Vagabond (5 page)

He knew what
they
’d be doing – it was always the same on a Sunday morning.

They
were the clients. Clients always followed a routine on the eve of the trip. They’d be getting the computer’s weather predictions for the Channel coast of France for the coming week, or filling in the baggage labels supplied by Sword Tours. The clothing would be laid out, and they’d ponder over their rainproof gear in case the forecasters were wrong. They would all have, in a travel pouch, the itinerary Sword Tours would follow: Dunkirk, Dieppe, the key places where the paratroopers had landed, and the gliders, Sword, Juno, Gold and Omaha beaches, and Falaise, with the closing of the Gap. Most of those clients would have had a friend’s recommendation – ‘Can’t praise him highly enough. He knows his stuff. You won’t find better than Danny Curnow. He lives those places, breathes them.’ That Sunday, as every Sunday, clients would be preparing to head for a rendezvous in the morning. It was so difficult to decide what to take
.

Dusty brought the bucket. ‘That the last, Danny?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘There’s a sandwich in the kitchen.’

‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

Dusty watched him, lingered. Danny said softly, ‘Problem, Dusty?’

‘No.’

Dusty left him to finish. Danny Curnow understood. They had history together, almost thirty years now, from when he was Desperate. For the last sixteen they had been in an historic Normandy town. The moment that bound them was when he had walked out of Gough, a spent vessel, with his officer’s shout in his ear for him to turn round, but he had kept on down Barrack Street and then had heard the footfall behind him. Dusty had followed him. They’d gone to the bus station and taken the coach together. Technically it was desertion, but they’d kept going and had finished up here. He knew that the older man was lonely when Danny was away. He had Lisette and Christine to look after him, good food and a warm bed, but he missed the company of his one-time sergeant, the man he’d shared ditches with.

Danny used the last of the water, paused to admire his work, then turned and walked down the hill, heading for his home. It was the right place for Danny Curnow to be because of his nerves and his memories.

Chapter 2

A stalker? A sad little man who followed a woman and hid in shadows? Perhaps, but that would have been a view of himself that Daniel Curnow couldn’t accept. He was a creature of routine, set patterns ingrained in him. It was Sunday, and the worshippers had cleared the abbaye, and the church of St Gilles – with the grave in the centre of the nave of Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror. Danny had eaten his sandwich in the kitchen, left the minibus parked on the kerb and gone to the bar he patronised. Routine governed him. In the Dickens bar he would drink, on a Sunday, one small glass of local beer, exchange a few inconsequential pleasantries with the
patron
, catch up on Caen news with a paper, smoke two cigarettes and be on his way. He wouldn’t stalk a woman in the town where he lived, but as the afternoon drifted by he would be driving north-east on the fast road a little back from the coastline. The woman was at Honfleur, around halfway to his destination. It was what he did every Sunday, summer and winter.

Routine was important to him, and had shaped his character.

His acceptance of an ordered lifestyle had made him a near legend in his chosen military unit, the Intelligence Corps. He could, of course, innovate but routine made for safety. That was what he craved and why he had moved, with Dusty, to the French Atlantic coast, where the cliffs were, the wide open beaches and the killing grounds.

He stubbed out the second cigarette, drank the last of the beer, folded the paper he had been reading and pushed it back across the bar.

Some customers were in their best clothing, which they wore for Mass, others greasy from working under their cars. A few were sweaty and in tracksuits from football on the all-weather pitch. They nodded to him, touched his arm or shook his hand. They were nearly friends but not quite. The doorbell of the Dickens Bar would chime as he went out onto the street. He would take – as he did every Sunday – the narrow alley with steep steps that led from the street where his bar was to the one with his minibus and his home.

He let himself into the house and went into the kitchen. Dusty was having lunch, beef in a sauce. Christine fussed behind him. Lisette was at the sink. They lived on a sparrow’s diet but cared devotedly for their long-time lodgers. All, in their way, were sad, but didn’t recognise it. The house was Lisette’s and Christine was her daughter. They had taken in the itinerant foreigners, and the arrangement suited them all.

He took bottled water from the fridge, smiled briefly at them and ducked his head. Dusty wished him a good trip. Lisette would have done his laundry when he returned next Saturday, and Christine would have tidied his room unnecessarily – he always left it pristine.

He was a gypsy, a traveller, as were they all.

He was an old soldier who needed routine. Dusty had long ago lost his parents, had a sister marooned in an urbanisation on a Spanish costa, a nineteen-year-old son living near Dortmund and another a year younger working in a Limassol hotel. Lisette’s mother had been seventeen when a German officer billeted on the family farm – overlooking the Canadian beach – had taken her to the hay barn. The baby was born after the successful invasion and the death of the officer. Lisette’s mother was dubbed a collaborator and her head had been publicly shaved. In response Lisette, sparky, aggressive and never one to compromise, had seduced a German tourist, come to visit the graves, and bedded him on three consecutive evenings. She had produced Christine, silkily blonde. The past governed all who lived in that house. It was worse for Danny Curnow than for the others: he lived with demons that had forced him to break away from his work and move on before it crushed him. He’d allowed no one to see him weaken.

He took his bag, packed with the little he would need for a week away, and carried it to the minibus.

His routine, on a Sunday afternoon, would take him to Honfleur within a couple of hours. There he would stalk a woman who refused to be sad. He walked around the vehicle and examined the tyres; he knew that Dusty would already have checked the engine. He climbed in, turned the key in the ignition, pulled away and slipped down the hill towards the great edifice of the castle.

