The Untouchable

Chapter Three

'What are you going to do? Go on, or step back?'

'I'm thinking.'

At a few minutes short of five o'clock in the morning, the sparrows, tits and chaffinches were starting to sing and, with the smear of grey softening the city's lights, Mister paced in the back garden. The Princess was now beside him. She had been to bed, had woken, found he wasn't beside her – panicked before clarity took over from the weariness – thrown on her dressing-gown, and come to find him. He did most of his thinking in the back garden, and made all of his calls on the mobile phones from behind the screen of conifers that would block out their cameras.

'Can you do it without Cruncher?' she murmured.

He was two years younger than Cruncher. At school he had made the money and Cruncher had been his banker; he had put the frighteners on the kids and they'd taken money from home, and Cruncher had minded it for him and told him where to put it; good old conservative Cruncher, then aged fifteen, had put his first hundred and his first thousand into Channel Island-based bonds, a numbered anonymous account. He'd lost touch with Cruncher when he'd gone to the young-offenders prison, and Cruncher had moved out of Attlee House. If Cruncher had been physically strong, and a hard man, he would eventually have taken over his parents' fruit and vegetable stall in Dalston market. If he'd had money, real money, he would have gone off to accountancy school.

He hadn't been strong, hadn't had the resources, so he'd taken a flat south of the river and a clerk's job in the City. The way Cruncher told it, the supervising clerk was embezzling, and doing it cleverly because when the books bounced the blame seemed to fall at Cruncher's feet. A fraud conviction had put Cruncher into Pentonville, and an old friendship had been resumed. Mister, and he'd always acknowledged it, was fascinated – in Pentonville and afterwards – by Cruncher's encyclopedic knowledge of the routes for moving covert money. The day after he'd been released, two weeks before Cruncher came out, he'd gone down to a suburban Blackheath road, kicked in the supervising clerk's door, beaten the man half to death, good enough for him never to work again, and Cruncher had become his man.

'I never backed off.'

'Is it that important, to you?'

'Seems to be.'

'But you've never done anything big – and this is the biggest – without Cruncher.'

Cruncher organized the network of bankers and dealers who would ignore the Disclosure regulations and flush the money into the legal financial system.

Cruncher liked to say that the size of the globe had been reduced to that of a computer screen. Accounts were held in the Caymans, Cyprus, Panama, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela and Canada, and still there was the old Jersey nest-egg. Cruncher talked a language, foreign enough to Mister, of cost flow, franchising, front companies and offshore. Half the year Cruncher was in the air or swanning in the best hotels on Mister's business, moving money and identifying the property investments that the Eagle made legitimate.

If there had been records available to public scrutiny, and there were not, Mister would have figured on any list of Great Britain's top twenty for wealth. It had been Cruncher's idea that he should move on, soar upwards, do his biggest deal. The thought of the deal, in the eight months in Brixton, had sustained Mister.

'Have to learn then, won't I?'

'Like the start again of the good days…?'

'The best days.'

The good days, the best days, the days he loved, were the early ones when he had made his turf sacred and cut down the legs of rivals. The days of security vans and factory payrolls, monitoring the competitors to rip off their trade, enforcing respect with the sawn-off shotguns and Magnum pistols, buying the first drinking clubs, the first bars and the first property in the marinas down on the south coast. He'd made the money, Cruncher had rinsed it, and the Eagle had kept him out of the courts. The best days, when he was on the rise to the top and rivals capitulated, were heady and exhilarating… Then the plateau.

