Rat Run

Chapter Six

'I'll bet you were begging for the call. Praying for it.'

The voice and the words, spoken in the shadows of the night, were crystal clear in Malachy's mind. He walked out of the stairwell street entrance of block nine and headed for the exit road from the Amersham.

'You had a taste for it, didn't you? All down to me.

I knew you'd come. Don't give me that stuff about "I done my bit". You've done precious little of damn all, and without me that's how it'll stay. You hearing me?'

The sun was over the highest tower, block four, and little cloud puffs scudded around its brilliance, but down on the street he was sheltered from the wind. In the dark, in the parking bay, the wind had funnelled between the pillars, peeled off the car and buffeted him.

He had heard, 'If you think you've "done my bit", go and look at her. I'm telling you very frankly, because I nearly trust you, we push paper round desks but we alter nothing. Enough, that's us, to get little newspaper headlines and "God, aren't we great?" stories on local TV, but we're not affecting the trade – it's the trade that put Millie where she is. You know what happened up north a few months ago? I'll tell you. A big city, with police costing millions a year, had to admit it was so swamped with class A that it had "lost control of crime" in its area. That's direct, what they said. "Lost control". Not Bogota, not Palermo, not bloody Kiev or Chicago, but a city you can take a train to. Barely surfaced in our papers and TV, because it was a bad-news story. Who wants bad news? But it's where we are. You live in this sink -

Christ, I couldn't – and you see what's not on TV and in the papers.'

The sun had brought the baby-mothers out. No thin gold finger-rings, just prams to push and toddlers to traipse towards the play places, or the swings and slides that weren't broken. Twice since he had lived on the Amersham, Malachy had seen children who could barely run, not understand, happily carry syringes picked up from the gutter back to the baby-mothers.

Once he had seen a little boy, done up in his best party clothes, kneel in the mud with a syringe and fly it over his head like it was a rocket.

'Up north, that time, they got round to admitting what we all know. We're losing. Not that you ever will, but if you came into my place – where I push my poxy bits of paper around – you'd see that only the arseholes and the career wonks find anything to cheer about. When we do get ourselves wound up, and head off to do the good things, we're tripping over the European Court of Human bleeding Rights and we're flat on our bloody faces. I'm telling you this because I reckon you understand, Malachy Kitchen, about losing. You're a loser big-time – but you came running when you were called.'

He came out past the last of the big blocks and walked a street towards the corner shop that Ivanhoe Manners had pointed out to him. There had been – he knew it because Millie Johnson had told him over tea – two more armed robberies since the twelve the social worker had spoken of. And the Southwark News had quoted the Asian shopkeeper as calling himself 'a sitting duck', with no insurance company prepared to quote for him. He couldn't quit because there was no buyer idiot enough to take it on. Guns under his chin, clubs in front of his face, CCTV and the panic button useless.

'My estimate of you is that you're sick, spewing it up, with losing… so I've got plans for you. You did well – three kids out of the picture. You did what we cannot. Over the line, of course, sufficient to get you banged up and a charge sheet as long as half your arm. You should look at me as a visiting angel, who pitched up to help you get your life back, and if you make it I'll be on the sidelines cheering you. You got a long, long road. You won't be coming to me with "I've done my bit", will you? You won't disappoint me, will you? That would really upset me, because – whichever way you look at it – I'm helping you.'

Malachy cut through the Green Street market, sidled past the stalls heavy with fruit and vegetables, thin clothing and tacky-bright toys; another plastic pistol was in the place where his had come from, good enough for a ten-year-old in daylight and good enough to scare the shit out of three gang youths at night. He glanced at his watch and quickened his stride. He saw ahead of him the traffic on Walworth Road, and the bus stop.

'Think of it as a pyramid – that's what all the clever buggers at the Home Office do. Right down at the bottom are the vagrants, the addicts, who have to buy and have to thieve and have to ambush Millie Johnson. They're dross, not worth the sweat. Next up from them are the pushers, the High Fly Boys, and you wrecked them, which was well done and got you on the ladder. Keep climbing. Read this name, memorize this address. The dealer feeds the pushers.

He is at the next level of the pyramid. If I wanted to crank it up I could say that he has Millie Johnson's blood under his dirty little fingernails. Got it in your memory? Good. I'll have the paper back. Look after yourself, Malachy, because no one else will, and a dealer fights dirtier than kids do.'

He crossed then and looked up Walworth Road.

Three buses came, in crocodile formation, towards him. They stopped, disgorged passengers and pulled away. He would wait till she came. More minutes and more buses. He idled. He knew what time she left work, and what time she would get the ride from Whitehall. She came off the bus.

