Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

She was toughened to suffering. She would not have acknowledged it of herself – she despised introverted self-examination – but part of her character that was remarkable was the absence of cynicism, and she did not know despair. The reward she found was in the gratitude of simple people – women who had nothing laughed with her and touched her arm or her clothes, children without a future chirped as they chanted her name. All the hours of sitting in officials' rooms and hearing excuses for procrastination were forgotten when she witnessed the gratitude and heard the chanting.

Bumping along in the lorry as it wove between sheets of ice on the road, she was cheerful, happy.

The man who had brought her the lorry had caused the lift in her mood. Most, if they had come with a lorry across Europe, would have wanted a photo-call and publicity for their generosity. She thought him the best of men because he had wanted nothing of her.

She sang cheerily in the lorry cab, not looking at the snow-capped peaks because they would have reminded her of home at Njusford. Thinking of home would have destroyed her mood. In that month, on that day, if the seas were not too fierce, her father would have been out in his boat with her elder brother, and her mother and sister would have been left to gut and behead the previous day's cod catch.

And all of them, when the boat came in, would have gone in the afternoon darkness to the grave of her younger brother. The black hours of winter, the harshness of the seas, the remoteness of the island and the agony of her brother's suicide had driven her away from Njusford. If she looked at mountains, she remembered. She sang with all of her ingrained enthusiasm.

They turned off the metalled road and lurched on a stone track towards the village with the charity load brought to her by a modest, caring stranger.

They were back from the court. For the midday recess, to save money, they avoided the canteen in the basement of the court building and went to his office to eat the sandwiches she always prepared at home.

While her father ate and concerned himself with the case papers, Jasmina threw her eyes cursorily over the overnight list of police reports. She would not normally have interrupted his concentration on a difficult case, which taxed both his humanity and his legal obligations. The case was murder. The defendant was a woman of twenty-two, already the mother of four children. The victim was a fellow gypsy, the father of two of the children. The weapon was an axe.

The defence was that the victim had beaten the defendant and she had acted to save her own life. The accusation was that the defendant had bludgeoned the victim nine times because he had found a younger lover. Self-defence or premeditated murder. Freedom or imprisonment. In the old days, before the war, her father would have been assisted in room 118 of the Ministry of Justice by a jury of professionals, but there was no longer the money for that luxury; he sat alone.

He must decide on guilt or innocence. It was typical of the cases thrown at him, without political overtones but laden with dilemma.

The fifth item on the police report of last night's incidents bounced back at her from the page.

She wheeled herself from her desk to the corner of the room, lifted a file and slid the rubber band from it.

She riffled among the top papers, selected one, then moved to his desk. He looked up irritably as she laid the report in front of him and pointed to the fifth item.

She waited until he had read it and when he looked up at her in annoyance she placed the page from the file on top of it.

A cloud seemed to shadow his face. He read the two pages a second time.

A drug addict, a disabled war veteran, had been savagely attacked in the Dobrinja district. Neighbours had seen nothing, had heard nothing, knew nothing except his name… A man of the same name and from the same address in Dobrinja had made a statement to the police on the death of the foreigner, Duncan Dubbs, in the Miljacka river.. . and the statement had been passed to the young British investigator, with permission for intrusive surveillance… and the IPTF had made the link with Ismet Mujic, who was the prime crime baron of Sarajevo, and Ismet Mujic was at the heart of his and his daughter's history.

'Better if I had never been involved,' he said. 'But I am, and I cannot step back from involvement…

There is an English expression – what do they say in English?'

'I think it is "You reap what you sow."'

Frank, and all of the team, sat in on the briefing for the new man attached to the Kula station. He was introduced as a senior detective from Dakar, Senegal. The briefing was by the station commander, an intelligence officer from the Public Security Department of Jordan, who used a pointer and a blackboard to emphasize his message. 'We are not colonialists, we do not give out instructions and orders, we are here to advise and help the local police forces. Above all else, we must show them that we believe totally in the importance of the law. .. '

Frank heard the briefing with wavering attention, distracted by a nagging shame. He had tossed through the night, failed to sleep, and had felt his self-imposed reputation of dedication to policing slip through his fingers. He had no friends in Bosnia; he went about his work, struggled with it, without the support of comrades. The only men who greeted him with warmth, on the rare times they saw him, were the cousins who made up the Sreb Four – Salko, Ante, Fahro and Muhsin. He had welcomed the liaison opportunity and had hoped he would grow to like Joey Cann, out from London. But Cann was now the source of his shame.

The Jordanian droned on… Frank had come to Bosnia for many reasons, most to do with the split from Megan, but among them had been a heartfelt desire to help a war-weary community. He detested the crime that ravaged the city but, like his international colleagues, could see no way to fight it… He had been dragged down, with his fine ideals, by Joey Cann… He didn't want to see him, hear from him, again.

He began to dream – the Irish bar at the weekend at the top of Patriotske lige, fried breakfast-lunch, wearing the red shirt and the dragon, the pint of Guinness, and the satellite relay of the international match from home, and the shame gone… but only if Joey Cann didn't ring him.

November 1996

Headlights speared against the plastic that covered the windows and interrupted the feast and the celebration. Alija, the son-in-law of Husein and Lila Bekir, had come to Vraca for his week's leave from army duties.

Their daughter now lived with the old couple. For ten months she had been with them and taken off them the weight of caring for their grandchildren, but it was good that the little ones' father was there. He had come the night before, dropped off by an army truck, and he would be with them for a week.

The family, reunited, sat in the candlelight around the table in the one room of the house that was dry and sealed against the cold, and they ate, laughed, sang and put aside the disasters of the past years. In their own bed, the night before, cuddling each other against the chill, Husein and Lila had heard the heave of the rusted springs in the next room, through a wall weakened by old shell fire. They had chuckled and predicted the arrival of another grandchild, and they had each, in their own way, prayed that they would be there to see its birth. There was little enough for them to look forward to, and much for them to forget.

Half of the population of Vraca had now returned.

Each day there was the beating of hammers, the scrape of saws and the crack of chisels reshaping the old, scorched stones. For that year, it was their aim that the returned families should have at least one room that was proof against the weather. No electricity, no water other than from the river, but protection against the elements. As patriarch of the community it was the role of Husein Bekir to decide who was next in the queue for help with the necessary repairs, and to assign the labour. It was slow work.