The Untouchable (33 page)

Ahead of him, the sunshine of the afternoon was slipping to dull dusk, but low light snatched at the stunted little concrete posts of vivid white that rose from the dirt earth. Why would Mister come to a place of the dead? On the hill above Patriotske lige, and on the slope below, were the densely packed white grave-posts, not in ordered lines, not set with geometric precision, but squeezed in, forced together too close for decency.

Where Mister led him, he followed. Above the railings and below them, women and men and children moved with sad duty and carried little bunches of posies, a gift to the graves. Joey had not comprehended the scale of the Sarajevo slaughter. He remembered, fleetingly, the stories of the radio and in newspapers, of night-time funerals so that mourners would not have inflicted on them the shell and mortar fire of their enemies. Snuggled against the lower side of the twin cemeteries was an earth and shale soccer pitch, not blessed with a blade of grass, and he remembered, too, hearing and reading that a sports field had been used as an overspill graveyard.

Looking through the railings on the upper side of the cemetery, flush to the pavement as if the corpses had been squashed short to fit the space given them, were five white stones, same family name and same date of death.

The pavement ahead of him was empty.

Joey cursed for allowing a graveyard, the war dead, to break his concentration.

His eyes raked the desolation around him.

He saw Mister, and breathed hard. The moment's tension slipped from his muscles. Mister walked among the dead's marker posts. They reached to his hips. Some had fresh-cut flowers resting against them, some had sealed glass bowls protecting artificial flowers, some had flowers long dead, some were abandoned. He should have asked why, and did not.

Mister went slowly towards a great grey stone monument that sprouted above the posts, dark against light and dominating. He seemed to have time, not to be worrying. Mister did not look at his watch, as any man would have done if he had made a rendezvous there.

Mister walked past the monument and out of Joey's view.

'I'll deal with it,' he'd said.

Mister was wearing his best suit and good, lightweight shoes. Mud and snow slush clung to the knees of his trousers, was caked on his shoes. He knelt. He was behind haphazard rows of white posts and away to the right of the monument. It was the first time he'd seen him.

He would deal with it because that was his way. At stake was respect. To have been in debt and under obligation to Ismet Mujic was unthinkable to Mister.

The young man was near the monument. He had stopped and hesitated, and looked around him. The circling glance was supposed to be casual . . .

The tracker had lost his target. The monument was a fallen lion, or a sleeping one, and the inscription that was hard to read was in German. The tracker eyed the monument, as if to display his innocence, and kept his head movement minimal but his eyes traversed the posts and the graves. Mister watched.

He looked like a student. Mister had never travelled abroad on work before, but he had been to Spain often enough with the Princess for sunshine breaks and he'd have prided himself that he could spot the stereotypical characteristics of foreigners. He thought the tracker was British. The spectacles were the give-away. They weren't a fashion accessory, styled, they were functional: he could see the big lenses that flashed in the last light as the head was gently twisted . . . A policeman wouldn't have passed Hendon with eyesight needing such assistance. Low on the wet dirt earth and puddles of slush water around his knees, his viewpoint gave him the narrowest of corridors between the posts.

All the way up the hill, a route chosen at random, he had never looked back. He had not doubled on himself or used the reflection of shop doorways.

Ahead of him had been the cemeteries, the locked-up sports stadium, and the hospital high on the furthest hill. The upper sloping cemetery had seemed to give him the best opportunity. He waited and watched . . .

He searched for more of them. Down the slope, beyond the monument, were the railings, the pavement and the road. He looked for men in raincoats or leather jackets, for women who had no purpose in being there. All he saw was old women, old men and a few children walking slowly to graves, or sitting on seats and reflecting, or hurrying away because the evening closed on the city. He did not identify a team.

The realization came quickly. They had sent one man. That was lack of respect. He knew all the women and men from the police Crime Squad, from the police intelligence, from Customs' Investigation Service who were prominent in tracking, trailing, following him.

