The Untouchable

Chapter One

When dawn came, the body was snagged in the branches of a tree. Not that it was easily recognizable as a corpse.

In spite of the foreigners' alternate pleading, threatening, and throwing money at the city's municipal authorities, refuse collection had again broken down.

In many of the streets back from the river rubbish was piled high outside business premises and at the doors of the old apartment blocks. The residents of the blocks facing the river, not believing that the dispute between the foreigners who nominally ran the city's affairs and local officials was about to be settled, had taken to heaving their plastic bags into the water. The body was wedged between two plastic bags, and was disguised.

The tree, holding it fast, was marooned on a spit of gravel half-way between two of the bridges straddling the river. One bridge was overlooked by the scaffolded and screened building where the National Library of historic documents without price had been housed before being hit by incendiary shells, and the second bridge marked the position taken by Gavrilo Princep eighty-seven years earlier in the moments before he had raised a handgun and fired the bullets that killed an archduke and an archduchess, and con-demned Europe to a conflagration of a scale unknown before.

The roads running either side of the Miljacka river

– the Obala Kulina bana on the north side, and the Obala isa-bega Isakovica on the south side – were already jammed with cars, vans, lorries and the foreigners' military jeeps and trucks. No driver had time to waste peering down into the river to notice the tree. Pedestrians crowded the bridges, smoking and hurrying, gossiping and continuing last night's arguments, and none of them, young or elderly, paused to stop and stand against the rush of movement to look down at the mud-brown water, the spit of gravel and the tree beached on it. As they had in the recent siege of the city, people hurried to complete their journey.

To linger and look around them had been to court death; for four years the city had been called the most dangerous place on earth and habits of survival died hard, but now the tide of inhumanity washed on other more distant shores: Dili in East Timor, and Grozny, and Mitrovica in Kosovo.

There had been five successive bright spring days over the city. The piled snow banks on the pavements beside the river, compacted by bulldozers in the winter months, were finally dribbling away. High above the city, dominating it, where the siege guns had been sited with a clear view of the river, the bridges and the streets, the ski slopes were melting.

Mountain streams seeking escape into the Miljacka cascaded down steep escarpments, and the river running through the heart of the city swelled and rose.

Its force grew. As the early rush of foot-sloggers and vehicles thinned, the strength of the water's flow lifted the body sufficiently for it to break free of the tree's branches.

There was nothing romantic or noble about the Miljacka. It was not a Thames or a Seine, a Tiber or a Danube; perhaps that was why none had bothered to stop and gaze down at its movement. Flanked with concrete and stone bank walls, fifty paces wide, if measured by a man who had a good stride and had not lost a leg in the shelling, broken up by weirs, it was more of a dirty drain than a majestic waterway.

As it continued its journey down-river, the body was sometimes submerged, caught in powerful deep currents, sometimes swirled to the surface before it was again dragged down and sometimes just the buttocks of the dark grey trousers protruded above the water.

There was no dignity for the body as it was taken through the unseeing city.

Behind him, he heard the scrape of the spy hatch being opened, then the clatter as it was dropped on its hinge against the outside of the door. He didn't look up.

'Coffee, Mister Packer. Cappuccino. Two measures of sugar, granulated and brown.'

He pushed himself off the floor, wiped the dust from the knees of his trousers and went to the cell door. He reached out and took the polystyrene beaker from the hand stretched through the hatch. He didn't thank the prison officer for bringing him the coffee, with two measures of sugar, but then he hadn't asked for it to be brought him, not that day or on any of the days that he had been in the Central Criminal Court.

He smiled briefly, as if that were sufficient indication of his gratitude. He could see the prison officer's face through the hatch, the blinking eyes and the flash of teeth, and he knew that his smile had been sufficient to lighten the stupid bastard's day. He understood why he was brought coffee, why this and others of the stupid bastards apologized to him for the dirt in the cell and the state of the toilet, and why they always grimaced when they put the handcuffs on him before leading him back to the wagon for the evening journey to HMP Brixton. They were all, every last one of them, frightened of him. They feared that he would remember rudeness, sarcasm, a sneer, and they thought he would have a good memory. They also knew that he could find out where they lived, what car they drove, where their women worked, at the snap of a finger. His reputation went before him. More importantly, he was going to walk, as certain as night follows day, and they all knew it. He was always brought coffee with sugar from their canteen when he was first put in the holding cell before being escorted up to Number 7 Court, and at the lunch recess, and in the evening after the court had risen and before he was loaded into the wagon.

'I'll let you know as soon as there's signs of movement, Mr Packer.'

