The Untouchable

Chapter Two

Past nine in the morning and the fingers still beat rhythms on the console's keyboard. Two hours before he had waved away the cleaners. The room was a tomb of stacked boxes around the cleared desks and the locker doors hung open crazily. When he had been fiercely tired, his head sagging, the sight of the photograph on the wall had stiffened him. Joey Cann was near the end.

The computer hummed with the latest instruction, then the format of cross-examination flickered on to the screen and locked. He read.

Question: And you were alone in the surveillance vehicle? Answer: I was.

Question: It was after eleven o'clock that night?

Answer: It was.

Question: Up to that time, eleven o'clock that evening, how many hours had you worked?

Answer: Seventeen.

Question: How many hours had you worked that week?

Answer: Ninety-four.

Question: You were tired? You were desperately tired?

Answer: I was doing my job.

Question: How many hours' sleep had you had that week – an estimate?

Answer: Thirty-five or forty – I don't know.

Question: What was the weather that night?

Answer: I can't recall, nothing exceptional.

Question: According to the Meteorological Office, there was low cloud and intermittent drizzle – but you don't recall?

Answer: I don't remember.

Question: Had you eaten in that seven teen-hour shift?

Answer: We usually try and get a burger – but 1 don't remember what I eat.

Question: I'm getting a picture of a tired man, and a hungry man – you are aware that hunger increases tiredness?

Answer: I suppose so.

Question: The distance between yourself and the vehicle in which you 'identified' Mr Packer was seventy-seven metres. Is that correct?

Answer: I believe so.

Question: You were tired, you were hungry, the visibility was poor, you were the length of three cricket pitches from the target of your surveillance, but you maintain that you are certain that you could identify Mr Packer?

Answer: I do, and 1 am.

Question: Had you, yourself, cleaned the windscreen of your vehicle?

Answer: No.

Question: When was the windscreen last cleaned?

Answer: I don't know.

Question: Don't you have the records that will tell you, records from the vehicle pool?

Answer: I don't have them.

Question: Was there a street-light close to the vehicle in which you allege Mr Packer was sitting?

Answer: There was enough light for me to make an identification.. .

Question: I asked whether there was a street-light close to that vehicle – was there?

Answer: I don't recall.

Question: On the map plan you have provided us with there is a street-light almost directly above the car you had under surveillance. Did you know that?

Answer: The light was satisfactory for an identification.

Question: According to the records of Haringey Council Roads Department, that light had been reported out of action eighteen days before and had not been repaired by the relevant date – does that surprise you?

Answer: I identified Mr Packer.

Question: Did you take photographs that night?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Where are those photographs?

Answer: They didn't come out.

Question: Didn't come out?

Answer: Correct.

Question: I see you wear spectacles – are they for general use?

Ansiver: Yes.

Question: How long have you been wearing spectacles?

Answer: Since I was a child.

It was a public demolition. The man in the witness box was as good as any of the Sierra Quebec Golf team at surveillance and had been made to appear an un-reliable amateur in court. The cool reasonable politeness of Mister's QC dripped off the transcript

… Joey heard the door open but did not look up.

He scribbled his notes. An informant had retracted, fingerprints had gone missing, the star witness had fallen on his face. It had been the systematic and clinical destruction of three years' work.

There was a spluttered hacking cough behind him.

'Putting the world to rights?'

He recognized the hoarse, guttural voice of the senior investigation officer. Joey closed down the computer, took his time, then swivelled in his chair. 'I was looking for what we did wrong.. . '

'Bollocks… I tell you what you are, Cann, you're an arrogant little prick.'

'Am I?'

'An arrogant shite with an attitude, problem.'

'Is that right?'

Joey stared at him, his gaze unwavering. He saw the blotched face and the puffy bags under the man's eyes. He saw yesterday's shoes, scuffed and scraped, and a pair of suit trousers that had been thrown on the floor. The man's eyes blazed at him.

'We went to the pub last night – I don't know how many pubs we went to. Some of us threw up, some of us fell over – two pubs put us out. We had a kitty and a banker, fifty quid each, and we packed it in when the banker said he was skint. We stayed together till all the mini-cabs were lined up and ready to go. No one was left behind. We got home. We were a team, the whole of SQG, except you. You were too fucking superior to be a part of the team. "I was looking for what we did wrong." You think you're the only one who cared. You think you're the only one with the intelligence to know what went "wrong". This is a team game, Cann, and until you realize it you're going to stay an arrogant little shite without a friend in the world. We don't have heroes here, we don't bloody want crusaders. Some of the best investigators in the business were in this team, but they're not good enough for you, and you piss on them. I doubt you'll ever learn… Stupid bugger, we all care, we all gave three years of our lives to put Packer away. Go home, go and dig your bloody garden.'

'I don't have a garden.'

'Your bloody window-box, then.'

'I don't have a window-box.'

'Then why don't you just fuck right off out of here?'

He knew that the SIO had eight months until retirement. The man would have retired well if he had been able to boast gently that he had prosecuted and put away Albert William Packer, the Untouchable. Little doors would have opened on to the well-paid circuit of security consultancy. The SIO had had the big one within his grasp and he had let it go down the drain.

Joey stood, stretched, then went to the wall and carefully took down the photograph of Mister's arrest, prising it slowly away from the paintwork so that the corners weren't torn, then he rolled it up and put it into his bag.

