The Untouchable

Chapter Fifteen

Henry hadn't left a contact address. He'd been vague, infuriatingly obtuse, about where he could be reached when he was abroad. 'May be in and out of several hotels – I'll be on the move. It wouldn't really be a good idea for you to call me or me to call you – it's only for a few days.' It had never been Mo Arbuthnot's habit to quiz her husband on his work, and she'd let it go. He'd kissed her cheek and said he'd ring from Heathrow when he was back in the country.

Three hours before, while she and the girls had slept, the cars had crunched onto the pepper-coloured gravel of the drive. The dogs in the kitchen had woken first, had disturbed Mo, and she'd seen in a half-awake haze the headlights against her bedroom curtains. She'd heard the dogs' barking and the chorus of birdsong in the garden's trees, the slamming of doors, the scrape of feet across the gravel, and the peal of the bell. She'd gone down the stairs, shrugging into her dressing-gown, and peered through the front door's spyhole. They'd activated the security lights.

They were well lit: a cluster of men, and one woman, on the step; one face was masked by a plume of pipesmoke. She'd called out that they should identify themselves and small cards were held up to the spyhole. She'd opened the door. Four of the men and the woman had pushed past her, no word said, but the one with the pipe, the eldest, biting on its stem, puffing like a damned chimney, had intoned the text of the authorized warrant to search her home then handed her the sheet of paper as if she might want to check that an error had not been made. She hadn't bothered to read it, but she had claimed, had insisted, that there had to be an error. ' I doubt it,' the older man had growled. 'We make very few errors, ma'am.' A police car was parked behind their cars, but the two uniformed men stayed in it, as if this was not their business. She had demanded the names of the intruders, and had been ignored. When the older man had stepped sideways in the hall to go by her she had proclaimed, with all the haughtiness she could muster, that she did not permit smoking in her home.

He'd smiled, a chilling crack at the side of his mouth, then strolled back on to the outer doorstep where he had whacked his pipe against the raised heel of his polished shoe and the embers had fallen onto the grouted bricks. He'd left them glowing there and gone by her

… Without proper points of contact, Mo Arbuthnot had no one to call, no one to cry to for help

… She thought her home was violated. Two of them were in her husband's study, his inner sanctum off the far end of the lounge. One was in the dining room and had the drawers and books out of the antique rosewood desk where she recorded the household accounts. Another had chosen the oak chest, Jacobean, in the sitting room. It had been like a wound to her.

But the worst of the wounds had not been the rape of her privacy, or the silent shock on the faces of her daughters who clung to each other at the top of the stairs, it was the woman and the family dogs. The woman had gone into the kitchen and left the door open. The dogs should have been leaping at her, or getting behind her legs and snarling at her ankles. She was down on the kitchen's heavy-weave carpet, scratching bellies, crooning to them: she had bought their affection. Then she had started to search every cupboard, every shelf, to open every cookery book kept on top of the dresser.

The older man, his warm pipe pocketed, tramped up the stairs. She saw the politeness with which he requested the girls to move aside and make way for him. He went into her bedroom. Out of her sight he would have been sifting in the drawers of her dressing-table, and that hurt too; but nothing hurt as cruelly as the betrayal of her dogs.

Mo Arbuthnot knew little of her husband's work.

He was a criminal lawyer, he worked through the week in London, and brought little of the work home.

At weekends, he did not discuss his caseload with her.

'Not what I come down here for,' he'd say. 'Down here is for getting away from it.' Sometimes, on a Sunday evening, he'd shut himself away in his study for an hour, and she and the girls would be in the sitting room with the television, then he'd bring out his briefcase and leave it by the front door for the early Monday-morning departure. It was always locked. At dinner parties or drinks sessions, at home or at their friends', if Henry was asked about work, he would answer in generalities and effortlessly steer away the talk. 'Legal stuff, anything that comes along, enough to make a c r u s t… How's the cricket team doing this summer?' The crust – she was not stupid, she could do the arithmetic – was in excess of two hundred thousand pounds in income a year, and there was a stocks portfolio and a pension scheme. She was looked after, as were the girls' schools, and the horses.

Few of the women she knew in the village, of her status, had a finger on the pulse of their husband's finances… She understood so little of his life and never pressed to be told. Not often, occasionally, not more than once a calendar month, the phone would ring, and Henry would he in the garden or at the stables, and she'd answer it, and a very soft-spoken voice would say, 'Mrs Arbuthnot? So sorry to trouble you, hope it's not inconvenient – can I speak to him, please? It's Mister…' She'd go to the front door, or the kitchen door, or the french windows off the dining room, and shout that he was wanted and who wanted him, and Henry would always come running. Mister was, Henry said, 'just another client'.

They left They look nothing with them, went empty- handed to their cars.

She hated them., but most of all their chief. 'You see?'she said, with venom. 'You made a mistake. As a piece of rudeness this is beyond belief. You bullock into my home, you disturb me, you terrify my girls, and al the end of otl the exercise was without the slightest justification.'

The older man said, as he lit his pipe, 'What you should remember, ma'am, and tell your husband upon his return is that as a more unpleasant creature than myself once remarked "We only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time." Good day, ma'am.'

She went to the phone, rather than to her daughters. It was the sixth time she'd called their office number – she was too stressed to consider or ponder on it, that the previous five times she'd dialled out none of the men, nor the woman, had objected They had not tried to prevent her spreading the word of their search – and she was rewarded.

'Josh? Thank God I've got you… It's Mo Arbuthnot… I am in the middle of a nightmare…

No, no, I mean it. Our house, home, us, we've been invaded by people from the Customs. They had a warrant. They've been through every nook and cranny… Of course, I'm trying to be calm… I don't know where Henry is… I don't know what it's all about, they never told me. They were here three hours, they've just gone… Where is he? I want him found. Find him and tell him that his home and his family have been subjected to a nightmarish intrusion

… I don't care what he told you. We've been treated like criminals, and I don't know why.'

'Was that all right, Mr Gough?' the woman, SQG8, asked him.

'That was dandy.'

'We didn't find anything.'

They were out of the lanes and had reached the bypass skirting Guildford.

'It was more than satisfactory. Far from home and a panic call down the phone, sobs and screams, that'll make Eagle's day. I thought it went well, and yesterday… Do you know, my dear, you or I would have to work for thirty years – without deductions of tax, pension scheme and National Insurance, and not touch our salary, only bank it – to afford that house?

Perhaps it'll be on the market soon… Do you mind if I take a nap? I doubt there'll be much opportunity for sleep later.'

The note had come by hand delivery. It was dropped through the letter-box and the bell was rung to alert her to its presence on the mat. The Princess, nee Primrose Hinds, took the envelope back to her bed.

She settled against her feather pillows and slit open the envelope.

My dearest Princess,

I miss you.

It's going well, but slowly. I hope to leave on the 22nd, 23rd at the latest. Hope all is good with you.

With love, Mister XXXX

A letter from Mister was a rare treasure. She understood why he never used the telephone and why she must never call him. Even when he'd been on remand, in Brixton, and she'd been forbidden to visit him, he had never written. Verbal messages had passed between them via the Eagle. It would have been five years, or six, since he had last written, from Amsterdam. She would have been with him in Amsterdam but for the influenza.

She kissed the letter, then lay back on the bed for a few moments, held a pillow and thought of him.

Then, she went to the en-suite bathroom, tore the page into small pieces and flushed them down the pan, as he would have wanted her to.

Through the hotel's big ground-floor windows, Joey saw the arc-lights that burned down on the Secretary of State. The wire services and the satellite news programmes would carry his words: 'Society here has to rid itself of corrosive corruption. Citizens of Bosnia Herzegovina, you must resist the extremists and the criminals, you have to turn your backs on the past.'

An American officer would interrupt the great man, cut him short in mid-stride, and would say into the microphone: 'I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen, we've run out of time if we're to make our flight window.'

Joey watched the stampede of the circus around the great man as they went out with him through the swing doors. The Secretary of State was hemmed in by bodyguards, military liaison officers, advisers, stenographers and his own travelling media, and all were hurrying to the long line of station-wagons, governed by their pecking order of importance. They couldn't get shot of the place fast enough, couldn't race to the airport and climb onto the 747 too soon.

Troops waved them away, sirens escorted them down Zmaja od Bosne, which had been Snipers' Alley.

A stillness seemed to settle on the yellow and chocolate hotel building, as if all inside it now caught their breath, sighed, sagged

… Joey saw the white UNHCR truck pull up in the space where the station-wagon convoy had been. She slipped out of the vehicle. He recognized her.

She was only half-way to the swing doors when Mister came through them. They were like kids meeting in a park. No kisses, but their handshake was more about touching and holding than formal greeting. He couldn't hear their laughter, but watched the mute pleasure on their faces.

When they drove away, Joey followed in the van.

She had the wheel, Mister was beside her.

They went past the new American headquarters camp on the far side of the airport, and along the road were stretched little wooden shacks, closed and locked.

She said, 'It's a little part ol the black market. Later in the day they will be opened. They sell every CD and video you ever heard of, all illegally recorded.

They've paid no duty on them, no copyright. Other than the market of servicing foreigners, the only industry is black. It is worse on the Tuzla road. There are not CDs and videos in the huts on the way to Tuzla, it is women, young women, some from Bosnia but most from outside – Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine.

When they have been "trained" here, they are sent on to brothels in western Europe – it is a disgusting, exploitative trade. Always, Mister, it is the criminals who win here… I am sorry, it is gloomy – but that is the reality.'

They climbed on hairpin bends and came to the village of Tvorno. There was lustreless snow beside the road, but the ice on it glistened prettily in the early sunshine. Rows of houses on the approach were gutted, roofless and burned, sandwiched between the road and a tumbling river. Beyond the river were rolling forested hills, then mountains that were snow-swept, formidable and magnificent. He was looking at the wreckage.

