Gerald Seymour: The Untouchable

When dawn came, the body was snagged in the branches of a tree. Not that it was easily recognizable as a corpse.

In spite of the foreigners' alternate pleading, threatening, and throwing money at the city's municipal authorities, refuse collection had again broken down.

In many of the streets back from the river rubbish was piled high outside business premises and at the doors of the old apartment blocks. The residents of the blocks facing the river, not believing that the dispute between the foreigners who nominally ran the city's affairs and local officials was about to be settled, had taken to heaving their plastic bags into the water. The body was wedged between two plastic bags, and was disguised.

The tree, holding it fast, was marooned on a spit of gravel half-way between two of the bridges straddling the river. One bridge was overlooked by the scaffolded and screened building where the National Library of historic documents without price had been housed before being hit by incendiary shells, and the second bridge marked the position taken by Gavrilo Princep eighty-seven years earlier in the moments before he had raised a handgun and fired the bullets that killed an archduke and an archduchess, and con-demned Europe to a conflagration of a scale unknown before.

The roads running either side of the Miljacka river

– the Obala Kulina bana on the north side, and the Obala isa-bega Isakovica on the south side – were already jammed with cars, vans, lorries and the foreigners' military jeeps and trucks. No driver had time to waste peering down into the river to notice the tree. Pedestrians crowded the bridges, smoking and hurrying, gossiping and continuing last night's arguments, and none of them, young or elderly, paused to stop and stand against the rush of movement to look down at the mud-brown water, the spit of gravel and the tree beached on it. As they had in the recent siege of the city, people hurried to complete their journey.

To linger and look around them had been to court death; for four years the city had been called the most dangerous place on earth and habits of survival died hard, but now the tide of inhumanity washed on other more distant shores: Dili in East Timor, and Grozny, and Mitrovica in Kosovo.

There had been five successive bright spring days over the city. The piled snow banks on the pavements beside the river, compacted by bulldozers in the winter months, were finally dribbling away. High above the city, dominating it, where the siege guns had been sited with a clear view of the river, the bridges and the streets, the ski slopes were melting.

Mountain streams seeking escape into the Miljacka cascaded down steep escarpments, and the river running through the heart of the city swelled and rose.

Its force grew. As the early rush of foot-sloggers and vehicles thinned, the strength of the water's flow lifted the body sufficiently for it to break free of the tree's branches.

There was nothing romantic or noble about the Miljacka. It was not a Thames or a Seine, a Tiber or a Danube; perhaps that was why none had bothered to stop and gaze down at its movement. Flanked with concrete and stone bank walls, fifty paces wide, if measured by a man who had a good stride and had not lost a leg in the shelling, broken up by weirs, it was more of a dirty drain than a majestic waterway.

As it continued its journey down-river, the body was sometimes submerged, caught in powerful deep currents, sometimes swirled to the surface before it was again dragged down and sometimes just the buttocks of the dark grey trousers protruded above the water.

There was no dignity for the body as it was taken through the unseeing city.

Behind him, he heard the scrape of the spy hatch being opened, then the clatter as it was dropped on its hinge against the outside of the door. He didn't look up.

'Coffee, Mister Packer. Cappuccino. Two measures of sugar, granulated and brown.'

He pushed himself off the floor, wiped the dust from the knees of his trousers and went to the cell door. He reached out and took the polystyrene beaker from the hand stretched through the hatch. He didn't thank the prison officer for bringing him the coffee, with two measures of sugar, but then he hadn't asked for it to be brought him, not that day or on any of the days that he had been in the Central Criminal Court.

He smiled briefly, as if that were sufficient indication of his gratitude. He could see the prison officer's face through the hatch, the blinking eyes and the flash of teeth, and he knew that his smile had been sufficient to lighten the stupid bastard's day. He understood why he was brought coffee, why this and others of the stupid bastards apologized to him for the dirt in the cell and the state of the toilet, and why they always grimaced when they put the handcuffs on him before leading him back to the wagon for the evening journey to HMP Brixton. They were all, every last one of them, frightened of him. They feared that he would remember rudeness, sarcasm, a sneer, and they thought he would have a good memory. They also knew that he could find out where they lived, what car they drove, where their women worked, at the snap of a finger. His reputation went before him. More importantly, he was going to walk, as certain as night follows day, and they all knew it. He was always brought coffee with sugar from their canteen when he was first put in the holding cell before being escorted up to Number 7 Court, and at the lunch recess, and in the evening after the court had risen and before he was loaded into the wagon.

'I'll let you know as soon as there's signs of movement, Mr Packer.'

His back was to the hatch. He took the top off the coffee, poured it down the toilet, and went back to his work on the floor. Laid across the concrete were sheets of a tabloid newspaper and on the sheets were the clothes and possessions he had used in the last eight months on remand since his arrest. His suit jacket was hitched on the back of the cell's single wooden chair.

On the newspaper were his second suit, conservative and grey with a light stripe, three button-down shirts, two ties, his three spare sets of underwear, five pairs of socks, and an extra pair of plain black shoes. They were all laundered, pressed or polished, because when he walked he didn't want to bring back soiled or creased clothes to the Princess. Neither of his suits was particularly expensive, not hand-made, off the peg. His shirts were decent, not monogrammed, his ties were sober, his shoes ordinary. Nothing about his clothes or his appearance was flamboyant. His confidence that he would walk had caused him to send home his trainers, T-shirts and the tracksuit he had worn during the long months on remand in Brixton's maximum-security wing before the start of the trial.

There were no books, no magazines, no photographs in frames, only a plain washbag and a small clock radio. Early that morning the prison staff had been surprised when he had cleared his cell, loaded everything that was his into a plastic bin liner and carried it to the wagon that was escorted to and from the court by policemen armed with Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols. The trial was half-way through, the prosecution case was concluded, and the previous afternoon his brief had made the proposition to the judge that the client had no case to answer.

At the time of his arrest, the newspapers had written that he was worth in excess of a hundred million pounds, that he had headed the capital's top crime family for a decade, that he was targeted by the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad, Customs amp; Excise's National Investigation Service, GCHQ, the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. But, he was going to walk.

He was an Untouchable. He knew he was going to walk because the Eagle had told him he would.