The Untouchable (6 page)

The SIO laughed, a hoarse snigger.

Glacial eyes gleamed at him. 'Why is that so funny?

Enlighten me, please.'

'Cann did that. Cann stayed behind. He was at the computer all night. Why? "To see what we did wrong." We didn't do anything wrong. It was the system, the process . . . '

The CIO had the palms of his hands together, fingers outstretched, a bishop in prayer. 'Always somebody else's fault. I hear you, Brian. Keep saying it often enough and you might gain some comfort from it. Anyway, I'm afraid that's the end of the line.

Sorry, there cannot be sentiment, not when a man as prominent as Packer walks free. So, what's it to be?'

There wasn't going to be a party. There might be a carriage clock sent on in the post, and there might be a seedy secretive gathering in a pub and the handing over of a sherry decanter bought with a whip-round.

He said quietly, 'I'd like the rest of the day to clear my things up, and say a few goodbyes.'

'Sensible choice. The pension people will be in touch.'

He flared. He was on his way out, headed for the rubbish heap. 'God, look, I wanted to put him down, I wanted it as much as anyone.'

'But you didn't, did you, put him down? That's the difficulty, Brian. Good luck.' The CIO smiled.

'Goodbye. Let's hope others manage where I failed.'

'Yes, with the right people I'm sure we will.'

The SIO was on his way to the door.

The voice behind him was sham matter-of-fact. 'Oh, the one in the team who resisted your leadership demand to get drunk, give me his name again.'

'You don't want to worry about him - he's not a team player, but then he was only the collator, did the archive, kept the paper in order. He's a nobody.'

What's "nobody's" name?'

'SQG12. Joey Cann.'

Joey turned into the road. He had never been there before. He had filed perhaps two hundred photographs of it; he knew its every detail - when the trees were in blossom, in leaf, or bare, and the gardens when they were stripped down or coming into flower.

It was as if he had lived in that road through the lenses of cameras secreted in canvas BT shelters, parked vans and abandoned cars. The road was usually in monochrome but it made little difference to his ability to recognize it.

He was a driven creature. In the world of legal process, a defence brief could have ripped to small pieces the slight-built young man, pale-faced, hair dark and tangled, with the large spectacles and the crumpled jeans who had turned into the southern junction of the road and who now sauntered along it towards the playing-fields at the top end. He had no authorization to be there, no permission for intrusive surveillance. Merely being in the road broke Church practice and bordered on the edge of legality. He could not have stayed away.

'Excuse me,' a voice shrilled behind him.

He drifted to the side of the pavement and a woman pushed a baby buggy past him. She turned and gave him a withering, suspicious glance. He knew her, from photographs, as Rosie Carthew.

He understood that he would have looked an out-of-place cuckoo, and she might have smelt his body. Her husband brought into the country Italian top-of-the-

range ladies' dresses, skirts, blouses and handbags.

He also knew that, eighteen months before, Rosie Carthew had twice phoned the local police to complain about suspicious vehicles in the road, and twice surveillance operations had been killed off.

A woman was sweeping the pavement of hedge clippings. From the pictures he recognized her as Carol Penberthy. Three months before Mister's arrest, at dead of night, the Security Service A Branch

'watchers' had buried a fish-eye camera in the brick gatepost on the drive of the house opposite his.

Nothing to do with Neighbourhood Watch but she must have been restless and up at her bedroom window as they worked. The next morning Carol Penberthy had been filmed by the fish-eye trooping out of her own doorway, down the pavement and up to the Packer doorway for a fast, whispered conversation with Mister in his dressing-gown and slippers.

That night a ramshackle van had come down the road and the fish-eye's last image had been of its front fender before it had crashed into the brick column and destroyed the camera.

He doubted that either woman was in conspiracy with Packer - just inquisitive, and nosy, with flapping tongues.

