The Walking Dead

Chapter 4

He used the Isosceles stance, and fired.

About all that David Banks knew of the ancient Greek language was 'Isosceles', and most of what he knew about geometry was of a triangle with two sides of equal length. He felt the jolt of the mechanism's recoil, and from the side of his eye saw the cartridge case discharged. His feet were apart and his toes level; his knees were slightly bent and his arms were punched out; his back was straight; the triangle was from his head to his fists holding the pistol and back to his belt. He realized immediately that his shot would be rated poor, as were most of those he had fired before — counted the trigger squeezes and knew his magazine was exhausted.

He shouted, 'Out.' He went down on to one knee, because the training dictated that a marksman should reduce the size of the target he offered when he was taken from the equation, and was slipping out the empty magazine and replacing it with a loaded one. Around him he heard a chorus of similar yells: 'Out.' Then the clicks, metal scraping on metal, as the others and he worked the safety catches forward. He stood and was breathing hard; he shouldn't have been.

He was apart from the rest, as if outside a tribal fence, not invited in and not making the effort to approach them. Maybe the instructors who oversaw them, or the invigilators who checked the target sheets and awarded the marks for 'pass' or 'fail', had been told that he was beyond the pale as far as the rest of the Delta team were concerned, or maybe they hadn't noticed.

An instructor came to him, not to the others. They were rated as 'pass', but if an instructor came straight up to a marksman it indicated 'fail'. Must have been three years since he had last been confronted by an instructor, wearing an expression of puzzlement and disappointment, to be told that his score was below the forty-two points out of fifty that were required.

'You been out on the piss last night, Banksy? Trouble is, you're giving me a problem.' The voice was quietly confidential, but the others would have known. 'My problem is that I cannot fudge the score. You're not just one down, you're seven. I can't remember you having had difficulty before — well not in the last three years. You're on thirty-five. You'll have to repeat it after the Alley work — sorry and all that.'

He heard, and was meant to, a staged whisper from the knot of the tribe and thought it was Delta 7. 'Not on the piss, more likely worrying about the survival of a 'rather brave and principled man' and therefore screwing up.'

They unloaded their pistols, handed over the live magazines, pulled on waterproof trousers and oiled jackets, tugged their caps low on their foreheads and walked in the rain to what was called, at the range, Hogan's Alley. It was the time for simunition, plastic bullets fired from pistols with their tips holding fractional quantities of red and black paint. The bullets would spatter a marking of the hit point, but would not break a man's skin. New magazines and pairs of eye-protectors were handed out. The way the team formed up in a queue to go down the Alley, Banks was left at the end and would shoot last. In front of him he could see a tiny nick — sandwiched between a coat's collar and the side of a cap — on an earlobe…Too bloody obstinate to apologize, not that there was anything to apologize for. Shooting in the Alley did not count in the areas of 'pass' and 'fail', but doing badly would be noted by the instructors and go on his report.

The Alley was designed to beat the 'complacency syndrome'. It was an open-air corridor flanked by imitation house fronts built of plywood and paint-daubed, with doors and open windows. It was designed as nearly as possible to replicate the 'real thing'. Between the house fronts were beaten-up cars, most without tyres. The Alley was where a marksman, an Authorized Firearms Officer, tested his reactions; no one could order him when to fire — it was his decision and his responsibility if he fouled up and a mistake, in the 'big and nasty world out there', brought a charge of murder down on his shoulders. A senior instructor stood back and had a console in front of him under a clear plastic sheet that kept the rain off the switches; cables led from it across the grass and the mud to either side of the Alley. The way to avoid a mistake was not to fire, never to fire, unless his own life was threatened and not his Principal's, but the Alley showed up that lack of determination.

