A duty of care, p.1
A Duty of Care, page 1
part #5 of Jonas Merrick Series
About the Author
Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter with ITN, covering Vietnam and the Middle East, and specialising in the subject of terrorism across the world. Seymour was on the streets of Londonderry on the afternoon of Bloody Sunday, and was a witness to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
Gerald Seymour exploded onto the literary scene with the massive bestseller Harry’s Game, that has since been picked by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best thrillers written since 1945. He has been a full-time writer since 1978, and six of his novels have been filmed for television in the UK and US. A Duty of Care is his forty-first novel.
Also by Gerald Seymour
Harry’s Game
The Glory Boys
Kingfisher
Red Fox
The Contract
Archangel
In Honour Bound
Field of Blood
A Song in the Morning
At Close Quarters
Home Run
Condition Black
The Journeyman Tailor
The Fighting Man
The Heart of Danger
Killing Ground
The Waiting Time
A Line in the Sand
Holding the Zero
The Untouchable
Traitor’s Kiss
The Unknown Soldier
Rat Run
The Walking Dead
Timebomb
The Collaborator
The Dealer and the Dead
A Deniable Death
The Outsiders
The Corporal’s Wife
Vagabond
No Mortal Thing
Jericho’s War
A Damned Serious Business
Battle Sight Zero
Beyond Recall
The Crocodile Hunter
The Foot Soldiers
In At The Kill
The Best Revenge
A Duty of Care
Gerald Seymour
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton Limited
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2025
The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ebook ISBN 978 1 399 72204 9
Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 399 72206 3
Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
For Gillian
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Prologue
He would not, absolutely not, have told her to kill the noise, shut the fuck up.
Would not have hissed at her, or snapped, because she was the granddaughter of the shef in the village and Bresnik was merely a mik, the lowest rank in the clan, subservient and with no authority to criticise her, let alone swear at her. From her mouth came the tuneless words of an Abba song, like it was stuck, repeated every few seconds. Perhaps she did not know any other verses. He loathed the song and hated it more each time she droned it, but he did not complain because he was bottom of the heap and all his loyalty was directed at her grandfather.
The singing was bad but the sound from the garden shears she held was worse. She was eleven years old. She was in a routine, not varying her pace, and her face was split with a broad smile as if she had found true happiness. For her to smile was rare, so infrequent that it would be worth telling his wife of it, but only in a hushed voice because to talk of the child was dangerous for a man at the basement level of the clan. She grinned, showing a glimpse of pleasure each time she came to the end of a phase of the routine . . . The shame was that she had not been killed in the explosion.
Because the shears were rusted at the fastening that held the blades together, the child had to use all her undeveloped strength to open them. There was then the scratching sound of metal forced against metal, until she sucked more breath into her lungs, steeled herself to slam the handles together, uniting the blades with a crack like a gun being fired. All her power was directed at the effort, and the noise echoed inside the cellar and bounced off the dark walls. Then she would lay the shears on her lap while she sat, cross-legged and resumed her singing; she liked to massage her lips with skinny fingers, sometimes kissing them or dripping one access into her mouth. Then, as if responding to the closing of the blades, she would crook the finger that had been in her mouth and the gesture would seem to demonstrate that the finger had been taken off at the second knuckle down from her dirt-encrusted nails.
She was Klea. The name given to girls at birth, acknowledging Cleopatra, the ruler of ancient Egypt, altered to fit with the dialect of the Gheg tribes in the northern mountainous part of the country. Other than its link to the woman of great power and beauty Klea was also their word for glory. Klea’s face was usually covered with a mask of expressionless withdrawal, eyes empty of emotion, like those of a slaughtered sheep or goat or a wild creature from up on the crags and cliff faces that were the boundaries, east and west, of the village. Her skin was pale and she wore a white dress, printed with sprigs of wild lavender and the wings of brightly coloured butterflies. It was said that the dress was washed each night by her grandfather’s housekeeper and then dried in front of a fire, whatever the summer temperature or whether snow was on the ground, then ironed ready for her to wear when she rose – at five or six in the morning. Then, shivering or perspiring, she would take her dog and her goats out from the corral where they were kept overnight. Sometimes she would walk to the meadow or climb the trails among the rocks, and sometimes prowl where only the most sure-footed could reach . . . They laughed at her, some of the village people, but only when sure of their privacy, and used the bastardisation of a phrase brought back from England – she was “not the full lek”, the lek being the official state currency, near worthless in comparison to the great American dollar. They laughed behind her back and where they were not overheard, but accepted that she possessed “gifts”.
