Gerald Seymour: The Untouchable

The beauty of the valley was lost as the squall crossed it. The russet and ochre colours were gone. Husein shivered, then coughed deep in his lungs and spat out the phlegm. He kicked the door shut behind him so that he would no longer see his valley.

The sign on the desk, printed off a PC and stuck to a cardboard strip, said, 'CANN do – WILL do'.

Sitting at the desk, stamping two-fingered instructions onto his console then staring at his screen, the young man pointedly ignored the chaos around him. It was as if the work he did divorced him from the atmosphere of morose and sour heartache. He was the only member of Sierra Quebec Golf who had not been in court. As SQG12, the dogsbody of the team, he had been left behind to mind the shop when the rest of them had trooped up to the Old Bailey. As he hit the keys and scribbled longhand notes on a pad, he seemed to refuse to accept what all the others knew. The team was finished. Some were packing papers into cardboard boxes, others were going round the walls and stripping down charts and photographs viciously enough for the paint to come away with the Sellotape, downloading computers and stacking disks, collecting the personal radios from the lockers around the room, checking the surveillance cameras' serial numbers against the docket sheets, and those on the telephoto lenses, then putting them roughly into the silver metal protected cases. The senior investigation officer chain-smoked under the no-smoking sign. It was over. The inquest would start in the morning, and it would not be pretty. The SIO would need to watch his back, and the higher executive officers would be making damn sure they didn't have to field the blame. When the inquest started, all of them but the SIO would either be taking the leave they'd postponed till after the trial or beginning life in a new team.

'Don't touch t h a t… '

He must have looked up at the moment that the final picture on the wall was about to be ripped down.

It was a half life-size picture, full length, of a man in T-shirt and trainers, handcuffed, being escorted down a garden path. At the foot of the picture one word

'Mister' was written in marker pen. It was the venom in the voice that made the man hesitate.

'Leave the damn thing there.'

The room had been ritually cleansed, the boxes and cases filled, all the computers switched off but one. It had taken them long enough for the pubs in the City to be emptying of commuters.

They filed out. Joey could hear their fraudulent laughter in the corridor. The team had been together for three years, for nothing. It was the senior investigation officer's idea of leadership: they were going to the pub to get so drunk they couldn't stand, then they'd fall into rip-off mini-cabs and get home, and in the morning they'd all have mind-bending hangovers, they'd have solved nothing and not eased the hurt.

He was twenty-seven years old. He was the junior.

Sierra Quebec Golf, formed to target Albert William Packer, no other purpose for its existence, was the only team Joey Cann had worked for. For those three years he had lived, slept, walked, crapped with Albert William Packer. He had never seen Mister face to face, only looked at photographs and watched video. He had never heard the man's voice clean, only listened to it on tape from the telephone intercepts and directional microphones. Yet he would have said that he knew him. For three years, in the room at the Custom House by the Thames, he had been buried in tapes, surveillance logs, photos, reports, forensic findings, buried so deep he had sometimes needed to gasp for air. It had come without warning. If the SIO had known that the case was about to fold, or the HEOs, or any of the older EOs, then none of them had thought to tell him. Just a call on a mobile phone to say that it was over.

He picked up a phone, dialled. 'Hi, Jen, it's me…

I'm going to be working late.'

'Tell me something new.'

'Did you hear?'

'About what?'

'About the case, dammit, the case – Packer.'

'Has it finished? It wasn't supposed to finish before-'

'It went down, Jen.'

'Sorry, am I being stupid? Has he gone down? What did he get?'

'Jen, the case went down. He walked.'

'You had it sewn up. From what you told me, it doesn't make sense

… Look, it's aerobics night, do you want me to skip it?'

'I'm working late.'

'Don't you want to talk?'

'No.'

He rang off. Speaking to Jen had put clutter in his mind. The chaff was cleared when he cut the call.

Doggedly, carefully, he began a long night of travelling again through the case work. In the pub they would have thought what he did was futile. Each time the tiredness tugged at his eyelids he blinked it away from behind his big, pebble-lensed spectacles, and looked up at the picture of Mister in its lonely honoured place on the wall. That alone was enough to shift the exhaustion and drive him back to the screen.

Past nine in the morning and the fingers still beat rhythms on the console's keyboard. Two hours before he had waved away the cleaners. The room was a tomb of stacked boxes around the cleared desks and the locker doors hung open crazily. When he had been fiercely tired, his head sagging, the sight of the photograph on the wall had stiffened him. Joey Cann was near the end.

The computer hummed with the latest instruction, then the format of cross-examination flickered on to the screen and locked. He read.

Question: And you were alone in the surveillance vehicle? Answer: I was.

Question: It was after eleven o'clock that night?

Answer: It was.

Question: Up to that time, eleven o'clock that evening, how many hours had you worked?

Answer: Seventeen.

Question: How many hours had you worked that week?

Answer: Ninety-four.

Question: You were tired? You were desperately tired?

Answer: I was doing my job.

Question: How many hours' sleep had you had that week – an estimate?

Answer: Thirty-five or forty – I don't know.

Question: What was the weather that night?

Answer: I can't recall, nothing exceptional.

Question: According to the Meteorological Office, there was low cloud and intermittent drizzle – but you don't recall?

Answer: I don't remember.

Question: Had you eaten in that seven teen-hour shift?

Answer: We usually try and get a burger – but 1 don't remember what I eat.

Question: I'm getting a picture of a tired man, and a hungry man – you are aware that hunger increases tiredness?

Answer: I suppose so.

Question: The distance between yourself and the vehicle in which you 'identified' Mr Packer was seventy-seven metres. Is that correct?

Answer: I believe so.

Question: You were tired, you were hungry, the visibility was poor, you were the length of three cricket pitches from the target of your surveillance, but you maintain that you are certain that you could identify Mr Packer?

Answer: I do, and 1 am.

Question: Had you, yourself, cleaned the windscreen of your vehicle?

Answer: No.

Question: When was the windscreen last cleaned?

Answer: I don't know.

Question: Don't you have the records that will tell you, records from the vehicle pool?

Answer: I don't have them.

Question: Was there a street-light close to the vehicle in which you allege Mr Packer was sitting?

Answer: There was enough light for me to make an identification.. .

Question: I asked whether there was a street-light close to that vehicle – was there?

Answer: I don't recall.

Question: On the map plan you have provided us with there is a street-light almost directly above the car you had under surveillance. Did you know that?

Answer: The light was satisfactory for an identification.