Rat Run

Chapter Four

On another morning, the sirens would have woken Malachy.

Dawn was breaking over the estate. He slept until full daylight. There was no reason for him to rouse himself, get up and wash, decide whether to shave with the blunt blade and dress in the charity-shop clothes. He had not been asleep when the sirens started, vague and distant at first, then clearer as they came closer. He had not slept because he had waited for the sirens, had lain in his bed, ears keen, through the long hours of darkness. When the sirens approached, coming up the Old Kent Road, then swinging into the Amersham, he could have pushed himself off the bed, gone to the window and looked out over the plaza towards the flat roof of block eleven, but he did not. He knew what the ambulance-men, the fire brigade and the police would find.

It had rained in the night but with the dawn came a low sunshine that spilled through the window. He had not drawn the curtains. If he had slipped off the bed and looked out on to the far side of the plaza, the sun's weak light would have fastened on his work.

He had no need to see it.

The clothes from his work were now back in the bin-liner, with his shoes, the penknife, the remaining tape on the roll and the plastic toy. He did not know yet whether he felt satisfaction at what he had done.

He rubbed his cheek, and could feel the thin scratches from fingernails that had penetrated the woollen hat.

There was a bruise on his right shin where one had kicked him but it was only with a trainer and the bruise was little more than an irritant; nothing in comparison to those on the face of Millie Johnson.

He rolled over, turned his face to the wall and his eyes were locked shut. Others would come to stand and gawp, but Malachy had no need to.

A crowd gathered on the worn grass beside the kids' swings and roundabouts in the plaza.

That morning, Dawn would be late for the ministry.

It was too good to miss: her supervisor always said that a watch could be set on Dawn's punctuality at work – even when she had had the flu she had been there with the mop and bucket and the vacuum cleaner. Not that early morning. She positioned herself at the edge of the crowd, did not reckon to use her bony elbows to force a way to the front. At the back she was closer to the parked fire engines, the two ambulances, the police cars and wagon. It was the best show she had seen in many years on the estate, better than any of the Christmas cabarets at the Pensioners'

Association or at the annual parties for the Tenants' Association. Two of them had been hoisted up on to the flat roof of block eleven and one still hung suspended from the rope. Where she was, Dawn could hear the conversations among the firemen, the ambulance teams and police officers, and it was good listening.

A fireman said to his senior, who had just reached the plaza, 'Never known anything like it, Chief, not on the Amersham. I suppose it's a feud between the low-lifes, what the army would call "blue on blue". Done a proper job, though. They're all taped up, ankles together and wrists behind their backs and they've gags in their mouths. Then rope was tied round the ankles and they were hung out over the edge of the roof with the rope fastened to the block's communal TV aerial. Been there half the night and they couldn't shout because of the gags in their mouths, and they wouldn't have wriggled around, would they? Bloody sure I wouldn't, not with more than a sixty-foot drop under me and my life depending on whether the rope's knot held. I'd have done what they did, stayed damn still. The word is that they're the kingpins of the local horror story, call themselves the High Fly Boys. Tell you what, Chief, they were that. They were high and they were flying, except for the rope. Must have been there for hours, and nobody saw them till the light came up. What I'm getting, they're right nasty scallys. They're the gang that push the class-A stuff round the estate. Last night, if you'd asked me, I'd have said – and sworn on it – that they were frightened of nothing. Different story now. Don't quote me, Chief, but this call-out's been a real pleasure.'

In front of Dawn the crowd parted. Few of the residents who lived in the flats overlooking the plaza dared to look direct into the faces of the two youths who were escorted by the ambulance crew and police officers through the opening that the residents made.

Dawn recognized Leroy Gates and Wilbur Sansom – everybody on that part of the Amersham knew them.

They sold; the vagrants bought. It went through her mind fast: because they sold and the vagrants bought, her best friend, the closest, was in hospital with an operation scheduled for that evening – the swelling would be down enough – to pin or plate a broken arm, and her face was a bright mass of bruises. The thought of Leroy Gates and Wilbur Sansom swinging upside down through half the night, and no help coming, was sufficient to bring a smile to Dawn's face, the first time she had allowed herself that little luxury since the call had come and she had rushed out – no night buses – to tramp all the way to the hospital by the river. She did what none of the others in the split crowd did: she fastened her eye on them. But they didn't meet her gaze: they shivered. If the ambulance crew had not held them up by the arms, they would have collapsed. She spat in front of them – had never done anything as crude in her life before. They came past her and she looked away from them and up towards the roof of block eleven. The third was being pulled up by firemen towards the angled edge of the flat roof. She heard what was said.

An ambulance girl spoke to her boss: 'First signs are, and it's extraordinary, there's not a mark on them.