The shears in her hands had not been oiled for as long as any of the older men in the community could remember, certainly not in the time since they had been put to new use. It was said that similar shears, with blunt and dirty sharpened blades, had been used by the father of the present shef during the interrogation of captured Italian or German soldiers during the years of occupation. Years later, a villa had been built for the chief man, and a landscaper had been called in to design a garden to equal those belonging to the capi of any of the Italian clans. But there had been no interest in looking after the garden, and the plants and sapling trees had either died in the winter snowfall, or been washed away when the spring thaw came, or had been scorched to their roots in the summer heat when the power of the sun was magnified inside the steep-sided walls of the valley. The shears abandoned by the landscape company had been forgotten until they had been found and new use given them. No oil and no stone to make the blades keener, and no scrubbing brush used to remove the stains of the last occasion that the blades had been put to use.
The singing, the obscene grin, the squealing as the blades were opened and the impact, sudden and terrifying as they were rammed shut, and the fingers flickering at the child’s mouth, were not aimed at the mik, but at the prisoner.
He was probably aged about 40. The cellar was dark but a light bulb from a hanging cable dangled above him. The throw of the light was sufficient for him to see the child who grinned each time she added to his torment but the mik was further back and to the side of her, sitting with his back against the door, a cushion under his backside, but uncomfortable because a Luger pistol was in his belt and the fore-sight pinched his groin. The slight degree of pain kept him alert which was important. There was no way the prisoner could free himself from the handcuffs fastening his wrists behind his back, and attached to a looped chain that was threaded into a ring on the wall and padlocked. The key to the padlock was in the mik’s trouser pocket. Both the child and he were beyond the length of the chain holding the prisoner to the wall. The mik’s duty was to guard the prisoner, to prevent any possibility of escape. He understood why the child was allowed to share the cellar space with himself and the prisoner, why at the age of eleven she was so indulged . . . She was responsible for the prisoner’s capture.
A brave man, the mik acknowledged. A man of dignity.
Anyone who worked for the shef of the village and for the network he ran that stretched far outside the valley, beyond Al bania’s frontiers, into Europe and across oceans, would appreciate that inside the areas of organised crime there were times of great success and also those when the heavens caved in upon them. In such times it was possible that even a figure in the clan as insignificant as a mik, a friend – not a kryetar who was an under-boss, not a krye who was a boss, not sitting on the bajrak which was the leadership council, not top man of the clan which was the shef – could still be in the line of fire. A feud, a vendetta between clans and he, Bresnik, might have become target and been carted off to a similar cellar, knowing that he would be mutilated so that a message was sent to everyone in the village, then put to death. Might well happen. He was rewarded with a decent house in the village, a fridge and a freezer in the kitchen, and an electric cooker and a washing machine, dishwasher and widescreen TV, but if those heavens fell and flattened him then he would have to hope that those who had taken him would do the job fast, minimise the torture, would get it fucking done . . .
She made a dirge of the song and continued to open the blades and slam them shut and to gesture that when she was given permission the shears could lop off his fingers. Bresnik, confused and twisted, imagined the terror that their prisoner was feeling.
The child was there because her grandfather had rewarded her. Her pleading had been accepted. Without her, the man’s cover would have held.
The name in the prisoner’s travel documents was Jean-Claude Michel. Three weeks before, he had hiked into the village, carrying the identity of a lecturer in the language from the Illyrian period – before the Greeks and Romans had arrived and the tribes had a tongue of their own. They had been skilled masters in creating jewellery from the silver they mined. Michel had hoped to study the dialect in this remote corner of the country, accessible only by a single gravel road. He was plausible . . . he was even liked . . . because of the warmth of his praise and gratitude, his ability to flatter. He was due to move on in a couple of days and a party was planned under the culture of besa – was trust – and a sheep would be slaughtered, disembowelled and skinned and roasted on a turning spit . . . the men and women of the village had grown fond of him, and so had the shef in his villa. He had possessed little money but had insisted on paying for his lodging over by the Orthodox church, and for the meals some of the families had prepared for him . . . He had duped them, deceived all of them, except the child who was the granddaughter of the man who mattered. Under the kanun by which they lived they were obliged to provide hospitality to a stranger, and were also obliged to exact ferocious revenge if their tradition was abused. It was the child who had denounced him.
