The Untouchable

Chapter Four

His head rested on his hands in front of the screen. He heard the door open and the beat of heavy shoes on the floor. He felt the presence of the man behind him.

'Are you Joey Cann?'

'That's right.'

'The name's Douglas Gough – Dougie to friends, but slow to make them.'

He had used a cold, pebble-rattling voice. It took Joey a few sharp seconds to realize why there was no warmth. They were not friends, pals, chums, mates.

He had been told during the phone call bringing him in, from the CIO's personal assistant, that a new team would reactivate Sierra Quebec Golf, and that he was to meet, and brief, the team-leader replacing Finch. He thought that the banter, wit and crack of the old team was dead. He turned to face Gough and saw no welcome offered him.

'I'm lumbered with you.'

'Don't expect me to apologize.'

'I was told I needed you because you're the archivist.'

'I know more about it than anyone else.'

'And that you're an arrogant shite.'

' I do my job as best I can.'

'The "best" is only adequate. Go short of the best and you're out on your neck.'

'Thank you.' He meant it. Joey felt a surge of gratitude and relief. In his room, over the weekend, he had lain on his bed, toyed with a takeaway, sipped and not enjoyed his beers, and imagined a life divorced from Albert William Packer. Anything, he'd thought, other than the work around Packer would be second-rate.

He noticed the scrubbed clean, babylike, out-of-doors complexion of Gough; the skin on his cheeks, veined, was the same as his father's down on the estate in Somerset. The shoes, polished and cracked, were the same as his father wore, and the suit when his father went up to the house to meet with the owners. There was the scrape of a match then the face was diffused behind pipesmoke.

A gravelled question. 'How did you come in, Joey?'

'I walked to the Underground, took a tube from Tooting Bee to Bank, then walked.'

'Did you see any soldiers?'

'No.'

'Did you see any police with guns?'

'No.'

'Did you go through any road-blocks, were you body-searched, did you have to produce ID?'

'I didn't.'

'This is just so that we understand each other, so you get to appreciate where I'm coming from, and where I'm going to. If the threat were terrorism, a similar threat, a threat on the scale we face now and today, then there would have been troops on the streets, guns, blocks and identity checks. Headlines in papers, worried faces on TV, pundits chattering – but it's not terrorism. It's crime… At the height of a terrorist campaign, assassinations and bombs in railway stations, how many people get hurt, get killed

– ten a year, maximum ten? What I'm saying, Joey, terrorism is pine marten's piss compared with the threat of crime. Where I come from, where I was reared, we have a small church, a free church, that makes a deal of laughter from people who don't know us. Our church believes in the power of evil. We don't make excuses for evil, we believe it should be cut out, root and branch, then burned. Crime is narcotics, narcotics are evil. They kill and they destroy. They threaten our values. There are no "sunlit uplands" in crime fighting, no bayonet charges, heroic it is n o t…

Do you get where I'm coming from, and where I'm going?'

'I think so.'

'Do you think I'm a mad, daft beggar?'

'I think I'd feel privileged to work on your team.'

'You can walk now.'

'I'd like to stay.'

'Why did the case go down?'

'All the usual suspects: incompetence, intimidation and corruption.'

'Listen hard to me, young man. We are losing the war against the importation of class A drugs. With our seizures we are not even touching the customer's supplies. We are incapable of creating shortages on the street. We are hemmed in by the restrictions of legal process, by the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, and we can shrug and walk away, and say tomorrow'll be better. It won't, it'll be worse.

I don't accept that. I have to win, Joey, and I will walk over people in my way to do it. I'll walk over you, if I have to, and not break stride. What's going on now, the volume of narcotics importation, shames us. It'll destroy us, it's a cancer in us. I'll tell you what I like – when a judge says, "Fifteen years. Take him down."

What I like better is when the guy then turns and shouts, "I'll fucking kill you, see if I won't." If you go after them hard you break the power. Without the power they're rubbish. You bin rubbish. When the pressure is exerted on an evil man he makes mistakes. When he makes mistakes you have to be there

… You may be arrogant – you may have an attitude problem – but it means nothing to me, as long as you're going to be there and ready when the mistake's made.'

Joey said, 'I want to be part of that being there.'

'Do me a cartwheel.'

Joey switched on the computer. A cartwheel was a diagram to show the organization of a criminal enterprise. He drew a box in the centre of the screen. He typed the two names in the centre of the box: Mister and the Princess.