She said, 'We call them cabriolet houses. Do you understand? It is houses without roofs… I am sorry, perhaps you do not think that funny. I promise you, Mister, it is sometimes necessary to have a dark humour if you work here. If you are too serious then you would weep. It is very beautiful, yes?'

The road came down from the high ground into a wide agricultural valley, leaving the snow and ice behind them. She pulled off the road, produced battered, well-used Thermos and poured coffee for them. They stood beside her vehicle and looked down at the valley and the big river running through it, and at a town beyond the river where there were close-set houses and the chimneys of industrial plants. He looked for damage. All he saw was the collapsed bridge that had spanned the river and had linked the town to the main road. The water now flowed over the bridge.

She said, 'It is Foca. I don't go there. It is a place of evil. I should go there. I could go with troops from the SFOR, but I do not wish to. There is suffering there, the same as everywhere, but I am not perfect. Do you think it wrong to care less for the suffering of some than I do for others? I could not argue if you thought that, Mister. Do you see men fishing? They have no work and they fish for food to eat. The factories have stopped, the chemicals leak into the river – it is the Drina river. I would not eat the fish but they are desperate… I do not go to Foca because it is a place where war criminals walk. Everyone knows their names, who the beasts are. You could meet them on the street in Foca just as in Sarajevo you could meet Ismet Mujic. In six years only once have the SFOR dared to try to capture one of them – Janko Janjic, the mass rapist and mass cleanser. He had an eagle tattooed on his stomach and the words "Slaughter Me" on his neck. Every minute of every day he had a hand-grenade hanging from his throat, and he pulled the pin when German troops came to take him. The rapist and the murderer, in Foca, was a hero. Many thousands went to his funeral. Myself – and a good man like you, Mister we do not know how to speak with such creatures.'

He kissed her at that moment, first her cheeks, then her forehead, then her eyes, then her lips.

'How long will you he here?'

'Just a couple more days.'

'But you will come back?'

I will bring, more lorries but that won't be as important as coming, back to see you.' Mister held her close, hugged her. It was not the way he embraced his Princess. He clung to her as if he had been infected by the misery she spoke of. I will come back, not send people who could do it instead of me, I'll come back because you're here…I don't talk a lot – Monika, you are the best human being I've ever met.' He saw the openness of her face and the trust. He had thought of her at first as a contact, a tool to be used, an opportunity lo be exploited. 'They were alone beside the road and his arms were tight round her. She was looking down. The way he held her she could see his left hand She was looking at his hand and the heavy gold ring on his third finger, the ring the Princess had given him.

'Come on, Mister Charity Man, let's hit Gorazde.'

She disentangled herself. Her face was flushed. It was eighteen years since he had married his Princess and in that time he had not touched another woman.

They drove alongside the Drina river, passed the wreckage ol the front line, and went on through the flattened emptiness of no man's land.

Goraz. de was a finger town pressed down between the hills.

Mister never reached across her and looked into the mirror, never saw that he was tracked. He would sleep with her. After the meeting he would sleep whole night with her before going to the airport and taking the plane home. Because he would sleep with her, afterwards, he knew, was certain of it, he would be supreme at the meeting.

A methodical man, with a long training of counter-intelligence operations behind him, Sandor Dizo was a survivor. Eighteen years of his professional life had been in the service of the 111/111 State Protection Directorate, but in 1990 he had effortlessly changed allegiance – not desk, chair or working hours – and had become an executive of the Office of National Security. He had the same view of the roofs of Budapest, from the same room, as he'd had before the collapse of socialism. Then he had worked to stifle internal dissent, now he turned the same standards of intellect to combating the rise in newly democratic Hungary of the influence of organized crime. He had unlearned the practices taught him by the KGB instructors, and had learned those of the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States and the Security Service of the United Kingdom. He was today's man.

The work of that day, and many others past and many to come, was his surveillance of the movements of Russians who were active in the vory v'zakone crime group. If Sandor Dizo had had available to him today the powers of coercion he had enjoyed prior to 1990, the opportunities of the old days, there would have been no Russian criminals on Hungarian territory, but those powers had been withdrawn. He was now a creature of government by computer, provided by the Americans, and fieldcraft, taught by the British. Instead of broken noses and broken necks, he followed the new rules and provided the printouts listing the coming and going of the Russians and filled the files with their photographs. It was not a surprise to Sandor Dizo that the Russians now flourished in Budapest. They ran prostitution, controlled the clubs, moved and sold narcotics, laundered money through the recently opened hanks, directed the country's oil-distribution Mafia; they were behind every rip-off fraud of public and private enterprises, they trafficked weapons, and they killed. Being an exact man, Sandor Dizo could list each of the one hundred and sixty killings and attempted murders and bomb explosions on his capital city's streets since he had joined the Office of National Security. On the fingers of one of his plump hands he could count the minimal number of arrests and convictions of those responsible. Without interfering with their operations, he had gained a comprehensive knowledge of the Russian groups.

Nikki Gornikov had left Budapest that morning. He had been photographed leaving his apartment on Prater Street, and photographed again on Line 2 of the Metro. He had then been seen to take the classic anti-surveillance procedure of diving for a taxi, had been spotted at the airport and watched on to the Vienna flight. By the time those strands of information had been sifted on Sandor Dizo's desk, Nikki Gornikov could have driven a hundred miles from Vienna, or could have boarded any of a dozen flights. He called him ironically, when he thought of him, Baby Nikki because he was a forty-nine-year-old bear bull of a man with a face made ugly by smallpox and knife fights. On Baby Nikki there was a fifteen-page computer printout and a four-centimetre-thick file was laid down by the American and British tutors of a democratic intelligence service, he noted the departure of Baby Nikki Gornikov, of the vory v'zakone group, from Budapest, put another page in the file and hoped the man – wherever he had gone – might slip, stumble, fall under a convenient tram or trolley bus. The place for such a man, so sadistic, cruel and vicious a man as Nikki Gornikov, was the prison yard at dawn.

His tasks of the morning done, Sandor Dizo called to his secretary in the outer office for coffee, and some biscuits if there were any.

'It was their graveyard, but when the Muslims were put out of their homes, the Serb boys used it as a football pitch.'

After her death at St Matthew's hospice, after the funeral service in church, his mother's body had been cremated. Her ashes now lay in an oakwood casket in the crematorium's Garden of Remembrance. It was a lovely garden, clean-raked and dignified in winter, bright with flowers in summer. If kids had come into that garden, just across the North Circular from where he lived, to play football over her casket Mister would have taken a shotgun to them, or a pickaxe handle, or an industrial strimmer, or a chainsaw. None of the little tossers would have been in a state to kick a football again – none of the little bastards would have had the knees to walk again, let alone run. But that wasn't Monika's answer.

' I don't blame the Serb children,' she said. 'They know nothing else. They have never been shown another way.'

'Isn't there a proper pitch in the village where all the kids can play?'

'There was, but it was a park for tanks. It was destroyed. There is no pitch.'

He stood beside her and looked across the graveyard that was a soccer field

She had gone into the UNHCR field office in Gorazde, left him lor less than five minutes, which had seemed an age lo him. Then they'd driven on through the town and out of it. Beyond the old no man's land they'd reached a village where the majority ol the homes were intact, pretty, perched on hillsides, and had fields where cattle browsed on the first of the spring's fresh grass. The village was called Kopaci, she'd said.

He saw the gravestones, low, old and poorly carved, that had been used as goalposts. The other stones, which had been near the penalty spots, at either side of the penalty boxes and across the half-way line, had been uprooted and thrown aside. They marked the sidelines ol the pitch. She had changed him, he knew it A few kids stood with their parents and grandparents by two houses. The families had returned from exile lor their former homes, to find their graveyard was a football pitch, well worn and often played on, It had no grass but had been smoothed by boots and trainers into flattened wet mud.

'I'm going to meet them are you coming with me?'

He shook his head. 'More coffee with a spoonful of grit, more losing at cards? No, thank you.'

'A quarter of an hour they have to be reassured. If they give up, go back into Gorazde, then five years is wasted. It is important to spend time with them if only a few minutes… '

'I'll be here,' Mister said. 'Won't be going far.'

He started to walk down the hillside track The warmth was on his face and his back. He was humming his Elvis. He reached the end of the track, where it joined the road. He was strolling and had not a care. He could not remember when he had last walked on a country track, if he ever had

… Because of the warmth, he slipped out of his coat and carried it on his arm. He was at peace. He looked up the road, wondering how far he should walk and what he might see… and he saw the blue van.

It was parked a hundred yards up the road and faced the junction. The sun, reflected off the van's windscreen, dazzled him for a moment, but when he edged forward and twisted his body further, he could see through the windscreen.

He saw the small pale face, the tousled hair and the big spectacle lenses.

Mister thought the head would turn away, duck, try to hide itself, but it did not.

There was the howl of a klaxon horn. The lorry missed him by a foot, could have been less. Mister felt the sweat coming on his body. He saw the finger on the arm jutting from the window and the gesture of contempt from the lorry driver. He shouted back emptily, uselessly, at the lorry's tail. He had seen them leave the hotel – Cann trailing the woman, carrying the bag and the case – seen them going in time to catch the morning flight out. He looked both ways, up the road and down it, and there were no other vehicles parked, only the blue van.

He turned his back on it and walked off down the road.

Was Mister frightened? He was never frightened.

Who'd ever seen him frightened? No one had. He went at a good pace. He had no destination. He strode on the road, and knew he was followed.

He gained a target, had to have one. He was walking faster. Ahead of him, sheep and goats grazed by the road, watched by a shepherd and children.

Above the animals, up the slope, was the graveyard.

He stopped near the shepherd, who leaned on a long stick, a scarecrow figure in his loose clothing. The children had ceased their game, stood in a little knot and stared at him. He turned, looked back up the road.

He began to run towards the van, but it reversed.

