The Untouchable

Chapter Five

'You call me each day – I need to hear from you every evening.'

Gough was awake, alert. Joey reckoned him the sort of man who didn't need sleep.

'I want a total log of where he goes and who he sees. They don't protect themselves away like they do at home. They get sloppy. I've a team put together that has to be fed, got to have something to bite on. I want everything and anything.'

Himself, he was dead to the world, and the last thing he needed was Gough nannying him at Heathrow, with the unlit pipe in his mouth and the smell of it on his breath.

'It's in the balance, Joey. If you find us material to work off I can hold the team together, can't if you don't. The Church is like any organization in these sad days – results, fast and furious, justify the balance sheet. If it's taking too long, if it's going to be too expensive, if there isn't a knock in sight and handcuffs, then we'll be wound up.'

Joey had come by mini-cab but Gough, the first thing he was told, had caught two buses to reach the airport. With his rank, Gough was entitled to a car and a driver. Joey realized it was Gough's way of telling him, fiercely, that the journey and the work were not holiday. Joey didn't know of another senior investigation officer who would have come out to Heathrow at ten to seven to see off a junior on a flight. His bag was checked in. He thought that soon, if not already, the new men and women of Sierra Quebec Golf would be drifting into the Custom House. They were a miserable crowd, not like the old team. What he'd seen of them, there was no wit among them. They looked puritanical in their serenity. Pulled in from around the country so there was no possibility that they were tainted by association, they were all hard and humourless, and suspicion of him had blazed in their eyes. They would be drifting into a room where the door's locks had been changed, and where new lockers would be installed later that morning with new keys, and there was already a spyhole set in the door and a voicebox for visitors to announce themselves. Within days, the room would stink because no cleaners were to be allowed inside during the night.

'But, and this is but and big, you do not put yourself at risk. At all times you are professional, and you are there to collect evidence. If what you do is illegal, can't be used, then you will get no praise from me. I don't want a bag full of material that a lawyer can pick holes in. You are legal at all times, and that is not negotiable.'

He had told Jen that it was just two or three days.

She'd been waiting for him and his clothes had been laid out on the bed. She'd washed all the shirts, put them through the dryer, then ironed them. She'd brought him, said sweetly, shyly, that he might want to take it with him, a strip of four photographs of herself froma supermarket booth; she smiled in one, frowned in another, pulled a solemn face in a third, and stuck her tongue out in the last. She'd stayed the night. They'd both been half awake, half asleep, after The alarm had gone off; he'd have forgotten the strip ol pictures if she hadn't pointed to them, and they were in his wallet against his backside. She hadn't cried as he'd left but she might have done when he'd closed the front door and run to the mini-cab in the street.

'That's her – the lady's privilege, tardiness…'

Gough's voice dropped. 'I want his head. I want the blood running on the plate, like it's gravy… but legal. Don't dare forget that.'

Following Gough's eyeline, Joey saw her. He'd expected one of the style of women he worked with in the Custom House. The style was flat shoes, square hips, small chests, chucked-back shoulders, no makeup, bobbed hair. He'd said to Jen often enough – and it mattered nothing to him – that femininity in the Church was the endangered species. They swore with the men, drank with the men, had failed marriages with the men, and pissed in the bucket with the men when they were cooped up in the vans on surveillance. He was staring because it was not what he had expected or was used to. She looked like Kensington or Knightsbridge woman. She was looking around her as she headed for the check-in of Croatian Airways. As she wafted into the queue, Gough removed the pipestem from his mouth and advanced on her. Joey trailed after him.

He heard Gough say, 'You're Miss Bolton? Good to meet you. I'm Gough, glad you made i t… '

Joey reckoned that lateness, in Gough's book, was a cardinal, capital offence. It was a sparsely veiled rebuff, and she ignored it.

Her accent was class. 'No point hanging around this bloody shed. Yes, I'm Maggie Bolton. Who's he?'

She jerked with her thumb towards Joey. He didn't wait for Gough. He said, 'I'm Joey Cann. We're travelling together.'

'With the kindergarten, am I? Not to worry, I expect we'll manage.'

The queue moved forward. Joey, feeling himself the hired hand, reached to push forward the heavy metal-sided case that she had brought along with a lightweight one.

'Don't touch it,' she said sharply. 'I'm quite capable.

Touch it and I'll kick you, bloody hard.'

She heaved the heavy case forward, then delicately toed the lighter one up against the check-in conveyor.

She told the girl, as an instruction, not for debate, that the heavy case would be going in the cabin with her, and slapped her ticket down on the counter with her passport. She had the weary look of a frequent traveller, as if life was a chore. He wondered how her job description was listed in the passport. There was stamping and the tearing out of the ticket's flimsies, and she was given her boarding card.

'Come on, then,' she said. 'Let's go.'

She'd been very pretty, as she'd approached them, small, elegant and finely made, like a detailed little figurine. Close-up, leaving the check-in, Joey saw the depth of her makeup. Her alarm must have gone an age before his because her face was a minor work of art. She might have been ten years older than him, but he couldn't have said so because the makeup blanked out crow's feet and mouth lines. Her hair, gathered into a short ponytail, was soft gold, but he didn't know whether it was real or from a bottle. She wore a loud blue-green blouse, silk, and a dark skirt suit with a knee showing above neat ankles and lightweight half-height shoes. There was an old necklace, supporting a gold pendant, at her throat, and her fingers flashed small diamonds, but no wedding-ring.

He'd been told she was a technician, expert, and had not expected a businesswoman. She lugged her bags towards the departure doors, not hurrying as the third and final flight call was made. She stopped, turned.

'Right, Mr Gough, now don't worry yourself. I'll look after him, make sure he changes his socks, and bring him back safely. 'Bye – oh, how's Porky?'

'I don't think,' Gough answered stiffly, 'I know anyone of that name.'

'I thought you worked for him. Your boss, isn't he?

Porky Cork – Dennis Cork. He wasn't going anywhere with us so he transferred to run your crowd.

How is he?'

Gough growled, 'He's well. He's happy in his work because he is now doing a job that is worthwhile. The job is worthwhile because it affects people's lives.'

' 'Bye, Mr Gough,' and she was moving.

They went through the gate. He saw the passport as it was opened and handed over for cursory examination. She was a personal assistant.

