The Untouchable

Chapter Nine

It was the spring day, in Sarajevo, when nothing much happened. There was a fast snow blizzard at dawn that hurried down the Igman slopes to envelop the city, then a bright, cold morning, then a bright, warm afternoon, then an overcast dusk, and rain in the evening.

The longest queue in the city, from dawn to dusk, was outside the high, guarded gates of the German embassy on Mejtas Buka. Every day on which it was open the queue was there. In the hunt for visas and escape it stretched down the street and round the corner. A few at a time were admitted to the hidden buildings behind the wall. Many of those who queued would fail to reach the front of the line before the offices closed. Few of those allowed inside would be given entry to a Promised Land. Down by the Miljacka river, a shorter queue of men jostled at the door of the Slovenian embassy, also looking for a route out of a doomed country.

There were no queues waiting for the shops to open on Mula Mustafe Baseskije and Saraci and

Bravadziluk Halaci. The windows displaying designer clothes brought in from outside were looked into, but the tills did not ring and the fitting rooms stay I'd empty. The boutiques gave an impression of vibrant wealth, but it was bogus. No one could afford the dresses, blouses, skirts and lingerie; most items would have cost a civil servant a year's salary.

The street markets were full from early morning when the stalls were set up to late afternoon when they were taken down and little pick-up trucks drove away with what had not been sold. The produce – cabbage, potatoes, carrots, beans, onions, peas – came from across the southern frontiers, because the country was still locked in winter's frosts. On other stalls there were clothes that had been smuggled in, no duty paid; they were cheap and thin, would not have kept out the morning's cold or the evening's rain. Everything in the markets came from abroad because the small factories, five years after the war's end, had not been rebuilt.

On the steps of the buildings appropriated for the use of the international community, foreign men and foreign women gathered to smoke their cigarettes, most of which had been bought on the black market.

Marlboro, Winston and Camel cigarettes, brought by high-speed launches from Italy or driven in from Serbia, were smoked on the steps of the buildings used by the Commission of Property Claims of Displaced Persons, the European Bank for Re-construction, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Labour Office and the International Monetary Fund… and the Office of the High Representative, the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe… and the United Nations Children's Fund, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the World Food Programme… and the United States Agency for International Development and the International Crisis Group. Men and women snatched short breaks, then ground out their cigarettes and went back to administering the country's every heartbeat. Roads, bus timetables, postage rates, sewage disposal, the design of banknotes, television programme schedules

– the life of the city was in the hands of those foreigners, this day and every day.

Romany beggars haunted the streets and crouched on corners beside war-maimed veterans who let their amputated limbs be seen, but their upturned caps and little cardboard boxes went unfilled. The city had no time for charity.

Government ministers swept between their homes and offices in bomb-proof cars. The black Mercedes of the gangsters raced on the narrow streets. Italian troops, bored near to sleep, patrolled as a show but had no power of arrest and had orders to avoid provocation.

In the street cafes, young men made a thimble of espresso or a can of Coca-Cola last an hour and swapped gossip on the best ways to gain admission to an Austrian, German or Scandinavian university.

Nothing much happened.

The Eel drove Mister along the Zmaja od Bosne, past the Holiday Inn, to Tower A of the UNIS building complex on Fra Andela Zvizdovica.

Compartments again ruled his mind. Stacked at the back of his thoughts, and ignored, were the matters involving Serif and the deal, the death of his friend and the blood-laced face of an addict. As they came down what Atkins had called Snipers' Alley past ruins and shell-holed blocks, Mister was pondering what lorries from Bosnia with Love could bring into the city, and what they could take out. He was rested and sleeping well, but he had slept well in his cell in Brixton. He slept well because the shadow of failure did not exist in Mister's mind.

From the Cruncher's calls to London, he had a name.

He dropped down from the lorry cab. It had been the Cruncher's idea to paint the slogan 'Bosnia with Love' on the trailer's sides. When the trade was up and running, the lorry, and others, needed to be recognized, known. He saw three towers. Two were still fire-gutted and open to the weather. Tower A had lights burning in the bottom half of its floors and above he saw men working precariously. He went into a cavernous hallway, gave the name at a reception desk and was told which floor he should go to, also that he should take the stairs as the lift wasn't operating. Before Cruncher had reported on it, Mister had never heard of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. After five flights of concrete steps he came to a landing. He straightened his quiet tie and smoothed his hair. He felt good. He asked for her at the security desk, and said what he'd brought.

She came out through an inner door, and her smile of welcome and relief hit him – a bright light in darkness. 'I'm Monika Holberg, a field officer but based in Sarajevo canton, and you are my white knight. Your name is?'

'I'm Packer. Mister Packer.'

'I am so delighted to see you because you have the lorry, you have what I need.'

'I have a lorry, Miss Holberg, and it is filled to overflowing with clothes, toys, everything that people at home thought would be wanted in Bosnia by those less fortunate than themselves.'

It was only a small untruth. The lorry was not

'overflowing'. Against the bulkhead at the back of the trailer was the empty space where the launchers and missiles, the handguns and the communications sets had been. She gripped his hand. In business he dealt with few women… only the Princess, in whom he confided everything. He went to his sisters, with the Eagle, when their signatures were needed for property contracts and bond purchases. At an associate's house he made it crystal plain that the women should be out of the room. He was never sure about women, except the Princess – never certain that they felt the same ties of loyalty as men, and that in interview rooms, late at night, battered by the questions of detectives in relays, they would stare at the ceiling and stay quiet.

She dropped his hand and her enthusiasm gushed.

'I am so grateful, so happy – it is what your friend, Mr Dubbs, said you would bring?'

'Just what he said. Would you like to come and look?'