When he ran faster, it backed faster away from him. When he slowed, it slowed. He stopped, the van stopped. The distance was a hundred yards. He knew he showed his anger… Christ, and it was beneath his dignity to show his anger. He ret raced his steps, over which he'd run and then walked, and the blue van followed him.

He nodded curtly to the shepherd, then tried to smile at the children through his anger. He sat down on the grass. The shepherd and the children watched him, and the animals grazed around him. As long as he could, he tried not to turn, but the compulsion beat him… Cann sat on a rock near to the blue van, cross-legged, like a pygmy bloody pixie. If he'd started to run towards him, he wouldn't have covered ten of the paces before Cann was back in the van, not twenty before the van was backing away… and he would have lost his self-respect. From what he knew of the Church and the Crime Squad, the greatest crime of surveillance was to show o u t – b u t Cann sat where he could be seen. Mister did not understand. Why wasn't the little bastard frightened of him?

She was standing at the top of the slope, at the edge of the graveyard, and waved to him. Round her were the few kids from the two families.

Cann was on the rock, a statue.

He walked to her, scrambled up the slope. Twice he slipped and mud smeared his trouser legs. She was laughing and said he was crazy. She held his hand.

'We have to leave, Mister,' she said. 'We need to be past Tvorno before night. We should not be on the ice in the darkness.'

'There's nothing to keep us here.'

Mister had his arm round her hip as they walked to her vehicle. She waved to the kids and to the older people at the graveyard, to the shepherd and the children with him. She was behind the wheel. She kissed his cheek. They drove away towards Gorazde.

The light had begun to fail as they cleared the finger town and began to climb, and her hand rested on his except when she changed gears. His face was turned away from her so that she would not see the fury that winnowed through him… No man stood against Mister, then walked away.

August 2000

It was their fourth morning, and that morning it rained.

It was incredible to Husein Bekir. He'd had to scratch in his memory to recall when it had last rained in that summer month. The clouds had gathered the previous evening and at dusk the storm had started.

The thunder had echoed into the valley from the west, the lightning had lit the valley as if it was the middle of the day, and the wind had gathered.

Through all of the night the gales had howled. By the morning, the fourth, the storm had passed and left only a steady drizzle in its wake.

When the mine-clearers had come on the first morning, Husein had immediately left his home, abandoned his breakfast, grunted at his wife as she'd hobbled after him down the track that he would not be long, and gone over the ford. He had bearded them where they had made their day camp, a battered caravan, a stinking portable lavatory and a parking space for their three pick-up trucks and the two ambulances, up the track from Dragan Kovac's house.

He'd asked the same question of the foreman on every morning since.

He asked it again. 'When are you going to start to clear my fields?'

And he had the same answer on the four con-secutive mornings: 'First we do the pylons. Your fields come after the pylons and the restoration of the electricity.'

'My fields are more important than electricity.'

'Your fields are next year, if there's the money.'

On the first three mornings, Husein had then shuffled down the track to Dragan Kovac's home, had beaten on the door and demanded fresh coffee and a substitute breakfast. Then he'd launched into a criticism of the foreman, and the six de-miners, and he'd denounced the priority of the electricity pylons, but he had won no sympathy. His friend, the idle fool, Dragan, had as little interest in the fields as they showed.

That fourth morning he was not going to visit Dragan Kovac. The morning before, when he had launched into the complaint that his fields were not given enough priority, his friend – the old fool – had remarked that Husein was now too aged, too feeble, to work the fields; Dragan had said it was a dream, no more than a fantasy, that Husein, with his withered muscles, would ever be able to plant the new apple orchard that would eventually be harvested by his grandson; Dragan had said that the fields were his history, that his present should be a game of chess, a seat in the sunshine and a glass of home-brewed brandy, or two glasses. The morning before, blinking tears and shouting curses, he had left Dragan's house and waded back over the ford.

The foreman stood in the caravan's door. Behind him the men read newspapers, smoked and drank coffee. In the ambulances the medics had their feet up on the dashboards and their radios played loud music. All his life, Husein Bekir had worked his fields in storms, hail showers, and in the heat that blistered his skin. To Husein Bekir, the foreman, his men and the medics seemed lazy and complacent, showed no understanding of his need to go back to his fields.

On the other side of the track from the junction where the caravan and the trucks were parked was the bunker that had protected the right flank of Ljut village. Leaning against its stone wall, beside its cave entrance, was a new sign. On a red-painted background was a white skull with crossed bones behind it, and one word: Mina. All the way down the track, on both sides, little posts had been put into the ground and yellow tape slung between them. There was no tape on his fields, only a slim corridor to the nearest of the pylons from which power cables dangled. He would not speak to Dragan Kovac until he had received abject apologies for the insult that he was too old, too feeble and the frustration fed his anger.

'Do you not work if it rains?'

'It will clear soon. We will work when the rain stops.'

'Do you have no sense of urgency?'

'What I have is five toes on each foot, four fingers and a thumb on each hand, eyes in my head, and two balls. I have them, old man, because I don't hurry.'

'If you used those machines, I have seen them on television, you could clear my fields. Why don't you bring the machines?'

The foreman said patiently, as if talking to an idiot,

'We have flails, fastened to the fron of a vehicle that is reinforced with armour plate. They don't clear ground to the standard necessary for a certificate of clearance.

We only use them to cut back scrub.'

'What about those things you carry, the things that find metal? You could go faster if you had them.'

'We have metal detectors but they're about useless in this situation, for two reasons. First, there is minimal metal in the PMA and PROM mines, they are made from plastic. Second, there are minerals in the ground, in the rock strata, which contaminate the signal, also there are the pylon cables, which confuse the machine.'

Husein Bekir snorted. He was being backed, and he knew it, into a cul-de-sac from which there was no retreat. His voice rose in strident attack. 'How, then, will you – one day, when it is convenient to you – clear my fields?'

'Perhaps we will bring dogs, but the greater part of the work will be on hands and knees, manually with the probe. We can push the probe four inches into the ground. That is how we do it.'

The foreman's quiet rebuttals seemed as insulting as Dragan Kovac's sneer that he was too old and too feeble.

'I don't know how you can clear the land if you cannot even put in posts, stakes, that will survive one night's storm weather,' Husein said.

'What do you mean?'

'Down past Kovac's house, your posts are already blown over by the wind, because you did not sink them deep enough.'

'The ground is very hard.'

'Oh, the ground is hard. It is too hard in the summer, too wet in the winter. I am sorry you do not find perfect ground, not hard, not wet. I work in my fields when it is hot, when it is cold… '

' I'll look at the posts. Do me a favour, go home.'

'When I have shown you the posts that you cannot put in the ground because it is too hard?'

' I will walk with you.'

To rid himself of Husein Bekir, the foreman, as if making a great sacrifice in the interests of peace, threw away the dregs of his coffee and went to the nearest of the pick-up trucks. When he reappeared he was carrying a small sledge-hammer. They walked in silence down the track. The clouds were breaking over the high ground in the west, and at the limit of Husein's eyesight were small patches of blue sky. He thought that within an hour there would be a rainbow and then the day would clear: they would have no excuse any longer to shelter in their caravan. In spite of the drizzle the birds were calling sharply. A thrush flew with the trophy of a wriggling worm to an elder bush, a sparrow was chased by finches, and there were little showers of redwings wheeling in formation. The storm in the night had greened his fields. If he had had cattle he would have blessed the rain that gave life to the fields that had been burned by the sun, but he did not have cattle and there was now a yellow tape strip to separate the fields from the track.

If he had had crops maize or wheat or vegetables – the storm rain would have brought them to a peak before the September harvest, but the fields were not ploughed and he had no crops.

With his rolling gait, his hip and knee both aching, Husein hurried towards the lord and the foreman's boots thudded behind him

There were two posts down, not more than twenty-five centimetres from the chipped stones of the track.

The tape lay on the thick grass verge. Of course, Husein Bekir could have taken the one step onto the grass, picked up the two posts, worked them back into their two holes and tautened the yellow tape. He could have done it when he had walked up the track half an hour earlier to beard the men in their caravan.

But he had made his point. How could they talk about clearing his land, more than two hundred and fifty thousand square metres of it, if they could not make two posts secure? He stood triumphant.

The foreman barked, 'You brought me down here because of that?'

Husein walked on.

He heard the thump ol the sledge-hammer behind him. He stopped, looked behind him, and grinned slyly to himself. One post was in. The foreman stepped back onto the track, moved along it half a dozen strides, and paused by the second fallen post

'I do not like to have my time wasted,' the foreman shouted after him.

Husein was about to turn. From the corner of his field of vision, he saw the foreman's left boot on the track, but as the man leaned forward to retrieve the second post he settled his right boot half a metre beyond the track. As he bent and reached, his weight transferred to his right leg.

The clap of the sound dinned into Husein Bekir's ears, the brightness of the flash seemed to blind him, the wind caught him, and he heard the foreman shriek.

When the Eagle came out of the hotel's lift, Atkins saw his face: it was pale, wiped with a deathly pallor, and shock was written on it. His eyes were dulled and his mouth slack.

They had killed the day on another tourist drive, but the Eagle hadn't been interested. They had driven, again, out towards Pale, and back again after lunch.

At Reception there had been six message slips in the Eagle's pigeon-hole, and he'd taken them upstairs.

'What's the problem? Seen a ghost?'

'We're late.'

They were late for the appointment to meet Ismet Mujic. They drove towards the old quarter. The Eagle's head was bowed.

'Do you want to talk about it?' Atkins asked.

'Talk about what?'

'Talk about whatever your problem is.'

'It is a problem,' the Eagle said quietly. 'A unique problem in my experience. My clerk's been on the phone for me. Under pain of death by garrotting, my clerk is not supposed to contact me unless the world's falling in.'

'Has it fallen in?'

'My home was raided. it dawn this morning. The Church came mob-handed with a warrant, all legal, and turned it over. Had my wife out of bed, woke the kids, stripped the place

'What did they find?'

'They found nothing, they look away nothing.'