The man now chained against the wall, unable to reach his persecutor, nor the mik and his Luger and the key in his pocket, would have heard each off-tune note in the child’s voice and each opening and closing of the blades, might have been spared a clear view of the fingers at her mouth, but probably had the intelligence to imagine. He had been beaten and his eyes were both near closed, and his cheeks were bruised and scars covered his head and blood had congealed in his long hair. The documents said he was from Rouen, in France. He had admitted what the papers and passport did not declare: that he was an officer of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police, that he worked from an anonymous office block in the 6th arrondissement, in Paris, that he had been chosen for this surveillance operation because of his slight knowledge of the Albanian language which had been helped along by a two-month intensive course. He had been close to being accepted in the village, the hub of a major organised crime group – one of the more successful ones in this corner of the Balkans – and had been “outed” by a child whose intelligence he had most likely not considered.
The mik knew the basis of the accusations made.
She was a child that no one would regard as a symbol of danger, more likely the subject of pity. She seemed to move outside the villa gates with the innocence of a leaf blown along by a light wind. Only a child. A simple child. A child who drifted on to the rough ground at the edge of the village and walked across the football pitch, and then came to meadows that were either frozen depending on the season, or rich in wild flowers. She would have her dog with her, one-eyed from a fight with a cat, and her goats would be close behind her. Her routine did not change if a gale blew, a blizzard of hail battered her, or the sun came low on her face, and she wore the same bright and modest dress every day . . . The French surveillance officer, chained to the wall, heard each note of her song and the squeal of the shears’ blades opening and the clatter of them closing, and maybe he did not care to watch the way she put her fingers to her mouth.
In the weeks that he had been in the village and had spoken with courtesy and respect, and had been fed as a guest in people’s homes and had taken the hospitality offered him under the terms of their kanun, he had not aroused suspicion. A fine party had been planned, and the morning after he was due to be driven to Shkodra and there would catch a bus to Tirana and the airport. He had told those who had cared to listen that he would remember with great affection, back in his office in the college at Rouen, the warmth and kindness extended to him.
The mik had seen the man’s last moments of freedom playing out. Had been close to the villa’s gates, hosing down the big Mercedes saloon used by the shef, and the child, Klea, had arrived at the gate, had seen her grandfather deep in conversation with two nervous boys from the village who were about to take the long journey across Europe. The child had gone to her grandfather, had tugged at his sleeve, had cut him mid-sentence, had led him away. No one else in the village, not even the shef’s grandson who was eleven years older than Klea, would have dared to snatch him away. She had spoken in his ear, standing on tiptoe. At first his expression had been of disbelief. Next, at his mouth and in his eyes, had been doubt and rare confusion. Then, still listening, his lips had narrowed and his chin had jutted, and his clenched fist had thwacked in anger into the palm of his free hand. He had called the mik to him, and others of the same rank, and a kryetar, and had phoned for his favoured krye . . . Those already with him were told to watch the stranger, no phones to be used and no radio activated. The old man had walked away with the child, who held his hand, and the goats trudged behind and her dog was at her heel . . .
A good haul – two mobiles, a transmitter, three bugs the size of matchboxes with magnets attached, a diary of handwritten notes. Beyond the football pitch and the meadows was a line of pine trees that hid the lower cliffs of the rock faces that towered over the village. The items – including military standard binoculars and a camera with a quality lens – had been wrapped in sacking and secreted in a tiny cave, hidden beyond an entrance no wider than the mouth of a household bucket. After an hour, grandfather and granddaughter returned, the child skipping beside the old man and the goats dutifully following, and the old man’s face was a thunder of anger. Instructions given . . . a beating started . . . protestations of innocence . . . a minimal confession easily gained . . . much more to be learned . . . a prisoner shackled in a cellar . . . bluster about being a French police officer and the retribution if he were harmed, and the words he would utter of gratitude in high places if he were freed without further injury. And he had spluttered out descriptions of his wife who ran a patisserie and his children who were approaching the age for important examinations, and his old father and his old mother, and . . .
Now he was silent, his head bowed, unable to block the sound of the shears in her hands.
The mik, unlike others in the village, took no pleasure in dishing out pain for the sake of demonstrating his superiority. Often enough he had reflected that his own time might come, and then he would pray for it to be quick. He knew the child had demanded of her grandfather that she be allowed into the cellar when the Frenchman had been chained against the far wall. Had seen her relish when she had first prised open the shears and struggled to whip the blades together, sometimes with a little giggle and more often the dirge of the Abba song. The mik had heard that the song had been playing in her parents’ car when it was hit, destroyed, killing them but not her. She had been allowed by her grandfather to sit in the cellar and he did not doubt that she would demand of the old man to be allowed to use the shears: he needed to know the codes, what information had been passed, the specifics of the targeting.