He waited his turn. Where he stood, at the tail of the queue, he could not see the shapes, human figures of cardboard, that would appear in windows, doorways and from behind the cars. Judges were walked up the Alley, and magistrates, and those sour-faced bastards from the Independent Police Complaints Commission who investigated every fatal shooting by a police officer. A few learned the difficulties of making the nano-second decision on whether to shoot or not, but most didn't…and that was why David Banks was there. His self-regard demanded it. It was what he did well, his purpose in life — until that morning when he'd shot like an idiot. Daft, but the ongoing shit with Mandy…their loathing of each other after the divorce was finalized, the word being passed to him that she was shagging a uniform sergeant from West End Central, the acrimony over the division of wedding presents and their old household's contents, his firm-held belief that the estate agent had colluded with her to mark down his split on the sale of the Wandsworth terraced house and her screaming denial. The shit with Mandy had never, in eight separate shooting assessments, caused him to fail.

Reading the diary had. Last night, lying on his unmade bed, with the plastic trays of the microwaved meal for one — vegetable curry, the only one left in the freezer, and pilau rice — on the carpet beside his pillow, he had been into combat on the fields of the Caso di Campo. He had heard machine-gun fire, artillery fire, tank fire and mortar fire, and he had learned that one-third — Cecil Darke's estimate — of the XIth International Brigade were dead or wounded when the dusk had mercifully covered the open ground. His great-uncle had come through the day, as had the friends who were his brothers. On the bed, Banks had lived it — the atrocity of the wounds, the agony of the deaths, the naked fear and the collapsed relief of those who were not hurt or dead on that foreign field. Bloody hell! What was a nicked earlobe when set against those casualties, dead and injured? The only soldiers he had met, men who were combat-trained, were those from Hereford — Special Forces guys — quiet as the grave, focused, trained and easy on their feet. But he did not know the man, without military experience, who had led him by the hand, through a notebook's pages, to the Caso di Campo and hell.

His turn, and the instructor waved him forward.

The Alley opened ahead of him.

No brothers beside him, no brigade around him, he started his walk and his hand was close to the pancake holster under his opened coat, and the rain slid down from the peak of his cap. OK, OK, a target was expected: he had the Glock out of the holster, and the sweat or the rain made his hand wet and his grip loose. His heart pounded. Anyone who'd said, 'Only an exercise, my old mucker, doesn't matter', was talking shit. He was a third of the way in and the silence surged. They would all be watching, their eyes needling into his back…Then–

A figure snapped upright in a doorway, and he swung, went Isosceles and had the safety off. His finger lay on the trigger stick, and he saw the shape of a woman, and against her chest, down his Glock's V sight and needle sight, was a life-size image of a held baby. He had not fired the paint bullet that would have 'killed' the baby and maybe the woman too.

There was stiffness in his legs and the pistol was a lead weight. He was on his own, isolated. The tribe was quiet behind him: a titter would have broken their prized code of 'professionalism', their totem god. The woman had been to his left — half-way down the Alley. To his right, a figure was thrown up in a window frame. A man: chest in the sights, finger on the trigger, starting to exert the pressure, then seeing, blurred, the man's empty hands with the palms exposed. He had not fired and the man lived. Went on, past more doors and more windows, more broken cars.

He was near the end of the Alley. Fatal, with only a few steps to the end, to relax. He summoned the dregs of his concentration. The car on the left. Two figure shapes jerking upright from either side, their bodies half hidden by the two doors. Saw, a flashed moment, that the shape — male — nearest him held a plastic supermarket shopping-bag. Saw, a lightning fast moment, the far man had a lifted and aimed handgun. Double tap. Two shots fired. A splurge of red paint on a lower chest, and second on the shoulder above the lung space and below the shoulder's bones. Two rivulets ran down the cardboard. He reached the end of the Alley.

When he looked back up it, only the instructors stood there.

He was told he had done well, that three of the others in the Delta team had killed innocents and that two more had fired on 'bad guys' but had missed their targets.

Banks went back to the range with the senior instructor. He learned that the rest of the Delta team had decamped to the canteen. He did not ask, so did not learn, whether they had watched him shoot — but he felt a small glow of satisfaction in the knowledge that three faced a possible murder charge, and two more were dead — and he knew, from that feeling deep inside his mind, that he would not, ever again, make the effort to be assimilated back into the tribe.

On the range, with the senior instructor watching over him, he made his authorization to continue carrying a weapon safe, secure. He scored forty-eight out of fifty and the senior instructor slapped his back cheerfully, then told him not to be a pillock again and waste everyone's time.