More than three years back he had realized he was going nowhere. No more raids and rip-offs because from the middle eighties, when Mister was in his early thirties, the trade had turned to importation, distribution and dealing. Heroin had made the serious money that Cruncher had laundered. Heroin from Afghanistan, imported into the country by the Turks from Green Lanes down the road from the North Circular, had brought in the big money, and the plateau had been reached when the competition had been wiped out. Mister ran the capital's supply, some that went to Birmingham, a bit of what went to Liverpool and Manchester, and most of what went to Newcastle. The only time since he had been on the plateau that he had been hands-on, in a car and taking a sack of stuff to a warehouse, he had been identified and lifted. He hadn't needed to be hands-on, but it was boredom that had put him in the car. In the best days he had been in sole control and Cruncher and the Eagle had fed off him; on the plateau there had been little for him to do but read the balance sheets that Cruncher presented to him, and authorize the contracts the Eagle prepared – he couldn't even spend the money because both chorused that yachts, villas, private jets and stakes in football clubs led to investigation and downfall. The week before his arrest, Cruncher had come to him with the plan for the deal, and the boredom had been stifled, killed, scraped out of his system.

The mobile in his pocket warbled quietly. He snapped it on. He listened, then he said, 'I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about. You must have a wrong number.' He switched it off and pocketed it. It was what the Eagle told him he should always say when the Crime Squad man called him.

There was a thin smile on his face. 'The guy who came tonight, he's been fired. He's finished. His time ran out at midnight. I'm still Target One, but his team's wound up.'

Her fingers touched his face. 'You're the top man, you're untouchable. You're walking rings round them.'

'Target One,' he mused, rolled it round his tongue.

'And the Church team's finished… Can't do anything about it, not right now, but Cruncher's pad has to be clean.'

Mister knew everything of Cruncher's life. He knew of Cruncher's three loves: rent-boys, luxury, and the handling of money. He tolerated the homo-sexuality, allowed the luxury and marvelled at the expertise in handling money. The police would be crawling through the terraced Docklands house. He had to hope that the records had been stored safely in the safety-deposit boxes of the small private banks, to which only he and Cruncher had the passwords and entry-code numbers. He didn't think that Cruncher, before he went away, would have left behind evidence that would incriminate him or – worse – lead to the sequestration of his assets.

'So…?'

'I'm going to go with it,' Mister said. 'It's what I want.'

'I'll make a coffee.'

'Don't think I'm not sorry about Cruncher, but I feel good.'

On the first train of the day that clattered down the tracks south from Glasgow a tall, elderly man with a stooping walk came back to his seat from the buffet car.

His seat was in standard class. His rank in Customs

amp; Excise entitled him to pullman or first-class travel, a full English breakfast in the restaurant, and compli-mentary newspapers. But it was his style that he claimed the minimum of available expenses. The habit was unsettling to his juniors and frowned on by his more senior colleagues. He revelled in the discomfort he caused. He would not have admitted it to anyone he worked with, but he rather prized the ability to create discomfort. No one in the National Investigation Service, whether drunk or hallucinating, would ever suggest there was a possibility that this senior investigation officer had his price. In work practice, he was regarded as a dinosaur from before the Stone Age, but his incorruptibility was guaranteed. He had demanded, and reluctantly been given, a receipt for the single beaker of coffee. He settled into his seat. A young mother was breastfeeding beside him. A businessman opposite shouted into his mobile.

He shared foot-space with a student who'd spread textbooks across the common table. He travelled light. In the rack above him were a small tartan sports bag and a waxed green coat. A thin briefcase lay on the table, close to his hand, as if it were the only thing of importance he had brought with him. He wore highly bossed but worn brown brogues, a heavy check shirt, a quiet braid tie, and a three-piece suit of grey tweed with green flecks. An antique gold watch-chain hung across his upper abdomen. The mother, the businessman and the student would have been hard put to place him in society. From an inside pocket he took a slim, ancient flask and poured a dash of malt into the railway coffee, sipped it, growled in quiet satisfaction, then clamped an unlit pipe in his mouth.

He unzipped his briefcase and took out a single sheet of paper, faxed to him the previous evening after he had been called to London. It was the preliminary report on a drowning in the river running through Sarajevo.

Late summer 1992

When dawn came, the soldiers were nervous and tired after a night of standing-to. An explosion had initiated the alert.