They walked towards the plane's pier. She was struggling with the metal-sided bag but Joey was damned if he was going to offer help; there was a small sweat rivulet on her brow about to carve a little canyon through the blanket of makeup. On the pier, at the aircraft door, she slipped the bag down and flexed her fingers.

Joey said, 'Why were you so rude, Miss Bolton, about me, and to Mr Gough?'

'Call me Maggie – it's not the sort of work I'm used to, and you're not the sort of people I'm used to working with, and it's hardly a target that excites me.'

He had overseen the burning of his clothes, and those of the Cards who had held the man down, in a metalworker's coke oven. Then he had gone home.

Mister showered.

He was a long time under the scalding spray and he used a heavy soap to wash every inch of his skin, and every orifice of his body.

He sang quietly to himself in the bathroom. He felt elation. The Princess had been asleep when he'd come home, and would still be sleeping when he went out again. The exhilaration coursed in him, powered by the water's heat, and the days ahead would challenge him. It was what he wanted, what he had dreamed of.

The wife wouldn't speak. Nobody would speak. Not the family, not the neighbours, and not Georgie Riley.

And the name would not be written down of the man responsible for the injuries inflicted on Georgie Riley. His name and his fate were not spoken of in the pub where thirty-six hours earlier he had slagged off Mister Albert William Packer. The neighbours of his terraced home had seen nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing. The wife, crouched over the hospital bed, had laughed into the face of the detective sergeant, then snarled that he should 'fuck off' and

'get lost'. The victim, Georgie Riley, had he wished to, could not have named his attacker because his tongue had been cut out with a Stanley knife. He could not have written down that name because the four fingers on each of his hands had been taken off with an industrial stone-cutter's circular blade.

He might live, a white-faced physician told the detective sergeant out of the hearing of the wife, for twenty-four hours, and it was possible that he would linger for forty-eight, but he would not survive. The damage was in the trauma and in the loss of blood.

Georgie Riley had lain unconscious in a ditch at the edge of a quiet road leading into Epping Forest for an estimated seven hours before a telephone-kiosk call, when a voice disguised by a handkerchief or clothing over the receiver, had given the location and summoned an ambulance.

'How do you get the creature responsible?' the physician asked.

'I don't know why it was done, and I couldn't on oath say for certain who is responsible,' the detective sergeant said. 'It's about fear. Riley is a medium-scale villain, more time in gaol as an adult than out of it, but he's done something that's caused offence. He wasn't killed outright because the point of the exercise is to create terror and to have that talked about. Men like Riley think themselves big shots, and brave with it. A shoot-out death is acceptable, top-of-the-range funeral and buckets of flowers, that's all fine, and they think they'll go into history… What's happened is that he has been humiliated and made to scream and he'll have wet himself and shat himself and begged for his life. There's nothing noble about the way he's going, a piece of dismembered meat.'

'Won't somebody, eventually, inform?'

'Probably – when the man who ordered it, maybe did it, no longer has power. That's what we live for, when the power dries up. You see, sir, for that sort of man, there is no retirement. There's no day that the birthday comes and he goes down to the post office and draws a pension, or heads off to a decent little villa outside Marbella to live off the interest. They can't walk away and protect what they have and live out their old age. When they're hands-off they're finished, and the information flows. The man who did this is not hands-off, he is up and running and wants his dirty world to know it.'

'And until then nobody will inform, people won't stand up?'

'Take you, sir… '

'Me? Where could I possibly fit into it?'

'Riley has never in his life passed the time of day with a policeman, but he'd trust you, wouldn't he, sir?

What about this for a scenario? I make available a video camera with microphone attached. You come in here in the dead of night, when his wife's asleep next door. You've cut down the sedation dose, and he can hear you and see you. You hold a photograph in front of him, a photograph of the man most likely to have inflicted these injuries on him. You ask him if that's the man who did it, and you tell him to nod or shake his head… Let's say, wonder of wonders, he nods, and it's on the tape. Are you with me, sir?'

The physician blanched. 'I really don't know, I'd have to think. .. There's ethics… '

'Very sensible, sir,' the detective sergeant said gravely. 'Let's say it all happened. Of course, we'd offer you and your family protection – wife down the supermarket with a Heckler amp; Koch machine-gun for company, kids at school with a Glock pistol alongside.

For how long? Try the day after the trial finished, then you're on your own, and scared witless every time the wife and the kids are out of your sight, and looking under the car each morning with a mirror. Much better, sir, not to get involved and cross over to the far side of the street and hurry on, like everybody does.'

'You make me feel ashamed.'

'I don't intend to, sir. Take me. Let's say a low-level plodder like me turns up the dirt on this man and my evidence is going to send him down. He can pay me and not notice it, what I'll work for twenty years to earn, or he can have my family blown away.'

'Do you know who he is?'

'A very fair idea. It's not a level playing-field, sir. I go into an interview room to confront him and I've a camera on me and a tape recording me, and a lawyer there to make sure my questions aren't oppressive, and because society demands it I've a book full of regulations tying my hands. When he goes into an interview room to talk to Georgie Riley all he has to worry about is whether the Stanley knife blade is decently sharp and whether the motor on the concrete-cutter works.'

'Well, you'll understand that I've a ward full of patients to see.'

'You called him a creature, sir. That's selling him short. If he's who I think then he's a very clever, very cunning man – stands to reason, he's at the top.'

The physician was at the anteroom door, and flustered. 'How do you nail him?'

'By getting lucky, sir.'

'Who's going to get lucky?'

'Not me, sir. It's someone who can look him in the face, straight in his eyes, and show he can't be bought, can't be frightened. Don't know where you'll find him.'

Late by ninety-five minutes into Zagreb, they had missed the connecting flight to Sarajevo, and been told that the following flight in the afternoon was cancelled.

They had to be in Sarajevo that night, Joey had said.

Then he should go and hire a car, she'd replied tartly.

He'd done it. He'd picked her up outside the terminal in a small Ford. She'd gone and bought a road map of Croatia, and the look on her face said this was Mickey Mouse and more of what she was not used to. They'd driven away from Zagreb, caught the Sisak road and gone through the ghost town of Petrinja. She'd had the wheel and he'd navigated off the map. It was only when he'd missed a turning that he realized an apology wasn't necessary because she'd caught it. She knew the road. Then he'd sulked and tossed the map over his shoulder so that it fell on to her metal-sided case on the back seat. Two miles after the first signpost to Dvor, she had swung the car abruptly off the road, bumped up a track into a wood and not stopped before they were hidden from other motorists' view.