When he'd finished they weren't in the canteen. They were sitting in the minibus that would ferry them back to London. The engine kicked into life when he was barely inside, and there was no query as to how he'd done, passed or failed, but the message was there: that he was a pain for delaying them all.

He heard, said in the front, with a camp accent intended to mimic him, '…"perfectly possible that such men there" — Iraqi suicide-bombers, bloody foreigners—"are brave and principled, and though I don't agree…" What fucking crap.'

His eyes closed, Banks shut them out.

He came off the Eurostar, and was a 'clean skin'. Not that Ibrahim Hussein, the youngest and only surviving son of an electrical-goods dealer in the extreme south-west of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, knew that phrase. His knowledge of the covert world of his enemies was as limited as were the inches of rain falling in a twelvemonth on the great desert, the Rub' al Khali, the hostile expanses that he had traversed at the start of his journey and that he would not see again. The importance of keeping his identity as 'clean' as the scrubbed skin on his cheeks was beyond his experience.

What he had learned already was the extent of the tentacles of the organization he believed he now served, and would serve with his life.

He wore the same jeans and trainers as he had at the airport in Riyadh, but his T-shirt was different and showed a reproduction of Jan Asselyn's The Threatened Swan on his chest. He had been told to leave his leather jacket loosely open when he went through the immigration checks at the London terminal. It had been explained to him that the T-shirt, and its motif, created an image of European intellect. He walked from the train towards the descending escalator stairs. His faith in the organization brimmed. There were no doubts.

On arrival at Schiphol in Amsterdam, he had been met and taken by train to a town thirty-five minutes away. He had been asked by his escort not to look at its name on, the station platform, and he had not. He did not register the name of the street to which he was driven. The whole of the previous day he had been alone in an upstairs room, with just two visits to the bathroom, and his food had been left on the rug outside the door. Late that evening a voice had called for him to leave his passport on the bed when he left. Early that morning he had been walked to the town's square where a taxi waited for him. He had sat in the back and the driver had not spoken to him. The only contact had been to point out an envelope of brown paper left on the seat he was to occupy. He had found a Canadian passport in the envelope, a rail ticket that listed a return journey in nine days, and a sheet of paper describing the life history of the young man named in the document. While they drove on the highway south he had memorized his new biography. The taxi had turned into the Belgian town of Lille and dropped him at the main railway station. There was no farewell from the driver, only fingers flicking persistently until he had lifted up the sketched-out biography and handed it forward. On the train, at departure, his passport had been examined by a policewoman and returned to him without comment.

He stepped on to the moving stabs.

It amazed him how many, already, had helped his journey, and the preparation that so far had been given to that journey. He did not know that, inside the organization, more care was given to the acquisition of reputable travel documentation than to the gaining of weapons, the forging of networks and the gathering of cash resources. He descended, and between the sheer sides of the escalator, there was no escape. Ibrahim Hussein had no wish to flee — but if he had there was no possibility of it. The escalator dragged him down towards the subterranean concourse. He saw policemen, huge, their bodyweight enhanced by armour, carrying automatic weapons, but if they saw him they did not notice him.

As he had been told to, he headed towards the sign and the cubicles for Commonwealth passports. A kaleidoscopq., of thoughts hit the young man, who was a second-year student at the university's school of medicine, and dazed him. He had entered, almost, the fortress of his enemy: had breached, almost, their walls with the same ease that he might have entered the Old Souk of Jizan or his father's shop behind the Corniche. He was surrounded by his enemy and their soldiers, but it was as if he was invisible to them. It was where he would strike against those who abused his Faith, and would avenge the martyrdoms of his brothers…A hand reached forward, a bored face gazed into his. 'Please, we don't have all day.. Your passport, sir.'

He offered it. The page of details was scanned into a machine, then the pages were flipped.

'The purpose of your visit, sir?' A tired question.

He said, as instructed, that it was tourism.

'Well, if the weather ever lifts, you'll enjoy your stay, sir. The place is empty so you won't have to queue for the Eye or the Tower. Don't let all the guns put you off. Actually, it's pretty safe here.'