The SIO lurched towards him and the fat finger, bright with last night's mahogany nicotine stains, stabbed at Joey's chest.

'You know why we hate heroes and crusaders, Cann? Why we root them out? Why? They put the safety of the team at risk. They miss the point of what we're trying to do. They're selfish and superior to colleagues. Any creep with a mission is not a team player. Fuck off, and when you've had some sleep, may be you should reflect on what to do about being too high, too mighty, to get pissed with the rest of us.

You've no future here.'

Joey walked out of the room and away down the corridor, his bag banging against his leg. He swiped his card at the door, stepped out onto the pavement, avoided the regular little clutch having their first cigarette of the day, and headed for the Underground station.

From Bank he could have taken a direct Northern line train south to Tooting Bee and his bed-sit, and he could have slept. Instead, he bought a ticket to go north on the Northern line to King's Cross, then to change for the Piccadilly line trains heading out into the suburbs.

Taking advice, good or bad, had never been an especial talent of Joey Cann.

He'd often had coffee in the wide, plant-strewn atrium, but it was the first time that Frank Williams had been into a room at the Holiday Inn. He'd brought two local policemen with him, reckoned it would be a good education for them to watch him at work, would give them a chance to learn basic policing exercises.

The bed was still made. The desk top was empty, except for the hotel's stationery pouch. He found two suits in the wardrobe where two more Italian shirts were hanging, with a pair of soft leather shoes underneath them. Beside the telephone there was a pad for note-taking, and he routinely tore off the top two pages and slipped them into a plastic sachet. He was looking for a passport, a briefcase, anything to put flesh on the occupier of the room, a family photograph; but he found nothing. Sunlight streamed into the room. If he had not been a policeman he would have felt that he intruded on privacy. He had already tried the Saraj, the Grand and the Motel Belveder, but none had a missing foreigner. It was the sort of basic police work that Frank Williams was good at. He was slow and thorough, and he made the local men wear the gloves with which he had provided them. Because they were young they were probably still honest, but they'd soon catch on. Another six months and they wouldn't have been down on the carpet, looking under the bed, or climbing on a chair to peer above the wardrobe, they'd have been out at a road-block, fining motorists, cash only and no receipts, for speeding or having defective lights. No passport, no briefcase, no wallet, no personal organizer, no cheque book or credit cards, no work papers, no mobile telephone, no tourist guides, but the room was held in the name of Duncan Dubbs, of 48 River Mansions, Narrow Street, London E14. The description of the room's occupier was a probable match to the battered face of the man from the river, and the certainty came quickly.

What sort of man, with what sort of business, left a hotel room sterilized of his work, background and personality? He was thinking about i t… He saw the flash from the sheen of the material and heard the raucous laugh from the younger of the local men – he had the bottom drawer of the chest open and was holding up a pair of underpants to be examined by the older one. Frank Williams reached out and snatched the underpants, checked the label and made the match. They were silk… Shitty enough to die far f rom home, he thought, but worse when your secrets became. 1 joke for strangers.

Mister was back.

For two men, at the top of his priority list, the news of the trial's collapse came too late for them to take flight. Neither had had time to board a plane to Miami, the Algarve, Spain or anywhere. One, during the eight months of Mister's imprisonment on remand, had defaulted on a payment in excess of three-quarters of a million pounds. The other, in Mister's absence, had muscled into the dealer network and imported his own Afghan-produced and Turkish-refined heroin.

To Mister, it was necessary to show that he was back.

The defaulter had been taken from his apartment, with his suitcase only half filled in a scramble of packing, too quickly for him to get to the Uzi submachine-gun kept for emergencies under a floor-board. That morning, he was in the intensive care unit of Charing Cross Hospital where a medical team struggled to keep him alive… The muscler lay on a bed in a similar unit at University College Hospital, festooned with monitoring wires and drip tubes.

When the Cards had come for him, in the small hours, at the drinking and snooker club he owned in Hackney, he had not known that his minders had flaked away from the front and rear doors.

Liberties had been taken while Mister was away. It had not been expected that he would regain his free dom without warning. It was not possible for Mister to retain his authority, his power, after eight months away, unless his strength was demonstrated. He had sent a message that night, twice.

A detective sergeant, at Charing Cross Hospital, asked a consultant to speculate how the right leg of the victim had been taken off at the knee. Ashen-faced, the consultant suggested the detective should go and look for a heavy-duty industrial strimmer, the sort used by workmen employed by Parks and Gardens to clear light undergrowth and scrub. 'How long would that have taken?'

'To sever it completely? Not less than a minute, maybe a bit more.'

Another detective sat in an alcove close to the cubicle at University College Hospital, alongside the useless presence of an armed police protection team, and had been told the victim had suffered huge abdominal damage from the discharge of a short-barrel shotgun. A doctor had asked him, 'Who does that sort of thing?'

'We call it "bad on bad". For them it's normal business procedure. You and I would fire off a lawyer's letter, they do it with a twelve-bore, sawn-off.'

The body, stitched up, was trolleyed back to the cold store.

The pathologist stripped off his messy gloves and his assistant untied the long apron's back cords and he shrugged out of it.

'Death by drowning,' the pathologist drawled, English language and American accent. 'Considerable alcohol in the stomach, and a meal – I really don't have time to tell you what he ate. There is no indication of criminality. The injuries, abrasions, are consistant with what would happen to a cadaver after thirty hours in the river. There is no reason why the cadaver should not be shipped home to the family for burial.' He paused to look up at Frank Williams.

