The Untouchable (9 page)

Late summer 1992

When dawn came, the soldiers were nervous and tired after a night of standing-to. An explosion had initiated the alert.

Dragan Kovac found Captain Vokic by the well. He saw the bags under his bleary eyes. The retired policeman no longer lived in his own home: he had been told it was too dangerous for him to stay there now that paramilitary bandits had moved into the village across the river, and he lodged with his nephew, his nephew's wife and their children, an awkward arrangement. The captain now slept in one of the two stone and heavy-timber bunkers, had made a command post in the dank interior of the other. Kovac had come to resent the presence of Captain Vokic in the community because he, the leader, was relegated in importance: all decisions affecting the village and its life were taken by the captain. Not that there was great life in the village. The younger men had all been taken into the Serb army and were scattered through Bosnia, and many of the younger women had left for the heartland of their own people, far distant from the uncertainties of the war's front line.

Dragan Kovac asked for, and was grudgingly given, the captain's binoculars. He stared out into a blur before the captain irritably showed him the focus ring. Clarity came. He was looking at the home of his former friend, Husein Bekir. When he talked with the old men and women who were left in Ljut, or his nephew, or the young soldiers, it was always of the enemy across the valley, and the atrocities that they would commit if they were ever able to come in strength over the Bunica river. There had been no contact with the men and women of Vraca since the soldiers had come to Ljut. He could see the smoke rising from the chimneys, children playing, and men with rifles sitting idly on stones, smoking or reading.

He did not see Husein Bekir, though he searched for him among the cattle and the sheep that scavenged the poor ground on that side of the river for fodder. If he had not had the binoculars he would not have seen Lila, Husein's wife, and then he would not have thought of the man whose home faced his. He handed them back to the captain.

'What happened in the night?'

'A mine exploded.'

'Did they try to come through, Captain?'

'I don't know. Perhaps.'

'The soldiers are scared, like women,' Dragan Kovac said dismissively.

'Of course they are frightened . . . They are not like the regulars who first came here, they are not even conscripts. They are village boys. All they have of the army is the uniform. Always I am asked to send more men away for transfer to a more important front line.

I don't think that we could resist an attack pressed with determination.'

'How do you give them courage?'

'I put out more mines. The more mines they have in front of them, the braver they are.'

Later in the morning the soldiers carried forward two sacks of PROM mines. The captain fretted around them in the long grass of the grazing fields, in the weeds that had grown up in the ploughed fields, and in the overgrown vineyards. The PROMs were bigger, more lethal. A few were buried in holes hacked out of the grass and weeds so that only four stubby prongs were visible before the plants were worked back over them, and they were hidden; they would be activated by nine kilos of pressure. More were attached to short stakes and had a trip-wire leading from the antenna to a second stake; they also would be hidden when the grass and weeds grew, and were activated by a three-kilo vigorous tug on the wire. Among the military men on both sides of the war, the PROM was the most feared. On firing, a first charge threw the explosive capsule nearly a metre into the air, then came the main detonation. The shrapnel would fly out at a level to hit the genitals or soft lower belly of the victim. It was deadly. If he had not had the detail of his map, the captain would not have been able to take his soldiers down into the fields where the fallen grass and yellowing, seeding weeds covered that earlier sowing.

Fourteen new mines were planted, to stiffen the morale of the young soldiers, and the location of each was added to the captain's map.

The pollution of the valley had spread, and other than the map there was no evidence of it.

'We found where the mine exploded, but there was no blood there, no pieces,' the captain later told Dragan Kovic. 'I think it was an animal, probably moving too low, on its stomach, for the shrapnel... You should go, you know, you should leave. It is not safe here.'

'It's my home,' the retired policeman said.

'I have heard on the radio - I am transferring in the morning to Sarajevo.' The captain stood outside his bunker. 'You will not have a professional to protect you, only an idiot from Foca, some untrained kids, and a minefield.'

On arrival at Heathrow airport, the body was hijacked.