Atkins trieid to smile, to reassure. 'Then there's no problem.'

'You know very little, Atkins. You jump when you should stand still. The Church – God, give them credit for a modicum ol intelligence know there's nothing in my home, and nothing in my grubby little office.

I'm not that bloody stupid… What matters is in safety deposits, and in my head. They wouldn't have expected to find anything.'

'So, what's the big deal?'

'Posting a letter to me felling me where I stand. A man said lo my wife "We have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time." That was the text of the message, Atkins Wife traumatized, girls in shock, neighbours wondering what the hell's going on, at dawn, at good old Henry's pad, Turning the bloody screw, squeezing till it hurts. Going for the weak spot, tightening the wire to breaking point… That's my problem.'

'Can you cope?'

A wintry little grin played at the Eagle's mouth.

'Probably not much better, but better than you.'

'What does that mean?' Atkins turned, confused, gazed at the Eagle. Hadn't seen the pedestrian who screamed, waved a stick angrily at them.

'Please, watch the road – the Church did your address yesterday.'

Atkins hissed, 'Why wasn't I told? Christ! You didn't tell me.'

'Mister's decision, because you're only on probation.'

'That is so bloody insulting.'

The Eagle pointed to a gap in the cars parked in the narrow street, overhung with narrow balconies.

'There's a space there, you can get into it. You were on the treadmill, you could have got off, you didn't, so don't whine. I've been on the treadmill twenty-something years. It goes faster. Get off, and you fall on your bloody face.'

They left the Mitsubishi, both sombre. They rang the bell, were let in and escorted up the stairs. They heard the dogs pawing the inner door. They saw the big teeth and the snarl in the set of the jaws. They were shown into the bedroom. The bed, Atkins thought, was big enough for a family. Enver was on his stomach and the sheet had ridden down to expose his bronzed back and his buttocks. Serif wore a T-shirt, and the sheet covered his groin. Serif said they were late, and they both apologized. He took a sheet of paper, rested it on a magazine, drew a map for them, said where they should be the next day, and at what time, and they both thanked him. Serif's question: where was Mister? The Eagle's answer: engaged in Ugandan practices. What were Ugandan practices? 'Oh, sorry, just slipped out, beg pardon, Ugandan practices are an expression we have in London for pursuing business contacts.' They were dismissed.

On the pavement, Atkins asked, 'If I was to jump off the treadmill, what would I get?'

'Mud on your face. If I were representing you, I'd urge you to plead. Seven years to ten years. But I wouldn't be representing you, I'd be beside you and looking at twelve to fifteen. That's why we don't jump.'

The talk was in the bedroom when the visitors came, not the living room And after they'd gone, Maggie's frustration grew because the talk stayed in the bedroom. The giggles. gasps, and the whine of the springs were enough to activate the microphone in the living room's telephone, but the talk was too muffled, too dominated by the sounds of the loving and the bed's heaving for her to comprehend what was said. She'd given the earphones to Frank and his expression had screwed into a sneer. He'd passed the earphones to each of the Sreb Four. Frank was closest to her, in the rented room, and sometimes his hand rested on her hip. She knew now the names of each of the survivors of the Srebienica massacre, Salko and Ante, Muhsin and Fahro. They'd have seen Frank's hand on her hip, but they showed no sign of it. being with them, feeling the pressure of his hand, softened the frustration

… Then the telephone bell. Then the padding of bare feet. Her pencil was poised.

She scribbled,

Da?

Serif?

Da.

(Russian language) It is Nikki, I come tomorrow, the agreed schedule.

(Russian language) OK, Nikki, I meet you. I take you.

(Russian language) It is all OK?

(Russian language) All OK.

The call was cut. She heard the feet pad away, then the springs sang, and there was distant laughter.

Maggie Bolton was fluent in Russian. She had an Italian coming to a meeting, and a Russian, but she did not yet know the location of the meeting. Quite deliberately, she took Frank's hand from her hip and laid it on her thigh.

The lights had been in the mirror through Ustikolina, and when they'd gone by the nowhere turning to the bombed bridge of Foca, on the open roads before and after Milievina, and when they climbed on the ice surface for the gorge that led to Tvorno. Always the lights were with them, holding their intensity because the distance between them did not grow and did not close.

Each time Mister looked in the mirror he saw the lights of the blue van.

She did not speak. The road and its ice held her attention. She did not hold his hand any longer. She had the wheel and the gearstick and she searched ahead for the longer thicker stretches of ice. Water ran down the rock faces beside the road and spilled onto the tarmac.

Always the lights were with him, and with the mirror.

'Would you stop, please?'

'What?'

'Sorry – Monika, could you stop, please?'

'What for?'

' I am just asking you to stop, please.'

'Ah, I understand. You want aa pee stop. You can say so.'

'Please stop.'

Very gently, not using, the foot brake but going down through her gears, she stopped. He stepped out.

His feet slipped and he steadied himself against the vehicle.

The headlights shone hard at him, and Mister walked towards the lights. If the Secretary of State had not been at the hotel, if there had not been a metal detector arch in the hotel lobby, if his pistol had not been left in the Mitsubishi, he would have had the weapon in his hand. The lights had stopped moving, and the interior lit as the door was opened. Cann came forward and stood in black silhouette in front of the lights The little bastard faced him. Mister blinked as he came closer to the lights. If he had had the weapon in his hand he would have used it. There was hate in his heart Men he had not hated were entombed in concrete foundations, were buried in Epping, were weighted on the sea bed, or walked on sticks. Cann stood ahead of the lights, his body diminished by their size

'Got a problem, Mister?'

He couldn't see the mouth, but light caught the rims of the big spectacles.

'What's a nice girl like that doing with a piece of shit like you?'

He walked through the question. Mister faced his persecutor. He towered over the shadowy shape in front of him. The lights blazed in his face, made tears in his eyes.

'Not going to have a weep on me, are you, Mister?'

Mister lashed out. Right fist, low, short arm punch.

The fist buried itself in the slight stomach. The body jack-knifed, would have fallen if the fist hadn't caugt the coat collar. He dragged Cann round the side of the blue van, to the back of it. He threw Cann against the doors, then punched him again, first the solar plexus, and as the head dropped, the upper-cut to the jaw. Cann went down. Mister kicked him. Kept kicking him. Nearly fell on the ice. Should have had heavier shoes, should have had the boots the Cards wore when they went out for a kicking, with lead or iron caps. He reached down, found the coat, pulled the body up. No resistance. Arms trying to protect the upper body, hands over the face. He punched until his hands hurt, put Cann down, then kicked until his toes hurt in his handmade shoes. It was hard for Mister to see the small figure on the road behind the van.

He walked away.

The voice was small behind him. 'That was a mistake, Mister, a mistake.'

Mister went back to the van. She said, laughing, that it was a long pee stop. His knuckles bled and he hid them from her.

Joey reached his room. He knew she was back. Ante was in the lobby and Muhsin lounged on the landing near her door. He'd been off the road twice, but he'd been lucky: a tractor had pushed him back from the drift once and a pick-up had towed him clear the second time. He'd gone twice into the snow because his spectacles' arms were broken and when the frame had fallen from his nose he'd swerved. There wasn't a part of his body that wasn't in pain.

He went into the bathroom. He held the spectacles, and his hand shook. The mirror showed him his face

– blood, scratches, rising wels. He managed his coat, shirt and vest, but the pain in his stomach wouldn't allow him to bend and unfasten the laces of his trainers, He pushed his trousers down, and his underpants, to his ankles. He stood in the shower, clinging lo the chrome support. Without it he would have collapsed The water ran over him and drenched his trousers, pants, socks and puddled in his trainers.

He heard the room door open.

'You're back?'

'Yes.'

'A good day?'

'A useful day,' Joey croaked.

'I needed a new pair of knickers and clean tights.'

'Good'

There must have been a sob in his voice. He held tight to the support She was in the bathroom doorway. The curtain wasn't drawn. She was looking at him. The water ran in rivers across his spectacles.

'What happened to you?'

Through the lenses her face was blurred. He didn't know whether she cared, or not. He grimaced, but that hurt his mouth, his jawbone, his cheeks and his brain.

'I walked into a door.'

'Did the door have boots and fists, or just boots?'

'If the door had had a gun I think it might have been rather more serious.'

She came into the bathroom and knelt beside the shower. The waler splashed from his body onto her.

'Packer?'

He nodded.

She untied his trainer laces and pulled them off his feet, then the sodden socks, then his underpants and his trousers, and threw each of them into the bath, the water had plastered her careful hair and had made streams of her more careful makeup. She sat on the bath edge, pulled a towel off the rack and rubbed her hair and face.

'You're not the world's most beautiful sight – is there blood in your urine?'

'Don't know.'

'Are you going to live?'

' I hope so.'

'There's a Russian coming.'

'Coming where?'

'Coming for a meeting, for tomorrow's meeting.'

'Where's it to be?'

' I don't have the location… Clean tights don't matter, not like knickers. I've got to get back. Do you want a doctor?'

'Tomorrow, then, I follow where he leads. My bloody bumper against his exhaust – no, no doctor.'

'We go mob-handed, Joey. I'll not take argument on it.' She said it as if she were his mother, his aunt, or his teacher.

'It's my show.'

'We go in numbers – it's not about whose show it is.'

'Yes, ma'am, three bags bloody full, ma'am.'

'Mob-handed, hardware, protection – safe. I wouldn't want to look like you look… Just so you know – the woman, she's Monika Holberg. She's a Norwegian tree-hugger. She does good deeds for unfortunates, out of UNHCR. You'll find her in Novo Sarajevo, third floor, apartment H, Fojnicka 27. Be a shame, wouldn't it, Joey, if she didn't know what Mister was, what he did? Wouldn't be a shame if, when she's learned it, she kept her legs together and Mister didn't get his over You up for that?'

'Could be.'

'You want me lo dry you?'

'I'll manage.'