Dragan Kovac found Captain Vokic by the well. He saw the bags under his bleary eyes. The retired policeman no longer lived in his own home: he had been told it was too dangerous for him to stay there now that paramilitary bandits had moved into the village across the river, and he lodged with his nephew, his nephew's wife and their children, an awkward arrangement. The captain now slept in one of the two stone and heavy-timber bunkers, had made a command post in the dank interior of the other. Kovac had come to resent the presence of Captain Vokic in the community because he, the leader, was relegated in importance: all decisions affecting the village and its life were taken by the captain. Not that there was great life in the village. The younger men had all been taken into the Serb army and were scattered through Bosnia, and many of the younger women had left for the heartland of their own people, far distant from the uncertainties of the war's front line.

Dragan Kovac asked for, and was grudgingly given, the captain's binoculars. He stared out into a blur before the captain irritably showed him the focus ring. Clarity came. He was looking at the home of his former friend, Husein Bekir. When he talked with the old men and women who were left in Ljut, or his nephew, or the young soldiers, it was always of the enemy across the valley, and the atrocities that they would commit if they were ever able to come in strength over the Bunica river. There had been no contact with the men and women of Vraca since the soldiers had come to Ljut. He could see the smoke rising from the chimneys, children playing, and men with rifles sitting idly on stones, smoking or reading.

He did not see Husein Bekir, though he searched for him among the cattle and the sheep that scavenged the poor ground on that side of the river for fodder. If he had not had the binoculars he would not have seen Lila, Husein's wife, and then he would not have thought of the man whose home faced his. He handed them back to the captain.

'What happened in the night?'

'A mine exploded.'

'Did they try to come through, Captain?'

'I don't know. Perhaps.'

'The soldiers are scared, like women,' Dragan Kovac said dismissively.

'Of course they are frightened… They are not like the regulars who first came here, they are not even conscripts. They are village boys. All they have of the army is the uniform. Always I am asked to send more men away for transfer to a more important front line.

I don't think that we could resist an attack pressed with determination.'

'How do you give them courage?'

'I put out more mines. The more mines they have in front of them, the braver they are.'

Later in the morning the soldiers carried forward two sacks of PROM mines. The captain fretted around them in the long grass of the grazing fields, in the weeds that had grown up in the ploughed fields, and in the overgrown vineyards. The PROMs were bigger, more lethal. A few were buried in holes hacked out of the grass and weeds so that only four stubby prongs were visible before the plants were worked back over them, and they were hidden; they would be activated by nine kilos of pressure. More were attached to short stakes and had a trip-wire leading from the antenna to a second stake; they also would be hidden when the grass and weeds grew, and were activated by a three-kilo vigorous tug on the wire. Among the military men on both sides of the war, the PROM was the most feared. On firing, a first charge threw the explosive capsule nearly a metre into the air, then came the main detonation. The shrapnel would fly out at a level to hit the genitals or soft lower belly of the victim. It was deadly. If he had not had the detail of his map, the captain would not have been able to take his soldiers down into the fields where the fallen grass and yellowing, seeding weeds covered that earlier sowing.

Fourteen new mines were planted, to stiffen the morale of the young soldiers, and the location of each was added to the captain's map.

The pollution of the valley had spread, and other than the map there was no evidence of it.

'We found where the mine exploded, but there was no blood there, no pieces,' the captain later told Dragan Kovic. 'I think it was an animal, probably moving too low, on its stomach, for the shrapnel… You should go, you know, you should leave. It is not safe here.'

'It's my home,' the retired policeman said.

'I have heard on the radio – I am transferring in the morning to Sarajevo.' The captain stood outside his bunker. 'You will not have a professional to protect you, only an idiot from Foca, some untrained kids, and a minefield.'

On arrival at Heathrow airport, the body was hijacked.

The slip of paper that authorized its removal was illegibly signed, but that was good enough for the London firm of undertakers. The hearse drove away empty from Cargo, and a closed van took the lined casket to the pathology wing of the West Middlesex Hospital. The man requested by the Home Office to carry out the post-mortem was an expert in the study of corpses retrieved from the water. It was said of him that if there were a chance of the cause of death being learned – suicide, accident or murder – he would find it. On a quiet Saturday morning, the professor of pathology waited for the trolley to be wheeled into his workplace, and for the casket to be unscrewed.

