The Dealer and the Dead by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page B

day for writing up a search report with results, and another on the value of a Covert Human Intelligence Source. Mark Roscoe thought it a good day, but quiet, calm, civilised days had a way of kicking them in the teeth without warning. Actually, he’d done well and the paper mountain was shrinking ahead of and rising behind him. They were all the same on a quiet day: they beavered at the paper – time was seldom on their side.
    It was the way of Mark Roscoe, his Bill and his Suzie, to value time away from the coal face. Most of the targets they sought to save were the god-awful people who organised the big cocaine shipments, kept a main residence at Puerto Banus – Costa del Sol – fell out with a dealer or a supplier and owed, maybe, a million sterling. Then word came in that the aggrieved party was not going to the High Court for justice but was hiring a gun. Couldn’t be allowed to happen; duty of care, and all the horse shit from the European Court of Human Rights. Had to jump through the hoops, do their damnedest to prevent blood, tissue, brains scattering across a London pavement. Mark Roscoe thought, was near certain, that Bill was asleep at his desk space on the far side of the cubicle area, and Suzie’s head was rocking.
    At another south-west area command police station, detectives were grilling the tenant of the house searched – Roscoe wasn’t big on liberal tendencies, but while ‘grilling’ was acceptable, ‘stitching up’ was not. His dad had been a detective in the days of black eyes and facial abrasions when the accused regularly walked into doors and conveniently fell downstairs in the cell block. His father didn’t like to talk of those days, as if he was ashamed of them. He had turned his back on thirty-seven years’ service, sold up the west London family home and disappeared to the Lake District. When the tenant had been grilled, whennames were on the tapes, the interrogation would begin: who was the hitman? Who paid the hitman? Who was the hitman’s target? Who did the collection and who did the drop off? He didn’t quiz his father about the ‘old days’ of policing London, but had he done so, and had he suggested to his father that it was interesting to be involved in the protection of organised players, serious players, keeping them off the mortuary slabs, the veins would have jumped on his father’s temples, his cheeks would have gone puce, his breathing would have quickened and his eyes narrowed: ‘Best thing for those animals is
bad
on
bad,
the more the better. Best place for them is in a box and going down under.’ Rare enough for Roscoe to make the long journey north, and not right that, when he did, their time should be spent bickering. Enough to say that the major work of his squad was protection of men he despised.
    It was sensible to let a day go slack when little jumped in his face. Wouldn’t last – could have bet his shirt on it. The information might come from a chis, or from an undercover officer, even a member of the public – an innocent who had seen or heard something and picked up the phone – or from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, or the spooks, or even from the listening superstars at GCHQ. When things moved, and the alarm bells clanged, it was usually at speed and without warning, what he called ‘straight out of a clear blue sky’, the worst sort of sky.
    A man wasn’t going to be brought in to fix the air-conditioner because nobody would take responsibility to strip down the walls. Looking between the slats of the blinds, Mark Roscoe could see the great emptiness he loathed above the rooftops: the clear blue sky.
    A police patrol car was parked back from the field as if to give space around the raised arm. A priest had come from Vukovar at the same time and his car was further down the Cornfield Road. Any of the villagers, or those who had lived in Bogdanovci or Marinci, or men and women of Croat origin from Vukovar, could tell which of the