'I helped you, Malachy. Don't look for more.'
'A dealer feeds the pushers. A supplier feeds a dealer. Who's next up the ladder?'
'We know who the corpse over the cliff defaulted on.
Know who killed him, having tortured him. I know, my inspector knows, my superintendent knows.'
'Who feeds the supplier?'
'We know the name, but we don't know where to look for evidence. What I said, forget it. It's big league, beyond your reach. Be satisfied.'
'I'm going up your pyramid. Who sold to George Wright?'
'Tell me, old friend, what is it you need to lose?'
'Disgust, what you can't imagine, shame. All of them queuing up to belt me…'
'Just self-pity, like a jerk-off.'
'You weren't there – you only read it in the file.'
'Then tell me, Malachy, what it is you need to get?'
'Ability to live, to walk, to laugh. Something of that.
You started me, put the ladder there. Don't take it from me. Please, I'm asking you – who sells to the supplier? It's not to do with Millie Johnson, it's for myself… please.'
From deep in the car there was a long, hissed sigh.
A ballpoint clicked. He heard the scribbled writing. A sheet was torn off a pad. Through the open top of the window a gloved hand passed the scrap of paper. He took it. A thin torchbeam shone on the scrap. He read a name and an address. Then the gloved hand snatched back the paper and the torchbeam was cut, replaced by the flash of a cigarette lighter and a little guttering flame.
'It's big boys' league. The importer sells to the supplier. Malachy, you watch yourself. Don't do anything if you haven't looked it over good and proper.
Take time.'
'Thank you.'
'Was it that bad, what was done to you?'
'It was bad.'
14 January 2004
When the sun was up, past eight, Dogsy limped to the lorry.
Fran, his friend, who was going to ride shotgun, reached down from the back to give him a hand up. Dogsy milked the moment, all his weight on his right boot and none on his bandaged left foot, and let out a little groan, not stifled, as he came on board.
He settled at the tail end of the bench, opposite Fran.
Inside the lorry, under the canvas, it would get to be rotten hot on the journey, but by the tailgate there would be air. He stretched out his left foot. Fran made a play of kicking it and Dogsy gave him a finger. The dust swirled, and the convoy moved off from Bravo.
It was because of personal hygiene that Dogsy had a seat on the lorry, and a bandaged left foot. The previous night, the stink of his boots had caused enough aggravation for them to be chucked out of the room where 2 Section of Salamanca platoon slept. In the morning, when they'd dressed for the lift operation, he'd gone in his socks, cursing, to retrieve them, and had stepped on a feckin' scorpion.
Little bugger had a bloody great sting in its tail. Dogsy had missed the lift: the corporal medic had bandaged him, and he had the ride back to Battalion and a look-over from the medical officer.
They had armour, Warriors, in front and behind for fire power. No chopper available. The lorry whined for power and the personnel carrier behind them gave a sort of comfort. It was a feckin' awful road back to Battalion – a sniper alley, and RPG-missile alley, a buried-bomb-at-the-end-of-a-control-wire alley. But the heat, feckin' awful, calmed him.
It was the smell, worse than his feckin' boots would have been. He looked inside the lorry. 'You know what, Fran?
One of them's shat himself.'
'Which one?'
He looked up the line of men, five of them, on the bench opposite, beyond Fran. Each had his ankles roped to the bench stanchions, wrists manacled behind them, and each was blindfolded with sticking tape. How would Dogsy decide which of them had fouled himself? He leaned forward so that he could check the men on his bench. Four more men with ropes, manacles and tape blindfolds – and another. At the lorry's bulkhead, up against the driver's cab, without restraints, was an officer.
'Hey, Fran, is that him?' he whispered.
'What you say, Dogsy? You got to shout. What?'
He did. 'Is that the Rupert?' he yelled.
'That's him.'
'The Rupert that Baz said was feckin'yellow?'
'Bottled out. That's him, Dogsy.'
'How could a guy do that, Fran – an officer?'
'Couldn't hack it. The section had a good fight, used up juice like no tomorrow, did slots, but the Rupert didn't stay around to see it.'
'What'll they do to him?'
'God knows… Who cares? I don't, you shouldn't.'
He stared up the swaying length of the lorry. They had been shouting questions, yelling answers. The officer's head shook against the bulkhead and he did not seem to feel pain, as if he was in deep sleep, and his body moved with the lorry's lurch when the wheels hit potholes… Poor bastard.
Not that, to Fran, Dogsy would have uttered sympathy for the man called a coward. He looked away, back at the nose of the following Warrior. •k**
Polly did lunch with Ludvik. She had booked the table at the restaurant over the Vltava from the embassy. It would not come cheap but would be on expenses, authorized by Justin Braithwaite. 'I want to take you out and show you my thanks, up close and personal, for the co-operation and professionalism at Kostecna,' she'd said, when she'd rung him – and, like an afterthought, 'Oh, by the by, something that's been hanging around on my desk for weeks. I'm sure it's not important, but I've a phone number. I need to know whose it is, what they do. Got a pencil?' She'd let him order – grilled carp and salad, after local soup, and fine beer. She'd waited, made small-talk, rolled her eyes at him and played at being fascinated by what he said.
During the salad, he'd let his knee nudge her thigh.
When she'd struggled to fillet the carp, he had leaned across the table, head close, hands near hers, to work the flesh expertly off the bone. Too much looking earnestly into the eyes around which she'd smeared the makeup. Thought he was in with a chance, didn't he? Thought the afternoon might end up at his apartment or hers, hadn't he? Then coffee, strong. It was what she had done with Dominic, end up at his flat, when she'd had a day off and the Foreign and Commonwealth wouldn't miss him, and they'd taken a bottle with them to bed… but that was all long gone.
She left it late, then slid in the question. 'That number, any luck?'
First, she was told what she knew – wasn't bloody stupid: the number was at Ostrava, near the Polish border.
'Oh, did you find whose it was? The office dumped me with it last month.'
She was given a name. She had her pencil out of her bag and scribbled what she was told on the back of a torn-open envelope, which she thought was an indication of the matter's minimal importance. Gaunt's favourite mantra was about trust: don't. His second favourite was about sharing intelligence with an ally: never, if it can be avoided. If it could not be avoided it should be economical in the extreme. He reached across the table, almost shyly, but far enough for his fingertips to brush against her hand, holding the envelope.
She smiled, in what she thought was a warm, caring way, then shrugged. 'Don't know why the office wanted i t… God, some of the work I get loaded with is dross. Anyway, what does he do in Ostrava?'
The man with that telephone number ran a factory producing furniture for export to Germany and was a subsidiary of a larger conglomerate.
'Riveting stuff. You'd have thought, in this day and age, that my people had better things to do with their time. Whose conglomerate?'
The furniture factory was a small part of the empire owned by Timo Rahman…
'Never heard of him.'
'A multi-millionaire from Hamburg, an Albanian.'
'OK, OK, we don't have to overwhelm my people – that'll do for them. I'll get a commendation for it… Tell me, is carp better grilled, like ours, or fried, or just put in the oven? What would your mother do?'