She closed the door after her.

Joey staggered to the bed. He was dripping wet. He collapsed onto it. He might have passed out but for the pain and the memory. He was back on the ground, squirming on the ice the Tarmac to make himself smaller, as the lists and boots rained in on him. That was a mistake, Misler, a mistake. The hammering, in his body and his head, was on the door.

He shouted, 'Yes?'

'Are you Cann. Customs and Excise?'

He crawled off the bed, leaned on the wall and then the wardrobe to steady himself, held the towel across his privates and opened the door. The man wore a grey suit, was five or so years older than Cann, had a good shirt and a nice tie. He looked at Cann with contempt, a replica of the sons of the landowner his father managed for superiority buried under a caked veneer of politeness.

'Sorry to disturb you, Mr Cann – by God, you've been in the wars. Don't tell me, let me guess, tripped down some steps, did you? I'm Hearn, from the embassy. I've been asked to pass to you a message that came to us via the Ministry of Justice. I do apologize for the inconvenience of calling on you so late, but we thought it the sort of matter that should not have been passed, for fear of misunderstandings, by telephone.

You had written authorization from Judge Zenjil Delic for "intrusive surveillance" of the UK national Albert William Packer during that gentleman's visit to Sarajevo. You can go home now, Mr Cann, which might save you another accident. Judge Delic informs us, through the Ministry of Justice, that he has with drawn such authorization. He's cancelled it. There's no mistake. I have it in writing, couriered to the embassy, over his signature.'

Joey gagged,'But that's impossible.'

' 'Fraid n o t… ' He paused. 'We do have a list of doctors, should you wish for medical attention. If you'd gone through us in the first place then things might have been different, but you chose not to…

The authorization for you to operate here is withdrawn. Good night.'

The X-ray machine had gone, and the metal detector arch. They walked, flanking Mister, across the empty atrium bar.

Mister said, again, 'I don't want to talk about it.'

Atkins persisted, 'His place has been turned over, searched, so's mine.'

' I'm not talking about it. Don't you listen?'

He gestured with his hand, into Atkins's face, made a cutting motion across Atkins's throat.

They went out through the doors, and the night frost's blast, carried in the wind, caught them. They went along the side of the hotel heading for the city and the old quarter.

'He was my friend,' Mister said. 'We don't ever forget that he was my friend.'

The Cruncher hadn't been the Eagle's friend, and Atkins hadn't known him. Small matter, the Eagle thought. It was enough that the Cruncher had been the friend of Mister. Atkins wouldn't have understood, was frightened, wouldn't have known when to close his mouth and keep it tight shut. They were walking briskly, filling the pavement of an empty street. Atkins would have seen the cuts on the knuckles when Mister had his fist near to his throat.

'What have you done to your hand, Mister?'

'I've done nothing to my hand.'

'The skin's all broken, it's '

Mister stopped. He turned to the Eagle. He held his hands under the Eagle's nose. The scars were angry, weeping, where the skin was split. 'Do you see anything wrong with my hands, Eagle?'

The Eagle said quietly, 'I don'I see anything wrong with your hands, Mister.'

He was Mister's man. He did not then and had not ever dared to be anything else They walked past the shops with the steel shutters down, and the benches where couples cuddled hopelessly in the cold, past the cafes where the waiters sluiced the floors and lifted the chairs onto the tables They came to the small park. Round the grass were thick bushes, bare of leaves but heavy enough to loss shadows on to the grass. They saw the boy. He had the earphones on his pretty head, and was gyrating with the music he listened to. The dogs smiled the grass, meandered between the shadows Their leashes were hooked to their collars and trailed on the ground after them. He was watched and he did not know it.

Atkins veered away to the right. The Eagle followed Mister to the left, to be behind the boy, as he had been told. He always did what Mister told him. It was about the Cruncher, whom the Eagle had detested, and about the Cruncher's honour, which there had never been any.

They closed on the boy, Enver, who was lost in his music.

C h a p t e r S i x t e e n

He walked, each step laboured, in agony. He could have taken the blue van

The excuse Joey gave himself for walking was that exercise would loosen the joints at his hips, knees, ankles, would dull the bruising on his ribcage, the wheeze in his lung's, and soften the ache behind his eyes. The excuse was merely a delaying tactic. He walked because he was in no hurry to reach his destination He had gone first to the third floor, apartment H, of Foinicka 37. A young woman had answered, draped in a long tailed man's shirt, and he'd asked lor Miss Holberg. She'd come to the door, wrapped in a heavy dressing gown, and she'd used her fingers to squeeze the sleep from her eyes, joey had betrayed her dreams, had told his story. When he'd finished, had demolished her, she'd stuttered questions at him Who are you? How do you know this? Why do you come to tell me it?' Without answering, he'd slipped away down the stairs, and back to the night.

The darkness and the chill of it were close to him.

From Novo Sarajevo, he had tracked alongside the Miljacka river going past the black towers of apartments, the snipers' homes, then had crossed the river at the Vrbanja bridge. It was where she had been shot where Jasmina and her boy had been, in their turn betrayed. Cars crossed where she had lain. Oil grease was smeared where she had bled. He was drawn towards the hill, the steep climb, a place he had no wish to be.

He had said: But that's impossible. He knew their stories, what they had suffered, and their strength…

It was not possible.

There were no more cars now, no people scurrying for home up the unlit road. The faster he went up the hill, the sooner he would know the truth of it. Without the moon, full and bright, he would have seen nothing after the last lit pool from the street-lamp. An owl shrieked from the cemetery. He went on. On his watch the hands were past midnight. It was already the day of the meeting. Without authorization for intrusive surveillance, signed by a recognized judge, any evidence accrued from the telephoto camera lens or the directional microphone carried in Maggie Bolton's steel-sided box was inadmissible in court. He could see the old, worn, condescending faces of the new men and the new woman who made the Sierra Quebec Golf team, and he could hear the criticizing merciless rasp of Gough's voice… He did not think it could be true, it was not possible.

Joey realized what was different.

Light spewed out at the end of the rutted, holed road from the windows of a house around which was set a skeleton of scaffolding poles. The light reflected on the sleek paintwork of a black Mercedes saloon, and danced back from the radiator screen. At the side of what had been only hall a house, captured by the light, were stacked piles ol concrete building blocks, and there were two cement mixers. The light, splaying from the window, fell on the slabs of a newly laid patio space between the scaffolding and the parked car, and was reflected up to show Joey the clean new roof timbers that peeped from under a spread tarpaulin.

Joey walked towards the light. He saw through the window the naked bulb hanging from new flex.

Before, there had been a grimy, unpolished, inadequate, smelly oil lamp in the room, humble but it had given out a glow ol pride. He went past the Mercedes and banged on the door with his clenched fist, hit it until the pain ran in rivers through his body.

The Eagle hung back. He was, of course, too experienced in the matters of criminal law to believe that staying back, not actually taking part, would in any way mitigate his guilt. The books to prove the guilt lined the shelves ol the office over the launderette; principal among, litem was Archbold, three inches thick of thin india paper and close print, with a leather cover, selling him back each January three hundred and twenty-five pounds. He would be accused, even if he pleaded he'd stayed back of 'acting in common' with Mister and Atkins. If he snivelled that he had not known what was to happen, he would still be guilty as an 'accessory to murder' For 'acting in common' or for being an 'accessory to murder' the sentence was the same life imprisonment. But that was semantics

… God alone knew the penalty in Sarajevo, most likely bollocks defenestration then filleting… It was his squeamishness, which Mister despised, that caused him to stay deep in the shadows. They didn't need him. God's truth, they hadn't needed him at a l l…

Atkins had done the dogs. All show, all piss and wind, the dogs had been. His dogs, at home with Mo could make a pretence of ferocity but embarrassed themselves with it. Atkins had slipped into the bushes by the grass, had sat down, had cooed at them, and the brutes had shown that their teeth and menace were a sham. Atkins had held the dogs, and Mister had chopped the back of his hand on to the pretty boy's neck, felled him, stuffed the gagging handkerchief into his mouth and wrenched his arms behind his back. Atkins had hooked the dog's leashes to a park-bench stanchion – which would hold them for a few minutes before they broke free – then had run after them, past the trailing Eagle, to help Mister drag Enver down the side alley that led to the river from the park. There was a dribble of moisture on the pavement, and the smell. The bladder had gone first, then the sphincter. The last few paces, from the alleyway to the bridge, the boy had known what was coming to him and had struggled for his life. Atkins, in that final stampede, had hissed, 'Don't you bloody bite me, you bastard.' The struggling and the way his arms were held up behind his back would have meant they were half dislocated out of the shoulder joints.

The Eagle winced. At the end, he couldn't help himself but watch. Mister raised his arm and chopped again, full force, on the back of the boy's neck. They were in the middle of the bridge. A car was turning on to it, but the lights hadn't yet come far enough round to light the rail. The boy slumped under the force of the blow. Maybe he was unconscious, maybe just dazed. It was all one movement. Mister and Atkins had him up, like he was dead weight, and over, like he was dumped trash. There was the splash. The car's lights illuminated the the of them as they walked back to where the Tagle waited. The boy would have been incapable of survival when he went into the water that flowed last, dark, deep, under the bridge's rail. They came towards him. The boy would drown. The drowning wouldn't help the Cruncher, nor the Cruncher's rent boys, nor the Cruncher's parents in their Torbay bungalow. It was about Mister's sell respect and Mister's dignity. As they reached him, Atkins was pulling off his glove and looking at his hand The Eagle heard Mister say,

'You're all right, didn't break the skin-nothing like a good pair ol gloves You did well, Atkins, brilliant.' At worst it was 'acting in common', at best it was

'accessory lo murder.' They didn't wait for him.

The Eagle bent over until his head was down at his knees, and vomited up his hotel dinner.

' I am not Falcone'

Joey shook his head, 'I don't know who is… '

'Nor am I Borsellino,' the judge said softly

' I don't know who you're talking about.'

