The Untouchable (46 page)

Gough laid down the cup and saucer, and made his excuses. It had been more of what he had hoped to hear.

The detective chief inspector wandered out of the entrance. Within sight of the front-desk security people, he lit up a cigarette. Half of the building, home of the National Crime Squad, slipped outside during a working day for a drag, cough, gasp. Round the corner, in the small length of pavement where the high cameras were blind, he reached in his pocket for the pay-as-you-go mobile. There was a clipped answer and he heard traffic in the background. He reported what he knew. He suggested what he would do next and it was sanctioned.

When the camera picked him up again, the mobile was back in his pocket and his cigarette was nearly smoked. He returned through the security check and took a lift to the fourth floor.

He stood in front of a grey-suited commander. His life was lived at the edge, walking a tightrope that was razor fine, and precarious. His bank accounts, held in customer confidentiality in the Channel Islands, proved it. He had known the commander for twenty years of police service, he was trusted and a friend, but was always correct.

' I thought you should know something, sir.'

'Cut the "sir" crap - what is it?'

'Hammersmith had a call, "intruders on premises", from a member of the public. They went to this address and found it stuffed with the Church, doing the place over, warrant and all. The property is the home of Bruce James, a security consultant and ex-military. He is also, which makes him interesting, listed as an associate of Packer. We are, as I understand it, supposed to be fully appraised of any Customs operation mounted against Packer. Wasn't that laid down, agreed? Nothing's come across my desk. It's not a situation I'm happy with, sir, if we're sharing with them but they're not sharing with us. Put frankly, it makes life bloody impossible and it's a slur. We're not to be trusted. I can't see you, sir, taking that lying down . . . Just thought you should know.

He pushed the wheelchair. He had changed into cleaner clothes, filled in the laundry list and dumped the bag outside his room. Then he had shaved, and walked to the Ministry of Justice, where he had searched out her father's courtroom. He had gone inside, tiptoed between the public's benches and the lawyers' desks, moved past a stenographer and the accused. He had gone to the raised desk where her father sat, walked under his nose to the side of the dais. He had slipped off the chair's wheel locks and pushed her out of the courtroom. Nobody had spoken, the case arguments had continued, nobody had intervened. He had wheeled her out into the sunshine.

On the pavement, Joey had said, 'It's my day off, that's what I'm told. I'm a stranger in need of a guide.'

Jasmina had said, 'Rules of engagement forbid discussion of the past, the war - of the present, the criminals.'

'To see the sights,' he'd said, 'which way do we go?'

It was an hour since they had set off. He protected the wheels from the broken pavements as best he could, and steered her across streets where the lights were with them but the traffic screamed to a threatening halt close to them. She showed him the locked doors of the old Orthodox church and took him inside the twin-towered cathedral; they looked across the Miljacka river to the synagogue and she told him that all the Jews were gone from the city. She waved for him to stop propelling her when she'd picked a view of the Ali-Pasina Dzamija, and she said that that mosque was the finest example of Islamic sacred architecture in Europe. There were libraries, public buildings, Olympic sites, and the bridge where an assassin had killed an archduke.

They did not speak of the war, or of the present.

There was nothing she showed him, and no story she told him, that could make them laugh. What was unsaid was all around them. The broken buildings and the grinding squeal of the wheelchair were allies in his despair.

He bought her flowers.

She sat in the chair and her hands gripped the stems that made the posy.

They were in a park. She pointed to old gravestones from medieval times and said they were called stecaks and recited to him as if she were his tour guide. 'It is taught us that the stecaks are the monuments of a period of our history not penetrated by understanding, by light. They are secret-keepers to us. If you do not know the stones then you do not know us. An epitaph is carved on one: "I stood praying to God, meaning no evil, yet 1 was struck to death by lightning." We can be a sad people, and we live in darkness, fortune does not shine on us, Joey. We have little to offer strangers, only our misery. You want to laugh, I want to laugh. What can we find to laugh at?'

The sun beat on them. He looked at the old stones.