They were traumatized when the fire guys lifted them up on to the roof, but we did quick checks on their bodies and we didn't find anything. They weren't beaten, nothing like that. They can't speak, in a state of terror. I've been here before, when there's been war between the High Fly Boys and the Rough Track Boys, and there's been blood. Not this time. I hope they've put them on plastic, because they've wet themselves and shat themselves – God, do they stink! My opinion, they should go to hospital for a check-over, maybe stay for a day's observation, but it's not medical help they need. They're in shock. I doubt anything in their charming little lives has been like this. Don't know how I'd be if I'd been hung out to dry like a bloody piece of washing – makes you think, doesn't it? – and wondering whether the rope would hold. Different, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining, but it's not what usually happens when these dysfunctional creatures scrap. Just different.'

The last group came through the crowd and headed for the cluster of vehicles. Dawn saw Danny Morris.

His face was pale grey and she could see where tears had streamed from his eyes and had run up by the bridge of his nose and over his forehead. He was carried. His Nike suit had been pure white but the crotch was stained and the fabric over his buttocks.

She rejoiced. The barricades on doors such as Millie had, the fear of old people about going out into the night, the need to clasp at a handbag and try to keep it safe from being snatched were because of the likes of Danny Morris. If it had been the day before, if she had seen him and the others walking on the pavement towards her, she would have backed away into a recess and hoped she wasn't noticed. She did not look into his eyes but, with purpose, stared at the groin stain, and hoped he would see. It was a pity if it was what the fireman had called 'blue on blue': it would have been better if those on the Amersham had set aside their fear and struck back… Not possible. If the Rough Track Boys had done this there was still cause to rejoice. Behind Danny Morris, a policewoman carried the plastic evidence bags: small ones contained wraps, the larger ones lengths of rope and cut sections of heavy masking tape. Dawn saw that Danny Morris, who was hardly capable of walking and whose arms were held, was handcuffed.

A policeman briefed his sergeant: 'It's bizarre and it leaves me confused. Doesn't seem right for us to put this down to the other gangs. Any sort of fight and there would be blood, mayhem, noise, chaos. None of that. Not a word, not a call. And not a sound…

Somehow somebody got them up on the roof having broken down the entry door up there, trussed them like bloody chickens, fastened the ropes to the TV aerial stanchion, lowered them over the edge and walked away. That's not the Rough Track Boys or the Young Walworth Boys. They haven't the wit for it. For them it would have been knives and, perhaps, a shooter, if there was that much aggravation between them. It's sort of vigilante stuff, but we've never had that all the time I've been on the Amersham. There aren't the sort of people here who're up for i t… I just don't understand. Looking on the bright side, and there's reason for that, they each had a wrap – and I guarantee it'll be a wrap of heroin – in their pocket. At the least we can do them for possession of a class-A drug. If the sun shines on us we can probably add

"intention to trade". They were so scared… That little rat Morris, he clung to my legs when we got him up and safe, like I was his guardian angel. It's made my day. Only one cloud. If the High Fly Boys are out of business, lost too much face, and there's a hole, then more scumbags'll be lining up to fill it. Still, someone did the business and did it well, if you know what I mean.'

The ambulances drove away, then the fire engines and the police numbers scaled down. As the crowd thinned, Dawn glanced down at her watch and started to run. She needed to be lucky and get a bus quick on the Walworth Road. As she puffed out of the estate, she thought of the excuses to be concocted for her supervisor, and what she would tell Millie later.

She would be at the hospital straight after work, be there when they took Millie down to theatre and be in the ward for when she came back from the operation.

She ran well, happy.

They should have gone at midnight, but the assault had been delayed till five in the morning. Then more delay.

It was now past eight and Polly saw Ludvik stride along the pavement towards her. He was grinning, hand lifted, thumb raised. About damn time too.

Behind him, at the end of the alley, the storm squad, backs flat against the wall, edged towards the outer door – big men, black overalls, helmeted, and enough fire power in their fists to start a war. The first postponement had been about the other occupants on the staircase leading to the top-floor apartment under the roof: should they be moved to safety, and how much noise would that make – how much warning would it give? There had been a debate, and at two in the morning, as she had shivered under her coat, a minister had come to add his opinion, and Justin Braithwaite – her station chief – had pitched up to add his pennyworth, but by five o'clock it had been agreed that the other occupants would be left to their beauty sleep. Then the second postponement: did they need a probe, audio or visual, drilled up from the floor underneath into the apartment, and how much noise would that make and how would they get into that apartment without waking the dead throughout the building? With his second pennyworth, Braithwaite had been succinct: 'For fuck's sake, just get on with it.'

Then there had been interference on the radio links between the storm squad and their control.

Braithwaite had gone back to his bed, a second minister had come and there was the question of what would happen to the building – historic, part of the city's heritage, dating back to the fifteenth-century rule of Wenceslas the Fourth – when the top-floor apartment was stormed. They had waited for more fire-tenders to reach Kostecna. Then other occupants had started to leave for work and had had to be grabbed and silenced at gunpoint – more arguments.