That weekend…

… Randomly chosen pubs, and the back rooms of the spieler Turkish-owned cafes in Green Lanes, were used by Mister for meetings. He set his business operations back on course. On the doors and in the alleyways at the rear and side of these buildings were his Cards. Shipments' movements were authorized, and tables were piled with envelopes of banknotes as debts and obligations were called in. Summoned by staccato calls on mobile phones, men came to pay court to Mister and wished him well. He spoke little, but that was his way. There were three patients now in the capital city's intensive-care beds – sufficient to emphasize his aura of power.

… For fourteen hours on the Saturday, and a further thirteen hours the following day, a man in a flecked tweed suit sat undisturbed and unseen in the small backroom annexe behind the chief investigation officer's suite and pored over the papers, profiles and tape transcripts concerning the life and times of Albert William Packer.

… Through Saturday, day and night, and Sunday, Joey Cann sat listlessly in the bed-sit that was his south London home, or slept fitfully. The telephone, in the ground-floor hall two floors below, never rang for him: neither did his mobile. On the Saturday afternoon, he should have been on the touchline watching Jen play hockey, but he'd not gone, and without explanation he'd cut the clubhouse disco in the evening.

On Sunday, he should have been in Somerset for his mother's birthday lunch, but he'd rung to say he had a cold and didn't want to pass it on. The photograph of the arrest was now Sellotaped to the wall at the foot of his bed.

… There was a crowded schedule for Henry Arbuthnot in the Surrey countryside, where nobody had heard of the Eagle. Pigeon shooting on Saturday morning, vulgar but useful for keeping the eye in practice for the serious matter of the pheasant season, a moment of respite before spending the next day with Maureen and the girls at the Chiddingfold Hunters' gymkhana, where his eldest banked on a rosette, and then a couple of solitary hours in his study to prepare for Monday's early journey to London.

… A charity's lorry was loaded at the back of a village's church hall in the East Midlands with boxes of woollens and cast-off clothes for adults and out-grown toys for children. An answer to a begging advertisement, placed in a local newspaper, for a haulage transporter to offer the charity a lorry had been answered by a Mr Duncan Dubbs, two months before, Not only would a lorry be provided, at no expense, to help those needy and unhappy people in the heart of Europe, but a driver too, and Mr Dubbs had told the organizing committee that he hoped to be able to add to their generosity with clothes and toys his own community had gathered together.

A sudden squalling blizzard hit Sarajevo. The mountains were masked by grey-black cloud, the streets were icy and treacherous. In premature darkness, gloom and danger fell across the city, and The river running through it rose to a spiteful torren t.

Crossing the main road cautiously into the city, Frank Williams had reached the offices of the judge. He'd skipped indoor football over the weekend, and instead had finalized the pouch of reports relating to the retrieval of a body from the Miljacka river. One more signature and the matter was closed. The judge's chambers were a chaotic mass of paper, and the man was distracted. He needed one more signature, received it, and then there was a final tying up of loose ends. Frank was given three eye-witness statements, the testimonies of three citizens of the city who had told local police that they had actually seen a man staggering from a night-club restaurant beside the river, then leaning alone over the rail of the bridge, and the last witness had heard a dull splash. Well done, the local boys, he thought. Good initiative, good enterprise – a welcome change. In return he gave the judge a telephone number that had been retrieved from a notepad found beside the bed in the hotel room; a Finn he worked with had known the technique of covering paper with the finest grains of black powder to identify the indentation of writing on the lower sheets of a pad after the upper sheets had been used and destroyed. They shook hands.

She found Joey in the unlit room, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. She would not have seen him but for the street-lights that beamed through the window.

The bed had not been made and it was now middle evening. The room was usually a temple to order-liness. Her eyes roved over the dirty coffee mugs, tinfoil containers from a takeaway curry, empty beer bottles, and typed papers scattered on the carpet. She had her own keys to the front door of the house and to the room on the second floor. They all said, the girls in her team, that she was lunatic to keep the relationship going. They were right, and she didn't listen. ..

