The Untouchable (12 page)

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

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

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

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

They were in a straggling confused formation, a rabble.

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

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

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

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

The officer came last.

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

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

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

'What has happened to the people of Ljut?'

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

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

'Did any escape?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He said that?'

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

'Tell me again what he said.'

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

In Intrusive Surveillance - Code of Practice, section 2

paragraph 3 states

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

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

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

'I appreciate what you've told me.'

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

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

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

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

'Hello, Reverend, how did it go?'

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

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

' I regret not being with you.'

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

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

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

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

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

'Where poor Mr Dubbs died.'

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

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

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

Mister stood up and wrapped his coat around him

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

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

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

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