The Watchman

"Help yourself to anything you want," the young man told Sophie and Alex.

"I'll find you some bags."

"What is all this stuff?" Alex asked.

"Mostly bits and pieces from shows and magazine fashion shoots," Sophie replied.

"A lot of it hasn't even been worn.

They eventually settled on a selection of items that Alex thought slightly over-fashionable and Sophie disappointedly described as 'somewhere between dreary and invisible'.

"In my world," Alex explained, 'the grey man is king. How much do we owe this guy?"

"Oh, give him a couple of hundred."

"Are you sure?"

"Don't worry. It'll get written off as damaged."

"You lot are worse than army quartermasters."

Sophie swung the keys of the Audi from a slender forefinger.

"My place?"

In the flat overlooking Sloane Street they heated up a Sainsbury's Prawn Vindaloo, drank Kronenbourg beer from bottles and watched Goodness Gracious Me.

For Alex, after weeks of rations consumed in exclusively male company, the evening was heaven.

When she saw that he had unwound a few notches, Sophie settled herself against him on the sofa.

"Is it good news that you're back?" she asked him tentatively.

"Does it mean that you've got some time off?"

"Yes and no," he said.

"I'm here to .. . chase something up.

"Anything you can tell me about?"

He shook his head.

"I'm sorry.

"Dangerous?"

He shrugged.

"Doubt it. I've got to find someone, that's all. Brain work, not bullets. So I'm going to be around, yeah, but I'm also going to be coming and going."

She nodded.

"Is it always going to be like this?" she asked.

"Me asking, you not telling?"

"For as long as I'm in, yes," he said.

"You mustn't take it personally."

"I don't take it personally," she said, with a flash of irritation, quickly suppressed.

"It's just that we've been together for a year now, on and off, and I'd like to feel that I had some.." access to your life."

"You have full access to my life," he told her gently.

"It's just my work that's off limits. And I promise you, you're not missing anything there."

"But your life is your work," she protested.

"I can see that in your face. All those missions in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, all those dead men.. . I can see them there behind your eyes.

He shrugged. It was not something he'd ever talked about in much detail. The demons, it was generally accepted, came with the job.

"I want all of you, Alex. Not just the burnt-out remains. He frowned at his Kronenbourg bottle. At the edge of his vision an RUF soldier crouched in blood sodden shock, his lower jaw shot away. Behind him staggered the blackened figure of Don Hammond.

There was a full company of such men quartered in Alex's head now.

Blinking them away, locking on to Sophie's grey green eyes, he smiled.

"I'm all here. And I'm all yours.

EIGHT.

Alex presented himself at the front desk of Thames House at a couple of minutes to nine. Dawn Harding was waiting for him there, briefcase in hand, and signed him in.

"We're wearing Italian today, are we?"

she said, noting his Gucci loafers and running an appraising glance up and down his grey Cerrutti suit.

"I thought you Hereford boys were more comfortable in Mr. Byrite."

"I know the importance you civil service types attach to appearances," Alex said equably, fixing his visitor's badge to his lapel.

"You wouldn't want me to let the side down, now would you?"

He followed her into the lift, where she pressed the button for the fourth floor.

"And you found somewhere to stay all right?"

"I managed to get my head down."

"I'm sure you did." She stared without expression at the brushed-aluminium wall of the lift. As previously, she was dressed entirely in black and wearing no make-up, perfume or jewellery. Her only accessories were the briefcase large, black and plain and a military issue pilot's chronograph watch. This spareness did not, however, disguise her femininity. In some cuno us way, Alex mused, allowing his gaze to linger around the nape of her neck, it highlighted it.

Or at least it made you wonder.

The lift shuddered to a halt.

"A word of advice," she said flatly, checking her watch as she marched out into a grey-carpeted corridor flanked by offices.

"The correct form of address for the , ,

deputy director is ma am.

Alex smiled.

"So who are you, then? Matron?"

She gave him a withering glance.

"Dawn will be just fine."

The deputy director's office was at the far end of the corridor. Dawn left Alex in an ante-room containing a leather-covered sofa and a portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB, and disappeared through an unmarked door.