The slip of paper that authorized its removal was illegibly signed, but that was good enough for the London firm of undertakers. The hearse drove away empty from Cargo, and a closed van took the lined casket to the pathology wing of the West Middlesex Hospital. The man requested by the Home Office to carry out the post-mortem was an expert in the study of corpses retrieved from the water. It was said of him that if there were a chance of the cause of death being learned - suicide, accident or murder - he would find it. On a quiet Saturday morning, the professor of pathology waited for the trolley to be wheeled into his workplace, and for the casket to be unscrewed.

That weekend . . .

. . . Randomly chosen pubs, and the back rooms of the
spieler
Turkish-owned cafes in Green Lanes, were used by Mister for meetings. He set his business operations back on course. On the doors and in the alleyways at the rear and side of these buildings were his Cards. Shipments' movements were authorized, and tables were piled with envelopes of banknotes as debts and obligations were called in. Summoned by staccato calls on mobile phones, men came to pay court to Mister and wished him well. He spoke little, but that was his way. There were three patients now in the capital city's intensive-care beds - sufficient to emphasize his aura of power.

. . . For fourteen hours on the Saturday, and a further thirteen hours the following day, a man in a flecked tweed suit sat undisturbed and unseen in the small backroom annexe behind the chief investigation officer's suite and pored over the papers, profiles and tape transcripts concerning the life and times of Albert William Packer.

. . . Through Saturday, day and night, and Sunday, Joey Cann sat listlessly in the bed-sit that was his south London home, or slept fitfully. The telephone, in the ground-floor hall two floors below, never rang for him: neither did his mobile. On the Saturday afternoon, he should have been on the touchline watching Jen play hockey, but he'd not gone, and without explanation he'd cut the clubhouse disco in the evening.

On Sunday, he should have been in Somerset for his mother's birthday lunch, but he'd rung to say he had a cold and didn't want to pass it on. The photograph of the arrest was now Sellotaped to the wall at the foot of his bed.

.. . There was a crowded schedule for Henry Arbuthnot in the Surrey countryside, where nobody had heard of the Eagle. Pigeon shooting on Saturday morning, vulgar but useful for keeping the eye in practice for the serious matter of the pheasant season, a moment of respite before spending the next day with Maureen and the girls at the Chiddingfold Hunters' gymkhana, where his eldest banked on a rosette, and then a couple of solitary hours in his study to prepare for Monday's early journey to London.

. . . A charity's lorry was loaded at the back of a village's church hall in the East Midlands with boxes of woollens and cast-off clothes for adults and out-grown toys for children. An answer to a begging advertisement, placed in a local newspaper, for a haulage transporter to offer the charity a lorry had been answered by a Mr Duncan Dubbs, two months before, Not only would a lorry be provided, at no expense, to help those needy and unhappy people in the heart of Europe, but a driver too, and Mr Dubbs had told the organizing committee that he hoped to be able to add to their generosity with clothes and toys his own community had gathered together.

A sudden squalling blizzard hit Sarajevo. The mountains were masked by grey-black cloud, the streets were icy and treacherous. In premature darkness, gloom and danger fell across the city, and The river running through it rose to a spiteful torren t.

Crossing the main road cautiously into the city, Frank Williams had reached the offices of the judge. He'd skipped indoor football over the weekend, and instead had finalized the pouch of reports relating to the retrieval of a body from the Miljacka river. One more signature and the matter was closed. The judge's chambers were a chaotic mass of paper, and the man was distracted. He needed one more signature, received it, and then there was a final tying up of loose ends. Frank was given three eye-witness statements, the testimonies of three citizens of the city who had told local police that they had actually seen a man staggering from a night-club restaurant beside the river, then leaning alone over the rail of the bridge, and the last witness had heard a dull splash. Well done, the local boys, he thought. Good initiative, good enterprise - a welcome change. In return he gave the judge a telephone number that had been retrieved from a notepad found beside the bed in the hotel room; a Finn he worked with had known the technique of covering paper with the finest grains of black powder to identify the indentation of writing on the lower sheets of a pad after the upper sheets had been used and destroyed. They shook hands.

