That night a ramshackle van had come down the road and the fish-eye's last image had been of its front fender before it had crashed into the brick column and destroyed the camera.
He doubted that either woman was in conspiracy with Packer - just inquisitive, and nosy, with flapping tongues.
Joey was outside the house. He had seen it through all the hours of the clock, days of the week, weeks of the month, months and seasons of the year. He knew the setting and size of the bricks of the walls, the number of glass panes in the front bay windows on either side of the porch, and the positioning of the spyhole in the door, the chimes in the hall from the bell - a year before the arrest a microphone had been set into the bark of the blossom tree by the front gate; it had lasted a week before being prised out; they'd muttered then that either Mister had got lucky, or that the information tap had leaked once again -
and the patterns on the curtains, and the mesh on the net. Behind the door and the curtains he knew the layout of the rooms. The house had been 'burgled' by the A Branch watchers, the first time they had been involved. They were the clever cats introduced to go where plodding policemen and mediocre Church men couldn't reach: they'd put a bug behind the cover where the TV aerial came into the living-room wall and a pinhead probe inside the ventilation grille in the bedroom, which had lasted four days. Both had gone out when the rubbish was put in the bin on the pavement. He knew the rubbish went on a Monday morning. The A Branch intruders had been in the house for seven minutes and had had time to photograph every room. He knew everything about the pictures on the walls, fine landscapes in watercolour but not mega-money, and the wallpaper, the pills in the bathroom cupboard and the food in the fridge. It was as if he had been a house guest.
'Can I help you?'
A woman was getting out of her car in the drive-way opposite and two doors down. Leonora Govan.
Separated, going on divorced, two children.
Surveillance said she was more often inside Mister's home for coffee with the Princess than any other woman in the road.
'No,' Joey said.
'May I ask what you think you're doing?' There was an accusing whip in her voice.
'You can ask, it's a free country.' Joey was smiling.
It was the first time he had smiled since he had taken the call on the mobile the afternoon before. But he walked on.
Well, it was a good question, which taxed him.
What did he think he was doing? He turned once and looked back. In the corner of his vision field was the woman, Leonora Govan, standing in the middle of her unloaded shopping-bags still staring at him. He glanced a last time at the house. He had brought it alive from the photographs simply by walking past it.
Joey Cann was not a romantic; those who didn't like him said he was humourless and without feeling, those who cared for him would say he was dedicated and focused. Flights of fantasy did not fill his mind. What did he think he was doing in a north London suburban road looking at a house where the only sign of life was a single upper window an inch open?
He stood stock still on the pavement. Ahead of him, on the playing-fields, was a class of boys learning football and beyond them a class of girls messing at hockey. At the end of the school day they'd be charging for the school gate, smelling of sweat and with dirty knees, and on the street outside the school would be the pushers, who bought and cut from the dealers. The dealers bought and cut from the importers. The importers made available the heroin, crack, cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD and amphetamines produced in the far corners of the world, and sold on for profit to the dealers and pushers. A romantic would have said the importer, an ordinary man from an ordinary house, was evil. Not the word Joey Cann would have used. The 'ordinary man', living in an
'ordinary house', was nothing more and nothing less than a target, the bloody biggest target the Church had: Target One. He wondered if the bastard, Packer, had laughed as he came out of court, released.
He had heard Mister's laugh on the tapes, seen it on the photographs.
What was he doing? By walking past the house he was putting life on to the photographs and tapes. He was making the man real. He rocked with tiredness and leaned against the fence. The man - Mister, Packer - would have thought himself an Untouchable.
He turned round. There was no movement in the road.
He whispered, 'What you should know, Mister, wherever you go, I'm with you, I'm following you.
Look over your shoulder, and I'm there.'
Joey giggled out loud.
On the Balkans Desk at the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, they read the signal sent by Hearn from Sarajevo.