She reappeared five minutes later. Alex was still standing the leather sofa was so slippery he could hardly sit on it and she led him into an office which would have been sunlit had not the blinds been partially lowered. This, Alex guessed, was to prevent glare rendering the computer monitors illegible. There were three of these on a broad, purpose-built desk, along with a telefax console and a tray piled high with what looked like newspaper cuttings. Maps, books and a large flat-screen monitor covered most of the walls, but a painted portrait of Florence Nightingale and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson romping with a dog went some way towards softening the room's essentially utilitarian lines. At the near end half a dozen leather-and-steel chairs surrounded a low table bearing a tray with a steaming cafeti~re and four civil service-issue cups and saucers.

Behind the desk, silhouetted against the half-closed blinds, sat the deputy director and once again Alex was struck by her handsome, clear-cut features and elegant appearance. Today she was wearing a charcoal suit, which perfectly complemented her shrewd blue eyes and the expensively coiffed gunmetal of her hair.

To one side of her, both hands thrust deep into the pockets of a suit which had probably once fitted him better, stood George Widdowes. To Alex, the studied informality of the posture looked like an attempt to play down his subordinate status.

The deputy director rounded the desk and held out her hand.

"Since we're to be working together, Captain Temple," she told him with a practised smile, "I think we should at least know each other's real names. I'm Angela Fenwick, and my full title is Deputy Director of Operations. Dawn Harding and George Widdowes you know. Welcome to Thames House."

As they arranged themselves in chairs around the table, Angela Fenwick leant forward and pressed down the plunger of the cafetiere.

"Boom!" whispered George Widdowes. No one smiled.

Angela Fenwick turned to Alex.

"I'd like you to know that nothing that is said in this office is recorded, unless you ask for it to be, and nothing you say here is in any way on the record. Basically, you can express yourself freely and I hope you will. The corollary is that you are not to make any mention of what I am about to tell you to anyone, in or outside this agency and that includes your Regimental colleagues, past and present -without my express say so. Do you have any problem with that?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Good. Coffee, everybody? George, will you be mother?"

When Widdowes was done, Angela Fenwick leant back in her chair, cup in hand, and turned to Alex.

"Craig Gidley's murder," she said.

"Did that remind you of anything?"

Alex glanced at the others. They were looking at him expectantly.

"You can speak openly in front of George and Dawn."

Alex nodded.

"PIRA," he said.

"Belfast Brigade took out those two FRU guys by hammering nails into their heads. Early 1996, it must have been, just after the Canary Wharf bomb. Left the bodies at a road junction outside Dungannon."

"That's right," Fenwick agreed.

"Can you remember where you were at the time?"

Alex considered.

"In February 1996 I was in Bosnia," he said.

"I was part of the snatch team that grabbed Maksim Zukic and two of his colonels for the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. But we heard about the Canary Wharf bomb pretty much as it happened, and later about the FRU guys too."

"Ray Bledsoe," added Widdowes.

"And Connor Wheen."

"Yeah, that's it. Bledsoe and Wheen. We didn't see that much of the FRU when we were on tours in the province, but I probably met both of them at various times."

Angela Fenwick frowned.

"Am I right in thinking that you were number two on the sniper team when Neil Slater shot the Delaney boy at Forkhill?"

"Yes, that was a year later."

"The information about the weapons cache at the Delaney farm came from a tout originally cultivated by Ray Bledsoe."

"Is that so?" said Alex.

"We tend not be told stuff like that."

"Why didn't you tell me last night that you thought there was a PIRA connection to the murders?" asked Dawn Harding accusingly.

"You didn't ask me," Alex answered mildly.

"But I was pretty certain of it as soon as Mr. Widdowes here mentioned six-inch nails."

Angela Fenwick nodded.

"I just wanted to establish that you knew about the Bledsoe and Wheen incident.

And you're right, the roots of this thing do indeed lie in Northern Ireland. But they go back a little further than 1996. Back to Remembrance Day in 1987, in fact."

"Enniskillen," said Alex grimly.

"Precisely. Enniskillen. On the eighth of November in 1987 a bomb was detonated near the war memorial in that town, killing eleven people and injuring sixty three. A truly horrendous day's work by the volunteers."

Alex nodded. Widdowes and Dawn, sidelined, were staring patiently into space.

"The day after the explosion there was a crisis meeting attended by six people. Two of those the former director and deputy director of this service are now retired. Of the remainder one was myself, one was George, and the others were Craig Gidley and Barry Fenn. I was thirty-nine, a little younger than the others, and I had just been put in charge of the Northern Ireland desk.

"The purpose of the meeting was to discuss something that we were acutely aware of already: our desperate need to place a British agent inside the IRA executive. As you'll probably be aware, we had a pretty extensive intelligence programme running in the province at the time. We had informers, we had 14th Intelligence Company people, and we had touts.