She bounded down the stairs. Her blond hair bounced on her anorak's collar. He had to scramble to keep up with her. She wore no makeup. His sisters, all past their fiftieth birthdays, and the brat girls they'd produced, all carried handbags full of powders and scent squeezers and mascara brushes. They tripped along on heels. She went down the stairs, two steps at a time, on muddied old walking-boots. He struggled to keep up. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the last flight, grinning and arching her eyebrows and he was laughing. He didn't laugh often, but the droll grin and the eyebrows forced it from him. They crossed the hall. On the outside steps he whistled for the Eel's attention in the lorry cab, and pointed to the rear doors of the trailer. When the Eel opened them for her, she scrambled up athletically, and began to rip the adhesive binding tape off the first cardboard box.

Sweaters, jackets, knitted woollen socks, coats, trousers, all were thrown up, then stuffed back. She looked into the depth of the trailer and her gaze hovered on the stacked boxes.

'They are all like this one?'

'Best as I know it, they are – but there's everything.

It's not just clothes, it's toys too.'

'Fantastic – it is marvellous!'

Her eyes were alight. Mister lived in a world where enthusiasm was forbidden, and gratitude made debts.

Mister shrugged. 'I'm glad it's all going to help.'

'It is what I needed.'

She dropped down from the trailer. He didn't offer his hand to steady her – she wouldn't have needed it.

Mister said, 'I'm pleased it's wanted. I honestly thought you'd have more of this sort of stuff than you could handle-'

She interrupted him, seemed to think nothing of cutting him short. 'Once, yes, but not now. It is "donor fatigue". People are tired, abroad, of giving to Bosnia.

They see no benefit and hear nothing good. They give to East Timor and Kosovo, and a little to Chechnya.

There was a window for Bosnia and people looked in, were sympathetic and gave, but the window is now closed. The refugees suffer as much now as when the window was open. The need is as great, but the goodwill does not exist.'

'I'm glad to be-'

'I used to have warehouses filled by the generosity of people in Europe, even in America, but they are empty now. There is a village near Kiseljak. We have brought DPs – displaced persons – back to live in their old homes. They are complaining, they say they have nothing. They say it is worse than the refugee camp.'

'I'm happy that-'

'In three days we are taking ambassadors, administrators and generals to this village to see the achievement of bringing these people home. We need money for them, for all the DPs. Many more than two million people fled their homes in the war. We have to have money to get them home. We need the international pledges, and each month it is harder. If the people seen by the VIPs are unhappy, complaining, the visitors will not write memoranda urging their governments to pledge more. It is a very little village, but it is very important…' The torrent of words subsided. There was innocence and a wide grin of apology on her face. 'I am sorry, I interrupted you – twice.'

Very few men, and fewer women, interrupted Mister. 'It's nothing. I'm glad to be of help – happy to have done something worthwhile.'

'I need the lorry for this afternoon, to deliver.'

'Probably better you use your own driver, someone who knows the roads.'

'Of course. Where do you stay in Sarajevo, Mister Packer?'

He evaded the question effortlessly. 'I'd like you to know that I intend this should not be a one-off.

There's plenty more where this load came from. I'm looking to offer regular deliveries. There must be a load of other people needing the same help as those in your village. Jason, give the lady the keys. I don't know how often I'll be able to get over here myself, but I promise you haven't seen the last of Bosnia with Love. It's been my pleasure meeting you, Miss Holberg. Just leave the keys at Reception when you're back and Jason'll collect them tonight. You'll have to excuse me, I've a few things to attend to – and, good luck.'

He sauntered away. Every week a lorry would arrive in Sarajevo, under cover of the bright-painted Bosnia with Love logo and filled with any kind of junk and chuck-out that the Mixer could lay his hands on.

And every week an apparently empty lorry would leave from Sarajevo with a hidden class A load that would not be measured in grams and low kilos, but high kilos to a tonne. At ferry ports, frontier crossings and at border Customs posts, Bosnia with Love, doing good works, would be a familiar sight. No bastard in uniform would stop a charity vehicle, going in or coming o u t… The Cruncher's plan was in motion.

He hadn't given her the name of the hotel where he stayed.

She was on the fifth floor, dialling on her telephone for the drivers' pool, Ankie was bringing her coffee and she was gazing idly from the window, when she saw him.

There were only a few generous people, in Monika Holberg's experience, who did good work and slipped away from the limelight, who did not want medals, official congratulations and invitations to international receptions, who shunned flashbulbs. She thought Mr Packer was one of them.

From her vantage-point, she watched as he went into the rear entrance of the Holiday Inn.

'He cannot do the meeting this morning,' the young man, Enver, said. 'He is sorry if that makes an inconvenience for you.'

The Eagle's response was curt. 'Mister Packer is not only an important man, he is a busy man.'

'The meeting will be in the afternoon, at four o'clock. I think he has interesting news for Mister Packer.'

'I speak for him – he'll be there.'

They'd been on a final cup in the coffee shop. The young man had found them there, bringing the dogs with him. The Eagle reckoned that in any other coffee shop, in any other city, the boy and his dogs would have been thrown out. One of the dogs had lunged at the cake trolley. It was disgusting, unhygienic. The Eagle had left Mister and Atkins at their window table, had gone to intercept Enver. He'd had a bad feeling about it the previous night, and the meeting's postponement had ratcheted it up. He never saw the enforcement side of Mister's business, was insulated from it, but the sight of the addict's pulped face had unsettled him. Between three and five years back, Mister had run a small side-show of enforcement business. A middle-rank figure was in debt to another middle-ranker who did not have the muscle strength to get himself paid. Mister bought out the debt, less twenty per cent, and sent the Cards round. The debt was paid – before or after the fists, coshes or a shotgun was used – and Mister's profit margin was one pound in five, or ten thousand in fifty thousand. The Cruncher had liked to call it 'diversification', but Mister didn't do it any longer because ten thousand pounds was chickenshit. The druggie's bloodied face had been the Eagle's sleeping companion, and his temper was on a short fuse.

