The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  his accountant. That's quite a victory, for us, him losing Cruncher. Can't figure it, what he would have thought he was doing in Sarajevo. I do hope the word spreads that Mister's right-hand scumbag wore silk knickers. Wish it was me who was going to pass on the good news.'

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

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

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

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

  He assumed a CCTV camera was on him.

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

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

  'What do you want?'

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

  'You got a warrant?'

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

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

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

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

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

  The door was closed in his face.

  Early summer 1992

  'Who is he?'

  'It is Husein Bekir.'

  'What does he think he's doing?'

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

  'Tell him to go back.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It kept on coming towards the Bunica river.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'You think he can hear you now?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Three

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

  'I'm thinking.'

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

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

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

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

  'I never backed off.'

  'Is it that important, to you?'

  'Seems to be.'

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

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

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

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

  'Have to learn then, won't I?'

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

  'The best days.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'So . . . ?'

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

  'I'll make a coffee.'

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

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

  His seat was in standard class. His rank in Customs

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