Dawn, the cleaning lady who was his neighbour and who was the friend of Millie Johnson, walked right past him. She saw him, recognized him and anger twitched at her mouth. She ignored him. He had a cavalcade of excuses to offer her – gone to sleep, dozed off – and a litany of apologies to make for leaving her last night to come into the estate alone, but the excuses and apologies went unsaid. As she crossed the road he watched the pride in her walk – she was not dependent on a man whose promise did not count. He followed her, but did not run to catch her; he hung back when she stopped in the market and bought fruit, which he knew she would later take to the hospital.

He had a good life, well organized. Jason Penney, a month past his twenty-eighth birthday, lived in a ground-floor flat. The one-bedroom unit had been allocated by Housing to a pensioner and was suitable for a disabled person. Legally, Penney was disabled, and to prove it he had a doctor's certificate, stating his severe knee-ligament injuries, which had cost him ?250 in cash from a Ghanaian medic and entitled him to benefit. But the disability money was chicken-feed to his other earnings. Illegally, he had inserted himself, his partner, his baby and his dog into the pensioner's home. As a base of operations it was ideal.

He sold class-A narcotics on the Amersham. What the customer wanted, the customer had – but only class A: he shunned cannabis and the derivatives as too bulky to handle and with insufficient profit margins. He dealt in heroin, cocaine powder, crack cocaine. Whatever the market demanded, he could get: MDMA tablets, made from a base of amphetamine, ketamine, 2C-B, and ephedrine or methylamphetamine. Where the market took him, he followed. A bad week gave him, clear, a thousand pounds; a good week, two thousand, but in a worst week, if he was arrested and nailed down with evidence, he faced seven years in prison. The money he made, and the risk of going to gaol, led Penney towards a life of exceptional caution.

The caution dictated where he lived.

His live-in partner, Aggie, had had his baby. Aggie had located the pensioner, and later, together and over three weeks, they had watched the block and the pensioner's door for suitability. That was eight months back. She had befriended the old man, a half-reformed alcoholic in his early seventies: meeting him, getting him into conversation at first, later, dropping off six-packs – 'You're my friend, aren't you? No problem'; later, getting inside, close to him on the sofa, cuddling him, touching him up – infatuating him; later, shopping for him – 'Don't thank me, it's for nothing, anything I can do to help'; later, moving in with the baby – 'Just while I sort myself out, and I'm ever so grateful'; later, Jason Penney's at the door, with his dog and his bag – 'He's ever so nice, you won't know he's here, and the dog's lovely. We'll all be company for you.'

In a month, Aggie had given Penney what he most wanted. He had safe premises among the pensioners' units that were about at the bottom of police priority taskings for surveillance. Penney, his partner and the baby had taken the pensioner's bedroom, the dog had the hall, the old man spent his days in the kitchen and slept on the front-room sofa with receding memories of the cuddles and the affection. And how was the old beggar going to get rid of them? No way. Changes were made to the flat, discreetly, and unnoticeable from the outside. Steel sheeting covered the inside of the front and back doors. New locks, bolts and chains were fitted. A trellis of bars reinforced the windows.

The pensioner's home, in which he stayed with an ever-open can from a six-pack, had become the fortress of the Amersham's premier dealer. The final touch: Penney had hired a welding torch for twenty-four hours, gone out on a wet November night and worked the flame over the manhole cover in the street in front of the flat, where the sewage went through. If they were serious, first thing the filth did when they raided was get the manhole cover up outside and slot a plastic sack over the pipe outlet into the main system. First thing a dealer did, when the sledgehammers hit the door, was flush what was in the house down the toilet. Jason Penney reckoned himself ahead of the game.

Aggie collected for him from the supplier. Anything up to a full kilo of brown or white, up to a thousand tablets, was brought back to the estate by the pale-faced, unremarkable girl with her baby. Aggie moved the brown, the white and the tablets in the pram under the baby, with shit and piss in the nappy that hid the dull scent of heroin, cocaine or MDMA, from the house to the stash place that was a hollowed-out cavern behind a loose concrete block in a play-area corner where the lights did not reach. Jason Penney, with perfect security around him, was a king on the Amersham.

The men and women in Housing, burdened by workloads and short staffing, had no interest in investigating areas from which no complaints came.

The pensioner's neighbours, similarly elderly and cowed, who would have seen Penney's shaven head, his muscled, tattooed body and his Rottweiler, were not daft: they would not call any police hotline even if it claimed confidential response.

He was irritable that day. He'd snapped at Aggie and bawled out the pensioner, had raised his fist to the dog so that it had backed off and crept to its corner. A little tremor of worry itched in him. He dealt with Danny Morris, Leroy Gates and Wilbur Sansom, had done ever since he'd set up in business on the estate, had found them good and reliable. He knew what had happened to them. He believed he felt the pulsebeat of the Amersham, but he could not have said who had left them suspended from a flat roof for most of a night.

He kept her in an apartment at Chelsea Harbour. It had a small balcony that looked down on the river, a small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom, a big TV with video and DVD, and a big bed that fitted tightly into the small bedroom.

She grunted hard.