His passport was given back to him. He found himself carried gently towards the last gates by the hurrying crowds from the train. A man, whose bag struck Ibrahim's heel, stopped to make profuse apologies, then dashed on. The last gates were open, and he took the final strides to enter the enemy's fortress.

'That's him.'

'I saw it.' A dry gravelled reply. 'The Threatened Swan has flown to us.'

'Not only flown, but landed.'

'What I say, this is a moment of danger.'

'There have been many moments of danger, but you are right to tell me of it and I recognize it.'

Below Muhammad Ajaq and the man standing beside him, the only one in the whole of his world to whom he entrusted his life, was the well of the Waterloo terminal where passengers came to board the Eurostar for a journey through the tunnel to Europe, or to leave it. They were at the top of wide steps, where their view would not be blocked. With Ajaq was the man he called, with honest respect, the Engineer. Because of the cold in the streets outside the station, and the rain glistening on the pavements, both could have their collars turned high, scarves at their throats and caps on their scalps. When they left the station they would expand their collapsed umbrellas. They knew of the cameras. Each would have been certain that his face was hidden from the lenses.

'It is good, The Threatened Swan, easy to see.'

'And good also because it has the look of a virgin's innocence, but it is defiant, which means it has determination.'

The Engineer chuckled, Ajaq took his arm and their laughter melded.

'I said to you that he walked well.'

'He has a good walk.'

'The rest were shit.'

'Shit and gone,' the Engineer said. 'Used and gone. But is it only a picture on a shirt of The Threatened Swan that has defiance? Is he determined enough? Is he strong?'

'I'll twist his arm out of its socket, or break it, to make him strong and able to walk…You've seen enough?'

'He has the shoulders and chest to take the vest…I have seen enough.'

Beneath them, the young man had dropped his bag on to the ground by his feet. He looked around him, waiting for the approach. Both Ajaq and the Engineer did the drills familiar to them. They watched for tails, for the surveillance people. To both men, the obvious and unspoken concern was that the youth who was a 'walking dead' had been identified, had been allowed to go on and enter a network. But they saw no tails from their vantage-point, no surveillance. It was this obsession with detail that had kept them alive and loose in the Triangle to the west of Baghdad.

'Have you seen yet the one who meets him?'

'No. He will be here, I am sure — but I cannot do everything.'

'Already, my friend, you have more burdens than one man should carry' the Engineer said sombrely.

They walked away, and the postcard from the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, of a painting created three and a half centuries before, of a swan with webbed claws apart, wings raised to fight and neck twisted in anger, was torn into many pieces and dropped on to a coffee shop table.

The morning was not yet finished, but the day had already been long; The meeting at the coast, the extraction of the packet from the boat's kitchen, the retrieval of monies, the settling of the matter of the boat's driver, more than five hundred kilometres of driving with the Engineer at the wheel and the return to the capital — he was drained. Ajaq needed to sleep before he met the young man. When he had slept he would have the charm and the mesmerizing gaze in his eyes that would calm the one who wished for martyrdom. And the Engineer, also, needed sleep because his fingers must be nimble and supple for the circuits and the wiring.

For part of Muhammad Ajaq there might have been, here, a sense of homecoming. Half of his heritage, his blood, was here. He hated that half…That blood had fashioned him, made him what he was.

They walked in the rain away from the station.

