The Untouchable (32 page)

'It is a possibility that was the last mine?' He said it so quietly that the officer did not hear his question and was gone out into the night.

'How are you settling in, Mr Gough?'

'Not badly.'

'That's good news. I don't suppose you're fond of London.'

'I'll survive it.'

In the late afternoon Dougie Gough and the chief investigation officer, Dennis Cork, slipped out of the Custom House and on to the embankment path beside the river. Ostensibly they left the building so that Gough could light his pipe. Unspoken was the desire of each man to be clear of the building, away from the eyes and ears that might watch or listen to them. Gough, face wreathed in pipesmoke, wore his old raincoat and a thick knitted scarf over the tweed suit. Cork was wrapped in a dark camel coat with a spatter of dandruff showing on the collar. The small-talk, conversational, was for the corridor and the knot of smokers on the outside step. Yes, Gough was settling, surviving; it was what he had told his wife in a phone call to Glasgow. She hadn't commented, seldom queried his work duties. He'd said the same thing to his son, Rory, and to his daughter-in-law, Emma, whose back bedroom in their south-west London terrace home he now occupied. He

hated London and yearned for escape to

Ardnamurchan, but that was behind him. They walked briskly.

'I wouldn't want you to misconstrue, Mr Gough, but I don't see the signs of great progress. I'm not complaining at your telephoning me in the dead of night - Cann's last report - but I'm not getting an impression of action. Can we liven it up a bit?'

'I was never one to rush things.'

'Create a frisson of excitement. Put them off balance. Isn't that the road to mistakes?'

'It's a two-sided game. Hurry when you should be walking and it's not just them that can make mistakes.

We
can make mistakes.'

'I want Packer and his crowd to feel pressured. I've a minister sitting on me. We've taken prime position in this investigation. I've elbowed aside both the Crime Squad and Criminal Intelligence, I've refused to share with them. Without a result, and a quick one, I may not survive.'

'That's the way of the game.'

'The young man we have there, Cann - it's interesting what he's turned up but it doesn't move us forward. Frankly, I'd have thought he'd have done better by now. It's all fat we've learned, not meat. I shouldn't, but I lie awake at night and think of that man, Packer, and he seems to turn to me, in the street, wherever, and laugh at me.'

'I sleep well at night.'

'Where I used to work we believed in the gospel of proaction. Leading and dominating, not merely reacting.' Cork remembered that he had minuted himself to refer to the dangers of over-confidence in surveillance, but he erased the minute.

'It's your bad luck you don't still work there, sir.'

'Dammit, Gough - Mr Gough - if Packer isn't nailed to a courtroom bench, I'll go down as a failure.

You tell me what Cann has unearthed, what has been in his communications that has been important.'

'Learn to be patient. You have to sit for hours, days, > to see a fine dog-otter off the rocks at Kilchoan or on the beaches under Ben Hiant. No patience, no reward

. . . "Target One is unaware of current surveillance."

That's important.'

The minute was forgotten. 'I'd better be getting back.'

Gough leaned on the rail above the river, smoked his pipe and pondered. The camel coat was disappearing among the pedestrians. Dougie Gough had plans, of course he had, for 'jarring' and 'pressuring'

Mister and Mister's clan, but they would not be discussed and negotiated with a man who had dandruff on his shoulders and who worried about the future of his career. It was about patience, and crucial to the fruits of patience was Joey Cann, a shadow, unseen, tracking Mister on Sarajevo's streets.

'Hello, dear. Just popped round, have you?'

'Thought I'd tidy up, and make sure everything's all right.'

The girlfriend, Jennifer, was rather pretty, Violet Robinson thought, and a decent girl, attentive and dutiful. Violet was fond of her. As freehold owner of the house in Tooting Bee, and the landlady, she made it her business to know all of the comings and goings in the building. She had two young women in the basement, both City professionals, and she rather hoped - for their benefit - they'd get themselves married off and find places of their own. Joey, she'd always had a soft spot for him, had the top-floor room under the eaves. When the girls in the basement moved out, it was her idea that Joey and his girlfriend could take it over. She'd be comfortable with them in her house. She thought young Jennifer was strained, tense . . . She'd checked the room after Joey had gone in that early-morning rush for his plane and thought it puritanically tidy. But perhaps there was ironing that was needed, or somesuch excuse, but more likely this little soul was lonely and had come over from Wimbledon simply to be in his single room.