'Why did you come to get me, Joey, today?'

'To be with you,' he said simply. 'Because I wanted to be with you. I'm not meaning to patronize you. It's not that I feel sorry for you. I just wanted to be here, close to you.'

He saw her fingers tighten on the flower stems. Do you have a girlfriend, Joey, at home?'

' I did.'

'Did she stop loving you, or did you stop loving her?'

' I came here. What I did here has hurt her. Because of me she has been through pain. After what I have inflicted on her, I doubt she'll love me again.'

'Don't pity me, Joey, because that would be worse for me than anything you brought to your girlfriend.

Would you take me back to my father?'

They were the opposites, Jen and Jasmina. He pushed the chair and contrasted them in his mind with each other. One was fit, healthy, the other was crippled, pale. Whatever the physical comparisons, one had a future, the other had a past. He felt an awful shaming, gnawing, consuming guilt. He had bought a girl flowers, he had killed his time with her, given her the charity of his company. He would climb on his plane. He would go up the steps where a wheelchair could not follow. She would be an ever fainter memory until she was brushed from his mind.

They reached the Ministry of Justice.

Joey said, ' I don't know how far we have gone but without your father's help, and yours, I would not have been able to start on that road.'

At last she smiled. It was a thin, fleeting, wan smile, and he thought it lovely. She wheeled herself away from him and up the ramp into the building. Before the gloom of the Ministry's interior engulfed her, he saw the final brightness of the flowers on her lap.

'Hello, Commander, were you trying to get a moment with me?'

The minister basked in the memory of the applause.

He had been the last speaker before the lunch break.

The audience had been police, editors, social-services executives and education experts. It had been his drugs speech - a velvet hand of sympathy offered to the abusing victims of the trade, a mailed fist to the architects of the misery. He had told his audience that he spoke for a government committed to helping the exploited and crushing the exploiters . . . and they, he'd said, would face the resources of the law-enforcement agencies, united and dedicated. He had clasped his hands together at that moment of his speech to represent the unity of purpose of the agencies. He had quoted, a favourite line when talking about inter-agency unity, from Ezekiel 37: 22, ' I will make them one people', and he'd said that had been his promise to the Prime Minister when he was honoured, privileged, to be given the appointment.

Evil men, he had said, would find they could run but not hide when hunted by agencies that were, in purpose and deed, united.

He was informed of the search that morning of the apartment belonging to Bruce James, and his temper surged.

'It's because they don't trust us, Minister, that they blunder in without sharing - it's divisive, bloody insulting and, worst of all, it runs in utter contradiction to the theme of your excellent speech, and government policy. If you want results, then they've to be reined in. Can I leave it with you?'

'Damn right you can.'

July 1999

'It was a PMA2. That's the most common mine that was laid. It's anti-personnel and designed to wound not kill. It has one hundred grams of explosive detonated by five kilos of pressure.'

'But you miss the point, Herr Barnaby.'

In his Portakabin room, in the mine-action centre, in the Marshal Tito barracks, in Sarajevo, the Englishman thought it was against the German woman's nature to allow him to complete a sentence of explanation.

Barnaby - he never made it clear whether that was a given name or a family name - was experienced in deflecting the bullying tactics employed by the executives of international charities. Just as he never hurried when cleaning a minefield, so he never raised his voice or lost his temper. 'What point do I miss, Frau Bierhof?'

'You miss the point that the woman, the Bekir woman, was the last to be hurt - that is thirteen months ago.'

'The point continues to evade me.'

'Nothing has been done in thirteen months.'

Frau Bierhof, do you have any idea of the scale of the problem?' He asked the question without point-scoring rhetoric. Frau Anneliese Bierhof, Barnaby thought, was a woman unused to detailed rebuttal. As the director (Field Operations) of World in Crisis, from Hamburg, with millions of DMs to spend, she was a powerful hitter. He imagined her bludgeoning her will through endless committee meetings, dictating policy over the hesitations of those unfortunates who feared the jab of her pen at them or her gimlet glance.