'Now, please excuse me.'

Frank thought the pathologist would be earning, maximum, five hundred German marks a month.

That would equate to around forty pounds sterling a week, before tax. The man was trained, a professional, had probably learned how to cut up bodies at an American university. While he was attached to the IPTF in Bosnia, Frank made six hundred pounds sterling a week, after tax, and had no college education. He believed nothing he was told by a government employee in Sarajevo; it could be that there were no criminal injuries, it could be that there were criminal injuries unnoticed by the pathologist, or perhaps criminal injuries that the pathologist had been paid not to identify. They were in a basement area of the Kosevo Hospital, and he could imagine what it would have been like here, in the candlelight during the siege, like a slaughterhouse, a carnage hell.

A young diplomat from the embassy was beside him.

'That's that, is it?' Hearn, the diplomat, asked. He grimaced. 'First time I've been at one, glad I missed lunch.'

Frank said, and overstated the irony, 'Well, isn't that convenient? You're staying in a hotel on business.

Problem: none of your business papers are in your room. So, incredibly, you are one of Sarajevo's five tourists a year. Problem: none of your guidebooks or local maps are in your room. All right, you're drunk and incapable. Problem: how do you climb over the railings on the bridges, or the walls on the river's edge, when you're fifty-something, and chuck yourself in after you've lost your wallet and every other piece of identification?'

' S o…? '

'Well, it's not good enough.'

'I've marked it, thank you. Leave it with me, and let's see where it runs/

The SIO stood. The chief investigation officer sat at his desk.

'There's no way round it, Brian.'

'I think I know that.' The SIO sweated.

'Sierra Quebec Golf, in its present form, is dismantled, and you – if you'll forgive my bluntness – are supernumerary.'

'It's been more than thirty years of my life.' He shouldn't have said that, didn't want to sound self-pitying. He'd known he'd be called in, but had hoped it would be later and that the drink would have been further through his system.

'That's a shame, and you have to believe it's sincerely m e a n t

… But facts have to be faced.'

'I'm familiar with the facts. We were unlucky, that's all.' He heard his own voice and thought it petulant.

He'd never been easy with the new man, the outsider, the blow-in from the intelligence community. Never been able to talk to him the way he had with his bosses when they were promoted from inside, closed shop.

'For heaven's sake, Brian, be adult. It's not a time for sulking. Millions of pounds have been spent. We were laughed out of court… Packer is the nearest thing we have in this country to a superleague organized-crime player. You had every resource you wanted, everything you asked for.'

'A witch hunt, is that what this is, and I'm the bloody broomstick?' He hadn't combed what hair he had. His head was throbbing, along with his anger.

The new man wore a perfect suit, a perfect shirt and a perfect tie with some bloody image on it that the SIO couldn't quite focus on, something from the spook days he supposed. And the CIO was Cambridge and connected, and had the ear of the elite.

'You can either be transferred to VAT investigations for the last few months or, if you think it more appropriate, take early retirement. Pension won't be affected, goes without saying.'

'That's remarkably generous of you.' Sarcasm never came naturally to him. His wife, who'd been with him as long as he'd been in the Church, said that when he tried sarcasm he demeaned himself. It was ignored.

'Looking at you, Brian – I don't get any pleasure from saying this – gives me the impression you slept in a hedgerow last night. Senior men getting drunk with juniors is seldom wise.'

'I took the team out. Bloody hell, don't you understand? It's what we always do when a case goes down. These men, these women, they'd put their lives into this, everything else secondary, and me. We went for a drink or three, so what?'

'Not a habit I sympathize with. I would have thought an assessment of the disaster, and it was a disaster, would have been better prepared while minds were clear, not through a hangover…'

The SIO laughed, a hoarse snigger.

Glacial eyes gleamed at him. 'Why is that so funny?

Enlighten me, please.'

'Cann did that. Cann stayed behind. He was at the computer all night. Why? "To see what we did wrong." We didn't do anything wrong. It was the system, the process… '

The CIO had the palms of his hands together, fingers outstretched, a bishop in prayer. 'Always somebody else's fault. I hear you, Brian. Keep saying it often enough and you might gain some comfort from it. Anyway, I'm afraid that's the end of the line.

Sorry, there cannot be sentiment, not when a man as prominent as Packer walks free. So, what's it to be?'

There wasn't going to be a party. There might be a carriage clock sent on in the post, and there might be a seedy secretive gathering in a pub and the handing over of a sherry decanter bought with a whip-round.

He said quietly, 'I'd like the rest of the day to clear my things up, and say a few goodbyes.'

'Sensible choice. The pension people will be in touch.'

He flared. He was on his way out, headed for the rubbish heap. 'God, look, I wanted to put him down, I wanted it as much as anyone.'

'But you didn't, did you, put him down? That's the difficulty, Brian. Good luck.' The CIO smiled.

'Goodbye. Let's hope others manage where I failed.'

'Yes, with the right people I'm sure we will.'

The SIO was on his way to the door.

The voice behind him was sham matter-of-fact. 'Oh, the one in the team who resisted your leadership demand to get drunk, give me his name again.'

'You don't want to worry about him – he's not a team player, but then he was only the collator, did the archive, kept the paper in order. He's a nobody.'