They've put you off again, Mister, they're giving you the runaround. Do we sit much longer in this hole? That's what I'm asking myself. Personally… '

Mister asked softly, 'Are they suggesting another time?'

'Four o'clock in the afternoon.'

'That's not a problem, then. That's when it is, fine.'

'So, we've a day to kick our heels.' The Eagle snorted, and sat down, confused. He had expected, been damned certain he'd see, Mister's snarled anger at the slight… but everything was fine. He did not understand. Earlier, the Eagle had been explaining cash-flow and the notice required to move substantial money orders, then the need for decisions on the conversion of a Caymans account from dollars into euros, and the further movement of funds into an Israeli bank.. . and he'd given up because he hadn't had Mister's attention.

Mister said to Atkins, 'You know this place. We've half the morning and half the afternoon. Show me round. We'll do the sights.'

The Eagle was left worse than confused. He was bewildered.

'You want me to drive?'

'I'm quite capable – don't mind me saying it, you're a right misery today.'

'Is that so?'

'Lighten up, you're piss poor company About lasl night?'

'Forget i t… It's not your business.'

She ripped through the gears. The transmission from the Toyota's beacon was a continuous strong bleep. A light flashed, with constant reassurance, on the screen she'd bolted under the dash. He'd spelled it out last night, after he'd returned to the hotel and sent his signal. He'd come to her room and she'd had to clear a chair of her underclothes so that he could sit down. He'd told it in a monologue of fifteen minutes.

All the time he'd talked he'd never looked at her or her underclothes as she'd sat on the bed with her robe round her shoulders. He'd stared at the drawn curtain. She'd sent him to his own room after telling him that everything, always, seemed better in the morning. There had been a man in Ceau§escu Towers, old guard, who'd clung with his fingernails to employment because there was nothing else in his life, who had been a rookie youngster on the team running Oleg Penkovsky, the best source ever out of Moscow.

She'd been with him in Beirut and she'd asked him how it was in the Century House building, home before the Towers, when they heard first that the Russian had been arrested, and then when they'd heard he'd been executed. He'd said, over king prawns and a bottle from the Beka'a, 'It's like when you've a good dog. As long as it's able to retrieve for the guns it's special. When it can't pick up birds you tell the keeper to get on with it. You hear the shot behind the stables, and you don't even blink. Hard things happen, and that's recognized by any man worth half a peck of salt.' She'd heard that the old warrior had died six months after they'd finally burned him out of the building… She'd taken what he said as a mantra ever since.

He was white-faced, had been since they'd met. All the time they'd watched and followed the lorry to lower A, his fingers had been knotted tightly together.

'I can see my room from here.' Mister was crouched close to the firing position, and Atkins heard the tremor in his voice.

'They used the fort for artillery spotting,' Atkins said. 'They couldn't have hit your room, not at this range, with a sniper rifle, but they could have put a tank shell through it.'

He had brought Mister and the Eagle to the strongpoint, high and south of the city, past a modern memorial of slate-coloured marble that was set into snow-spattered flagstones then walked into the old fortress. He didn't think the Eagle cared a damn for it, but Mister's fascination was obvious. In front of a two-storey barracks building of off-white hewn stone blocks was a small parade area, closed in by the lower wall with the gun slits. The slits each had two shutters that closed on rollers. They were made of intimidating black-painted metal and were bullet- and shrapnel-proof. All the time Atkins had been in Sarajevo serving on the general's staff and wearing the blue beret, he had cursed the strongpoint and its view down on to Snipers' Alley, the Holiday Inn and every damn building that mattered. The city was laid out as a peaceful tableau and made benevolent by the snow.

He remembered ruefully what he had thought then, that the spotters for the guns had the power of life and death, could see the panicked groups at the water stand-pipes, the groups round market stalls, and the schoolchildren, and could decide on which to call down the shells of the heavy guns.

'You couldn't hide from it, could you?' Mister said.

'Only if you'd done a deal, Mister.' Atkins remembered how much the blue beret men had hated the warlords – Caco, Celo and Serif. 'Some could, because they did deals. Serif, yes, he'd fight one day a week, and six days a week he'd be trading across the front line, particularly before the tunnel was dug. Drugs, ammunition, jewellery if they could steal it, food, alcohol, they all went back and forth across the front line. That was the other side of the war… '

'Am I hearing you right, Atkins, ammunition?'

'The Serb warlords sold the Muslim warlords – the likes of Serif – ordnance that was fired back on their own men. They achieved power by holding the line, and made themselves rich by trading.'

Mister had straightened up and he stared hard at Atkins. 'You're telling me not to trust him?'

'Not as far as you can kick him, Mister. Here, you trust nobody.'

'Ink on paper?'

'Worthless… Nobody.'

Atkins saw, first time he'd seen it, a pensive scowl cutting Mister's face. He had engineered the occasion.

They could have gone to monuments in the city to the Ottoman time of greatness and seen mosques and galleries that were half a millennium old. They could have gone to the Imperial coffee-house, the interior unchanged since Austro-Hungarian rule. Instead, he had taken them to see the front line and had prepared the message he wanted to pass on. Mister was thinking.

They were walking back from the barracks' parade-ground, away from the gun slits and the view of Mister's bedroom far below. The Eagle wandered ahead of them then veered off the flagstones, his shoes sinking in the snow as he went to examine the marble of the memorial. Atkins had told them when they'd arrived that the memorial was for Tito's fighters killed in the world war.

Atkins shouted, a pressing, ruthless yell, 'Stop right there. Now, come back. Retrace your steps.

Exactly…'

For a moment the Eagle stood statue still. Then he turned, fear on his face.

'Put your feet precisely where you walked, and move.'

The Eagle came back to them. In the bright sunlight, in the crisp wind, the sweat dribbled on his forehead.

Step by step, through the snow, until he reached the flagstones.

