The Outsiders: A Novel Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Also by Gerald Seymour

  Copyright

  For Gillian

  PROLOGUE

  It was an awful place – it hit her in the stomach as she went through the flapping rubber doors that screened the area from the corridor. The cold air of the morgue played on her skin – her cheeks, eyes and mouth. On any normal day, confronted with the damp, the squalor and the indifference of her escort, Winnie Monks would have gazed in front of her and let loose a volley of obscenities. She bottled them.

  She heard the doors bluster shut, the sound die. The attendant stood silent – she noted his mournful bloodhound eyes and stained knee-length smock. Her muscle, the faithful Kenny, rattled keys or coins in his pocket. In the quiet, the dripping of water was loud, the tiled floor puddled. The iron window frames were flaking and the glass painted over for privacy.

  To her left were the steel doors of the bays, on two levels. The attendant lifted his head, caught her eye, shrugged and pointed to a door far down the lower level. She nodded.

  It was an awful place that the boy had been brought to, a fucking awful place. She assumed this was where the vagrants who died on doorsteps when the snow came were brought, or the suicides who had no hope, or the drug addicts who had overdosed … Maybe it was where the young guys shot down half a century before by the Soviet Army when Budapest was retaken had been dumped … The embassy had raised a collective eyebrow when told where he was.

  The man dragged open the door of the bay. It squealed. Perhaps the resident dead weren’t worth a drop of oil. The name was written on a cardboard label attached with string to an ankle hidden under a sheet. She went forward. She tugged back the sheet. She gasped when she saw Damian Fenby’s features.

  Behind her, Dottie gave a sob, and the breath hissed through Kenny’s teeth. She had been warned what to expect, but it was still hard to look at the boy’s face, what was left of it.

  They had used Damian Fenby’s head as a football. His eyes were closed, but the flesh around them was bruised. There were abrasions on the cheeks, the ears had swelled and the lips were parted – she could see the gaps where his teeth had been.

  That autumn, Winnie Monks – counter-intelligence at Five, in a steadily diminishing corner of Thames House – ran the Graveyard Team, the poor relation to everyone else in the building on the north side of the river, their remit Organised Crime Group investigations. Maybe by the end of the year – faced with the jihadist lobby that gorged on resources – the OCG would be as dead as Damian Fenby. He had gone to Budapest, with the rookie Caro Watson, on her instructions. She was answerable. She had known what to expect when she had eased the sheet off the boy’s face – he had been gentle and gay, with a good brain and total commitment – because she had been driven, with Dottie and Kenny, from the airport to where the bastards had found their football and played their game. The rain had been sluicing down. The local spook had stayed in the vehicle while they slid on the slopes and figured out, with Caro Watson’s help, the picture.

  The side of her nose itched and she scratched it. She wore flat shoes, dulled by the rain. Her ankles were soaked, as was the hem of her skirt. Water still dribbled off her coat and the waxed cap perched on her red-gold hair. She wore no makeup. She took the sheet to tug it further down, steeling herself because she knew what she would see.

  They had been met off the first flight of the day. It had been long after midnight that Caro Watson’s call had come through to a night duty officer. She had been near hysterical and making little sense, but she was patched through to Winnie Monks’s home.

  The telephone had woken her. She had listened to the blurted information and rung off. She had thrown on clothes, splashed water on her face, gone into the kitchenette, taken a plastic bag from the roll and started to search for his things. Did anyone in Thames House, or in the Graveyard Team, know that Damian Fenby was dossing at the home of the Boss, Winnie Monks? No one. She could be open and she could be private. The boy was not a closet homosexual, had outed himself, and a relationship had developed between them. It was no one else’s business.

  Nominally he was there while his own flat was redecorated. Liaisons did not have to be pigeon-holed or stereotyped, she had told him. He would have gone home when the decorator had finished, but no date had been set. He had left three days ago, taken a bus at dawn, and she’d cursed him softly for not waking her.

  She had blundered through her flat, filling a bag with his clothes, clean, dirty, ironed or crumpled, his lotions, spare razor, two pairs of shoes, the old coat he’d have used for working alongside A Branch surveillance, a couple of books and a framed photograph of his parents. She had cleansed him from the flat, and it had seemed a betrayal. Last, she had snatched up his key-ring.

  The taxi had taken her through the heart of London to a road behind one of the great railway termini. She’d gone inside his flat with the bag, and found the old actor there, asleep on a camp bed, surrounded by paint pots. He’d blinked in the light and gazed at her with hostility. No explanation. She’d dumped the bag in a wardrobe, said nothing, and gone back out into the night.

  The taxi had taken her on to the airport where she’d met the Graveyarders. It was no one’s business that Damian Fenby had lodged with Winnie Monks.