What we didn't have, however, was anyone close to the decision-making process. We didn't have anyone sufficiently senior to tip us off if another Enniskillen was in the wind and there couldn't be -there absolutely couldn't be another Enniskillen.

"So basically we had two choices. To turn a senior player or to insert our own sleeper and wait for him to work his way up. The former was obviously the preferable choice in terms of time but in the long run it would have been much less reliable, as we could never be sure that we weren't being fed disinformation. We tried it, nevertheless. Got some of the FRU people to approach individual players that 14th Int had targeted and make substantial cash offers for basically harmless information. The hope was that we could hook them through sheer greed and then squeeze them once they were incriminated. Standard entrapment routine.

"But as we half expected, none of them went for it.

Even if they had any ideological doubts and in the wake of the slaughter at Enniskillen one or two of the players certainly did have ideological doubts they knew only too well what happened to touts. Apart from anything else, they knew they'd never be able to spend any money we gave them. So they told our people where to get off and in a couple of cases published their descriptions in the Republican newspaper An Phoblacht. Which, as you can imagine, made us look pretty damn stupid.

"So the decision was made to put in a sleeper. Not someone who, if he was lucky, might be allowed to hang around the fringes of the organisation and report back snippets of bar talk. Not a glorified tout, in other words, but a long-term mole who would rise through the ranks. Someone who had the credentials to rise to the top of this highly sophisticated terrorist organisation, but also the courage, the commitment and the sheer mental strength to remain our man throughout.

We would need someone exceptional, and identifying him would be a major project in itself.

"Operation Watchword, classified top secret, was planned and run by the four of us myself, George, Gidley and Fenn. It had a dedicated budget and a dedicated office, and no one else in the Service was given access of any kind. It was to be divided into three stages: selection, insertion and activation. Our man, once we found him, would be known as Watchman.

"Selection began in October 1987. The first thing we did was to make a computer search through MOD records. We were looking for unmarried Northern Irish-born Catholics aged twenty-eight or less and ideally those who had been the single children of parents who were now both dead. We looked at all the armed services. From the list that we got, including those with living parents and siblings, we eliminated all the officers, all those above the rank of corporal or its equivalent and all those with poor service records for drinking, fighting, in discipline and so on.

"We were left with a list of about twenty men, spread across the various services, and at that point we borrowed a warrant officer named Denzil Connolly from the RWW."

Alex nodded. He had never met Connolly but knew of him by reputation. A right hard bastard by all accounts.

"Connolly dropped in on the various commanding officers and adjutants. He didn't enquire directly about the individuals we were interested in, merely asked if he could make a brief presentation and put up a notice calling for volunteers for Special Duties, which pretty much everyone knew meant intelligence work in Northern Ireland. Afterwards, over a cup of tea or a beer, he'd ask the adjutant if there was anyone he thought might be suitable. Self-sufficiency, technical ability and a cool methodical temperament were what was needed. If the target name failed to crop up he'd bring out a list that included the man in question. He had been given a dozen possibles, he'd say. Could the CO grade them from A to D in terms of the qualities he'd mentioned?

"By Christmas we had the numbers down to ten, all of whom answered the selection criteria and had either been directly recommended or assessed as As or Bs.

The ten were then sent to Tregaron to join the current selection cadre for 14th Intelligence, bumping the course numbers for the year up to about seventy. You probably know more about the 14th mt course than I do, Captain Temple, but I believe it's fairly demanding."

"It's a tough course," said Alex.

"I think it prepares people pretty well for what they're going to encounter as undercover operators."

Angela Fenwick nodded.

"Well, of the ten we sent on the course, four were among those returned to their units as unsuitable by the staff instructors at the end of the first fortnight. The other six were pulled out of Tregaron by us at the same time, although they assumed that what followed was part of the normal selection course. They were housed in separate locations in the area where our Service's psychiatric people interviewed them over several days to assess their suitability."

"Why not let them just go through the normal 14th Int selection course?" asked Alex.

"Because there was a big difference in what we wanted out of them. Working undercover is lonely and solitary work but ultimately you're still part of a team. You're still a soldier on a tour of duty, and there are plenty of times in an undercover soldier's life when he can let his guard down, put aside his cover, socialise with his colleagues and be himself The man we were looking for, on the other hand, would have no such opportunity. Once inserted he would probably never speak to another soldier again. He'd be giving up everything and everyone he'd ever known. We needed to know that he was capable of that."

