The Untouchable

by Gerald Seymour

  Joey had come by mini-cab but Gough, the first thing he was told, had caught two buses to reach the airport. With his rank, Gough was entitled to a car and a driver. Joey realized it was Gough's way of telling him, fiercely, that the journey and the work were not holiday. Joey didn't know of another senior investigation officer who would have come out to Heathrow at ten to seven to see off a junior on a flight. His bag was checked in. He thought that soon, if not already, the new men and women of Sierra Quebec Golf would be drifting into the Custom House. They were a miserable crowd, not like the old team. What he'd seen of them, there was no wit among them. They looked puritanical in their serenity. Pulled in from around the country so there was no possibility that they were tainted by association, they were all hard and humourless, and suspicion of him had blazed in their eyes. They would be drifting into a room where the door's locks had been changed, and where new lockers would be installed later that morning with new keys, and there was already a spyhole set in the door and a voicebox for visitors to announce themselves. Within days, the room would stink because no cleaners were to be allowed inside during the night.

  'But, and this is but and big, you do not put yourself at risk. At all times you are professional, and you are there to collect evidence. If what you do is illegal, can't be used, then you will get no praise from me. I don't want a bag full of material that a lawyer can pick holes in. You are legal at all times, and that is not negotiable.'

  He had told Jen that it was just two or three days.

  She'd been waiting for him and his clothes had been laid out on the bed. She'd washed all the shirts, put them through the dryer, then ironed them. She'd brought him, said sweetly, shyly, that he might want to take it with him, a strip of four photographs of herself froma supermarket booth; she smiled in one, frowned in another, pulled a solemn face in a third, and stuck her tongue out in the last. She'd stayed the night. They'd both been half awake, half asleep, after The alarm had gone off; he'd have forgotten the strip ol pictures if she hadn't pointed to them, and they were in his wallet against his backside. She hadn't cried as he'd left but she might have done when he'd closed the front door and run to the mini-cab in the street.

  'That's her - the lady's privilege, tardiness...'

  Gough's voice dropped. 'I want his head. I want the blood running on the plate, like it's gravy . . . but legal. Don't dare forget that.'

  Following Gough's eyeline, Joey saw her. He'd expected one of the style of women he worked with in the Custom House. The style was flat shoes, square hips, small chests, chucked-back shoulders, no makeup, bobbed hair. He'd said to Jen often enough -

  and it mattered nothing to him - that femininity in the Church was the endangered species. They swore with the men, drank with the men, had failed marriages with the men, and pissed in the bucket with the men when they were cooped up in the vans on surveillance. He was staring because it was not what he had expected or was used to. She looked like Kensington or Knightsbridge woman. She was looking around her as she headed for the check-in of Croatian Airways. As she wafted into the queue, Gough removed the pipestem from his mouth and advanced on her. Joey trailed after him.

  He heard Gough say, 'You're Miss Bolton? Good to meet you. I'm Gough, glad you made i t . . . '

  Joey reckoned that lateness, in Gough's book, was a cardinal, capital offence. It was a sparsely veiled rebuff, and she ignored it.

  Her accent was class. 'No point hanging around this bloody shed. Yes, I'm Maggie Bolton. Who's he?'

  She jerked with her thumb towards Joey. He didn't wait for Gough. He said, 'I'm Joey Cann. We're travelling together.'

  'With the kindergarten, am I? Not to worry, I expect we'll manage.'

  The queue moved forward. Joey, feeling himself the hired hand, reached to push forward the heavy metal-sided case that she had brought along with a lightweight one.

  'Don't touch it,' she said sharply. 'I'm quite capable.

  Touch it and I'll kick you, bloody hard.'

  She heaved the heavy case forward, then delicately toed the lighter one up against the check-in conveyor.

  She told the girl, as an instruction, not for debate, that the heavy case would be going in the cabin with her, and slapped her ticket down on the counter with her passport. She had the weary look of a frequent traveller, as if life was a chore. He wondered how her job description was listed in the passport. There was stamping and the tearing out of the ticket's flimsies, and she was given her boarding card.

