Gerald Seymour: The Untouchable

The defaulter had been taken from his apartment, with his suitcase only half filled in a scramble of packing, too quickly for him to get to the Uzi submachine-gun kept for emergencies under a floor-board. That morning, he was in the intensive care unit of Charing Cross Hospital where a medical team struggled to keep him alive… The muscler lay on a bed in a similar unit at University College Hospital, festooned with monitoring wires and drip tubes.

When the Cards had come for him, in the small hours, at the drinking and snooker club he owned in Hackney, he had not known that his minders had flaked away from the front and rear doors.

Liberties had been taken while Mister was away. It had not been expected that he would regain his free dom without warning. It was not possible for Mister to retain his authority, his power, after eight months away, unless his strength was demonstrated. He had sent a message that night, twice.

A detective sergeant, at Charing Cross Hospital, asked a consultant to speculate how the right leg of the victim had been taken off at the knee. Ashen-faced, the consultant suggested the detective should go and look for a heavy-duty industrial strimmer, the sort used by workmen employed by Parks and Gardens to clear light undergrowth and scrub. 'How long would that have taken?'

'To sever it completely? Not less than a minute, maybe a bit more.'

Another detective sat in an alcove close to the cubicle at University College Hospital, alongside the useless presence of an armed police protection team, and had been told the victim had suffered huge abdominal damage from the discharge of a short-barrel shotgun. A doctor had asked him, 'Who does that sort of thing?'

'We call it "bad on bad". For them it's normal business procedure. You and I would fire off a lawyer's letter, they do it with a twelve-bore, sawn-off.'

The body, stitched up, was trolleyed back to the cold store.

The pathologist stripped off his messy gloves and his assistant untied the long apron's back cords and he shrugged out of it.

'Death by drowning,' the pathologist drawled, English language and American accent. 'Considerable alcohol in the stomach, and a meal – I really don't have time to tell you what he ate. There is no indication of criminality. The injuries, abrasions, are consistant with what would happen to a cadaver after thirty hours in the river. There is no reason why the cadaver should not be shipped home to the family for burial.' He paused to look up at Frank Williams.

'Now, please excuse me.'

Frank thought the pathologist would be earning, maximum, five hundred German marks a month.

That would equate to around forty pounds sterling a week, before tax. The man was trained, a professional, had probably learned how to cut up bodies at an American university. While he was attached to the IPTF in Bosnia, Frank made six hundred pounds sterling a week, after tax, and had no college education. He believed nothing he was told by a government employee in Sarajevo; it could be that there were no criminal injuries, it could be that there were criminal injuries unnoticed by the pathologist, or perhaps criminal injuries that the pathologist had been paid not to identify. They were in a basement area of the Kosevo Hospital, and he could imagine what it would have been like here, in the candlelight during the siege, like a slaughterhouse, a carnage hell.

A young diplomat from the embassy was beside him.

'That's that, is it?' Hearn, the diplomat, asked. He grimaced. 'First time I've been at one, glad I missed lunch.'

Frank said, and overstated the irony, 'Well, isn't that convenient? You're staying in a hotel on business.

Problem: none of your business papers are in your room. So, incredibly, you are one of Sarajevo's five tourists a year. Problem: none of your guidebooks or local maps are in your room. All right, you're drunk and incapable. Problem: how do you climb over the railings on the bridges, or the walls on the river's edge, when you're fifty-something, and chuck yourself in after you've lost your wallet and every other piece of identification?'

' S o…? '

'Well, it's not good enough.'

'I've marked it, thank you. Leave it with me, and let's see where it runs/

The SIO stood. The chief investigation officer sat at his desk.

'There's no way round it, Brian.'

'I think I know that.' The SIO sweated.

'Sierra Quebec Golf, in its present form, is dismantled, and you – if you'll forgive my bluntness – are supernumerary.'

'It's been more than thirty years of my life.' He shouldn't have said that, didn't want to sound self-pitying. He'd known he'd be called in, but had hoped it would be later and that the drink would have been further through his system.

'That's a shame, and you have to believe it's sincerely m e a n t

… But facts have to be faced.'

'I'm familiar with the facts. We were unlucky, that's all.' He heard his own voice and thought it petulant.

He'd never been easy with the new man, the outsider, the blow-in from the intelligence community. Never been able to talk to him the way he had with his bosses when they were promoted from inside, closed shop.

'For heaven's sake, Brian, be adult. It's not a time for sulking. Millions of pounds have been spent. We were laughed out of court… Packer is the nearest thing we have in this country to a superleague organized-crime player. You had every resource you wanted, everything you asked for.'

'A witch hunt, is that what this is, and I'm the bloody broomstick?' He hadn't combed what hair he had. His head was throbbing, along with his anger.

The new man wore a perfect suit, a perfect shirt and a perfect tie with some bloody image on it that the SIO couldn't quite focus on, something from the spook days he supposed. And the CIO was Cambridge and connected, and had the ear of the elite.

'You can either be transferred to VAT investigations for the last few months or, if you think it more appropriate, take early retirement. Pension won't be affected, goes without saying.'

'That's remarkably generous of you.' Sarcasm never came naturally to him. His wife, who'd been with him as long as he'd been in the Church, said that when he tried sarcasm he demeaned himself. It was ignored.

'Looking at you, Brian – I don't get any pleasure from saying this – gives me the impression you slept in a hedgerow last night. Senior men getting drunk with juniors is seldom wise.'

'I took the team out. Bloody hell, don't you understand? It's what we always do when a case goes down. These men, these women, they'd put their lives into this, everything else secondary, and me. We went for a drink or three, so what?'

'Not a habit I sympathize with. I would have thought an assessment of the disaster, and it was a disaster, would have been better prepared while minds were clear, not through a hangover…'

The SIO laughed, a hoarse snigger.

Glacial eyes gleamed at him. 'Why is that so funny?

Enlighten me, please.'

'Cann did that. Cann stayed behind. He was at the computer all night. Why? "To see what we did wrong." We didn't do anything wrong. It was the system, the process… '

The CIO had the palms of his hands together, fingers outstretched, a bishop in prayer. 'Always somebody else's fault. I hear you, Brian. Keep saying it often enough and you might gain some comfort from it. Anyway, I'm afraid that's the end of the line.

Sorry, there cannot be sentiment, not when a man as prominent as Packer walks free. So, what's it to be?'

There wasn't going to be a party. There might be a carriage clock sent on in the post, and there might be a seedy secretive gathering in a pub and the handing over of a sherry decanter bought with a whip-round.

He said quietly, 'I'd like the rest of the day to clear my things up, and say a few goodbyes.'