Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Mister bought in Green Lanes.

For all of the efforts, and the quality of the surveillance equipment, the clan communities of the street of dingy shops and paint-scraped homes were almost impossible to penetrate. The culture of secrecy could not be broken into. Informers were unknown.

The spielers were regularly scanned with high-grade equipment to detect bugs and probes, and entry into a cafe by an executive officer of the Church or a detective sergeant of the Crime Squad would be noticed immediately. They sat in their vehicles and watched and waited for Lady Luck, but she called rarely.

The same routing, from the cafe to the apartment in Sarajevo's Old Quarter, had warned of the visit of Duncan Dubbs Esquire, the Cruncher, and had vouched for him.

In the early evening, a transmitted message to a mobile phone in an elegantly furnished apartment in Bosnia's capital announced the imminent arrival of Albert William Packer, with two companions, and urged that they be treated with the respect due to important players.

The entry into the terraced house was fast and brutal.

The man, Riley, was taken by men wearing balaclavas from the kitchen table where he was eating with his partner and their children and dragged out through the sagging door.

He was driven in the back of a van, chicken trussed.

He wet himself. A length of sticky tape blindfolded him.

He was taken from the van, his feet scraping the ground helplessly, and into a great echoing vault that he thought was a disused warehouse.

There seemed to him to be several men in the room.

A chair scraped, as if the man sitting on it leaned forward.

A whispered voice, and his hope died: 'People tell me, Georgie, that you've been talking about me… '

'It'll have to be the youngster,' Gough said.

'Isn't there a way round it?'A bead of sweat rolled down the chief investigation officer's cheek.

'I've a room full of people who don't know each other, let alone the target.'

'Is he up to that sort of work?'

'Have to wait and see, won't we?'

'You're a bundle of encouragement, Mr Gough. I can arrange for a surveillance expert to accompany him.'

'That'll be useful, providing they're decent.'

The CIO scribbled briskly on his pad, and passed a name and a telephone number. 'If he's flying tomorrow, he should meet this fellow tonight. We wouldn't be endangering him, would we?'

'Don't know don't know anything about the place. '

'Because he'll be close up to Packer, that animal,' the CIO breathed heavily.

Nol very close – it'll be surveillance, watching from a distance. Shouldn't be dangerous if he's sensible,'

What you've got to understand, Mr Cann, is that it is a remarkable corner of Europe – you could say that it is unique in its diversity and richness of culture.'

Cann hadn't been to university. He had left the comprehensive school in his small Somerset town, applied to join the police, and been rejected on the grounds of eyesight and physique. If the school had possessed more ambitions for higher education he might have made it, but it hadn't. He'd been mooning around the estate where his father was the factor, undecided, getting in his parents' way, a sharp stone in their lives, when a Customs amp; Excise VAT team had come to look over the estate's books. He'd seen the way the new-money owner, a bullying, blustering man, had cringed before their power; his mother, who helped with the books, had talked after their departure of the reach of their authority. Slightly built, relying on heavy spectacles, a disappointment to his father and a worry to his mother, it had seemed to Cann like some sort of answer. He'd applied and been accepted. The man who talked to him was a lecturer at the School of East European and Slavonic Studies, part of London University.

'It was created by the great empires, those of Greece, then Rome, then that of Charlemagne, and after that the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians, and finally Communism. With the empires came the religion – western Christianity, the eastern Church, Judaism and Islam, then political atheism. Throw those origins together and you have a bed for artistic brilliance to breed in, and also ethnic hatred.

'Of course, each new regime interbred with what they found, but the Bosnian heritage is having a foreign power sitting on the territory, and hating it.

There was a little window of independence, while they were at war and being carved up, but now – as you'll find – a new foreign power sits on them. Just don't expect to be welcomed as a liberator.'

It was past ten o'clock. In Tooting Bec Jen would be waiting for him at the bed-sit, and his bag would need packing. He had been told by Gough that it was an instruction from the chief investigation officer, that he should ring the number and beg an appointment, whatever the hour. He had beaten a retreat from the first meeting of the new Sierra Quebec Golf team and had done as he was told. The meeting had been bizarre and hurtful. He'd felt himself regarded as an intruder, the only survivor from the old disbanded and disgraced unit. The team, assembled that afternoon, arriving with small bags off trains and in their cars, had been recruited from the north-west of England, the west, the Midlands, the north-east, from Scotland, and one was from Belfast. Gough had told them that incompetence, intimidation and corruption had combined to win Albert William Packer his freedom. They were all older than him, the nine men and one woman, and Gough had said that each had been selected for their skills, their lack of fear and their integrity; then the eyes had fixed on him, as if he were the least solid of the chain's links, to be treated with suspicion, tolerated because he was the archivist.

After the preamble, Gough had made him get up, talk through the cartwheel, and give a detailed biography of Mister. At the end the eyes fastened on him seemed to wonder if he was the weak link. When he'd finished his stumbling address, Gough had taken him out into the corridor and told him in clipped, sparse sentences where he was going that evening, and where he was travelling to in the morning… He listened and wondered what was the relevance of it.

'Take a map, look at it. The geography is of spines of mountains and valleys cut by impassable rivers.

The common phrase of today would be "bandit country". That's not something they've learned recently. Back in the reign of King Stephen Tvrtko they'd achieved a semblance of discipline, but after he'd died, 1391, and things slid, a French pilgrim wrote: "They live purely on wild beasts, fish from the rivers, figs and honey, of which they have sufficient supply, and they go in gangs from forest to forest to rob people travelling through their country."

'And right from those days, honour and sticking to one's word were seldom important. A Turkish janissary serving in Sultan Mehmet's invasion army, that's 1463, wrote of the flight of King Stephen Tomasevic to a fortress at Kljuc, in central Bosnia, where he did a deal and surrendered on the promise of safe passage: "When the king's servants who were in the fortress saw that their lord had surrendered, they gave themselves up. The Sultan took possession of the fortress, and ordered that the king and all his companions should be beheaded. And he took the entire country into his possession." Be wary of criminals, Cann, and be doubly wary of promises.

'Oh, and be most wary of the women. Two thousand years ago silver was mined by the Romans at Srebrenica. The Roman garrison's barracks have long disappeared, but you can still find there a medieval castle, in ruins, on a high hill south of the town. It was built by Jerina, a warlord's widow, with slave labour. When she'd occupied the castle it was her habit to have a slave brought up to her bedroom each night, and every following morning an exhausted slave was precipitated to his death from the castle walls. .. Summary: a history of oppression, violence, plague and thieving, ruthless cruelty and utter dishonesty.'