'Oh, C h r i s t . . . ' a woman said. 'Another body, that's all we damn well need. Lead-lined coffins, paperwork like a phone directory. It's like Interflora, isn't it?
People shift bodies, undertakers, like florists shift flowers, don't they? It'll take a whole morning and half an afternoon to sort it. Families always say yes, then balk at the cost, right? I suppose Zagreb would be the nearest for an international undertaker, don't you think?'
The man beside her nodded. He was reading the signal for the third time. He said quietly, 'It doesn't seem that Hearn's too happy about this. I'll push it at the men in raincoats across the river. Give them something to do.'
* * *
It worked away at him, like an itch needed scratching.
Where was the Cruncher?
That morning he went to see his father. Other men suffered bad claustrophobia in gaol or deteriorated physically and mentally, became weighed down by the burden of institutionalism, but not Mister. He had survived imprisonment and now he believed his reputation was gold-plated. He had beaten them. He drove the Princess's 5-series BMW, three years old, and had the front windows down so that the street air blew onto his face. Several times on the drive down Green Lanes from the North Circular, his territory, before he had turned off for Cripps House, he had felt that peculiar buzz of excitement, the product of power, but each time as it peaked there had been the itch - Cruncher's absence.
There were eight floors to Cripps House. The estate had been built in 1949 and was ageing, decaying, but the housing authority always found resources to daub new paint on the doors and windows. The lift was regularly maintained. There were no muggings or thievings in that block, no drugs sold and no syringes left on the landings. On the eighth floor, at the end of the open walkway, perched like a sentry tower with a view to the main road and the parking areas, was the home of Herbie Packer, retired bus driver, widower, never in trouble with the police. Elizabeth Packer, who, when she had worked, had cleaned rooms at the Waldorf Hotel, had been dead now for four years. By the time Albert, not yet Mister, had been twelve years old the regular visitors to the top-floor flat had been teachers and social workers. When he was fourteen they'd been replaced by uniformed and plainclothed police. The refrain from Herbie and Elizabeth Packer to them all had been: 'He's a good boy, really, heart of gold, trouble is he's just got caught up with the wrong crowd.' There was no shifting them on that, even when the police came and arrested him and he went down, aged fifteen, for a year in the youth detention centre at Feltham - and at nineteen, when the door was broken open at dawn and he had been taken away to do two years in Pentonville. And still, as he proudly told it, they refused to blame him. He took the lift up. In any of the other blocks on the estate, all named after cabinet ministers of the day, he would have seen graffiti on the lift walls, and the contact numbers of tarts and pushers. There would have been the screwed-up paper balls on the floor that held heroin wraps, and even in daytime there would have been a mugging risk in the airless shadowed hall beside the lift shaft. But his father lived in Cripps House and the use of a pickaxe handle and electric terminals had secured the safety of the older residents, and small sums of money in plain brown envelopes judiciously placed in the right hands ensured that the building stayed clean and painted and that the lift worked.
Out of the lift, he paused on the walkway and looked across Alb
ion Road to the more distant Highbury Grove. His sight line travelled past the Holloway Road and locked on to the central tower of HMP Pentonville. By screwing up his eyes, straining, he could make out the regimented lines of cell windows on the back of D Wing. During his two years there, he had made the critical contacts of his adult life. As a result of time in Pentonville he had met the men who armed him, distributed for him, dealt for him, and the Eagle, and there his ties to the Cruncher had been strengthened. He swore softly . . . His eyes raked back over the dull skyline of towers, church spires and chimneys. Over the wall of the walkway were Dalton House and Morrison House, then the largest of the estate's blocks, Attlee House. Attlee House had been the Cruncher's home.
He could put his life into boxes. To each he allocated a varied amount of time and commitment.
One held the matter of the priority of discipline and respect, and had been dealt with. Another box was his father. He rang the doorbell and set the smile on his face.
The matter of the missing Cruncher was isolated in its own box.