He'd watched. His help was neither asked for nor offered. She stripped out the back seat, with the metalwork under it and the door panels, then opened the heavy case. There were probes, terminals, a variety of light sockets, power units and gear he could not recognize. He'd thought he'd seen everything of surveillance equipment in the room used by Sierra Quebec Golf, but some of what he now looked at was smaller and more compact, and the rest he had never seen before. It all went into the door handle and under the back seat, then she rebuilt the car. Last, she took half of her clothes from the soft bag and casually dumped them into the case. He saw, before the case was closed and locked, a couple of cocktail dresses, items of underwear, and a pair of heavy walking boots, and they'd driven on. He carried only his camera, with the 300mm lens, and that could be explained. He had no paperwork with him.

The border was a line in the river between Dvor and Bosanski Novi. The bridge over it was military, an iron frame and rattling planks. The old bridge was collapsed and unrepaired from the precision of a USAF strike five years earlier. They crossed and were waved down. As she braked she asked for his passport.

She snapped out of the vehicle. She took charge.

She flourished the passport and a packet of cigarettes had emerged from her handbag, then another, as if they were loaves and fishes. The Customs men, who had been bored and lounging and smoking, were around her. She was their honeypot. She flashed smiles, and the cigarettes slipped into clawing hands.

She spoke their language and they laughed with her. She marched a man with sergeant's stripes back to the car, flicked open the case and her bag, then Joey's bag, and there was more laughter as she rolled her eyes when her underwear was exposed. She went into a dismal wood-plank shack. He wondered how many languages she spoke and where she had been, and he knew, in truth, that he had just not thought through the question of going into a Customs check.

When she came out, holding the passports, she offered her hand to the sergeant. He took it formally, slobbered a kiss on the back, and they were gone.

'Well done,' Joey said gruffly.

'Thrilled, I'm sure, to be honoured with praise.'

'You've been here before?' It seemed a pointless question.

'Where do you know best?' she asked.

'Nowhere, not abroad… ' He thought his answer confirmed that he was low grade. 'Workwise? Well, bits of London. On my team it would be Green Lanes, but the last three years I've hardly been out of the Custom House. Yes, it would be Green Lanes, that's north from Stoke Newington and south from-'

'Yes, yes… There's a dozen places I know best. Here's one, and you don't need to know the others.'

She drove fast. Twice he closed his eyes as, late, she swerved out of a lorry's path. She'd have seen that he flinched, and that hurt. She seemed not to care about the pot-holes in the tarmac.

It was dismal country, pocked with isolated farmhouses, and he saw women doing the subsistence work and digging in fields. His mind raced. Serb territory, and the atmosphere was of poverty from which there was no recall and helplessness. They went past gaudy, ghastly roadside bars, painted to grate on the eyes, and lonely little fuel stations. He thought he was in the land of the abandoned where the people paid a collective price for their crimes.

Coming towards Prijedor they skirted villages where weeds grew inside roofless houses and rake-thin dogs chased the car's wheels. No living person moved in these villages, which were being overwhelmed by undergrowth. He had seen these places on television, when it had happened, but he had not seen them since they were destroyed. Brambles and thicket bush survived where people had not.

She said quietly 'The north-west and the south-east were the worst for cleansing. That's their word, used in their army manuals. The word is ciscenje, to clean – as in minefields, barricades, enemy positions. They merely transferred it to people. They surrounded these villages, one at a time, and told the Muslims they were leaving. First they made them sign away their property rights and took all evidence of property possession from them, then they separated them. The women and children went into UN camps over the Croat border. The men were taken to camps close to here. They killed as many of the men as they could, by beheading, beating, disembowelling – you name it – and they bulldozed the cemeteries, poisoned the wells and blew up the mosques. They involved a lot of people in the cleansing and the killing so that the guilt was shared round. The guilt's collective, that was the skill of the leaders. The other part of the skill was the destruction of the heritage of those forced out. But remember, always remember, there were no saints among the warlords, whatever side we're talking about, only sinners. I don't suppose you feel hungry.

You can go off food here, easily.'

'I'm not hungry,' joey said.

She told him that outside Prijedor had been the worst of the camps, source of the skeletal human images on the television, where there had been the worst of the killings.

'Could we have done that?' Joey blurted. 'Could we have done those things in the camps, you and me?'

'Of course we could,' she drawled. 'It's about environment, a sense of survival and propaganda.

And it's about wanting to humiliate an enemy. Scratch anyone's skin and you'll find an abscess of beastliness hidden away. Where there's an obsession of hatred, where the loathing is targeted, where there's a desire to prove supremacy, any of us can get to act like that.

Go to Germany, stand in a queue with the pensioners, dear old folks, and ask them.'

He felt the growing sensation of an awesome helplessness, more acute than when they had first driven through the ravaged villages. On the road near to Banja Luka, high above the town, he saw a great metal-fabricated complex, which she said had been an old steel works. He could make out the tanks, armoured personnel carriers and troop-carrying twin-rotor helicopters, and she told him it was the headquarters of the British army contingent attached to SFOR in Bosnia, and explained that was Stabilization Force. She drove hard. Beyond Banja Luka the road deteriorated. It was hairpin and cut out of a rock wall beside a fast river. There were stones in the road that she swung the wheel to avoid, and crashed vehicles that teetered on the cliffs above the water torrent. He had thought there might be pride in rebuilding a country after war, but he saw none of that. There was a lake where the river was dammed and men fished among a debris of floating bottles and rubbish bags. He must have shaken his head, must have shown his bewilderment.

'You don't just pack up after a war, Joey, like nothing's happened. Nobody escapes, everyone is scarred. Because you don't read about it any more, that doesn't mean the scars have gone. All it means is that the rest of the world, which once cared, has got bloody bored

… Can't actually say that I blame it.

God helps those who help themselves, if you're with me. They don't know how to help themselves.'

