The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  Henry Arbuthnot had only been twenty-two when he had first met the man who now paid him that healthy retainer, introduced to him by his black sheep brother, David, who had done twenty-seven months, fraud, in Pentonville prison and met Packer there

  - twenty-four months, aggravated robbery. In the twenty-eight years since then his client had never been convicted. He finished his glass of Pepsi and lemonade, wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and eased himself heavily off the high stool. As a twenty-two-year-old, fresh from college and his degree, learning criminal-case law, he had been a fierce drinker; not any more. He had been 'dry' since he had met Mister. He was on call twenty-four hours, day and night. For his retainer, which ratcheted up each year, it was demanded of him that he be constantly available. Mister was his meal ticket, and abstinence from alcohol was the price to be paid.

  He left the pub and sheltered for a moment in the doorway to gauge the strength of the rain.

  Opposite was the main entrance to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court. Word travelled fast.

  Photographers were gathering at the principal security entrance. Two police cars were parked at the kerb in front of the entrance, and the armed men were already loading their machine pistols into the secure compartments behind the front seats, their job over.

  There had been armed police on the corners of the building since the trial had started. He shuffled across the street. Because of his heavy gut he walked badly.

  He went inside and flashed his card. The Eagle knew the way it would end, had known for days.

  The prosecution case had originally involved the identification by Customs & Excise - the Eagle called it the Church - of his client in a car, his client's fingerprints in the car, and the evidence of an informer also in the car. While Mister had been on remand, the Eagle had systematically demolished the case with the help of the big man's enforcers. The Protected Witness Unit was supposedly secure and secret.

  Money had bought the location of the gaol where the PWU was housed, and the number given inside the unit to the informer. Big money had bought the prison officer who had contaminated the man's food.

  A stomach pump had saved his life, but not his resolve. 'If they can get me here,' he had whined, 'they can get me anywhere.' He had withdrawn his evidence, refused to testify.

  Mister was standing at the far end of the corridor, wreathed in dull light. The cell door beside his client was the only one in the block that was open. At his shoulder were the clerk, Josh, and a prison officer who clutched the bin bag, as if he were a hotel porter.

  The Home Office Forensic Laboratory was at Chepstow, across the Welsh border. The fingerprint evidence had been there. A technician with a predi-lection for gambling at the roulette tables of a Newport casino had been offered a choice: for co-operation his debt of nine thousand pounds would be paid off, for obstruction his mother's legs would be broken with such baseball-bat severity that she would not walk again. The fingerprint evidence had gone missing.

  'All right, then - shall we go?' There was a watery smile at the Eagle's mouth.

  The Church's identification of his client by their surveillance team had been a greater challenge. He couldn't buy the Church and couldn't threaten it, so the Eagle had had to burn late-night oil to work meticulously through the surveillance logs for the fissure in that part of the case. Having found the point of weakness, he had then diverted the attention of the enforcers, the Cards - Mister's hard men - to the leafy suburban detached home of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer on the special-case desk . . . It was all worked out, it was the power of his client.

  Mister never looked round. The prison officer passed the bag to the clerk. The Eagle led them back up the steps. At the first landing, instead of turning left and waiting at a barred grille gate for it to be unlocked and taking the route up to Number 7 Court, he turned right. At that gate, he showed his pass, as did his clerk, and the youngster pushed the discharge document under the face of the security man with the keys to Mister's freedom, a big, bluff, red-faced ex-Guardsman who wouldn't have brought coffee to a prisoner or carried his bag for him. The Eagle sensed that the security man wanted to sneer, spit, but didn't.

  They emerged into the great lobby area of the building.

  'Did you get the taxi, Josh?'

  'Yes, Mr Arbuthnot - side door, like you said.'

  No way that the Eagle would have Albert William Packer photographed close-up by a scrum of snappers, then have the pictures used every time a low-life hack wrote an organized-crime story on the capital. Anonymity was what the Eagle sought, for his client and for himself.

  Two groups of men and women were watching them. They'd have to pass them on their way to the side exit.

  'Just walk past, Mister, no eye-contact.'

  The first group were the detectives from the National Crime Squad. As the Eagle knew, they'd have had a watching brief because the targeting of his client had been taken away from them and given to the Church. Only fools played games when they walked past the detectives after a prosecution had failed. He recognized most of them, but behind him Mister, who had the keenest memory the Eagle had ever come across, would know their names, their ages, their addresses, their children's names . . . and there was one, who looked away, that Mister owned.

  The Eagle waddled past the detectives and towards the second group, rolling on his feet, arid panting a little from the climb up the steps.

  'You know what the Church say, Mister?' The Eagle spoke out of the side of his mouth.' "Of course there are professional jealousies between them and us, Church and Crime Squad. We're professionals and they're jealous." That's what the Church says.'

  There might have been a death in the family. The Church people stood hangdog, close to the side exit.

  There was a senior investigation officer and what the Eagle reckoned were all of the higher executive officers and executive officers who made up the Sierra Quebec Golf team, and they looked like they were too shattered to throw up. Sierra Quebec Golf had been assigned exclusively to his client for three years prior to Mister's arrest. It was all budget sheets, these days.

