The Untouchable (4 page)

He looked back at the valley floor across the riverbank. He saw the good grazing fields and the arable fields where the summer's maize crop had been harvested, the vegetables grown in strips had been lifted and the stark lines of posts linked with wire above the cut-down vines. He looked beyond the yellowed grazing fields, the ploughed arable land and the weeded corridors between the vines, past the mulberry tree from which the leaves were flaking, and the house with the shallow porch from which Dragan watched him, and up the hill track, by the well, towards the other village where smoke bent from chimneys, and over the ochre of the trees that caught the last of the sun's strength. His hearing was no longer keen, but he thought he had heard strident voices coming from north and south, warring in the few seconds that his tractor had stalled. But with the engine now straining to carry him up the far bank such sounds were blotted out. As the wheels spewed water and slithered on the mudbank, he saw the pool upstream and the fine trace of the wormed long line he had left out for trout.

It was the fault of the radios. The radios that played in his own village, Vraca, spat out poison, as did the radios in the other village, Ljut. Against the tractor's engine, they were dead. He braked. He allowed the dog to take the sheep ahead. He stood up, to his full short, wiry height. He lifted his frayed cap from his sparse hair. His mouth, filled with ragged teeth, was set in a weathered walnut face below a greyed, drooping moustache. It was, Husein thought, ridiculous to the point of evil, that the radios' poison and hatred should destroy an old grumbled friendship. He waved his cap and shouted, 'Dragan Kovac, can you hear me? Heh, I will be back in two days, if the river has not risen, to plant the apple trees. Heh, can we take coffee? Maybe we take brandy. Heh, I will see you, in two days, if it does not rain.'

He waited to see if his friend would wave back and strained for a far-away call in response, but he saw no movement, heard no answering shout.

For two centuries the ancestors of Husein Bekir had bought land from the ancestors of Dragan Kovac, paid over the odds and bought every scrap, every parcel, every pocket handkerchief. Christian land was now Muslim owned. To Husein it was incredible, as it had been to his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather, that the Serb village was prepared to sell precious land to a Muslim village for short-term gain.

He understood that the Serb people prized a uniform more highly than hectares of grazing and arable ground, orchards and vineyards. The Serbs were bus drivers, hospital porters, clerks in the Revenue, soldiers, Customs men and policemen. Dragan Kovac had been a sergeant in the police before his retirement.

They sought the status of the uniform and the security of the pension, not the scarred hands and the arthritis that came from working the land. Husein himself had bought the pocket of land right under the home of Dragan that included the mulberry tree and the field where he hoped next week to plant the apple trees.

There was no more land left to buy, and the radio from Belgrade, listened to in Ljut, said each morning, afternoon and evening that Muslims had stolen Serb fields.

The radio from Sarajevo, heard on the transistors in Vraca, said every day that Serb tanks, artillery, and atrocities in distant Croatia would not intimidate the Muslim leaders from the prize of Bosnian independence. They killed old friendships.

His wife of thirty-nine years, Lila, chided him for not wearing a thicker coat as protection against the evening chill and his grandchildren, wild little mites, charged excitedly to fence in the sheep. There was a rumble of thunder as grey dark clouds chased the sunset.

The first splatter of rain fell on Husein Bekir's face.

He climbed down stiffly from the tractor.

The sun still shone on the far side of the valley, on the land he owned that stretched from the riverbank to the scrub-covered slopes that rose to the tree-line and the other village. He was a simple man: his formal education had finished on his fourteenth birthday and he could read and write only with difficulty. He claimed that political argument was beyond his comprehension and he followed the simpler instructions of the mullah in the mosque. He knew how to train a dog. He knew also how to work land, and get the heaviest possible weight of crops from the arable fields and grapes from the vineyard. He knew how to catch a trout that would feed five people. He knew how to stalk a bear and shoot it for its skin, how to track a deer and kill it for its meat. The valley was his place. He loved it. He could not have articulated that love, but it burned in him. Because of what the radios said, from Belgrade and Sarajevo, he did not know what was its future.

He thought that Dragan, the retired police sergeant and a monument of a man, separated from him by politics and religion, shared the same love. He walked awkwardly up the hill towards his home. At the door he paused. The sun dipped. The rain came on harder.

The beauty of the valley was lost as the squall crossed it. The russet and ochre colours were gone. Husein shivered, then coughed deep in his lungs and spat out the phlegm. He kicked the door shut behind him so that he would no longer see his valley.

The sign on the desk, printed off a PC and stuck to a cardboard strip, said, 'CANN
do
- WILL
do'.

Sitting at the desk, stamping two-fingered instructions onto his console then staring at his screen, the young man pointedly ignored the chaos around him. It was as if the work he did divorced him from the atmosphere of morose and sour heartache. He was the only member of Sierra Quebec Golf who had not been in court. As SQG12, the dogsbody of the team, he had been left behind to mind the shop when the rest of them had trooped up to the Old Bailey. As he hit the keys and scribbled longhand notes on a pad, he seemed to refuse to accept what all the others knew. The team was finished. Some were packing papers into cardboard boxes, others were going round the walls and stripping down charts and photographs viciously enough for the paint to come away with the Sellotape, downloading computers and stacking disks, collecting the personal radios from the lockers around the room, checking the surveillance cameras'

serial numbers against the docket sheets, and those on the telephoto lenses, then putting them roughly into the silver metal protected cases. The senior investigation officer chain-smoked under the no-smoking sign. It was over. The inquest would start in the morning, and it would not be pretty. The SIO

would need to watch his back, and the higher executive officers would be making damn sure they didn't have to field the blame. When the inquest started, all of them but the SIO would either be taking the leave they'd postponed till after the trial or beginning life in a new team.