The light was slipping as they skirted Jajce. They bypassed the town, which was dominated by a medieval fortress perched on a rock crag, and she said

– with the casualness of a tour guide handing down morsels – that the place had been a Second World War headquarters for Tito's partisans, where the German forces had not been able to reach him. More history, as if she too thought history as important as the academic had the night before. They had the heater on in the car but the cold was creeping in. He had started to shiver, through tiredness, hunger and a bright sliver of fear. Headlights speared them. Out of the Serb territory, into Croat and Muslim-controlled land, the road climbed. It was a better surface, but there was ice on it. There were oases of light, which they sped through – Donji Vakuf, Travnik and Vitez, with shadow figures walking nowhere on dull pavements, the blocks of old socialist architecture and closed-down factories.

When she stopped at a roadside cafe there were foul toilets round the back. They were the only customers, but the atmosphere made them feel intruders. Three men and a woman lolled on the cafe counter, eyed them and never spoke or moved other than to agree the order, then bring them coffee and a Coca-Cola chaser. There was a broken ceiling fan above them, short of a spoke, and around them were faded pictures of Grand Prix cars. He noted that she didn't speak their language to them, but English.

Their eyes never left her. She smoked a long, dark-wrapped cigarette, and he muttered that she could have lit up in the car had she wanted and she said that it was to cut down that she hadn't smoked, not out of consideration to him. Did she want him to drive, and she'd laid her small precise hand on his and told him it was better for her to drive… The road away from the cafe ran towards a mountain pass. The ice glistened on it and there were snow heaps at the side.

Four times he saw places where the crash-barriers had been pierced by skidding vehicles. Each time the wheels slipped momentarily on the ice he felt the further fraying of his nerves. They came round a corner, low gear and struggling, and ahead of them and far below a long finger was illuminated and laid out. She pulled into the side of the road, opened her door and stepped out. The blast of cold air jolted him and he followed her, his feet crunching in the drift.

'That's it,' she said. 'That's Sarajevo.'

The cold settled on his nose and lips, and the wind hit him. He felt far from home, ignorant and uncertain. She must have read him. She tucked her hand into his arm. 'I hope he's worth it, your man.'

He was tired, stressed, and the hand on his arm irritated him. 'Can I just say something? Please, and I'm asking you pleasantly, don't patronize me… I've never worked with your crowd, I don't know whether you're good or bad or indifferent at what you do, I have to take you on trust. Why did they send me?

Because they assess me as being inside the target's skin. I hope that's enough of an explanation.'

She squeezed his arm. 'I stand chastized. What's the immediate priority?'

'We work inside a legal system. I don't know about you, what you normally do, but for us the legal system is the Bible. As a Customs officer I can't just swan in here, without local authority, and poke about at what is called "intrusive surveillance". I need permission. If I don't have that permission then anything I discover – sorry, we discover – on Target One would be ruled as inadmissible in court, as would anything that leads from initial information gathered here.

Without authority, I would be bounced so hard when I get back that my feet won't touch before I'm standing at Dover, in uniform, poking into holiday suitcases. In addition, if I – that's we – show out and get lifted by the local police, and there's not a signature on a piece of paper, we're dead in the water.'

'Who's the "local authority"? Who signs?'

'A local judge, a magistrate… '

She was laughing at him, mocking. 'Don't you know anything about this place?'

'Bugger all,' Joey said.

'It's bent, corrupt. You're not telling me you believe judges and magistrates, here, are independent.

They're owned.'

He gazed down at the myriad dancing lights around which, confining them, were the darker expanses of towering snow-covered mountains.

'Then I have to find one who isn't. It's all I need – just one… You asked if the target was worth it?' He could see the first photograph he had filed of Mister.

Mister wore brown shoes, fawn slacks and a blue polo shirt. He could hear the first tape he had transcribed of Mister's voice. Mister had been on his doorstep and had been going over, item for item, the shopping list for the supermarket given him by the Princess. And, the cruellest cut, the rest of them in the old Sierra Quebec Golf hadn't even thought to warn him that the case was going down and Mister would walk. 'He is – maybe not to you, but to me, yes, well worth it.'

Cruncher was cremated, gone. By now the few flowers would have been dumped or taken to a hospital. A hole had appeared and needed filling.

Would Abie Wilkes's boy slot into it? It was a big decision to make, but young Solomon was well spoken of. Even Cruncher had said good things of Sol Wilkes, and had used him.

A different man from Mister would have floundered at the disruption of his business life. Men at the fringes had been discarded. But the inner circle had lasted the course. They were either family or from the estate where Mister had grown up, or they were trusted contacts from the Pentonville experience.

They were all long-term on the team.

Before he went to a rendezvous with young Sol Wilkes, Mister travelled alone into central London to open up the safety deposit boxes, the contents of which had been known only to him and to Cruncher.

There were four locations for him to visit. Since he had heard of Cruncher's death, Mister had ordered a surveillance operation mounted on the four buildings where his boxes were lodged. He had been assured that none of the locations was watched, and he had also had the streets in which the buildings stood scanned for the type of radio communications watchers would have used. He was now convinced that Cruncher had left nothing behind in the home that investigators could find. The other set of keys, not Mister's, would have been placed in the care of a solicitor, not in the Eagle's safe.

It was a simple procedure. He visited each building, opened the boxes and cleared them, loaded the contents into his attache case, handed in the keys and discontinued the contracts.

He walked to a West End of London hotel, no reservation made, and booked into a room. He emptied out onto the bed coverlet the legal proof of his great wealth. There were bank statements, bonds, title deeds for five hotels and three aircraft, more deeds for residential property in France, Greece, the Bahamas, the Caymans and Gibraltar, and a stack of computer disks. He could not, in the hotel room, enter the disks, but he speed-read the documents as if he needed to remind himself of the resources available to him. The fact that he did not spend the wealth on himself and the Princess, that he hoarded it and seldom released it other than to underwrite further ventures, did not in any way detract from the pleasure he took in glancing over the figures and the property descriptions with the income generated. Wealth was power – power, although he would not have recognized this, was the drug that sustained him.

He used the hotel room for fifteen minutes, then checked out. He paid two hundred and sixty-five pounds for it, cash to the cashier, and slipped anonymously into the street.

He walked across central London. It was his city.

