Chapter 7
‘Don’t worry, shouldn’t fret, something’ll show up – always does.’ What Knacker would have said if he could have reached him on a phone. Gaz had been at the lay-by a couple of minutes short of an hour. He was still hunched in the undergrowth near to the collapsed picnic bench.
He heard a car’s wheels on the stones behind the trees, where the slip-road came. He braced himself, ready to drag himself up. He had decided he would stay in cover until the car was at a halt, then would slip forward; he expected a window to be wound down, the codeword given, and he’d be inside a saloon, a fast handshake and they’d be off, the tyres squealing on the loose ground, and his heart could stop pounding, and… A police car came into the lay-by. It parked some forty paces from him. Two uniforms on board.
Knacker would have shrugged. ‘You’ll reckon a way round it when the pick-up gets to you. That’s who you are, what you do.’
The mosquitoes seemed to search for him. Some had success. Gaz could not stand up and could not flail and could not sit in a bush and light up a pipe… In his trade they reckoned that cows were bad because they would gather in a half-moon around a hide dug into a hedge, and sheep were crazily difficult because they were liable to stampede, and dogs were always curious. The policemen opened the door of the vehicle and were unwrapping sandwiches and unscrewing a flask.
Knacker would have said, ‘Think on the bright side – ask them for a lift into town, if the contact doesn’t show.’
The police were well dressed and their vehicle had been washed. They settled into their meal, then each had a cigarette, and then poured from the thermos. They might catch half an hour of sleep. One back-up plan seemed to Gaz to be the most realistic: give it an hour, maximum. Give it an hour and then go through the trees again and look for the animal track and follow it as far as the lake, and forget about the sense he had had that he was watched as he moved but had heard nothing. Get back to the lake and trail around the end of it and go by the little beach in front of where the fish had jumped, and look for the dead tree. Get a bearing off it, reach the fence. Don’t worry about prints in the ploughed strip or about leaving torn clothing on the wire, just run at it and jump, roll and fall. Walk back into town. Show up at the safe house and be turning over some variation of ‘not capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery’, and facing the big man.
Knacker would have said, ‘Just needed a bit of patience, and it was all going so well. I’d have thought better of you.’
Would go back to the island and drag the mower out of the shed and start catching up on a backlog of cutting grass, and doing the little jobs. Tell Aggie that he had flipped… would never have another chance of suffocating that black dog, the one that tracked him each dark night. He tried to remember good days… Not a whole heap of them. Bad for him to reminisce and hard for him to maintain that blood was not on his hands. He pinched himself. Hurt himself by twisting a fold of skin between his fingers as much as the mosquitoes did on the rest of his skin. He sat, and the insects feasted.
The policemen ate their food and crumpled the paper wrapping and chucked it aside. They shared a bar of chocolate and the tinfoil went the way of the sandwich wrapping, and they both swallowed from a plastic bottle of soft drink and dumped it with the rest of their garbage. Then they settled back in their seats, closed the doors and windows, and prepared for sleep. Enough to make a man cry.
Knacker would have said, ‘Remember you’re the best, Gaz. Not just because you were the witness, but because you are top of the tree. Why we chose you.’
And he stayed put, could not work out an option. Instead, he focused, remembered the target, why he was there providing a meal for mosquitoes, saw the face, needed to cling to it.
Not much to fill the boxes. The music centre and the widescreen TV, then into the kitchen.
Lavrenti could have called Mikki or Boris, told them to get off their arses and come up to the apartment and take over the packing up. Or at least politely request their help. Did neither. The removals company had assumed that he would not himself – Major Lavrenti Volkov – do the work. It had been explained that the company was not responsible for breakages if items were not correctly wrapped… He was losing his temper: two plates were cracked and a glass broken. But still he did not call them.
It mattered little how much he damaged. His mother would replace everything when he returned to the capital. Settling him into life in the Arbat quarter of Moscow would be her next project. There, he would be shot of Mikki and Boris, would tell his father that he longer required them. A big step for Lavrenti. A plate slipped from his hand, landed on its edge, and the pieces scattered. He kicked out, lashing then into the wall.
This was a good apartment by Murmansk’s standards. The landlord would have hoped for some personal advantage to come his way if the rent was at rock-bottom, and the maintenance charges waived. He was another who would find that patronising an officer of FSB carried a bad kickback. The window had a view of the docks: idle cranes, moored and rusted hulks, a destroyer awaiting cannibalisation. Not a cruise liner in sight although they had been promised, and the wind rippling the oily water. Through the same window, in view if he pressed his nose against the glass, was his official car, black and polished, and leaning against it were his minders.
They would not be worried by Lavrenti. Both were Afghan veterans, devoted to his father. They’d have licked his backside. They’d have been overrun, so the account went, when the local bastards surrounded a patrol that was edging down an incline of loose rock. Twenty men, an under-strength platoon and all of them from the security division. Calm words from his father and a call to get close, to keep up the volume of aimed shots – not enough ammunition to blast away on automatic – stay low among the rocks and believe… A Soviet flag was tied proudly to a thorn bush. His father had called in an air strike. Had called it in right above them. Who believed in God’s hand? None of them, before the jets arrived from the strip at Jalalabad. All of them, when the noise of the explosions died and the smoke cleared and they were free to finish the lives of the wounded mujahedeen, most of them had already gone to their God. The Russians were all alive, considered that their officer had saved them. Mikki and Boris were not loyal to Lavrenti but to his father. They lounged beside the big car and smoked and must have reflected that they lived a pretty good and prosperous life.
They had done jobs for his father, and chauffeured his mother, and provided protection during the wild years when the old regime collapsed. His father had done well, and the muscle he had brought to a killing ground had been supplied by Mikki and Boris. It was natural that as his father climbed he would need reliable men to watch his back against revenge and jealousy. The boy going to Syria, and his mother in tears, and his father, gruffly anxious, had sent them to stand alongside his only child to protect him. They had been with him that day, had seen it, watched it, but had not taken part in it…