He held his father in his arms and felt the thin bones of the old man's shoulders. Years ago he could have bought a bungalow for his parents down on the coast but his mother had always refused to leave Cripps House. Now, in his seventy-fourth year, his father was the same, wouldn't move closer to Vicky, Alex, May and Julie, his daughters. He stayed put: it was his home. They went in through the door and Mister kept his arm round his father's shoulders. The living room was dominated by the outsize widescreen TV and a soap was playing with the sound turned high because the old man's hearing was going.
'You're looking well, son.'
'Not too bad, Dad, considering.'
'I'm not too bad myself.'
'Is there anything you want, Dad?'
'No, nothing, I want for nothing.'
'You just have to shout. You know that.'
'Nothing, you're a good lad . . . I'm pleased to see you back. Hasn't been right without you being around.'
'Just a bit of a mistake, Dad. They was putting two and two together, making five. Nothing for you to worry about.'
It was as close as they ever came to talking about his life. He sat on the settee that had been pulled apart, half a dozen times a year, in the old days by the CID from Caledonian Road, his heels resting on the same carpet that had been lifted by the police so many times. Beside the television was the shelf and cupboard unit that had never fitted together properly since the detectives had dismantled it for the first time thirty-two years before. Whatever the teachers and social workers had said of him, that he was a hooligan and a thug, his father had never criticized him, never raised a hand or a voice in anger to him. All he had been allowed to provide for the flat was a new cooker and fridge for the kitchen, the fancy electric fire with lit artificial coal, and the widescreen television. In turn, he hadn't allowed his father to visit him on remand, for the same reason that the Princess had not been permitted to come to Brixton, or to sit in the public gallery at the trial. They talked about the programmes on the TV, and the new striker from the Cameroons just signed by Arsenal up the road in Highbury, and the weather, and the girls' babies; mostly he listened and his father talked.
When it was time for him to be moving, he said, 'I thought I might call in at St Matthew's, Dad - thought I might do that.'
They were on the walkway. Over his father's shoulder was the looming mass of Attlee House and he could see the boarded-up window where the Cruncher had been a kid. He kissed his father and hurried away.
* * *
The diplomat's signal moved electronically to the Secret Intelligence Service building on the south bank of the Thames river. The name, Duncan Dubbs, and the address, 48 River Mansions, Narrow Street, London E14, were fed into their computers. They failed to register a trace. The Sarajevo signal was recopied and passed back over the river to Thames House, home of the Security Service.
He asked for Matron.
'What name is it, please?' the receptionist asked curtly.
'Packer, Albert Packer.'
The receptionist was new. He hadn't seen her before and his name meant nothing to her. 'Do you have an appointment?'
'I just called by.'
'I know she's rather busy this afternoon.'
'Just tell her that Albert Packer's here. Thank you.'
From the outside it was a depressing Victorian building with a high facade of grimed brick. Inside there was all the light and warmth that fresh-cut flowers could muster. With his eldest sister and his father, he had brought his mother here four years ago.
The tumour in her stomach had been inoperable. The receptionist spoke on the phone and he saw the surprise she registered. She told him that he should go up, the implication being that Matron would clear her desk for him, and he said he knew the way. His mother had lingered for a week in St Matthew's Hospice before ending her life in peace. He loved the quiet of the building, and the smell of its cleanness, the light in the corridors and on the stairs, the scent of the flowers. It no longer held terrors for him.
Matron met him outside her office, wearing a prim blue uniform always decorated with her medal from the British army's nursing corps, and from her chest hung an old gold watch. She was a tall, gaunt-faced woman from the west of Ireland. She was formidable until she spoke, severe until a stranger saw the sparkle of wit in her eyes. On a cold February afternoon, four years ago, when he had brought in his mother, and he'd been refusing to accept the doctors'
diagnosis, and he'd seen Matron for the first time, he'd asked defiantly, 'Is it ever possible, does it ever happen, that a patient walks out of here?' Looking him straight in the eye, she'd replied, 'No, it never happens, it isn't ever possible and it would not be helpful to think it.' Few people told Mister the truth, unvarnished, with no adornments. In the next bed to his mother had been an artist who had exhibited with the best, and on the other side of her had been a retired colonel from the Brigade of Guards. His mother, the hotel cleaner, had been between talent and status, given equal care, equal love, equal amounts of pain-killing drugs.