His wealth gave him the power he craved. Hundreds of people, the huge majority of whom had never heard of him, worked in that city to multiply his wealth. In the evenings and at night, thousands of the city's seething, moving, stirring population bought the product that he purchased after importation and sidled away into dark, private, hidden corners to inject themselves or to inhale. He was buffeted by the home-going office workers, shop women and the tourists, and he felt contempt for them because they would never, none of them, approach the power and wealth that were his.

He saw the young man sitting at the back of the cafe in the new piazza square of Covent Garden.

Sol Wilkes stood up as he approached. Mister wove a way between the tables. He'd checked outside for watchers and not seen any. Inside he took a zigzag route to the table in the rear recess of the cafe. It gave him the chance to observe most of its clients, and look into their ears. Any of the Church watchers, men or women, would have moulded clear plastic earpieces.

It was an old routine, but useful. He liked the cut of the young man. The suit was good, new and quiet, the shirt was a gentle cream, the tie wasn't loud, and the haircut was tidy. The Financial Times on the table was folded beside the half-empty glass of orange juice; it was a good first impression.

'Evening, Mister Packer.'

'Evening, Sol – you don't mind if I call you that?'

'Not at all, what can I get you?'

'Cappuccino, please.'

The coffee was ordered. There was an attraction in going for new blood. Mister thought it spoke of his personal virility if he went after youth. Wouldn't have considered it, of course not, if the Cruncher hadn't ended up in the river. But he had… And maybe, as the operation into the Balkans expanded and came alive, it was the right time to think the unthinkable.

The Eagle was old. The Fixer might just be past his best years. New people and new ideas, it was something to chew and think on, but carefully. Everything must be done carefully.

'I've known your family a long time, Sol.'

'So my lather told me.'

Trusted your family, Sol, for many years.'

As my father's trusted you.'

'Always had respect for your father.'

'And him for you.'

'And now I'm short of someone I can trust and respect, and who'll show the same to me, and who will handle various of my affairs.'

'Look after your investments, Mr Packer, and see them grow.'

'That sort of thing, Sol.'

'Move in where the Cruncher was.'

'With discretion.'

'My father would walk on hot coals for you, Mr Packer. I'd work for someone, with someone, if I knew I'd have the same loyalty back that my father's shown you.'

'Of course.'

'But my father was surprised that you weren't at the Cruncher's funeral.'

There had been no change of inflection in Sol Wilkes's quiet conversational tone, but the statement smacked the air separating them. Mister would have gone, and taken the clan, but the Eagle had counselled against it. The Eagle had said it would be a photo-graphic jamboree for the Crime Squad and the Church, and he'd taken the advice. He thought the young man had balls – questioned whether it demonstrated due loyalty to an old and trusted colleague if a cold shoulder was turned at the end, the funeral. He was jolted… The young man wasn't frightened of him, not in the way the Eagle was. He couldn't say to Sol Wilkes that he'd stayed away because the Eagle had told him to, that he wasn't his own man when it came to a last farewell to a friend. Perhaps he should not have listened to the Eagle, but he had… There was no fear in the young face as there had been terror last night in an older face. His reputation created fear, but Sol Wilkes was holding his eye, not wavering, and waiting for an answer.

'If you worked for me, Sol, you'd get to see the bigger picture. You'd know more. You'd find it easier to make judgements.' He smiled. 'Whether that's good enough for you or not, that's what you're getting.'

'What are you offering me, Mr Packer?'

'To come on the payroll.'

'With a percentage of profits, as the Cruncher was?'

'Are we running before we can walk?' There was menace in his voice. He was not in control of the talk.

His fist was clenched on the table as if in threat.

'If I'm inside, Mr Packer, then there's no going back.

I understand that. It's not short-term, it's as far as I can see, for ever… Five per cent comes with my guarantee of loyalty, of respect.'

Their hands met. Mister took the smaller fist of Sol Wilkes in his and the deal was sealed. He squeezed the hand until the blood had drained from it and he heard the crack of the bone knuckles, but the young man did not flinch.

He took the papers and the disks from the attache case and passed them across the table. They were read fast, and there was no expression of either surprise or admiration on Sol's face, just as there had been no fear.

A twenty-eight-year-old, trained investment broker, the son of a friend of forty years, was invited into the inner circle. When the papers were read they were returned, with the disks, to the case. Rules of engagement were discussed, then Mister launched into his description of the future and of trade through Bosnia. He didn't think it necessary to spell out that, should he be double-crossed, ripped-off, then all of the Wilkes family would suffer, wish they had never been born, the father and mother, the sisters and brothers, and especially young Solomon; it wasn't necessary to say it because Albie would have made it clear in one-syllable words to his favourite boy. The arrangements were agreed for new safety-deposit boxes. They would meet again when Mister was back from abroad.

He walked out into the evening crowds. He felt good, lifted by Sol's youth – and he knew that the attraction of the Eagle's worried fussiness was waning: he was the big man, and supreme.

Pitching up there had not been Joey's idea. The crush of bodies was all round him, and the smoke and the loud laughter, and the big voice boomed at him,

'You're Joey? That right, Joey?'

'I'm Joey Cann, yes.'

'With Maggie? You're Maggie's bag-carrier?'

'Something like t h a t… and you are?'

'Francis. We weren't introduced. Francis. I'm your host here, this is my pad, I'm HM's man in Sarajevo. She's a great girl. Why'd you make her drive the whole way? She says she's driven from Zagreb. Couldn't you have done a bit at the wheel?'

'It's what she seemed to want.'

'Terrific girl, wheelbarrows of fun. Your first time here, Joey?'

'Yes.'

'Let me mark your card, explain the ground you're on.'

'I'd be very grateful.'

He would have preferred his bed. Something to eat, a slow bath, and bed. The message at the hotel had been for her. The party at the Residence was to celebrate Commonwealth Day. He thought she would have despised him if he'd pleaded exhaustion and the need of food, a bath and bed. She'd driven for eight hours, and she was still up for a party. He could see her on the far side of the room. She must have sluiced herself under a shower, slipped into that little black dress and done her face. She had a cluster of older men round her, was honeypotting again as she had done at the Customs post at Bosanski Novi. It was a brief little black dress. The men leered at her, and Joey thought each of them believed himself to be the centre of her attention, in with a chance. She must have told the Ambassador – cheerful, noisy Francis – that Joey Cann was her burden of the day and wasn't up to driving across Bosnia. He readied himself for the lecture, and snatched a drink off the waiter's tray.