Now they were going.

Polly Wilkins had once spent a day with what Frederick Gaunt irreverently called 'The Hereford Gun Club'. She had been with three other recent Service incomers to the special forces on the edge of a country market town. There, she had stood under an old clock tower and read the inscription:

We are the pilgrims, Master, we shall go Always a little further. It may be

Beyond that last blue mountain buried with snow, Across that angry or glimmering sea.

She'd thought it naff and self-indulgent, until she'd watched a training session in their Killing Room: she had been deafened and almost frightened to death by the explosions and ricocheting rounds, the smoke and the shouting, and she'd crept back to London in awe of the pace and ruthlessness of the simulated attack. Now men from the Prague police were going into a Killing Room, doing it for real. She wondered how good they were… from Hereford she remembered overwhelming power and speed. Were these men, young Czechs, good enough?

Time to find out. Ludvik strode close to her.

She recalled the last signal from Gaunt: 'Good on you, Wilco. From this distant end we anticipate the capture of a full-blown co-ordinator. We are all ears, Gaunt.' She had always been Wilco to Frederick Gaunt, his little joke. Old RAF slang for 'Will Comply' was 'Wilco'. It was a name that indicated his admiration for her – Polly Wilkins did as she was asked and, more, had the dedication. Other women at Vauxhall Bridge Cross thought it patronizing. She did not, and wore the name like a badge, with pride.

Ludvik said, 'We are going now. As your Mr

Braithwaite remarked, "For fuck's sake, just get on with it." We are, at last, to get on with it. Perhaps it will be spectacular. You have a seat in the best row of the theatre and-'

'Please, Ludvik, shut up.'

It was not meant to wound his enthusiasm. But Polly Wilkins thought it almost obscene that a storm – gun against gun, body against body, faith against commitment – should be treated as theatre by those who would not be a part of it. In the Killing Room at Hereford, as they had come in, she had sensed naked terror and had realized the acute danger created by the assault. The squad was out of her sight, had disappeared through the outer door. She imagined them creeping, soft-footed, up the worn stone steps of the staircase. Behind her, beyond the police cordon, the fire engines revved their engines and made ready, and the ambulances had the doors open and… the attack started.

From the upper window, under the old roof tiles where the dishcloth still hung, came the sound of battering, fast, desperate blows, the strike against the apartment door's lock. Then the shooting. At first, one weapon recognizable by its sharp clatter on automatic.

Then answering gunshots. A scream, shouting, competed with the firing.

She knew, instinctively, that it had already failed.

Half a minute after the first blows on the door high in the building, with a sledgehammer, Polly Wilkins knew it was screwed. By now, if the storm squad had succeeded, there should have been the thunderclap of the flash grenades in the room and the curl of the immobilizing gas swirling from the window. She thought that the bodyguard and the man reckoned by Gaunt to be a co-ordinator, had been ready for them and waiting. More volleys of shots, but not the flash grenades and not the gas canisters.

Ludvik said, 'I think they will be inside very soon.'

'Accept it.' Her voice was cold. 'They're not inside.

Because of the bloody heritage you waited too long. It failed.'

'You cannot call it failure, which is insulting. You cannot, yet, call it failure. They are closed in. They have nowhere to go.'

She said, as if tiredness swept over her, 'What my boss would say. Dead they're hunks of meat, alive they're an intelligence dream. We wanted to talk to them.'

He bridled. 'I suppose you will report we are incompetent.'

'I will report that the heritage of the Old City dictated more fire engines were ordered up, that you had many fire engines but no explosives to blow the door off.'

'They are inside, that is what is important.' He faced her, intense. 'Trapped. I tell you, Polly, I believe you give these people too great an admiration. They will shoot, and they will think. When they have thought of their position they will surrender. They are going nowhere. Give an enemy too much importance and he will dominate you.'

She blinked as the pain of exhaustion caught her.

She looked up the alley. Two casualties were brought out. The one with the face wound had rich red blood dribbling from the mouth in his balaclava and she could hear the choke in his throat. The other was carried by two colleagues and his hands were across his lower stomach, down from the bottom edge of his bulletproof vest, and he howled as they struggled to run with him. She felt small, alone, so inadequate.

And Ludvik, alerted by the beat of the boots and the howl, watched with her.

Polly said quietly, 'I don't give them too much importance.'

They went back to a cafe behind the cordon.

He crawled across the floor towards the half-open window. It was slow going and the pain came in rivers. It was a big effort for him to crawl, and a bigger one for him to locate the grenade's pin and work his finger into it. He gasped, dragged out the pin, then propped himself up on an elbow and tossed it through the window. For a moment it seemed to bounce on the sill and he wondered if it would roll back and drop down beside him, but it did not. Far below he heard it bounce, men's yells, panic, and the explosion.

