The Untouchable (65 page)

'God, Mister, you are a disappointment to me . . .

Not going to run? Is Christmas cancelled? What you going to do, sit there all night? There's going to be a lot of laughs round Stoke Newington and Dalston, Hackney, Hoxton, Harringay. You won't be able to hear yourself think up Green Lanes, with all the laughter . . . What's the next big plan?'

He sobbed, and the light failed around him. And the smell of the Eagle and the urine would be worse in the night and the wires would come closer to him, edge tighter around him.

'You know what I was going to do, Mister, if you'd run? I've a big dog here, an Alsatian. I was going to let you get close to the river - if you hadn't stepped on a mine - and I was going to send him after you. You might lose a leg with a mine but this brute's bad, you'd have lost your throat with him. What's to be done, Mister?'

He was mesmerized by the voice and the tears ran on his sun-blistered cheeks and the wind seemed colder on his back. He knew the fear.

'Come and get me.'

'Is that a joke, Mister, is that funny talk?'

'Come and get me out.'

'What? Walk in there?'

'Get me . . . I can't do another night, not here . . . Get me out.'

'Didn't your mummy ever teach you what to say?'

'Please . . . fucking get me o u t . . . Please . . . '

'Got to do better than that, Mister, a lot better.'

He cried into the growing darkness that hemmed in the sun's final light, 'I'm begging you - for charity's sake, for mercy's sake - help me. Please help me.'

' Is it over, Mister? Did I win and did you lose?'

' I lost, you won . . . It's over.'

The voice changed. The mocking sneer was

replaced by a brusque rattle of instructions. 'You will sign a statement listing, in your own handwriting, every criminal offence you have committed since your release from HMP Pentonville . . . You will plead guilty at every subsequent trial you face . . . You will name every criminal associate . . . '

'Any fucking thing - but not another night out here.'

'Your word is your bond?'

'Trust me - and help me.'

'You are armed, Mister. Throw any firearm away from you.'

He took the PPK Walther from his belt. He swung his arm and hurled it high. He saw it against the ruddied glow before it fell against the darkness of the hill's slope.

' I did it.'

' I saw you do it, Mister. Strip off. I want all your clothes off you, and your socks and your shoes.

Everything. Then stand. Then I'll come and get you.'

'Thank you. Thank you, Cann.'

He tore off his jacket and his fingers fumbled with his tie. He ripped his shirt open and threw it at the grass, then the belt.

In the dropping light, Joey watched as Mister, out in the field, stood and kicked off his trousers.

He took the mobile phone from his belt and the battery from his pocket, married them, and punched the numbers.

He was tinny and distant in her ear. 'It's as if I've killed him, I have destroyed him. I know what I have done. To get there, Jen, I went down lower than him. I was more cruel, more brutal, more vicious. I sucked the strength out of him. He was untouchable, he did not know fear, he is now standing in a field and bending to take off his shoes and socks and then he will be quite naked - I told him to strip. He said, Jen, to me:

"Please." For what I've done, you wouldn't want to know me. Two days ago, he thrashed me, and I didn't cry out. He had a big meeting, I wrecked it. I brought him down, I peeled his men away from him. He went into a field. I am at the edge of the field. I have taunted him, laughed at him, I've brought the fear into him which he never had - a good person like you should have no time for me. You asked me, Jen, "How is it that people like that can have such power?" I've taken the power from him, I've exchanged it for fear. He's naked, he's in the palm of my hand . . . I don't have ideology, Jen, I am not serving a cause here, I'm not a crusader - it was about who was left standing, him or me, nothing more, nothing less. It's not because I'm good and he's evil. I am worse than him, have gone lower. It's like I'm contaminated, by him and what's around me . . . I have to go and get him, Jen, and I can't show fear, I have to bring him out. Where he is, Jen, it's a minefield . . . '

The rambling voice went, and she was left with only the tone's purr in her ear.

He was stripped, was bare. The wind was on his skin and it seemed to Mister to heal him, to soothe the burns and sponge off the sweat. He held out his hands at his sides and made a cross of himself.

The sun had gone, but left its fainter glow on the hill's crest, and the lights of the two villages shone distant and bright.

He saw the movement at the tree-line. Cann came for him, with the dog at his knee, to bring him out.