  The Eagle could snap the figures through his head. He estimated that the Church had committed a minimum of five million pounds to the investigation, then all the extras of Crown Prosecution Service and an Old Bailey trial. The men and women of Sierra Quebec Golf had good reason to think the ground had opened under their feet. He couldn't help but look at them as he went to the side exit. Set in the frustration of their faces, men and women, was deep, sincere hatred.

  They weren't like policemen. The Eagle had walked his client many times out of police stations, no charges offered, and had witnessed close up the resigned shrugs of men going through the form and 'doing something'. This was different, personal. He had to look down at his feet as he went past them because the loathing bled from their eyes. He went through the door, stampeded down a narrow set of steps, and behind him was Mister's measured tread. Mister wouldn't have been intimidated by the Church men and women.

  The taxi was idling at the side door. He dived for the security of the back seat. He saw the way the driver looked nervously at the client following him, then away. All the cabbies in London would know that the quietly dressed man with an unremarkable face, his client, was Albert William Packer. He gave the destination to the cabbie. The Eagle realized then that Mister had not yet thanked him, had not squeezed his arm in gratitude, nor muttered a kind word to him.

  As the taxi pulled out from the shadowy passage behind the Central Criminal Court, Mister asked softly, 'Where's Cruncher?'

  The first time the Sarajevo firemen had managed to get the grab hook onto the body and pull it out of the Miljacka's central flow and into slower side waters, they had ripped off a sleeve of its jacket. Their rope went slack, and they hauled it in to find the length of cloth.

  The chief fireman steadied himself, checked the coiled rope at his feet then swung the grab hook in faster circles above his helmet. The trees res
tricted the length of rope he could swing to gain the necessary momentum. There was a crowd behind them, and another on the far side of the river. Frank Williams, wearing the light blue uniform of the International Police Task Force, was enough of a student of the recent war to understand why there were trees on this section of the bank. This point in the river had been the front line. The burned-out apartments over the water had been the home of the sniper nests, crouched with their telescopic sights and looking down at a perfect view of the trees. All over the city, even in the worst of the shelling, men had gone out with axes and saws to fell trees for basic warmth, and take a chance with death. Here the trees had survived because death would not have been a lottery, but certain. He went to night classes to learn the language of Serbo-Croat-Bosnian; he was not especially bright, not formally intelligent, and the learning was difficult to him, but his slight knowledge of their language was always appreciated by the local men he worked with. It made an impossible bloody job marginally less difficult.

  Painstakingly, but fervently, in Welsh-accented patois he urged them: 'Come on, guys, let's get this shit business over with.'

  The chief fireman launched the grab hook. It was a good throw. He had made a clever calculation of the speed with which the river carried the body. It was now on its back, arms out as if floating at leisure in a swimming-pool. The hook splashed into the water down-river of the body's legs and caught the trousers. He took the strain. There was a ripple of applause on the far side of the river and a cheer from behind them.

  Frank Williams winced. When a body came out of the Taff or the Ebbw, the Usk or the Tawe, it would, at least be accorded a degree of respect, compassion.

  Here, it was a diversion, a brief show. The body made a bow wave as it was dragged against the current.

  He lapsed, as he always did when stressed, into English: 'For Christ's sake, do it with a bit of bloody care.'

  Three of the firemen scrambled down the stones of the river's wall, gaining purchase on the footholds where shells had splintered the masonry, or the weight of machine-gun fire had chipped the stones.

  They caught the rope and hauled the body over the slimy stones at the river's edge. Frank leaned over the wall and peered down at the white face, the big eyes and gaping mouth. He had been thirteen years in the South Wales Constabulary and a week short of seven months on secondment to the United Nations mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and he had not yet learned to be caustically removed from emotion at the sight of a stranger's corpse. The body was lifted up, heaved on to the wall, then lowered casually to the pavement, where the river water subsided from it. An ambulance pulled up behind them. The crowd pressed forward to get a better view.

  As he wound up the rope, the fire chief said dismissively, 'It is a foreigner . . . '

  'How can you tell?'

  Frank had been driving by twenty-seven minutes earlier when he had seen a bunch of street kids pelting something in the water. He had stopped, reflex action, as he would have stopped in Cardiff, expecting to find the kids' target was a wing-damaged swan, a duck or a drowning dog. He had been on his way back to his base at Kula, beside the end of the airport runway, from an early-morning shopping raid at a copper-smith in the old quarter, where he had bought a bracelet for his mother's birthday. He was already late. If the corpse was that of a Muslim, dead in the Muslim sector of Sarajevo, then it was of no concern to the IPTF. If a Serb died in the Muslim sector, there was IPTF involvement. If the body was that of a foreigner, the involvement was heavy.

  'Look at the watch on his wrist - it is gold. He is either a politician or a criminal, if there is a difference, or he is a foreigner.'