His back was to the hatch. He took the top off the coffee, poured it down the toilet, and went back to his work on the floor. Laid across the concrete were sheets of a tabloid newspaper and on the sheets were the clothes and possessions he had used in the last eight months on remand since his arrest. His suit jacket was hitched on the back of the cell's single wooden chair.

On the newspaper were his second suit, conservative and grey with a light stripe, three button-down shirts, two ties, his three spare sets of underwear, five pairs of socks, and an extra pair of plain black shoes. They were all laundered, pressed or polished, because when he walked he didn't want to bring back soiled or creased clothes to the Princess. Neither of his suits was particularly expensive, not hand-made, off the peg. His shirts were decent, not monogrammed, his ties were sober, his shoes ordinary. Nothing about his clothes or his appearance was flamboyant. His confidence that he would walk had caused him to send home his trainers, T-shirts and the tracksuit he had worn during the long months on remand in Brixton's maximum-security wing before the start of the trial.

There were no books, no magazines, no photographs in frames, only a plain washbag and a small clock radio. Early that morning the prison staff had been surprised when he had cleared his cell, loaded everything that was his into a plastic bin liner and carried it to the wagon that was escorted to and from the court by policemen armed with Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols. The trial was half-way through, the prosecution case was concluded, and the previous afternoon his brief had made the proposition to the judge that the client had no case to answer.

At the time of his arrest, the newspapers had written that he was worth in excess of a hundred million pounds, that he had headed the capital's top crime family for a decade, that he was targeted by the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad, Customs amp; Excise's National Investigation Service, GCHQ, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. But, he was going to walk.

He was an Untouchable. He knew he was going to walk because the Eagle had told him he would.

He sat on the chair and faced the door, glancing over the graffiti on the walls written by Provos and Yardies, murderers and rapists. A brief involuntary action, but he touched in turn each of the pockets of his jacket hitched on the chair. They were all empty.

There were no cigarettes because he did not smoke, no keys because he did not need them, no wallet with cash because tough men in Brixton queued to give him anything he wanted, no credit cards or cheque book because no card company or bank had accounts in the name of Albert William Packer.

'Just been told, Mr Packer, judge'll be back in five minutes.' The face was again at the open hatch.

He nodded, then sucked a long gulp of air into his lungs. On life's ladder, Mister, as he insisted on being called by those who worked for him and those who spoke to him on his constantly changing mobile phones, had learned to trust few. Among the few was the Eagle, his lawyer on a heavy retainer, his 'legal eagle'. The Eagle had promised him he was going to walk and he trusted that prediction. It hadn't crossed his mind until that moment that such trust might be misplaced. It would go bad for the Eagle if it were. He breathed out steadily, then stood and took his suit jacket from the chair back and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He walked towards the cell door, then straightened his tie.

Through the hatch the voice said, 'Right, Mr Packer, if you're ready I'll take you up – oh, don't worry about your bag, I'll see it's minded.'

He smoothed his hair against his scalp as the key was turned in the door's lock, and put the dirt and squalor of the past eight months behind him.

In the themed Irish pub, across the street from the Old Bailey, the Eagle lingered over his lunch of steak and Guinness pie, with a side salad. A hack called over to him, with the familiarity of his trade, 'Henry, the judge is coming back in, going to rule on it.'

The Eagle merely nodded. Other than to deny his client's guilt, and then only cursorily, he never spoke to court journalists and crime reporters. He regarded them as parasitical scum, and it irked him that his given name should be used by a complete stranger.

There had been others, at the top of the tree before his client, Mister Packer, had climbed into the upper branches, who enjoyed the company of hacks and liked to read their names in the newspapers. A long, long time back, he had advised his client that newspapers and their writers should be avoided. In the Eagle's opinion, newspapers were symptomatic of vanity, and vanity was dangerous. He carried on pecking at his pie.

His clerk, close to him, mobile phone at the ear, murmured, 'Three or four minutes, Mr Arbuthnot, and the judge'll be back in.'

'No panic, Josh,' the Eagle said quietly. 'I'll follow you over.'