She saw the picture on the wall. It was new, hadn't been there last week. He shouldn't have stuck the photograph to the wall. It wasn't fair on Violet, who'd put up good expensive wallpaper for her tenant.

Normally she would have said it was a damn fine room, airy and light in the daytime, and even felt something like home when the curtains were drawn.

But, this evening, in the shadows cast by the orange street-lighting it seemed to her to hold a threat. She looked back at the picture, as if it were the source, not the mess on the floor and Joey prone on his unmade bed. The room conspired to frighten her.

'How long have you been here?'

He did not answer. His eyes held a point on the ceiling.

'I'm speaking to you, Joey. How long have you been like this?'

The silence beat back at her.

'Joey, I'm not asking much. Aren't I entitled to expect an answer to a civil question – entitled or not?'

She thought she saw a brutishness in his face, and something cruel at his mouth.

'Joey, don't mind me, you're being pathetic. You don't want me here? Right, I'm going.'

Not that she did. The other girls said she was attractive and could have done better. It wasn't love, between them, not the sort of love she'd read of in the magazines from her teenage days, it was just something bloody comfortable, and she'd learned to exist alongside the variations of rudeness or indifference.

They'd met when he'd been sent to the school to liaise with the headteacher about setting up a remote surveillance camera in the roof space above the science block that would monitor a house across the road from the school's front gate. She'd had a free period and been deputed to show him the attic trap door.

She'd liked him immediately, and liked more the boyish shyness with which he'd asked to see her again. God, the ground didn't move under them, but they slept together, went to the cinema together and watched TV together. The last two years, before and after the arrest of the man Sellotaped to the wallpaper, she'd come to the empty – more often than not

– room, cleaned and cooked and sometimes taken his washing to the launderette. All the other girls said she was an idiot.

She knew the answer, but asked: 'Haven't you been to work today?'

'Not wanted. Told to go home. Put my feet up, they said. Relax, enjoy myself, think about something else.

So, here I am.'

She was always, couldn't help herself, most an idiot when he seemed so vulnerable. She doubted anyone else in the world saw the fractured, weak aspect of him. For two years he had been unable to think, to her knowledge, of anything else. When they were together, she'd shared him with Sierra Quebec Golf – what a stupid name. No hobbies, no interests. Some of the men she worked with were into sport, or pho-tography, hill rambling, boozing, or skirt-chasing. He only had his team and his target. She didn't count against his team, or the man whose photograph was on the wall. She sat on the bed beside him.

'What's special about him?' She took his hand.

'Why does he matter so much?' With her thumb and forefinger she kneaded the rough skin on the back of his hand. 'Isn't it just another job, another day?'

While she held his hand she turned away from his face, and the pain she saw there, and looked up at the photograph. 'Is it because of corruption?'

She'd hit the cord. His fingers jerked tightly around her hand and his nails gouged her. His mouth slackened then tightened in a spasm.

'Did he buy his way out? That's the worst, isn't it?

Corruption hurts most, yes?'

He loosened her hand.

'Corruption's the worst, right? You're all looking at each other, all tainted by suspicion. I suppose men come in and search the files, go through all your assessments, get the computers to hack into your bank accounts, and look at what car you're driving, what your mortgage or your rent is, pry into your lives.

There's no answer to it, is there? Can't get rid of the smell. Trust's gone… I'm sorry, Joey, believe me. I don't know what else I can say… '

She knew the way, from what he'd told her – no confidences but the basics – that the investigation had involved the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and, of course, the Crown Prosecution Service, and, the National Investigation Service.

Ferocity in her voice. 'Don't let anyone ever say it was you… Don't let anyone ever say the bastard bought you, or frightened you.'

She pushed herself up from the bed, stamped to the door, switched on the light, then went back across the room to the window where she ripped the curtains shut. She seemed to smack her hands together as if it were time to start afresh. She had her back to him as she crouched on the carpet and started to pull together the scattered papers and pack them away, haphazardly, any old order, into the file boxes, then dropped the lot of them beside the door. He didn't protest, had turned to face the wall. She went to the cupboard under the sink, retrieved a bin bag and stuffed the takeaway tinfoil boxes into it. She swept up the bottles and dumped them, too, into the bag.

