The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  '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, an
d 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 a
uthorization (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.