YOU can run but you can't hide. If you commit the crime then your justice will arrive, in its own sweet time. Even a bushy beard and a pair of glasses can't hide you forever, as Radovan Karadzic found out. He will very soon be meeting his justice in the Hague.

On a slightly different scale one of our local criminals met with justice, but of the somewhat rougher kind. The baby-faced gangster was never implicated in anything like mass genocide, his crimes were more on the gangster scale, hence the nickname (obviously). His lifestyle of petty crime, sanctions busting and gun running into Zimbabwe earned him more enemies than friends, and eventually led to him assuming a new identity and hiding out in rural France.

As with all criminals, his very crimes and his inability to keep them quiet were to be his downfall, but not in the obvious way. Despite his new identity, a weakness for drink and hanging out in bars meant that everybody who knew him (and many of those who didn't) had a good idea of how he used to make a living. He made himself into a local legend.

So it was that two years ago in one of the quiet bastide towns that dot the French countryside and nothing ever happens, something happened. It was the age-old tale of a bored or unhappy wife checking out the greenness of the grass on the other side. Unfortunately, the grass on the other side had a camera on his mobile phone and he knew how to use it and managed to snap the straying wife wearing not much more than a smile. There is not much use in having a photo unless you show it to somebody else, and there is no more appreciative audience than a bunch of bored blokes in a bar supping Pastis. A bit of harmless fun? Well, it could have been if one of the bored blokes in the bar wasn't wearing the horns of a cuckold. Not a smart move.

A publicly humiliated husband is going to want revenge, and what better revenge than to put out a contract? If you want your windows cleaned you call a window cleaner, if you need your car fixed you call a mechanic, and so it was that the baby-faced gangster was called out of retirement. The legend has it that the baby-faced gangster was holding a loaded gun against the trembling kneecaps of Mr Green Grass in the back of a moving car when Green Grass managed to overpower his assailant, struggle free, jump out of the car and escape across the countryside to escape to freedom, never to be seen again.

Until two weeks ago, when Green Grass miraculously reappeared, just before the baby-faced gangster was found at the foot of a flight of stone steps with a broken neck.