He knew their rank, their addresses and their families'

names. He knew about their kids, their cars and their holidays. With the Eagle he had walked past them at the Old Bailey on his way to the side door, had gone past their misery and their sourness. He did not know this one young man who now stood confused close to the monument.

A heavy rain had begun to fall.

He saw only the whiteness of the stones, the little clumps of flowers and the dark grey slabs of the monument. The lion, shrapnel-pocked, slept. It was a memorial to the German soldiers killed in a long-ago war. Joey felt the chill of the place, and the rain that was carried in the growing wind beat on his back and against his trousers. In some of the stones, set in shallow recesses, nested photographs of the dead -

young men, from the carved dates of their lives. He did not know whether they were soldiers or civilians, whether they had died in combat or been killed by shell splinters or by snipers. Some would now have been his age, or younger. Dreaming . .. and the wrong place to dream.

Joey Cann was the loser. While he had stood near to the monument around him the cemetery had emptied.

Joey, the footman, had lost the eyeball.

He turned away. The rain ran on his spectacles and he dragged them off and wiped them hard; without them the white posts were jagged blurs. He did not know whether he had shown out or whether he had fouled up. He could not say that he had been seen, or whether the bulk of the monument - the sleeping artillery-shredded lion - had masked Mister as he'd walked out of the cemetery's far side and disappeared into the network of small streets above it. There was a story written into the history of the Church of the day when twenty executive officers and higher executive officers had been deployed to follow a Colombian from a bank meeting in the City of London. Five lost the target in the first Underground station. More had been scattered as the target had changed trains on his journey. Three out of twenty had reached Heathrow with him. No one in authority could blame him for being dropped by his target, but he blamed himself.

He left the cemetery. The rain was sprayed in headlights, spattered off the glistening road, and soaked his trousers.

Going down the hill, first on Patriotske liga and then on Kosevo, he walked fast. Then, abruptly, he crossed a small park that separated Kosevo from Alipasino. He went past the fortress of the guarded American embassy, could see only the roofs of the buildings behind the high walls. The flag above them was limp and the floodlights burned brightly. Guards eyed him, a camera swivelled to train on him. Joey was trained in footman surveillance, not in the counter-culture. He had passed the tests, flying colours and praise from the instructors, in following, not in being followed. The sense of failure overwhelmed him. The failure, an itch in his mind, shut out a cooler response. Tears smarting in his eyes, he did not wave down taxis, didn't jump on buses. His nightly report would list Mister's movements, the tourist trail around old trenches above Sarajevo and lunch in a fish restaurant above Pale, and his drive to the meeting with Ismet Mujic and the unloading of more boxes that had been taken into the apartment. It would not speak of failure. He remembered how it had been in the room occupied by the new men and women recruited to Sierra Quebec Golf; Gough's harsh, staccato introduction, the hostile suspicion of the eyes that had glared at him, the interloper.

With the rainwater dripping off him, he stamped into the hall of his hotel, didn't respond to the friendly inquiry from the reception clerk as to whether he'd had a good day, and hurried for the stairs, his room and dry clothes. He never looked back, never saw the reaction of the snubbed clerk.

A hand palmed a banknote across the table to the value of one hundred German marks. It represented a quarter of the monthly wage paid to a hotel reception clerk, and won an answer. 'Joey Cann, room 239, from London.'

Another banknote, another hundred marks, slipped into the clerk's hip pocket and the name was fed into the hotel computer. Abill was printed out then passed over the desk. It was scanned. A name, a passport number, no address beyond London SW17, no occupation given, itemized food and coffee, one call made on the room's telephone.

A final question, and another banknote: was Mr Cann alone? He was travelling with a woman, separate rooms, a very smart woman - a lady. Hands were shaken, smiles were exchanged.

Mister walked out into the rain and the falling darkness.

The number of the mobile telephone was known only to its owner and its owner's paymaster. Three calls were made from it that evening.