Joey was outside the house. He had seen it through all the hours of the clock, days of the week, weeks of the month, months and seasons of the year. He knew the setting and size of the bricks of the walls, the number of glass panes in the front bay windows on either side of the porch, and the positioning of the spyhole in the door, the chimes in the hall from the bell - a year before the arrest a microphone had been set into the bark of the blossom tree by the front gate; it had lasted a week before being prised out; they'd muttered then that either Mister had got lucky, or that the information tap had leaked once again -

and the patterns on the curtains, and the mesh on the net. Behind the door and the curtains he knew the layout of the rooms. The house had been 'burgled' by the A Branch watchers, the first time they had been involved. They were the clever cats introduced to go where plodding policemen and mediocre Church men couldn't reach: they'd put a bug behind the cover where the TV aerial came into the living-room wall and a pinhead probe inside the ventilation grille in the bedroom, which had lasted four days. Both had gone out when the rubbish was put in the bin on the pavement. He knew the rubbish went on a Monday morning. The A Branch intruders had been in the house for seven minutes and had had time to photograph every room. He knew everything about the pictures on the walls, fine landscapes in watercolour but not mega-money, and the wallpaper, the pills in the bathroom cupboard and the food in the fridge. It was as if he had been a house guest.

'Can I help you?'

A woman was getting out of her car in the drive-way opposite and two doors down. Leonora Govan.

Separated, going on divorced, two children.

Surveillance said she was more often inside Mister's home for coffee with the Princess than any other woman in the road.

'No,' Joey said.

'May I ask what you think you're doing?' There was an accusing whip in her voice.

'You can ask, it's a free country.' Joey was smiling.

It was the first time he had smiled since he had taken the call on the mobile the afternoon before. But he walked on.

Well, it was a good question, which taxed him.

What did he think he was doing? He turned once and looked back. In the corner of his vision field was the woman, Leonora Govan, standing in the middle of her unloaded shopping-bags still staring at him. He glanced a last time at the house. He had brought it alive from the photographs simply by walking past it.

Joey Cann was not a romantic; those who didn't like him said he was humourless and without feeling, those who cared for him would say he was dedicated and focused. Flights of fantasy did not fill his mind. What did he think he was doing in a north London suburban road looking at a house where the only sign of life was a single upper window an inch open?

He stood stock still on the pavement. Ahead of him, on the playing-fields, was a class of boys learning football and beyond them a class of girls messing at hockey. At the end of the school day they'd be charging for the school gate, smelling of sweat and with dirty knees, and on the street outside the school would be the pushers, who bought and cut from the dealers. The dealers bought and cut from the importers. The importers made available the heroin, crack, cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD and amphetamines produced in the far corners of the world, and sold on for profit to the dealers and pushers. A romantic would have said the importer, an ordinary man from an ordinary house, was
evil.
Not the word Joey Cann would have used. The 'ordinary man', living in an

'ordinary house', was nothing more and nothing less than a
target,
the bloody biggest target the Church had: Target One. He wondered if the bastard, Packer, had laughed as he came out of court, released.

He had heard Mister's laugh on the tapes, seen it on the photographs.

What was he doing? By walking past the house he was putting life on to the photographs and tapes. He was making the man real. He rocked with tiredness and leaned against the fence. The man - Mister, Packer - would have thought himself an Untouchable.

He turned round. There was no movement in the road.

He whispered, 'What you should know, Mister, wherever you go, I'm with you, I'm following you.

Look over your shoulder, and I'm there.'

Joey giggled out loud.

On the Balkans Desk at the Foreign and

Commonwealth Office, they read the signal sent by Hearn from Sarajevo.

'Oh, C h r i s t . . . ' a woman said. 'Another body, that's all we damn well need. Lead-lined coffins, paperwork like a phone directory. It's like Interflora, isn't it?

People shift bodies, undertakers, like florists shift flowers, don't they? It'll take a whole morning and half an afternoon to sort it. Families always say yes, then balk at the cost, right? I suppose Zagreb would be the nearest for an international undertaker, don't you think?'

The man beside her nodded. He was reading the signal for the third time. He said quietly, 'It doesn't seem that Hearn's too happy about this. I'll push it at the men in raincoats across the river. Give them something to do.'