  'Come on, then,' she said. 'Let's go.'

  She'd been very pretty, as she'd approached them, small, elegant and finely made, like a detailed little figurine. Close-up, leaving the check-in, Joey saw the depth of her makeup. Her alarm must have gone an age before his because her face was a minor work of art. She might have been ten years older than him, but he couldn't have said so because the makeup blanked out crow's feet and mouth lines. Her hair, gathered into a short ponytail, was soft gold, but he didn't know whether it was real or from a bottle. She wore a loud blue-green blouse, silk, and a dark skirt suit with a knee showing above neat ankles and lightweight half-height shoes. There was an old necklace, supporting a gold pendant, at her throat, and her fingers flashed small diamonds, but no wedding-ring.

  He'd been told she was a technician, expert, and had not expected a businesswoman. She lugged her bags towards the departure doors, not hurrying as the third and final flight call was made. She stopped, turned.

  'Right, Mr Gough, now don't worry yourself. I'll look after him, make sure he changes his socks, and bring him back safely. 'Bye - oh, how's Porky?'

  'I don't think,' Gough answered stiffly, 'I know anyone of that name.'

  'I thought you worked for him. Your boss, isn't he?

  Porky Cork - Dennis Cork. He wasn't going anywhere with us so he transferred to run your crowd.

  How is he?'

  Gough growled, 'He's well. He's happy in his work because he is now doing a job that is worthwhile. The job is worthwhile because it affects people's lives.'

  ' 'Bye, Mr Gough,' and she was moving.

  They went through the gate. He saw the passport as it was opened and handed over for cursory examination. She was a personal assistant.

  They walked towards the plane's pier. She was struggling with the metal-sided bag but Joey was damned if he was going to offer help; there was a small sweat rivulet on her brow about to carve a little canyon through the blanket of makeup. On the pier, at the aircraft door, she slipped the bag down and flexed her fingers.

  Joey said, 'Why were you so rude, Miss Bolton, about me, and to Mr Gough?'

  'Call me Maggie - it's not the sort of work I'm used to, and you're not the sort of people I'm used to working with, and it's hardly a target that excites me.'

  He had overseen the burning of his clothes, and those of the Cards who had held the man down, in a metalworker's coke oven. Then he had gone home.

  Mister showered.

  He was a long time under the scalding spray and he used a heavy soap to wash every inch of his skin, and every orifice of his body.

  He sang quietly to himself in the bathroom. He felt elation. The Princess had been asleep when he'd come home, and would still be sleeping when he went out again. The exhilaration coursed in him, powered by the water's heat, and the days ahead would challenge him. It was what he wanted, what he had dreamed of.

  The wife wouldn't speak. Nobody would speak. Not the family, not the neighbours, and not Georgie Riley.

  And the name would not be written down of the man responsible for the injuries inflicted on Georgie Riley. His name and his fate were not spoken of in the pub where thirty-six hours earlier he had slagged off Mister Albert William Packer. The neighbours of his terraced home had seen nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing. The wife, crouched over the hospital bed, had laughed into the face of the detective sergeant, then snarled that he should 'fuck off' and

  'get lost'. The victim, Georgie Riley, had he wished to, could not have named his a
ttacker because his tongue had been cut out with a Stanley knife. He could not have written down that name because the four fingers on each of his hands had been taken off with an industrial stone-cutter's circular blade.

  He might live, a white-faced physician told the detective sergeant out of the hearing of the wife, for twenty-four hours, and it was possible that he would linger for forty-eight, but he would not survive. The damage was in the trauma and in the loss of blood.

  Georgie Riley had lain unconscious in a ditch at the edge of a quiet road leading into Epping Forest for an estimated seven hours before a telephone-kiosk call, when a voice disguised by a handkerchief or clothing over the receiver, had given the location and summoned an ambulance.

  'How do you get the creature responsible?' the physician asked.