'He's always called Mister. It's the code on the phones and how he expects to be addressed – we think it started off as respect. He wanted to be Mister Packer.

She's Primrose, her code and what he calls her is the Princess. She's a part of his firm, talked to and trusted.

He doesn't play about, he's totally loyal to her.'

Joey drew a circle around the box, and then the spokes from the box to the circle. He typed at the end of a spoke the Cruncher. 'All the prime associates are coded names. The number cruncher, the accountant, Duncan Dubbs. He does the finance on every significant deal – wasn't at the Old Bailey.'

He was passed a sheet of paper by Gough.

His brow furrowed as he read the pathologist's report, the layperson's version. 'I don't understand what was for them in Sarajevo.'

'It'll keep. Go on.'

He typed another name. 'Henry Arbuthnot is the Eagle, that's legal eagle. He's the solicitor on retainer, and he does all the contracts.'

More names and more spokes, and the cartwheel formed. Joey said that Atkins, the soldier Tommy Atkins, was Bruce James, ex-Royal Green Jackets, the armourer who produced the weapons used by the Cards, the Cardmen/Hardmen, who were the enforcers, and he named the three principals. Then there was the Mixer, Mixer/Fixer, who acted as the firm's general manager and made the routine arrangements.

He drew the last spoke line, and he wrote in the Eels. 'Eels is wheels – that's Billy Smith and Jason Tyrie. They drive for him. They're both from the block he grew up in, and both from Pentonville days. That's the inner team. Oh, and there's a name I don't have, and a code. It's the information spoke – might be us or the Crime Squad – and it's important. It's on the inside.'

Gough gazed down at the cartwheel.

The drawing represented the fruits of Joey's life over the last weeks, months, years. The cartwheel was the obsession that held him. The hook had caught him from the first day he had been given the archivist job in Sierra Quebec Golf. All the photographs and all the tape transcripts were on the computer, but they needn't have been. They were lodged in Joey Cann's mind. Locked in that room, with the screen for company, he had learned more about Mister than any of the men and women who had tracked the cars, watched the house, tried to follow the money, and who could go out at the end and drink until they couldn't stand. He had overheard it said, but never to his face, that it was obsession, and sad. Joey thought he had been thrown a lifeline.

'What's the weakest link?'

'There may be one, but we never found it. What I t h i n k… '

'What do you think, Joey?'

'He reckons he's beaten us, and he'll be running now to catch up on his life – I think the weakest link is Mister.'

It was off his tongue, and he wished he hadn't said it. He looked at the cartwheel he'd made laughing at him prettily from the computer screen, and wondered whether Gough thought him foolish.

He looked round to see if his opinion was sneered at but saw only Gough's back, going out.

'I'm taking you with me,' Mister said.

The Eagle's voice fluttered. 'Are you sure? – Is that really necessary?'

'Yes, that's why I'm taking you.'

'Don't you think I'd be more use here?'

'No, or I wouldn't be taking you.'

There were two locations where Mister had always felt talk was safe: one was the Clerkenwell office of Henry Arbuthnot, Solicitor at Law, above the launderette. Under the terms of the published Intrusive Surveillance – Code of Practice, authorization for bugs and taps in premises where client met legal adviser could not be given by a policeman or a Customs officer. Section 2 paragraph 7 demanded that authorization came from a commissioner. Section 1 paragraph 8 stated a commissioner was a 'person who holds or has held high judicial office and has been appointed by the Prime Minister for a term of 3 years to undertake functions specified in Part III of the Act (Police Act 1997)'. Serving and retired judges were likely – the Eagle swore to it – most times out of ten to throw back the request. The office was safe territory.

Josh, the clerk, was making coffee, and never came in before he'd knocked and been told to enter.

'We go on Thursday. Mixer's doing the tickets.'

'I'm not sure that I've the background or, indeed, the expertise required.'

'Are you turning me down?'

The Eagle never disagreed with Mister. Privately, personally, buried from sight, he had been against the venture from the day the Cruncher – the barrow-boy

– had raised it. With mounting dismay he had noted Mister's ever-growing enthusiasm for the branch-out into new territory. He knew how far to go: there was a line over which he would not step. When he was maudlin – worst when he took the Monday-morning train from Guildford to London and left behind the comfort of his family, his land and his home – he thought of himself as a victim. He could do his own deal, of course, and go Queen's Evidence, but he had no doubt that he would never live to enjoy the parts of his life that mattered to him – the family, the land, the home. He would be killed ruthlessly, and painfully.