The body floated face down. It was wedged under the slats of the pontoon at the far extremity of the marina's spider legs. The pontoon rested on large plastic drums that gave it buoyancy and also prevented the body being carried by tide or current from under the pontoon. It was beside the berth of a luxury launch that, when the boating season for weekend sailors started, would be the same centre of envied attraction as it had been since the Joker of the Pack had first been moored at Kingswear. Unless a member of the marina's permanent staff or a yachtsman came along that far pontoon, then stopped and peered directly down through those slats, the body might remain undiscovered for several days. If Dennis Foulkes was not seen for a week or two that would not have been remarkable, and his absence from the Joker of the Pack would arouse no suspicion. The launch, tethered to the pontoon, was closed up and none of the portholes or bridge windows gave a view into the galley. An opened bottle of whisky lay on the tiled floor, which was stained below it. When the body was found and retrieved, and the hatches forced open, an impression would be left of a lonely man drinking to a state of intoxication, then coming on deck, losing his footing, slipping, falling — and drowning. A subsequent post-mortem would find whisky traces in his stomach tubes, and marina water in his lungs, no marks of violence on his skin. A forensic search of the launch would identify no other individuals as having been present in the galley on the night of Dennis Foulkes's death: they had worn disposable rubber gloves. The CCTV camera at the marina's gate would not show the arrival of individuals and their walk through the reception area: they had come by dinghy on a route beyond the reach of the lens. A sniffer dog, with an excellent nose, trained by the police or Customs, might have located the faint traces of explosives in a galley cupboard: the chance of such a dog being used, when the scenario of the cadaver's death was so obvious, were minimal. The killing had been done with care.

Its legs and arms splayed out, zebra stripes of light on its back, the body lay — unfound and unmourned — under the pontoon's slats, the last tied knot of a conspiracy's small loose end.

He saw him, could not miss him. The leather coat was open and the white of the swan was clear and prominent on his chest. Ramzi recognized the bird: they glided on the Derwent river, which split the city that was his home, and made nests on an island close to the bridge that linked the shopping centre to the main bypass round Derby and the county cricket field. It had been in the evening paper, last month, that white kids had thrown stones from the bridge's parapet at the swans' nests with the intention of breaking the eggs, and his mother had said it was disgraceful behaviour. Ramzi crossed the concourse, remembered what he had been told to say and came close to the young man from behind his shoulder. Ramzi said, 'Is that the work of the painter Asselyn?'

There was a short gasp, a fraction of hesitation, the turn of a brain's flywheel, then the smile. 'It is the work of Jan Asselyn…Yes, Jan Asselyn.'

He saw relief split across the young man's face. He had been told that he should use no names and that conversation should be limited to the briefest exchange. But the relief at the approach, the successful exchange of the coded greeting and the response killed his intentions. 'I am Ramzi, and I am sorry to have been late. Please, when we meet with others do not say that I was late.'

'My name is Ibrahim. I won't speak of it.'

Ramzi hugged him. Ramzi was heavy to the point of obesity but he used weights and reckoned his bulk gave him authority. He had been recruited twenty-one months before at a cultural centre in the Normanton district of the city after announcing his determination to be a part of the armed struggle against the oppression of Muslims — in Britain, Checbnya, Kashmir, Iraq, anywhere. He had been told then that his value to the armed struggle dictated he went home, never returned to the cultural centre, and 'slept' till he was woken. He had not believed that the terms of his recruitment represented inadequacy, but held the opinion that his talents would be employed in a strike of major proportions. Roused from sleep a week earlier, he had assumed the role of 'muscle' in the cell that was coming together. Once, before the call, and long ago, Ramzi had boasted that his destiny was martyrdom. In his bear grip, he felt the frailty of the young man, Ibrahim, the prominent bones of his shoulders and the slightness of his arms. For a moment he thought of their destruction.

Ramzi towered over him. 'We should go. We are going to walk. It is quite a long way but there are cameras on the buses and trains. We will seem to part now — cameras are watching us. I will be ahead of you and you will follow…'

'Why do the cameras matter?' The question was asked with simplicity, in good but accented English, and seemed to demand honesty.

Ramzi had been told by the woman — who knew everything, who had arrogance — that the cell had been woken and afterwards would return to a second long sleep. The cameras were important because after the strike the cell would disband and wait for a call to reactivate them, their identities safeguarded.

Ramzi said limply, 'It's what I was told.'

Ramzi hugged him again, tighter, heard the breath hiss from the young man's mouth. He broke away and strode off up the stairs to the station's main concourse. At the top — and he should not have — he turned and looked down. He saw the confusion and, almost, pleading in the young man's face, as if he had expected bonding within a brotherhood but was abandoned; he saw the swan on the young man's chest, between the flaps of his leather jacket — was that jacket big enough to hide a belt or a vest? It was a good jacket — and he thought of the birds that had been stoned on their nests in the Derwent river. He lengthened his step.