'I'm not going to ask what you're doing here, because I don't want to know. What I usually do when Maggie's people are in town is take the phone off the hook and head off up country. Do not embarrass me, there's a good fellow. What I mean is, don't step on any toes. Last thing I want is muddy water… We may, that's the foreign community, run this horrible little place and bankroll it, but they are extraordinarily sensitive to overt interference… The local talent is for obstruction. We tell them how to live, we send them our best and our brightest, we shovel money at them, but it isn't working, nothing's moving. Right now they're seeing the signs of what we tell them is

"attention fatigue", we're running down. They've decided all they have to do is sit tight and wait till we're off their backs. Nobody listens in London when I tell them that it's all been a very considerable failure.

Truth is that you cannot make people live together when they actually hate each other, then hate us nearly as much… Can I top you up?'

Joey shook his head.

'Even me, Joey, and I'm an old hand – I was here during the war, where I met Maggie – I'm quite astonished at the viciousness of the place. We haven't even started, haven't begun to start, getting rid of this brutality. Do you know, in the Brcko region the Serbs held Muslim civilians in a furniture factory. They had shredders there to make wood chips out of raw timber

– for chipboard, you know. They fed Muslims into the shredding machines, got human chips out of raw bodies, then spread the chopped-up stuff on the fields… Just to give you an idea of what we're up against… I'd better circulate. Anyway, nice to have met you. Have a good stay, and please don't cause me any problems, you know what I mean. Have another drink.'

Joey stood alone against the wall.

He watched her. There was a little bag in her hand, leather and delicate.

One moment she was in the group, the next she was gone and the knot of older men were peering around, over their shoulders. He looked to see which appeared the most bereft. Then she was beside him.

'Come on, time to go.'

Joey said sourly, 'Only if you've finished enjoying yourself.'

'I was working.'

'Looked as if you were working hard.'

'Don't be so bloody pompous.'

They left. She didn't bother to wait in the queue and thank her host. Moments later, they were out in the cold air, walking down a winding cobbled street, the party's noise behind them. Her hand was back in his arm and he could smell her scent. The little shops they passed were shuttered with steel and wooden grilles. The street was empty.

'What was the work?'

'You wanted a name.'

'I'm sorry, I'm not focusing – what was the name I wanted?'

'A judge's name. You know, the needle in the haystack…'

'Come again?'

'The name of a judge to trust – God, you didn't think I was talking to those deadbeats for the good of my health? Cop on, Cann. Here, the judges co-operate with politicians and Mafia, drive a big car, live in a big apartment and their kids get university places. Or the judges don't co-operate and they listen to all the horseshit the foreigners give them about the sanctity of the rule of law, and they're machine-gunned or car-bombed, and they're dead. Least likely, they're marginalized, and don't get involved, not noticed – actually it's not "they", it's only one… He's straight, but the problem is – if you want to stay legal – he's useless. He stays alive and lives like a pauper. If you want "straight", then Zenjil Delic's your man.'

'Thanks.' They walked fast. 'What is this place?'

'It's the old market, the heart of the old city… The Serbs hit it with a mortar, the final straw that brought in the Americans. Thirty-eight dead and eighty-five wounded.'

He gazed over the gaunt frames of the market stands, now cleared for the night. A floodlit mosque minaret reached up towards the low cloud, the spit of snowflakes cavorting in the beam. 'Were you here?

Did you see it?'

'You never ask for war stories in Sarajevo, Joey. You get enough without asking.'

'How near was the front line?'

'A few hundred yards, maybe four hundred.'

'How was the line held?'

'It was held because there was nowhere else to go.'

'Weren't they heroes, the commanders who held the line, saved the city?'

'Bad luck, Joey. Nothing here is as it seems. One day they held the line, the next day they did deals across it for the supply of black-market food, cooking oil and bullets. They weren't heroes, they were thugs.'

In the folklore of the city, he was the man who had preserved its name, identity, its heartbeat.

He had the title of legenda. He could strut the streets of the old quarter, walk at liberty on the Mula Mustafe Baseskija, the Branilaca Sarajeva, the Obala Kulina Bana, and the old and the young would recognize and make space for him. Some of the oldest would wish to touch his hand as their saviour and some of the young would dream of working for him.

A message reached him from London, passed by cut-out figures from the Turkish community there to the Turkish community in Sarajevo, that Albert William Packer travelled to his city the next day, and that he and his colleagues should be shown respect. In his apartment, richly furnished and luxuriously fitted, he talked of this matter with the deputy commander of the Agency for Investigation and Documentation, and with the nephew of the ruling party's politician controlling the Ministry of Justice. The latest message came by the same route as that which, two weeks before, had introduced the first visitor – now dead, taken from the river and freighted back whence he had come.

The legenda called himself Serif. He was Ismet Mujic. Old police files had listed him as born in 1963, reared in an orphanage following the disappearance of his father and the committal of his mother to a psy-chiatric ward after a nervous collapse, but the files had long since been taken from the shelves and destroyed. After running from the orphanage, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he had joined the street kids roaming loose in the city and had begun a life of thieving. His early career had had two sides: he had also gained rich rewards from informing the police about other kids who followed the same trade.

Then, and it had not seemed unnatural to him, he had become a policeman… He could remember very clearly the man who had come, and he could roll his tongue over the strange-sounding name of Duncan Dubbs. By 1984, Olympic year and a year of prime pickings, he had been a police bodyguard to the same official who was now paramount in the Ministry of the Interior and had mixed his duties with the lucra-tive provision of 'protection' to those traders, club-owners and restaurateurs who made fat killings from the Winter Games. When the war had started and chaos had gripped the undefended city, the legend of Serif had taken flight. The city had been about to collapse under the onslaught of the Serb forces, and its Muslim community had neither the men nor the munitions to prevent its fall. The scale of the impending catastrophe had thrown up, spewed out, a fighting leader. He had gone to the old prison, cleared out the hardest of the convicts, driven them in two lorries to the Central Bank and rifled the cash tills, then gone on to the Marshal Tito barracks on Zmaja od Bosne and thrown the banknotes at the officer commanding the regular troops' armoury then taken out all the small arms that could be loaded onto two lorries, and they had gone into the line. On those first days, the greatest threat to the city's survival had been the Serb infantry push from Grbavica towards the former Olympic complex of Skenderija. In fighting of primitive ferocity, the line had held. It had been rifle against rifle, grenade against grenade, knife against knife, fist against fist. He became a fire brigade. First he deployed in Grbavica, then on assaults up the hill between the gravestones of the Jewish cemetery, then in Dobrinja to protect the tunnel linking the besieged city to the outside world – and his wealth had grown.