The apartment, across London from Bevin Close, with the girl in residence, was the greatest luxury in Ricky Capel's life. It was leased in her name, two years and renewable, but the girl was more complicated: she had been bought for cash, then the money had been paid back and she was a gift. Maria, twenty years old, from Romania, was smart, clever and long-legged, and had worked out of a brothel in King's Cross.

The thong, suspenders and little lacy brassiere that she always wore when he arrived, the high-heeled shoes and the silk robe were scattered in a trail between the front door of the apartment and the bed.

Maria was high luxury to Ricky Capel and high risk.

The times he was able to get away from the cousins, and from Bevin Close, were luxury because then he thought he breathed freedom. He tried to come to Chelsea Harbour once a week, but if his life was complex and business burdened him, it was once a fortnight, which made for expensive luxury – with the lease, her spending money and her presents. It was liberation when he shed his family. Free of Joanne, who did sex only when she reckoned she had to and was always bleating on about the thinness of the wall between their room and Wayne's, and refused straight-up to do anything beyond basic. The girl, Maria, rode him on the bed, and his hands reached up for the hang of her breasts, and she grunted louder as he pushed up into her and her head was back like it was ecstasy for her. Her fingernails, long and painted silver to match her lip gloss, caught in his chest hair and scratched at his skin. He let out sharp, stifled squeals, and her grunts came faster.

But high risk. For Ricky Capel to have set up his girl at Chelsea Harbour opened little cracks in the defence wall built round his wealth and enterprises. He had met her in the hours after his first meeting with Enver, who hummed round King's Cross in a flash Ferrari Spider. Charlie had identified the business opportunity. Albanians ran girls into the country, but they hadn't the cover: Customs and Immigration had peeled eyes for Albanians driving white vans into Dover, Folkestone or Harwich. They were losing too many and too much cash, and they were operating on foreign territory. It was Charlie's proposition. Ricky should get himself up alongside the Albanians and take over the cross-border, cross-Channel runs. He had access to the drivers and to the lorries they brought back from the long overland European hauls.

He would be paid up front by the Albanians for the transport, and take a cut from the brothel earnings where the new girls would work. The way Charlie told it, it was pretty straight, and Benji had suggested approaching Enver. He'd heard that Albanians stuck by their word, were professional, made good partners.

They'd done the meeting, had shaken hands on a deal, and then there had been food in the club. The girl had stood at the back and her eyes had never been off him.

Christ, he'd wanted her, like he'd never wanted anything. Bought her, hadn't he? Bought her for cash, peeled it out of his pocket, and told Enver that there'd be no more bloody customers for her, and he'd collect her when he'd got premises. In a careful life, it was the wildest thing that Ricky Capel had ever done – bought a tart out of a brothel off an Albanian.

The way she grunted on him, the whole of that building at Chelsea Harbour, through concrete floors and concrete walls, would have heard her. Bloody, bloody – God – marvellous, and he clung to her breasts.

In his third or fourth meeting with Enver, long after he'd taken delivery of her, Ricky had told him, sort of casual, that his grandfather had been in Albania in the war. What was his grandfather's name and where had his grandfather been? Percy Capel, up in the north and he'd struggled to pronounce the place name

– with a Major Anstruther. Next time they'd met, him and Enver, Ricky had been given an envelope. In it was what he'd paid for the girl. Enver had giggled and told him why the money had come back. Enver's uncle was in Hamburg, Germany. The uncle's father was Mehmet Rahman, who had fought with Major Hugo Anstruther and Flight Sergeant Percy Capel against the Fascists in the mountains north of Shkodra. Small world, small bloody world.

She was coming, crouched over him, bellowing, like he was the best shag she'd ever had.

He did not rate the risk she represented. The Albanians, from that distant link between a grandfather and the father of an uncle, were his partners – well, not real partners because he controlled it all. He called the tune, Ricky did. He was never backed into a corner. He bought off them and used Harry's trawler to bring in the packages. He used his network of knowledge for haulage companies to help them get the girls, from Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, into the country. He hired them – his cousin Benji called them 'the Merks', the mercenaries – for heavy punishment if a man showed him disrespect.

He had no cause to sweat on the arrangement: he had not lost control, never would – and the money rolled in for Charlie to wash, rinse, scrub clean.

She came, then him. Ricky sagged on the bed and she rolled off him. She peeled off the condom, and went to make him tea. Always tea, never alcohol.

He lay back and gasped. She was his best, his most precious secret.

Mikey Capel always watched little Wayne, Ricky's boy, play football for the under-nine team of the junior school, St Mary's.