What's "nobody's" name?'

'SQG12. Joey Cann.'

Joey turned into the road. He had never been there before. He had filed perhaps two hundred photographs of it; he knew its every detail – when the trees were in blossom, in leaf, or bare, and the gardens when they were stripped down or coming into flower.

It was as if he had lived in that road through the lenses of cameras secreted in canvas BT shelters, parked vans and abandoned cars. The road was usually in monochrome but it made little difference to his ability to recognize it.

He was a driven creature. In the world of legal process, a defence brief could have ripped to small pieces the slight-built young man, pale-faced, hair dark and tangled, with the large spectacles and the crumpled jeans who had turned into the southern junction of the road and who now sauntered along it towards the playing-fields at the top end. He had no authorization to be there, no permission for intrusive surveillance. Merely being in the road broke Church practice and bordered on the edge of legality. He could not have stayed away.

'Excuse me,' a voice shrilled behind him.

He drifted to the side of the pavement and a woman pushed a baby buggy past him. She turned and gave him a withering, suspicious glance. He knew her, from photographs, as Rosie Carthew.

He understood that he would have looked an out-of-place cuckoo, and she might have smelt his body. Her husband brought into the country Italian top-of-the range ladies' dresses, skirts, blouses and handbags.

He also knew that, eighteen months before, Rosie Carthew had twice phoned the local police to complain about suspicious vehicles in the road, and twice surveillance operations had been killed off.

A woman was sweeping the pavement of hedge clippings. From the pictures he recognized her as Carol Penberthy. Three months before Mister's arrest, at dead of night, the Security Service A Branch

'watchers' had buried a fish-eye camera in the brick gatepost on the drive of the house opposite his.

Nothing to do with Neighbourhood Watch but she must have been restless and up at her bedroom window as they worked. The next morning Carol Penberthy had been filmed by the fish-eye trooping out of her own doorway, down the pavement and up to the Packer doorway for a fast, whispered conversation with Mister in his dressing-gown and slippers.

That night a ramshackle van had come down the road and the fish-eye's last image had been of its front fender before it had crashed into the brick column and destroyed the camera.

He doubted that either woman was in conspiracy with Packer – just inquisitive, and nosy, with flapping tongues.

Joey was outside the house. He had seen it through all the hours of the clock, days of the week, weeks of the month, months and seasons of the year. He knew the setting and size of the bricks of the walls, the number of glass panes in the front bay windows on either side of the porch, and the positioning of the spyhole in the door, the chimes in the hall from the bell – a year before the arrest a microphone had been set into the bark of the blossom tree by the front gate; it had lasted a week before being prised out; they'd muttered then that either Mister had got lucky, or that the information tap had leaked once again – and the patterns on the curtains, and the mesh on the net. Behind the door and the curtains he knew the layout of the rooms. The house had been 'burgled' by the A Branch watchers, the first time they had been involved. They were the clever cats introduced to go where plodding policemen and mediocre Church men couldn't reach: they'd put a bug behind the cover where the TV aerial came into the living-room wall and a pinhead probe inside the ventilation grille in the bedroom, which had lasted four days. Both had gone out when the rubbish was put in the bin on the pavement. He knew the rubbish went on a Monday morning. The A Branch intruders had been in the house for seven minutes and had had time to photograph every room. He knew everything about the pictures on the walls, fine landscapes in watercolour but not mega-money, and the wallpaper, the pills in the bathroom cupboard and the food in the fridge. It was as if he had been a house guest.

'Can I help you?'

A woman was getting out of her car in the drive-way opposite and two doors down. Leonora Govan.

Separated, going on divorced, two children.

Surveillance said she was more often inside Mister's home for coffee with the Princess than any other woman in the road.

'No,' Joey said.

'May I ask what you think you're doing?' There was an accusing whip in her voice.

'You can ask, it's a free country.' Joey was smiling.

It was the first time he had smiled since he had taken the call on the mobile the afternoon before. But he walked on.

Well, it was a good question, which taxed him.

What did he think he was doing? He turned once and looked back. In the corner of his vision field was the woman, Leonora Govan, standing in the middle of her unloaded shopping-bags still staring at him. He glanced a last time at the house. He had brought it alive from the photographs simply by walking past it.

Joey Cann was not a romantic; those who didn't like him said he was humourless and without feeling, those who cared for him would say he was dedicated and focused. Flights of fantasy did not fill his mind. What did he think he was doing in a north London suburban road looking at a house where the only sign of life was a single upper window an inch open?

He stood stock still on the pavement. Ahead of him, on the playing-fields, was a class of boys learning football and beyond them a class of girls messing at hockey. At the end of the school day they'd be charging for the school gate, smelling of sweat and with dirty knees, and on the street outside the school would be the pushers, who bought and cut from the dealers. The dealers bought and cut from the importers. The importers made available the heroin, crack, cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD and amphetamines produced in the far corners of the world, and sold on for profit to the dealers and pushers. A romantic would have said the importer, an ordinary man from an ordinary house, was evil. Not the word Joey Cann would have used. The 'ordinary man', living in an

'ordinary house', was nothing more and nothing less than a target, the bloody biggest target the Church had: Target One. He wondered if the bastard, Packer, had laughed as he came out of court, released.

He had heard Mister's laugh on the tapes, seen it on the photographs.