'That's lovely, dear. Have you heard from him?'

'He rang to say he'd arrived. Didn't tell me much.

He hasn't rung since.'

'You know you can always use the phone here.'

'He didn't give me the number.'

Violet Robinson had been a widow for eight years.

Her late husband had been with the diplomatic corps and had been taken from her by a rare strain of fever with an unpronounceable name and beyond t h e skills of the American hospital's doctors in Asuncion. Perry had been acting ambassador to Paraguay, h a d gone down overnight and been too ill to be f l o w n out to better facilities in Buenos Aires. With the d e g r e e of independence expected from a seasoned "Foreign Office wife she had set to and divided up t h e i r home in Tooting Bee. The ground and first floor s h e had kept for herself, but the basement and attic w e r e converted to rented accommodation. Joey had b e e n with her for five years. Until young Jennifer came into his life, she'd thought that he would still be t h e r e when she was carried out by an ambulance crew or an undertaker, had been almost at the point of d e s p a i r of him meeting the right sort of girl - and then _ Jennifer had arrived.

'Well, ring his work, ask them for it.'

'They wouldn't give it me, it's agaii*ist the regulations.'

'Of course they would, in an emergency. Not to worry, I'm sure he's all right there.'

'Yes . . . I keep expecting him to ring from the airport. It's only a few days.'

It was her opinion, a little of it from vanity, that Joey confided in her more than he did in his girlfriend, Jennifer. At least once a week, when he came back late at night from work, she would invite him into her sitting room off the ground-floor hall, and sit him down in Perry's old chair. She'd make him strong coffee, cook him Welsh rarebit or an omelette, pour him a stiff whisky and let him talk. She was used to discretion. She knew everything about the working days of what he called Sierra Quebec Golf, and everything about the life of Albert William Packer. To pass long days and long evenings she watched the soap operas, but there was nothing on television that was remotely as interesting as the work of SQG and the life of Mister. Joey had told her that he only gave the barest skeleton of it all to Jennifer. It gave her pride, and some little purpose, to know the heart of the story.

'And we're missing him, aren't we?'

' 'Fraid so - anyway, I'll get on.'

'He's a sensible young man and, what you should remember, they wouldn't have sent him if he wouldn't be all right there.'

'Of course you're right - and thanks for saying it.'

Young Jennifer's back was to her, going up the stairs, and she wouldn't have seen Violet's shiver.

Perry had told her often enough that when diplomats, soldiers or intelligence officers were sent abroad, were far from home, they lost their sense of self-preserving caution. It had been a theme of his. Men and women, on duty and overseas, shed the ability to recognize the moment to step back. It was about the isolation, Perry had said. They felt invulnerable, discarded the armour of carefulness, and walked close to cliff edges

- he often talked about it.

She called up the stairs, 'Don't you worry yourself.'

The answer came down to her, and the surprise:

'Why do you say that, Mrs Robinson? I'm not worried.'

'Of course you're not, and you've no cause to be.'

'I won't be long - just get it shipshape. I've got to get back for the c a t . . . '

When she'd checked the room after he'd gone, Violet had noted that the photograph was no longer on the wall. As she'd put her own rubbish sack in the outside bin for the refuse men, she'd found it ripped to small pieces. It had been an ugly picture of an ugly man, like an odour in her house. She went back into her room. She hoped Joey, spare, slight, with his big spectacles, was not drawn close to a cliff edge. High above her, carried down the staircase, she could hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

'Is that so?'

To another man, a lesser man, what Mister was told by Serif would have been a pickaxe into the stomach.