She interrupted, spoke sharply, 'Giovanni Falcone was a magistrate in Sicily, He arrested many of the Mafia and prosecuted them, imprisoned them. He was killed by a culvert bomb, with his wife and his bodyguards. He was followed by Paulo Borsellino who pursued the Mafia with the same dedication.

Borsellino was killed by a car bomb, with his bodyguards. 'They stood against the tide.'

The room was a building site. They were itinerants, travellers, squatting in their own home. Across the table were layered sheets of newspaper: across the newspaper was a sandy shore of dust. Two of the four walls had been stripped of the plaster rendering, to expose old stone. It had been a room, as he remembered it, of dirty, uncomfortable peace when it had been lit by the oil-lamps, but the new electricity threw down a glaring brightness. There were shining new plastic window-frames in place of the rotten splintered wood that was now propped against the wall. Joey was perched on the end of the table and faced her father, who sat on the bed in his shirtsleeves, close to a three-bar electric fire. She rounded on them, with the restlessness of a zoo-caged animal, circled them in her chair.

' I am not a hero. They were martyrs to the reputation of jurisprudence. I am not them. They looked into the abyss, as I have done. They jumped, I stepped back.'

She said with scorn, as if to support her father,

'There were great demonstrations in Palermo after the killings, many thousands were on the streets to denounce the Mafia. The Mafia is still alive, but Falcone and Borsellino are dead.'

'You said you helped me so that you might regain your self respect.'

When the oil-lamps lit the room, the judge had had a face of old dignity. Under the new glare, the face was haunted by defeat. Joey had no business to be there, he was a criticism of them.

The judge said wearily, 'It was a dream… Do you know who has had the biggest funeral in Sarajevo, during the war and since? Musan Topalovic. To the people on the streets of Sarajevo he was a hero and a martyr. He called himself Caco. Who killed the hero?

He was shot by Muslim government troops during a few days of crackdown on criminality in the last year of the war, to show a skim of respectability to the foreign powers. In the first days of the siege he held a line with what he named the Tenth Mountain Brigade, a formation ot rats from the sewers. He was a butcher before he was a hero and a martyr, he slit the throats of Serbs who had stayed in the city, after he had robbed them, and he burned their bodies. He was a man of evil… Four years ago his body was dug up and carried shoulder high through the streets, to a new and more respectable grave. Shops emptied, and the cafe, and the bars. I see it in my mind, the worship of those who watched. I awoke, Joey, from the dream. The people ol Sarajevo did not want me – they wanted as their hero and their martyr the man who was a butcher, Caco. They would not want me who was an insignificant imitation of Falcone and Borsellino… Everything I said to you, it was only a dream.'

The judge's words faded. A week before, Joey Cann would have nodded sympathetically and would have understood. But a long week had gone by.

'So, what happened?' Joey persisted. 'What turned you?'

The judge looked up at him, and his dulled eyes blinked under the force of the ceiling light. 'There were two offers put on the table. The offer to be killed,

… Eighteen men came to the house this morning, at first light, with lorries, cement mixers, blocks, timber. They worked all day, until it was dark, and they will be here again in a few hours. At lunchtime the Mercedes came. In the afternoon the catalogues were delivered to us. We will have the bathroom of our choice with a special shower for Jasmina, the kitchen that will suit her and a refrigerator freezer and the decoration for the rooms. What do you say '

Joey, the week-old veteran of Sarajevo, said with spite, 'I say that the whole city will know you had a price.'

' It is Sarajevo, Joey, the city will applaud me, a fool has become sensible… In the evening a functionary came from the pensions department of the Ministry of Finance. He gave me back the document I had given nine years before to Ismet Mujic as part payment for Jasmina going to the Vrbanja bridge. With the document was an account statement, the scheme was paid up. They own me, they have bought me, and the world can know it. Don't you have a price, Joey?'

The question hurt, cut deep, and he hesitated. She was behind him, circling them. The wheels crunched on the fallen plaster and squealed. He could not see her face. He had bought her flowers. Anyone who'd cared to look from the pavements, or from their cars on the streets of this shit city, would have seen that a girl in a wheelchair carried his flowers. The question was under his guard.

' I don't know – if it was about someone I loved… '

' I did not think I had a price. I urge you, pray to your God that you never have to drink from the devil's cup.' The judge looked into Joey's eyes and asked simply,' Who would have looked after her?'

'Papa, enough of talking,' she snapped. 'He has no sympathy for what you say – look at him. He involved us, Papa. You should not justify yourself.' She came round the table, braked the chair between her father and Joey.

' If it had been about someone I loved I might have had a price. I don't stand in judgement. I hope I don't have that conceit.'

'Will you leave? You upset my father.' He saw the anger blaze in her eyes, and the colour flush her cheeks.

'The withdrawal of the authorization for intrusive surveillance, Joey, does that make it hard for you?'

The judge's thin voice seeped from behind her back.

'If I wore the uniform, had the mentality of the uniform, it would be impossible for me to continue.'

'Without the uniform, what is the action of a driven man? What do you do, |oey?'

Because he had come into their lives, the dignity was gone from them. He wondered if, when he was gone, they would curse him. The love that gave flowers was finished. He stood tall over them, and they waited on his answer. He did not know himself, and nobody who knew him would have recognized Joey Cann

He said, with savagery, 'I go to the end of the road, follow where I am led. I think it finishes tomorrow.

Tomorrow you will know whether you were bought too cheaply, whether you surrendered your pride too quickly… Look and listen.'

He went out of the room and into the night. They might curse him, they might weep in each other's arms or forget he had ever come into their lives. In a few hours it would be finished. He walked down the hill, left the building site and the Mercedes behind him, with his decency.

She passed the earphones to Salko, who began to scribble on a sheet of paper. When the call was finished, he gave the sheet to Frank. Frank wrote the translation, and palmed it to Maggie.

'Sorry about that, boys, a little bit of panic there for a moment,' she chimed. 'Turkish isn't one of my talents… If I was clever, which I'm certainly not at this time of a God-forsaken night, I'd rather fancy a limerick coming on. It's getting quite multinational, don't you think? Line one: "There once was a Russkie, an Eyetie, and a Turk." Then we've "perk", "kirk",

"dirk" and " l u r k "… I'm too bloody tired. You know anything about Turks, Frank?' She eased back in her chair against him, liked the touch of him.

'Mainstream heroin trafficking.'

She grinned. 'You know what I think?'

'Unveil yourself to me, Miss Bolton.' Frank smirked at her.

She pushed him away, but she liked his sauce. It was cold as death in the room. There was a single small light, the bulb heavily shaded, in the room, on the floor. She clamped the earphones back on her head.

'Mister thinks this is going to be his meeting – I think he's in serious danger of diving into the pond and finding he's out of his depth.'

'Why would he do that?' Ivor Jowett asked into the phone. His wife, her face frozen in fury, tossed beside him. He listened, thanked the caller, and rang off. He switched off the bedside light, and lay on his back in the darkness.

Ivor Jowett was the drugs liaison officer on a posting from the Custom House to the British embassy in Ankara. The Turkey secondment was a good one. At the embassy, Sehit Ersan Cad. 46/A Cankaya, he was the early-warning siren for the premier cases of heroin importation into the United Kingdom. As an ambitious investigation beaver, with the information fed him by the polisi in the cities and the jandarmas in the countryside, he would be noticed and fast-tracked to promotion. The stuff poured through the refineries and flowed out over the Bosphorus and across Europe to the British Channel and North Sea ports. Without the contacts, the phone calls at dead of night, Ivor Jowetl would have wallowed uselessly. The pity of it was that the calls came, a good half of them, into his apartment in the night hours, not to his office in the working day. Newspaper clippings were sent him each week hy the public affairs section of the Custom House, most times the credit for a seizure at Harwich docks, or Felixstowe or Dover, or at the port of Southampton was given to the 'dedication and persistence and thoroughness' of the uniformed staff; the figures soared a million pounds' worth, street value, of intercepted heroin was commonplace, ten million pounds was not rare. Ivor Jowett, late of the Sierra Quebec Juliet team, was a s t a r… His wife rolled over and cradled hcrself in his arm. She was Gloria, formerly ol Sierra Quebec Roger, it was said at the Custom House that internal marriages were the only ones that had a chance.

'Do you want a coffee?'

'Wouldn't mind.'

The principal strain on the marriages was the refusal of officers to confide in wives who were not in the family. He could tell Gloria. She did the secretarial in the embassy office, but still grumbled and complained of under-employment. What would he tell her, when she brought back the mugs of coffee?

He was Fuat Selcuk, believed to be forty eight years old. He was from a village on the Aras river near to Erzurum. His territory stretched along the old Soviet border, now Georgia and Armenia, from Artvin and Kars in the north to Mount Ararat and Mount Tendurek in the south. It was where he had his refineries, where he employed the best young chemists from the universities. The product in which he dealt, raw opium, originated in the poppyfields of Afghanistan. In sacks, lashed to the backs of mules, the cargo was brought north from the collection point at Taloqan then was ferried across the Pjandz river, where the escort of machine-guns was changed, then taken overland across Tajikistan, and shipped over the width of the Caspian Sea, unloaded at the Azerbaijani harbour of Sumqayit, then moved on to the border posts close to Igdir and Ardahan. There Fuat Selcuk waited for the cargo's arrival and paid for it with cash, dollars. The money, cut and cut and cut – as the cargo would be – returned on the trail and paid off the lorry drivers, the middlemen, the ferry crews, the border guards, the machine-gunners, the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, and the farmers who grew the crops of poppies in their fields. He was never cheated. The cargo was never stolen en route, sacks never fell from the backs of the lorries or the mules. Hiss arm reached from western Turkey all the way back to the hill fields of Afghanistan. To cheat him would have been the same as tying a heavy stone around the neck and wading out into the Pjandz river. Neither was he cheated in the refineries by his chemists, nor as the lorries rolled off the Bosphorus ferries for the long drive north across Europe and the ultimate destinations in Holland, Germany, France, or Green Lanes in north London. In his younger days, when his reputation as a businessman of honour was not yet confirmed, Fuat Selcuk's speciality was to slice off a man's testicles and stifle the screaming by placing them in the victim's mouth, then stapling his lips together so that they could not be spat out. He was also a man of charity: he had built hospitals and schools, and he paid for the repair of mosques.

