An Macanespie had once confided to a friend that he was not a man given to introspection. His pal had guffawed, almost choking on his beer. When his coughing fit subsided, he said, 'Christ, if I looked like you, I'd take introspection over the view in the mirror every time.' It was a point of view that had been reinforced when Macanespie had split up with his long-term girlfriend a couple of years later.
'Next time I want to live with a ginger pig, I'll buy a Tamworth,' had been her parting shot. Increasingly, when he looked in his shaving mirror, he found it hard to disagree. His ginger hair had grown paler and more sparse, his stubble coarser. His eyes seemed smaller because his face had become fatter. He didn't want to think about what his body looked like; these days, there were no full-length mirrors anywhere in his flat. When she left, she told him he'd given up on himself. He had a sneaking suspicion she'd been right about that too.
Macanespie didn't like the way that made him feel. He realised that his career had stalled, but that didn't mean he'd shirked his job at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. OK, investigating war criminals and helping to track them down wasn't where he'd imagined his law degree would take him, but it was preferable to writing wills and conveyancing in some scummy wee town in the central belt of his native Scotland. He'd carved out a nice little niche in one of the grey areas between the Foreign Office and the Department of Justice and it suited him just fine. The worst thing about it was having to share an office with that miserable Welsh git Proctor.
But all that might pale into insignificance if today went tits up. His previous boss, Selina Bryson, had what a more charitable man than Macanespie might have called a laissez-faire attitude to her ICTFY operators. Macanespie described it more pithily: 'She couldn't give a flying fuck what we do as long as we deliver results she can take credit for and we don't fart at the ambassador's cocktail receptions.' But Selina was history and today the new boy was coming to wave a big stick at him and Proctor. Making them come into the office on a Saturday, just because he could.
He might be lazy but Macanespie wasn't stupid and he knew forewarned was forearmed. So he'd called one of his London drinking buddies and sought the low-down on the new boss. Jerry had been happy to oblige on the promise of a bottle of Dutch genever the next time Macanespie left The Hague for London.
'Wilson Cagney,' Macanespie said. 'Tell me about him.'
'What have you heard so far?'
Macanespie made a sardonic face. 'Too young, too well dressed, too black.'
Jerry laughed. 'He's older than he looks. He's nearer forty than thirty. He's got enough miles on the clock to dish out plenty of bother. He dresses Savile Row but the word is that he lives in a one-bedroomed shed in Acton and doesn't drive. Spends all his readies on good suits and all his spare time in the office gym. Sad careerist bastard, basically.'
'How did he climb the greasy pole? Merit? Backstabbing? Or trading on being black?'
Jerry breathed in sharply. 'I hope this is a secure line, mate, saying things like that. HR are bloody everywhere these days. He's got the qualifications – law degree at Manchester, then a Masters in security and international law, according to our star-struck IT assistant. But he's the only black face at his grade, so make of that what you will. Put it this way, Alan. He's not one of us. You'll never find him down the Bay Horse on a Friday night.'
'So he's not coming over to give us a pat on the back and say, "As you were, chaps."'
'Word is he's looking for so-called austerity cuts. Which is spelled c-u-l-l. Watch your back, Alan.'
And so Macanespie, card marked, had determined that he wasn't going to be the lamb to the slaughter. Welsh lamb, that was a much better option. He'd be the ginger pig, tusks flashing danger signs at anyone who thought he was a pushover. He'd arrived in good time and to Theo Proctor's astonishment, he set about clearing his desk and tidying his end of the office.
'You trying to be teacher's pet, then?' Proctor demanded.
'I just looked at this place through somebody else's eyes and decided it didn't need to be a pigsty,' he said, grabbing three dirty mugs and popping them into his bottom drawer. Proctor, clearly uneasy, began straightening files and papers on his desk.
Before he'd made much impression, one of the canteen staff came in with a Thermos jug and a single cup. She consulted a piece of paper. 'Which one of you is Wilson Cagney?'
'He's not here yet, love. And you need two more cups.' Proctor always managed to sound an officious prick, Macanespie thought.
'No, I don't.' She waved the paper at him. 'Look: "Order for Wilson Cagney. Black coffee for one." Can one of you sign for it?'
'I don't see why I should sign for it if I'm not getting to drink it,' Proctor grumbled.
'Give it here,' Macanespie said, scribbling his signature on the bottom of the sheet. 'We'll not drink it, I promise.' When she left, he unscrewed the top and inhaled. 'Aye, that's the good stuff,' he said.
'For crying out loud, Alan, close it up. He'll smell it.' Proctor looked panicked, but Macanespie just curled his lip in a sneer as he closed the jug.
Five minutes later, a tall black man in an immaculate charcoal pinstripe suit walked in without knocking. His hair was cut close, emphasising his narrow head and surprisingly delicate features. 'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said, then poured himself a coffee from the Thermos jug. He glanced briefly at them both then gestured with his cup at Proctor. 'You must be Proctor.' Theo nodded. Cagney looked pleased with himself. 'Which makes you Macanespie.' This time there was a faint note of distaste in his voice.
Cagney sat down and hitched his trousers at the knee before he crossed his legs. 'I imagine you know why I'm here?'
'You're Selina Bryson's replacement,' Macanespie said. 'Making a tour of the front-line staff.' He smiled, instantly worrying that he was showing too many teeth in a display of nerves.