The mugs went into the sink. The clothes from the floor, and the shoes, she threw headlong into the back of the wardrobe. She rinsed the mugs and his knife and fork, then banged them down on the draining-board. She took the vacuum cleaner out of the cupboard beside the shelf on which his crockery was stacked, and ran it over the carpet, searching for rice grains, dust, purging the room. She went to the bed, caught at his T-shirt and spilled him off it, onto the floor. She made the bed, smacked the creases out of the blankets, sheets and pillows, then turned to face the picture on the wall. She reached up to it and carefully, so that Violet's wallpaper would not be damaged, freed it from the floral pattern. She held it in her hands and her fingers quivered.

'That bastard doesn't own you, Joey,' she hissed.

'You leave him there and the bastard dominates you, watches over you. Don't let him, Joey, or he'll destroy you. He may think, the fucking bastard, that he can buy anybody, frighten anybody – but not you, Joey.

He's a piece of shit.'

She was crying as she tore the picture into pieces and flung them into the rubbish bag.

'How is it that people like that can have such power?'

The tears streamed down her face. She shrugged into her coat. The telephone was ringing in the hall downstairs. She closed the door after her and stumbled down the stairs with the rubbish bag.

Joey's landlady, Violet, was speaking into the phone. 'His workplace, you say.. Right, I'll go and get him. It's two flights of stairs, so it'll be a moment.'

She should have done it herself, should have gone back up the stairs and saved the elderly lady the trudge, but she could not face the doom atmosphere of his room again. She went out into the street and dropped the bin bag into the dustbin. But she knew that the man's power remained in the room with Joey.

He sauntered a pace behind Atkins, his armourer. For a man hard to surprise it was an eye-opening experience. Mister had never before been to anything like the Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition. Outside, the spring morning tipped with rain. Atkins had picked him up at a service station on the north side of the motorway ringing London and brought him down in the four-wheel drive. They'd been clogged in traffic as they'd approached the site and had crawled past demonstrators at the gate, hemmed in by a police cordon, as they held up placards denouncing the 'Death Supermarket'. That he was there, that the arrangements had been put in place, was a reflection of his confidence in the Eagle's assurance that he would walk from the Old Bailey. He seldom spoke, but he listened. His armourer knew enough to initiate conversations that he thought Mister would be interested to hear, but not to involve or introduce him.

They went down the aisles between stands that displayed the pride of military hardware. Everything was on show from tanks and armoured cars to titanium-plated aircraft cockpits, rotating helicopter mounts for rapid-firing triple-barrel machine-guns, protective clothing for troops in a chemical-warfare environment, land-, air- and sea-launched missiles.

At the main door, as their entry passes were processed, Atkins had asked, 'What in particular, Mister?'

'Just what I'm getting,' had been the laconic reply.

'In how long?'

'No hurry.'

In the past he had taken the Princess to the Ideal Home Exhibition, and the Motor Show. Not a lot of difference. From behind the stands, salesmen, who hooked on to any interest, darted out and tried to pressure drinks into hands. But they stayed dry: Atkins knew enough of Mister to know that alcohol was frowned on. Mister had made a major financial commitment to what he was getting, but he regarded it as necessary if the deal were to go through – the deal had been Cruncher's concept.

It was all about 'peace', Mister noted. Peace-keeping, peace enforcement, peace maintenance were the slogans of the day. He didn't hear the word kill, or read it. He hung back when Atkins met a general he'd served under, and who knew his father.

'Hello, hello, how are things going, now that you're out?'

'Struggling along, sir, but not too bad, sir, can't complain – it's an eye-opener, sir, but I haven't seen a bayonet.'