'Good to see you back, Mr Packer. I was wondering . . . ' She chuckled.
'Were you now? What, hoping the bad penny wouldn't turn up?'
She held his hand. They were both laughing. With his other hand he reached into his hip pocket, took out a small, thickly filled envelope, and passed it to her.
There was never less than two and a half thousand in fifties and twenties in the envelopes he gave her, and seldom more than five thousand. With sleight of hand she slipped it down the V of her uniform under her throat, then winked. She never mentioned his life, or what she read in newspapers. The first time he had gone back to see her, a month after his mother's funeral, he'd asked her what she needed. She'd said that she'd a list as long as her arm, but a cheque would do. He didn't do cheques, but he did cash, as long as there weren't questions. 'How do I put cash through the books if I don't have a donor's name? Do I tell the financial controller that Christmas came early?' she'd asked. He'd grinned. 'You don't tell anybody anything. You do a bit of creative accounting.
You buy what you want to have, you don't have to wait on a committee's delay for authorization. It's yours to spend when and how you want to. I'll send along a man. His speciality's creative accounting.'
Cruncher was the money man. The cash in the little envelopes bought tilting beds, painted the wards, provided new TVs, paid half the annual salary of a Macmillan nurse, put in the computer that tracked the daycare patients, helped towards decent funerals for the dead without funds, the bus for outings, the comedians for parties, and holidays for carers. No other person knew of his financial contributions to the hospice and Matron never inquired into the source of the money she gratefully spent. He stayed away from public fund-raising occasions. His photograph had never been taken at the hospice. She'd told him once that what he did was 'raw, no frills charity', and told him another time that when, alone, late at night, she struggled with income and expenditure she
didn't know what she'd do without his generosity. He'd blushed then, and she'd never said anything like that again.
'What can I do?'
'I don't really like to ask you . . . '
"Try me.'
She rolled her eyes. 'There's a Mr Thompson who's just joined us. He might be with us for a couple of weeks, not much more. He's brought in a box of cowboy books, and his eyes aren't up to reading to himself, and he says women can't read cowboy stories aloud . . . I don't like to ask.'
'No problem.'
Half an hour later, Mister closed Sunset Pass having read two chapters of Zane Grey's story to a former water-board engineer suffering from terminal lung cancer.
'Well, that's interesting, very interesting.'
At Thames House, the computer registered a trace when fed the name of Duncan Dubbs. They were hard times at the Security Service. The end of the Cold War internal-espionage threat and the reduction in Irish mainland bombings had set in place a furious campaign to find work to justify the ever-climbing budget. A right-wing politician had described the Service as one of 'sound mediocrity'; on the other side of the House a left-winger had called it 'the worst and most ridiculed in the western alliance'. They were
'grey-shoed plodders' suffering 'institutional inertia'.
They were 'boringly parochial' and unable to bring
'intellectual debate' to their future role. As an apology of employment, organized crime had now been dumped on their desks. The computer clattered out the secrets of a man hauled from the Miljacka river in Sarajevo. Success bloomed, a reason for existence.
The line manager pored over the printout.
'Fascinating stuff. What will Mister say? Dear me.
Poor old Cruncher. Best bit of news I've heard all day, all week - Cruncher gone to his Maker . . . but in Sarajevo. What the hell was he doing in Sarajevo? I tell you what - "what" is going to cast a certain pall over Mister's face, going to wipe all that joy at walking out of the Old Bailey.' He turned to the young woman who had brought him the printout. 'Cruncher was at Mister's right hand - number cruncher, got it, Irene? -
The Untouchable Page 5