He was on the touchline in the park area. There were no trees to break the force of the wind and he was huddled among the young mums and other grandparents. In a mid-week afternoon there were few fathers. He was at ease, liked the gossip among the men of his own age and a quiet flirt with the mothers. He enjoyed those afternoons. Little Wayne wasn't good, only useful, and he was hidden away by the teacher in charge on the left side of midfield where the kid's shortcomings in talent had least effect on the side's efforts; little Wayne was always picked by the teacher because his father, Ricky, had provided the team's shirts, knicks and socks, the same colours as Charlton Athletic, who used the Valley down the road. Maybe 'useful' was putting it strong, but it was fun for Mikey to watch him… He knew, that afternoon, where Ricky was and with whom, why he wasn't on the touchline.

Actually, the game against Brendon Road Junior was absorbing enough for him not to notice the powerfully built man, perhaps five years older than himself, with an erect bearing, sidle to his shoulder.

The noise around him had reached fever pitch. The ball was with a little black kid, might have been the smallest on the pitch but tricky like a bloody eel, and he was wriggling down his team's right touchline and the St Mary's left side and was coming right up against the faded white markings of the penalty box. The black kid had skill.

'Go on, Wayne, fix him!' Mikey yelled, through his cupped hands.

The little black kid, the ball seeming stuck to his toe, danced round little Wayne.

'Don't let him, Wayne! Block him!'

Oh, Jesus! The ball was gone, and the kid nearly gone, when little Wayne shoved out his right boot – most expensive that Adidas made for that age group

– hooked it round the kid's trailing leg and tripped him. Oh, Christ! The Brendon Road mums and grandfathers howled for blood – red-card blood – and the whistle shrieked. Oh, bloody hell. But the referee didn't send him off. He merely wagged his finger at the sour-faced child.

A rich Welsh accent rang in Mikey's ear: 'I suppose his dad's bought the referee. Chip off the old block that one, vicious little sod – proud of him, Mikey? I expect you are.'

He swung. Recognition came. 'It's Mr Marchant, isn't it?'

'And that's Ricky Capel's brat, right?'

'That is my grandson. I thought he tried to play the ball and – and was just a bit late in the tackle.'

'About half an hour bloody late. Like father, like son. I always reckon you can tell them, those that are going to be scum.'

'There's no call for that talk, Mr Marchant.' But there was no fight in Mikey's voice.

His mind clattered through the arithmetic of it.

Would have been nineteen years since he had last seen Gethin Marchant, detective sergeant, Flying Squad – a straight-up guy and civilized, never one to make a show. The Squad had come for Mikey, half six in the morning, and the afternoon before they'd done this factory pay-roll and all gone wrong because a delivery lorry had blocked in the get-away wheels and they'd done a run with nothing. Mr Marchant had led the arrest team, nothing fancy, and the door hadn't been sledgehammered off its hinges before Sharon had opened up. Even given him time to get out of his pyjamas and dressed. And allowed him to kiss Sharon in the hall so that the neighbours wouldn't have too much to tittle over, and Ricky had come out of his bedroom and down the stairs, like a bloody cyclone, and thrown himself at the arresting coppers. Barefoot but he'd kicked at shins and kneed balls, and then he'd jumped up more than his full height and head-butted a constable hard enough to split the man's lip, flailing with his fists. It had taken three of them, and his mum, to subdue the thirteen-year-old Ricky, and the girls at the top of the stairs had been weeping their bloody eyes o u t… Proper upsetting it had been.

'Where's Ricky now? Doing his scum bit?' The Welshness lilted, but there was contempt in the hard voice of the retired detective sergeant. 'God, I'd hate to think I'd fathered that sort of creature, and that there was another coming along, same vein. What encourages me, it'll all end in tears because it always does… Sorry, sorry. Nice to have met up with you again, Mikey – got to go.'

Mikey saw Gethin Marchant scurry, as best he could at his age, on to the pitch. The little black kid was down, in tears, and the foul had ended his afternoon's football. When the game restarted, while the detective sergeant held the little bundle of the boy on his shoulder on the far touchline, the Brendon Road kids scored, and then the referee blew his whistle for full time.

Little Wayne came to him. 'We was bloody robbed.

We-'

'You were shit,' Mikey, the grandfather, snapped back. 'Next time your father can watch you. It won't be me.'

No, Ricky wouldn't be there to watch little Wayne, because Ricky was screwing on those afternoons when St Mary's had matches. He had a good mate, been inside with him and shared a cell with him, who now drove a mini-cab for a company at the bottom end of the King's Road. They drank together some Tuesday nights. The mini-cab driver had been waiting for a fare at Chelsea Harbour when he'd seen Ricky with his bottle-blonde tart, her big boobs and long legs. Mikey had never cheated on Sharon. He remembered, looking down at little Wayne, what the retired detective had said.

He grabbed the sulking child's hand. 'Come on, let's go home.'

What had been said, which he believed: It'll all end in tears because it always does. He strode away across the grass and the mud, dragging the kid behind him.

'What's the priority?'