He knew what the Cards did, and he knew that Mister was more vicious than the men he employed.

The Eagle took the money, and did what he was told to do.

'How'd you get that idea? You want me to go with you, I go. It's as simple as that.'

'Just for a moment I thought the old Eagle was giving me the shoulder.'

'Never, Mister, never in a million. It'll be a good trip.'

He was a cautious man and saw the journey as danger. There was the quiet cry of a mobile phone in the dull room, coming back off the booklined walls and off the floor where the files were stacked, the territory of grime and spiders. He liked to work on his own ground, where he had confidence. He needed to be alongside a legal system that he could waltz around, where rules were laid down that could be bent with ease and broken – but he would not have dared to stand up in open opposition. Mister dragged the mobile out of his pocket, listened expressionlessly, then snapped it off.

'Got to be going, something to be dealt with…

Atkins'll be with us. We'll talk.'

'Yes, Mister. I'll be here and waiting. Just let me know where you want me.'

The Eagle understood but had little sympathy for the new restless drive he saw in Mister. Himself, he was tired, looking for an easier road. He shuddered at the thought of Sarajevo. He remembered the TV images of bodies and wreckage, drunk teenagers with guns.

Autumn 1992

It was first light when the troops began to come back over the river. He had not seen the fighting but he had heard it. Husein Bekir had let his wife go to their room and had refused her entreaties to follow her. He had switched off the lights in the house, wrapped himself in a thick coat and gone to sit on a fallen log that was half-way between his home and the well that served the village. It was a bright night: there was a star canopy and a wide moon. It was a night when he would have backed his chances, when he was younger, of succeeding in hunting deer.

The troops came out from the trees behind Vraca, went through the village and down the track towards the ford. Earlier in the evening, before the attack was launched, an officer had come to him and expected him, the patriarch authority of the village, to tell where the mines were laid in defence of Ljut. That had been difficult for Husein because there were friends from his whole life across the valley, and he had pleaded that he was old and could not remember where he had seen them sown.

He had thought it the worst problem he had ever confronted, telling where the mines were or not, when he had heard from the darkness the crumpling, echoing crack of the detonations, ear-splitting noise that blasted between the valley's walls, and among the small-arms fire and the shouting, and the officer's whistle had been the awful humbling screaming, as when the dogs caught a fox and could not kill it quickly.

No flares were used in the battle, as he and his friend Dragan Kovac had been taught to use them when they had gone away for conscription training.

He had relied on his deteriorating hearing to follow the course of the fighting. Four men had been carried back from the far side of the river: one had lost half a foot; one the whole of a leg below the shred of his uniform trousers at the knee; another, as they had carried him, held his hands across his stomach to keep in his intestines; one had had the side of his face taken away. All of them had screamed, except the one with the stomach wound who called softly for his mother, and the men who brought them back had cursed the mines.

From his place on the log, he had known from the firing that the Muslim troops had reached the village, and then there had been a strange, frightening quiet.

He had thought he heard, but could not be certain, shouts and cries from far away. He had pulled the coat tighter around him, and cupped a match in his hand to light a cigarette: he had been careful not to betray his place with the cigarette's glow. Darkness had never, in his life, caused him worry. Often he had thought, when he hunted or when he fished for the big trout in the river, that the darkness was an ally, that he was more familiar with the darkness than with the deer and the boar or the big trout. But the quiet in the valley had been hard on him.

It had broken. The battle had restarted. Husein Bekir, an old farmer but a shrewd man, had imagination. It would have been hand-to-hand fighting at first, but he could see nothing of it, only hear the sound of it, and then Serb soldiers had driven the Muslim troops back down the hill. He had not needed to see it to understand what had happened.

They were in a straggling confused formation, a rabble.

They were soaked from swimming, their eyes shone and were wide, and Husein saw madness in their faces.

There were more wounded with them and he saw again the work of the mines. The sight of the injuries troubled him because he had not said what he knew.

At dawn there was always, in the autumn cold, a mist low over the river and the fields, and the troops emerged from it. They seemed to bless the cover it gave them, and some turned to fire their rifles uselessly through it, back towards the village they had taken, and lost. They came past him, and their madness made them shout obscenities towards the unseen enemy. He saw a knife in a corporal's belt. Dark blood stained the blade, and more blood had dripped from it on to the upper trouser of the man's camouflage uniform.

