The Untouchable by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

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