The Untouchable (42 page)

You want out because you don't think you're valued

. . . You are, sincerely you are. Who was the last person to tell you that you were quality, the best? Your father?'

He held Atkins's hand and his thumb massaged the knuckle. His voice was pitched low and Atkins had to lean forward to hear him. He knew about all the people he employed, and their families. There was a brigadier, retired, down in Wiltshire who had received from the Queen in his soldiering days a Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross. From what Mister had learned, the brigadier thought worthless the son who had been bumped out of the army in disgrace.

He knew Atkins hadn't been home last Christmas. If he skipped going home at Christmas then it was to save himself from supercilious insult. He held the hand and saw the head shaken glumly.

'It's what I'm telling you, you're quality and the best. I want you beside me. I value you, Atkins.

Everything's going to be all right, I promise. Just a few hiccups, but it'll all work out. Anything you want to say?'

'No, Mister, nothing.'

'No more talk of quitting?'

'None.'

'Well said. Said by a man I can lean on, a man I'd depend on. You want to go and get some sleep. That hand . . . ' Mister loosed it. ' . . . I'd put my life in that hand and know it's safe.'

He watched Atkins shamble away to the lift.

He leaned further across the table. Without warning, with a short-range jab, he punched the Eagle's upper arm, aimed at the flab where it would hurt. He laughed, as if that were his idea of amusement.

'Snivelling little rat . . . Tell me it wasn't your idea, Eagle, didn't prime him to it. No, no . . . '

'You did well, Mister,' the Eagle said. 'But, then, you always do.'

He told the Eagle about his dinner, what he'd learned and what he'd agreed to. He said where he would be early in the morning, and where he would be for the day, and what he wanted from the Eagle and Atkins while he was away.

'Seems good to me, Mister.'

They ambled towards the lift and his arm draped over the Eagle's shoulder. 'I reckon we're rolling.'

Chapter Thirteen

For Mister the day started well.

There was a clear sky over him with a dipping quarter-moon. The sun wasn't yet up over the rooftops of the city but a sheen of its coming light slipped into the side-street where he stood. His position, half in the doorway of a steel-shuttered boutique, gave him a useful view of the square and its shrub bushes draped with wind-blown litter, the hotel's steps, the interior foyer and the reception desk.

He had the timetable of the flights. He had risen early and expected to be rewarded for it. He saw them come into the foyer together, and go to the desk. He understood the way they worked, operated, at the Church.

They backed off. It was the difference between him and them. There would have been a meeting, and fed into the meeting would have been options - to stay and reinforce or to back off. He felt supreme.

She carried a lightweight case out of the foyer and down the hotel's steps. The young man, Cann, followed her, loaded with a heavy silvery metal case and a smaller overnight sports bag. She didn't look like anyone from the Church he'd seen before - too petite, too smart - and not police either. She would have been the bug e x p e r t . . . but he'd seen her off. She turned on the pavement and walked towards the far end of the hotel building, Cann trailing behind her.

Under a street-lamp, Mister saw their faces. Hers was tight, his was depressed and lowered. They disappeared from his view, went round the corner of the hotel's block. Mister waited. He had seen enough, but his innate care and sense of caution ruled him.

An old blue van came fast from the side of the hotel and accelerated past the steps to the foyer, then braked noisily at the traffic lights. She was driving. A lesser man than himself would have whistled and waved to them, or given them the finger. They were gone. He looked down at his watch to make the quick calculation. They were on schedule for the flight out.

There was a bounce in his stride when he left the side-street. It would be a good day for him.

She'd held her silence all the way down the old Snipers' Alley, past the destroyed newspaper building, past the ruins of what had been the front line protecting the airport corridor, and past the camp of the French soldiers. She'd said nothing and Joey hadn't broken into her mood.

She parked, switched off the engine, then tossed him the keys.

'Good luck,' she said.

'I'll see you in.'

'You don't have to - I'm capable of catching, on my own, an airline flight.'

'I'll carry your case.'

She pouted. 'The gentleman to the last.'