Atkins said, 'This was a military position, it would have been mined. You were walking on snow. You didn't know what was under it – could have been flags, concrete or earth. If it had been earth there could have been mines. You never walk off-road here, or off the hard core – not if you want to keep your legs. Of course it's been "cleared", but there's no such thing as guaranteed clearance, and won't be for a hundred years. Just don't go walkabout.'

They went in silence to the Toyota.

He drove them along a winding road, away from the memorial, that cut down into a valley. The traffic signs were now in Cyrillic script; he told them they were in Serb territory. They went past old women sitting on collapsible stools with big plastic bags by their knees. He said it was where they sold smuggled cigarettes from Italy, at eighty British pence a packet.

They went left and climbed, came to the crest of the hill. The road hugged the rim. Below them, again, was another view of the city. He drove on another hundred and fifty metres then pulled into what had once been a car park for a bungalow restaurant, but the building was wrecked and bullet-pocked, and its roof timbers were charred.

He slipped out of his seat and walked away from the Toyota. Mister and the Eagle followed him. He remembered watching, with image-intensifier binoculars handed him by French troops, a night attack up through the Jewish cemetery towards the trenches that were now in front of his feet. He stood on a narrow strip of cracked concrete. He had willed on, that night, those Muslim troops, civilians in ill-fitting uniforms and with outdated weapons, scrambling up the hill and advancing into the machine-gun fire from these trenches. He had shouted his support to them into the darkness, and they wouldn't have heard even the whisper of what he screamed over the volume and intensity of the gunfire. He thought of who he was now, and what he did now, and he spat the bile from his throat. He had not planned that memory or that thought.

'I can see the hotel, but I can't see my room,' Mister said.

The trenches were a metre wide and a metre and a half deep. Where the machine-guns had been sited, which had driven off that night attack, with the grenades and the bayonets, there were still heavy logs of pine laid flat to protect the Serb soldiers. The water in the pit of the trenches was frozen, and caught in the ice were dulled rusty cartridge cases. Further along, going east and in front of what had been the restaurant's conservatory dining area, the trench was reinforced by a twenty-metre length of half-moon concrete section. He could have told them, because it was what he had been told years back, that the section came from the Olympic Winter Games bobsleigh run, but he didn't bother.

Atkins said, 'The gunfire would have broken up their little kitchen gardens. Both sides grew cannabis plants right in front of their forward positions. The warlords, that's Serif and those on the Serb side, encouraged the planting of cannabis. They reckoned that stoned guys wouldn't think too much about the war, and they also reckoned they'd fight harder because they wouldn't want to abandon their crop.

Can you think what it was like up here in winter if you weren't drunk or stoned out of your mind? The little men fought, stoned, pissed and half dead with cold, and the big men – like Serif – got fat on their backs and their bodies. He's scum.'

'I do business anywhere I can find it, if the price is right.'

'I thought it might help you, Mister, to know where your new partner is coming from. I thought it might help you to know what sort of man he is, and what's his power base. He danced on graves… ' Atkins let his words die.

He turned. Neither of them had listened to him.

They were already walking back to the Toyota.

Didn't he know it? He was a fly in the spider's skein. He trotted after them to the vehicle.

'You all right, Atkins?'

'Never been better, Mister.'

'You know what? I reckon it's the tourist trail. They're doing the battlefield tour… It's not Utah or Gold Beach, or the Passchendaele Ridge or that farmhouse at Waterloo, but he's getting the Sarajevo scene. Don't you think?'

'How the hell do I know?'

'Just making conversation, sunshine… You'd be doing me a favour if you spat it,' Maggie said.

They were a clear quarter of a mile from where the Toyota was parked. Joey watched it through the binoculars.

He said, a recitation without feeling, 'I crossed a line. I broke every rule I'm supposed to abide by. I knew the illegality of what I asked for, and had other men who'd no scruples do what I was incapable of. I wanted it to happen.'

She shrugged. 'So that's all right, then – stop moaning.'

'What I did, and justified to myself, meant I walked outside my team.'

'Are you one of these "enthusiasts"? We weed them out at our place. Even if they've fooled the recruitment board, we spot them and chuck them. Their feet don't touch the ground. Don't, please, tell me you're an enthusiast.'

'You've a good sneer… No, I don't think I am.'

'But it's justified, the nasty work? Right, right – you've a sister who died of drugs, overdosed?'

'No, I haven't.'

'What's the other hackneyed drop of tripe – oh, yes.

"My best friend got to be a pusher. That's why I'm a crusader against drugs." Is that it?'

'I didn't have a best friend on Sierra Quebec Golf,'

Joey said simply. 'My best friend at school teaches maths in a comprehensive in Birmingham.'

'So, what justified last night?'

'Are you listening?' Joey breathed in hard. His mind was a tangle of snipped string, no knots. 'It's about him, who he is – and about me, about who I am.'

'A winner and a loser is what you told me.'

'He's the highest mountain. Why climb a mountain? Because it's there. It's there in front of you. It's in front of you, indestructible, and laughing at you because you are so small – pygmy fucking small. The whole team of Sierra Quebec Golf spent three bloody years and they fell off the bloody mountain, they're history. I want to climb the mountain, beat the bastard, sit with my arse on his nose, because it's there

… because he' s there. They say he's no fear, I want to see him scared. They say he's in control, I want to hear him scream and beg. I want – little, small me, and it's the only thing in my life that I want – to bring down the mountain. Is that an answer?'

Maggie touched his hand. 'I think it's better than most could give.'

She thought that the clerk in Warsaw, in the shadows when he kissed her, would have said something like that, about mountains, if she'd asked him, and the Libyan boy on the veranda in Valetta's moonlight. She'd wept for them both. God, was that her future, growing old and sad because young men fell off the crags on bloody mountains?

They were climbing back into the Toyota, made huge by the binocular lenses, and she eased the van forward.