"And there were other factors," added George Widdowes.

"We didn't want our man known as one of those who successfully completed the course. As part of his cover story he needed to have failed. And to have failed early enough for it to be believable that he couldn't remember much about the other sixty-odd blokes on the course. We didn't want our operation to compromise the security of the ones who passed."

Alex nodded.

"Yes, I see what you mean.

"The other thing at that stage was that we had to separate our six men from each other in case they figured out what they had in common and put two and two together. It wasn't a huge risk,

but even at that stage we had to be one hundred per cent security conscious.

"Right."

"We interviewed the six," continued Angela Fenwick, 'and, as George explained, they assumed the process was part of the normal 14th Int selection.

Four of them we were happy with, the other two we sent back to Tregaron. The four we liked the look of were bussed one at a time to different points in an MOD training area in the North-West Highlands near Cape Wrath, given rudimentary survival and communications kit, and ordered to dig in. It was January by then and conditions were atrocious, with blizzards and deep snow.

"Over the next three weeks, although they were never more than a few kilometres from each other, none of the four men saw each other or another human being. They were given their instructions by radio or through message drops and ordered to carry out an endless series of near impossible tasks marching all night to food drops where there turned out not to be any food, processing unmanageable amounts of data, repairing unmendable equipment, that sort of thing and made to do it all on next to no sleep and in the worst possible physical conditions.

The idea, obviously, was to test their mental endurance, and although the four never saw them they were in fact being monitored throughout by a three man team from the SAS training wing at Hereford.

"At the end of the three weeks they were each put through an escape and evasion exercise. This culminated in their being captured, given a beating and driven to a camp near Altnaharra where they were subjected to forty-eight hours of hard tactical questioning by a team from the Joint Services Interrogation Wing.

"After this the four were assessed by the instructors.

One was in a very bad way by then and clearly unsuitable I think he ended up having a nervous breakdown and leaving the army. Two were reckoned to be tough enough but essentially more suited to teamwork than a solo placement and were taken back to Tregaron to continue the 14th Intelligence course.

The fourth one the one they recommended was a Royal Engineers corporal named Joseph Meehan.

"We had been hoping that Meehan would be the one they went for. He was young, only twenty-three at the time of the Watchman selection programme, and very much a loner. So much so, in fact, that his CO had been worried about his long-term suitability for regimental life. At the same time he was highly intelligent, highly motivated, and had an exceptional talent for electronics and demolitions. As it happened, he was also on the waiting list for SAS selection.

"For our purposes he seemed to be perfect. We needed someone young it was going to take years rather than months to get him to a position of authority within the IRA. And of course we needed a loner. As far as we were concerned he had everything.

"Anyway, Meehan it was. From Altnaharra he was helicoptered down to London and installed in one of our safe houses in Stockwell. At the point at which George and I first met him, in February 1988, he still thought he was on the 14th Int course. He thought everyone did a month's solitary in Scotland. Even said he'd enjoyed it.

"We told him the truth. Explained exactly what we wanted of him. Said that if he took the job his soldiering days were effectively over. That he'd never be able to see his army mates again. He told us what he'd told the psych team a month earlier, that he hated the IRA with every bone in his body and would do or say whatever was necessary to destroy them.

Knowing Joe Meehan's life story as we did, we were inclined to believe him. He was the only son of a Londonderry electrician who, when the boy was twelve, attracted the attention of the local IRA for accepting a contract to rewire a local army barracks.

Meehan senior was knee capped his business was burnt out and he was chased from the province, eventually resettling in Dorset. Joseph went with him, left school at sixteen, and apprenticed himself to his father, but by then the old man was in a pretty bad way. He was crippled, drinking heavily and going downhill fast. He died two years later."

"Was there a mother?" Alex asked.

"The mother stayed behind in Londonderry," said Widdowes.

"Disassociated herself from the father completely after the kneecapping. Asked Joseph to stay behind when the father left and when he wouldn't she shrugged and walked away. Ended up remarrying a PIRA enforcer who ran a Bogside pool hall

"Nice," said Alex.

"Very nice," agreed Widdowes.

"And that was the point when Joseph joined the British army. One way or another he was determined to avenge his father's treatment. His hatred of the IRA was absolutely pathological he described them to our people as vermin who should be eliminated without a moment's thought." Widdowes blinked and rubbed his eyes.

