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; they'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.
'Good to see you, Mister, good to have you h o m e… '
He kissed her, on the cheek. It was not a kiss of devotion but of true friendship. Later she would give him the numbers of the new mobile phones that the Cards had dropped off, and when the house was last scanned for bugs, and where the vans were in the road for the cameras. She was a pretty woman, an inch or so taller than him, and had a good throat and good ankles. He had insisted that she never visited him in Brixton, never came to the gallery for the magistrate's committal hearing or travelled down to the Old Bailey. He protected his Princess from prying, peering, stripping eyes.
'… I expect you'd like a bath, and how about a nice lasagne then? God, it's good to have you back.'
She closed the door behind him.
As if it were his sole priority, Mister said, 'We don't know where Cruncher is. He wasn't on the plane last night. His hotel don't know where he is… It's ridiculous… Cruncher's never gone missing.'
The judge paused in the process of his laborious handwriting, shrugged, smiled helplessly and said that his daughter normally did the typing for him, but sadly she was not available. Frank Williams had just looked down at his watch.
'It's not a problem, sir,' Frank said. 'You have my name, number and workplace, yes? My involvement is purely coincidental. I happened to be passing the river and saw the body. It might be that of a foreigner, which would make the death IPTF business. The routine, sir, is that we should have a post-mortem, and that I'll set in motion an investigation to find out the identity of the deceased. It's all pretty straight-forward, I don't expect too many earthquakes… '
Again there was a self-deprecating gesture with the hands. 'It is because it is routine that you have been sent to me. If earthquakes were anticipated you would have been channelled to someone more appropriate, to someone more worthy.'
'I just need a signature, sir, for the hospital and the pathologist.'
Taking an age, the judge filled out the form. Back at home the work would have been done by a brisk, competent official in a quarter of the time. He wondered where they had dug this old fool out from, which stone they had lifted.
There had been no identification on the body, and no hotel security card. His starting point would be the better hotels in the city. The clothes carried designer labels: an Italian suit, a French shirt, an Italian tie, German shoes, and brief tight underpants of silk with a London l a b e l… silk.
Autumn 1991
He was watched. He had been watched all through the day from the early morning. It was late afternoon now, the sun was low over the golden outlines of the trees on the hills to the west of the valley, and he turned his slight body on the tractor seat to stare back hard at the big man who sat on a wooden chair by the door to the house. The tractor's wheels caught a rut in the field and jolted him, shook his spine through the thinning foam cushion on the iron seat. He lost sight of the hard eyes gazing at him from past the grazing fields, the big mulberry tree and the fencing close to the house that he had put up the previous spring.
They were two old, obstinate and opinionated men, and each in a moment of privacy would have called the other a valued friend, grudgingly, but times were difficult and changing for the worse, and on that day neither had called out a greeting or waved. They lived on opposite sides of the valley, separated by the Bunica river, and the events of the summer, now slipping away to autumn, had seemed to widen the differences of politics and culture; no wave and no greeting cry. Each would have thought it the role of the other to make the first gesture.
Above the noise of the engine he whistled to his dog. Years before he could have rounded up the cattle in the morning and the sheep in the afternoon on foot, but age had taken a toll of his knees and hips and he relied now on the tractor and the dog's skill. When the dog looked back to him for instructions he pointed towards the ford. In the morning, with his dog, he had brought the cattle back from the grazing fields, crossed the river with them, and driven them back to the fenced corrals by his barns; now he brought back the sheep. The grass was exhausted, the weather was closing for the winter. His dog harried the flanks of the column of sheep and stampeded them towards and into the river at a place where his father and grandfather, and his grandfather's father and grandfather, had dumped cartloads of stones to create the ford. Husein and the man who watched him had only been away from their own villages, in a whole life-span, for the two years of conscripted military training, and that was more than forty years ago.
He looked back at the valley floor across the riverbank. He saw the good grazing fields and the arable fields where the summer's maize crop had been harvested, the vegetables grown in strips had been lifted and the stark lines of posts linked with wire above the cut-down vines. He looked beyond the yellowed grazing fields, the ploughed arable land and the weeded corridors between the vines, past the mulberry tree from which the leaves were flaking, and the house with the shallow porch from which Dragan watched him, and up the hill track, by the well, towards the other village where smoke bent from chimneys, and over the ochre of the trees that caught the last of the sun's strength. His hearing was no longer keen, but he thought he had heard strident voices coming from north and south, warring in the few seconds that his tractor had stalled. But with the engine now straining to carry him up the far bank such sounds were blotted out. As the wheels spewed water and slithered on the mudbank, he saw the pool upstream and the fine trace of the wormed long line he had left out for trout.
It was the fault of the radios. The radios that played in his own village, Vraca, spat out poison, as did the radios in the other village, Ljut. Against the tractor's engine, they were dead. He braked. He allowed the dog to take the sheep ahead. He stood up, to his full short, wiry height. He lifted his frayed cap from his sparse hair. His mouth, filled with ragged teeth, was set in a weathered walnut face below a greyed, drooping moustache. It was, Husein thought, ridiculous to the point of evil, that the radios' poison and hatred should destroy an old grumbled friendship. He waved his cap and shouted, 'Dragan Kovac, can you hear me? Heh, I will be back in two days, if the river has not risen, to plant the apple trees. Heh, can we take coffee? Maybe we take brandy. Heh, I will see you, in two days, if it does not rain.'
He waited to see if his friend would wave back and strained for a far-away call in response, but he saw no movement, heard no answering shout.