There were others in her organization, and in every one of the foreign communities camped in the city, who didn't care. She loathed their company.

With the lorry driver, Monika headed for the village beyond Kiseljak.

She cared. If she had not then she might as well, as she often told herself, have stayed at Njusford, sheltered by the mountains and overlooking a bay that was classified by UNESCO as a 'preservation-worthy environment'. The bay was on Flakstodoya island, one of the Lofoten archipelago. It was the home she had rejected. Because she had needed to care she had left Njusford, turned her back on the little coral-painted house that had been her home. She had seen in Bosnia everything that brutality had to offer.

She was toughened to suffering. She would not have acknowledged it of herself – she despised introverted self-examination – but part of her character that was remarkable was the absence of cynicism, and she did not know despair. The reward she found was in the gratitude of simple people – women who had nothing laughed with her and touched her arm or her clothes, children without a future chirped as they chanted her name. All the hours of sitting in officials' rooms and hearing excuses for procrastination were forgotten when she witnessed the gratitude and heard the chanting.

Bumping along in the lorry as it wove between sheets of ice on the road, she was cheerful, happy.

The man who had brought her the lorry had caused the lift in her mood. Most, if they had come with a lorry across Europe, would have wanted a photo-call and publicity for their generosity. She thought him the best of men because he had wanted nothing of her.

She sang cheerily in the lorry cab, not looking at the snow-capped peaks because they would have reminded her of home at Njusford. Thinking of home would have destroyed her mood. In that month, on that day, if the seas were not too fierce, her father would have been out in his boat with her elder brother, and her mother and sister would have been left to gut and behead the previous day's cod catch.

And all of them, when the boat came in, would have gone in the afternoon darkness to the grave of her younger brother. The black hours of winter, the harshness of the seas, the remoteness of the island and the agony of her brother's suicide had driven her away from Njusford. If she looked at mountains, she remembered. She sang with all of her ingrained enthusiasm.

They turned off the metalled road and lurched on a stone track towards the village with the charity load brought to her by a modest, caring stranger.

They were back from the court. For the midday recess, to save money, they avoided the canteen in the basement of the court building and went to his office to eat the sandwiches she always prepared at home.

While her father ate and concerned himself with the case papers, Jasmina threw her eyes cursorily over the overnight list of police reports. She would not normally have interrupted his concentration on a difficult case, which taxed both his humanity and his legal obligations. The case was murder. The defendant was a woman of twenty-two, already the mother of four children. The victim was a fellow gypsy, the father of two of the children. The weapon was an axe.

The defence was that the victim had beaten the defendant and she had acted to save her own life. The accusation was that the defendant had bludgeoned the victim nine times because he had found a younger lover. Self-defence or premeditated murder. Freedom or imprisonment. In the old days, before the war, her father would have been assisted in room 118 of the Ministry of Justice by a jury of professionals, but there was no longer the money for that luxury; he sat alone.

He must decide on guilt or innocence. It was typical of the cases thrown at him, without political overtones but laden with dilemma.

The fifth item on the police report of last night's incidents bounced back at her from the page.

She wheeled herself from her desk to the corner of the room, lifted a file and slid the rubber band from it.

She riffled among the top papers, selected one, then moved to his desk. He looked up irritably as she laid the report in front of him and pointed to the fifth item.

She waited until he had read it and when he looked up at her in annoyance she placed the page from the file on top of it.

A cloud seemed to shadow his face. He read the two pages a second time.

A drug addict, a disabled war veteran, had been savagely attacked in the Dobrinja district. Neighbours had seen nothing, had heard nothing, knew nothing except his name… A man of the same name and from the same address in Dobrinja had made a statement to the police on the death of the foreigner, Duncan Dubbs, in the Miljacka river.. . and the statement had been passed to the young British investigator, with permission for intrusive surveillance… and the IPTF had made the link with Ismet Mujic, who was the prime crime baron of Sarajevo, and Ismet Mujic was at the heart of his and his daughter's history.

'Better if I had never been involved,' he said. 'But I am, and I cannot step back from involvement…

There is an English expression – what do they say in English?'

'I think it is "You reap what you sow."'

Frank, and all of the team, sat in on the briefing for the new man attached to the Kula station. He was introduced as a senior detective from Dakar, Senegal. The briefing was by the station commander, an intelligence officer from the Public Security Department of Jordan, who used a pointer and a blackboard to emphasize his message. 'We are not colonialists, we do not give out instructions and orders, we are here to advise and help the local police forces. Above all else, we must show them that we believe totally in the importance of the law. .. '

Frank heard the briefing with wavering attention, distracted by a nagging shame. He had tossed through the night, failed to sleep, and had felt his self-imposed reputation of dedication to policing slip through his fingers. He had no friends in Bosnia; he went about his work, struggled with it, without the support of comrades. The only men who greeted him with warmth, on the rare times they saw him, were the cousins who made up the Sreb Four – Salko, Ante, Fahro and Muhsin. He had welcomed the liaison opportunity and had hoped he would grow to like Joey Cann, out from London. But Cann was now the source of his shame.

The Jordanian droned on… Frank had come to Bosnia for many reasons, most to do with the split from Megan, but among them had been a heartfelt desire to help a war-weary community. He detested the crime that ravaged the city but, like his international colleagues, could see no way to fight it… He had been dragged down, with his fine ideals, by Joey Cann… He didn't want to see him, hear from him, again.

He began to dream – the Irish bar at the weekend at the top of Patriotske lige, fried breakfast-lunch, wearing the red shirt and the dragon, the pint of Guinness, and the satellite relay of the international match from home, and the shame gone… but only if Joey Cann didn't ring him.

November 1996

Headlights speared against the plastic that covered the windows and interrupted the feast and the celebration. Alija, the son-in-law of Husein and Lila Bekir, had come to Vraca for his week's leave from army duties.