What was he doing? By walking past the house he was putting life on to the photographs and tapes. He was making the man real. He rocked with tiredness and leaned against the fence. The man – Mister, Packer – would have thought himself an Untouchable.

He turned round. There was no movement in the road.

He whispered, 'What you should know, Mister, wherever you go, I'm with you, I'm following you.

Look over your shoulder, and I'm there.'

Joey giggled out loud.

On the Balkans Desk at the Foreign and

Commonwealth Office, they read the signal sent by Hearn from Sarajevo.

'Oh, C h r i s t… ' a woman said. 'Another body, that's all we damn well need. Lead-lined coffins, paperwork like a phone directory. It's like Interflora, isn't it?

People shift bodies, undertakers, like florists shift flowers, don't they? It'll take a whole morning and half an afternoon to sort it. Families always say yes, then balk at the cost, right? I suppose Zagreb would be the nearest for an international undertaker, don't you think?'

The man beside her nodded. He was reading the signal for the third time. He said quietly, 'It doesn't seem that Hearn's too happy about this. I'll push it at the men in raincoats across the river. Give them something to do.'

It worked away at him, like an itch needed scratching.

Where was the Cruncher?

That morning he went to see his father. Other men suffered bad claustrophobia in gaol or deteriorated physically and mentally, became weighed down by the burden of institutionalism, but not Mister. He had survived imprisonment and now he believed his reputation was gold-plated. He had beaten them. He drove the Princess's 5-series BMW, three years old, and had the front windows down so that the street air blew onto his face. Several times on the drive down Green Lanes from the North Circular, his territory, before he had turned off for Cripps House, he had felt that peculiar buzz of excitement, the product of power, but each time as it peaked there had been the itch – Cruncher's absence.

There were eight floors to Cripps House. The estate had been built in 1949 and was ageing, decaying, but the housing authority always found resources to daub new paint on the doors and windows. The lift was regularly maintained. There were no muggings or thievings in that block, no drugs sold and no syringes left on the landings. On the eighth floor, at the end of the open walkway, perched like a sentry tower with a view to the main road and the parking areas, was the home of Herbie Packer, retired bus driver, widower, never in trouble with the police. Elizabeth Packer, who, when she had worked, had cleaned rooms at the Waldorf Hotel, had been dead now for four years. By the time Albert, not yet Mister, had been twelve years old the regular visitors to the top-floor flat had been teachers and social workers. When he was fourteen they'd been replaced by uniformed and plainclothed police. The refrain from Herbie and Elizabeth Packer to them all had been: 'He's a good boy, really, heart of gold, trouble is he's just got caught up with the wrong crowd.' There was no shifting them on that, even when the police came and arrested him and he went down, aged fifteen, for a year in the youth detention centre at Feltham – and at nineteen, when the door was broken open at dawn and he had been taken away to do two years in Pentonville. And still, as he proudly told it, they refused to blame him. He took the lift up. In any of the other blocks on the estate, all named after cabinet ministers of the day, he would have seen graffiti on the lift walls, and the contact numbers of tarts and pushers. There would have been the screwed-up paper balls on the floor that held heroin wraps, and even in daytime there would have been a mugging risk in the airless shadowed hall beside the lift shaft. But his father lived in Cripps House and the use of a pickaxe handle and electric terminals had secured the safety of the older residents, and small sums of money in plain brown envelopes judiciously placed in the right hands ensured that the building stayed clean and painted and that the lift worked.

Out of the lift, he paused on the walkway and looked across Albion Road to the more distant Highbury Grove. His sight line travelled past the Holloway Road and locked on to the central tower of HMP Pentonville. By screwing up his eyes, straining, he could make out the regimented lines of cell windows on the back of D Wing. During his two years there, he had made the critical contacts of his adult life. As a result of time in Pentonville he had met the men who armed him, distributed for him, dealt for him, and the Eagle, and there his ties to the Cruncher had been strengthened. He swore softly… His eyes raked back over the dull skyline of towers, church spires and chimneys. Over the wall of the walkway were Dalton House and Morrison House, then the largest of the estate's blocks, Attlee House. Attlee House had been the Cruncher's home.

He could put his life into boxes. To each he allocated a varied amount of time and commitment.

One held the matter of the priority of discipline and respect, and had been dealt with. Another box was his father. He rang the doorbell and set the smile on his face.

The matter of the missing Cruncher was isolated in its own box.

He held his father in his arms and felt the thin bones of the old man's shoulders. Years ago he could have bought a bungalow for his parents down on the coast but his mother had always refused to leave Cripps House. Now, in his seventy-fourth year, his father was the same, wouldn't move closer to Vicky, Alex, May and Julie, his daughters. He stayed put: it was his home. They went in through the door and Mister kept his arm round his father's shoulders. The living room was dominated by the outsize widescreen TV and a soap was playing with the sound turned high because the old man's hearing was going.

'You're looking well, son.'

'Not too bad, Dad, considering.'

'I'm not too bad myself.'

'Is there anything you want, Dad?'

'No, nothing, I want for nothing.'

'You just have to shout. You know that.'

'Nothing, you're a good lad… I'm pleased to see you back. Hasn't been right without you being around.'

'Just a bit of a mistake, Dad. They was putting two and two together, making five. Nothing for you to worry about.'