The call in the night that had woken Ivor Jowett had been a whispered communication. The men he dealt with always dropped their voices when they spoke of Fuat Selcuk, because they knew the reach of his arm. T hat morning, Fuat Selcuk had left Erzurum by light aircraft and had flown to Ankara. At the airport, a bright, brave young spark on surveillance duty had chanced his luck and moved close enough for an

'overheard'. The spark's target had met an Ankara-based associate and had said: 'It'll be a dog fuck of a day. All the way there to meet a bastard from England, who thinks he is the top fuck. I'll eat him. .. ' and the associate had said, 'Or he'll eat his fucking balls.. . ' and they'd gone beyond the hearing of the listener.

Fuat Selcuk had caught an afternoon flight to Damascus, then an evening connection to Zurich – his caller had told him.

Why would he do that?

She brought the tea, and Ivor Jowett told his wife about the call.

Her eyebrows arched. 'Taking a hell of a risk, isn't he, the Brit, dealing with a man like that?'

Maggie was hunched over the recorder, listening hard, pressing the phones against her ears. A tight little frown dented her forehead. Frank watched her.

Salko and Ante pushed themselves up from the far wall and sauntered towards her table. Her eyes were screwed tight, she concentrated, then she shrugged. 'I can't make it out.'

She passed the earphones to Frank. He listened, scratched under his chin. 'There's a problem… something about the peach-bottom boy.'

Frank gave the earphones to the men; they were slipped to each in turn.

Salko said, 'Serif has lost the boy, Enver. He took the dogs out. They have come back, but not the boy.'

Ante said, 'He's talking about an accident. They are going to telephone the Kosevo Hospital. Such a thing has not happened before.'

Fahro said, 'You can hear the worry of him.'

Frank translated and Maggie scribbled down what they'd said. Moments like these always brought a slight joy to her. She pried into her targets' lives. She heard their happiness and she was with them in crisis.

At the other end of the tap, she sensed the panic. The first search party had gone out. She imagined them, in their black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets, the gold chains garlanding their necks, coming back and reporting failure – they were sent out again. She was the witness to the growing chaos. All the days in the basement workshop at Ceausescu Towers, and the evenings whiled away with the foremen technicians at Imperial College, the nights curled in her chair with her dog and the electronics magazines, had a value when she played the voyeur. She had no interest in the whereabouts of the boy, it did not matter to her if he was prone on a hospital bed, or had gone walkabout, or was drinking himself stupid in a bar, or was in a morgue on a slab. It was her position as an intruder that thrilled her, did now and had in the past. It was her power to insert herself under her target's skin Those who controlled her walked blind without her skills.

She had neat copperplate handwriting.

My dear Mister,

Tonight a man came to see me. He told me who you were. He described your career as a criminal of importance. I asked his name and how did he know such things and why he told me them, but he did not give me answers.

I hate criminality and its exploitation of the weak, and its very selfishness. Therefore, Mister, I should hate you (I see no reason why the man who visited me should have lied), but…

But I think it is impossible for me to hate you.

The man said that you had sought me out as a recipient of charitable goods in order to create an authentic alibi of good works; you used me; you wished to create respectability for your Bosnia with Love lorries which would return to the UK loaded with the class A narcotic – heroin. That is cause for me to hate you, b u t…

But I am a good judge (I hope) of a genuine man.

I see many who come here with insincerity.

Whatever were your first motives for bringing the lorry to the UNIS Building, Tower A, I wish to believe they were replaced by a spirit of true friendship and true affection.

I was not with a criminal in the village of Visnjica. A criminal would not have played cards in the village with the old men, and given them dignity, and would not have held the hand of a child without a father, and given him kindness. A criminal would not have come with me to Gorazde and shown such sympathy for the plight of unfortunates. I was with a man who cared, who had a love for fellow human beings – that is my judgement and it is precious to me.

Perhaps, Mister, when you came here you did not bring sympathy and love. Perhaps you learned them here, in my company (if I am wrong then I am a simple and stupid woman but I think you gained a softness here that you did not travel with)

… I think you are a good man. Wherever I go, whatever is my future, I will remember you and your kindness. I had hoped – until this man came and told me of you – to see you each time that you visited Sarajevo, to spend time with you, and to grow close to you. You would have made a light where there is darkness, summer to winter, brought hope where there is despair. You should be proud of what you did, with your decency.

We will not meet again,

With love, and may God watch over you,

Monika (Holberg)

She sealed the letter into its envelope.

March 2001

'You'll meet him in a minute, the foreman, Five-D.'

The Englishman, Barnaby, walked down the hill towards the bunker and the junction where the turning led to Ljut village. His guest, an attentive young man, hurried at his side. The lights shone boldly in the repaired houses of the nearer village and were bright pinpricks across the valley, beyond the river, in Vraca.

Within a quarter of an hour, the sun's strength would wipe out the electricity's glow from the new windows of the houses of the twin villages. Just before the autumn weather had closed in on the valley, the previous year, five and a half months back, the certificate of clearance had been issued for the corridor of land under the line of power pylons, and the engineering teams had moved on to the site. For a further month, into November, the teams had worked inside the narrow corridor of yellow tape, had lifted the pylons and raised the cables and had restored the power. There had been no further accidents. The power had been switched on. Light had blazed, glowed, shone from each home in the two communities that had been reoccupied. The bulbs were never switched off. The German charity World in Crisis paid the bills.

On the two occasions Barnaby had been to the valley to plan the main clearance operation, he had gained the impression, very distinctly, that the Muslims in Vraca and the Serbs in Ljut kept their lights on through the day whether the sun shone or didn't, and through the night whether they were awake or asleep. It was not for him to tell the villagers that the German aid and generosity were running out.

Because all of the donors were now scrambling to turn their backs on the country, and the funding for the de-mining gangs was drying up, Barnaby had brought the journalist to the valley. Fenton, from a London broadsheet with a daily circulation of less than four hundred thousand readers, was the best recipient Barnaby could find. The work had barely begun, the funding for mine clearance was required for another two decades, minimum. He needed journalists from mass-circulation newspapers, and he needed politicians to tramp down that lane and a thousand others, but they were beyond reach. Instead, he had Wilf Fenton. He always tried to be cheerful when he brought a guest to a minefield.

'Why do you call him Five-D?'

The way Barnaby told it, there were Five-Ds on a hundred sites. It was a regular part of his introductory patter. He knew, from his dogged persistence in seeking out funding, that anecdotes played better in journalists' copy than statistics.

'All the Ds. He was a De-miner, and was blown up, and damn lucky. He became a Driver, ferried others around but didn't go into the field. He was bored, and went back to De-mining. Was blown up again, was even luckier, didn't lose his leg. Started again at being a Driver. Couldn't beat the boredom so he's at it again, De-mining. That's the five Ds – got it?'

Fenton shuddered as he walked and was eyeing the yellow tape suspiciously, staying on an imaginary line that ran down the exact centre of the track. 'Once would have been enough for me.'

'There's so much shrapnel in him…' It was another line from Barnaby's regular patter. All the foremen supported his story '… that we always test a new metal detector by holding it up against his backside. The lights flash and the buzzer goes full blast.'

'God – and that's the extent of what you've got to cover, is it?'

'Yes, that's the valley. That's the Bunica river valley.'

It was laid out in front of them. A hawk hovered over the flattened dead weeds of the old arable fields, fluttered on to hunt across the dull weather-stamped grass of the old grazing fields, then soared in the light wind and flew towards the fallen posts and dropped wires of the old vineyard. There was no beauty to it.

The green growth of new grass shoots would come in the next month and the flowers would make their carpet in the month after. It was as though the place had lost its soul, Barnaby thought. There was a long, seemingly endless line of yellow tape that marked the extent of the fields, running along the edge of the wooded slopes.

'How long will it take you to clear it?'

'Seven months, eight. That's twenty men working five days a week.'

'How many mines are there?'

'We don't know, the records don't exist.'

'Would you walk there?'

Barnaby shook his head resolutely, 'I wouldn't step an inch over the tape. I am fifty-six years old and I have been working with mines for twenty-four of them. I've learned to respect them.'

He told the stories of the foreman, the grandmother and the son in law, and Fenton scribbled busily.

They had reached the bunker. The yellow tape was all round the squat construction of stone and damp tree trunks. The paint was cracked on the red surround and had peeled from the skull shape and the crossed bones. Barnaby took Fenton inside and the journalist flashed his Marlboro lighter, turned it up to full. There were scribbled numbers chalked on the walls, the remnants of an old occupation. Did Barnaby know what they signified? He didn't. Fenton said they looked like the bookies' lists you'd find pinned up on a wall of a betting shop. The last date, where the chalk line erased the list of odds, was for a summer day seven years earlier and above the dale was the word: Rado.

T can't help you,' Barnaby said. ' I don't know what it means.'

'A pity, sort of interesting, isn't it? About ghosts.'

They went out into the sunlight, and blinked. The lights in the Ljut windows and the pinpricks across the river were now burned out. A column of de-miners tramped down the track in front of them, the weight of their boots thudding on the stones.

'What are the boots? They look pretty solid.'

'They're supposed to be proof against an anti-personnel mine, or what we call a nuisance mine.'

'That's comforting.'

'Not really – they have rigid soles. They're all right on the flat but they're a liability on a stone slope. You fall over in them, reach out to break your fall, then your whole pressure is on your hand, and your weight. It takes five kilos of pressure to detonate a PMA2. If they're working on a gradient, like the vineyard, they'll kick the over-boots off.'