Their daughter now lived with the old couple. For ten months she had been with them and taken off them the weight of caring for their grandchildren, but it was good that the little ones' father was there. He had come the night before, dropped off by an army truck, and he would be with them for a week.

The family, reunited, sat in the candlelight around the table in the one room of the house that was dry and sealed against the cold, and they ate, laughed, sang and put aside the disasters of the past years. In their own bed, the night before, cuddling each other against the chill, Husein and Lila had heard the heave of the rusted springs in the next room, through a wall weakened by old shell fire. They had chuckled and predicted the arrival of another grandchild, and they had each, in their own way, prayed that they would be there to see its birth. There was little enough for them to look forward to, and much for them to forget.

Half of the population of Vraca had now returned.

Each day there was the beating of hammers, the scrape of saws and the crack of chisels reshaping the old, scorched stones. For that year, it was their aim that the returned families should have at least one room that was proof against the weather. No electricity, no water other than from the river, but protection against the elements. As patriarch of the community it was the role of Husein Bekir to decide who was next in the queue for help with the necessary repairs, and to assign the labour. It was slow work.

Those who had come back were the elderly; the young men would not return. If the young did not come back he doubted their community could ever achieve vibrant life – but that was for another day's thoughts, not for an evening of celebration, with a feast before the family.

Under the terms of what the foreigners called the quick-support grant, Husein had been given a pregnant cow, which would give birth in February of next year, and through the income-generation grant they had been given tools, nails and sacks of cement.

The foreigners brought them food, heating-oil, plastic sheeting for the roofing not yet repaired, and packets of vegetable seed. Without the gifts they would have starved. There was a little sour milk to be taken each day from the goats but, in truth, they had nothing.

They were dependent on the foreigners' charity. They had hoed strips of ground near the village to plant the vegetable seed but the crop had been minimal.

The good ground was across the ford over the river.

There was no sign left of the fire that Husein had lit to clear the grass, the weeds and the mines. He could not look across the valley from inside his house: he had no glass for the windows, which were screened with heavy nailed-on plastic sheeting. Each time he had stepped out of his house – through the successive seasons of the last year – he had thought that his fields beyond the river mocked him. The ground on his side of the river made poor grazing for the few sheep and goats his dog had rounded up from the woods, and the pregnant cow, and he had no fertilizer for the ground where he had sown the seeds.

They had gone out that morning, at first light.

Pelted by rain Husein – in the old overcoat that he lived in, tied with bale twine – and his son-in-law had gone down to the riverbank. Husein had started to explain where he thought mines had been buried, scratching in his memory, but Alija had gestured with his hand that Husein should not speak but let him concentrate. Unless it had been pointed out to him, Husein would not have seen the small round grey-green plastic shape lying in a run of silt in the arable field a dozen paces from the far bank. Directly opposite the point where the PMA2 mine had surfaced, Alija stripped off his boots and clothes, shed everything except his undershirt and underpants.

Then, not seeming to feel the cold, he unknotted the twine from Husein's waist. He unravelled it, then tied the strands together to make a long thin length of more than thirty metres. He said he knew about mines from his army training. The strands that made a slender rope were all he took with him when he went down the bank and swam the width of the dark pool.

Husein had stood very still and watched. Alija crawled up the far bank and slithered through old grass and dead nettles towards the mine. Husein had thought it bravado, and madness. He would be blamed by Lila and his daughter, by the tears of his grandchildren, if the mine exploded because he had complained they had no food worthy of a feast and a celebration. Very carefully, Alija scraped away with his fingers the silt earth in which the mine lay, then lifted it clear of the ground. Husein had gasped. It was so small. Alija tied the end of the strand of twine to the mine's narrow neck, between its body and the little stubbed antenna, and had called softly to Husein to lie flat and put his hands over his ears. He had been on the ground, pressing down into wet grass, when Alija had tossed the mine casually into the river pool. There had been a thunderous roar reaching deep into his covered ears, then water had rained down on him.

They had returned to the house with two pike, the largest more than five kilos in weight, and three trout, all heavier than a kilo. Poached in an old dish, with rich flesh to be handpicked from the bones, the trout and the pike made a feast for a celebration.

The headlights against the plastic were cut, and the growling engine of the jeep died. There was a rapped fist at the timber door.

They always welcomed the young Spanish officer.

They stood around the table long enough to embarrass him. He was introduced as their benefactor to Alija, and Husein's daughter offered him a chair at the table, but he refused it and sat on an upturned wooden box. The officer apologized for his lateness, but the supplies were now being unloaded at the building that had been a schoolhouse. They had no alcohol to offer him, but Lila sluiced the plate in the bucket of river water, wiped her hand on her apron picked the last of the trout and pike flesh from the carcasses and set it before the officer.

'I congratulate you,' he said. 'You are successful fishermen.'

They had no lines in the village, no hooks, and no money to buy them. He was told how it had been done.

The frown cut his forehead. 'That is very dangerous. I cannot encourage that. Until it is cleared I very much advise that you do not go across again.'

Husein squirmed. He would have been responsible.

He challenged, 'We are trapped here. The valley was our life. Without going across the river, how can we live, what life do we have?'

The officer said, as if he believed none of it, 'A committee has been set up in Sarajevo, a mine-action centre, and they are now examining the places where it is known mines were laid. They are drawing up a list for the priority of clearance.'

'Where would I be in that priority?' Husein persisted doggedly.

'I would lie if I said you were high on it. The cities come first. Sarajevo is at the top, then Gorazde, then Tuzla. There is Travnik and Zenica, and the whole of Bihac province. It is said there are a million mines laid in Bosnia… but you are on the list, I promise you.'

'At the bottom of it?'

'Not high on it.'

'How long before we are high on the list?'

'At an estimate, there are thirty thousand places where mines were put. I think it is a very long time before you are high on the list.'

Husein knew he had destroyed the pleasure of the evening, but could not stop. 'How many mines do you believe are in my fields?'