Husein Bekir began to look at each man who passed him – the dead carried over the shoulders, the wounded brought back on litters, and the men who were not dead and not maimed.

The officer came last.

Husein Bekir sat on his log, lit another cigarette. He could see, as the mist cleared, a pall of smoke over Ljut, the old gold of the trees behind the village, the fallen yellow grass of the fields he had not ploughed that spring and the sagging weeds in his vineyard, the house of his friend, Dragan Kovac.

He asked, 'Did it go hard for you?'

The officer stumbled. He would have fallen from exhaustion but was able to collapse on to the log, and his breath came in great heaving pants. 'It was the mines – because we did not know where they were. I don't know, I have to check, I think I have twenty men, not more, killed or wounded, and the mines would have been fifteen, or fourteen.'

'What has happened to the people of Ljut?'

'The village is cleaned. It is no longer a threat to you,' the officer said.

Husein thought of the blood he had seen on the knives, and of the people of the village across the valley whom he had known.

'Did any escape?'

'A few ran away because we were held up some minutes by the bunkers. Most stayed in their homes, in their cellars.'

'And you had time to find them before you were pushed back?' Husein asked grimly.

'We are a platoon and they were a company. When the reinforcements came it was one man against three… Yes, we found them in the cellars before that.

If I had wanted to stop the men I could not, not after they had seen what the mines did.'

Husein gabbled his question: 'Was there a big man there – a boar of a man – he is a retired policeman – big shoulders, big stomach, big moustache – a leader? Did he escape? Is he alive?'

'If he ran away, he is alive. If n o t… ' The officer shrugged, and struggled to his feet. 'I don't know. I didn't see him – there were many I did not see, did not care to see.'

When his wife came with coffee and a slim glass of brandy, the old farmer told her that in the night the life of the valley had died. She steadied his shaking hand so that he did not spill the coffee, and he gulped the brandy. He did not have to tell her, because she knew it, that it would have been the old people who had hidden in the cellars. They knew it because on other mornings they had stared, together, across the valley and the river, and seen the distant figures going about their lives.

The sun rose and threw clear long shadows from the trees on the far side of the valley. He watched as the Serb soldiers emerged from the smoke of the village with a wheelbarrow and heavy sacks. He saw them fan out then gather in little groups and kneel.

More mines were sown in his fields to replace those detonated during the night, and he tried to shut out the screams, and the whimper of a young trooper who had held his stomach and asked for his mother.

Dougie Gough would go a long way for a good funeral, if it were up on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

Many times he'd helped to carry the coffin from the Free Presbyterian chapel at Kilchoan to the cemetery that was neatly cut out from a grazing field. He liked to stand in that cemetery, high over the sea that stretched across to Mull, and ponder on the life of a friend and fellow worshipper, to feel the wind, the rain or the sun on his face. It was the best of places for a temporary parting, and he always looked to the cliffs to see if an eagle hunted or over the water for a glimpse of a seal or a porpoise. His faith gave him a sense of fatality and a feeling of inevitability that did not frighten him. He had no fear of death, or of hard-ship. The lack of fear toughened him.

This, though, was a pathetic funeral, he thought.

There was no dignity, no love, no respect at the crematorium.

The coffin carrying the stitched remains of Duncan Dubbs, whom he now knew as the Cruncher, was wheeled into the chapel by strangers. He stood at the back. The coffin was followed by a couple in their seventies and he thought they understood nothing of their son's adult life. Only four women had taken places in front of Gough, the same age as the parents, and two young men in loose gaudy shirts without jackets. The vicar, another stranger, hurried through the service of committal. Gough thought the church-man knew little more of the dead man than his name and therefore fell back on to familiar ground. 'Duncan was, above all, a private man, whose loyalties were primarily directed towards his beloved parents, to whom he accorded all the love of which he was capable. He was a popular and well-liked member of his community and will be sorely missed by his many friends.' A reedy hymn was sung as the curtains closed, and without the vicar's strength of voice the words would have been drowned out by the power playing of the female organist.

Outside, in light rain, his waxed coat heavy over his tweed jacket, he stood back and kept his distance as the mourners paused beside the show of flowers. The parents, Gough reflected, would now be millionaires from their son's last will and testament, and the rent-boys would be hoping that the suddenness of the Cruncher's death had not precluded generous bequests. But he had come to see others, and he was disappointed. No Packer and his wife, no acolytes or enforcers. An official gently, but firmly, hurried them on. Behind a low wall with a trellis above it supporting climbing roses, a new funeral party was forming up. The vicar, sheltered under an umbrella, was pleading urgent business elsewhere, and shaking hands.