The trigger for the calls was a simple request for information. As soon as the bleep and vibration heralding the call had cut into the conversation in the crowded Italian restaurant in Victoria, its owner had left the table and gone to the toilets. He was never without that phone, pay-as-you-go. He had listened to the brief message left against a rumble of background traffic.

His first call was to the night duty officer at the National Investigation Service of Customs & Excise.

He identified himself as the father of Joey Cann, and asked to speak to him. He was patched through to an extension number, and repeated himself. He was told, curtly, that Cann was abroad and apologized with humility. Buried in the workings of the mobile was an attachment that scrambled its number, preventing it being traced, placed there by a three-man electronics company from the east of London.

His second call was to a British Telecom engineer's home. The engineer worked in a building in central Bristol considered sufficiently sensitive to be un-publicized. From the building, telephone taps and the inquiries of covert law-enforcement organizations were handled. Among its many prized facilities was the ability to feed a number into a computerized system and receive back the name and address of the subscriber.

He waited in the toilet, left his wife and three colleagues, and their wives, at the table.

He was a detective chief inspector, on attachment to the National Crime Squad. A recent paper that he had read, 'Police Corruption Vulnerability Profiling', had offered a solid description of him, but he went unidentified and trusted because it was not the nature of the squad actively to search for culprits. He had known Mister since 1973 when he had been a probationer beat constable out of Caledonian Road and had taken the first small 'donation'. Now he was three years from retirement and had a record, with commendations, of distinguished service and a high detection rate. He was well regarded by colleagues and had successfully served in drugs, serious crime and robbery teams; he seemed to have a nose for guilt.

He was regarded by those alongside him as arrogant and brash, with justification. The woman at the table, waiting for his return, represented his third venture into marriage; his income from the Crime Squad, paid monthly, was divided between what he kept and what he paid to the two women from the failed relationships. He was secretive about his policing methods, seldom shared, rejoiced in the title of 'a copper's copper'. It was whispered of him that he bent regulations, but that had never been proven. He should have been made detective superintendent but promotion had been denied him for no articulated reason. It was likely that it had been blocked because he seldom hid an overweening contempt of his superiors and their dogma of political, sexual, ethnic and legal correctness; he was a 'thief-taker' and what the bosses wanted was a 'socialist pedagogue who was black and had a law degree in criminal sociology' - this was his familiar refrain when he bought the big drinks rounds for the juniors. Without the money Mister paid him he would have been as impoverished as a stray dog.

He had no fear of being unmasked. His seasoned experience meant that he knew the system of internal investigation and covered his tracks with care. Most recently for Mister he had identified the location of a prison's Protected Witness Unit, and the PWU

number given to a prisoner, and had named a technician at a Home Office Forensic Laboratory to which incriminating fingerprints had been sent.

For a quarter of a century, his arrangement with Mister had been mutually beneficial; he had received information on Mister's rivals and lifted them, always with evidence to convict. He had earned the right to promotion by his successes. Its denial had added a hatred of the system he served, he had no qualms about what he did - and the money kept coming.

His telephone bleeped, tickling the palm of his hand. He listened and wrote down what he was told, for the sake of accuracy.

He made his third call. He heard the distant traffic.

'Joey Cann works at NIS, the Church - he's abroad right now. The subscriber on that number is Jennifer Martin, address is Ground Floor Flat, 219A Lavenham Road, London SW18. Got it?' The connection cut in his ear.

The piece of paper, torn into many pieces, was flushed down the pan. He returned to the table to resume as its life and soul.

He looked around, saw nobody who he thought watched him, and lightly rapped the door at the back of the van. 'Me,' Joey said.

He was let in. He scrambled into her territory. There was a dull light inside, like a photographer's dark room. Maggie was squatting on her stool in front of her console. He avoided the bucket, saw that it was a quarter full. Beside it were her sandwich wrappings, two apple cores and an empty Pepsi tin. He looked at the screen. The camera, trained on the hotel main door, was bolted on to the dashboard top and was covered in yesterday's newspapers.