'I don't know. You ask me questions that I cannot answer… It could be ten, it could be a hundred, it could be the last one that went into the river to kill the fish… I don't know.'

Husein clutched the straw. 'It might have been the last one?'

'I cannot promise it – it is a possibility, not more.'

'You are blessed with the privilege of education, you are an intelligent man. If you were me, what would you do? How would you live?'

'It is my duty to urge you to be patient… I have some interesting news for you. The first from across the valley is coming back next week, to the other side.

We have to escort him.'

'Who is that?'

'An old man, a retired policeman. He has the house over the river that is nearest to your house. He has been in Germany, but the Germans are pushing out the refugees. He will be the first of them.'

Husein thought it was said to cheer them. The officer had eaten none of the fish laid in front of him. The wooden box scraped back, and he stood. He was apologizing for his intrusion. Husein thought momentarily of the return of his friend, of the chance again to argue, bicker and dispute, to play chess in the shade of his friend's mulberry tree – if he crossed the ford when the river was slow in the next summer, and if the track to Dragan Kovac's house was clear, clean, safe. The officer was at the door.

'It is a possibility that was the last mine?' He said it so quietly that the officer did not hear his question and was gone out into the night.

'How are you settling in, Mr Gough?'

'Not badly.'

'That's good news. I don't suppose you're fond of London.'

'I'll survive it.'

In the late afternoon Dougie Gough and the chief investigation officer, Dennis Cork, slipped out of the Custom House and on to the embankment path beside the river. Ostensibly they left the building so that Gough could light his pipe. Unspoken was the desire of each man to be clear of the building, away from the eyes and ears that might watch or listen to them. Gough, face wreathed in pipesmoke, wore his old raincoat and a thick knitted scarf over the tweed suit. Cork was wrapped in a dark camel coat with a spatter of dandruff showing on the collar. The small-talk, conversational, was for the corridor and the knot of smokers on the outside step. Yes, Gough was settling, surviving; it was what he had told his wife in a phone call to Glasgow. She hadn't commented, seldom queried his work duties. He'd said the same thing to his son, Rory, and to his daughter-in-law, Emma, whose back bedroom in their south-west London terrace home he now occupied. He hated London and yearned for escape to

Ardnamurchan, but that was behind him. They walked briskly.

'I wouldn't want you to misconstrue, Mr Gough, but I don't see the signs of great progress. I'm not complaining at your telephoning me in the dead of night – Cann's last report – but I'm not getting an impression of action. Can we liven it up a bit?'

'I was never one to rush things.'

'Create a frisson of excitement. Put them off balance. Isn't that the road to mistakes?'

'It's a two-sided game. Hurry when you should be walking and it's not just them that can make mistakes.

We can make mistakes.'

'I want Packer and his crowd to feel pressured. I've a minister sitting on me. We've taken prime position in this investigation. I've elbowed aside both the Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, I've refused to share with them. Without a result, and a quick one, I may not survive.'

'That's the way of the game.'

'The young man we have there, Cann – it's interesting what he's turned up but it doesn't move us forward. Frankly, I'd have thought he'd have done better by now. It's all fat we've learned, not meat. I shouldn't, but I lie awake at night and think of that man, Packer, and he seems to turn to me, in the street, wherever, and laugh at me.'

'I sleep well at night.'

'Where I used to work we believed in the gospel of proaction. Leading and dominating, not merely reacting.' Cork remembered that he had minuted himself to refer to the dangers of over-confidence in surveillance, but he erased the minute.

'It's your bad luck you don't still work there, sir.'

'Dammit, Gough – Mr Gough – if Packer isn't nailed to a courtroom bench, I'll go down as a failure.

You tell me what Cann has unearthed, what has been in his communications that has been important.'

'Learn to be patient. You have to sit for hours, days,› to see a fine dog-otter off the rocks at Kilchoan or on the beaches under Ben Hiant. No patience, no reward

… "Target One is unaware of current surveillance."

That's important.'

The minute was forgotten. 'I'd better be getting back.'

Gough leaned on the rail above the river, smoked his pipe and pondered. The camel coat was disappearing among the pedestrians. Dougie Gough had plans, of course he had, for 'jarring' and 'pressuring'

Mister and Mister's clan, but they would not be discussed and negotiated with a man who had dandruff on his shoulders and who worried about the future of his career. It was about patience, and crucial to the fruits of patience was Joey Cann, a shadow, unseen, tracking Mister on Sarajevo's streets.

'Hello, dear. Just popped round, have you?'

'Thought I'd tidy up, and make sure everything's all right.'

The girlfriend, Jennifer, was rather pretty, Violet Robinson thought, and a decent girl, attentive and dutiful. Violet was fond of her. As freehold owner of the house in Tooting Bee, and the landlady, she made it her business to know all of the comings and goings in the building. She had two young women in the basement, both City professionals, and she rather hoped – for their benefit – they'd get themselves married off and find places of their own. Joey, she'd always had a soft spot for him, had the top-floor room under the eaves. When the girls in the basement moved out, it was her idea that Joey and his girlfriend could take it over. She'd be comfortable with them in her house. She thought young Jennifer was strained, tense.. . She'd checked the room after Joey had gone in that early-morning rush for his plane and thought it puritanically tidy. But perhaps there was ironing that was needed, or somesuch excuse, but more likely this little soul was lonely and had come over from Wimbledon simply to be in his single room.

'That's lovely, dear. Have you heard from him?'

'He rang to say he'd arrived. Didn't tell me much.

He hasn't rung since.'

'You know you can always use the phone here.'

'He didn't give me the number.'

Violet Robinson had been a widow for eight years.