It was as close as they ever came to talking about his life. He sat on the settee that had been pulled apart, half a dozen times a year, in the old days by the CID from Caledonian Road, his heels resting on the same carpet that had been lifted by the police so many times. Beside the television was the shelf and cupboard unit that had never fitted together properly since the detectives had dismantled it for the first time thirty-two years before. Whatever the teachers and social workers had said of him, that he was a hooligan and a thug, his father had never criticized him, never raised a hand or a voice in anger to him. All he had been allowed to provide for the flat was a new cooker and fridge for the kitchen, the fancy electric fire with lit artificial coal, and the widescreen television. In turn, he hadn't allowed his father to visit him on remand, for the same reason that the Princess had not been permitted to come to Brixton, or to sit in the public gallery at the trial. They talked about the programmes on the TV, and the new striker from the Cameroons just signed by Arsenal up the road in Highbury, and the weather, and the girls' babies; mostly he listened and his father talked.

When it was time for him to be moving, he said, 'I thought I might call in at St Matthew's, Dad – thought I might do that.'

They were on the walkway. Over his father's shoulder was the looming mass of Attlee House and he could see the boarded-up window where the Cruncher had been a kid. He kissed his father and hurried away.

The diplomat's signal moved electronically to the Secret Intelligence Service building on the south bank of the Thames river. The name, Duncan Dubbs, and the address, 48 River Mansions, Narrow Street, London E14, were fed into their computers. They failed to register a trace. The Sarajevo signal was recopied and passed back over the river to Thames House, home of the Security Service.

He asked for Matron.

'What name is it, please?' the receptionist asked curtly.

'Packer, Albert Packer.'

The receptionist was new. He hadn't seen her before and his name meant nothing to her. 'Do you have an appointment?'

'I just called by.'

'I know she's rather busy this afternoon.'

'Just tell her that Albert Packer's here. Thank you.'

From the outside it was a depressing Victorian building with a high facade of grimed brick. Inside there was all the light and warmth that fresh-cut flowers could muster. With his eldest sister and his father, he had brought his mother here four years ago.

The tumour in her stomach had been inoperable. The receptionist spoke on the phone and he saw the surprise she registered. She told him that he should go up, the implication being that Matron would clear her desk for him, and he said he knew the way. His mother had lingered for a week in St Matthew's Hospice before ending her life in peace. He loved the quiet of the building, and the smell of its cleanness, the light in the corridors and on the stairs, the scent of the flowers. It no longer held terrors for him.

Matron met him outside her office, wearing a prim blue uniform always decorated with her medal from the British army's nursing corps, and from her chest hung an old gold watch. She was a tall, gaunt-faced woman from the west of Ireland. She was formidable until she spoke, severe until a stranger saw the sparkle of wit in her eyes. On a cold February afternoon, four years ago, when he had brought in his mother, and he'd been refusing to accept the doctors' diagnosis, and he'd seen Matron for the first time, he'd asked defiantly, 'Is it ever possible, does it ever happen, that a patient walks out of here?' Looking him straight in the eye, she'd replied, 'No, it never happens, it isn't ever possible and it would not be helpful to think it.' Few people told Mister the truth, unvarnished, with no adornments. In the next bed to his mother had been an artist who had exhibited with the best, and on the other side of her had been a retired colonel from the Brigade of Guards. His mother, the hotel cleaner, had been between talent and status, given equal care, equal love, equal amounts of pain-killing drugs.

'Good to see you back, Mr Packer. I was wondering… ' She chuckled.

'Were you now? What, hoping the bad penny wouldn't turn up?'

She held his hand. They were both laughing. With his other hand he reached into his hip pocket, took out a small, thickly filled envelope, and passed it to her.

There was never less than two and a half thousand in fifties and twenties in the envelopes he gave her, and seldom more than five thousand. With sleight of hand she slipped it down the V of her uniform under her throat, then winked. She never mentioned his life, or what she read in newspapers. The first time he had gone back to see her, a month after his mother's funeral, he'd asked her what she needed. She'd said that she'd a list as long as her arm, but a cheque would do. He didn't do cheques, but he did cash, as long as there weren't questions. 'How do I put cash through the books if I don't have a donor's name? Do I tell the financial controller that Christmas came early?' she'd asked. He'd grinned. 'You don't tell anybody anything. You do a bit of creative accounting.

You buy what you want to have, you don't have to wait on a committee's delay for authorization. It's yours to spend when and how you want to. I'll send along a man. His speciality's creative accounting.'

Cruncher was the money man. The cash in the little envelopes bought tilting beds, painted the wards, provided new TVs, paid half the annual salary of a Macmillan nurse, put in the computer that tracked the daycare patients, helped towards decent funerals for the dead without funds, the bus for outings, the comedians for parties, and holidays for carers. No other person knew of his financial contributions to the hospice and Matron never inquired into the source of the money she gratefully spent. He stayed away from public fund-raising occasions. His photograph had never been taken at the hospice. She'd told him once that what he did was 'raw, no frills charity', and told him another time that when, alone, late at night, she struggled with income and expenditure she didn't know what she'd do without his generosity. He'd blushed then, and she'd never said anything like that again.

'What can I do?'

'I don't really like to ask you… '

"Try me.'

She rolled her eyes. 'There's a Mr Thompson who's just joined us. He might be with us for a couple of weeks, not much more. He's brought in a box of cowboy books, and his eyes aren't up to reading to himself, and he says women can't read cowboy stories aloud… I don't like to ask.'