Not that Joey had seen many but he thought it was like any early-morning airport anywhere. She took her place in the check-in queue. In front and behind them were the personnel of the international community. There was a buzz and a rippling of jokes in a mess of languages. They were getting out, they were getting shot of the place for ever, or had the lesser escape of a week's leave. Policemen, soldiers, Red Cross workers, United Nations officials, they all let the staff on the check-in know how they felt about a reservation on the silver freedom bird. Maggie Bolton wasn't a part of them. She was severe, cold, as if that were her protection. The laughter rang around her, over her. When she was one place short of the front of the queue, she turned to Joey. She didn't speak but pointed to her ticket, her eyes asking the question: was he coming? He shook his head. She knew nothing of the clamour of his bedside telephone. What I'm looking for, Joey, is mistakes, big ones, the ones that nail him. It had been a long time, many clocks' chimes disturbing the night quiet, before he had slept again.

Maggie gazed at him, as if he were far away, then jabbed her elbow into his ribcage.

'Right, that's it, that's me on board.'

Both of her bags would go with her in the cabin.

She left the check-in and started to walk towards the departure doors, let him carry the heavier bug case.

'What happens when you get back?' Joey asked.

'Is that supposed to be bloody sarcastic?'

'It's merely a simple question, meant to be polite.'

She paused at the doors and stood against the flow.

'Into Heathrow about eleven thirty, if the Zagreb connection works. A car to meet me and take me into London - not because I'm important but because of the bag. A debrief - if they ask me why you didn't travel, I'll say you were waiting for the dry-cleaning to come back. Don't worry, I won't shop you.'

Joey said softly, 'My instructions are to stay, carry on without you, as best I can.'

Her composure broke. 'What? That is worse than bloody stupid.'

'And when you've had your debrief?'

'Check the bug into the workshop, see if it's past help. Go home. Look at the post, ring my mother. The usual. Then put my feet up. Then . . . We all fail, you know. We don't brood about it. Learn to accept failure.'

'Have a good flight.'

She swivelled away from him, joined the flow and went through the doors.

'It's a tip,' Atkins said.

'The right road, the right number.'

'Can't be r i g h t . . . '

'It's what Mister said,' the Eagle muttered. 'Are you going to whinge, or are you going to do what he told you to do?'

'You bastard.'

'Eating from his hand. A couple of little compliments - God, you come cheap.'

Atkins flushed.

They walked towards the half-intact, half-destroyed house. Where his parents were, down in Wiltshire, a dry cow or a useless lame gelding wouldn't have been kept in such a place. This building was lived in. Where the stumped rafters were lowest from the angle of the roof, what was left of it, a washing-line was suspended and it reached to the bottom branch of a bare tree. On the line, drying in the sunshine, were a young woman's flimsy pieces of underwear, and mixed with them was a ragged assortment of long baggy pants, thick vests, heavy check shirts and the darned socks of an old man.

There had once been a garden. Over the rubble of the house end lay the tangle of sprouting rose suckers, trying to crawl towards the open, wall-papered interior. What had been an inner door was barricaded with nailed planks. Atkins thought it a pitiful place, not a judge's home, not five years after the war had ended. He saw the nearly buried roof of a car. If he hadn't been examining the building, turning it over with his trained eye, he would not have seen it. It would have been parked beside the building when the artillery shell had struck home. Part of the roof and all of the outer wall had fallen on it, along with the last of the dirtied snow of the winter. There were narrow wheelmarks making tramlines to and from a ramp leading to the main door. It was the right address, the wheelmarks confirmed it. The door, with the paint weathered off it, was firmly shut. There were no lights behind the two remaining windows, which were covered with double layers of cellophane; he could not see inside . . . He was the best, quality. Mister had said it. He turned his back on Judge Delic's home.

Over breakfast and before leaving for a vaguely explained destination, Mister had described the departure of Cann and a woman scuttling with their bags from a central hotel - without crowing - and then Atkins had been told of a 'little problem' that Mister wanted sorting out. He looked above the house. He searched the hillside for a place of elevation, where the tripod could be set up, that could be reached on tarmac.

He thought the place would be near the Jewish cemetery.

Atkins set off to find it, and the Eagle puffed after him.

