evidence that would incriminate him or – worse – lead to the sequestration of his assets.
'So…?'
'I'm going to go with it,' Mister said. 'It's what I want.'
'I'll make a coffee.'
'Don't think I'm not sorry about Cruncher, but I feel good.'
On the first train of the day that clattered down the tracks south from Glasgow a tall, elderly man with a stooping walk came back to his seat from the buffet car.
His seat was in standard class. His rank in Customs
amp; Excise entitled him to pullman or first-class travel, a full English breakfast in the restaurant, and compli-mentary newspapers. But it was his style that he claimed the minimum of available expenses. The habit was unsettling to his juniors and frowned on by his more senior colleagues. He revelled in the discomfort he caused. He would not have admitted it to anyone he worked with, but he rather prized the ability to create discomfort. No one in the National Investigation Service, whether drunk or hallucinating, would ever suggest there was a possibility that this senior investigation officer had his price. In work practice, he was regarded as a dinosaur from before the Stone Age, but his incorruptibility was guaranteed. He had demanded, and reluctantly been given, a receipt for the single beaker of coffee. He settled into his seat. A young mother was breastfeeding beside him. A businessman opposite shouted into his mobile.
He shared foot-space with a student who'd spread textbooks across the common table. He travelled light. In the rack above him were a small tartan sports bag and a waxed green coat. A thin briefcase lay on the table, close to his hand, as if it were the only thing of importance he had brought with him. He wore highly bossed but worn brown brogues, a heavy check shirt, a quiet braid tie, and a three-piece suit of grey tweed with green flecks. An antique gold watch-chain hung across his upper abdomen. The mother, the businessman and the student would have been hard put to place him in society. From an inside pocket he took a slim, ancient flask and poured a dash of malt into the railway coffee, sipped it, growled in quiet satisfaction, then clamped an unlit pipe in his mouth.
He unzipped his briefcase and took out a single sheet of paper, faxed to him the previous evening after he had been called to London. It was the preliminary report on a drowning in the river running through Sarajevo.
Late summer 1992
When dawn came, the soldiers were nervous and tired after a night of standing-to. An explosion had initiated the alert.
Dragan Kovac found Captain Vokic by the well. He saw the bags under his bleary eyes. The retired policeman no longer lived in his own home: he had been told it was too dangerous for him to stay there now that paramilitary bandits had moved into the village across the river, and he lodged with his nephew, his nephew's wife and their children, an awkward arrangement. The captain now slept in one of the two stone and heavy-timber bunkers, had made a command post in the dank interior of the other. Kovac had come to resent the presence of Captain Vokic in the community because he, the leader, was relegated in importance: all decisions affecting the village and its life were taken by the captain. Not that there was great life in the village. The younger men had all been taken into the Serb army and were scattered through Bosnia, and many of the younger women had left for the heartland of their own people, far distant from the uncertainties of the war's front line.
Dragan Kovac asked for, and was grudgingly given, the captain's binoculars. He stared out into a blur before the captain irritably showed him the focus ring. Clarity came. He was looking at the home of his former friend, Husein Bekir. When he talked with the old men and women who were left in Ljut, or his nephew, or the young soldiers, it was always of the enemy across the valley, and the atrocities that they would commit if they were ever able to come in strength over the Bunica river. There had been no contact with the men and women of Vraca since the soldiers had come to Ljut. He could see the smoke rising from the chimneys, children playing, and men with rifles sitting idly on stones, smoking or reading.
He did not see Husein Bekir, though he searched for him among the cattle and the sheep that scavenged the poor ground on that side of the river for fodder. If he had not had the binoculars he would not have seen Lila, Husein's wife, and then he would not have thought of the man whose home faced his. He handed them back to the captain.
'What happened in the night?'
'A mine exploded.'
'Did they try to come through, Captain?'
'I don't know. Perhaps.'
'The soldiers are scared, like women,' Dragan Kovac said dismissively.
'Of course they are frightened… They are not like the regulars who first came here, they are not even conscripts. They are village boys. All they have of the army is the uniform. Always I am asked to send more men away for transfer to a more important front line.
I don't think that we could resist an attack pressed with determination.'
'How do you give them courage?'
'I put out more mines. The more mines they have in front of them, the braver they are.'
Later in the morning the soldiers carried forward two sacks of PROM mines. The captain fretted around them in the long grass of the grazing fields, in the weeds that had grown up in the ploughed fields, and in the overgrown vineyards. The PROMs were bigger, more lethal. A few were buried in holes hacked out of the grass and weeds so that only four stubby prongs were visible before the plants were worked back over them, and they were hidden; they would be activated by nine kilos of pressure. More were attached to short stakes and had a trip-wire leading from the antenna to a second stake; they also would be hidden when the grass and weeds grew, and were activated by a three-kilo vigorous tug on the wire. Among the military men on both sides of the war, the PROM was the most feared. On firing, a first charge threw the explosive capsule nearly a metre into the air, then came the main detonation. The shrapnel would fly out at a level to hit the genitals or soft lower belly of the victim. It was deadly. If he had not had the detail of his map, the captain would not have been able to take his soldiers down into the fields where the fallen grass and yellowing, seeding weeds covered that earlier sowing.
Fourteen new mines were planted, to stiffen the morale of the young soldiers, and the location of each was added to the captain's map.
The pollution of the valley had spread, and other than the map there was no evidence of it.
'We found where the mine exploded, but there was no blood there, no pieces,' the captain later told Dragan Kovic. 'I think it was an animal, probably moving too low, on its stomach, for the shrapnel… You should go, you know, you should leave. It is not safe here.'
'It's my home,' the retired policeman said.
'I have heard on the radio – I am transferring in the morning to Sarajevo.' The captain stood outside his bunker. 'You will not have a professional to protect you, only an idiot from Foca, some untrained kids, and a minefield.'
On arrival at Heathrow airport, the body was hijacked.
The slip of paper that authorized its removal was illegibly signed, but that was good enough for the London firm of undertakers. The hearse drove away empty from Cargo, and a closed van took the lined casket to the pathology wing of the West Middlesex Hospital. The man requested by the Home Office to carry out the post- mortem was an expert in the study of corpses retrieved from the water. It was said of him that if there were a chance of the cause of death being learned – suicide, accident or murder – he would find it. On a quiet Saturday morning, the professor of pathology waited for the trolley to be wheeled into his workplace, and for the casket to be unscrewed.
That weekend…
… Randomly chosen pubs, and the back rooms of the spieler Turkish-owned cafes in Green Lanes, were used by Mister for meetings. He set his business operations back on course. On the doors and in the alleyways at the rear and side of these buildings were his Cards. Shipments' movements were authorized, and tables were piled with envelopes of banknotes as debts and obligations were called in. Summoned by staccato calls on mobile phones, men came to pay court to Mister and wished him well. He spoke little, but that was his way. There were three patients now in the capital city's intensive-care beds – sufficient to emphasize his aura of power.
… For fourteen hours on the Saturday, and a further thirteen hours the following day, a man in a flecked tweed suit sat undisturbed and unseen in the small backroom annexe behind the chief investigation officer's suite and pored over the papers, profiles and tape transcripts concerning the life and times of Albert William Packer.