In that step there was lightness. He could boast of his determination to be a martyr for God, and know he was not chosen. He was in the rain, leaving the station, and his follower would be tracking behind him.

'It is what I saw.'

'But what you say you saw is impossible.'

'I saw it, I promise that to you.'

'A person cannot be in two places at the same time,' Omar Hussein said, and chuckled. 'You are wrong. He is in Sana'a.'

'I saw your son, my nephew, at the King Khalid airport in Riyadh. Omar, I have known him all of his life.'

'Did you see his face?'

'I saw his back, but I have seen him walk — from the front and the side and the back — all of his life and mine.'

'Our country has a population in excess of eight millions. Do you not consider, my brother, that one other boy can walk like Ibrahim, if seen only from the back? He is in Sana'a to see cousins, from his mother's family, and in a week he returns to go back to the School of Medicine. Is that not good enough for you?'

'I saw him. The flight was called and he went to the gate. Only one flight was boarding. The flight was the Dutch airline, and was for Amsterdam. I do not lie, brother, and I know my nephew's walk.'

'It is impossible.'

'It is what I saw.'

Doubt crept now into the mind of Omar Hussein. Eleven days before he had been told by his son, Ibrahim, of a journey to Sana'a, the principal city of Yemen, to visit cousins from the family of Omar's beloved and missed wife. Now, his brother who had a sharp mind that was not dulled with age, as his own was, declared with certainty that the boy had lied to his father and sisters and had travelled to Riyadh, then caught an aeroplane to Europe.

'I shall telephone him,' Omar Hussein said, attempting a decisive response.

In the living room of that prosperous home were the fruits of his labours: a wide-screen television with cinema-standard speakers, video and D\TD attachments, electric fans that purred softly to shift the day's heat, and a state-of-the-art cordless phone. He picked it up from its cradle, punched into its gargantuan memory, waited and listened, then asked. An answer, in Sana'a, was given him. His lips pursed. 'They have not seen him. They have not been told to expect him.'

'I can only tell you what I saw, brother.'

Again, Omar Hussein delved into the memory of his telephone, and rang his son's personal mobile. He was told that its owner was unavailable and was requested to leave a recorded message. The days of the last week had flown past with stock checks at the shop and with representatives calling on him to sell new models. A father realized now how long it had been since he had spoken to a son, and how there had been no phone calls. He led his brother up the wide stairs of the villa.

He found the door to his son's bedroom locked, put his shoulder to it and could not break it open. He felt tears of frustration welling. But his brother was stronger, fitter, and crashed his weight into the door. It swung open, and his brother half fell through it. Omar came past him, steadied him, and looked round the room.

It was so tidy. The room was that of a twenty-one-year-old boy and normally shoes, clothes, books for studying and magazines littered the floor. Everything had been left so neat. He saw the two photographs on the wall, the glass of the frames gleaming, of his elder sons, both dead. The loss of them was a misery of which he rarely spoke but always felt. There was a vase of flowers on a table under the photographs, but the water had been sucked out in the room's heat and the blooms had withered. His son's mobile phone was on the bedside table, switched off. Now Omar Hussein believed what his brother, who had the eyesight of a hunting Lariner falcon, had told him — and he understood. The weight of it crushed him.

'What should I do?'

'To protect him, and to safeguard your daughters and yourself, there is only one choice open to you.'

'1b,11 me.'

'It is just possible that he can be intercepted and stopped…I think more of you and of your daughters. Times, Omar, have changed. They are no longer martyrs, they are terrorists. When his name is released and when the television shows what he has done, you will be hounded by the police, by every agency. You will be seen — . because you reported nothing and because you are from Asir Province, which they say is a 'hotbed' of terrorism — as an accomplice to an atrocity. The families of those who flew into the Towers, and most of them were from Asir, are now disgraced, ruined. You may endure it, you probably can, but do you wish that on your daughters? I think you know what you should do.'

Omar Hussein, his head hung, said, 'If I did nothing my wife, if she were able, would curse me.'