Dragan Kovac watched from his porch, and Husein Bekir from the log in front of his home. It was their valley, and was invaded by strangers. They had the right to watch.

He stepped over the yellow tape.

Joey started to walk towards Mister. He felt a bond with the dog. The dog had no fear and the weight of its body rippled against Joey's leg, and that was comfort. The dog gave him courage. He had asked: What would be his chance of selling off a mine? He had been told: It would be in God's hands. The dog's paws glided on the grass, but Joey stamped it down with each stride.

He knew everything of the man who stood ahead of him with the arms out: when he ate, when he showered, when he had sex, when he cleaned his shoes. He knew the cartwheel of his organization, the pitch of his voice, the gait of his walk, and the assets secreted away that made Mister first among equals.

Only Joey knew what had brought the fear to Mister's mind and had crushed him. At the Custom House, if they had seen Mister naked and holding out his arms in surrender, they would be launching the piss-up to end all binges. Joey alone owned the moment. He felt no elation, but a simple flat lack of satisfaction. No thrill, no triumph. He had gone to the end of the road, followed where it had led him, and the vista was empty.

He did not look down.

Joey reached the Eagle's body. He smelt it, and the dog sniffed at it. He swung to his left and started out on a wide half-circle that would bring him face to face with Mister. The dusk gathered around him. The dog, close to Joey, growled softly and bared its teeth as they skirted Mister's buttocks, then his hip, then his groin.

In the half-light gloom, Mister cut a pathetic and pitiful figure, but compassion had long ago been sluiced from Joey. He saw the pleading in Mister's eyes and knew that he had won. He faced Mister.

He could not reach into the future.

He would lead his prisoner to the trees, take him up the path and past the skeleton, up to the crest of the hill, and he would permit him to dress except for his shoes and his socks, and would sit the dog down near to his prisoner. In the morning, when the vehicles came, he would commandeer - beg or borrow - a ride to Sarajevo's airport, and he would fly back to Heathrow. There he would hand his prisoner into the custody of the SQG team, and he would go back to the bed-sit on the top floor of the house in Tooting Bec, and he would sleep. He did not think he would ever again return to the Custom House. He had left the uniform behind, he was not a part of the culture. It was the price he paid - the taking of Mister did not come cheap - he would be shut out. He looked over Mister's body. There was no power, no threat. He had no sight of the future.

Joey went forward to take Mister's arm and to bring him out.

His first step was onto matted grass, and a thistle stem that broke under his trainer shoe. His second was on to a patch of ground that was bare. He was looking into Mister's face. His third step was snagged.

Joey felt the restraint, and kicked his foot forward to break the snag.

Barnaby kept the mines on a shelf in his prefabricated office in the Marshal Tito barracks - and when he had visitors, potential donors to the mine clearance programme, he always lifted them down and explained, without emotion, their mechanisms.

'This is the anti-personnel bounding fragmentation mine, which is proven as the most deadly of all those used in the Bosnian war. It has either a trip-wire or a pressure-activated role, but it is more usual in the trip-wire mode. We call it PROM. As you see, ladies and gentlemen, it has a bottle-shaped body, steel, and the fuse is in the bottle's neck. The inside of the bottle has internal grooving, which better aids the shrapnel spread, fragmentation. But this is a clever mine. On a trip, or pressure, its first reaction is to fire a small black powder charge that throws upwards the main charge, held by a tether, a further twenty-five centimetres. That's the "bounding" factor. It carries nine hundred grams of explosive and the main charge detonates - not at ankle level - to cause maximum damage to upper thighs, genitalia, and the vital organs of the lower stomach. The lethal radius is twenty-five metres; the PROM has caused more casualties to our personnel than any other mine.

This evening, in your hotel, when you order a good little Slovenian red, look at the bottle the waiter brings, and remember the other bottle I've shown you, the PROM, exactly the same size, but a killer.'

Barnaby put the deactivated mine back on the shelf.

The faces of his audience, as he would have predicted, were limp. He doubted many would order wine that evening with their dinner.

A woman visitor paused at the door and looked back at the shelf. He asked her if she would like to handle the PROM. A little shudder crossed her face, but she nodded. He took it down and passed it to her.

She held it as though unconvinced that it had been made safe.