"And from our point of view this was good. Hatred is one of the great sustaining forces and Meehan's hatred, we hoped, would keep him going through the years ahead. When we told him the nitty-gritty of what we wanted, he didn't hesitate. Yes, he said. He'd do it. We had our Watchman."

NINE.

"Training Joseph Meehan took six months," said Angela Fenwick, staring out over the grey-brown expanse of the Thames.

"We would have liked to have given him more time, but we didn't have more time, so we packed everything into those six months. He lived in a series of safe houses, always alone, and the instructors came to him. Without exception these were the top people in their respective fields and permanently attached to Special Forces or Military Intelligence institutions on the mainland. For obvious security reasons no serving personnel were let anywhere near him. To start with we put him in one of the accommodation bunkers at Tregaron. Isolation conditions, of course, and we bugged the room and tapped the phone."

Alex knew Tregaron well. Two hundred acres of windswept Welsh valley, rusted gun emplacements and dilapidated bunkers, all of it behind razor wire.

He'd blown up a few old cars there as part of his demolitions training. Bloody miserable place to stay on your own, especially in winter.

"Who did you put in charge of him?" asked Alex.

"An RWW warrant officer, who provided us with progress reports and so on. We started off by getting a couple of the Hereford Training Wing NCOs to put him through their unarmed combat course, and sharpen up his advanced weapons and driving skills.

Apparently he managed to bring the unarmed combat instructor to his knees by the end of the third session.

"Impressive," confirmed Alex.

"I wouldn't fancy trying to deck one of those guys.

Fenwick nodded.

"At the same time we had an instructor from Tregaron taking him through his surveillance and anti-surveillance drills, and generally familia rising him with intelligence procedures drop offs dead-letter boxes and so on. After this we brought in a rapid succession of people to teach him individual skills like covert photography, lock picking bugging and counter-bugging, demolition and so forth. You probably know most of the specialists in question?"

"Stew for locks?" asked Alex.

"Bob the Bomber for dems?"

"Well, it's not exactly how they were introduced to me," said Angela Fenwick with a smile.

"But I think we're probably talking about the same people. We had a couple of our own Service people bring him up to speed on computers, too. The technology was obviously less advanced than it is now but it was clear even then that the intelligence war was going to be fought every bit as keenly in cyberspace as on the ground.

"Meehan learnt very fast indeed, especially the technical stuff. According to his service record he'd always been a natural with electronics and the SAS demolitions people described him as the best pupil they'd ever had. The usual routine was that he'd do the physical stuff in the mornings and the classroom stuff in the afternoon. The Tregaron people updated him on the geography of the province and told him the locations of all the drinking houses, social clubs, players' homes, safe houses et cetera, to the point where he could almost have got work as a minicab driver, and at least once a day they ran him through different aspects of his cover story. Like all the best cover stories, this had the advantage of being ninety five per cent true. Only nine months of it would have to be fictionalised. Nine months and a lifetime's beliefs."

Alex was impressed by Fenwick's grasp of the salient details of the operation. She certainly seemed more on top of things than most of the MI-5 agents he'd met in the field. He was also beginning to feel the beginnings of sympathy for Meehan. If the ex Royal Engineer was twenty-three in 1987, thought Alex, he's just a year older than me. We were probably learning much the same things at much the same time. The difference being that I was learning them in company with a bunch of mates and going out on the town on Friday nights and he was stuck in an isolated bunker in Tregaron with a tapped phone.

Poor bastard.

"Anyway," continued Fenwick, 'the instructors hammered away at him pretty much full-time, seven days a week. We had a couple oftheJSlW people come down and take him through his story until he was practically reciting it in his sleep. And, of course, we played the usual mind games, getting him to memonse complex documents, waking him up in the middle of the night to check minute aspects of his cover, that sort of thing. Every room in the house was plastered with pictures of IRA players, so even in his time off he was taking in information."

She paused. To either side of her George Widdowes and Dawn Harding sat in trance-like silence.

"After three months we moved him down to Stockwell for a couple of days so that the Watchman team could spend some time with him and from there it was on to Croydon for a couple of months of advanced field craft training with our service instructors. By that stage we were very much concentrating on demilitarising him, on knocking the professional soldier out of him. For that reason his time at Croydon was deliberately made as unstructured as possible. We fed him junk food, beer and roll-ups, slowed his metabolism down, sent him on the sort of exercise that involves spending the day in a pub. There's a test we set field agents that involves selecting a total stranger in a public place pub, launderette, that sort of place and seeing what information you can extract. There was a checklist we had name, address, phone number, car registration number, job description, place of birth, spouse's maiden name, credit card number... It's not an easy skill but Meehan got to be very good at it indeed and he always made the other people think that they were the ones doing the questioning. All in all, he was a natural. A fantastic find." She coughed and patted her throat.