Muhammad Iyad bought time. Not much time left to him, but time for the man he protected.

The door was barricaded with the cooker and the refrigerator, and with the mattresses from the beds, all wedged between the door and the wall opposite by the table, chairs and the wardrobe from the bedroom.

If they came close on the landing above the staircase, he fired sprays of bullets on automatic above the barricade, then slithered back to a corner where the answering shots could not find him. He was down now to his last grenade and to his last three magazines of bullets.

He lay in a pool of his own blood. It was smeared across the carpet from each time he had manoeuvred himself to the firing position. It came from a chest wound and from his shattered knee. To kill the pain, he had only his faith in God and the image of his wife, and the thought that the man would use well the time given him. It was an hour, more than an hour, since they had last approached the door when he had expended a whole magazine from the machine pistol, and a handful of minutes since he had thrown a fourth grenade through the slit of the open window. Of course he would die in the little room on the top floor in a city far from his home and the family he loved. He had no fear of death. The only uncertainty in the mind of Muhammad Iyad was that he had not given the man the time that was needed.

Before they had come – in the night – before he had heaved the barricade into place, he had cleaned the apartment. With water and soap, he had scrubbed down every surface where the man's fingers might have rested, plates he had eaten off and cups or glasses he had drunk from. The bedding in which he had slept, the clothes from the man's bag, his toothbrush, razor, and spare trainer shoes were piled in a loose heap in the room's centre. They were there because Muhammad Iyad was one of the few in the Organization who understood the power of the enemy. The skill of their fingerprint experts and the quality of their ability to examine for microscopic particles of DNA were known to him. No trace of his man was to remain when the ability to fight – not the will for it – had seeped from Muhammad Iyad's body.

There were new sounds beyond the barricade – scraping noises, as rats might make, and he thought they chipped away stones from the dividing wall under the roof tiles and sought to come at him from above.

He knew about the grenades with the thunder noise that deafened and the flash that blinded, and about the gas that choked. Too long – if he waited for them to come, waited too long, and he was unable to light the fire… but every second he delayed, each minute, every hour he bought, gave the man more time. They were closer, more urgent in their work.

Muhammad Iyad hoped that prayers would be said for him. He trusted that in his village, in the far-away mountains of Yemen, men would speak well of him.

There was a story of the dying moments of the great prince Saladin, who had defeated the Crusaders on the hill of Kurn-Hattin. He had been told the story, as a child, by the imam of the village: when Saladin lay dying he called for his standard-bearer and ordered him to ride round the limits of the city of Damascus with a torn-off rag from Saladin's shroud on the tip of the standard-bearer's spear, and to shout out that Saladin had gone with no more of his possessions to his grave than his shroud. It was fitting to be so humble, and Muhammad Iyad hoped to ape the great prince. Nothing would go to his unmarked grave, the body buried in the dead of night, but his faith in God, his love for his family and his sense of duty to his brothers and friends. He fired an angled burst into the ceiling, towards where the scraping had been, and heard the rats squirm back. An oath was muffled by the stonework and the ceiling's plaster cascaded down to whiten him and make a film over the blood in which he lay, like the snow of the Afghan mountains. He reloaded, tossed away the empty magazine and called instructions, as if he was ordering another man where to be and when to fire.

He felt the weakness growing – knew that God and Paradise beckoned. If he delayed, if the weakness overwhelmed him, the DNA would not be destroyed.

He took the last grenade from the black bag and the last magazines, and a box of matches. He laid the grenade on the whitened floor, put the magazines on top of the heap of bedding and clothes, then made a little burrowed space at their base. He tore up scraps of paper from the bag, the coded instructions for each move forward in the journey. He struck the first match, and the paper lit.

Then he struck a second match, lit the paper better, and a third, and blew lightly on the fire; blood from the chest wound was at his lips.

When he saw the flames climb and spread,

Muhammad Iyad pulled the pin from the grenade and slid it under his stomach, his gut held down the lever.

If he moved, or was moved, the lever would fly free and seven seconds later the grenade would detonate.

The smoke gathered in the room and the wind from the open window fanned the fire.

When the bedding and clothing under the magazine caught and the heat reached furnace point, the bullets would explode and career round the room and into the walls and the ceiling, which would win more minutes; if he shifted away from the fire the grenade would explode.

He did not think he could have done more to win the man time to get clear and resume the journey to the north German coastline.

He had something that day to tell his wife.