He said quietly, because dispassionate factual description worked better with potential donors than melodrama, 'The tether mechanism, the jump before scattering the shrapnel, is what makes it particularly effective. When it's on a trip-wire it only takes a three-kilo pull to fire it. If your foot snags the wire, you'd hardly feel it.'

Her fingers trembled as she gave it back to him.

October 2001

Dougie Gough wrote the name in his notepad: Dragan Kovac. He poised his pen and waited for the translation.

' I am a retired sergeant of police and so I am familiar with the style of statement that an esteemed gentleman such as yourself would expect . . . The memory of that day is very clear to me . . . I now know that the older man was called Packer, and the younger man was Cann. The man, Packer, had stripped off his clothes, he had surrendered. The combat between the two was over. Packer had submitted. It was last light.

Cann came with a dog to bring him out of the minefield - that he came into the field was the final marker of his victory. Packer was naked and the dog was near him, guarding him, and Cann set off the mine. It was a PROM, with a trip-wire. Cann went down. I had a fine view of it from the porch of my house. Packer snatched up some of his clothes and ran, as if he had a sense of liberty. He ran for the river. When Packer was nearly at the river, the dog caught him. I went from my house, down the track to the riverbank and called the dog - I am familiar with police dogs. I had with me my long-handled axe. It was becoming dark but there was light enough for me to see that the dog was injured by some of the shrapnel the mine had thrown, and that the dog had bitten Packer's arm. I took them, Packer and the dog, back to my house. The dog guarded him, and 1 had my axe and I waited for help to come. Then he cried out, Cann did, in the field.

The dog heard it. It limped away, went back into the field. I was left with the prisoner. I had the axe but I am an old man, I have been retired many years.

I could not keep the prisoner - I was not to blame for his escape. The dog went back into the field and from the time it reached Cann he did not cry out again. You should believe me, I could not have kept the prisoner.'

He was retired now, had 'gone early'. But a telephone call had come to the bungalow on the outskirts of Kilchoan, the chief investigation officer himself, and the request had been made that he should attend the small ceremony as the Custom House representative. A young diplomat, Hearn, had met him at the airport and had driven him to the valley. He had not been able to understand the speeches and he had wandered off. It had been his wife who had suggested he should take his walking-boots. He had sat on the riverbank and changed from his brogues to his boots then used the highest stones to cross the river. He had walked across a ploughed field, newly turned but not yet sown, and across a grazing field where his advance had scattered goats, sheep and two dry cows.

He had passed the skeletons. He did not have to be told where to go. The target that drew him forward was a waist-high cairn of stones. It was similar country and he felt comfortable, small fields, wooded slopes and distant mountains, to that which bounded the road approaching his home on the Ardnamurchan peninsula. He stood quietly by the stones and soaked the place of its images, and he'd said the same quiet prayer that he spoke in his mind each Sunday in the quiet of the chapel at Kilchoan. When the ceremony was over, a drifting procession had followed him to the cairn. The diplomat translated the words of the rugged, bluff, self-serving man who wore an old uniform greatcoat and a policeman's cap. He knew he must play the part of a sponge to their stories. There was an official report, which had been drawn up by the embassy half a year earlier, but it had carried no sense of soul in its typed pages. The retired policeman saluted him and stepped back. An old man, his cheeks nicked from the shave to mark the importance of the ceremony in the village, came forward to take Kovac's place, and beside him, hobbling with him, was a German shepherd dog with its left front leg off at the knee.

He wrote the next name: Husein Bekir (farmer).

' I came from my home and I waded over the ford, and I thought I would be swept away, and then I went up the track past Kovac's house - the old fool was whining that it was not his fault that the prisoner had escaped from him - and I followed the de-miners who had been called out. We went on a path they had made between their tape and the trees at the far side of my fields. They had big lamps with them. They worked as fast as they dared to make a corridor across the field. When they had gone half-way the light from the lamps showed him. I had been told he was called Joey a silly name. He was on the ground, on his side. He was alive then. They went faster, I think they took great risks. They found one mine, a small one like the mine that has crippled my wife, and a trip-wire but it had become disconnected from the PROM or the PMR2, and then they stopped. Why? Because of the dog. The dog was beside Joey. It guarded him.