  'I don't know why it was done, and I couldn't on oath say for certain who is responsible,' the detective sergeant said. 'It's about fear. Riley is a medium-scale villain, more time in gaol as an adult than out of it, but he's done something that's caused offence. He wasn't killed outright because the point of the exercise is to create terror and to have that talked about. Men like Riley think themselves big shots, and brave with it. A shoot-out death is acceptable, top-of-the-range funeral and buckets of flowers, that's all fine, and they think they'll go into history . . . What's happened is that he has been humiliated and made to scream and he'll have wet himself and shat himself and begged for his life. There's nothing noble about the way he's going, a piece of dismembered meat.'

  'Won't somebody, eventually, inform?'

  'Probably - when the man who ordered it, maybe did it, no longer has power. That's what we live for, when the power dries up. You see, sir, for that sort of man, there is no retirement. There's no day that the birthday comes and he goes down to the post office and draws a pension, or heads off to a decent little villa outside Marbella to live off the interest. They can't walk away and protect what they have and live out their old age. When they're hands-off they're finished, and the information flows. The man who did this is not hands-off, he is up and running and wants his dirty world to know it.'

  'And until then nobody will inform, people won't stand up?'

  'Take you, sir . . . '

  'Me? Where could I possibly fit into it?'

  'Riley has never in his life passed the time of day with a policeman, but he'd trust you, wouldn't he, sir?

  What about this for a scenario? I make available a video camera with microphone attached. You come in here in the dead of night, when his wife's asleep next door. You've cut down the sedation dose, and he can hear you and see you. You hold a photograph in front of him, a photograph of the man most likely to have inflicted these injuries on him. You ask him if that's the man who did it, and you tell him to nod or shake his head . . . Let's say, wonder of wonders, he nods, and it's on the tape. Are you with me, sir?'

  The physician blanched. 'I really don't know, I'd have to think . . . There's ethics . . . '

  'Very sensible, sir,' the detective sergeant said gravely. 'Let's say it all happened. Of course, we'd offer you and your family protection - wife down the supermarket with a Heckler & Koch machine-gun for company, kids at school with a Glock pistol alongside.

  For how long? Try the day after the trial finished, then you're on your own, and scared witless every time the wife and the kids are out of your sight, and looking under the car each morning with a mirror. Much better, sir, not to get involved and cross over to the far side of the street and hurry on, like everybody does.'

  'You make me feel ashamed.'

  'I don't intend to, sir. Take me. Let's say a low-level plodder like me turns up the dirt on this man and my evidence is going to send him down. He can pay me and not notice it, what I'll work for twenty years to earn, or he can have my family blown away.'

  'Do you know who he is?'

  'A very fair idea. It's not a level playing-field, sir. I go into an interview room to confront him and I've a camera on me and a tape recording me, and a lawyer there to make sure my questions aren't oppressive, and because society demands it I've a book full of regulations tying my hands. When he goes into an interview room to talk to Georgie Riley all he has to worry about is whether the Stanley knife blade is decently sharp and whether the motor on the concrete-cutter works.'

  'Well, you'll understand that I've a ward full of patients to see.'

  'You called him a creature, sir. That's selling him short. If he's who I think then he's a very clever, very cunning man - stands to reason, he's at the top.'

  The physician was at the anteroom door, and flustered. 'How do you nail him?'

  'By getting lucky, sir.'

  'Who's going to get lucky?'

  'Not me, sir. It's someone who can look him in the face, straight in his eyes, and show he can't be bought, can't be frightened. Don't know where you'll find him.'

  Late by ninety-five minutes into Zagreb, they had missed the connecting flight to Sarajevo, and been told that the following flight in the afternoon was cancelled.

  They had to be in Sarajevo that night, Joey had said.

  Then he should go and hire a car, she'd replied tartly.

  He'd done it. He'd picked her up outside the terminal in a small Ford. She'd gone and bought a road map of Croatia, and the look on her face said this was Mickey Mouse and more of what she was not used to. They'd driven away from Zagreb, caught the Sisak road and gone through the ghost town of Petrinja. She'd had the wheel and he'd navigated off the map. It was only when he'd missed a turning that he realized an apology wasn't necessary because she'd caught it. She knew the road. Then he'd sulked and tossed the map over his shoulder so that it fell on to her metal-sided case on the back seat. Two miles after the first signpost to Dvor, she had swung the car abruptly off the road, bumped up a track into a wood and not stopped before they were hidden from other motorists' view.