* * *

It worked away at him, like an itch needed scratching.

Where was the Cruncher?

That morning he went to see his father. Other men suffered bad claustrophobia in gaol or deteriorated physically and mentally, became weighed down by the burden of institutionalism, but not Mister. He had survived imprisonment and now he believed his reputation was gold-plated. He had beaten them. He drove the Princess's 5-series BMW, three years old, and had the front windows down so that the street air blew onto his face. Several times on the drive down Green Lanes from the North Circular, his territory, before he had turned off for Cripps House, he had felt that peculiar buzz of excitement, the product of power, but each time as it peaked there had been the itch - Cruncher's absence.

There were eight floors to Cripps House. The estate had been built in 1949 and was ageing, decaying, but the housing authority always found resources to daub new paint on the doors and windows. The lift was regularly maintained. There were no muggings or thievings in that block, no drugs sold and no syringes left on the landings. On the eighth floor, at the end of the open walkway, perched like a sentry tower with a view to the main road and the parking areas, was the home of Herbie Packer, retired bus driver, widower, never in trouble with the police. Elizabeth Packer, who, when she had worked, had cleaned rooms at the Waldorf Hotel, had been dead now for four years. By the time Albert, not yet Mister, had been twelve years old the regular visitors to the top-floor flat had been teachers and social workers. When he was fourteen they'd been replaced by uniformed and plainclothed police. The refrain from Herbie and Elizabeth Packer to them all had been: 'He's a good boy, really, heart of gold, trouble is he's just got caught up with the wrong crowd.' There was no shifting them on that, even when the police came and arrested him and he went down, aged fifteen, for a year in the youth detention centre at Feltham - and at nineteen, when the door was broken open at dawn and he had been taken away to do two years in Pentonville. And still, as he proudly told it, they refused to blame him. He took the lift up. In any of the other blocks on the estate, all named after cabinet ministers of the day, he would have seen graffiti on the lift walls, and the contact numbers of tarts and pushers. There would have been the screwed-up paper balls on the floor that held heroin wraps, and even in daytime there would have been a mugging risk in the airless shadowed hall beside the lift shaft. But his father lived in Cripps House and the use of a pickaxe handle and electric terminals had secured the safety of the older residents, and small sums of money in plain brown envelopes judiciously placed in the right hands ensured that the building stayed clean and painted and that the lift worked.

Out of the lift, he paused on the walkway and looked across Albion Road to the more distant Highbury Grove. His sight line travelled past the Holloway Road and locked on to the central tower of HMP Pentonville. By screwing up his eyes, straining, he could make out the regimented lines of cell windows on the back of D Wing. During his two years there, he had made the critical contacts of his adult life. As a result of time in Pentonville he had met the men who armed him, distributed for him, dealt for him, and the Eagle, and there his ties to the Cruncher had been strengthened. He swore softly . . . His eyes raked back over the dull skyline of towers, church spires and chimneys. Over the wall of the walkway were Dalton House and Morrison House, then the largest of the estate's blocks, Attlee House. Attlee House had been the Cruncher's home.

He could put his life into boxes. To each he allocated a varied amount of time and commitment.

One held the matter of the priority of discipline and respect, and had been dealt with. Another box was his father. He rang the doorbell and set the smile on his face.

The matter of the missing Cruncher was isolated in its own box.

He held his father in his arms and felt the thin bones of the old man's shoulders. Years ago he could have bought a bungalow for his parents down on the coast but his mother had always refused to leave Cripps House. Now, in his seventy-fourth year, his father was the same, wouldn't move closer to Vicky, Alex, May and Julie, his daughters. He stayed put: it was his home. They went in through the door and Mister kept his arm round his father's shoulders. The living room was dominated by the outsize widescreen TV and a soap was playing with the sound turned high because the old man's hearing was going.

'You're looking well, son.'

'Not too bad, Dad, considering.'

'I'm not too bad myself.'