The wind came in low off the sea and caught the wires that divided the gardens of the properties in Westdorf. The homes, the few that were occupied all year and the many that were opened and aired only when the tourist season started, were now packed close together. When Oskar and Gertrud had come to the island of Baltrum, in their flight from his family's past, it had been a perfect refuge. Now every handkerchief of open ground in Westdorf, and in the twin community of Ostdorf, was packed solid with buildings. He, the complainant each time there was a whisper of new foundations going in, was now overlooked each summer and swamped by visitors; he hated them. If Oskar had not been so old, and the arthritis in his knees had been less acute, he told himself he would have moved to the neighbouring island of Langeoog, or even to the more deserted Spiekeroog, but it was a fantasy. Gertrud was at Ostdorf, and he would never leave her.

Oskar Netzer lived in an old house in the heart of Westdorf. Homes on the island did not have names but were identified by numbers. The lower the number, the older the house. A hundred years before, his would have been the home of a fisherman. Its number was 23A, but around him and prying into his life were 248, 212,179 and 336. All were empty, locked and shuttered, and would stay that way till Easter week; he loathed Easter, when the hordes returned.

No one visited Oskar at house number 23A. No guests were invited in. Anyone who called could state their business at the door even if the rain lashed on them. In the years since Gertrud's death, not a single person had seen the inside of his living room or gone up the stairs and witnessed the state of the bedroom or been led into the kitchen for a welcoming mug of coffee. The house was enveloped with grime. His living room was littered, table, chairs and floor, with planning applications for development. He rotated the sheets on his bed every three or four weeks, and hung out the dirty ones in summer or winter to be washed by the rain; the winds took away their smell.

In the kitchen, pots, plates and pans were encrusted with fat. It was – and his neighbours were loud in their complaints when they arrived for their summer vacations, from Bremen or Hamburg, Cologne or Dusseldorf – a pig-sty. Their opinions did not concern him, and the filth of his home had little effect on his health. The resident doctor on the island had opined that Oskar Netzer was not mentally unstable, merely eccentric. The secret of his past, the shame he carried through blood, was known only to him and had been shared only with Gertrud, who was dead now.

In a month, there would be a mass of wild flowers that he could pick from his overgrown garden lawn, which was never mown, and take to the cemetery.

That day there were daffodils for cutting. The wind snatched at his overalls and heavy coat, ripped at his old Frislander's cap and rifled against his face.

He left his front door flapping open.

A councillor came out of the supermarket. Oskar had opposed the building of the second supermarket, had succeeded in delaying it for two years before permission was given. Behind the supermarket were the high floodlights of the public tennis courts. Oskar had fought them, and their building had been postponed for twenty-eight months, until his objections were overruled. To the mainland side of the tennis courts was the monstrosity of the Fitness Studio, his greatest defeat. But for every failure there had been successes: a block of holiday apartments, permission reluctantly refused by the council, an all-weather football pitch and eight new homes – and now the extension to the pasta and pizza outlet.

The councillor with his trolley was in front of him.

'What a charming sight – the dutiful widower with flowers, a devoted man for whom a stranger might feel sympathy.'

'Your way, the island would be concreted from north to south,' Oskar growled. 'From east to west.'

'But the stranger would be ignorant. The stranger would not have known of the poison an old fool can spurt.'

'I do what's right for Baltrum.'

'Flatulent arrogance. Can't keep your nose out, can you? Have to interfere. The island survives on the money it makes in the season – and only a senile idiot fails to see that fact.'

'Step aside.'

'When I've finished/ the councillor spat back. 'All of us, in a competitive world, strive for the future of the island. Each year thousands of euros, which could be better spent on our community, are wasted by the required legal investigations to your objections. You, one man, bleed us dry. Prying and interfering, Herr Netzer, is all you are good for… I say this, and I am not proud of it, she is better where she is than listening to the drivel you manufacture.'

'Would you have made money from the extension to the pasta and pizza place?'

'I offer you the future. One day you will interfere once too often, pry into a hole, find a wasps' nest and be stung. Who then will help you?'

'I go my own way. I know what is right.'

The trolley was pushed out of his path. The wind fluttered the councillor's hair. The short spat had no effect on Oskar. He thought that the price he paid for his vigilance was the rudeness of those who did not comprehend his concern for the island of Baltrum. He would not change, he would fight until death took him – as it had taken Gertrud. He strode away and his fist was tight on the stems of the daffodils. To his right was the grass strip for light aircraft to land; he had opposed it and said that the noise of the planes would disturb the island's wildlife. Further to his right was the little lake that was fed only by rainwater and the field converted to a children's play area; he had opposed that and said it was too adjacent to the Westheller, the marshland, a summer haven for wading birds. Before he reached Ostdorf, the smaller of the two villages at the western end of the island, a horse-drawn cart had veered by him because he would not give way. All building work was done in autumn, winter and spring, and the materials were brought in by the ferry, then loaded on to horse-drawn carts to be taken to the site. This one was to change a two-bedroom house into a five-bedroom eyesore, the extra rooms for visitors – and that fight, too, after a year of conflict, he had lost.