His clerk, Josh, ran for the pub door. The Eagle laid down his knife and fork on the small round bar table at which he was perched, then changed his mind and hooked up a final piece of lettuce leaf. He was an ample man and his backside splayed over the rim of his stool. He wore an old suit that carried the stains of other meals, his shirt was far from new and the collar was slightly frayed; the tie had the crumple creases of frequent use. With what the Eagle earned from his solicitor's practice, and the retainer paid him by Mister, he could have worn as good a suit and shirt as might be found in Jermyn Street. Tucked under his knees on the stool's foot bar were his scarred tan suede shoes. When he left his home in the country to come up to London on a Monday morning he wore gentlemen's clothes, and his first act on reaching his office over a launderette in Clerkenwell was to strip off those clothes with their fancy labels, consign them to a hanger in the cupboard, and change into the tired suit, shirts and ties of better days, and ease on the suedes; his last act on a Friday afternoon was to reverse the process. It was as if he switched identities before taking the train to Guildford. His London suit, shirts, ties and shoes were an essential part of what he preached to Mister: nothing should be flamboyant, nothing should draw attention to wealth that could not be easily explained.

Henry Arbuthnot had only been twenty-two when he had first met the man who now paid him that healthy retainer, introduced to him by his black sheep brother, David, who had done twenty-seven months, fraud, in Pentonville prison and met Packer there

– twenty-four months, aggravated robbery. In the twenty-eight years since then his client had never been convicted. He finished his glass of Pepsi and lemonade, wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and eased himself heavily off the high stool. As a twenty-two-year-old, fresh from college and his degree, learning criminal-case law, he had been a fierce drinker; not any more. He had been 'dry' since he had met Mister. He was on call twenty-four hours, day and night. For his retainer, which ratcheted up each year, it was demanded of him that he be constantly available. Mister was his meal ticket, and abstinence from alcohol was the price to be paid.

He left the pub and sheltered for a moment in the doorway to gauge the strength of the rain.

Opposite was the main entrance to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court. Word travelled fast.

Photographers were gathering at the principal security entrance. Two police cars were parked at the kerb in front of the entrance, and the armed men were already loading their machine pistols into the secure compartments behind the front seats, their job over.

There had been armed police on the corners of the building since the trial had started. He shuffled across the street. Because of his heavy gut he walked badly.

He went inside and flashed his card. The Eagle knew the way it would end, had known for days.

The prosecution case had originally involved the identification by Customs amp; Excise – the Eagle called it the Church – of his client in a car, his client's fingerprints in the car, and the evidence of an informer also in the car. While Mister had been on remand, the Eagle had systematically demolished the case with the help of the big man's enforcers. The Protected Witness Unit was supposedly secure and secret.

Money had bought the location of the gaol where the PWU was housed, and the number given inside the unit to the informer. Big money had bought the prison officer who had contaminated the man's food.

A stomach pump had saved his life, but not his resolve. 'If they can get me here,' he had whined, 'they can get me anywhere.' He had withdrawn his evidence, refused to testify.

Mister was standing at the far end of the corridor, wreathed in dull light. The cell door beside his client was the only one in the block that was open. At his shoulder were the clerk, Josh, and a prison officer who clutched the bin bag, as if he were a hotel porter.

The Home Office Forensic Laboratory was at Chepstow, across the Welsh border. The fingerprint evidence had been there. A technician with a predi-lection for gambling at the roulette tables of a Newport casino had been offered a choice: for co-operation his debt of nine thousand pounds would be paid off, for obstruction his mother's legs would be broken with such baseball-bat severity that she would not walk again. The fingerprint evidence had gone missing.

'All right, then – shall we go?' There was a watery smile at the Eagle's mouth.

The Church's identification of his client by their surveillance team had been a greater challenge. He couldn't buy the Church and couldn't threaten it, so the Eagle had had to burn late-night oil to work meticulously through the surveillance logs for the fissure in that part of the case. Having found the point of weakness, he had then diverted the attention of the enforcers, the Cards – Mister's hard men – to the leafy suburban detached home of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer on the special-case desk… It was all worked out, it was the power of his client.

Mister never looked round. The prison officer passed the bag to the clerk. The Eagle led them back up the steps. At the first landing, instead of turning left and waiting at a barred grille gate for it to be unlocked and taking the route up to Number 7 Court, he turned right. At that gate, he showed his pass, as did his clerk, and the youngster pushed the discharge document under the face of the security man with the keys to Mister's freedom, a big, bluff, red-faced ex-Guardsman who wouldn't have brought coffee to a prisoner or carried his bag for him. The Eagle sensed that the security man wanted to sneer, spit, but didn't.

They emerged into the great lobby area of the building.

'Did you get the taxi, Josh?'

'Yes, Mr Arbuthnot – side door, like you said.'

No way that the Eagle would have Albert William Packer photographed close-up by a scrum of snappers, then have the pictures used every time a low-life hack wrote an organized-crime story on the capital. Anonymity was what the Eagle sought, for his client and for himself.

Two groups of men and women were watching them. They'd have to pass them on their way to the side exit.

'Just walk past, Mister, no eye-contact.'