'Miss Bolton? I'm Ruthin, Eddie Ruthin. I came down from Vienna.' She thought him a vacuous-looking younger man, with a quiff of hair falling on his forehead below a trilby, thin under an oversized Burberry mackintosh.

'What for?'

She had come into the airside concourse at Zagreb.

She felt wretched. It was not the turbulence that had hit the flight, but the glowering thoughts in her head that affected her. She was out, Cann was still in. She had found justification for it and had walked away, abandoned him. She hadn't even pecked him on the cheek, but had given him instead a homily on failure.

'They thought, in London, after what you've been through, that a friendly face might help.'

'Did they?'

'Well, your life was in danger, wasn't it? So, how can I help?'

'How long do I have here?'

' 'Fraid there's three hours to kill before the London flight. I suppose, also, they didn't want you lugging all your gear round on your own. May I take the case?'

'I'm perfectly capable.'

'Well, let's find a chair, somewhere to sit you down.

What about a coffee?'

Maggie sat in a chair and faced the plate-glass windows. She manoeuvred the heavy case under her thighs and behind her shins, stared out over the runways and saw a distant line of hills to the west.

Beyond the hill was the border, and beyond the border was Joey Cann. The case holding the equipment that might have helped him was cold against her shins and thighs.

'I'd like, please , if you can get them to make it, a pink gin'

Gough listened. 'So, you came down to see old Finch, to see how the old beggar's surviving, and to pick the old brains. Surviving not too bad, actually, with a bit of help from ten year-old malt. You know the best-kept secret in the Custom House? There's a life outside. Fancy that. My life now is the garden and the newspapers, and I do the housework because Emily's still working, and I've .a bit of time to think. You'll be wondering if I'm bitter and twisted. Can answer that easily enough - I am. What makes me bitterest, twists me tightest, is that Cann still works in Sierra Quebec Golf. I used to pity him, almost feel sorry for him. now I just detest him. I go to the wall at dawn, blindfold over my face, and the rest of my people get the Church's version of Siberia, but Cann survives.

You want to know what I think? He's one of those empty people fuck-all in him. No life and therefore no balanced view, searching for a cause. The cause might have been God,, might have been Chelsea bloody Football club, might have been fuchsias in a green-house. but it was Packer. That sort of empty person needs a bloody cause, something to fill the hole.

Bastard didn't have one iota of the ethic of law enforcement, not like I had and the rest of my people

- and look where it's got us. It was more like that pitiful sort of dedication those sick creatures have who stalk celebrities, photograph them, stand outside their homes and go through their rubbish , all wrapped up in some shitty justification that he was the only one who cared about the job. I ran a good team. We worked for each other. He didn't. To the other guys, girls, he was a pain. He wanted to be alone, wasn't a part of us, he had his mission. His mission made him a big boy, gave him a reason for living. People with a mission, they come unstuck, don't know when to stop. You shouldn't have sent him there, not to Bosnia. Wouldn't that be the sort of place where you'd need to know when to stop, and back off?'

Gough left Brian Finch in his conservatory with the first glass of the day in his hand. He had heard what he wanted to hear.

'It's a neck of the world I don't know.' Mister's con-fession of ignorance felt like an apology.

'I promise you, there is no place more beautiful, more pure, Mr Packer, or more sad. Perhaps one day you will go there, yes?'

'Maybe. The way you tell it maybe I should - but not to see the sad part.'

Monika Holberg was like no woman he had ever known. But, then, the Lofoten Islands, north of the Arctic Circle, was a place he had never heard of. As she'd told him about her home and a life of farming small fields, and of dragging cod out of the sea, he'd thought grimly that they didn't grow poppies in their fields or coca bushes, didn't have laboratories that manufactured E tablets or amphetamines, had nothing for him to buy, nothing for him to sell. Not good fertile territory for trading. She was like no woman he'd known because she talked. From the time she'd |picked him up, with her driver, sitting in the back of the UNHCR jeep she had barely drawn breath, He knew about her home village, Njusford on the island ol Hakstodoya. He knew about her parents, Henrik and Helge. About her brother and sister, Johan and Hulde. He knew the names of their cows that lived eight months of the year in a heated barn, and the annual weight of the cod they caught in the nets.