The Outsiders Read online

  ‘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.’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  ‘You could take a friend. The cat matters to them.’

  He sat at his desk and faced his screen. If he had scrolled up or down he would have stayed with the statistics of the company’s home-delivery vans, their mileage and routes from the three depots in the south and south-west of England, their annual fuel consumption and the price of the fuel. It was Jonno’s job to drive down the consumption and the cost. Dessie did the drivers’ wages, and worked out how to get more from their man-hours, while Chloë watched the transit of goods from warehouse to depots. They reckoned, all three of them, that they could have done the business with their eyes closed, but corporate discipline demanded enthusiasm. They both questioned him: had he won the lottery, or had his father done a runner? He smiled, then gave a little snort as if his mind was made up. He left the latte on his desk, with the mileage, consumption and tonnage, and let a sharp smile settle on his face.

  He went out through the doors, past the coffee outlet and the cabinet that held the sandwiches, past the notice-boards displaying photographs of employees, the times of aerobics classes, the office choir’s practice sessions, and an entry form for a charity half-marathon. It was neither exciting work nor an inspirational setting, but it was a job. His parents lived in a village between Bath and Chippenham, a mile off the old A4 trunk road, near to Corsham. He went home once a month and heard a regular litany: which of their neighbours’ kids were on a scrap heap – temporary or permanent – having failed to find work. Truth to tell, enough of his friends from university were out of a job, pounding the streets, or stacking shelves and looking at dead-ends. He went down one floor in the lift.

  How would he have described himself? Better: how would others have described him? Average. Conventional. Normal. A decent sort of guy. He made way for the director who oversaw that floor, and was rewarded with a manufactured smile. He wondered if the guy had the faintest idea who he was and what he did. It was the first week of November, a week when temperatures dropped, evenings closed in, leaves made a mess and rain was forecast every day – not the best time to go waltzing into Human Resources and demand time in the sunshine.

  Jonno knocked on a glass door. He saw a face look up, a frown form, and matched it with a smile, a sad one. The frown softened. He was beckoned inside.

  He was economical.

  Jonno said Spain, but did not emphasise that he was talking about the Costa del Sol and the slopes above the coast that were sheltered by the foothills of the Sierra Blanca. A relative was leaving his home to travel to England for a life-threatening operation – he did not say it was a routine hip resurfacing with a high success rate. Neither did he say that the ‘relative’ was merely a long-standing friend of the family, nor that he had never met the ‘relative’ in question, Flight Lieutenant (Ret’d) Geoff Walsh, or his wife, Fran. He knew they sent a card each Christmas to his parents – not a robin in the snow but an aircraft, a fighter, a bomber or a transport C130, of the sort that used to fly out of the RAF base at Lyneham. The last had shown a jet lifting off a runway and had been sold in support of the Royal Air Force Association. He had never even seen a photograph of them. But a distress call had come.

  He spoke of an elderly couple returning to the UK for surgery, might have implied ‘war hero’, and their fear of leaving their property unguarded, abandoned, while his uncle went under the surgeon’s knife. Jonno’s personal file was on her screen. There would have been commendations from his line manager, distant prospects of promotion, his allocation of days in lieu, the statutory bank holidays he had worked, and leave not yet taken. Against that were the pressures of November in the trading calendar.

  She pondered. She played on it, miserable bitch, milking the moment. The arrogance of power.

  It was done grudgingly. ‘I think that would be all right. Don’t make a habit of it. The compassion factor is big with the company, but it’s not to be abused. It’ll mean rejigging your holiday entitlement and we’ll probably call you in for the sales and through into the new-year holiday.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Where exactly was it you were going?’

  ‘Some dump down there – nothing too special. I’m grateful.’

  The deceit had tripped easily off his tongue. It hurt him, denting his self-esteem. He would have liked to say, ‘I apologise for lying to you. I don’t know the man who’s having his hip chopped around, but the weather here is foul, the job’s dead boring, and it’s a chance to go to Marbella and stay in a villa. My mum says I can take my girlfriend, and we only have to find the air fares and money for food.’

  He thanked her again, sounding, he hoped, as though he’d made a big sacrifice in agreeing to mind a villa in the hills on the Costa del Sol. What did he know about the place? Nothing.

  Last year, Jonno and four friends had gone to the North Cape of Norway. The year before three of them had hired bicycles and pedalled round southern Ireland. Before that there had been a coach trip to a village near Chernobyl, in radioactive Ukraine, where a gang had tried to build a nursery for kids on the edge of the zone that had been contaminated by the nuclear-fuel explosion. Jonno liked to get up a sweat on his holiday, not lounge on a recliner.

  He went back to his desk and his cold latte. He wriggled the mouse and recalled the figures, but the lines seemed utterly meaningless. He was thinking of a luxury villa with a garden and views to infinity. He considered the chance of Posie taking him up on the offer and . . . His mind darted. Chloë and Dessie were looking at him. An explanation was required.

  Jonno said, ‘It’s a family problem. An old uncle needs an operation, but he and his wife need a house-sitter for the cat. I’ve drawn the short straw. HR were really helpful about me having some time out . . . Sorry, and all that, but you’re going to have to do without my sunshine lighting your lives for a while.’ He shrugged. No way he’d let either of them – or anyone else in the building – know that he was bound for a villa in Marbella, top-of-the-range on the Costa del Sol, or tongues would wag and the gossip run riot on texts, emails and tweets. He wore a sober expression, gave nothing away. Dessie and Chloë had their heads down, expressions to match, and murmured sympathetically. He wished, fervently, that he hadn’t had to bend the truth. He was asked where he was going. ‘Nowhere either of you would want to be.’

  More important was what Posie would say. He went back to his charts and made a pig’s ear of it because his mind jerked him back to the Costa del Sol.

  At the end of the first year, on the anniversary, Winnie Monks had told the Graveyard Team, ‘Always think of the woman, tailored jeans and green wellies, who walks an arthritic retriever in the woods. Focus on her.’

  They’d been outside among the burial stones in the garden behind Thames House. The wind had whipped Winnie’s cigarillo smoke into their faces. An inventory of investigation avenues had been worked over. An FBI source, Polish, had named a Russian career criminal as the agent’s killer. Months had gone into tracking the bastard, and on the relevant dates he’d been having kidney stones extracted in a Volgograd clinic. A French asset had pointed to a flight leaving Budapest airport at the time they’d flown in on that grim morning. The airport cameras were said to have been wiped and excitement had risen, so they’d hacked into the Malev 100 passenger manifest and pushed the names to Six. Six station in Moscow had failed to identify anyone on
the list with criminal links.

  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 ine
xorably 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.