The first group were the detectives from the National Crime Squad. As the Eagle knew, they'd have had a watching brief because the targeting of his client had been taken away from them and given to the Church. Only fools played games when they walked past the detectives after a prosecution had failed. He recognized most of them, but behind him Mister, who had the keenest memory the Eagle had ever come across, would know their names, their ages, their addresses, their children's names… and there was one, who looked away, that Mister owned.

The Eagle waddled past the detectives and towards the second group, rolling on his feet, arid panting a little from the climb up the steps.

'You know what the Church say, Mister?' The Eagle spoke out of the side of his mouth.' "Of course there are professional jealousies between them and us, Church and Crime Squad. We're professionals and they're jealous." That's what the Church says.'

There might have been a death in the family. The Church people stood hangdog, close to the side exit.

There was a senior investigation officer and what the Eagle reckoned were all of the higher executive officers and executive officers who made up the Sierra Quebec Golf team, and they looked like they were too shattered to throw up. Sierra Quebec Golf had been assigned exclusively to his client for three years prior to Mister's arrest. It was all budget sheets, these days.

The Eagle could snap the figures through his head. He estimated that the Church had committed a minimum of five million pounds to the investigation, then all the extras of Crown Prosecution Service and an Old Bailey trial. The men and women of Sierra Quebec Golf had good reason to think the ground had opened under their feet. He couldn't help but look at them as he went to the side exit. Set in the frustration of their faces, men and women, was deep, sincere hatred.

They weren't like policemen. The Eagle had walked his client many times out of police stations, no charges offered, and had witnessed close up the resigned shrugs of men going through the form and 'doing something'. This was different, personal. He had to look down at his feet as he went past them because the loathing bled from their eyes. He went through the door, stampeded down a narrow set of steps, and behind him was Mister's measured tread. Mister wouldn't have been intimidated by the Church men and women.

The taxi was idling at the side door. He dived for the security of the back seat. He saw the way the driver looked nervously at the client following him, then away. All the cabbies in London would know that the quietly dressed man with an unremarkable face, his client, was Albert William Packer. He gave the destination to the cabbie. The Eagle realized then that Mister had not yet thanked him, had not squeezed his arm in gratitude, nor muttered a kind word to him.

As the taxi pulled out from the shadowy passage behind the Central Criminal Court, Mister asked softly, 'Where's Cruncher?'

The first time the Sarajevo firemen had managed to get the grab hook onto the body and pull it out of the Miljacka's central flow and into slower side waters, they had ripped off a sleeve of its jacket. Their rope went slack, and they hauled it in to find the length of cloth.

The chief fireman steadied himself, checked the coiled rope at his feet then swung the grab hook in faster circles above his helmet. The trees restricted the length of rope he could swing to gain the necessary momentum. There was a crowd behind them, and another on the far side of the river. Frank Williams, wearing the light blue uniform of the International Police Task Force, was enough of a student of the recent war to understand why there were trees on this section of the bank. This point in the river had been the front line. The burned-out apartments over the water had been the home of the sniper nests, crouched with their telescopic sights and looking down at a perfect view of the trees. All over the city, even in the worst of the shelling, men had gone out with axes and saws to fell trees for basic warmth, and take a chance with death. Here the trees had survived because death would not have been a lottery, but certain. He went to night classes to learn the language of Serbo-Croat-Bosnian; he was not especially bright, not formally intelligent, and the learning was difficult to him, but his slight knowledge of their language was always appreciated by the local men he worked with. It made an impossible bloody job marginally less difficult.

Painstakingly, but fervently, in Welsh-accented patois he urged them: 'Come on, guys, let's get this shit business over with.'

The chief fireman launched the grab hook. It was a good throw. He had made a clever calculation of the speed with which the river carried the body. It was now on its back, arms out as if floating at leisure in a swimming-pool. The hook splashed into the water down-river of the body's legs and caught the trousers. He took the strain. There was a ripple of applause on the far side of the river and a cheer from behind them.

Frank Williams winced. When a body came out of the Taff or the Ebbw, the Usk or the Tawe, it would, at least be accorded a degree of respect, compassion.

Here, it was a diversion, a brief show. The body made a bow wave as it was dragged against the current.

He lapsed, as he always did when stressed, into English: 'For Christ's sake, do it with a bit of bloody care.'

Three of the firemen scrambled down the stones of the river's wall, gaining purchase on the footholds where shells had splintered the masonry, or the weight of machine-gun fire had chipped the stones.