She found Joey in the unlit room, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. She would not have seen him but for the street-lights that beamed through the window.

The bed had not been made and it was now middle evening. The room was usually a temple to order-liness. Her eyes roved over the dirty coffee mugs, tinfoil containers from a takeaway curry, empty beer bottles, and typed papers scattered on the carpet. She had her own keys to the front door of the house and to the room on the second floor. They all said, the girls in her team, that she was lunatic to keep the relationship going. They were right, and she didn't listen . . .

She saw the picture on the wall. It was new, hadn't been there last week. He shouldn't have stuck the photograph to the wall. It wasn't fair on Violet, who'd put up good expensive wallpaper for her tenant.

Normally she would have said it was a damn fine room, airy and light in the daytime, and even felt something like home when the curtains were drawn.

But, this evening, in the shadows cast by the orange street-lighting it seemed to her to hold a threat. She looked back at the picture, as if it were the source, not the mess on the floor and Joey prone on his unmade bed. The room conspired to frighten her.

'How long have you been here?'

He did not answer. His eyes held a point on the ceiling.

'I'm speaking to you, Joey. How long have you been like this?'

The silence beat back at her.

'Joey, I'm not asking much. Aren't I entitled to expect an answer to a civil question - entitled or not?'

She thought she saw a brutishness in his face, and something cruel at his mouth.

'Joey, don't mind me, you're being pathetic. You don't want me here? Right, I'm going.'

Not that she did. The other girls said she was attractive and could have done better. It wasn't love, between them, not the sort of love she'd read of in the magazines from her teenage days, it was just something bloody comfortable, and she'd learned to exist alongside the variations of rudeness or indifference.

They'd met when he'd been sent to the school to liaise with the headteacher about setting up a remote surveillance camera in the roof space above the science block that would monitor a house across the road from the school's front gate. She'd had a free period and been deputed to show him the attic trap door.

She'd liked him immediately, and liked more the boyish shyness with which he'd asked to see her again. God, the ground didn't move under them, but they slept together, went to the cinema together and watched TV together. The last two years, before and after the arrest of the man Sellotaped to the wallpaper, she'd come to the empty - more often than not

- room, cleaned and cooked and sometimes taken his washing to the launderette. All the other girls said she was an idiot.

She knew the answer, but asked: 'Haven't you been to work today?'

'Not wanted. Told to go home. Put my feet up, they said. Relax, enjoy myself, think about something else.

So, here I am.'

She was always, couldn't help herself, most an idiot when he seemed so vulnerable. She doubted anyone else in the world saw the fractured, weak aspect of him. For two years he had been unable to think, to her knowledge, of anything else. When they were together, she'd shared him with Sierra Quebec Golf -

what a stupid name. No hobbies, no interests. Some of the men she worked with were into sport, or pho-tography, hill rambling, boozing, or skirt-chasing. He only had his team and his target. She didn't count against his team, or the man whose photograph was on the wall. She sat on the bed beside him.

'What's special about him?' She took his hand.

'Why does he matter so much?' With her thumb and forefinger she kneaded the rough skin on the back of his hand. 'Isn't it just another job, another day?'

While she held his hand she turned away from his face, and the pain she saw there, and looked up at the photograph. 'Is it because of corruption?'

She'd hit the cord. His fingers jerked tightly around her hand and his nails gouged her. His mouth slackened then tightened in a spasm.

'Did he buy his way out? That's the worst, isn't it?

Corruption hurts most, yes?'

He loosened her hand.

'Corruption's the worst, right? You're all looking at each other, all tainted by suspicion. I suppose men come in and search the files, go through all your assessments, get the computers to hack into your bank accounts, and look at what car you're driving, what your mortgage or your rent is, pry into your lives.