'It's all so damned sophisticated. Easy to forget that fighting is done by men. The better the equipment you give your men, the bigger the chance that it'll crash. If it crashes he's lost. In real combat it's man against man – but all the foreign people want is the best, so they can drool over it and hope to God they never have to use it. Must be getting along. Jolly good to see you… '

They came to a mock-up of a 'frontier post' where the British army were 'fighting for peace'. He looked over the Land-Rover with the machine-gun mounted, a sniper in a gillie suit, and a mortar team. In front of him were a cluster of tiny Asians, Chinese and Thais, and towering over them were their escort officers.

They were looking down. Mister's eyes ducked, and Atkins eased the small-built men a little to the side, did it with care so that no offence was given. Prone on the ground in front of the 'frontier post' were two camouflaged soldiers who made a tableau with a squat, thuggish piece of gear mounted on a shallow tripod. The dull light reflected from the launcher's lens. A sergeant was telling the Asians the qualities of the anti-tank weapon system: '… destroys tanks, helicopters and bunkers. Can fire up to three per minute. Aim point is hit point, and it's effective up to 2,500 yards. You can change target during the missile's flight, and because of its low-launch velocity the chance of detection and counter-measures is minimal. It has a double-charge warhead for penetration, packs a hell of a punch…'

Mister's question was whispered: 'Is that what I'm getting?'

'The medium-range Trigat – MR Trigat – that's what you're getting. Sorry, that's what you've got. It's an excellent weapon, Mister, the best of its kind.'

He had absorbed everything he had heard. En route to Bosnia was a weapon that could not be afforded locally, that was sophisticated and would be a prized symbol of superiority. On one of his rare visits to Brixton, Cruncher had told him that he should take with him gear that would turn heads. The gear was an offering, a gift – so Cruncher had explained it – to convince doubters that Mister was top league. When Mister came, bearing gifts, he would be listened to. He was going to ride on the back of the MR Trigat. It was heavy stuff, new to anything he had had before.

Atkins, the armourer, had provided him in the past with Uzis and Glocks, Skorpions, Hecklers and a Kalashnikov, and with two-ounce measures of Semtex explosive to blow a reinforced warehouse door for a protege. He liked Atkins, nine years in the Royal Green Jackets with a final rank of captain; the man's leaving his regiment in the wake of a scandal – impregnating a brigadier's daughter and running from the consequences – then setting up as a freelance military consultant had slotted in well with Mister's plans.

Atkins had a mannered drawl, offhand, but he took no liberties, and he delivered. Atkins had also done time in Bosnia. Mister had no complaints. Atkins had suggested the way to acquire four MR Trigat launchers, and twenty missiles, as well as seven hand-sets and the control unit for an ITT-built Advanced Tactical Communications System, combining data and voice-network capability, and security. When Mister travelled, he would be well laden with gifts. He did not understand how the anti-tank weapon or the communications system worked, but that didn't leave him with any feeling of inferiority. The gifts guaranteed that he would win a hearing and respect

… Cruncher had been laying the ground.

'What about lunch, Mister? You've seen about everything other than the open-air displays, but there's no call for you to get soaked. I expect it'll be a salmon steak in the VIP restaurant.'

'Why not?'

He could beat the legal system, and he could buy into supplies of the latest, most restricted military equipment, and they could not touch him.

'Tell me, all this stuff here, who are the customers?'

'Other than you, Mister, they're governments.

That's the level this place is at.'

The pathologist had few illusions as to the technical knowledge of those who would read his reports, so he doubled up: one report for men and women with a medical and forensic background, and a second for policemen, Security Service officers, civil servants from the Home Office and Customs amp; Excise. The second report, for laypersons, explained the finding of a narrow bruised contusion at an upper position at the back of the cadaver's – Dubbs's – neck. The blow causing the contusion would have been sufficient, in the pathologist's opinion, to cause death or, at least, total disablement. It followed that the cadaver could not, in the pathologist's opinion, have then mounted a railing or a wall and pitched himself into the river. An intervening paragraph stated that the injury had not been sustained during the cadaver's journey down the river. The half-page report concluded: 'The blow was probably effected with the heel of a hand by a man of considerable strength and with a knowledge of where to strike. Assume he is trained or has familiarized himself with the techniques of unarmed combat, as taught to Special Forces. Conclusion: Murder.'