They'd stayed away. In the car park the parents climbed into and were lost inside the big black limousine, and the young men left by scooter. He stayed put until a car on the far side of the car park had driven away. He'd seen the camera lens. It would have been routine for the Crime Squad to send along a police photographer, and he had no wish to be pictured and identified by them.

It was interesting to him that Packer had stayed away. It told him something of the coldness of the man, and something of the care taken by him not to display himself. He had learned from the funeral.

'He said that?'

' That's what the little shit said, Mister.'

'Tell me again what he said.'

' He said, I can quote it because I heard it, "Mister's gone, washed up, history." Then he said, "Mister's not hands-on any longer. You don't have to worry about Mister. Anyone who pays him is chucking money at a has-been. You just ignore Mister." It's all gospel. I heard Georgie Riley say it.'

In Intrusive Surveillance – Code of Practice, section 2 paragraph 3 states

Any person giving an authorization (for intrusive surveillance) should first satisfy him/herself that the degree of intrusion into the privacy of those affected by the surveillance is commensurate with the seriousness of the offence… no intrusion should be authorized which is out of proportion to the crime committed or planned. This is especially the case where the subjects of the case might reasonably assume a high degree of privacy or where there are special sensitivities such as where the intrusion might affect communications between a Minister of any religion or faith and an individual relating to that individual's spiritual welfare.

Safer than the Eagle's office was the sacristy of a turn-of-the-century brick-built church in Hackney.

Along with the vicar, two churchwardens, and a cleaner, Mister was a keyholder to the rear door of the church and the sacristy. He had never worshipped there but his contributions to the upkeep of the grounds surrounding the building, and the generosity of his donation to the roof fund, ensured him access to a building where there was no possibility of bugs and taps.

'I appreciate what you've told me.'

In an east London pub, a medium-scale importer, dealing primarily in amphetamines ferried over the Channel from Holland, with drink taken, had shot off his mouth. That man, Riley, stood on a rung far below the one occupied by Mister. At that time, he represented no threat to Mister's commercial dealings.

Mister knew the way it worked because he had climbed that ladder himself and pitched off it men who had believed themselves superior. It would start with talk, then there would be the elbowing in on Mister's territory, then he would similarly be thrown off the step. To hold his place at the top, he must act at the first sign of talk – Cruncher would have understood, but maybe not the Eagle. He knew Riley, thought he was clever arid careful, except when drink was taken.

The informant scurried away, perhaps believing that he had ingratiated himself and that Mister was now indebted to him. It would be the informer's error if he acted on that conviction.

Alone in the sacristy, Mister made several short, pithy calls on his mobile, using an always-changing code to cover names and locations. He had just switched it off when the vicar, half drowned, came in behind him.

'Hello, Reverend, how did it go?'

'Well, we could have done with a few more there.

But I think those who did attend valued the occasion.'

' I regret not being with you.'

'Difficult times, Mr Packer. There was a wretched photographer hiding in a car – looking for you, I suppose, no sense of decency or occasion – and one man I didn't recognize who neither the family nor the boys acknowledged.'

The funeral's stranger was described, and the vicar said he had not been dressed like a policeman, but as if from the country: he had had the appearance of a rural vet. Then he dropped his voice and grimaced. 'A miserable-looking vet, the sort who'd put down a family dog and not console you. But he sang well, knew all the words of the hymns I'd chosen, never looked at the hymnal.' If the Eagle's court strategy had not accomplished the halting of Mister's trial, the vicar had been lined up, ready to take his place in the witness box and swear firmly to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth', and say that on the night Mister was alleged to have been in the car he had in fact been in the sacristy discussing further fund-raising for the repair of the rotting roof.

'I'll be away for a bit,' Mister said casually.

'Somewhere nice?' The vicar was discarding his vestments, darkened at the hem by the rain.

'Doubt it's nice, don't know whether it's warm. I've a bit of business in Sarajevo.'

'Where poor Mr Dubbs died.'

'He was setting up a deal – too good a deal to let go.

That's the trouble with business, these days, you've got to run fast just to stand still.'

'I wouldn't know… but I read that Sarajevo is an unhappy place, quite brutalized by that awful war I'll be concerned for you, Mr Packer.'

Mister stood up and wrapped his coat around him

'Don't worry about me. I can look after myself.'