'No problem.'

Half an hour later, Mister closed Sunset Pass having read two chapters of Zane Grey's story to a former water-board engineer suffering from terminal lung cancer.

'Well, that's interesting, very interesting.'

At Thames House, the computer registered a trace when fed the name of Duncan Dubbs. They were hard times at the Security Service. The end of the Cold War internal-espionage threat and the reduction in Irish mainland bombings had set in place a furious campaign to find work to justify the ever-climbing budget. A right-wing politician had described the Service as one of 'sound mediocrity'; on the other side of the House a left-winger had called it 'the worst and most ridiculed in the western alliance'. They were

'grey-shoed plodders' suffering 'institutional inertia'.

They were 'boringly parochial' and unable to bring

'intellectual debate' to their future role. As an apology of employment, organized crime had now been dumped on their desks. The computer clattered out the secrets of a man hauled from the Miljacka river in Sarajevo. Success bloomed, a reason for existence.

The line manager pored over the printout.

'Fascinating stuff. What will Mister say? Dear me.

Poor old Cruncher. Best bit of news I've heard all day, all week – Cruncher gone to his Maker… but in Sarajevo. What the hell was he doing in Sarajevo? I tell you what – "what" is going to cast a certain pall over Mister's face, going to wipe all that joy at walking out of the Old Bailey.' He turned to the young woman who had brought him the printout. 'Cruncher was at Mister's right hand – number cruncher, got it, Irene? – his accountant. That's quite a victory, for us, him losing Cruncher. Can't figure it, what he would have thought he was doing in Sarajevo. I do hope the word spreads that Mister's right-hand scumbag wore silk knickers. Wish it was me who was going to pass on the good news.'

It was twenty-five minutes to midnight when the 5-series BMW turned into the drive. The SIO sat in the passenger seat beside Freddie, the most loyal of his HEOs. Slowly, after Packer and the Princess had gone into the house, he counted to fifty. Then he eased himself up and pushed open the car door. He stood up, coughed, and checked that his ID, in a slightly worn leather case, was in his breast pocket; the card had twenty-four minutes validity left. In the windows the lights blazed. He made his way across the road.

He walked up the drive and rang the bell, heard the chimes as footsteps approached the door. He stood flush in front of the spyhole, opened the leather case and displayed the card.

'Brian Finch, senior investigation officer, Customs and Excise. Sorry to disturb you, sir, or ma'am, but I'm afraid it's important. It's about a death. Could you let me in, please?'

The door opened to the extent of the chain and again he displayed the card. The chain was released.

He assumed a CCTV camera was on him.

'Good evening, Mrs Packer. It's your husband I've come to see.'

Mister was standing in a doorway off the hall. He'd loosened his tie and discarded his jacket. He seemed taller than he had in the dock at the Old Bailey. There seemed to be a cast in his right eye for the lid was lower than the left, and a finger went to the scar as if that were a nervous tic. Not particularly big, or particularly powerful. No display of threatening muscles in his arms or shoulders, no show of strength in his stature. Rather ordinary, and pale-skinned from the months locked up. And this was a man who, as Brian Finch well knew, created terror.

'What do you want?'

'Came to share a spot of bad news with you, Mr Packer.'

'You got a warrant?'

'I doubt I need a warrant for what I've got to say, Mr Packer.'

'It's intrusion and harassment. I'll call my solicitor.'

'Almost a family bereavement, Mr Packer, I'm afraid. They've fished a body out of the river in Sarajevo, wearing silk underpants – takes all sorts in this life. We think it's the body of your very good friend, Mr Duncan Dubbs. Drowned, probably pissed, no suggestion of foul play. We need a bit of help, Mr Packer, next of kin, that sort of thing… '

Later, the SIO would count this as one of the more extraordinary moments of his professional life. He was telling a major figure in organized crime that his principal lieutenant, his financial guru, his genius at hiding the laundered money, was dead. His eyes never left the face in front of him. There was no reaction. He'd tried, with his words, to belt the man in the most vulnerable place, as if he kicked the softness of the stomach. No gasp, no flicker, no foot shift, no tongue on the lips, no looking away.

'And also, Mr Packer, we can't figure out what Cruncher – sorry, Mr Dubbs – was doing there, a dangerous place like that. Why would he have been in Bosnia?'

The door was closed in his face.

Early summer 1992

'Who is he?'

'It is Husein Bekir.'

'What does he think he's doing?'

'I think he's bringing apple trees. He tried to bring them last autumn, but the water rose too quickly and defeated him. It is the first time the water has been down.'

'Tell him to go back.'

The regular army unit had moved into Ljut the previous afternoon, and in the early evening the captain, Vokic, had used the time to reconnoitre the land leading down from the village to the natural barrier of the river. His orders stated that he should prepare the village as a defensive position, and deny the enemy the chance to take it and so dominate the road behind. In the late evening a woman had come down the hill to Dragan Kovac's house and cooked a meal for him and the retired policeman. Then the two men had sat on the porch, waved away the flies, and drunk brandy.