An hour after his brother had left the villa, and in response to Omar Hussein's telephone call to the Ministry of the Interior police, whose compound was around the walls of the Ottoman fort in Jizan, an unmarked Chevrolet car drove up to his front door.

Two men of the mabaheth sipped coffee with a frightened father and took notes of what he said concerning a missing son who was far away and lost.

'A nice little runner, Miss.'

She walked a fourth or fifth time round the Ford Fiesta. She had left the yard at its wheel and they had done a short circuit round the side-roads off the main route to the motorway, and Avril Harris had not found fault. It was her finances that caused her to hesitate at this last hurdle. She was twenty-five years old, a nurse in A and E at Luton's main hospital where she earned a pittance for the responsibilities heaped on her, and her last car — with a hundred and fifty-one thousand on the clock — had died on her. No young woman in her right mind would come off night duty and rely on finding a taxi or getting a late bus across the town. The town at night was a battlefield of violence, and she did not need the local paper to tell her so: in A and E, on night duty, she fielded the victims. She had seen, from different dealers, four other cars but this Fiesta — seventy thousand miles done — priced at nine hundred pounds seemed the best value. It shone, the seats were clean, and she did not have her father there to check the tyres and pose better questions. She asked for a discount and saw the pain on the dealer's face as he offered it for eight fifty, 'final price — a give-away'. She rooted in her handbag for that amount in cash, and a half-full tank was thrown in. She signed the papers, got in and turned the ignition.

At the lights blocking the Dunstable Road, at the hospital turn-off, she had to pull up, and her new joy echoed with the report of the Fiesta's backfire. For a moment she was dazed by the intensity of the noise. Then there was an impatient hoot behind her because the lights had changed, and Avril Harris drove on, swung to the right and headed for A and E's staff parking area.

The team was in place and it waited, like a hunting pack for prey at a waterhole, for the business of court eighteen to be finished for the day.

With the collusion of Nathaniel Wilson, criminal solicitor, who had slipped away in the lunch adjournment with a description of the clothing worn by a single juror — as requested before the day's proceedings were under way — the prey was identified.

Three men on foot and the drivers of two mass-produced, unremarkable cars made up the strength of the team. The target was described as bearded, a little over average height, with longish, brown hair, grey flashes at the temples, wearing a green anorak, designer jeans that were probably imitation, bought off a market stall, and heavyweight leather sandals; he would have a navy blue rucksack carried on one shoulder. A piece of cake, couldn't be missed.

The Nobbler himself, Benny Edwards, was not with them. He would come on to the scene when a dossier of the target's identity had been fashioned, not before. He could rely on these men to fulfil the preparatory work because they were the best in this field. The services they provided, through Benny Edwards, were much sought after. He only employed the best, and his own reputation was supreme over his rivals'. The five men, whether on foot or at a car's wheel, had skills in the arts of surveillance that kept them on a par with any unit that might have been put on to the roads or pavements by the Serious Crime Directorate of the Metropolitan Police; those skills had been refreshed by the recruitment the previous year — a source of considerable pride to the Nobbler — of a detective sergeant from the SCD who had suffered problems with his claims, written down and signed for, on overtime sheets. The prime difference between Benny Edwards's men and the Directorate's was in communications. He used pay-as-you-go mobile phones that were ditched and changed usually after two days' use, three maximum, and they used complex networks of digitally enhanced radios that could not be broken into, but the difference in effectiveness was minimal. Where they were equals — the Nobbler's people and the Directorate's — was in street craft. His men could follow and track; they could put a target in a 'box', a 'trigger man' having initially identified him or her, and not be 'burned'. Never, not once, had men paid by Benny Edwards been spotted while walking or driving as a tail.

When court eighteen finished for the day, when Mr Justice Herbert's clerk had yelled, 'All rise', and the jurors were led back to their room to shrug on their coats, the solicitor would hurry into the Snaresbrook corridor and dial a number, let it ring four times, then cut the connection, unanswered.

The team, activated, would follow wherever the target led them.