"Sorry, as you can see I'm not used to doing so much talking."

Standing, she walked to a small table beside her desk and poured herself a glass of Evian water. George Widdowes half rose, as if about to pat her on the back, but caught Dawn Harding's eye and sat down again.

The room, Alex noticed, was becoming uncomfortably stuffy.

"After Croydon," Widdowes said, 'we put our man through his first real test. We sent him back to the Royal Engineers two weeks before the 14th Int selection course was completed the course, that is, that we'd pulled him out of several months earlier and told him to get himself kicked out of the regiment. Left it up to him how he managed it.

"What he did was to go around telling everyone he'd been kicked off the 14th Int course because he was Catholic and Irish-born. He made it look as if this had really dented him -he started drinking a lot, picking fights, getting his name on charge sheets and so on. He'd already visibly put on weight and was a long way from being the lean, mean fighting machine the Engineers had originally sent up to Tregaron.

There was an insubordination charge, a complaint of insulting behaviour by one of the civilian catering staff and some incident with a pub bouncer in Chatham all slippery-slope stuff. The end came when one of the warrant officers discovered some detonator cord in his locker in the course of a room search. He claimed that it was a mistake, that he'd signed it out for instruction purposes and forgotten to sign it back in again, but the CO wasn't having it and Meehan was out on his arse."

Alex whistled quietly and Widdowes shrugged.

"It was the only way. The whole thing had to be believable we couldn't risk asking the CO to fake up a dishonourable discharge. Enough people were in the know already.

"Immediately after his discharge Meehan moved back to London and got a bed in a working men's hostel in Kilburn. Within a couple of weeks he'd picked up work with an emergency plumbing and electrical repair outfit run by a local tough called Tony Riordan. He stuck with Riordan long enough to figure out all the scams and fiddles, and generally acclimatise himself in the role of jobbing electrician, and in the evenings, like any other twenty-three-year old he'd hit the bars. As we hoped would happen before too long in that area, he ran into a few exiles from Belfast and Derry, and picked their brains about job prospects over there. Wasn't a political guy, he said, just had family over there and wanted a change.

"He ended up being given a few names. Nobody who'd seen the quality of his work thought twice about recommending him. And finally, over the water he went.

"The first thing he did over there was to visit his relatives. There was his mother, of course, still living over the pool hall in Bogside, and there were the usual uncles and aunts and cousins scattered around the place. He looked them all up, said his hellos, paid his respects. He didn't advertise the fact that he'd been in the army, but he didn't try to hide it either. Just told anyone who asked that he'd got fed up and left.

"He saw his mother for the first time in more than ten years, but made no secret of how he felt about her walking out on the family. The boyfriend, by now a pissed old fart approaching sixty bit like me tried on a bit of Republican stuff, told him there were people he should meet and so on, but Meehan wasn't buying.

Didn't want to know, he said. Wasn't interested.

"By the autumn he was living in Belfast. A cousin who was a chartered surveyor highly respectable guy, married, kids, house in Dunmurry offered to take Meehan in until he'd found his feet. Meehan stayed there for eight weeks or so, sorted himself out a job with the service department of a store in the city centre, a sort of Tandy-type place called Ed's Electronics, and moved into a rented place a few streets away from his cousin. He also started seeing a girl, a hairdresser called Tina Milazzo. She was a careful choice Catholic, clearly, but not part of any obvious player set-up. Her family were immigrants and her parents ran a cafe in the Andersonstown Road. The Milazzo family were known to us because of Tina' sbrother Vince, who fancied himself as a hot-shot driver and all round dangerous dude, and liked to hang out where the players hung out. He would never have been allowed within a mile of any real action because he was a loudmouth, but he was tolerated.

"After that, it was basically a question of waiting.

We sent Barry Fenn out as his agent handler and Barry used that waiting period to run through the various communications procedures something we always try to do if we can, because it reassures the agent in the field that the systems work.

So we were pretty well informed about the assimilation process.

"Did Fenn handle anyone else?" Alex asked.

"No. He was Meehan's dedicated handler. We didn't tell Meehan that, though."