' C h r i s t… why do they do it?'

'For money, so that they eat and their families eat.'

'How do you hold up morale, after an accident?'

'Hunger does the job. Usually, when a de-miner's been hurt, or killed, at least two of them jack it in – they don't eat, and their families don't.'

'You're showing me a bloody – excuse me – brutal world.'

'Feel free to quote me.'

They followed the de-miners down to the ford. The water was in spate across it. Barnaby pointed to a distant farmhouse and spoke of some recent family-history: an old woman who moved on crutches and a young man whose skeleton body would not be re-covered until the end of the summer because of where it lay, and of an old farmer who survived senility in the belief that he would reclaim and work his fields.

He was not yet out of his bed – and that was a greater mercy.

They stood at the side of the track, close to the river.

Parallel lines of yellow tape strips ran from the track out into the fields, each wide enough for two men to walk alongside each other. Between these stunted corridors were wide expanses of grass and weed, but the two men in each corridor did not walk, they knelt, their visors down. They probed with thin sharpened steel prods. Fenton said that it was like watching paint dry. Barnaby said, drily, that the chance of losing a leg when home decorating was slight. Fenton saw the dog, and his face lit. A heavy German shepherd, shaggy-coated, was in the longest grass in a corridor between the yellow tape and twenty-five yards from the track. A long thin cord linked the dog to the handler.

'That's what I need.' Fenton raised his pocket camera, aimed at the dog. 'Tell me about him.'

'He's Boy. Nine years old. He's the best, a prime asset. He was trained first by an American de-mining company. They worked him in Angola, then Rwanda and Croatia. They sold him to us. He's going to work out his time here. He scents the explosive… Not everybody trusts a dog. If he misses a mine he won't detonate it, but the handler following him will. Many prefer to put their trust in the prodder. We argue about it. But Boy is special. When a dog's done its useful work, it's shot. Boy won't be, his handler'll take him home.'

'That's wonderful. Can I go closer?'

'Sorry, no. Mr Fenton, you have to understand that we're in the first week of the season. The men are rusty. They haven't been in the field for four or five months. It's a time of maximum danger for them.'

'I've an angle now, I'm going to write something positive,' Fenton said enthusiastically. 'Something, about brave men, and Boy, working to bring a proper life back to two communities in the valley. I like it, I've got the buzz – the valley where the peace will never again be broken.'

'Would you all like a cup of tea?'

It was what the Princess's mother had always done each time the old Bill had come visiting at dawn in their Ilford house, when she'd been a child.

'It's no trouble to me, easy enough to put the kettle on.'

Except when her father was locked up, the old Bill had been regular early-morning visitors. Her mother, Clarrie Hinds, always brewed up a big pot, and cleared the cupboard of mugs for the tray; if there was a senior man among them she'd usually have sliced up a lemon, just in case. She'd always put a plate of biscuits on the tray, opened a fresh packet for them.

Like mother, like daughter. Her mother said it helped to make a bad experience more pleasant, and also said that tea and biscuits and talk about the weather – would it rain or wouldn't it? – was distracting for the searchers.

This was a sour lot. Tea declined, biscuits refused, small-talk ignored.

It was now nine months since the last time the Princess's home had been 'visited'. They'd been polite enough then. No sledge-hammers, no shouting, no blue lights flashing, and no sirens when they'd driven Mister away. He'd been given at least ten minutes to get himself dressed, and they'd been discreet when they'd taken him out through the front door. It had only been afterwards that she'd heard from Rosie Carthew, Carol Penberthy and Leonora Govan that the house had been surrounded by armed police crouching in their gardens; the Princess hadn't even seen them. The last time, Mister had gone off as if a few golf friends were shipping him to a far-away course – but Mister didn't play golf. This lot were cold, correct, silent.

They knew the house. They'd have been working from the pictures taken when the house was 'burgled' a year back. They'd each been assigned a room. The oldest man among them had an unlit pipe stapled in his mouth. She'd seen him look around from the moment he'd come in through the front door. There were no ashtrays in the Princess's home. She thought he yearned to produce his matches and scratch a flame, but he didn't ask her. The old Bill always asked if they could smoke, and her mother had always produced an ashtray for them. This man wandered between the rooms, took on the role of a supervisor, and the Princess followed him. They went into the kitchen, the sitting room, the living room, her snug where she did her post, the dining room that was never used, and up the stairs to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. She tracked him like a suspicious dog.

When the woman who had searched the dining room, taking everything from the sideboard then replacing each plate and each glass just where they'd been, had met the heavy-bearded man, who'd gone through the sitting room with fine-tooth comb care, the Princess had been at the top of the stairs. The woman and the bearded man were in the hall below.

'You know what's funny about this place, sort of creepy, it's not lived-in. It's like a show house at the Ideal Home. There's nothing out of place – and there's not a book. Did you find one book here? I didn't. It gives you the shivers. Or it's like a hotel room, cleaned for the next guest.'

Then they'd seen her at the top of the stairs, and the Princess hadn't heard another word spoken among them, until they left.

They filed out. Years ago, Clarrie Hinds had said that you never showed anger to them, never flipped, never screamed, because they'd talk about that in the canteen at their late breakfast, and the word would have been passed to the scum, the informers, they paid. To have shouted at them, to have wept in a corner, would have demeaned her dignity, would have diminished Mister's self-respect. They took nothing with them.

'Thank you for your co-operation, Mrs Packer.'

The older man's match flashed in the dull light.

She didn't answer. The cars were starting up in the road. Usually, at her mother's home or at her own since she'd married Mister, when the police or the Church came with a warrant, searched and left empty-handed without evidence in a bag, there would be tight-lipped annoyance at the senior man's mouth. She didn't see anger, but there was a slow smile, which might have been contempt, or satisfaction. It was no big deal. She'd tell Mister about it when he was back, tomorrow or the day after. Their house rule, which she'd never broken, was that she did not call him when he was away. It would keep until his return. They were a partnership. In his strange, unshown way, her Mister loved his Princess.

He didn't crawl all over her, didn't touch her when they were out, didn't smarm her with compliments in front of strangers, but he loved her. It was returned.

The trust was between them. When he came back, she would tell Mister where they'd been, how they'd searched, what they'd looked like. He'd listen to her, never interrupting, and every detail of it would be stored away in his mind, his memory. When she'd finished, he'd say, 'Well done,' or 'That's good,' or, if he was expansive, 'You'd have thought they'd have better things to do…' and life would go on. She never looked to the future, didn't think about it. A long time ago, when they were first married and Mister was on the up, she'd feared he'd be found in a gutter, or in a fire-destroyed car, and that the uniformed Bill would come to escort her to a mortuary to look at his body.

She no longer harboured such a fear. He was untouchable now; as she joked with him, 'God wouldn't dare.' She didn't ask him what the future was, and didn't care.

As the cars drove off, she saw across the road that Leonora was hy her gate, in her bathrobe, and miming at her a charade game of filling a kettle and drinking a cup, but she shook her head, smiled – because it was no big deal and closed her door behind her.

One point confused her. There had been no warning. The night before his arrest, Mister had known they coming for him in the morning. She'd tell Mister that his network hadn't warned her… She went into the kitchen. She made hersell a collee and put bread in the toaster. She took the toast and the mug into the sitting room and switched on the television.

Her eyes roved from the set, from the mug and the plate, over the room. There was no sign that the Church had come mob-handed into the house, it was all strangely tidy and undisturbed. She was almost at the end of the traverse of her gaze over the watercolour paintings, the ornaments, the decanter and the glasses, the fireplace, when she saw the envelope.

It was propped up on a low table beside the chest where she kept her tapestry. She had not put a brown, large-size envelope on that table.

She wondered what they'd left behind.

She laid her cup and the plate on the footstool beside her chair, went to the table and picked up the envelope.

The flap was not sealed, was folded inside. There was no logo on it, nor any handwriting. She opened it and took out a wad of plate-size photographs.

Attached to the back of the top photograph was a stick-on message note. 'Room 329, Holiday Inn, Sarajevo. Phone: (00 387 32) 664 273.' She turned the photographs over. She looked.

Her eyes closed, she lashed out with her foot. The fluffy pink slipper kicked against the stool beside her chair. The toast went, margarine-and-marmalade side down onto the carpet, and the cup of coffee flew. The Princess ripped off the stick-on message note, marched into the kitchen and snatched up the telephone.

He had been dressing, his best suit, best shirt and best shoes and the phone had pealed beside the bed.

Mister held it away from his ear, and heard the rant.

'They're not my problem, they can come any time they want, once a week if they want, by appointment or without – you're my problem, Mister. Who is she? You are my problem. Who is she? Don't play dumb eith me, Mister, and don't bloody tell me,

''Oh, she's just nobody… Oh, she's just a friend, someone I met Oh, she's just a quick shag." Out in the bloody open, like you're some sort of kid out in the park Who is she? Lost your bloody voice, Mister? Did you lose your trousers, Mister? Have to be called "Mister", don't you? because that's about your bloody self-respect. What sort of self-respect is it to be out in the middle of the bloody day, cuddling and cow eyes, in front of the Church's camera? And, don't tell me, "I didn't see the camera, I didn't know they were there", you wouldn't have seen luck all except for her tits, you wouldn't have seen a camera if they'd poked you with it.

Bloody good laugh for the Church. I have sweated for you, Mister, I've been here when you've wanted me, I've covered your back, I've lived a bloody half-life – and what do I get out of it? It's a bloody Crown copyright surveillance picture of you with a horn on hanging on to a bit of stuff young enough to be your bloody daughter if you were capable of making a daughter. I've trusted you, Mister, and now you've -'

He put the phone down on the cradle.

He finished dressing, chose a good tie, and checked himself in the mirror.

They were waiting for him in the lobby. How was he? He was fine, he was looking forward to a good day, he was top of the game.