They caught the rope and hauled the body over the slimy stones at the river's edge. Frank leaned over the wall and peered down at the white face, the big eyes and gaping mouth. He had been thirteen years in the South Wales Constabulary and a week short of seven months on secondment to the United Nations mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and he had not yet learned to be caustically removed from emotion at the sight of a stranger's corpse. The body was lifted up, heaved on to the wall, then lowered casually to the pavement, where the river water subsided from it. An ambulance pulled up behind them. The crowd pressed forward to get a better view.

As he wound up the rope, the fire chief said dismissively, 'It is a foreigner… '

'How can you tell?'

Frank had been driving by twenty-seven minutes earlier when he had seen a bunch of street kids pelting something in the water. He had stopped, reflex action, as he would have stopped in Cardiff, expecting to find the kids' target was a wing-damaged swan, a duck or a drowning dog. He had been on his way back to his base at Kula, beside the end of the airport runway, from an early-morning shopping raid at a copper-smith in the old quarter, where he had bought a bracelet for his mother's birthday. He was already late. If the corpse was that of a Muslim, dead in the Muslim sector of Sarajevo, then it was of no concern to the IPTF. If a Serb died in the Muslim sector, there was IPTF involvement. If the body was that of a foreigner, the involvement was heavy.

'Look at the watch on his wrist – it is gold. He is either a politician or a criminal, if there is a difference, or he is a foreigner.'

'So, where's Cruncher?' he asked again and saw the Eagle's eyes flick once in surprise. But his solicitor was never going to be superior with him, would never make a fast jibe. He knew the Eagle was terrified of him, and the combination of terror and greed kept the man in place. Mister's life was about power and control, whether at home, whether free, whether in a cell. He formed few attachments but he was fond of the Cruncher. He had grown up with the Cruncher, him in Cripps House and the Cruncher in Attlee House on the local-authority estate between the Albion and Stoke Newington roads. He had been to school with the Cruncher, lost sight of him, then met him again in Pentonville. He'd once heard the Eagle call the Cruncher, wasn't supposed to hear it, a

'bloody little barrow-boy'.

The cab turned off the North Circular and drifted into tree-lined streets where the first spring blossom was showing. He'd been in maximum security since the last day of the previous July when the trees had been heavy in leaf; he had missed the autumn gold and the Christmas stripped bareness. Now the daffodils were out in full glory under the blossom trees, but the crocuses were waning. It was a time of year the Princess liked… They were at the top of his own road. The houses were wide, detached buildings, brick, stucco or mock-Tudor, and there were Neighbourhood Watch stickers on many of the ground-floor front windows. Bumps in the road prevented illegal speeding by cut-through drivers. It was a quiet, respectable road, one of hundreds in the capital, just as his own house was like one of thousands of similar properties. Only fools drew attention to themselves: most of those who did were in Long Lartin or Whitemoor, or down on the island at Albany gaol. Other than twice to ask the question about the Cruncher, who should have been there, Mister had not spoken during the journey; he had listened to what had happened in his absence – details of property purchases and sales, and profits too sensitive for the prison-visit booths – and taken a careful mental note of it.

The Eagle tapped the screen behind the driver and pointed up the road to Mister's house, then said, 'He should have been back last night. The Cards were down at the airport to meet him. He wasn't on the flight, didn't come through. The Cards called me. I rang his hotel. They said he hadn't checked out, but his bed hadn't been slept in the last night. I called again this morning, he still hadn't been back in his room. Sorry, Mister, that's as much as I know.'

It should have been a perfect day. He wasn't looking at twenty, twenty-five years, but at coming home to his Princess… but Cruncher hadn't been there.

There was a bleat in the Eagle's voice. 'You know what I worry about. I mean it, lose sleep about? One day you overreach – know what I mean – take a step too far. I worry… It was close run this time.'

He hit the Eagle with a closed fist, where it hurt, just below the heart. It was a short jabbed punch, and his solicitor let out a little stifled gasp. Mister owned a detective inspector at the heart of organized-crime investigations, a prison officer, telephone engineers in the sections where taps were monitored, had a man in place wherever he was needed; he could strike terror into rivals, turncoats and lawyers. He employed the best of solicitors on retainer, and the best of accounting number crunchers… so where the hell was Cruncher?

The taxi pulled up. Mister slipped out of the cab with his bin bag, didn't offer an invitation to the Eagle to come in with him. He hadn't thanked the Eagle, the work was well paid for. He would never be in debt – money or for services rendered – to any man, never under obligation.

'Hello, Mr Packer, nice to see you back.'

He smiled at the young woman pushing the buggy with the sleeping baby along the pavement. She was from four doors down and her husband imported Italian fashionwear. 'Good to be back, Rosie.'

