“Did your friend Flackyard give you the list or did you steal it from him?” I asked out of the blue.
George slowly looked up at me through swollen eyes before speaking.
“No,” he said quietly, “Robert Flackyard is the most honourable man I know.”
“Look, George,” I said, “I rarely interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are misinterpretting ‘honour’ and inventing lies and halftruths, because, in fact, they are far more interesting than the actual truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; either you start telling the truth or I’m going to drop you over the side with your hands still tied together.”
“What do you or your kind know about honour?” he said tersely.
“Honour,” I said, “Sure and of course you do; you, Caplin, Hawkworth and Flackyard. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Ferlind” — it was the first time I had used his real name — “you’re just trying to break one leg off of a centipede. Behind me is another, just like me, and behind him another. I’m a pussycat compared with some of the others who are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All that my boss and those in Whitehall want back is a report stating the assignment is ‘closed’ written in bold letters across the front of the file. Those individuals named in that list can then get on with their sordid little lives, without the fear of being blackmailed. Try and be a bit sensible. I may even tell the authorities what a helpful chap you’ve been. You never know, they may even cut a deal with you.”
“What do you want to know?” he said.
“I don’t know what’s missing until I hear it, if there is anything you don’t want to tell me just miss it out!”
“How very cunning,” said George, “the gaps tell you more than the story in between.”
“Something like that,” I said, “I’m really the Chief Constable travelling undercover with a wire taped to my chest, or it could just be George, that you are a little paranoid!”
Getting up, stiff from sitting on the deck my ribs ached from where Ferdinand had whacked me. I walked to the main cabin, leaving Fiona to watch both the girl and George while I poured him a large brandy from Harry’s well-stocked drinks cabinet. I released Ferdinand’s left hand from the steps but left his right securely tied to the handrail, just in case he decided to jump overboard on his own. He sipped at the big glass of brandy I had given him, lost in deep thought.
He said, “Bosnia? Do you remember the news footage, the images that came out of the Kosovo conflict? Dying and wounded babies, animals and children, hundreds of dead bodies everywhere, riddled with bullets or torn apart by landmines?” He lit a cigarette, taking a hard pull of smoke into his lungs.
“Frightened, I was so bloody frightened. People like you don’t understand…”
“…do you?” he said. He wanted a reply.
I said, “As long as you don’t say it’s because of my lack of imagination.”
He went on staring out to sea and smoking. George Ferdinand nodded.
For a moment I thought he was going to smile.
“Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was merely someone who wanted to come to terms with my trauma. Men I had known from the army had volunteered to fight as unpaid mercenaries with the Kosovo Liberation Army.”
“So I went to join Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian force as a highly paid mercenary, just to be different. They posted me to a small elite unit inside Kosovo which was carrying out assassinations against their own Serbian police officials and Albanian collaborators. Why? I hear you ask. Very simple really. To discredit the Kosovar Albanians, who at the time were part of a peaceful movement. Caplin thought I was working with the Liberation Army.”
“He liked it that way so I never disillusioned him.” “How long were you with the Serbs?” I said.
“Long enough. It was just like an exercise really, we’d be told which police official or collaborator to hit. All we had to do was follow him around, see where he went, plant a bomb somewhere convenient and using a remote detonator, execute him. Bombing was always the preferred method, as it always gained maximum shock horror reactions. It made it a nice impersonal fight for me. No close up view of who you were hitting. No one trying to hit you. The best bit was being paid thousands of pounds by the Serbs to actually go out and kill Serbs. Ironic is what I’d call it, bloody ironic.”
I could see that in some perverse way the destruction and carnage that Ferdinand had experienced in Kosovo had never left him, and probably never would. How he really did believe in his own twisted mind, that working for the Serbs in Bosnia was nothing more than an exercise.
“When I came back to England, I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing, except getting drunk and doing a little coke more often than not.”
“Anyway, after a while I got introduced to a local East End lad who operated a string of lap dancing clubs in Soho and was heavily into dealing drugs. It wasn’t long before I had a flat and a flash car. He told me that in return for the lifestyle, I would be contacted when the occasional ‘special job’ had to be done, otherwise my time was my own.”
Ferdinand looked at me and shrugged.
“And you fell for this guy’s bullshit?” I said.
“I fell for it,” said Ferdinand.
“Then you met Jasper Lockhart?”
George didn’t fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, “Yes, I saw him soon after I’d started. He told you?”
I tried a simple lie. “No, I guessed,” I said, “when I saw you in London. It was when I met Jasper Lockhart at that lap dancing club.”
“That was you, was it?” said Ferdinand. “Yes, I sometimes go back there to see some of the girls. Purely for pleasure, you understand.”
I knew he was lying. He had obviously been there delivering a consignment of drugs that afternoon, but I said nothing.
The brandy was helping Ferdinand to relax, so I poured him another drink.
He finally said, “It was the redhead.”
I handed him the glass. “It was — the redhead,” he said again. As I got up and walked up to the wheelhouse, Fiona was sat on the stowage locker talking to the girl. I stretched some of the tension and stiffness out of my body. George screamed as loud as he could over the force four that was blowing, “It was the fucking redhead, do you hear me?”
Both Fiona and the girl looked around sharply.
“OK,” I said.
“Listen, she’s one of the dance girls I dated when I worked in London, I keep in touch with her because she feeds me little snippets of info about her boss — who used to be my boss. I like to know what he’s up to, especially as we’re — were in the same line of business, so to speak.”
“Tell me about how you met Robert Flackyard?” I asked him.
Ferdinand’s eyes flitted around like a butterfly in flight, first in one direction and then another. He started to talk quickly. “Flackyard was a big man at the Russian Embassy in London, and a group of them used to come to the titty bars in Soho, usually once or twice a month. They spent money like it was going out of fashion, a thousand sometimes two thousand at a time. On one occasion my boss made a point of introducing the Russians to me. The reason, very simple, I was to look after his esteemed guests personally. They all liked to snort coke, just as they liked to touch the girls who were dancing for them. Some of Flackyard’s cronies paid extra to take the girls up to a private room and have sex with them. But, the only thing that Robert Flackyard was interested in was the setups with the clubs and of course a little cocaine now and again, for recreational purposes only.”