The question came from a line manager, who lived his working life in a complex surrounded by thousands of yards of fencing and razor wire, protected by armed guards, built on moorland in north Yorkshire, west of Scarborough on the coast and north of Malton. At Menwith Hill – officially an outpost of the British listening spies at Cheltenham – the National Security Agency, headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland, called an American tune. The majority of the budget for the intercept databases on this wind-scarred, remote ground of bracken and heather, was in dollars.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

At Menwith Hill, great white golfball shapes rise above the moorland, sometimes glittering in sunshine and sometimes misted by low cloud. The balls protect the scanning dishes that suck in millions of phone communications every day. Then computers, operating at speeds of nano-seconds, interpret what has been swallowed into the stomach of the beast.

Hundreds of NSA personnel have made this corner of the United Kingdom into a little piece of the Midwest of America. American needs, in the War on Terror, dictate how the computer time is allocated. British technicians must accept the reality, however unwelcome, of being the subordinate partner.

So, the line manager demanded clarification of the priority level of the request from London. 'I'm sure you'll appreciate, Mr Gaunt, that matters related to Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen and the Saudi Kingdom take most of our time – and that's all linked, as you know well, to US requirements. Prague isn't high, no. If you were to tell me that by monitoring all satphone and mobile links out of Prague to wherever in Europe, I would be meeting a category-four priority level – you know, life and death, Mr Gaunt – then I might be able to play with a bit of machine-switching, might… and I'd have to know, Mr Gaunt, in what language we'd be most likely dealing, and what the trigger words are. I think that if I had your assurance, and I'd need a back-up signal of authorization that this was category-four minimum, then I might, might, be able to help. Are you there, Mr Gaunt?… Albanian language, that's not easy. Oh, might be Arabic, or a Chechen dialect, oh… No trigger words?… All I can say, Mr Gaunt, is that I'll do my best – say three or four days. Yes, Mr Gaunt, and we're pushed at this end too… '

The screen gave Polly a black-and-white image of the interior of the cell.

Ludvik, at her shoulder, asked her remotely, 'Do you not approve?'

'Not for me to have an opinion,' she murmured. 'I just have to hope that what you're doing is effective.

Whether I like it or not is irrelevant.'

Yes, old matters of ethics and morality took a back seat in the new war. She saw a bucket lifted and the water from it was thrown so that it splashed on to the face and head of the man she knew to be a cafe owner from the east of the Old City, out by the Florenc bus station. The water ran down his cheeks and chest, and blood sluiced off the injuries inflicted on him. She thought, momentarily, that this was a return to days long gone when Stalin's purges had filled these same basement cells, and before that as Gestapo interrogators had gone to work to extract the names of the assassins of Reichs-Protector Heydrich.

'It is necessary.'

'You did not hear me say it was not,' Polly said softly.

The cells, dark little cubicles with high, barred windows of dirty glass that looked out at boot level on to the interior square of the police barracks, were where Communist and Nazi torturers had been. They could similarly have justified the pain and brutality of what they did. Now it was the turn of the democrats to use that cell and to beat, slap and kick, deprive a man of sleep, make him scream in agony, and to hide behind the wall of 'It is necessary'. As the water dripped to the floor, the man's head lifted and his bruised face focused again on the ceiling, the work resumed. Short-arm, closed-fist punches to the face, booted kicks to the kidneys and when the cafe owner's head dropped again, his grey hair was caught and held up so that the target remained accessible. There was no high horse on which Polly Wilkins could have sat and played indifference. Over the last two years men and women from the Service had trooped in and out of interrogation rooms at Bagram in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and at holding camps in Iraq – her people, her colleagues. No bleat from the Service then about ethics and morality. Of course, her hands and their hands stayed clean because they let surrogates do it and could then claim ignorance. And others were shipped, in the name of the War on Terror, to cell blocks in Damascus or Cairo, and transcripts were sent back – with no bloodstains on them – that drove forward investigations.

'What has he said so far?'

'Nothing of importance.'

'Perhaps that's because you have hit his face so often that he cannot talk any more/ she said drily. 'Do you think he might talk better if you hit his face less often?'

'Do you want information or do you want your conscience to be comfortable?'

'Oh, for fuck's sake… ' She turned away from the screen. If her mother and father – both teachers in an insignificant country town in Wiltshire, both thrilled that their daughter worked for the Defence of the Realm – had known what their daughter watched on a TV screen they might have vomited. But, far from home, it was the reality of what she did. She looked back at the screen, then blinked and peered harder at it. If they had not held the cafe owner's grey hair, his head would have fallen on to his soaked chest, but they did, and his hands rose briefly and feebly to protect his face – fingers over his eyes and mouth – before they were ripped away and another punch landed.

'Can you zoom in?'

'No, it is a fixed lens.'

'I want to go in there.'

'Because we do not understand the skill of interrogation? Do we need another lesson from SIS?' The sarcasm hit her. 'Why?'

'Just put me in there, dear friend, because, by your own admission, you have learned nothing. Good enough?'