A woman was clipping the early spring growth on her hedge two doors up. Her husband owned a garden centre in Edmonton, and her garden was always a picture. They supplied the labour that kept the Princess's lawns and herbaceous borders neat.

'Afternoon, Mr Packer, welcome home.'

'Thanks, Carol, thanks very much.'

Rosie and Carol, and all the rest of the road, would have remembered clearly that morning, the last day of last July, when the road had swarmed with armed police and white-overalled forensics people, as he had been led away in handcuffs by the Church. Every upstairs curtain would have twitched; they'd all have been in their nightdresses and pyjamas, peering down at him as he was escorted to the car and pushed inside. He knew from the Princess that Rosie had been by that morning, when the police and the forensics team had gone, with a cake, and that Carol had brought flowers. They were ordinary neighbours in an ordinary road, and they knew fuck-all about anything.

He heard the taxi pull away behind him, and rang the doorbell. The climbing roses over the porch were in leaf but not yet in bud. The lawn had had its first cut. The door opened.

She had been Primrose Hinds. Their marriage had lasted eighteen years in which time he had never touched another woman. She was the daughter of Charlie 'The Slash' Hinds who had emphysema, a hot temper, and a regular address in the Scrubs, and who was flash. From his father-in-law he had learned all that was wrong about a lifestyle. Primrose was his Princess. She knew everything about him, she was as discreet as her father was not, she was the only person he fully trusted. He could have bought his Princess a castle, covered her with jewellery and lived the celebrity existence, as others did. She had never worked since their marriage, at which no photographs were taken by guests and no official snapper was employed. A year after the wedding, a doctor had told her that she was unable to have children.

'Good to see you, Mister, good to have you h o m e… '

He kissed her, on the cheek. It was not a kiss of devotion but of true friendship. Later she would give him the numbers of the new mobile phones that the Cards had dropped off, and when the house was last scanned for bugs, and where the vans were in the road for the cameras. She was a pretty woman, an inch or so taller than him, and had a good throat and good ankles. He had insisted that she never visited him in Brixton, never came to the gallery for the magistrate's committal hearing or travelled down to the Old Bailey. He protected his Princess from prying, peering, stripping eyes.

'… I expect you'd like a bath, and how about a nice lasagne then? God, it's good to have you back.'

She closed the door behind him.

As if it were his sole priority, Mister said, 'We don't know where Cruncher is. He wasn't on the plane last night. His hotel don't know where he is… It's ridiculous… Cruncher's never gone missing.'

The judge paused in the process of his laborious handwriting, shrugged, smiled helplessly and said that his daughter normally did the typing for him, but sadly she was not available. Frank Williams had just looked down at his watch.

'It's not a problem, sir,' Frank said. 'You have my name, number and workplace, yes? My involvement is purely coincidental. I happened to be passing the river and saw the body. It might be that of a foreigner, which would make the death IPTF business. The routine, sir, is that we should have a post-mortem, and that I'll set in motion an investigation to find out the identity of the deceased. It's all pretty straight-forward, I don't expect too many earthquakes… '

Again there was a self-deprecating gesture with the hands. 'It is because it is routine that you have been sent to me. If earthquakes were anticipated you would have been channelled to someone more appropriate, to someone more worthy.'

'I just need a signature, sir, for the hospital and the pathologist.'

Taking an age, the judge filled out the form. Back at home the work would have been done by a brisk, competent official in a quarter of the time. He wondered where they had dug this old fool out from, which stone they had lifted.

There had been no identification on the body, and no hotel security card. His starting point would be the better hotels in the city. The clothes carried designer labels: an Italian suit, a French shirt, an Italian tie, German shoes, and brief tight underpants of silk with a London l a b e l… silk.

Autumn 1991

He was watched. He had been watched all through the day from the early morning. It was late afternoon now, the sun was low over the golden outlines of the trees on the hills to the west of the valley, and he turned his slight body on the tractor seat to stare back hard at the big man who sat on a wooden chair by the door to the house. The tractor's wheels caught a rut in the field and jolted him, shook his spine through the thinning foam cushion on the iron seat. He lost sight of the hard eyes gazing at him from past the grazing fields, the big mulberry tree and the fencing close to the house that he had put up the previous spring.

They were two old, obstinate and opinionated men, and each in a moment of privacy would have called the other a valued friend, grudgingly, but times were difficult and changing for the worse, and on that day neither had called out a greeting or waved. They lived on opposite sides of the valley, separated by the Bunica river, and the events of the summer, now slipping away to autumn, had seemed to widen the differences of politics and culture; no wave and no greeting cry. Each would have thought it the role of the other to make the first gesture.

