new territory. He knew how far to go: there was a line over which he would not step. When he was maudlin – worst when he took the Monday-morning train from Guildford to London and left behind the comfort of his family, his land and his home – he thought of himself as a victim. He could do his own deal, of course, and go Queen's Evidence, but he had no doubt that he would never live to enjoy the parts of his life that mattered to him – the family, the land, the home. He would be killed ruthlessly, and painfully.
He knew what the Cards did, and he knew that Mister was more vicious than the men he employed.
The Eagle took the money, and did what he was told to do.
'How'd you get that idea? You want me to go with you, I go. It's as simple as that.'
'Just for a moment I thought the old Eagle was giving me the shoulder.'
'Never, Mister, never in a million. It'll be a good trip.'
He was a cautious man and saw the journey as danger. There was the quiet cry of a mobile phone in the dull room, coming back off the booklined walls and off the floor where the files were stacked, the territory of grime and spiders. He liked to work on his own ground, where he had confidence. He needed to be alongside a legal system that he could waltz around, where rules were laid down that could be bent with ease and broken – but he would not have dared to stand up in open opposition. Mister dragged the mobile out of his pocket, listened expressionlessly, then snapped it off.
'Got to be going, something to be dealt with…
Atkins'll be with us. We'll talk.'
'Yes, Mister. I'll be here and waiting. Just let me know where you want me.'
The Eagle understood but had little sympathy for the new restless drive he saw in Mister. Himself, he was tired, looking for an easier road. He shuddered at the thought of Sarajevo. He remembered the TV images of bodies and wreckage, drunk teenagers with guns.
Autumn 1992
It was first light when the troops began to come back over the river. He had not seen the fighting but he had heard it. Husein Bekir had let his wife go to their room and had refused her entreaties to follow her. He had switched off the lights in the house, wrapped himself in a thick coat and gone to sit on a fallen log that was half- way between his home and the well that served the village. It was a bright night: there was a star canopy and a wide moon. It was a night when he would have backed his chances, when he was younger, of succeeding in hunting deer.
The troops came out from the trees behind Vraca, went through the village and down the track towards the ford. Earlier in the evening, before the attack was launched, an officer had come to him and expected him, the patriarch authority of the village, to tell where the mines were laid in defence of Ljut. That had been difficult for Husein because there were friends from his whole life across the valley, and he had pleaded that he was old and could not remember where he had seen them sown.
He had thought it the worst problem he had ever confronted, telling where the mines were or not, when he had heard from the darkness the crumpling, echoing crack of the detonations, ear-splitting noise that blasted between the valley's walls, and among the small-arms fire and the shouting, and the officer's whistle had been the awful humbling screaming, as when the dogs caught a fox and could not kill it quickly.
No flares were used in the battle, as he and his friend Dragan Kovac had been taught to use them when they had gone away for conscription training.
He had relied on his deteriorating hearing to follow the course of the fighting. Four men had been carried back from the far side of the river: one had lost half a foot; one the whole of a leg below the shred of his uniform trousers at the knee; another, as they had carried him, held his hands across his stomach to keep in his intestines; one had had the side of his face taken away. All of them had screamed, except the one with the stomach wound who called softly for his mother, and the men who brought them back had cursed the mines.
From his place on the log, he had known from the firing that the Muslim troops had reached the village, and then there had been a strange, frightening quiet.
He had thought he heard, but could not be certain, shouts and cries from far away. He had pulled the coat tighter around him, and cupped a match in his hand to light a cigarette: he had been careful not to betray his place with the cigarette's glow. Darkness had never, in his life, caused him worry. Often he had thought, when he hunted or when he fished for the big trout in the river, that the darkness was an ally, that he was more familiar with the darkness than with the deer and the boar or the big trout. But the quiet in the valley had been hard on him.
It had broken. The battle had restarted. Husein Bekir, an old farmer but a shrewd man, had imagination. It would have been hand-to-hand fighting at first, but he could see nothing of it, only hear the sound of it, and then Serb soldiers had driven the Muslim troops back down the hill. He had not needed to see it to understand what had happened.
They were in a straggling confused formation, a rabble.
They were soaked from swimming, their eyes shone and were wide, and Husein saw madness in their faces.
There were more wounded with them and he saw again the work of the mines. The sight of the injuries troubled him because he had not said what he knew.
At dawn there was always, in the autumn cold, a mist low over the river and the fields, and the troops emerged from it. They seemed to bless the cover it gave them, and some turned to fire their rifles uselessly through it, back towards the village they had taken, and lost. They came past him, and their madness made them shout obscenities towards the unseen enemy. He saw a knife in a corporal's belt. Dark blood stained the blade, and more blood had dripped from it on to the upper trouser of the man's camouflage uniform.
Husein Bekir began to look at each man who passed him – the dead carried over the shoulders, the wounded brought back on litters, and the men who were not dead and not maimed.
The officer came last.
Husein Bekir sat on his log, lit another cigarette. He could see, as the mist cleared, a pall of smoke over Ljut, the old gold of the trees behind the village, the fallen yellow grass of the fields he had not ploughed that spring and the sagging weeds in his vineyard, the house of his friend, Dragan Kovac.
He asked, 'Did it go hard for you?'
The officer stumbled. He would have fallen from exhaustion but was able to collapse on to the log, and his breath came in great heaving pants. 'It was the mines – because we did not know where they were. I don't know, I have to check, I think I have twenty men, not more, killed or wounded, and the mines would have been fifteen, or fourteen.'
'What has happened to the people of Ljut?'
'The village is cleaned. It is no longer a threat to you,' the officer said.
Husein thought of the blood he had seen on the knives, and of the people of the village across the valley whom he had known.
'Did any escape?'
'A few ran away because we were held up some minutes by the bunkers. Most stayed in their homes, in their cellars.'
'And you had time to find them before you were pushed back?' Husein asked grimly.
'We are a platoon and they were a company. When the reinforcements came it was one man against three… Yes, we found them in the cellars before that.
If I had wanted to stop the men I could not, not after they had seen what the mines did.'
Husein gabbled his question: 'Was there a big man there – a boar of a man – he is a retired policeman – big shoulders, big stomach, big moustache – a leader? Did he escape? Is he alive?'
'If he ran away, he is alive. If n o t… ' The officer shrugged, and struggled to his feet. 'I don't know. I didn't see him – there were many I did not see, did not care to see.'
When his wife came with coffee and a slim glass of brandy, the old farmer told her that in the night the life of the valley had died. She steadied his shaking hand so that he did not spill the coffee, and he gulped the brandy. He did not have to tell her, because she knew it, that it would have been the old people who had hidden in the cellars. They knew it because on other mornings they had stared, together, across the valley and the river, and seen the distant figures going about their lives.
The sun rose and threw clear long shadows from the trees on the far side of the valley. He watched as the Serb soldiers emerged from the smoke of the village with a wheelbarrow and heavy sacks. He saw them fan out