David Jennings had taken home the carriage clock two years ago. He'd have preferred his farewell from the Custom House, from the Sierra Quebec Golf team, to have been marked with a crystal decanter, but they'd given him a clock. It didn't work now and the jeweller he'd taken it to had said repairs would cost more than it was worth.

Enforced retirement had been a bitter blow to him: one day an experienced executive officer working on heroin importation then targeting Albert Packer, the next thumbing through conservatory leaflets and estimating what a new back patio would cost. At first his wife had said that it was wonderful to have him home and around to help with the shopping, but that had palled. An increasingly testy marriage was kept alive by off-peak sunshine holidays.

All the girls in the travel agency were busy, so Jennings settled himself on the bench by the window, ready to book a pre-summer break in Tenerife. He didn't have to see the Fixer's face to know him. Most times he'd seen him from the back, on buses and tube carriages and pavements. He knew him well. He'd been close up in pubs with him, close enough to count hairs on the back of his neck, trying to get 'overheards'. His last year before retirement, when the team had been expanded to a branch, kitted with body microphones, with an eyeball on the Fixer, hoping to hear him talking dirty rather than talking social, he'd spent hours, nights, weeks, months on the Fixer who was Target Six. God, and he missed it. The old life was still a microbe in his bloodstream.

When the Fixer was finished and had left with his tickets, three of them, Jennings slotted into the empty . hair in front of the girl. Former habits died hard. He was a good pump man, always had been. He asked casually where his pub friend was going, and not taking the darts team, was he, not with the quarter-final coming up.

'Funny old booking,' she said, grinning. 'Takes all sorts, b u t. .. ferry to Calais, hire car, then Amsterdam to Zagreb on KLM, and on to Sarajevo. First time I've ever booked for there.'

'He's not taking Brennie and Pete – we won't ever win anything without Brennie, please tell me it's not Brennie and Pete.'

'A Mr Packer, a Mr Arbuthnot, and a Mr James – that's the passengers' names.'

'That's not George James, surely? He's not as tasty as Brennie, but he's useful – in our second pair.'

'Bruce James.'

'When are they going, then?'

'Travelling Thursday, arriving Friday. Now do you want some help or do you want to talk about your darts team?'

He laughed, she giggled. He started to explain the hotel details of the last trip to Tenerife, and how they wanted a back room because the front rooms were too noisy, and as high up as possible because of the row from the discotheque. By the time he had finished explaining about the hotel the girl had forgotten her breach of customer confidentiality. David Jennings hadn't forgotten when the old Target One was travelling, with his Eagle and his Atkins, or when he was arriving. As he always used to tell the few who were close to him, and who put up with his former-life anecdotes, it had never been flushed out of the system. Nursing his small morsel of information he went home, his sunshine break reserved, and made a telephone call to an old chum at the Custom House.

'It's probably nothing, but I thought you'd like to k n o w… '

A message was sent from a spieler, a Turkish cafe, in Green Lanes. The cafe was sandwiched between a halal butcher and a greengrocer specializing in Near Eastern vegetables. From the long street in London that represented the heart of the immigrant Turkish population, it went by digital phone to the Bascarsija district of Sarajevo. The Turkish community in Green Lanes, and in Sarajevo, understood the value of strategic alliances.

At any time, day or night, there were in that drab street, with renovation and refurbishment yet to arrive, the parked cars and vans in which sat surveillance experts of the Church, the Crime Squad, Criminal Intelligence and the spooks.

Any of those men and women, idling away the hours, waiting for the next greasy burger and fries, watching, recording and photographing, would have known the statistic that dominated their work.

Of every ten wraps of heroin imported into the United Kingdom, nine passed through Turkish hands, and most of those hands were in Green Lanes.

The trail started in the poppy fields of fundamentalist Afghanistan. A train of camels would carry a tonne of raw produce over the porous Iranian frontier. From Iran the cargo moved by lorry, passage cased by back-handers, across the Turkish border. In Turkey the opium was refined to high-grade heroin, too strong for the human body to accept by swallowing, or inhalation, and the tonne was divided into one hundred-kilo loads, each with a final street value ol eight million pounds sterling. Hidden in long-distance transport lorries the loads were moved through the Balkans, Germany and France, and up to the choke points of the Channel ports, where the danger of discovery was greatest for the Turkish importers. Once inside the United Kingdom, the Turks sold it on to the major dealers.

Mister bought in Green Lanes.

