The Untouchable Read Free Page B

under the face of the security man with the keys to Mister's freedom, a big, bluff, red-faced ex-Guardsman who wouldn't have brought coffee to a prisoner or carried his bag for him. The Eagle sensed that the security man wanted to sneer, spit, but didn't.
    They emerged into the great lobby area of the building.
    'Did you get the taxi, Josh?'
    'Yes, Mr Arbuthnot - side door, like you said.'
    No way that the Eagle would have Albert William Packer photographed close-up by a scrum of snappers, then have the pictures used every time a low-life hack wrote an organized-crime story on the capital. Anonymity was what the Eagle sought, for his client and for himself.
    Two groups of men and women were watching them. They'd have to pass them on their way to the side exit.
    'Just walk past, Mister, no eye-contact.'
    The first group were the detectives from the National Crime Squad. As the Eagle knew, they'd have had a watching brief because the targeting of his client had been taken away from them and given to the Church. Only fools played games when they walked past the detectives after a prosecution had failed. He recognized most of them, but behind him Mister, who had the keenest memory the Eagle had ever come across, would know their names, their ages, their addresses, their children's names . . . and there was one, who looked away, that Mister owned.
    The Eagle waddled past the detectives and towards the second group, rolling on his feet, arid panting a little from the climb up the steps.
    'You know what the Church say, Mister?' The Eagle spoke out of the side of his mouth.' "Of course there are professional jealousies between them and us, Church and Crime Squad. We're professionals and they're jealous." That's what the Church says.'
    There might have been a death in the family. The Church people stood hangdog, close to the side exit.
    There was a senior investigation officer and what the Eagle reckoned were all of the higher executive officers and executive officers who made up the Sierra Quebec Golf team, and they looked like they were too shattered to throw up. Sierra Quebec Golf had been assigned exclusively to his client for three years prior to Mister's arrest. It was all budget sheets, these days.
    The Eagle could snap the figures through his head. He estimated that the Church had committed a minimum of five million pounds to the investigation, then all the extras of Crown Prosecution Service and an Old Bailey trial. The men and women of Sierra Quebec Golf had good reason to think the ground had opened under their feet. He couldn't help but look at them as he went to the side exit. Set in the frustration of their faces, men and women, was deep, sincere hatred.
    They weren't like policemen. The Eagle had walked his client many times out of police stations, no charges offered, and had witnessed close up the resigned shrugs of men going through the form and 'doing something'. This was different, personal. He had to look down at his feet as he went past them because the loathing bled from their eyes. He went through the door, stampeded down a narrow set of steps, and behind him was Mister's measured tread. Mister wouldn't have been intimidated by the Church men and women.
    The taxi was idling at the side door. He dived for the security of the back seat. He saw the way the driver looked nervously at the client following him, then away. All the cabbies in London would know that the quietly dressed man with an unremarkable face, his client, was Albert William Packer. He gave the destination to the cabbie. The Eagle realized then that Mister had not yet thanked him, had not squeezed his arm in gratitude, nor muttered a kind word to him.
    As the taxi pulled out from the shadowy passage behind the Central Criminal Court, Mister asked softly, 'Where's Cruncher?'
    The first time the Sarajevo firemen had managed to get the grab hook onto the body and pull it out of the Miljacka's central flow and into slower side waters, they had ripped off