian peninsula, with particular emphasis on the docks of Cádiz and Málaga, either side of the so-called Costa del Sol. It’s the most significant of the five hubs, the prime gateway into Europe for all forms of hard drugs, class A, immigrants, trafficked humans, weapons. And, because of lax banking regulations, for laundering money. Into that zone has come an influx of foreign criminals, not merely foot soldiers but leaders, men of influence, huge power, vast wealth. The south-west hub represents our greatest challenge.’

Another year, and Winnie Monks had said, ‘We have to believe.’

And another candle had burned, small but bright, on her windowsill.

‘It’ll happen. It’ll drop into our laps. One day.’ There was power in her voice, authority and sincerity. None of her seniors – her own chief, the Branch director, the deputy director or the great man himself – would have dared to tell her the investigation was losing impetus and should be scaled down. They might have murmured it in an executive dining room or in a club’s deep armchairs but they wouldn’t have said it to her face. In her office, pride of place on a bare wall, was the outline of a head and shoulders, white on granite grey, no features filled in. Winnie maintained it was important to have it there. Beside it hung the horror-film image of Damian Fenby’s ravaged face. None of her seniors would have said to her that it was mawkish and in poor taste to display the photograph.

‘We have to believe. It’s owed him. Life does not “move on”.’

She slid her chair back from her desk, swung it round and stood up. There was little lustre in her face.

Winnie Monks was a stone too heavy, and the skirt she wore was a size too small. Her blouse strained and a cardigan that should have been loose was tight. She coughed, hacking. Her window, on the fourth floor of Thames House – offering a view of a narrow street – showed that the evening light was dropping, and the rain was steady, spattering the panes. The blastproof glass distorted the reflections from the streetlamps. She reached into her handbag and scrabbled for the packet of cigarillos and her Zippo lighter, which stank of its fuel. The wall that had once carried the pictures now accommodated a leave chart, but the Sellotape scars remained. She slipped on a raincoat, long, heavy, proof against the weather, and pocketed her necessities. There had been a time when, on a dank evening, the sight of Winnie Monks putting on her coat, or rifling the smokes out of her bag, would have been enough to get the outer office on their feet, donning raincoats and retrieving umbrellas. Not now. The Graveyard Team had not survived the new-year reorganisation, launched with dreary fanfares on 2 January 2008.

She went past the PA’s desk. She had not chosen the girl but had been allocated her: there was no way Winnie Monks would have plucked out of the applicants’ list anyone who was an alcohol abstainer, a vegan who seemed to survive on what her sisters’ rabbits, long ago, had lived off. From behind her, ‘Going for a comfort break, Winnie? If there’s any calls for you, I’ll say you’re back in ten minutes.’

‘I’m going for a smoke and—’

‘I’m sure you’ve been told, Winnie, that tobacco will do your health no good at all.’

‘My fucking problem, not yours,’ she chipped cheerfully.

The members of the Graveyard Team were now spread through the diaspora of Thames House. Dottie had gone to A Branch, and Caro Watson was in the deputy director general’s outer office. Kenny shuffled paper and checked expenses, and Xavier did liaison at Scotland Yard. A couple had retired, and another had gone to one of the private security companies where the directors could trade well off his history. Winnie Monks followed the money, the Bible text of any investigator; she was in the process of developing a network of bank staff, in the choicer areas where the Muslim population was densest, and she expected to be warned when cash transfers were made. She hated it . . . but the Graveyard Team was broken, the Organised Crime Unit closed down, and she knew no other life.

Outside the building, in the side-street, the wind slapped her face and the rain wet it. The café was closed – the staff were swabbing the tables and sluicing the floor. Her head was down against the weather as she came off Horseferry Road, and took the entrance to the gardens. It was her favourite place.

None of her team, in the old days, had called her by her given name. To them she had been ‘Boss’. Many in the building had found that title immature and smacking of the police culture, but an equal number had envied the loyalty she inspired. The Security Service had been given Organised Crime, its higher echelons, when the Northern Ireland insurgency had fizzled out, the Cold War had gone tepid and a use had had to be found for underemployed intelligence officers. Most had thought the work beneath them and only a few had relished new challenges. She had. Dottie, Kenny, Caro, Xavier, some others who had now quit and the ‘associates’ dragged in when needed – like Snapper, the surveillance photographer, and Loy, his apprentice – had been among the ‘few’. Damian Fenby, long dead and buried, had been a star of the Graveyard Team with his analysis and intellect. Jihadist bombs, alliances among angry young Muslims, and the hatred supposedly bred from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had turned Thames House against an obvious and immediate threat, one with its head above the parapet. Every other section had been stripped to the bone to satisfy the demands of Counter-terrorism for resources, but Organised Crime had gone to the knacker’s yard.

She sat on a bench and the rain pattered on her from high branches.