Her late husband had been with the diplomatic corps and had been taken from her by a rare strain of fever with an unpronounceable name and beyond t h e skills of the American hospital's doctors in Asuncion. Perry had been acting ambassador to Paraguay, h a d gone down overnight and been too ill to be f l o w n out to better facilities in Buenos Aires. With the d e g r e e of independence expected from a seasoned "Foreign Office wife she had set to and divided up t h e i r home in Tooting Bee. The ground and first floor s h e had kept for herself, but the basement and attic w e r e converted to rented accommodation. Joey had b e e n with her for five years. Until young Jennifer came into his life, she'd thought that he would still be t h e r e when she was carried out by an ambulance crew or an undertaker, had been almost at the point of d e s p a i r of him meeting the right sort of girl – and then _ Jennifer had arrived.

'Well, ring his work, ask them for it.'

'They wouldn't give it me, it's agaii*ist the regulations.'

'Of course they would, in an emergency. Not to worry, I'm sure he's all right there.'

'Yes… I keep expecting him to ring from the airport. It's only a few days.'

It was her opinion, a little of it from vanity, that Joey confided in her more than he did in his girlfriend, Jennifer. At least once a week, when he came back late at night from work, she would invite him into her sitting room off the ground-floor hall, and sit him down in Perry's old chair. She'd make him strong coffee, cook him Welsh rarebit or an omelette, pour him a stiff whisky and let him talk. She was used to discretion. She knew everything about the working days of what he called Sierra Quebec Golf, and everything about the life of Albert William Packer. To pass long days and long evenings she watched the soap operas, but there was nothing on television that was remotely as interesting as the work of SQG and the life of Mister. Joey had told her that he only gave the barest skeleton of it all to Jennifer. It gave her pride, and some little purpose, to know the heart of the story.

'And we're missing him, aren't we?'

' 'Fraid so – anyway, I'll get on.'

'He's a sensible young man and, what you should remember, they wouldn't have sent him if he wouldn't be all right there.'

'Of course you're right – and thanks for saying it.'

Young Jennifer's back was to her, going up the stairs, and she wouldn't have seen Violet's shiver.

Perry had told her often enough that when diplomats, soldiers or intelligence officers were sent abroad, were far from home, they lost their sense of self-preserving caution. It had been a theme of his. Men and women, on duty and overseas, shed the ability to recognize the moment to step back. It was about the isolation, Perry had said. They felt invulnerable, discarded the armour of carefulness, and walked close to cliff edges

– he often talked about it.

She called up the stairs, 'Don't you worry yourself.'

The answer came down to her, and the surprise:

'Why do you say that, Mrs Robinson? I'm not worried.'

'Of course you're not, and you've no cause to be.'

'I won't be long – just get it shipshape. I've got to get back for the c a t… '

When she'd checked the room after he'd gone, Violet had noted that the photograph was no longer on the wall. As she'd put her own rubbish sack in the outside bin for the refuse men, she'd found it ripped to small pieces. It had been an ugly picture of an ugly man, like an odour in her house. She went back into her room. She hoped Joey, spare, slight, with his big spectacles, was not drawn close to a cliff edge. High above her, carried down the staircase, she could hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

'Is that so?'

To another man, a lesser man, what Mister was told by Serif would have been a pickaxe into the stomach.

Beside him the Eagle had gasped and he had heard a little whistle of shock hiss from between Atkins's teeth. Serif's signature was on the document, drawn up by the Eagle, after two hours of dispute and amendments. There had been brittle politeness in the haggling and twice Serif had gone out with his people into the corridor. Mister was satisfied. The figure agreed, to be paid quarterly, was for a million and a half sterling, converted to American dollars, paid into Nicosia. Under Atkins's supervision, Serif's men had carried two more of the boxed medium-range Trigat launchers from the Toyota into the apartment, and the missiles. The communications systems had been handed over and Serif had leaned intently over Atkins's shoulder as the workings were explained. It should have been the moment for a popping cork, but Mister – still smiling – had asked with a laser's directness whether Serif was responsible for the beating given to the eyewitness from Dobrinja, the last person to see the Cruncher alive. Serif had denied it. Then Serif had rolled the hand-grenade across the table, and it had fallen into Mister's lap, and the Eagle had gasped, Atkins had whistled, but Mister had not blinked.

'You have my promise, Mister Packer, of the truth of it. You are followed.'

'I hear you.'

'A young man, foreign – I assume from your country. He is small, with big spectacles and dressed without any style. His coat is green. He followed you yesterday, Enver saw him. You stopped to look in a window, and he stopped. You walked back towards him and stood very close to him, and he looked away from you. You went away, and he followed. You are under surveillance. It is not a situation that I welcome

… I know nothing of the beating of the addict in Dobrinja. Look elsewhere for those responsible, look to a man who follows you.'

No panic flicked in Mister's eyes. His calm dripped off him. 'I am grateful to you.'

'I do not tolerate investigation of my business. You bring good trade to me, but also embarrassment.'

Mister's fingers rapped the table. 'I'll deal with it.'

'But you will need help. It is better we take responsibility.'

'Thank you, no help.'

'It is my city.'

Mister said decisively, burgeoning his authority. 'I help myself. I need no assistance. If I have a problem, then I finish it. Thank you, but I don't ask for help.'

He detested providing the opportunity for a smirk to play at Serif's mouth. Hands were shaken and then, at the last, he let Serif take him in his broad arms and brush-kiss his cheeks. He himself dealt with every problem that faced him, had ever challenged him, and would do so until he dropped. They were out in the street and heading for the Toyota. The Eagle was a lawyer and good on contracts. Atkins was a soldier and understood war weapons. Atkins knew nothing of counter-surveillance, and the Eagle knew less. He told them to drive back to the hotel and wait for him.

He left them by the vehicle and started to walk slowly, with his eyes on the shop fronts, along Mula Mustafe Baseskija.

He wandered at his own pace, never looked behind him, never doubled back, and turned at the big junction on to Kosevo, and climbed the hill.

It was the day that nothing much happened, and everything changed.