'Don't touch t h a t . . . '

He must have looked up at the moment that the final picture on the wall was about to be ripped down.

It was a half life-size picture, full length, of a man in T-shirt and trainers, handcuffed, being escorted down a garden path. At the foot of the picture one word

'Mister' was written in marker pen. It was the venom in the voice that made the man hesitate.

'Leave the damn thing there.'

The room had been ritually cleansed, the boxes and cases filled, all the computers switched off but one. It had taken them long enough for the pubs in the City to be emptying of commuters.

They filed out. Joey could hear their fraudulent laughter in the corridor. The team had been together for three years, for nothing. It was the senior investigation officer's idea of leadership: they were going to the pub to get so drunk they couldn't stand, then they'd fall into rip-off mini-cabs and get home, and in the morning they'd all have mind-bending hangovers, they'd have solved nothing and not eased the hurt.

He was twenty-seven years old. He was the junior.

Sierra Quebec Golf, formed to target Albert William Packer, no other purpose for its existence, was the only team Joey Cann had worked for. For those three years he had lived, slept, walked, crapped with Albert William Packer. He had never seen Mister face to face, only looked at photographs and watched video. He had never heard the man's voice clean, only listened to it on tape from the telephone intercepts and directional microphones. Yet he would have said that he knew him. For three years, in the room at the Custom House by the Thames, he had been buried in tapes, surveillance logs, photos, reports, forensic findings, buried so deep he had sometimes needed to gasp for air. It had come without warning. If the SIO had known that the case was about to fold, or the HEOs, or any of the older EOs, then none of them had thought to tell him. Just a call on a mobile phone to say that it was over.

He picked up a phone, dialled. 'Hi, Jen, it's me . . .

I'm going to be working late.'

'Tell me something new.'

'Did you hear?'

'About what?'

'About the case, dammit, the case - Packer.'

'Has it finished? It wasn't supposed to finish before—'

'It went down, Jen.'

'Sorry, am I being stupid? Has he gone down? What did he get?'

'Jen, the case went down. He walked.'

'You had it sewn up. From what you told me, it doesn't make sense . . . Look, it's aerobics night, do you want me to skip it?'

'I'm working late.'

'Don't you want to talk?'

'No.'

He rang off. Speaking to Jen had put clutter in his mind. The chaff was cleared when he cut the call.

Doggedly, carefully, he began a long night of travelling again through the case work. In the pub they would have thought what he did was futile. Each time the tiredness tugged at his eyelids he blinked it away from behind his big, pebble-lensed spectacles, and looked up at the picture of Mister in its lonely honoured place on the wall. That alone was enough to shift the exhaustion and drive him back to the screen.

Chapter Two

Past nine in the morning and the fingers still beat rhythms on the console's keyboard. Two hours before he had waved away the cleaners. The room was a tomb of stacked boxes around the cleared desks and the locker doors hung open crazily. When he had been fiercely tired, his head sagging, the sight of the photograph on the wall had stiffened him. Joey Cann was near the end.

The computer hummed with the latest instruction, then the format of cross-examination flickered on to the screen and locked. He read.

Question:
And you were alone in the surveillance vehicle?
Answer:
I was.

Question:
It was after eleven o'clock that night?

Answer:
It was.

Question:
Up to that time, eleven o'clock that evening, how many hours had you worked?

Answer:
Seventeen.

Question:
How many hours had you worked that week?

Answer:
Ninety-four.

Question:
You were tired? You were desperately tired?

Answer:
I was doing my job.

Question:
How many hours' sleep had you had that week - an estimate?

Answer:
Thirty-five or forty - I don't know.

Question:
What was the weather that night?

Answer:
I can't recall, nothing exceptional.

Question:
According to the Meteorological Office, there was low cloud and intermittent drizzle - but you don't recall?

Answer:
I don't remember.

Question:
Had you eaten in that seven teen-hour shift?

Answer:
We usually try and get a burger - but 1

don't remember what I eat.

Question:
I'm getting a picture of a tired man, and a hungry man - you are aware that hunger increases tiredness?

Answer:
I suppose so.

Question:
The distance between yourself and the vehicle in which you 'identified' Mr Packer was seventy-seven metres. Is that correct?

Answer:
I believe so.

Question:
You were tired, you were hungry, the visibility was poor, you were the length of three cricket pitches from the target of your surveillance, but you maintain that you are certain that you could identify Mr Packer?

Answer:
I do, and 1 am.

Question:
Had you, yourself, cleaned the windscreen of your vehicle?

Answer:
No.

Question:
When was the windscreen last cleaned?

Answer:
I don't know.

Question:
Don't you have the records that will tell you, records from the vehicle pool?

Answer:
I don't have them.

Question:
Was there a street-light close to the vehicle in which you allege Mr Packer was sitting?

Answer:
There was enough light for me to make an identification.. .

Question:
I asked whether there was a street-light close to that vehicle - was there?

Answer:
I don't recall.

Question:
On the map plan you have provided us with there is a street-light almost directly above the car you had under surveillance. Did you know that?

Answer:
The light was satisfactory for an identification.

Question:
According to the records of Haringey Council Roads Department, that light had been reported out of action eighteen days before and had not been repaired by the relevant date - does that surprise you?

Answer:
I identified Mr Packer.

Question:
Did you take photographs that night?

Answer:
Yes.

Question:
Where are those photographs?

Answer:
They didn't come out.

Question:
Didn't come out?

Answer:
Correct.

Question:
I see you wear spectacles - are they for general use?