For all of the efforts, and the quality of the surveillance equipment, the clan communities of the street of dingy shops and paint-scraped homes were almost impossible to penetrate. The culture of secrecy could not be broken into. Informers were unknown.

The spielers were regularly scanned with high-grade equipment to detect bugs and probes, and entry into a cafe by an executive officer of the Church or a detective sergeant of the Crime Squad would be noticed immediately. They sat in their vehicles and watched and waited for Lady Luck, but she called rarely.

The same routing, from the cafe to the apartment in Sarajevo's Old Quarter, had warned of the visit of Duncan Dubbs Esquire, the Cruncher, and had vouched for him.

In the early evening, a transmitted message to a mobile phone in an elegantly furnished apartment in Bosnia's capital announced the imminent arrival of Albert William Packer, with two companions, and urged that they be treated with the respect due to important players.

The entry into the terraced house was fast and brutal.

The man, Riley, was taken by men wearing balaclavas from the kitchen table where he was eating with his partner and their children and dragged out through the sagging door.

He was driven in the back of a van, chicken trussed.

He wet himself. A length of sticky tape blindfolded him.

He was taken from the van, his feet scraping the ground helplessly, and into a great echoing vault that he thought was a disused warehouse.

There seemed to him to be several men in the room.

A chair scraped, as if the man sitting on it leaned forward.

A whispered voice, and his hope died: 'People tell me, Georgie, that you've been talking about me… '

'It'll have to be the youngster,' Gough said.

'Isn't there a way round it?'A bead of sweat rolled down the chief investigation officer's cheek.

'I've a room full of people who don't know each other, let alone the target.'

'Is he up to that sort of work?'

'Have to wait and see, won't we?'

'You're a bundle of encouragement, Mr Gough. I can arrange for a surveillance expert to accompany him.'

'That'll be useful, providing they're decent.'

The CIO scribbled briskly on his pad, and passed a name and a telephone number. 'If he's flying tomorrow, he should meet this fellow tonight. We wouldn't be endangering him, would we?'

'Don't know don't know anything about the place. '

'Because he'll be close up to Packer, that animal,' the CIO breathed heavily.

Nol very close – it'll be surveillance, watching from a distance. Shouldn't be dangerous if he's sensible,'

What you've got to understand, Mr Cann, is that it is a remarkable corner of Europe – you could say that it is unique in its diversity and richness of culture.'

Cann hadn't been to university. He had left the comprehensive school in his small Somerset town, applied to join the police, and been rejected on the grounds of eyesight and physique. If the school had possessed more ambitions for higher education he might have made it, but it hadn't. He'd been mooning around the estate where his father was the factor, undecided, getting in his parents' way, a sharp stone in their lives, when a Customs amp; Excise VAT team had come to look over the estate's books. He'd seen the way the new-money owner, a bullying, blustering man, had cringed before their power; his mother, who helped with the books, had talked after their departure of the reach of their authority. Slightly built, relying on heavy spectacles, a disappointment to his father and a worry to his mother, it had seemed to Cann like some sort of answer. He'd applied and been accepted. The man who talked to him was a lecturer at the School of East European and Slavonic Studies, part of London University.

'It was created by the great empires, those of Greece, then Rome, then that of Charlemagne, and after that the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians, and finally Communism. With the empires came the religion – western Christianity, the eastern Church, Judaism and Islam, then political atheism. Throw those origins together and you have a bed for artistic brilliance to breed in, and also ethnic hatred.

'Of course, each new regime interbred with what they found, but the Bosnian heritage is having a foreign power sitting on the territory, and hating it.

There was a little window of independence, while they were at war and being carved up, but now – as you'll find – a new foreign power sits on them. Just don't expect to be welcomed as a liberator.'

It was past ten o'clock. In Tooting Bec Jen would be waiting for him at the bed-sit, and his bag would need packing. He had been told by Gough that it was an instruction from the chief investigation officer, that he should ring the number and beg an appointment, whatever the hour. He had beaten a retreat from the first meeting of the new Sierra Quebec Golf team and had done as he was told. The meeting had been bizarre and hurtful. He'd felt himself regarded as an intruder, the only survivor from the old disbanded and disgraced unit. The team, assembled that afternoon, arriving with small bags off trains and in their cars, had been recruited from the north-west of England, the west, the Midlands, the north-east, from Scotland, and one was from Belfast. Gough had told them that incompetence, intimidation and corruption had combined to win Albert William Packer his freedom. They were all older than him, the nine men and one woman, and Gough had said that each had been selected for their skills, their lack of fear and their integrity; then the eyes had fixed on him, as if he were the least solid of the chain's links, to be treated with suspicion, tolerated because he was the archivist.