He came to the cemetery at the limit of Ostdorf's development. The flowerbeds in the garden of house number 23A, which she had tended, were overgrown and beyond recognition, but the daffodils she had planted still flourished for him to pick. The garden in front of her grave was meticulously tended. Not a weed in the sandy soil. He bent awkwardly, lowered himself to kneel and laid the flowers in front of the stone. They had a cleanness and purity about them, which should have been the island's virtues.

On Baltrum, Gertrud – dead five years – had been the only soul who knew of his past, and the torture it had brought him. She had sat beside him, and his mother, in the Hamburg lawyer's office when his uncle's will was read and when the letter of confession – with a dying man's shake in the handwriting

– had been produced. First the letter had been read in the lawyer's clipped tone; its second reading had been in his mother's halting, shocked voice. The confession had driven him from his work as a construction fore-man in the Blohm amp; Voss shipyard: he had resigned the day after the visit to the lawyer's room in the humid summer of 1975. He had sold their property, a three-room apartment in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort, cheaply for speed. They had gone to Baltrum, bought the house and he had believed himself safe from the intrusion of the outside world.

As a child, Oskar Netzer had come through the Feuersturm bombing in August 1943. As an adult he should have been stronger when confronted with the letter of confession; he had not. It had made of him the self-centred recluse kneeling in front of the weathered stone. He was alone with her, the only company – other than the beloved eider ducks – that he sought.

'I showed them, my sweetheart, that they could not ignore me. They loathe me but I do not care. I thought they would burst blood vessels. Now, coming here, I am accosted by a councillor – you will remember him, Schulz, with the face of a goat. He accuses me of interference, prying, putting my nose where it has no business. The idiot thinks he offends me. I am proud of his description. More important, my sweetheart, is that the eider are back…'

The rain came on harder, soaking his shoulders and the back of the coat, and dribbling on his face; it crushed the blooms of the daffodils and ran on to the stone.

In truth, not much more than interference, prying and putting his nose into other persons' business remained in the life of Oskar Netzer. It was his spine.

The Bear drove Timo Rahman away from the house in Blankenese. As they approached the electrically operated gates, Timo lowered the window, extended his arm and waved. He looked back and for a moment glimpsed the wan face of Alicia in an upstairs window, but she did not wave to him. They pulled out into a quiet street, and he had the window up again.

To neighbours, there was little remarkable about the Albanian who had come to live among them in Blankenese, a speckgurtel district of Hamburg.

Blankenese was one of the affluent 'bacon-belt' areas of the city, where the well-fed had their homes. Those neighbours knew little of the man who kept himself to himself, whose wife they rarely saw, whose children were taken by car to school and driven home. His name was not in the newspapers, he did not entertain locally, and offers of drinks or summer barbecues were always politely refused – 'We are already committed on that evening/ weekend / lunchtime, and so are unable to accept your kind invitation.' It was the way of the pate that the least should be known about him.

He had come far in his life from the village north of Shkodra in the Albanian mountains close to the border with Montenegro.

A VW Passat had been parked on the main road, backed into a driveway so that its occupants could see up the dead-end street and respond easily to whichever way his car turned on the main road: north towards the Blankenese station for the S-Bahn line, or south and the Elbchaussee. Timo leaned across the Bear's shoulder and peered into the mirror. A woman was driving the Passat with a man as her front-seat passenger. Sometimes the surveillance on him was covert, and needed his instinct – and the Bear's – to spot. Sometimes the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat section put a car on his tail in the full knowledge that it would be instantly identified.

It was a gesture, covert or obvious, and one to be ignored. Lesser men than Timo Rahman were in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Fuhlsbuttel.

Other than to visit a blood relation eleven years back he had never been there, and such visits were now inappropriate and beneath his stature.

He did not remark on the Passat, two cars back in the traffic behind them, neither did the Bear.

It was the assumption of Timo Rahman that every remark he made – in his bedroom, his kitchen, his car, at a business meeting – was overheard by audio devices. He had been told that the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat boasted to favoured politicians that the equipment available to them was the best in Europe. Nothing that incriminated him ever passed his lips and those he dealt with were schooled at the same desk. He discussed with the Bear, as the VW Passat followed them, the weather forecast for that day in northern Germany, as any of his neighbours would have.

Inside the speed limit, the Bear drove down

Elbchaussee. Set back from the wide road, which wound down from the high ground above the river, were the great mansions where the elite of the city's commerce and banking had made their homes, with views across the estuary to the Airbus factory. He could have lived there, could have moved Alicia and the girls into an Elbchaussee home, but it would have drawn attention to him. Timo lived in Blankenese, without the views, among the chief executives and principal department heads, and did not draw comment. But his financial empire, always moving on a steady path to greater legitimacy, based on stocks and bonds, property holdings and aircraft leasings, could have bought him the best.