Cagney inclined his head. 'Right. And also wrong. It's true that I've taken over from Selina. But I'm not here to press the flesh and tell you all what a sterling job you're doing. Because in the case of you two, you're not.'
Proctor flushed, a dark plum stain spreading upwards from his bright white shirt collar. 'We're one small part of a big operation here. You can't blame us for everything that's gone wrong.'
Cagney sipped his coffee, clearly savouring it. 'The UK government is committed to the concept of international law. That's the main reason we supported the UN in the formation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It's why we seconded people like you to work with the tribunal. Everybody knows it's going to wind up at the end of this year, so we're all drinking in the last-chance saloon. And some people aren't happy about that. Would you say that was a fair assessment of the situation?'
Macanespie hung back, waiting to see which way his colleague would jump. Proctor stuck his chin out, his expression belligerent. 'A tribunal like this is never going to manage to satisfy people's demands for justice. Stands to reason. After all this time, you can't expect to develop the kind of evidence that will always stand up to challenge in court.'
Cagney set his cup down. 'I appreciate that. What worries me is the cases that have never made it to court. The ones where a dossier was put together and a raid was planned to arrest the alleged war criminal. Only, the arrests were never carried out because, by pure chance, the target of the operation was assassinated before we swung into action.'
So that was the way the wind was blowing. Someone was getting cold feet about someone else's black ops. Macanespie shrugged. 'Rough justice. You'll not see many tears shed over the likes of them. But that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.'
Cagney smacked a hand down hard on the table, making the crockery rattle and the teaspoons jingle. 'Don't give me that. There was nothing serendipitous about these deaths. At least ten of them. The last one, Miroslav Simunovic, just last week.'
'There's still a lot of murdering bastards in the Balkans,' Proctor said.
Cagney glared at him. 'Remind me not to recommend you for a diplomatic post. The point I'm making is that, while my predecessor may have been willing to turn a blind eye to whatever programme of DIY justice was going on here, I'm not.'
'Like you said, it's all going to be over and done with by the end of the year,' Macanespie said, his voice surly.
'So, what? You think I should just let sleeping dogs lie?' Cagney paused dramatically. The other two exchanged a look. It was apparently enough to create a consensus that the question was rhetorical. They stared at Cagney with expressions of stubborn mulishness. He shook his head, clearly impatient. 'You just don't get it, do you? This is the end of the tribunal. This is where we draw the line in the sand. This is where we say to Bosnia and Croatia and Montenegro and Kosovo and the rest of them, "It's done. Settle down and try to behave like you're inhabiting the twenty-first century, not the twelfth." It's where we tell them that we've done our best to mete out justice to the bad men. And now they have to move on. Let the past bury its dead.'
Proctor made a noise halfway between a cough and a dry, bitter laugh. 'I don't mean to sound rude, but it's obvious you're new to that part of the world. They're still fighting those ancient battles. They talk about it like it was yesterday. We might think it's over and done, but nobody on the ground over there thinks like that.'
'Well, they're going to have to learn. If they want to be part of modern Europe, they're going to have to learn to live like modern Europeans, not like the private armies of medieval warlords.'
Macanespie shifted his bulk in the chair and reached for the coffee jug. 'It's not that simple. It's all bound up in ethnicity and religion and tribal factions. It's like Northern Ireland multiplied by ten. Rangers and Celtic to the power of mad.' He took a mug out of his drawer and poured. Cagney looked momentarily furious, then mildly amused. But it wasn't enough to divert him from his course.
'And how else is it going to change if we don't impose a higher expectation on them? You think there isn't a new generation of young people in the Balkans who want things to be different? Who look at the world through the prism of Facebook and Twitter and see another way of living? Who are fed up with the old way of doing geopolitics in their back yard?'
Another look exchanged. Macanespie's shoulders slumped, confronted yet again by the ignorance of a suit from London who didn't have a clue how this world worked. 'Maybe. But I don't see what that's got to do with us.'
Cagney compressed his lips into a thin exasperated line. 'The killing has to stop. These assassinations – because that's what they are, let's not glorify them with words like "rough justice" – they've got to be history.'
'I take your point,' Macanespie said. 'But why is that our problem? We didn't do the killing or commission it. Not even behind our hands.'
'Because what they all have in common is that every one of those assassinations was a case where we had a key frontline involvement. We, us, this office. We're the common denominator. Either somebody on our team thinks they're channelling Charles Bronson or there's a mole leaking the product of our investigations to a third party who's got his own programme of Balkan cleansing going on.'
Proctor was visibly shaken and Macanespie suspected he was too. He'd never put it together quite like that. They exchanged another look, this time aghast. 'Fuck's sake,' Macanespie hissed under his breath.
'Like he said. We're not killers,' Proctor said, indignant.
Cagney allowed a smile to twitch one corner of his mouth. 'Now that I've met you, I'd have to agree. But somebody is. And I'm making it your job to find who.' He pushed back from the table and stood up.
'We're lawyers, not detectives,' Macanespie said.
'You might have been lawyers once. But these past few years, you've been hunting dogs, triangulating the whereabouts of a bunch of butchers. This is your last assignment. Find the avenger. You can make a start first thing tomorrow.'
'Tomorrow's Sunday,' Macanespie protested.
'You sound like a shopkeeper.' Cagney's contempt was obvious. 'The sooner you get started, the sooner you can deliver. Then maybe you'll have a career to come home to.'