"Why not?"

"Well, I suppose because we didn't want to worry him by suggesting that PIRA might have sussed out the others. They hadn't, of course, but we didn't want him concerning himself for one moment with those kinds of issues. Anyway, once Meehan was in place we told him that henceforth the drops and meets would be initiated by him rather than by us, and that we'd be pulling Barry back or "Geoff' as Meehan knew him until he reported that a definite approach had been made. We knew this was likely to be months rather than weeks, because we'd agreed from the start that Meehan would adopt a strictly "not-interested" posture vis-~-vis any Republican stuff' "Wasn't there a danger that PIRA would take him at his word and leave him alone?"

"I think we pretty much made him irresistible. As well as working at the shop he let it be known that outside work hours he was happy to do repairs at home. Transmitter-receivers and computers that no one else could fix, that sort of thing. The more complex the problem, the better he liked it. It was only going to be a matter of time before the word got around that one of the guys at Ed's was a circuitry wizard and a few quiet checks started to be made. And of course we also had Vince Milazzo shooting his mouth off about his sister's new bloke who'd been in the army but had got pissed off and walked out."

"And they bit?"

"Eventually they bit. To our relief, as you can imagine. It had been more than eighteen months since Enniskillen by then, and in that eighteen months we'd had eight soldiers killed in Ballygawley, six at Lisburn and two in the Buncrana Road. More than thirty-five men had been seriously injured and that's just the army statistics. I can't honestly remember how many civilians and UDR members had been murdered in the period, but the pressure on this Service to get a man in place was unbelievable.

"The way it happened was that one evening in June 1989 a couple of fellows were waiting for Meehan when he finished work. Suggested he came for a quiet drink and drove him to MacNamara's, which is very much a volunteer hang-out. Asked him if he took on private work. He said he did, but nothing political, which they seemed to accept. One of them then took him out to the car park and showed him an army Clansman radio. Asked if he could fix it.

"Well, obviously he could have fixed it in his sleep, but he refused, said he wasn't touching it. When they asked him why, he told them that he recognised the radio as army issue and wanted no involvement with that sort of business. Then he thanked them politely for the drink and walked off. They didn't try to stop him.

"But of course they were back a few days later, and this time it was six of them and they didn't take him to a bar, but to the first floor of a house in the Ballymurphy area. They'd done some checking, they told him, and they had some questions that needed answering. They were still polite, but it was clear that if the answers weren't good enough he was in serious trouble.

"It was the moment he'd rehearsed a thousand times. Sure, he'd been in the British army, he told them, and he'd never tried to hide the fact. His family knew it, his girlfriend knew it and his employer knew it. He also told them what had happened to his father and how he had been chased from the country a decade earlier. With his father dead, he explained, he no longer had any family on the mainland, so he'd come home.

All he wanted now, to be honest, was to carry on with the work he was doing, bank a decent salary and be left alone to get on with his life.

"They heard him out. As a Royal Engineer, they said, he must have been involved in demolitions.

"Sure, he told them, and for the first time allowed a note of bitterness to creep in. He'd been a qualified demolitions instructor and at one time had considered a career in the quarrying industry after leaving the army. With his dishonourable discharge, however, all that had gone up in smoke.

"Tell us about the discharge, they said, so he did.

He'd been stitched up, he explained, and all for a couple of lengths of det cord. All the instructors kept bits and pieces in their lockers -signing the stuff in and out every day took bloody hours. It wasn't as if it had been drugs or live ammunition, they'd just had it in for him for being a Mick. But then that was the Brit Establishment for you heads they win, tails you lose.

But what the fuck, he still had the skills. No one could take the skills away.

"They listened and then drove him back to his flat.

Nothing much was said, but this time when they handed him the Clansman he took it. They gave him a number to ring when it was ready.

"After this encounter, which he described to Barry in detail from a public phone near his home, the communications from Meehan via Barry Fenn almost dried up. It became clear to him that he was being watched almost full-time. He was certainly being tested; a few days after mending and returning the Clansman a woman called round at his flat at seven in the morning with an Amstrad computer in a plastic bag. It had crashed, she told him, and she needed a data-recovery expert.

"He unpicked the mess, downloaded the data and discovered that it contained details of the security system of one of the city-centre banks. It was obviously a set-up: if the security was beefed up in any way they'd know he was a player for the other side. So we did nothing about it at all didn't even bother to tell the bank. And of course there was no raid.