Fewer than a dozen men – and the woman whose face had been at the upper window of his home

– could have brought down the empire of the pate, could have consigned Timo Rahman to the

Fuhlsbuttel gaol by their testimony He had no fear of them. Alicia, watched by her aunt in all her waking hours at the villa, was incapable of action. The Bear could have sent him to the prison they called 'Santa-Fu', but the idea was ludicrous. The net of loyalty around Timo – of which the Bear was part – was the same in Hamburg as it was in the mountains of Albania. It was based on the centuries-old diktats laid out in the Canun of Lek Dukagjen, was based on the besa, which was a man's word of honour – and violation created an inevitable hakmarrje, the blood feud. As his father had in Albania, Timo Rahman sat at the head of a clan, a fis, in Hamburg. He had brought with him the disciplines of the Canun from the village north of Shkodra to the richest of German cities, and with his baggage had been the im-penetrable strength of the fis.

The route the Bear took him that day was past the old fish market, where he had been shot by a Russian in the right side of his upper chest. It was when the Russians had come, refugees, into the city, sensed the wealth of the pickings – narcotics, weapons, girls

– and sought to muscle aside the power in place. Some of the Russian groups had been 'persuaded' at gunpoint to go elsewhere; some had laughed at the advice and had fought for territory. Timo's way had sent the message five times. Russians dead, packed like herrings into ice boxes, then dumped in the boots of cars, which were pushed off the quay of the fish market car park into the waters of the Elbe. The man who had shot him, spitting through his gag, struggling to break the rope on his elbows, had gone into the boot of his Mercedes and he – Timo – had slammed down the lid. All the way to the quay's edge there had been kicking inside the b o o t… and he had helped to push the car over the edge. He had had no more difficulties with Russians. Three or four of the men who had helped him in those days, twelve years before, could have put him with their testimony into a cell at the Santa-Fu, but they were all the gjak, blood relations, who would not have contemplated betrayal.

The Passat remained behind them, and took the same turn away from the fish market. Political friends, men bought with money, told him of the director of the unit that dealt with what they designated organized crime. The pinnacle of the director's police career would be the conviction of Timo Rahman, but he would never reach it.

The Bear headed for the Reeperbahn. It was where Timo had begun, where he had been knifed. He took the narrow cut through and they were held up behind a tourist bus that paused for photographs of the street with the high wall at its end and the gap through which only pedestrians could go to the brothels. At the police station, high and brickbuilt on the corner of the Reeperbahn, where the detectives had always failed to link him to ownership and 'immoral earnings', the Bear swung right and into the wide street.

Young, fresh from Albania, he had dismissed the Germans who ran the Reeperbahn, fought them and overwhelmed them. Three or four of those who had been at his side in that little war of guns and knives, all Albanians from the northern mountains, could have sworn evidence and imprisoned him, but they were miqs, relatives by marriage, and would have died rather than be accused of treachery against him.

Now, increasingly, he was clean. His business activities were distant from the wars on which he had built his empire. The Bear brought him to

Schauenburgstrasse and the premises of one of the oldest and most respected legal companies in Hamburg. A fellow guest, but arriving by a different doorway off the street, would be a city politician against whom no stigma of corruption existed. In a private room, over lunch, there would be discussion on the development funds necessary for the building of high-quality offices on one of the few bombsites remaining from the Feuersturm; minor investment and major profit in return for development permission being nodded through Planning. Neither the politician nor the lawyer who would chair the discussion, knew of the Canun or of the fis, had little comprehension of the reach of a blood feud and the vicious reprisals that could be brought down on them and their families, but they understood the threat of public disgrace that an appearance in court would bring them and those they loved, and they would not have lasted a sentence of imprisonment in the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. He was safe from them.

For Timo Rahman the meeting was routine. A matter of greater complexity was nagging in his mind as he took the lift to the upper floor where the lawyer practised hospitality. That matter, the rewards for which were great and the challenge huge, would take him to the western coastline. It excited him because the ground to be covered and the cargo to be delivered were new to him, and the risk to his security was devastating. He shook the lawyer's hand and was ushered inside. What nagged at him was his feeling of certainty that the man he must rely on was a foreigner with no understanding of the loyalties of Timo's people, the grandson of his father's comrade in war, Ricky Capel. The coded name Timo had given him, spoken with contempt, was 'Mouseboy'.

Rubbish day, and from the window Sharon Capel, matriarch certainly of number eight and probably of all Bevin Close, saw the bin lorry edge into the top of the cul-de-sac. Her own wheelie was outside her front gate, on the pavement, but her daughter-in-law next door received better treatment because the boys came down the side of that house to collect her wheelie, then put it back by the kitchen door. Joanne had that small luxury because nothing that concerned her husband, Ricky, was too much trouble for the bin-boys.