Captain Vokic was a professional soldier of the Yugoslav National Army; looking on to the valley in the falling light he had been struck both by its beauty and by the simplicity of its defence. At first light, while Dragan Kovac still snored on a cot bed in the living room, the captain had risen from his host's bed, offered to him with enthusiasm, washed, shaved and eaten a plate of bread, cheese and an apple. He had gone up to the village and found his senior NCO and a detail of troops, commandeered two wheelbarrows, and supervised the unloading of the mines from the lorries into the wheelbarrows.

An old tractor, pulling a rattling trailer, was coming down the road beyond the river heading for the ford, where the river flow boiled and charged over the shallow stones. It came towards the fields in front of where the retired policeman now stood beside the captain. In the sunshine the fields glistened with dew and the light caught the brightness of the wild flowers.

'He has bought the fields. They belong to him. He bought them, and his grandfather, and his grandfather's grandfather.'

'He does not come across the river – tell him.'

Dragan Kovac did as he was ordered by the captain. He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed into the early-morning air. His friend, Husein Bekir, was not permitted to cross the ford, and should go back. But the tractor kept coming. The instruction was ignored. The captain peered through his binoculars into the early-morning light. He saw a short, thin little man hunched over the tractor wheel. The exhaust fumes hung in a trail behind the tractor's slow advance.

It kept on coming towards the Bunica river.

'I think he is deaf. I think he cannot hear me over the noise of the tractor.'

The captain turned, pointed to the rifle slung on a soldier's shoulder, then reached out his hand for it. He took it, armed it, heard the bullet engage in the breech, depressed the safety, and aimed.

The retired policeman protested: 'He is a friend, he is deaf, he owns the fields.'

Dragan Kovac was not to know that the aim taken by the captain was into mud and grass on the track in front of the tractor. The captain squinted over the open sights, then fired a single shot. His shoulder rocked on the recoil. There was a momentary disturbance in the track, five or six paces in front of the tractor, but the high velocity bullet did not bury itself, a spent force, in mud. It hit a smoothed stone and ricocheted upwards into the tractor's radiator.

The tractor jerked to a halt. The bullet's discharge echoed through the valley, and then silence. The bullet had killed the engine. Silence hung over them, and over the dark ploughed fields, the lush green meadows, the vineyard that needed weeding and where posts and wires needed maintenance, over the water in the river, and over the villages of Ljut and Vraca.

The war had now been alive in Sarajevo for a month.

On that day in Sarajevo eight civilians would be killed and forty-nine injured by shells fired from tanks and artillery; the airport was closed; the maternity hospital lost power until barrels with a precious two hundred litres of kerosene were fed into an emergency generator; residential areas came under sustained attack. Tickets were issued, that day, for the rationing of basic foods… but it had been the first shot fired over the valley.

A few metres short of the ford, the old man sat starkly upright on his motionless tractor.

'You think he can hear you now?'

'I don't know,' the retired policeman said sourly.

'Try. Tell him he should go back. Tell him that if he approaches the river again he will be shot. Tell him this side of the river is now a prohibited area, under the control of the military.'

Dragan Kovac shouted into the silence. He had no heart in what he was ordered to do, yet he was not a sensitive enough man to feel that the one shot had destroyed, perhaps fatally, the innocence of the valley in which he had spent his life and which was home to Husein Bekir. His friend across the river heard him out, then stood on the tractor's footplates and shook his fist at them, before trying to start the tractor again.

There was neither a cough from the tractor's engine nor a turn-over whine. He watched the farmer step down clumsily, then turn away and start to trudge back towards his home and his village.

'I don't think you need me,' Dragan Kovac said grimly.

'Correct, I don't. But there is something you should not forget. We are here for your protection. If we are not here they will come across in the night and slit your throats as you sleep, and if they let you live you will be the servants of their religion. You will be dominated by fundamentalists.'

'I suppose s o… ' What the officer said was only what they were forever repeating on TV and the radio.

He saw the diminishing back of Husein Bekir, and the tractor marooned near the river, then went back to his home.

The captain supervised the laying of the mines. The previous evening he had drawn a close-detail map of the village, the track down to the river, the fields, the mulberry tree and the riverbank. The two wheelbarrows carried forty-seven mines, and when each one was buried he drew a circle to identify its resting place on the map that filled the greater part of the printed page, marked Zapisnik Minskoeksplozivne Prepreke (MEP). Thirty-one of the mines were designated as PMA2, the remaining sixteen were classified as PMR3. They were anti-personnel mines. First the PMA2s were buried. They were circular, painted brown-green, and ten centimetres in diameter. They went into shallow pits, scooped out by trowels so that only the three-centimetre-wide six-pointed crown protruded. They would take a five-kilo pressure to detonate ninety grams of Hexogen/TNT. At a metre, on exploding, they were reckoned fatal; at five metres they would maim and mutilate, at twenty-five metres they were ineffective. The captain had six locations for them. They were settled in the ground, position noted, then armed. No mine markers or fences needed to be placed around them: the soldiers who would guard the village knew where they were.

The PMR3s required more care to site. They stood thirty centimetres off the ground and were fastened to a wooden holding stake. From each the soldiers played out twenty-five metres of fine wire, tightened it, then staked the end. The trip-wire, taut, was six inches above the ground. Inside the ribbed metal container, which would fragment into shrapnel, was a core of TNT. They could kill anyone within a twenty-five metre radius of the detonated charge. The positioning of each was marked on the captain's map, and the location of two PROMs and their trip-wires.

As the war stretched out its greedy arms to them, the villages and the valley were now contaminated.