After anxiously telephoning the chief investigation officer, a civil servant agreed to follow the unusual and possibly illegal road of withholding the post-mortem's findings sine die. Rank was pulled. The civil servant was left in no doubt as to the importance of the connections of the CIO, and his Whitehall influence, and took a sensible course. The pathologist's conclusion would not enter the public domain.

Hardly a month went by without the CIO telling colleagues: 'There's no point having authority if you're not prepared to exercise it.' The final twisting of the civil servant's arm, close to verbal breaking-point, was the CIO's clear message that the findings represented a matter of national security.

Both reports, technical and layperson's, were locked away.

'You come with a backpack of recommendations.'

'I didn't put them there.'

The chief investigation officer, Dennis Cork, poured tea from a silver pot into a bone-china cup. He held up the milk jug, an invitation, but across the desk there was a shake of the head. He pointed to the lemon slices, but there was a hand-gestured refusal. He passed the black tea to his guest. It was passed back.

' I'll take three sugars, please.'

Three sugar cubes went into the cup. It was returned, then stirred vigorously. 'Thank you – it's the way my father always took it.'

'The recommendations wrap round, and protect, a considerable reputation.'

'That's for others to say… and I don't believe compliments, sincere or otherwise, ever contributed much.'

The CIO liked him. His office was temperature-controlled: a new system he'd had put in when the suite was refurbished – at expense – enabled him to be shirt-sleeved and comfortable. He thought it displayed eccentricity and character that the guest still wore the heavy tweed jacket and the buttoned waistcoat with its watch-chain. They were bright eyes facing him, a little rheumy with age, but they were hard, and when they were fastened on him he found them difficult to meet.

'You've read yourself in?'

'I've read as much as I can in two and a half days of a three-year investigation.'

'It's wounded us.'

'When a man like that walks it's always hurtful, particularly if you have to account for the expenditure.'

If the CIO had been looking to be rewarded with sympathy he would have been disappointed. He doubted this man was big on commiseration. It was hardness he wanted, and chilling coldness – and leadership. He pressed on. 'You are fifty-nine years old, facing retirement. You have done us the kindness of travelling south at short notice, personal inconvenience, and now I am asking you – it is a request to spend a few weeks, maybe a month, of your last year with us, to squat down here. A last tilt at Packer while the iron's still moderately warm, if you know what I mean. If it all goes cold then it might be years before I can justify the same level of resources to target him – a final throw. Will you?'

It was a plea for help. He was offering the best and most responsible job in the Service, and the most difficult. Short of getting down on bended bloody knee he could hardly have gilded that particular lily further. The guest pondered, took his time. It seemed an age. The CIO drummed carelessly at his desk top with a pencil. A frown had cut the man's forehead; his fingers were locked together and creaked as he opened and closed the palms of his hands. Then he sipped the tea, and made up his mind.

'My way, without let or hindrance.'

'Any way you want, within the law. I don't know how often you'll get back-up there… '

'They'll still be there when I've finished.'

The CIO imagined mountains and sea cliffs that were as remote and inhospitable as the eyes that were again locked on him. The file told him this dour man spent his weekends away on a peninsula up the north-west coast from Glasgow. He supposed, a flight of fancy, that the terrain and the seascape, harsh and without charity, had moulded the character of the man. The response was a challenge.

'It'll be a new team.'

'Agreed.'

'Chosen by me, from outside London, from outside the Custom House.'

'Agreed.' He started to beam his charm. 'But with one exception.'

'I'm not hearing you.'

He hadn't wanted to recruit an easy man to take over Sierra Quebec Golf. He wanted a man who was contrary, awkward and dogmatic, a man who bullied.

'A new team from outside London, chosen by you, is what you'll get – with one exception.'

'I'm not a negotiator.' The response, rasped back, was immediate.

'The record says, which is why you're here, that you don't compromise. The one exception – I think you should consider it – was described to me as "an arrogant shite". At least meet him.'

Joey Cann sat alone in the room, with the empty lockers, clean walls and blank computer screens, and waited. He did not know what to expect.