None of her people had gone voluntarily. Their budget had inexorably contracted, and their office space had shrunk. She had begun to bring them outside, into St John’s Gardens – a graveyard of Georgian and Victorian London. She took out the packet, ripped off the cellophane, shoved a cigarillo into her mouth and flashed the Zippo. Smoke billowed and she sighed. Some days in steaming heat, midsummer, they would get soft drinks and sandwiches from the café, and pull some benches into a horseshoe and brainstorm tactics for the bringing down of a target. Other days in chilling frosts, midwinter, they would be here with coffee from the café, laced with Scotch from Kenny’s hip flask. She dragged again on the cigarillo. Winnie Monks felt, often, humiliated that the Graveyard Team had been dismantled, that promises made were not honoured, and the boy’s killers had walked free.

She was a highly experienced security officer, in her twenty-first year with the Service, but she had not realised he was close to her, only knew it when the edge of the umbrella came from behind her shoulders into her eyeline and she was sheltered from the rain. ‘For fuck’s sake, Sparky, you’ll be the death of me.’

A long time since Sparky Waldron had been the death of anyone.

‘Can’t have you getting wet, Miss.’

‘Thanks . . . Hard to get through an afternoon without a quick gasp.’

She grinned at him. He laughed quietly. He wore his work gear of heavy industrial boots and thickened overalls over jeans and a coarse-knit sweater. The logo of the borough that employed him was on the front of the baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and also on the umbrella. It was on all the gear of those who worked in Westminster Parks and Gardens. Three years back, he had been on the bench since the gates were opened at first light but hadn’t started work, when a voice, Welsh-accented, had said, ‘Move your fucking self. It’s my bench. Get off it.’ He owed much to her, he knew. Maybe she, too, on that morning long ago, had been as alone as he was. She’d had the look of a person who made decisions and expected them obeyed, but there had been mischief in her eyes. He’d not thought to swear at or ignore her. He’d moved off the bench and squatted close to where she sat, then watched as she started on a bacon sandwich. She’d left the last third and passed it to him, said something about her hands being quite clean. She’d coaxed a little of his life history out of him. She was hardly a kindred spirit . . . yet she’d helped him stay with the job, stick at it. He knew her as ‘Miss’, and would have walked on lit coals for her.

The psychiatrists had said that the best therapy for his condition was to work in a garden where he was safe, the danger was distant and the screams were silenced. When he had slipped back, stayed in his hostel bed, she had gone there, pitched him out and dictated the apology letter to Parks and Gardens, his employer, and had acted as a referee, done a letter of support for him – might even have used headed paper. Why? He didn’t know or care, but he was grateful. He had kept his job, and now stayed the course.

She came every day to the same bench, and had her smoke in the oasis of quiet. He held the umbrella over her and had abandoned raking the leaves and stowing them in the bags he’d toss into the barrow. Now they scudded over paths he had already raked and swept. St John’s Gardens had been a cemetery from the early eighteenth century, with 5,126 graves. At the turn of the nineteenth century, funds were allocated for two night-watchmen to preserve the newly buried corpses from theft. The year before the battle of Waterloo they were armed with pistols – there was a desperate shortage in the medical schools for cadavers. Now it had been closed to bodies for a hundred and fifty years. Occasionally she would host a reunion there, the wine and gin in soft-drink or water bottles. She called her guests the Graveyard Team . . .

He had told her about everything he had done
before
– what he was proud of and what he was ashamed of.

She reached over to drop the butt into the waste bin and stood up. ‘Time to get back to the fucking treadmill, Sparky.’

‘Yes, Miss.’

He escorted her to the gate and only then let her go free of the umbrella. She bobbed her head and was gone . . . He often thought she was as alone as himself. Some days, when she had work out of London, she had hired a car and called his supervisor. Then he’d drive her. They didn’t talk and she sat in the back with her papers. Now Sparky went back to raking leaves, filling bags and loading his trailer. He would go on until it was too dark to see, and Lofty shouted that it was time to lock up. He loved this place for its peace, which he valued. The gardens were the horizon of his world.

On the third anniversary, with her Graveyard Team gathered round her and an air frost forming across the garden, Winnie Monks had said of her branch director, ‘The fat fucker hadn’t the balls to say it to me, but I could read him. What he wanted to say was ‘‘Stuff happens, people get hurt and we have to be adult in our response because that’s life. Accept it. We must look to the future and move on’’, but he didn’t dare. He just authorised the budget. I would have told him that we’re a tribe, we protect our own, and a strike on one of us is a strike against us all. It’s the creed we follow. Old-fashioned, maybe, but it’ll do for me and all of us. In a year we’ve made fuck-all progress. They want to consign the team to history, but the tribe stays strong. One day, I promised him, it’ll happen.’

The taxi driver hooted.