Above the noise of the engine he whistled to his dog. Years before he could have rounded up the cattle in the morning and the sheep in the afternoon on foot, but age had taken a toll of his knees and hips and he relied now on the tractor and the dog's skill. When the dog looked back to him for instructions he pointed towards the ford. In the morning, with his dog, he had brought the cattle back from the grazing fields, crossed the river with them, and driven them back to the fenced corrals by his barns; now he brought back the sheep. The grass was exhausted, the weather was closing for the winter. His dog harried the flanks of the column of sheep and stampeded them towards and into the river at a place where his father and grandfather, and his grandfather's father and grandfather, had dumped cartloads of stones to create the ford. Husein and the man who watched him had only been away from their own villages, in a whole life-span, for the two years of conscripted military training, and that was more than forty years ago.

He looked back at the valley floor across the riverbank. He saw the good grazing fields and the arable fields where the summer's maize crop had been harvested, the vegetables grown in strips had been lifted and the stark lines of posts linked with wire above the cut-down vines. He looked beyond the yellowed grazing fields, the ploughed arable land and the weeded corridors between the vines, past the mulberry tree from which the leaves were flaking, and the house with the shallow porch from which Dragan watched him, and up the hill track, by the well, towards the other village where smoke bent from chimneys, and over the ochre of the trees that caught the last of the sun's strength. His hearing was no longer keen, but he thought he had heard strident voices coming from north and south, warring in the few seconds that his tractor had stalled. But with the engine now straining to carry him up the far bank such sounds were blotted out. As the wheels spewed water and slithered on the mudbank, he saw the pool upstream and the fine trace of the wormed long line he had left out for trout.

It was the fault of the radios. The radios that played in his own village, Vraca, spat out poison, as did the radios in the other village, Ljut. Against the tractor's engine, they were dead. He braked. He allowed the dog to take the sheep ahead. He stood up, to his full short, wiry height. He lifted his frayed cap from his sparse hair. His mouth, filled with ragged teeth, was set in a weathered walnut face below a greyed, drooping moustache. It was, Husein thought, ridiculous to the point of evil, that the radios' poison and hatred should destroy an old grumbled friendship. He waved his cap and shouted, 'Dragan Kovac, can you hear me? Heh, I will be back in two days, if the river has not risen, to plant the apple trees. Heh, can we take coffee? Maybe we take brandy. Heh, I will see you, in two days, if it does not rain.'

He waited to see if his friend would wave back and strained for a far-away call in response, but he saw no movement, heard no answering shout.

For two centuries the ancestors of Husein Bekir had bought land from the ancestors of Dragan Kovac, paid over the odds and bought every scrap, every parcel, every pocket handkerchief. Christian land was now Muslim owned. To Husein it was incredible, as it had been to his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather, that the Serb village was prepared to sell precious land to a Muslim village for short-term gain.

He understood that the Serb people prized a uniform more highly than hectares of grazing and arable ground, orchards and vineyards. The Serbs were bus drivers, hospital porters, clerks in the Revenue, soldiers, Customs men and policemen. Dragan Kovac had been a sergeant in the police before his retirement.

They sought the status of the uniform and the security of the pension, not the scarred hands and the arthritis that came from working the land. Husein himself had bought the pocket of land right under the home of Dragan that included the mulberry tree and the field where he hoped next week to plant the apple trees.

There was no more land left to buy, and the radio from Belgrade, listened to in Ljut, said each morning, afternoon and evening that Muslims had stolen Serb fields.

The radio from Sarajevo, heard on the transistors in Vraca, said every day that Serb tanks, artillery, and atrocities in distant Croatia would not intimidate the Muslim leaders from the prize of Bosnian independence. They killed old friendships.

His wife of thirty-nine years, Lila, chided him for not wearing a thicker coat as protection against the evening chill and his grandchildren, wild little mites, charged excitedly to fence in the sheep. There was a rumble of thunder as grey dark clouds chased the sunset.

The first splatter of rain fell on Husein Bekir's face.

He climbed down stiffly from the tractor.

The sun still shone on the far side of the valley, on the land he owned that stretched from the riverbank to the scrub-covered slopes that rose to the tree-line and the other village. He was a simple man: his formal education had finished on his fourteenth birthday and he could read and write only with difficulty. He claimed that political argument was beyond his comprehension and he followed the simpler instructions of the mullah in the mosque. He knew how to train a dog. He knew also how to work land, and get the heaviest possible weight of crops from the arable fields and grapes from the vineyard. He knew how to catch a trout that would feed five people. He knew how to stalk a bear and shoot it for its skin, how to track a deer and kill it for its meat. The valley was his place. He loved it. He could not have articulated that love, but it burned in him. Because of what the radios said, from Belgrade and Sarajevo, he did not know what was its future.