  He'd watched. His help was neither asked for nor offered. She stripped out the back seat, with the metalwork under it and the door panels, then opened the heavy case. There were probes, terminals, a variety of light sockets, power units and gear he could not recognize. He'd thought he'd seen everything of surveillance equipment in the room used by Sierra Quebec Golf, but some of what he now looked at was smaller and more compact, and the rest he had never seen before. It all went into the door handle and under the back seat, then she rebuilt the car. Last, she took half of her clothes from the soft bag and casually dumped them into the case. He saw, before the case was closed and locked, a couple of cocktail dresses, items of underwear, and a pair of heavy walking boots, and they'd driven on. He carried only his camera, with the 300mm lens, and that could be explained. He had no paperwork with him.

  The border was a line in the river between Dvor and Bosanski Novi. The bridge over it was military, an iron frame and rattling planks. The old bridge was collapsed and unrepaired from the precision of a USAF strike five years earlier. They crossed and were waved down. As she braked she asked for his passport.

  She snapped out of the vehicle. She took charge.

  She flourished the passport and a packet of cigarettes had emerged from her handbag, then another, as if they were loaves and fishes. The Customs men, who had been bored and lounging and smoking, were around her. She was their honeypot. She flashed smiles, and the cigarettes slipped into clawing hands.

  She spoke their language and they laughed with her. She marched a man with sergeant's stripes back to the car, flicked open the case and her bag, then Joey's bag, and there was more laughter as she rolled her eyes when her underwear was exposed. She went into a dismal wood-plank shack. He wondered how many languages she spoke and where she had been, and he knew, in truth, that he had just not thought through the question of going into a Customs check.

  When she came out, holding the passports, she offered her hand to the sergeant. He took it formally, slobbered a kiss on the back, and they were gone.

  'Well done,' Joey said gruffly.

  'Thrilled, I'm sure, t
o be honoured with praise.'

  'You've been here before?' It seemed a pointless question.

  'Where do you know best?' she asked.

  'Nowhere, not abroad . . . ' He thought his answer confirmed that he was low grade. 'Workwise? Well, bits of London. On my team it would be Green Lanes, but the last three years I've hardly been out of the Custom House. Yes, it would be Green Lanes, that's north from Stoke Newington and south from—'

  'Yes, yes . . . There's a dozen places I know best. Here's one, and you don't need to know the others.'

  She drove fast. Twice he closed his eyes as, late, she swerved out of a lorry's path. She'd have seen that he flinched, and that hurt. She seemed not to care about the pot-holes in the tarmac.

  It was dismal country, pocked with isolated farmhouses, and he saw women doing the subsistence work and digging in fields. His mind raced. Serb territory, and the atmosphere was of poverty from which there was no recall and helplessness. They went past gaudy, ghastly roadside bars, painted to grate on the eyes, and lonely little fuel stations. He thought he was in the land of the abandoned where the people paid a collective price for their crimes.

  Coming towards Prijedor they skirted villages where weeds grew inside roofless houses and rake-thin dogs chased the car's wheels. No living person moved in these villages, which were being overwhelmed by undergrowth. He had seen these places on television, when it had happened, but he had not seen them since they were destroyed. Brambles and thicket bush survived where people had not.

  She said quietly 'The north-west and the south-east were the worst for cleansing. That's their word, used in their army manuals. The word is ciscenje, to clean -

  as in minefields, barricades, enemy positions. They merely transferred it to people. They surrounded these villages, one at a time, and told the Muslims they were leaving. First they made them sign away their property rights and took all evidence of property possession from them, then they separated them. The women and children went into UN camps over the Croat border. The men were taken to camps close to here. They killed as many of the men as they could, by beheading, beating, disembowelling - you name it -