She was taken down a flight of stone-flagged steps and along a corridor where men lounged on hard chairs, read newspapers without interest, smoked and stripped her with their eyes. Down more stairs and into the basement. She walked boldly and with purpose, wanted only confirmation of what she had seen, in black and white, on the screen. The door was opened for her. Bright light speared from a lamp into the cafe owner's face. The men turned from their work and stared at her. The head was permitted to fall.

She went close to the chair on which he was propped, then knelt in front of him. Her body masked what she did. She took the cafe owner's hands. The man's fingers clawed at hers, as if he believed she was his salvation, his release. She was not there for kindness. She examined the hands quickly, then let them drop on to his lap, which was wet with water and urine. She stood, turned her back on him, and walked out of the cell into the corridor.

'What was that for?'

No reply from Polly Wilkins as she swept by

Ludvik. She went out into the inner square of the building where Communists and Fascists had been, and felt herself dirtied. She thought of the shower she would take, endless and soapy – and drove away.

Of the many companies owned by Timo Rahman, all doing legitimate business, one shipped furniture to Hamburg from a factory at Ostrava in the extreme east of the Czech Republic. The tables and chairs, side-boards, chests and wardrobes would be inexpensive in Germany and Timo had identified a good market for those made from beech wood. The company's offices, warehouse and showroom were in the

Hammerbrook district.

The message was brought from Hammerbrook by a young Albanian boy – a good, clean, intelligent worker – who was the son of a second cousin of Timo.

Because the boy was gjak, a blood relation, he had been entrusted with the message by the company's manager who was from the miqs, a relative by marriage. Nothing had been written down, and the message was in the boy's memory – the telex from the factory at Ostrava was now in slivers, having passed through the company's shredder.

That evening Timo was the guest at a restaurant of a Rathaus functionary who dealt with the provision of care homes for the elderly – an area he had decided was promising for expansion. The city's government, near bankrupt and bumping along on empty, needed private capital for investment in the homes to fulfil an election promise. Late in the meal, the Bear came to Timo's shoulder and whispered in his ear. Apologies were made. Timo slipped from the table, out of the restaurant and on to the pavement where the boy waited.

Timo saw the boy's nervousness and confusion. He had heard of him but had never met him – his job in the office was a reward for the cousin's loyalty. He smiled with warmth and hugged the boy to reassure him. Then the message was stammered out against the noise of passing traffic and the music that spilled from a discotheque.

'This is what I am to say, from the shipping section of Home Furnishing. "Regret cargo load 1824 has not been forwarded. Our local agent is indisposed. Also half of the cargo is damaged and cannot be sent, and the remainder, which comprises the more valued items, is missing. We await further information." That is all. The telex was signed by the director at Ostrava.

I apologize for disturbing you on such a minor matter, but that is what I was instructed to do.'

If he felt a frisson of anxiety, Timo gave no sign of it.

He asked quietly, 'Would you repeat the message?'

He was told it again.

The boy was hugged and sent away into the night.

Timo murmured to the Bear that he would need ten minutes to extract himself from the functionary's table, then they would drive.

An hour later, he stood in a car park far out to the west of the city, beyond his home at Blankenese and stared down at the quiet dark flow of the Elbe's estuary. He watched a freighter coming downriver and pondered. Whenever a difficulty obstructed him Timo came to that viewpoint, near the village of Hetlingen, and the Bear stayed in the car. It was where he scratched his mind for solutions when problems reached crisis point. It was indeed a difficulty. The coded message gave him the extent of it. The local agent – the cafe owner – was a unit leader, a kryetar, of a clan, a fis, to which Timo was allied, and

'indisposed' was the cover word for 'arrested'. A half of the cargo was 'damaged' and could not be sent: the lesser man of the two was dead. The second half of the cargo, the part that contained the 'more valued items' was missing: the man he had been paid, handsomely, to move on from Hamburg was in flight. He did not know what evidence had been found, what the interrogation of the kryetar would throw up, what link could be made between himself and the fugitive.

He seemed to see, as he stood in the darkness and watched the river traffic, the walls and roof of the maximum-security wing at the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. The extent of the difficulty – he would never have acknowledged that crisis had hit him – was that, for once, Timo Rahman did not know how to protect himself.

More rain in the late afternoon came with the wind that battered the island. He would not intervene.

Oskar Netzer could see a frightening beauty in the shape and lines of the circling marsh harrier, the killer.

He knew all of the harriers on Baltrum. Of the three pairs who nested and bred there, two had gone south for winter migration and were not yet back, but one had stayed. He watched the male bird hunting; an hour ago he had seen the hen hover over a reed bed with lichen in her talons for nest-building. Against the darkened clouds, the harrier's upper body feathers and wings made an almost black silhouette. Earlier it had shouted its kee-yoo cry, but now it was silent, dangerous and beautiful.