Sharon had lost track of time. If she had realized how late it was in the morning she would not have been dusting in the front room. She kept the house spotlessly clean because there was little else for her to do. It hadn't always been that way. She had been in Men's Underwear at British Home Stores for most of Ricky's childhood, and spent evenings washing up in a cafe, all the years that Mikey was 'away' doing bird and his share of what had not been retrieved by the Old Bill was running down. Mikey had been in Brixton, Wandsworth and Pentonville too long and too often… and when he was out she had kept up the jobs because the big one that he was going to retire on always fucked up. Mikey had been between release and rearrest on a day when the bin lorry had come into Bevin Close. That same day, Ricky had been a month past his twelfth birthday – and from that day his sisters, Therese and Rachel, had detested him.

Small wonder that Therese now lived in Australia and didn't write, and Rachel was in Canada and didn't ring. They should have beaten him that day, made a line and queued up to thrash the little sod – but none of them had. He had stood by the door with his fists clenched and no one had dared face him down when the bin lorry had come along Bevin Close.

It was the day she had realized the nature of her son.

The cat was a coal-black neutered torn and the family called it Soot. It was worshipped by the girls and however many bloody years Mikey had been inside it always greeted him when he came out, like he was Soot's favourite. The cat was old and could be

'caught short'. That morning, wheelie-bin day, Soot had been shut inside little Ricky's room – probably an open window downstairs had slammed the door.

Ricky had gone to his room and found that it had crapped right in the middle of his bed. He'd brought the cat down, holding it helpless by the neck, and before any of them could intervene, he had wrung the cat's neck, then smiled, like it was nothing, and taken it outside the front, where the wheelie was waiting for the bin lorry. He had lifted the lid, dropped the cat inside, then gone straight back upstairs, brought down his bedding and dumped that in the wheelie too. He'd come back in, had stood by the door and had dared them, his grandad and his nan, his mum, dad and sisters, to do something. If he had screamed abuse at them, they would have done 'something'.

Not like that… calm as anything, a little smile at the side of his mouth and no creases on his face. His eyes

– Christ, his eyes – had been so bloody cold that they'd terrified her. Not just her: Mikey, who had been a quality get-away driver for wages snatches, and Percy, who had been a one-man crime wave in burglary after his demob. All of them frightened by a boy of twelve because of what was in his eyes.

She went on with the dusting and cleaning. Because of the money her son gave Mikey, she didn't have to work, didn't have to do anything but keep the house clean and cook his favourite meals, and she doubted he even remembered killing the cat.

That day there was a harsher atmosphere on the Amersham. Malachy sensed it.

Not a new dawn, but more a day clouded with uncertainty. He walked.

Old ladies did not linger to gossip with friends as they would usually have done during the daylight hours, kids were not on the soccer spaces, young mothers stampeded with their prams, and the vagrants had disappeared, as if they were fearful of taking the blame for what had happened.

He went right round the perimeter of the area that had been, until the early hours of that morning, the territory of the High Fly Boys. He passed doorways of flats that had been deserted since they'd been torched in disputes, past windows that were boarded up because residents had fled, and along the walkways until he reached the steel barricades erected by police to prevent the pushers having free run. He walked by the empty shopfronts and the closed-down daycare centre. Ivanhoe Manners had told him, months before, that more than fifty million pounds for the New Deal for the Community programme had been swallowed by the estate. He could see no evidence of its value. He strode past the never-used garage with parking bay 286. Fear of the unknown blanketed the estate, and it was because of him.

He did his circuit and when he came back to the main entrance of the stairwell of block nine, he stopped, turned and leaned against the concrete.

Had he concern for the estate? Did he care about Millie Johnson? Was he now self-obsessed? No answers. The estate was in shock because the order of its life was altered. Millie Johnson, waiting for the anaesthetist, wouldn't have cared, not a damn. Just self-centred crap to make him, Malachy Kitchen, feel better, think he was taking a worthwhile step on the ladder.

Nothing achieved, nothing changed for the better.

As self-centred, as self-indulgent as when he had been asked to screen suspects from a lift operation and he had remarked to the battalion's adjutant: 'Be happy to – if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half insensible.' Hadn't told the adjutant, or Cherie who shared the Portakabin with him, of the email that had come in that morning. Not from Roz – he hadn't heard from her for three weeks. The email was from Major Arnold – decent Brian Arnold who might have qualified for the title of kindest old guy at Chicksands.

Hoped he was well, hoped his work was interesting, hoped he'd fitted in, hoped he would note 'There's a lot of bicycling these days round Alamein Drive. One cycle is most popular. Cheers and good wishes from all of us deskbound warriors, Brian.' It meant, in code, that Roz was the base bicycle: the Chicksands honey-pot was his home, halfway down the left-hand side of Alamein Drive. So self-centred that he had snapped the sarcasm at the adjutant, and so self-indulgent that his mind had been a country away from the village street when the ambush had been sprung and the RPG round had come in close.