By the end of the war his power over the city had been absolute.

Serif discussed again with the intelligence officer and a politician's nephew the proposal that had been made by Duncan Dubbs two weeks before, as they had discussed it before the visitor's death and after it, sipping good imported whisky. It was a natural arrangement in that city that a 'businessman' and an official sworn to defend the security of the state and the young relation of a principal politician should meet to talk over the merits of a contract offered by an outsider.

'What does he know?'

'Nothing,' the intelligence officer said.

'A list of witnesses has been given to the idiot judge, Delic, who will sing the same song, and the pathology report is in place – there is nothing he can know,' the politician's nephew said.

'And because he knows nothing, he comes with the promise of gifts,' Serif mused.

The intelligence officer murmured, 'Gifts should always be accepted, and after they have been given, the decisions can be made.'

They left the apartment as his boy, Enver, his sweet boy, returned from walking his Rottweiler dogs. They went out on to the street where the guards had machine pistols hidden under their coats. They walked with a cordon of guards around them. Serif had physical presence: he was short, broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven head, and dressed always only in black. In Bascarsija's narrow lanes he owned the DiscoNite and the Platinum City where those few with money came and filled the tables, but in each a private room was always kept for him. The Platinum City was near to the river and they headed for it. It was where he had entertained Duncan Dubbs on the night of his death. At the door he paused. 'The man who came, Dubbs, he understood nothing of us.

The man who is travelling with gifts, who looks to buy us, whom we are urged to treat with respect, I doubt that he understands more of us… '

His mobile phone rang. It sounded sharp in the night air. He answered it. 'Yes?… Yes, yes, this is that number… Who is that?… Who is it?… Do you have a wrong number? Who are you? Go fuck your father… ' He closed the call and pocketed the phone.

He Shrugged. 'Just some woman, she asks me if she has the right number and reads off the digits, then says nothing – some crazy bitch.'

They went down the stairs and into the throb of the dance music.

New Year's Day 1993

The radio said that the war went badly. They did not need to be told. The tanks had come to the far side of the valley on the day before the enemy's Christmas festival. They had not fired on the day of the festival, but the shells had hit Vraca each day afterwards. The troops at Vraca had no tanks, no artillery and no heavy mortars for retaliation. Led by Husein Bekir, those villagers who had stayed in their homes spent the nights in their cellars and the days cowering in the outhouses at the rear of the houses, or they had gone to live in tents in the cover of the trees that climbed above the village. In the daylight hours it was assumed that the tank crews slept or drank themselves stupid, but it was still not safe to walk between the houses because two snipers operated from close to the river and the bullets from their long-barrelled rifles could reach Vraca.

And it had rained ever since the enemy's festival.

The day the tanks had arrived across the valley the low clouds had scattered a fine carpet of snow over the two villages and the valley between them. From Vraca, Husein had been able to see the track trails they left as they nudged into the hiding-places chosen in the wreckage of Ljut. He had seen the lorries arrive and the unloading of the bright brass shell cases. Then the rain had started. Snow was seen only rarely in the valley, but the rain came down with a particular and cruel intensity, battering the roofs of the damaged buildings and through windows and doors that had been blasted off their frames. And with the rain came the cold.

Smoke from the fires the villagers lit to warm themselves was a beacon to the tank gunners. Even when it had been safe to light fires, the kindling and split logs were too damp. There was no heating-oil left in the village; it had been finished a month before the snow-fall and the arrival of the tanks. They lived, like animals, day and night, in darkness, wrapped in wet blankets; their food and the troops' rations were near to exhaustion. At dawn, on the enemy's New Year's Day, the officer came to Husein Bekir's home. He was panting because he had sprinted from the village, across open ground, to the house and then down into the cellar.

There was no coffee, if she could have heated it, that Lila could offer to the commander of the troops. ' I have bad news – and then perhaps worse.' The officer grimaced.

Over the weeks since the troops had come to Vraca, they had almost become friends. Husein thought the officer a good man, and did not believe him responsible for what had happened across the valley, in Ljut, on the autumn night of the attack over the river. They could never be close friends, but he respected the man's honour, and in return was always treated with courtesy. He was the first of the village's civilians to be told of military plans. The officer was from the east, and the town where his family lived, his wife and two children, had been purged of Muslims, and he did not know whether his family had fled successfully or been killed. The officer talked with them, Husein and Lila, as if they were his own parents.

'Brigade does not believe that Vraca is of sufficient strategic importance.'

'What does that mean?'

'That we will pull out, retreat to a more defensible position.'

' A n d…? '

'We have information from behind the lines on the other side that the tanks have come to soften our defence before an attack on the village. When it comes, it will not be from soldiers but from the scum of the White Eagles. They are the same as Arkan's criminals or Seselj's. When they come, esteemed friend, they will kill every male, old or young. They will violate every woman, old or young, and they will destroy the village and flatten the cemetery where your people are buried, and mine. They will make the men watch the violation of their women, their daughters, their sisters and their mothers, and then they will kill them. As the chief man of the village, you would be selected for torture in front of all the men, women and children. It is what they have done all over the country. The military do the fighting, then the scum come to scavenge, and kill.'

'Because of what your men did in Ljut.'

'I cannot justify that madness – but we did not begin the barbarism.'

'And you will abandon us?'

'We will escort you from a place that is no longer defensible – I am taking casualties for no gain. Our position does not make military sense.'

'Can you not put down mines, as they have done?'

'We have no mines, we do not have the factories as they do – we have to go, Husein, and we will take you with us.'

The old farmer pulled himself to his full height, the crown of his balding scalp brushing against the beams and the sodden plaster of the cellar ceiling. Emotion broke his voice. 'It is my home. They are my fields.'

'We all have homes,' the officer said grimly. 'We all have families, and we all have cemeteries where our people are buried. My orders are to evacuate you.'