In the lee of a dune of low scrub, sheltered by the base of the viewing platform of weathered timber, he watched the killer quarter the marshland and knew that when its patience was exhausted it would come over the sand, the bushes and the little stagnant lake.

Oskar could recognize the beauty of the harrier, which was the enemy of those he loved. Sitting there, with a little rain splattering his back, the swirl of the wind in his hair, and the cold on his face, he could recall the birds of beauty that had come high over him when he had been a child and terrified by the havoc they had brought. The Fortresses during the day, silver specks in front of their vapour trails, the Lancasters and Halifax bombers at night, sometimes caught in the cones of searchlights, had cruised elegantly over the city and had made the Feuersturm below them. They had taken the lives of his father and more than forty thousand other citizens of Hamburg. He knew about beauty and about death flying high for a target. He had no right to intervene in the ways of nature, but the pain was in him.

The harrier in front of him had a wingspan of a metre. He knew it would come to kill and feed. The wind strength changed. It swung and slackened.

The reeds beyond the little lake where the eiders gathered were no longer bent and flailing. So fast…

The fate of a duck, one among them, was sealed, but he would not intervene. Earlier the wind had blown the harrier away from the lake with its green weed covering. The bird, of course, could cope with wind speeds to storm level, but now it would be easier for it to circle, select and dive. It was a lottery as to which of the gentle eider ducks would be chosen. It had been the same lottery that had killed his father when the wall of a blazing building had collapsed and other men on the hose had survived.

He spat, but not noisily enough to disturb the quiet around the lessening whistle of the wind and the rain.

It was their island: it was home as much for the marsh harriers as for his eiders. As the bombs had, when he was a child, the bird plummeted. One moment, peace

– the next, the chaos of panic. He heard the kok-kok-kok shriek of a male eider, and half of its brilliant white winter plumage was buried under the killer's weight.

The struggle was brief. The harrier began to rip at the chest feathers, where white became black. They floated up in the lighter wind, and red flesh was exposed. Oskar was aware, then, as the harrier feasted, of little calls of excitement.

He looked up.

There were six of them, three couples. They were festooned with binoculars and cameras with jutting lenses, and wore heavy waterproof clothing. They seemed, to Oskar, to rejoice in the images their cameras trapped, and when they were satiated on photography they replaced cameras at their eyes with the binoculars and magnified their view of the slaughter. Then they were bored, and moved on.

The marsh harrier was a third of the weight of its kill. It could not lift the carcass of a male eider and fly with it to where the hen built the nest in the reeds. It would fill its crop, then fly to its partner and regurgitate her food.

The male eider, ravished, was left in the mud among a snowfield of feathers.

He pushed himself up. It was Oskar Netzer's habit to follow visitors who came into the territory of Baltrum's wildlife haven. He could stalk as well and as silently as the hunting harrier. He skirted the lake where, already, the surviving birds returned and clattered into the water. He took the path that the photographers had. He did not look ahead at their receding backs but kept his eyes on the ground beaten down by their walking boots. He followed to find fault – and purge his anger. Grim satisfaction settled at his mouth.

He bent and picked up the Cellophane wrapping of a boiled sweet that rested on the most recent indent in the mud of a walking boot, and a scrap of the shiny paper that had been around a chocolate bar, then three discarded matches. Further along the path, he retrieved the squashed filter tip. He quickened his stride. When he reached them, they were sitting on the crest of a dune and overlooked the sea channel between Baltrum and Langeoog islands. They had a Thermos open and drank coffee from plastic beakers.

When he came towards them, they looked away from the white crest waves and smiled a welcome at him through the rain.

He attacked. Oskar opened his palm and allowed to drop close to their feet what he had picked up. A sweet wrapper, a piece of chocolate paper, matches and a filter tip.

'You come here, where you are not wanted, and you desecrate the place. Go away and take your rubbish with you.'

They stared at him in growing amazement.

'Go home. Scatter your filth on your own ground.'

Their faces flushed. He thought, was pleased by it, that he had destroyed their pleasure in photographing and watching the marsh harrier rip apart the duck. He turned and strode away.

Behind him a chorus of voices erupted, which he ignored.

'What a fucking idiot… No, just some sad fool…

Must live here. The isolation's turned his mind

… Wrong. Not the isolation, has to be something more and something deeper… Probably his whole life is seeing what's different each morning. I doubt a flea moves here without him knowing, the fool.'

He heard the laughter but kept walking. He felt better for the spat. He believed it his self-appointed duty to keep the paradise of Baltrum pure. He went back to the lake where he could watch the eiders. The harrier, fed, would not kill again for three or four days but the carcass was there, to be seen and to hurt him.

From the shadows of the fenced hedge that surrounded the sheds where the Amersham's maintenance staff kept their tools, Malachy watched the ground-floor door of the pensioners' units. He learned the rhythms of the dealer's evening and night.

He was tucked away, hidden and hunched down, with his back pressed into the thickness of the hedge.

