Gerald Seymour: The Untouchable

He sat on the chair and faced the door, glancing over the graffiti on the walls written by Provos and Yardies, murderers and rapists. A brief involuntary action, but he touched in turn each of the pockets of his jacket hitched on the chair. They were all empty.

There were no cigarettes because he did not smoke, no keys because he did not need them, no wallet with cash because tough men in Brixton queued to give him anything he wanted, no credit cards or cheque book because no card company or bank had accounts in the name of Albert William Packer.

'Just been told, Mr Packer, judge'll be back in five minutes.' The face was again at the open hatch.

He nodded, then sucked a long gulp of air into his lungs. On life's ladder, Mister, as he insisted on being called by those who worked for him and those who spoke to him on his constantly changing mobile phones, had learned to trust few. Among the few was the Eagle, his lawyer on a heavy retainer, his 'legal eagle'. The Eagle had promised him he was going to walk and he trusted that prediction. It hadn't crossed his mind until that moment that such trust might be misplaced. It would go bad for the Eagle if it were. He breathed out steadily, then stood and took his suit jacket from the chair back and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He walked towards the cell door, then straightened his tie.

Through the hatch the voice said, 'Right, Mr Packer, if you're ready I'll take you up – oh, don't worry about your bag, I'll see it's minded.'

He smoothed his hair against his scalp as the key was turned in the door's lock, and put the dirt and squalor of the past eight months behind him.

In the themed Irish pub, across the street from the Old Bailey, the Eagle lingered over his lunch of steak and Guinness pie, with a side salad. A hack called over to him, with the familiarity of his trade, 'Henry, the judge is coming back in, going to rule on it.'

The Eagle merely nodded. Other than to deny his client's guilt, and then only cursorily, he never spoke to court journalists and crime reporters. He regarded them as parasitical scum, and it irked him that his given name should be used by a complete stranger.

There had been others, at the top of the tree before his client, Mister Packer, had climbed into the upper branches, who enjoyed the company of hacks and liked to read their names in the newspapers. A long, long time back, he had advised his client that newspapers and their writers should be avoided. In the Eagle's opinion, newspapers were symptomatic of vanity, and vanity was dangerous. He carried on pecking at his pie.

His clerk, close to him, mobile phone at the ear, murmured, 'Three or four minutes, Mr Arbuthnot, and the judge'll be back in.'

'No panic, Josh,' the Eagle said quietly. 'I'll follow you over.'

His clerk, Josh, ran for the pub door. The Eagle laid down his knife and fork on the small round bar table at which he was perched, then changed his mind and hooked up a final piece of lettuce leaf. He was an ample man and his backside splayed over the rim of his stool. He wore an old suit that carried the stains of other meals, his shirt was far from new and the collar was slightly frayed; the tie had the crumple creases of frequent use. With what the Eagle earned from his solicitor's practice, and the retainer paid him by Mister, he could have worn as good a suit and shirt as might be found in Jermyn Street. Tucked under his knees on the stool's foot bar were his scarred tan suede shoes. When he left his home in the country to come up to London on a Monday morning he wore gentlemen's clothes, and his first act on reaching his office over a launderette in Clerkenwell was to strip off those clothes with their fancy labels, consign them to a hanger in the cupboard, and change into the tired suit, shirts and ties of better days, and ease on the suedes; his last act on a Friday afternoon was to reverse the process. It was as if he switched identities before taking the train to Guildford. His London suit, shirts, ties and shoes were an essential part of what he preached to Mister: nothing should be flamboyant, nothing should draw attention to wealth that could not be easily explained.

Henry Arbuthnot had only been twenty-two when he had first met the man who now paid him that healthy retainer, introduced to him by his black sheep brother, David, who had done twenty-seven months, fraud, in Pentonville prison and met Packer there

– twenty-four months, aggravated robbery. In the twenty-eight years since then his client had never been convicted. He finished his glass of Pepsi and lemonade, wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and eased himself heavily off the high stool. As a twenty-two-year-old, fresh from college and his degree, learning criminal-case law, he had been a fierce drinker; not any more. He had been 'dry' since he had met Mister. He was on call twenty-four hours, day and night. For his retainer, which ratcheted up each year, it was demanded of him that he be constantly available. Mister was his meal ticket, and abstinence from alcohol was the price to be paid.

He left the pub and sheltered for a moment in the doorway to gauge the strength of the rain.

Opposite was the main entrance to the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court. Word travelled fast.

Photographers were gathering at the principal security entrance. Two police cars were parked at the kerb in front of the entrance, and the armed men were already loading their machine pistols into the secure compartments behind the front seats, their job over.

There had been armed police on the corners of the building since the trial had started. He shuffled across the street. Because of his heavy gut he walked badly.

He went inside and flashed his card. The Eagle knew the way it would end, had known for days.

The prosecution case had originally involved the identification by Customs amp; Excise – the Eagle called it the Church – of his client in a car, his client's fingerprints in the car, and the evidence of an informer also in the car. While Mister had been on remand, the Eagle had systematically demolished the case with the help of the big man's enforcers. The Protected Witness Unit was supposedly secure and secret.

Money had bought the location of the gaol where the PWU was housed, and the number given inside the unit to the informer. Big money had bought the prison officer who had contaminated the man's food.

A stomach pump had saved his life, but not his resolve. 'If they can get me here,' he had whined, 'they can get me anywhere.' He had withdrawn his evidence, refused to testify.

Mister was standing at the far end of the corridor, wreathed in dull light. The cell door beside his client was the only one in the block that was open. At his shoulder were the clerk, Josh, and a prison officer who clutched the bin bag, as if he were a hotel porter.

The Home Office Forensic Laboratory was at Chepstow, across the Welsh border. The fingerprint evidence had been there. A technician with a predi-lection for gambling at the roulette tables of a Newport casino had been offered a choice: for co-operation his debt of nine thousand pounds would be paid off, for obstruction his mother's legs would be broken with such baseball-bat severity that she would not walk again. The fingerprint evidence had gone missing.

'All right, then – shall we go?' There was a watery smile at the Eagle's mouth.

The Church's identification of his client by their surveillance team had been a greater challenge. He couldn't buy the Church and couldn't threaten it, so the Eagle had had to burn late-night oil to work meticulously through the surveillance logs for the fissure in that part of the case. Having found the point of weakness, he had then diverted the attention of the enforcers, the Cards – Mister's hard men – to the leafy suburban detached home of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer on the special-case desk… It was all worked out, it was the power of his client.