  The rookie girl had been at Arrivals, with the embassy staffer and a local intelligence man. They had gone into the city, then up the hill through the trees and had emerged – knackered, because crisis seldom came at a convenient hour – in a tourist bus park. A uniformed policeman had come forward, the staffer had interpreted, and Caro Watson had murmured in her ear what she knew. Something of the picture was clear: near obsolete and surplus arms stocks behind the old Curtain were still being liberated from weapons and munitions dumps, and OCGs – with government approval, of course – were flogging them on. They might have been going to Somalia or Sudan, any of the shit-holes where life was cheap, or to the Irish splinter groups who called themselves Real or Continuity. A good source had suggested they were headed for County Fermanagh or County Armagh. A shipment was going through, it was said, from Budapest for onward loading on a Danube barge, then downstream to a drop-off point in Serbia or Bulgaria; the source had promised waybill documentation.

  Damian Fenby, the way Caro Watson told it, must have received the alert that the source was headed for one of the kiosks up the hill from the buses. All were open that morning, except one. She’d seen the padlock on its shutter. Any other day or evening, it was used by the source’s brother-in-law, cousin or …

  Damian Fenby and Caro Watson had adjoining rooms at the Hilton by the suburban railway station; the connecting door had not been locked, and the call had come to him. Caro Watson had been in the bathroom, stark naked and washing her hair. By the time she’d wrapped a towel round her he was gone – she could hardly chase him down the corridor to the lift and the lobby, and if she’d called him he would only have said there wasn’t a problem, he’d be fine on his own. Winnie Monks reckoned the girl would carry the guilt to her grave.

  Now she brought the sheet further down. There was mud on his chest, mucus and bloodstains.

  She knew that body. Winnie slept alone. The boy had bunked on the sofa. She’d seen most of his body when, a towel around him, he’d gone to the bathroom to shower. She knew it better from three nights before he’d gone. He was a Five man and could collate complicated detail, but he had to sleep with a light burning – he’d left on the strip over the bathroom basin. She’d needed to pee. In the sitting room, he’d thrown off the bedclothes and lay on his side. She saw his chest, back and stomach, the skin as smooth as brushed silk, no blemishes. She had stood and stared, and he hadn’t woken. She hadn’t known where the relationship would take them. Winnie Monks had felt a softness that none who knew her would have recognised. It would have taken them somewhere. She hadn’t touched him, and now wished she had.

  His small steel case had been beside him, big enough for a Notepad but not for a full-size laptop. That case was Damian Fenby’s pride and joy, with its secure lock, and the chain integral to the handle that ran to a handcuff. It was like something a diplomatic corps courier might have used to carry classified documents. Often Damian Fenby had nothing inside the case when he came to work, other than high-energy soft drinks and the sandwiches he bought at the newsagent by his flat. He’d had the case with him. It would have been locked and the cuff fastened.

  His arms lay alongside his body. She saw what she had been told she would see. The left hand was attached to the arm. The right hand ha
d been placed near to the right arm. It seemed to Winnie Monks that it had been brutally sawn off; the fist was clenched, gripping mud and grass.

  He had been in the citadel which overlooked the city. Most of Budapest was laid out below it and the river, with its bridges, the palaces, churches and the remaining glories of the long-gone Austro-Hungarian empire. The relic of another fallen era dominated the old fortress building: a towering statue of a robed goddess holding an evergreen wreath above her head: Liberty in the Soviet style. It commemorated the defeat of the Wehrmacht and the SS defenders. Behind the citadel, but overlooked by the statue, gardens ran wild around military strongpoints. Damian Fenby would have realised he was compromised, stalked. Not special forces-trained, he had carried no weapon, would have been inept at unarmed survival combat. Dottie had told her about the old actor – turned decorator – he grappled with, but that would have been the limit of his body-to-body combat. Perhaps near the kiosk – before or after the drop – he’d seen they had blocked his route back to the hire car outside the closed café, and he would have turned for the darkness and cover, but they’d caught him.

  She studied the wounds on the arm and the detached hand, and wondered if Damian Fenby had still been alive when they had decided they couldn’t break the chain or open the locked case, and had severed it to free the cuff.

  They would have knelt over him. He might have been in pain spasms or motionless, in a coma. If conscious, would he have called her name, Winnie Monks, or Denys Carthew’s? She hoped it had been hers, thought it likely.

  The uniformed policeman had led them to a strip of leaf-strewn grass dominated by an oak. At the edge of the grass there was a bunker’s entrance, and under the tree a work of rare beauty: a sculptor had fashioned a foal, its shoulder level with the hip of a rough-cast, angular young woman. Close to it, scenes-of-crime tape marked where the body had been dumped, and the hand.

  Kneeling over him, they would have used a pocket knife or a short-blade sheath knife, and butchered their way through the flesh, veins and sinews, then worked apart the bones at a joint. He might have been – pray to God he was – already dead.

  When she turned away, the policeman began to wind up the tape. The rain was heavy enough to have washed away the last of the blood. She thought the statue good, a fine headstone for him.

  Precious little dignity was left to Damian Fenby. She pulled the sheet back over him. She could visualise him in her office. Polite as always, with a grin that was his own, his sexuality kept for life outside Thames House; utterly professional, a young man whose company she had valued and whose sense of fun had been infectious.