Beside him the Eagle had gasped and he had heard a little whistle of shock hiss from between Atkins's teeth. Serif's signature was on the document, drawn up by the Eagle, after two hours of dispute and amendments. There had been brittle politeness in the haggling and twice Serif had gone out with his people into the corridor. Mister was satisfied. The figure agreed, to be paid quarterly, was for a million and a half sterling, converted to American dollars, paid into Nicosia. Under Atkins's supervision, Serif's men had carried two more of the boxed medium-range Trigat launchers from the Toyota into the apartment, and the missiles. The communications systems had been handed over and Serif had leaned intently over Atkins's shoulder as the workings were explained. It should have been the moment for a popping cork, but Mister - still smiling - had asked with a laser's directness whether Serif was responsible for the beating given to the eyewitness from Dobrinja, the last person to see the Cruncher alive. Serif had denied it. Then Serif had rolled the hand-grenade across the table, and it had fallen into Mister's lap, and the Eagle had gasped, Atkins had whistled, but Mister had not blinked.

'You have my promise, Mister Packer, of the truth of it. You are followed.'

'I hear you.'

'A young man, foreign - I assume from your country. He is small, with big spectacles and dressed without any style. His coat is green. He followed you yesterday, Enver saw him. You stopped to look in a window, and he stopped. You walked back towards him and stood very close to him, and he looked away from you. You went away, and he followed. You are under surveillance. It is not a situation that I welcome

. . . I know nothing of the beating of the addict in Dobrinja. Look elsewhere for those responsible, look to a man who follows you.'

No panic flicked in Mister's eyes. His calm dripped off him. 'I am grateful to you.'

'I do not tolerate investigation of my business. You bring good trade to me, but also embarrassment.'

Mister's fingers rapped the table. 'I'll deal with it.'

'But you will need help. It is better we take responsibility.'

'Thank you, no help.'

'It is my city.'

Mister said decisively, burgeoning his authority. 'I help myself. I need no assistance. If I have a problem, then I finish it. Thank you, but I don't ask for help.'

He detested providing the opportunity for a smirk to play at Serif's mouth. Hands were shaken and then, at the last, he let Serif take him in his broad arms and brush-kiss his cheeks. He himself dealt with every problem that faced him, had ever challenged him, and would do so until he dropped. They were out in the street and heading for the Toyota. The Eagle was a lawyer and good on contracts. Atkins was a soldier and understood war weapons. Atkins knew nothing of counter-surveillance, and the Eagle knew less. He told them to drive back to the hotel and wait for him.

He left them by the vehicle and started to walk slowly, with his eyes on the shop fronts, along Mula Mustafe Baseskija.

He wandered at his own pace, never looked behind him, never doubled back, and turned at the big junction on to Kosevo, and climbed the hill.

It was the day that nothing much happened, and everything changed.

Chapter Ten

Joey Cann trudged up the steep street. For the life of him, he could not understand why Mister had walked out of the inner city and taken the street up the hill. It was a lesson learned long ago by Joey, heard at the feet of experts, that where a target went a footman followed. The task of the footman was merely to stay in touch, stay unseen, but to hold the link.

At first, going up the street, past small guest-houses and smaller shops with barely filled shelves, he thought of himself as a predator and Mister as his prey. As a child, on the estate where his father was the factor, he had been taught a stalker's arts by the gamekeeper. The keeper had been young, just out of agricultural college, from the Exmoor countryside, and had been - so his father said - the best that the estate owner had ever employed. Joey, a teenager, and the keeper, early twenties, in late summer mornings had stalked fallow deer, and he'd watched the keeper shoot them with a rifle. At different times of the year, when killing was not the priority, their game had been to creep close, and Joey had known that flushing excitement from being so near and unobserved. Then he had felt himself the predator and thought of the deer as his prey. The man ahead of him took the prey's role, showed no awareness and no fear, and strolled.

The keeper had gone when the new owner had taken the estate, too expensive for the new money. A syndi-cate from Bristol had bought the shooting rights and employed a part-time man who had neither the time nor the inclination to take a youngster out with him.

Joey's stalking talent had lain dormant until now.

He had said he was the loser and Mister was the winner. But the loser tracked the winner. Elation surged in him. He felt the power of the predator.

His mind was focused on the roll of the shoulders in front of him and the bob of the curly uncombed hair. He did not think of Jen, or of Dougie Gough who had given him the chance, or of
why
Mister wandered towards the outskirts of the city. He had a bounce in his stride.