'Where will we go?'

'I don't know… to a camp, or abroad.'

'What can we take?'

'What you can carry – no more.'

'When do we go?'

'Tonight.'

The officer climbed out of the cellar. Husein's wife held him, and the tears streamed down his cheeks. He smelt the damp of her clothes. Without speaking they clung to each other for several minutes, near to a quarter of an hour. The village was their lives, and had been their parents' lives and their grandparents' and, until the madness came, they had assumed it would be their grandchildren's lives. She took a grimy handkerchief from the pocket of her apron, under a heavy coat, and defiantly wiped his eyes; she had not wept. He climbed the steps, treacherous from the damp, from the cellar. She would pack. She would know better than him what they, old people, could carry.

He went out of the back, then tried to run to the outbuildings. He could not go quickly and his best effort was a slow, crabbed short stride and he bent his spine to make a smaller target. The one shot was high.

He reached the buildings where the cattle bellowed in protest, They were hungry: no fresh fodder had been brought to them for three days.

He went to the main double door of nailed planks, and threw it open. The rain spat on to him.

Husein Bekir looked out over the valley, peered through the driving rain. Past his rusting tractor, and his fields that had died from inattention, past his vineyard where the weeds sprouted and the posts sagged, grey streams of water ran down the hill from the village of Ljut and from the high ground that flanked it. The track from the far village was a watercourse, but many more streams were pounding in torrents from the hills and pressing past the bare trees to the flooded river, which had already broken its banks.

Although he was not stupid, with a deep-set experience of agriculture, and cunning where money and commerce were concerned, Husein Bekir did not have the intelligence to consider that a minefield was, in effect, a living organism with the power of movement.

His eyes roved over those places where he had witnessed the mines being laid, and he did not know that some of the PMA2 anti-personnel mines were now being buried deep under silt that would provide a protective layer over them, and that others would be lifted by the flood's force and carried metres from where they had been sown. Neither did he know that the wooden stakes holding in place the PMA3s and the PROMs could be pushed from the ground by the streams, as the stakes holding the trip-wires had been dislodged. He did not know that some of the points he believed to be poisoned with the mines were now free of them, and some of the places where he had thought the ground safe were now lethal.

As he looked across the valley there was nothing to see of this secret movement.

The whole of the afternoon, he stayed in the outbuildings and talked quietly with his cattle, the beef calves and the sheep. He told them what he would do and, in his simple way, he wished them well, and said that he would return. He would come again, he said, and they nuzzled against him. At last light, the main door to the outbuildings left open, he went back to his home where Lila had filled two small bags.

He shouted at his dog. His voice was sufficiently angry to ensure that it ran from him and hid. He could not take it, or bring himself to shoot it.

His animals were already out and foraging for food when Husein Bekir, Lila, the villagers and the troops, in the growing darkness, trudged slowly away from the village. He found only minimal comfort in the knowledge that when he came back he would remember where the mines had been laid.

Bent over his desk, her father had not noticed.

For a long time after the call had ended, Jasmina Delic sat with the phone in her hand. She had been helping her father to clear his desk. She had to nag him to keep control of the paper mountain that covered it. There were no resources to employ the staff who should have worked for a judge. She had taken one file from the pile in the corner where they were stacked, and casually opened it. At the top had been the note from the IPTF policeman, Williams, concerning the drowned Englishman, and the telephone number retrieved from a bedside notepad. Idly, she had rung the number. She had heard the voice, she had asked if the number was correct, and it was confirmed. She had recognized the voice, had listened to it until the call was cut.

She put down the phone, closed the file, wheeled herself to the corner and dropped it onto the floor.

Her father noticed nothing. She would tell him in the morning.

Always the busy man, without time to waste, Mister had three more meetings between the time he left the Covent Garden cafe and his arrival home. At one meeting he authorized the payment on delivery at Felixstowe harbour for a container, now at Rotterdam docks, that held a fraction under a million pounds' worth of heroin, street value, bedded in made-in-China ornamental garden tubs; at another he rubber-stamped an agreement for him to be paid a little more than a thousand pounds a year by a novelty-stall holder operating in Trafalgar Square, up from the previous rate by seven per cent; at the final meeting he talked over with an architect a development project for four hectares of Mediterranean coastal land west of Cap d'Antibes. Whether the profit margin was measured in millions or hundreds was immaterial to him. He despised laziness. He kept the same close eye on all his deals. That night the negotiation that gave the greatest satisfaction was the one with Lennie Perks for the safety of the stall in Trafalgar Square, because he had taken Lennie Perks's money for twenty-nine years, and the job went at a loss. But he never gave up on a customer, would never accept that he was now too grand to deal with the bottom end of trade. He spoke on his mobile phone with Albie Wilkes, as he walked the night streets, to confirm what they both already knew because it had been well worked out before he had cast an eye over young Sol; he spoke also to a detective chief inspector in the National Crime Squad and was told that investigators were without leads in the matter of Georgie Riley, who was not expected to last the week; then he took a taxi home.

There were aspects of his life on which he would not have dreamed of acting without the approval of the Princess. His dress was one of them. He had not, as she had not, ever been to Bosnia-Herzegovina. She would have checked on the TV's text earlier in the evening for local-weather advice, and that would have decided her on what clothes he should take. On his return, they packed the case together.

Then they drank together, champagne but only one glass each, and she toasted him and wished the venture well. He knew she looked at him, over the glass, and he thought he saw in the sparkle of her eyes a sense of triumph for him because he was on the road he wanted to travel, and also of apprehension.

But he knew there was no cause for fear, not for her and not for him. Nothing frightened him, nothing ever had. He kissed her eyes. His lips brushed them and when he looked again he thought he'd chucked out the anxiety. He was fine, he said, had never felt better. It was good days ahead.

Back at the hotel, Joey rang Jen. He told her about the plane delay and the drive. She said she loved him and he rang off. He was too tired to work out in his mind whether he loved her or not.

In the hotel's car park, underneath his window, the light fall of snow caked on Maggie Bolton's coat as she stripped down the hire car, retrieved her equipment, then rebuilt the car's interior – and Joey didn't know that her work was not yet finished.

He slept. Small pieces of a mosaic were falling into place, and he was dead to them, unaware of their importance.