Gerald Seymour - The Untouchable

'All the Ds. He was a De-miner, and was blown up, and damn lucky. He became a Driver, ferried others around but didn't go into the field. He was bored, and went back to De-mining. Was blown up again, was even luckier, didn't lose his leg. Started again at being a Driver. Couldn't beat the boredom so he's at it again, De-mining. That's the five Ds – got it?'

Fenton shuddered as he walked and was eyeing the yellow tape suspiciously, staying on an imaginary line that ran down the exact centre of the track. 'Once would have been enough for me.'

'There's so much shrapnel in him…' It was another line from Barnaby's regular patter. All the foremen supported his story '… that we always test a new metal detector by holding it up against his backside. The lights flash and the buzzer goes full blast.'

'God – and that's the extent of what you've got to cover, is it?'

'Yes, that's the valley. That's the Bunica river valley.'

It was laid out in front of them. A hawk hovered over the flattened dead weeds of the old arable fields, fluttered on to hunt across the dull weather-stamped grass of the old grazing fields, then soared in the light wind and flew towards the fallen posts and dropped wires of the old vineyard. There was no beauty to it.

The green growth of new grass shoots would come in the next month and the flowers would make their carpet in the month after. It was as though the place had lost its soul, Barnaby thought. There was a long, seemingly endless line of yellow tape that marked the extent of the fields, running along the edge of the wooded slopes.

'How long will it take you to clear it?'

'Seven months, eight. That's twenty men working five days a week.'

'How many mines are there?'

'We don't know, the records don't exist.'

'Would you walk there?'

Barnaby shook his head resolutely, 'I wouldn't step an inch over the tape. I am fifty-six years old and I have been working with mines for twenty-four of them. I've learned to respect them.'

He told the stories of the foreman, the grandmother and the son in law, and Fenton scribbled busily.

They had reached the bunker. The yellow tape was all round the squat construction of stone and damp tree trunks. The paint was cracked on the red surround and had peeled from the skull shape and the crossed bones. Barnaby took Fenton inside and the journalist flashed his Marlboro lighter, turned it up to full. There were scribbled numbers chalked on the walls, the remnants of an old occupation. Did Barnaby know what they signified? He didn't. Fenton said they looked like the bookies' lists you'd find pinned up on a wall of a betting shop. The last date, where the chalk line erased the list of odds, was for a summer day seven years earlier and above the dale was the word: Rado.

T can't help you,' Barnaby said. ' I don't know what it means.'

'A pity, sort of interesting, isn't it? About ghosts.'

They went out into the sunlight, and blinked. The lights in the Ljut windows and the pinpricks across the river were now burned out. A column of de-miners tramped down the track in front of them, the weight of their boots thudding on the stones.

'What are the boots? They look pretty solid.'

'They're supposed to be proof against an anti-personnel mine, or what we call a nuisance mine.'

'That's comforting.'

'Not really – they have rigid soles. They're all right on the flat but they're a liability on a stone slope. You fall over in them, reach out to break your fall, then your whole pressure is on your hand, and your weight. It takes five kilos of pressure to detonate a PMA2. If they're working on a gradient, like the vineyard, they'll kick the over-boots off.'

' C h r i s t… why do they do it?'

'For money, so that they eat and their families eat.'

'How do you hold up morale, after an accident?'

'Hunger does the job. Usually, when a de-miner's been hurt, or killed, at least two of them jack it in – they don't eat, and their families don't.'

'You're showing me a bloody – excuse me – brutal world.'

'Feel free to quote me.'

They followed the de-miners down to the ford. The water was in spate across it. Barnaby pointed to a distant farmhouse and spoke of some recent family-history: an old woman who moved on crutches and a young man whose skeleton body would not be re-covered until the end of the summer because of where it lay, and of an old farmer who survived senility in the belief that he would reclaim and work his fields.

He was not yet out of his bed – and that was a greater mercy.

They stood at the side of the track, close to the river.

Parallel lines of yellow tape strips ran from the track out into the fields, each wide enough for two men to walk alongside each other. Between these stunted corridors were wide expanses of grass and weed, but the two men in each corridor did not walk, they knelt, their visors down. They probed with thin sharpened steel prods. Fenton said that it was like watching paint dry. Barnaby said, drily, that the chance of losing a leg when home decorating was slight. Fenton saw the dog, and his face lit. A heavy German shepherd, shaggy-coated, was in the longest grass in a corridor between the yellow tape and twenty-five yards from the track. A long thin cord linked the dog to the handler.

'That's what I need.' Fenton raised his pocket camera, aimed at the dog. 'Tell me about him.'

'He's Boy. Nine years old. He's the best, a prime asset. He was trained first by an American de-mining company. They worked him in Angola, then Rwanda and Croatia. They sold him to us. He's going to work out his time here. He scents the explosive… Not everybody trusts a dog. If he misses a mine he won't detonate it, but the handler following him will. Many prefer to put their trust in the prodder. We argue about it. But Boy is special. When a dog's done its useful work, it's shot. Boy won't be, his handler'll take him home.'

'That's wonderful. Can I go closer?'

'Sorry, no. Mr Fenton, you have to understand that we're in the first week of the season. The men are rusty. They haven't been in the field for four or five months. It's a time of maximum danger for them.'

'I've an angle now, I'm going to write something positive,' Fenton said enthusiastically. 'Something, about brave men, and Boy, working to bring a proper life back to two communities in the valley. I like it, I've got the buzz – the valley where the peace will never again be broken.'

'Would you all like a cup of tea?'

It was what the Princess's mother had always done each time the old Bill had come visiting at dawn in their Ilford house, when she'd been a child.

'It's no trouble to me, easy enough to put the kettle on.'

Except when her father was locked up, the old Bill had been regular early-morning visitors. Her mother, Clarrie Hinds, always brewed up a big pot, and cleared the cupboard of mugs for the tray; if there was a senior man among them she'd usually have sliced up a lemon, just in case. She'd always put a plate of biscuits on the tray, opened a fresh packet for them.

Like mother, like daughter. Her mother said it helped to make a bad experience more pleasant, and also said that tea and biscuits and talk about the weather – would it rain or wouldn't it? – was distracting for the searchers.

This was a sour lot. Tea declined, biscuits refused, small-talk ignored.

It was now nine months since the last time the Princess's home had been 'visited'. They'd been polite enough then. No sledge-hammers, no shouting, no blue lights flashing, and no sirens when they'd driven Mister away. He'd been given at least ten minutes to get himself dressed, and they'd been discreet when they'd taken him out through the front door. It had only been afterwards that she'd heard from Rosie Carthew, Carol Penberthy and Leonora Govan that the house had been surrounded by armed police crouching in their gardens; the Princess hadn't even seen them. The last time, Mister had gone off as if a few golf friends were shipping him to a far-away course – but Mister didn't play golf. This lot were cold, correct, silent.