She was a large woman with shoulders accentuated by the padding of her jacket. 'Allow me, please, as they appear in this office, to tell you the facts of life that must be taken into consideration.'

' I know the fact of life, Herr Barnaby. You will hear the "fact" that I acknowledge. In Germany today we have twenty-three families from the Muslim village of Vraca, and we have eighteen families from the Serb village of Ljut. The stabilization force of NATO reports to Berlin that the Bunica valley is peaceful and does not suffer inter-ethnic tension. Our government wants these people returned to their domicile. They refuse to return while there are still mines in the locality. The mines must be cleared. A start must be made. It is thirteen months since Frau Bekir was disabled, and that start has not been made. World in Crisis has the money in place, waiting to be spent, for the repair of their homes and the infrastructure of their villages -

such as the electricity - but we must know that the mines have been removed. When will it happen? Why has thirteen months been allowed to elapse?'

He said quietly, against the rising crescendo of her voice, 'Because there are other places that have a higher priority.'

'That is not an answer that is satisfactory.' She paused, sipped at the bottled water she had brought with her.

Well, satisfactory or not, it was the answer she would have to accept. From his Portakabin, he co-ordinated the work of fifteen hundred de-miners, but the computer database held the locations of many thousands of minefields . . . Barnaby had worked a lonely life in minefields for most of the last twenty years. The only easy work in those twenty years had been the clear-up in Kuwait a decade before. Nice straight lines of anti-tank mines, TMMs, TMAs and TMRPs, laid with the exactness of potatoes in a flat field; find the end of a line and keep going until dusk.

Kuwait was the only place it had been easy, and in Kuwait there had been no shortage of money, If Frau Bierhof had been less confrontational, less antagonistic, he might have sympathized with her predicament. He knew, because the evidence of it littered his desk each day, that the pressure was on to expel the refugees from the European havens and send them whence they came.

It was thirteen months since a mine, what he classified as the 'nuisance' variety, a PMA2, had been detonated under the right foot of Lila Bekir, in her seventy-third year, and it was eleven months since he had been to the valley and seen her. She had been home from hospital a week. And she had been lucky

. . . If a woman of that bulk, of that weight, had come from anywhere in Great Britain and had lived the soft life, she would have died. She had hobbled to meet him on her crutch, had insisted on making coffee for him, and had served him a sweet cake filled with grated almond. She had told him, disparaging the men who had been there, that she had shouted at them that they should not come forward to help her, should not put their own lives at risk. After the blast, she had put the child on her back and had crawled to the safety of the fence. She had told him that she had reckoned her body would protect the child if she had detonated a second mine. She was as tough as an old boot. It was a miracle, from his experience, that gas gangrene had not set in. The calcaneus, the heel bone, was destroyed at the talus, where the tibia and fibula meet, and she would never walk unaided on that foot. The doctors treating her had decided against amputation at the mid calf. They had not believed a woman of that age would cope with a prosthetic leg.

There had been a wheelchair in the corner of her kitchen, but from the shiny newness of the frame and the clean tyres he had realized it had not been used, and he didn't think it ever would be. There had been no compelling reason for him to go and see the family, but his memory of the beauty of that valley had drawn him back. She was one of a few more than eleven hundred killed or wounded by mines since the guns had gone silent.

'Have you actually been there, Frau Bierhof?'

' I am familiar with the situation there.'

' I'm sorry - have you stood on the safety of the track that links Ljut and Vraca, and viewed the valley?'

' I don't have the time to stand in each ruined village. Every minute of my day is spoken for.'

He did not tell Frau Bierhof that the budget for de-mining, which he co-ordinated for the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was above twenty-five million American dollars. Nor did he tell her of the numbers of 'accidents' to the men who worked at his direction, who were careless, who would have no worthwhile pension; nor did he tell her of the men killed or maimed in 'incidents' - the pleasantry used to describe suicidal attempts to end the stress of the work. He went to his filing cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Like a card-dealer he flicked them, blown-up and in monochrome or colour, across his desk.