  Winnie Monks’s nails ground into her palms. There had been a conversation with the local intelligence man: what business had Damian Fenby and Caroline Watson had on Hungarian territory? Why had there not been contact with the authorities in Budapest prior to a visit by UK agents? Why had Caroline Watson insisted that her colleague’s body be repatriated the same day? Why had Damian Fenby been alone at the citadel in darkness? Who had he gone to meet?

  Winnie Monks had remarked on the weather, the beauty of the view from the viewing platform, and had spoken of the help that British security officers had given their Hungarian counterparts when the KGB yoke had been ditched. She had asked whether he still had the hammer and sickle embroidered on his underpants. Behind her, Dottie murmured that a hearse had arrived. The intelligence man had accepted that his questions were necessary, that the answers were predictable. He had eyed Winnie Monks, had grinned at his failure to extract information, and had offered her a cigarette – probably smuggled, brought in from Belarus. She’d accepted it. They’d caught a sandwich from a fast-food counter and come on to the morgue. He had said that no witnesses had been identified and no evidence discovered at the crime scene. He doubted that a successful conclusion to any investigation was likely.

  Lying bastard. Only a Russian-based organised-crime group would have killed the boy in that way. The city was riddled with such people – the country was a chokepoint for them – and the older spooks were unreconstructed: they had been comfortable with their former masters. He had grimaced, and they’d been silent for the remainder of the journey to the morgue.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. ‘Get him loaded up.’

  A plain coffin, chipboard, was wheeled in, and Kenny came forward with a body-bag. Winnie Monks, Kenny and Dottie lifted the boy and slid him into it. He was light. They did it easily. Dottie, bloody useful kid, would have done the basic paperwork for bringing him home.

  The attendant produced a clear plastic sack of Damian Fenby’s clothes. Inside it, Winnie Monks made out his wallet and the mobile phone he would have used on the mission. She laid it on the bag, and watched as the coffin lid was screwed down. The trolley’s wheels screamed under the weight. The light was failing as they brought him out, and wheeled him to the hearse, a van with tinted windows. Dottie said she’d ride with him.

  They headed for the airport.

  ‘They’re so arrogant, those fucking people. They think they’re untouchable,’ Winnie Monks muttered.

  They swept out of the morgue’s yard into the traffic. The driver hit the buttons for a siren and for the lights to flash. The staffer was behind, and Caro Watson was with him. He’d see them up the steps, watch their boy go through the cargo hatch and think it was good riddance. He’d hope fervently never to see them again. His headlights came through the back window and bounced on Kenny’s head.

  Quietly Kenny said, ‘They believe they’re untouchable, Boss, because they aren’t often touched.’

  She spoke with a rich, distinctive accent, from a South Wales valley in one-time mining country. ‘My promise to him, Kenny. I’ll nail those who did it. Believe me, I will. As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’

  She did not make idle threats. She mouthed it again, sealing the guarantee she had given Damian Fenby: ‘As long as it takes, wherever it goes.’

  1

  ‘Jonno, your mother’s on the phone for you.’

  He was carrying a latte back into the open-plan work area from the dispenser in the corridor, and he might have blushed. Dessie, at the desk to the right of his, held up the telephone for him. On the other side of his work space, Chloë had twisted in her seat, had a grin, ear to ear – maybe his mother was ringing to check he’d put on clean socks that morning. Might have been worse – he might have been ignored and his desk phone left to ring unanswered. He gave them the finger and was rewarded with laughter. He could have been like Tracey or Chris, who sat on the far side and worked alone, ate their sandwiches alone and went home alone in the evenings.

  For as long as he could remember he had been Jonno: there were documents – passport, employment contract with the department-store chain, Inland Revenue – where he was recorded as Jonathan, but everywhere else he was Jonno. People seemed to like him and he wasn’t short of company in the evenings. He would have said life was good to him and … He slapped the coffee beaker beside his mouse mat and took the phone from Dessie. Chloë rolled her eyes.

  Jonno said, ‘Hi, Ma – I’m surrounded here by doughnuts and donkeys. Did you hear manic laughter and think you were through to a nuthouse? Before you ask, I’m wearing clean underpants—’

  His mother coughed, her annoyance clear.

  ‘What’s the problem, Ma?’

  He was told. Not a problem, more of a miracle. His mind worked at flywheel speed as he identified the difficulties; then thought through the lies he needed to dump on the sour-faced woman who oversaw holiday entitlement in Human Resources. She said it again, as if she believed her son, aged twenty-six but still regarded as a child, had failed to grasp what was on offer and why.

  ‘Have you written down the dates?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘Stansted would be best – that’s where the cheapest go from. Jonno?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘Your dad and I, we’ve just too much on. Don’t ask me to run through it all but the diary’s full, and your father won’t fly, anyway. It’s not so much for your uncle Geoff as for your aunt Fran. They just want someone there, peace of mind, that sort of thing. Enough on their plate without worrying about the cat. It was premature of me but I sort of volunteered you. I think we’re talking about two weeks. It’s important, Jonno.’