Old thoughts and old lessons stirred in him. At Chicksands, he had been a student in surveillance classes. The instructors, hardened and bland from time in the Province, had tried to drill into him and others from the corps what they had practised during months in south Armagh's hedgerows and west

Belfast's ghetto streets. Sheep, 'because they're so bloody curious', and dogs, 'always the worst because they have that damn gene of suspicion', were to be avoided. An itch could do for a man because it made movement, and movement in a lie-up sangar was dis-covery, or-a fly up the nose.

The classes had run for a month, two hours every Thursday afternoon for four weeks, and they'd seemed so inappropriate to Malachy as he prepared for his posting to the military attache's office at the embassy in Rome. He dug deep to remember more of what he had been told on those Thursdays when his mind was clouded with the statistics of the Italian armed forces and NATO strengths. 'If it's a one-man lie-up, and it has to be sometimes, you'll feel isolated.

Keep your head clear. Start feeling bloody sorry for yourself and you'll show out. Stay focused.

Everything you see in front of you is relevant,' the chief instructor had said, at the end of the last Thursday.

He'd been packing away his clipboard of notes When a young sergeant had raised her hand diffi-dently. 'Excuse me, I've just one question,' she'd said.

What do you do if a dog's right up against you, a mean dog?'

The chief instructor had grinned. 'I tell you there's not a dog I can't handle. Get through to them and they're all soft as brushes. Act like you've the right to be there – if you show fear the dog'll recognize it and you're screwed. You want to be on your hands and knees and offering love, tender loving care. Any dog'll fall for it. And don't ever forget that a dog that lives in a home is always put out at night for a sniff round and a crap. Last thing, the dog's going to be out and free to run. When I was based at Bessbrook Mill and we were doing a lie-up near a farm at Newtown Hamilton, there was this big hound, a massive bugger, and… ' Malachy had slipped away, had felt the need for more time on his Italian files.

There were no sheep on the Amersham, no flies in the darknes dog. s to get up his nostrils, but he had seen the It had come out with the woman an hour earlier.

She'd pushed the pram one-handed, and had hung on the short leash with the other. It had strained and pulled her and its head had been high as it sniffed the air. She'd been gone twenty minutes, in the direction of the kids' play area.

A television was on in the pensioner's unit living room and the brightness flicked at the curtains and lit the bars.

After she'd come back, the man – the target – had brought a plastic bag out through the door and dumped it in the wheelie on the pavement. He thought of all those who had made the demons. They cavorted in his mind: soldiers, officers, medics and Roz, the retired brigadier, who was his father, and the prim, tall woman, who was his mother. The little man who had owned the estate agents had called up the last of the demons… He wondered, crouched in the darkness, whether any of them considered what had happened to him – often, rarely or never – and whether he was a source of amusement or was forgotten.

With him, Malachy had the sticky-backed binding tape, rope, a length of cloth, the plastic toy and half a packet of digestive biscuits. A mini-bus came to the edge of the estate, the road beside the pensioners' block.

He watched. Three youths jumped down from the side door. He had seen them, each face lined with terror, as they had been hoisted up, then lowered jerkily over the rim of the flat roof. They would have blinked at the view, bird's eye, of the spinning pavement below. Freed on police bail, Malachy assumed.

There was division among them, sullen argument, as they stopped close to the ground-floor door – where they would have gone before. But this was another night, after unpredicted change. The door opened. The dealer's voice came sharp to Malachy: 'I heard your bloody voices. Don't come here no more.

Get the message – you're dead, history. Piss off.'

Malachy felt nothing, as if the demons had cauterized emotion, no sympathy for them and no anger. He saw them drift away and one gave a finger to the closing door. Youths joined them. They were jostled, pushed and one fell. Then they ran. He had no concern for their future.

He had gone feral, did not recognize it and none who had known him would have. He wore the vagrant's clothes, damp and stinking, and the lustre of the shoes was gone, with smeared mud from toe to heel.

It was past midnight. Malachy ached with stiffness as he huddled into the hedge's shadows. A chain was loosened, a bolt drawn, a lock turned. Light flooded the pavement. The dog, off the leash, bounded out, crossed the road and came to the grass in front of the hedge. He saw the man stand in the doorway and there was the flash of a cigarette lighter. The dog came to the hedge, cocked its leg. If you show fear, the dog'll recognize it and you're screwed. He saw the smoke, across the road, rise from the man's mouth. He cooed softly, so gently, and in his hand were biscuits. There was a moment when the hackles on its neck were up and the growl was deep in its throat – then the docked tail swung, wagged and against his hand was the warm wet slobber of the mouth. He gave it love, tender loving care. He stroked the jowl fur of the dog and murmured at its ear.

The snarled shout came across the road and the grass. 'Come on! Where are you? Just get on with it, you little fucker. Hurry up! Do I have to come and get you?'