Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

Mister ate only what he thought was necessary for sustenance. Each plate brought to him was taken away half finished. The insult, and what he would do about it, consumed him. Out of an insult, and its answer, came strength. The insult provided an opportunity for him to demonstrate his strength. When he was twelve years old, a teacher had called him 'an evil little swine, a thief' in front of the class; he had followed that teacher home after school, put on a balaclava, punched the man to the ground and kicked him again and again; charges could not be brought, the teacher could not make an identification; he had become king, much feared, among the twelve-year-old kids. As he'd grown older he'd left a trail of the same fear behind him, in gaol and on the streets. The man running Hackney and the east when Mister was climbing the ladder's rungs had said that Mister was a Tittle shite with no future' and was now walking on sticks because pistol bullets had disintegrated his kneecaps. A man in Eindhoven, a dealer who was careless with buyers' money, had fled naked during the night with his wife and two children from a house that had cost him a million and a half Dutch guilders while the fire that destroyed it blazed around him. A man who had hacked him off in a pub, who now had no tongue and no fingers, might today have died.

Mister was experienced in answering insults. He had considered his problem, decided on his response.

He didn't wait for coffee.

In his room he felt safe, in control. He knew of nothing that should make him feel otherwise. A full day awaited him in the morning. He was soon asleep.

Under his room the city's late-night traffic prowled and did not disturb him.

'Is there anything more about that lorry?'

It was late evening and Monika Holberg was just back in her office in the UNIS building, Tower A, and she was tired, which was rare for her, and irritable, which was rarer. She had been on a field day out in the country, west of the city. She kicked off her muddied hoots and slung her heavy anorak at the door hook.

Whether she was in the city and trawling through office appointments or away in the country villages, she wore the same anorak and boots. She had no other life in Sarajevo other than her work for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She was tired because her driver had gone sick, there hadn't been another available so she had driven herself, and on the way back – on the mountain road from Kiseljak

– the rear right tyre of the Nissan four-wheel drive had punctured, she'd had to change it herself, and the nuts had been hell to shift. She was irritated because the village she'd visited beyond Kiseljak was light years from being ready to receive and impress the visitors she would be escorting there next week. She was a driven woman. It was not in Monika's character to accept that second best was enough, whether in vehicle maintenance or visit preparation. Her secretary was on the other side of the thin partition that separated their cubicles, brewing coffee and making a sandwich.

'What lorry is that, Monika?'

'The lorry from those British people. What do they call themselves? "Bosnia with Love"? Isn't that what they call themselves? I need that lorry.'

'Maybe Ankie took the call – when I was at the meeting or at lunch.'

Monika rolled her eyes. Her secretary was not a driven woman. Her main concerns were what she was earning in salary and living allowance from UNHCR and what a sacrifice she made, and how she hated Sarajevo. She was fat on the city's back and her hair was always freshly styled. The desk was littered with small squares of sticky yellow Post-it notes, fastened where there was space among a haphazard strewn-paper sea. She was bending over her table, skipping the secretary's messages and identifying those of Ankie, the Dutch girl, who fielded her phone when it rang unanswered.

'There isn't a message from Ankie about the lorry.'

'Perhaps there was no message – can we talk about it in the morning?'

She was brought the sandwiches and the coffee.

Monika had eaten nothing since a rushed breakfast at dawn, and it was the first half-good cup of coffee. Her secretary was gone. But, she needed that lorry and its load. The village had been sullen and unresponsive.

Ambassadors, functionaries and officials from the international community were coming to the village next week. Unless the mood lightened the VIPs might be whistled, jeered at or, worse, ignored and cold-shouldered. A little man, dapper and dancing in expensive shoes, had waltzed into her office two weeks previously, come in off the street, Fra Andela Zvizdovica, and had offered a lorry full of clothes, toys, basic household goods, and talked about what he called 'jumble sales' and 'coffee mornings' and 'fete collections'. Monika Holberg spoke fluent English, as well as Spanish, German and Italian, but these were words that she could not translate from her experience of an island upbringing off Norway's coast north of the Arctic Circle. She needed the lorry and its cargo to wipe the morose depression off the villagers' faces before the visit. Donors, she had learned, wanted hope, required stoic optimism, if they were to dig again into their pockets and deeper than the last time.

She had a promise of the lorry but no word of its arrival in the city.

She wolfed her sandwiches and slurped her coffee.

She had believed the promise that the lorry's contents would be hers to distribute. Thirty-three years old, tanned, weather-beaten, blond-haired, and uncaring about her appearance, Monika Holberg was another piece of the mosaic that was falling quietly into place, and she also had no knowledge of it.

She threw the cardboard sandwich plate, and the coffee beaker, at her rubbish bin, missed, and started to rip the messages off her desk.

Joey had said on the stairs, 'We'll call him the Cruncher, Target One's accountant. He was murdered.

What you suspected is proven. When I find out how he was murdered and why, the door will begin to open for me. Then I get to know what our Target One is here for.'

'I'll do my best,' the policeman had said, and had hit the door with his fist. 'Can't do more than my best.'

There was a veneer of respectability, cigarette-paper thin, about the room and its tenant. She was middle-aged going on elderly, and her face was deeply lined, but on the dressing-table were the jars and powder tins that would have helped her shed a few years. She wore an old dressing-gown that had once been flamboyant, but which was now faded, and Joey could see the careful stitches where it had been repaired. Her hair was gathered into curling rollers.

Her hands betrayed her immediate past. She had seen better times: now they were scarred, reddened and swollen. She smoked as she talked, clamping a short cigarette-holder between yellowed teeth. She had only one room.

Her name had been the first typed on the page that Judge Delic had given Joey. He'd had no option but to call the only other official link to the killing, the policeman, Frank Williams. The policeman was involved because he had pulled the body from the river and written the report. It was against Joey's instincts to break Church ranks and confide in a policeman, even if the man was separated from the world of Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, sawing on a buried nail in a log. He'd been told the policeman had to clear involvement with a superior and, if that was achieved, get away when he could.

He would not have been there without the policeman, would have had no chance of finding the attic garret room, and having gained admittance he would have had no language to hear her statement. She sat on the bed from which she had been disturbed. Frank was opposite her, at the table under the ceiling light.

Beside his hand was a one-hundred Deutschmark note that was on offer but not yet handed over.