It was the same for Danny Curnow that Sunday as every Sunday. In more than a dozen years nothing had altered for him. The disciplines of routine had made him a good soldier with a medal – long gone in a rubbish bin – and three mentioned-in-despatches commendations. He had shredded the certificates.

He drove out of the town towards Honfleur.

He lived a lie. Ralph Exton believed that if he ever lost its cover he would be dead. The likelihood was that his death would not be an easy release from suffering but would involve torture.

Part of the lie, a minor segment, had been to step out of the Heathrow terminal and avoid the stand for the coach service to Reading. Instead he had walked shakily to the taxi queue and waited his turn. When the driver had pulled up level with him he had given his address in Berkshire, more specifically in the nearly-royal residential road on the remoter outskirts of Bucklebury. It had been a bit of the lie to take the taxi because the Five woman wasn’t picking up the tab and the Irish had not yet paid him. A whisky or three on the flight would have helped calm him, but he was sober and more than conscious of the debrief he would be put through. He would pay off the cab on his debit card, which would send his account further into the red but the fear still racked him. He might not have been able to hold a glass steady if he’d ordered a drink on the flight. He felt sick. Ralph Exton did not consider himself unnaturally brave. He wasn’t a hero, would have grimaced at the idea. It was just that the ‘little problems’ of his life seemed disproportionably large. He existed alongside them, as if they were a constant but manageable head cold. He took the cab to the service station on the motorway going west. They, the bastards, would have had a chauffeured car from the airport. They would have watched him forgo the bus and get into a taxi. At that point his mobile had trilled and the location was given him. He could not have met them at Aldergrove or Heathrow, and certainly not at his home. It was thought the Irish might opt either for a surveillance run at him coming off the flight or stake out his home. The chance of them tailing him was almost negligible but nothing had been easy in his life, neither during the high-flying times nor later. He had survived, though, and there would be another deal around the corner.

There had been just coffee to drink.

The taxi’s meter had been drumming in his mind, and his hip ached from when he had been in the closed van and they had driven him up the hillside. He had lain – too frightened to move – on the shovel’s handle.

In the service station he’d sat across the table from them. The staff seemed to ignore that corner – the dirty plates and mugs had been left for them to gaze at. The man Ralph Exton knew as Hugo looked incapable of getting a tray to clear the debris, and the woman, Gaby, had brought the coffee and a muffin for him. The look on her face was thunderous, mostly for the hapless Hugo. Bugger it. Ralph had stood up and shouted at the nearest staff member in Polish, Romanian and then colloquial Russian. The guy had flushed, come over to their table and swept up the dirty crockery.

Gaby sent him a rueful smile. What had he said? ‘Clear this table or you’re on the next flight out tonight.’

They’d done the debrief.

Normally when they talked, he was close to her, and she had a small recorder in her bag. Hugo would play the man in charge and push the direction of the questioning. Sometimes Ralph would see her lips curl in exasperation because Hugo had interrupted the line they were following. It was important for Hugo, as Ralph Exton saw it, to be the man in charge, and he had the smart accent to go with it – like most people did in Bucklebury.

Not that day.

Ralph Exton was good at languages, a superior practitioner at selling high and buying low, and was moderately expert in staying a few steps ahead of the VAT or Revenue people, but he didn’t claim expertise in mental health. He didn’t need to. Hugo had clearly flipped, or whatever the word was for a full-blown nervous collapse. What was his problem? He hadn’t been on his back in a dark van and lain on top of the spade that would dig a grave on the edge of a field in Tyrone. The man from Five hadn’t had to listen to a drill being brought up to speed. The man from Five, good school and university, the type that inhabited the village further down the road from where Ralph Exton lived, had not been up close and personal, squeaking for his life with the two men who’d thrown the questions. Hugo was slumped, head on his arms, snivelling and sniffing.

She was all right, on good form, used his name when she spoke and sucked in what he told her, big stuff. Her expression was warm and he sensed admiration. It was confirmation of a trade. He knew now what was wanted, how much, and when delivery was required.

For Ralph Exton it made only a small difference if the commodity was furniture from a fire sale, cigarettes coming into Spain from North Africa, glass seconds from a middle-European factory, or rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine-guns and military detonators. He was not big on moral dilemmas but took seriously the figures on the statements sent him each month by his banks. Money was his priority. Once it had brought him good things and Felicity, or ‘Fliss’ as everyone knew her, especially the dentist, had had the best, as had his daughter, Victoria – ‘Toria Exton’ on the loudspeakers at gymkhanas. Fliss and Toria hadn’t realised that the good and moderate times were behind him or the bloody difficult times lay ahead. During the good times he had given a helping hand to a struggling Russian wannabe entrepreneur; during the moderate times he had facilitated the supply of duty-free fags to the Irish. Now, in bloody difficult times, any contract was manna from on high. Life was complex, frighteningly so. Ralph Exton was an agent. He was still breathing because he lived a lie – or several.

His changing landscape was where the fear lay. Perhaps the Five people frightened him most, or the Russian friend from the old days, but the Irish – the men he had met that morning – were currently on the rostrum. He played the fears against each other, let them compete, and clung to a series of lies. The vehicle was at the gate. The amount on the meter was extortionate. The Irish wouldn’t pay it and Gaby from Five had shaken her head when he’d asked. He couldn’t afford it but in his line of business he had to exude confidence and demonstrate success. He couldn’t walk up the road from a bus stop.

He still felt the fear and seemed to hear the whine of the drill. He punched in his PIN and was given his card back. The man drove away fast because he hadn’t rounded up a tip.