He thought that Dragan, the retired police sergeant and a monument of a man, separated from him by politics and religion, shared the same love. He walked awkwardly up the hill towards his home. At the door he paused. The sun dipped. The rain came on harder.

The beauty of the valley was lost as the squall crossed it. The russet and ochre colours were gone. Husein shivered, then coughed deep in his lungs and spat out the phlegm. He kicked the door shut behind him so that he would no longer see his valley.

The sign on the desk, printed off a PC and stuck to a cardboard strip, said, 'CANN do – WILL do'.

Sitting at the desk, stamping two-fingered instructions onto his console then staring at his screen, the young man pointedly ignored the chaos around him. It was as if the work he did divorced him from the atmosphere of morose and sour heartache. He was the only member of Sierra Quebec Golf who had not been in court. As SQG12, the dogsbody of the team, he had been left behind to mind the shop when the rest of them had trooped up to the Old Bailey. As he hit the keys and scribbled longhand notes on a pad, he seemed to refuse to accept what all the others knew. The team was finished. Some were packing papers into cardboard boxes, others were going round the walls and stripping down charts and photographs viciously enough for the paint to come away with the Sellotape, downloading computers and stacking disks, collecting the personal radios from the lockers around the room, checking the surveillance cameras' serial numbers against the docket sheets, and those on the telephoto lenses, then putting them roughly into the silver metal protected cases. The senior investigation officer chain-smoked under the no-smoking sign. It was over. The inquest would start in the morning, and it would not be pretty. The SIO would need to watch his back, and the higher executive officers would be making damn sure they didn't have to field the blame. When the inquest started, all of them but the SIO would either be taking the leave they'd postponed till after the trial or beginning life in a new team.

'Don't touch t h a t… '

He must have looked up at the moment that the final picture on the wall was about to be ripped down.

It was a half life-size picture, full length, of a man in T-shirt and trainers, handcuffed, being escorted down a garden path. At the foot of the picture one word

'Mister' was written in marker pen. It was the venom in the voice that made the man hesitate.

'Leave the damn thing there.'

The room had been ritually cleansed, the boxes and cases filled, all the computers switched off but one. It had taken them long enough for the pubs in the City to be emptying of commuters.

They filed out. Joey could hear their fraudulent laughter in the corridor. The team had been together for three years, for nothing. It was the senior investigation officer's idea of leadership: they were going to the pub to get so drunk they couldn't stand, then they'd fall into rip-off mini-cabs and get home, and in the morning they'd all have mind-bending hangovers, they'd have solved nothing and not eased the hurt.

He was twenty-seven years old. He was the junior.

Sierra Quebec Golf, formed to target Albert William Packer, no other purpose for its existence, was the only team Joey Cann had worked for. For those three years he had lived, slept, walked, crapped with Albert William Packer. He had never seen Mister face to face, only looked at photographs and watched video. He had never heard the man's voice clean, only listened to it on tape from the telephone intercepts and directional microphones. Yet he would have said that he knew him. For three years, in the room at the Custom House by the Thames, he had been buried in tapes, surveillance logs, photos, reports, forensic findings, buried so deep he had sometimes needed to gasp for air. It had come without warning. If the SIO had known that the case was about to fold, or the HEOs, or any of the older EOs, then none of them had thought to tell him. Just a call on a mobile phone to say that it was over.

He picked up a phone, dialled. 'Hi, Jen, it's me…

I'm going to be working late.'

'Tell me something new.'

'Did you hear?'

'About what?'

'About the case, dammit, the case – Packer.'

'Has it finished? It wasn't supposed to finish before-'

'It went down, Jen.'

'Sorry, am I being stupid? Has he gone down? What did he get?'

'Jen, the case went down. He walked.'

'You had it sewn up. From what you told me, it doesn't make sense

… Look, it's aerobics night, do you want me to skip it?'

'I'm working late.'

'Don't you want to talk?'

'No.'

He rang off. Speaking to Jen had put clutter in his mind. The chaff was cleared when he cut the call.

Doggedly, carefully, he began a long night of travelling again through the case work. In the pub they would have thought what he did was futile. Each time the tiredness tugged at his eyelids he blinked it away from behind his big, pebble-lensed spectacles, and looked up at the picture of Mister in its lonely honoured place on the wall. That alone was enough to shift the exhaustion and drive him back to the screen.