  * * *

  'So, where's Cruncher?' he asked again and saw the Eagle's eyes flick once in surprise. But his solicitor was never going to be superior with him, would never make a fast jibe. He knew the Eagle was terrified of him, and the combination of terror and greed kept the man in place. Mister's life was about power and control, whether at home, whether free, whether in a cell. He formed few attachments but he was fond of the Cruncher. He had grown up with the Cruncher, him in Cripps House and the Cruncher in Attlee House on the local-authority estate between the Albion and Stoke Newington roads. He had been to school with the Cruncher, lost sight of him, then met him again in Pentonville. He'd once heard the Eagle call the Cruncher, wasn't supposed to hear it, a

  'bloody little barrow-boy'.

  The cab turned off the North Circular and drifted into tree-lined streets where the first spring blossom was showing. He'd been in maximum security since the last day of the previous July when the trees had been heavy in leaf; he had missed the autumn gold and the Christmas stripped bareness. Now the daffodils were out in full glory under the blossom trees, but the crocuses were waning. It was a time of year the Princess liked . . . They were at the top of his own road. The houses were wide, detached buildings, brick, stucco or mock-Tudor, and there were Neighbourhood Watch stickers on many of the ground-floor front windows. Bumps in the road prevented illegal speeding by cut-through drivers. It was a quiet, respectable road, one of hundreds in the capital, just as his own house was like one of thousands of similar properties. Only fools drew attention to themselves: most of those who did were in Long Lartin or Whitemoor, or down on the island at Albany gaol. Other than twice to ask the question about the Cruncher, who should have been there, Mister had not spoken during the journey; he had listened to what had happened in his absence - details of property purchases and sales, and profits too sensitive for the prison-visit booths - and taken a careful mental note of it.

  The Eagle tapped the screen behind the driver and pointed up the road to Mister's house, then said, 'He should have been back last night. The Cards were down at the airport to meet him. He wasn't on the flight, didn't come through. The Cards called me. I rang his hotel. They said he hadn't checked out, but his bed hadn't been slept in the last night. I called again this morning, he still hadn't been back in his room. Sorry, Mister, that's as much as I know.'

  It should have been a perfect day. He wasn't looking at twenty, twenty-five years, but at coming home to his Princess . . . but Cruncher hadn't been there.

  There was a bleat in the Eagle's voice. 'You know what I worry about. I mean it, lose sleep about? One day you overreach - know what I mean - take a step too far. I worry . . . It was close run this time.'

  He hit the Eagle with a closed fist, where it hurt, just below the heart. It was a short jabbed punch, and his solicitor let out a little stifled gasp. Mister owned a detective inspector at the heart of organized-crime investigations, a prison officer, telephone engineers in the sections where taps were monitored, had a man in place wherever he was needed; he could strike terror into rivals, turncoats and lawyers. He employed the best of solicitors on retainer, and the best of accounting number crunchers . . . so where the hell was Cruncher?

  The taxi pulled up. Mister slipped out of the cab with his bin bag, didn't offer an invitation to the Eagle to come in with him. He hadn't thanked the Eagle, the work was well paid for. He would never be in debt -

  money or for services rendered - to any man, never under obligation.

  'Hello, Mr Packer, nice to see you back.'

  He smiled at the young woman pushing the buggy with the sleeping baby along the pavement. She was from four doors down and her husband imported Italian fashionwear. 'Good to be back, Rosie.'

  A woman was clipping the early spring growth on her hedge two doors up. Her husband owned a garden centre in Edmonton, and her garden was always a picture. They supplied the labour that kept the Princess's lawns and herbaceous borders neat.

  'Afternoon, Mr Packer, welcome home.'

  'Thanks, Carol, thanks very much.'

  Rosie and Carol, and all the rest of the road, would have remembered clearly that morning, the last day of last July, when the road had swarmed with armed police and white-overalled forensics people, as he had been led away in handcuffs by the Church. Every upstairs curtain would have twitched; t
hey'd all have been in their nightdresses and pyjamas, peering down at him as he was escorted to the car and pushed inside. He knew from the Princess that Rosie had been by that morning, when the police and the forensics team had gone, with a cake, and that Carol had brought flowers. They were ordinary neighbours in an ordinary road, and they knew fuck-all about anything.

  He heard the taxi pull away behind him, and rang the doorbell. The climbing roses over the porch were in leaf but not yet in bud. The lawn had had its first cut. The door opened.

  She had been Primrose Hinds. Their marriage had lasted eighteen years in which time he had never touched another woman. She was the daughter of Charlie 'The Slash' Hinds who had emphysema, a hot temper, and a regular address in the Scrubs, and who was flash. From his father-in-law he had learned all that was wrong about a lifestyle. Primrose was his Princess. She knew everything about him, she was as discreet as her father was not, she was the only person he fully trusted. He could have bought his Princess a castle, covered her with jewellery and lived the celebrity existence, as others did. She had never worked since their marriage, at which no photographs were taken by guests and no official snapper was employed. A year after the wedding, a doctor had told her that she was unable to have children.