After the preamble, Gough had made him get up, talk through the cartwheel, and give a detailed biography of Mister. At the end the eyes fastened on him seemed to wonder if he was the weak link. When he'd finished his stumbling address, Gough had taken him out into the corridor and told him in clipped, sparse sentences where he was going that evening, and where he was travelling to in the morning… He listened and wondered what was the relevance of it.

'Take a map, look at it. The geography is of spines of mountains and valleys cut by impassable rivers.

The common phrase of today would be "bandit country". That's not something they've learned recently. Back in the reign of King Stephen Tvrtko they'd achieved a semblance of discipline, but after he'd died, 1391, and things slid, a French pilgrim wrote: "They live purely on wild beasts, fish from the rivers, figs and honey, of which they have sufficient supply, and they go in gangs from forest to forest to rob people travelling through their country."

'And right from those days, honour and sticking to one's word were seldom important. A Turkish janissary serving in Sultan Mehmet's invasion army, that's 1463, wrote of the flight of King Stephen Tomasevic to a fortress at Kljuc, in central Bosnia, where he did a deal and surrendered on the promise of safe passage: "When the king's servants who were in the fortress saw that their lord had surrendered, they gave themselves up. The Sultan took possession of the fortress, and ordered that the king and all his companions should be beheaded. And he took the entire country into his possession." Be wary of criminals, Cann, and be doubly wary of promises.

'Oh, and be most wary of the women. Two thousand years ago silver was mined by the Romans at Srebrenica. The Roman garrison's barracks have long disappeared, but you can still find there a medieval castle, in ruins, on a high hill south of the town. It was built by Jerina, a warlord's widow, with slave labour. When she'd occupied the castle it was her habit to have a slave brought up to her bedroom each night, and every following morning an exhausted slave was precipitated to his death from the castle walls. .. Summary: a history of oppression, violence, plague and thieving, ruthless cruelty and utter dishonesty.'

They were seated in a hot little room in a Gower Street second-floor flat. The only light shone on the desk where the lecturer sat. A baby was crying in another room and a woman's voice tried to soothe it.

The coffee he'd been given was too bitter for him and was now cold. The light shone on the map. The lecturer chain-smoked.

'So you're telling me that a major figure in organized crime in the UK is going to Bosnia, and you don't know why. Let's begin with a tasty quote. The present-day foreign occupying power, operating under various names that add up to United Nations, was headed a couple of years back by Elisabeth Rehn, UN Special Representative of the Secretary General.

She said: "If we fail to do something, this country will become an Eldorado for criminals." Normally, that wouldn't matter. Take a look at that map again. Look at Bosnia's position. It used to be called "the Balkans route". It is a crossroads, a junction. It is the natural melting point for the roads linking the Middle East, the mediteranean, Central Europe and the northern countries of the continent. People using that crossroads were rather inconvenienced by forty-five months of fighting, but that's over now and the lorries are rolling again. Whatever it is that you want to bring into Bosnia, once you have brought it there you have many options as to where you ship it to. Nothing was done, and it's now Eldorado… Do I need to say more?'

Joey assumed that the chief investigation officer -

God to him, a distant figure he had never met and only seen in a presentation speech – had activated a contact from his former home, the Secret Intelligence Service. He stirred.

'You don't need to say any more. You'll excuse me, I've got to pack, an early start.'

'Do you not have a feel, Mr Cann, for the worth of academic history?'

'I'm only an executive officer, five years' service with the Investigation crowd, and I'm going away – forty-eight hours or seventy-two hours – to watch a man, write reports and come home. They're sending me on sufferance… I'm grateful for your time.'

'I apologize for delaying you, Mr Cann. Forgive me, but having time to pack is the least of your problems. I've tried to give you three or four snapshots, postcards, from Bosnia. Violence and treachery, a hatred of foreigners and a culture of smuggling are as ingrained in that society as mineral iron in granite rock. Don't forget that. Bosnia is not Bognor, it is not Birmingham, not Brighton. Watch your back, Mr Cann.'

He felt the shiver in his body and ground his fingernails into his palms to halt it. He stood up and said weakly, 'It's nothing serious. If it were a big deal then it wouldn't be me they'd have sent.'