'So, Mr Curtis, you would have the jury believe that you are the unhappy victim of what would be, in effect, a conspiracy of lies by the prosecution's witnesses. The conspiracy, which you claim has put you before the court, involves sworn — and therefore perjured — evidence from a young woman who is sure she saw you, evidence from the owner and staff working in the jewellery shop, evidence from reputable police officers of which several have commendations on their records for outstanding conduct…and they all lied. I am being blunt, Mr Curtis. That seems to be the defence you are offering to these very grave charges. I see you shrug. I take that as the answer you are providing. They are all lying. You alone are giving the members of the jury the truthful version of events. No more questions.'

Jools saw the theatrical roll of the barrister's shaggy eyebrows, as if the whole thing was a game. But not a bloody game to anyone who had been in that shop and who had faced the open barrel of a pistol and a revolver: Jools didn't think it was a bloody game. His eyes followed Ozzie Curtis's back as the horrible bloody man was taken from the witness stand to the dock — could look at him then because the damned intimidating eyes gazed the other way.

He heard the judge: 'We've had a long and concentrated session, and I don't think we should start with the evidence of Mr Ollie Curtis before the morning. Ten thirty tomorrow.'

The clerk sucked in breath to make herself better heard: 'All rise.' Another day gone.

Actually, quite a good day — one of the best.

A day of good entertainment…not in court but at the lunch break.

A wholesome spat, if he did not feature in it, always entertained Tools Wright. The argument, materializing from nowhere, had been worthy of one of those bickering catfights in the staff common room. The dispute had featured Rob, the foreman, and Peter, the moaner. The first complaint Peter had thrown at Rob had involved the quality of the rice pudding served to them: was it not Rob's function, as jury foreman, to lodge the matter with the catering manager? Rob had said, 'You want a damn nanny? Well, you can find one for yourself. My job, as leader of the jury, is with the case we're hearing, not wet-nursing you and your bloody dietary groans.' Seconds out. No holding. Blows above the belt, please. A good clean fight, gentlemen. The bailiff had rung the bell, end of the round, and called them back. But it had been good spectator sport, and the pleasure of it had lasted Jools Wright through the afternoon as Ozzie Curtis had wriggled and lied and pleaded loss of memory through the prosecution barrister's final and impeccably polite onslaught.

He loved a catfight, claws and teeth, when he was a spectator. Didn't love the ones at home.

Couldn't abide them when he was the receiver and Babs on the attack.

She didn't do teeth, claws and insults. She hit with endless silences, occasional tears, and her ability to move around in a room as if he did not exist and had no place in the house. Perhaps she knew, perhaps she didn't know, of Hannah and the weekends, but it was not spoken of. Nor had their financial state, getting worse, been recently discussed. Tears were in another room. Weeping usually followed his bald statement that he would be going to see 'Mum and Dad' for the weekend because 'they're not getting any younger and it's the right thing to spend what time I can with them before they're gone'. He had no intention of leaving home, couldn't bloody well afford it. He was, he didn't deny it to himself, a low-life, a deceiver, a man who did not deserve trust — and he lived for the days when he was gone early through the front door and on his way to court eighteen, and for the weekends when Hannah shagged him. Could have been worse…

From the locker allocated to him, he took his green anorak and zipped it over his shirt, then slid the navy rucksack on to his shoulder. Because he had enjoyed his day, Jools called cheerfully from the jury-room door, "Bye, everybody. Have a nice evening. See you all tomorrow.'

He noted it as one of those daft afternoons when the sun shone between darkened clouds. It lit the brightness of his shirt and highlighted the gaudiness of his socks, but he had to pull up the anorak's hood to protect his hair from the shower. The socks might get really wet if the rain came down any heavier. He lengthened his stride down the Snaresbrook driveway and hoped he wouldn't be kept waiting at the pedestrian lights across the main road. Then there'd be the charge in the open up the hill to the station.

He knew nothing of counter-surveillance procedures, nor had any reason to wish he had been taught them. He did not look behind him as he went for his train, and would not look beside him and along the platform when he waited for it.

Jools Wright was in ignorance of the world in which he moved, an innocent, and would have been bemused had he been told that the price of innocence could be costly.