"A couple of weeks later the first two men turned up at his flat on a Saturday morning. As far as we can work out he was taken on some kind of tour of the city. Various introductions were made and the day ended at a drinking club.

"Over the next few months a gradual process of indoctrination took place. The people that he met were low-level players for the most part, and I guess they flattered Meehan and showed him a pretty good time. A charm offensive, if you can imagine that. Our instructions to him, relayed via Barry, were to allow himself to be drawn out. We wanted him to give the impression of "coming to life", both socially and politically.

"Tina Milazzo certainly helped with this. Sources on the ground told us that she gave the impression of enjoying the nightlife and the conspiratorial atmosphere, and the company of the other girlfriends.

She probably sensed that the other men were respectful of Joe that they had plans for him and that this reflected well on her. Whatever, she fitted in. She helped the thing along.

"Over the months that followed we heard almost nothing from Meehan. We wanted him to dig in, to live and breathe Republicanism, and we told him that he should only contact Barry if he had anything really vital to report.

"Nothing vital came up. The killings of soldiers and others continued, but we considered it highly unlikely that Meehan was anywhere near the inner circles where such things were discussed and planned. It would be years, probably, before that would be the case. But he was on his way. Shortly before Christmas 1989 a seventeen-year-old named Derek Maughan was picked up by a team of volunteers after stealing a car and joyriding around the outskirts of the city. It was not the first time this had happened, it was decided to make an example of him, and he was driven out to waste ground and a nine-mil round was put through his kneecap. From the front, as he was just a lad, rather than from the back. Now as it happened, one of the volunteers on the snatch team was touting for the FRU and within a couple of days of the shooting we had the names of all those involved.

"The driver was one Joe Meehan. That year this agency was able to give the Cabinet Office a very special Christmas present. The assurance that a sleeper was in place in the Belfast Brigade. That, finally, MI-5 had a man in the IRA."

TEN.

There was a lengthy pause. Dawn Harding, as if to make a tacit point about self-control, sat motionless and without expression. George Widdowes stretched in his chair and recrossed his legs. Rising and marching briskly to her desk, Angela Fenwick lifted the telephone and ordered sandwiches for four. From a desk drawer she took a clear plastic folder. Inside was a sheaf of photographs, which she handed to Alex.

He examined them one by one. There was an early Meehan family shot taken in a kitchen: the father standing in his shirtsleeves, the blowsy bottle-blonde mother smoking by the stove and the pinched, worried-looking boy even then the image of his dad crouched over his homework. In the school photo, scrubbed and hair brushed young Joseph didn't look much happier, but he appeared to have cheered up a bit for the holiday snap in which, aged about eleven, he and his mother were sitting at a folding table by a river with a caravan in the background. Another shot, possibly taken on the same holiday, showed the boy triumphantly holding up a small trout. Almost a smile on his face.

And then there was Meehan aged about fifteen taking part in a cross-country race. The seriousness and the pinched look were back by then, and had been joined by something else a tenacious ness a hard intentness of purpose. The same expression was waiting behind the level gaze as the sixteen-year old apprentice stood with his visibly frail father in front of their van ("Lawrence Meehan, Electrical and General Repairs').

And finally as a squaddie. A formal sit-down shot of the battalion in shirtsleeve order. Meehan in civvies posing with two fellow privates in front of an armoured personnel carrier. Meehan in issue overalls doing something complicated at a workbench with a soldering iron.

Meehan and a couple of mates brewing up on exercise beneath a rock face

And that was it. A life in ten photographs. Not conventionally handsome, but intelligent-looking. Not naturally one of the lads, but the sort you could rely on to stand his round. Not a natural tough guy, perhaps, but a fast learner. And without question a bad enemy.

A real implacability behind the pale, narrow features and the rain-grey eyes.

"So this is him," said Alex eventually and, catching Dawn Harding's scornful expression, immediately regretted the statement's pointlessness.

"This is him," said Angela Fenwick.

"The Watchman. Our PIRA mole."

"I'm assuming the story you're telling me has an unhappy ending," said Alex.

"I want you to know everything," said Fenwick.

"I

want you to know exactly what sort of man we're dealing with. I want you to know everything we know."

Alex nodded. He was busting for a piss. He said so and Dawn Harding stood up. En route, she officiously hurried him past several open office doors. For fuck's sake, he thought.

"Aren't you coming in?" he asked her when they reached a sign marked Male Staff we.

"Just in case I catch sight of something I shouldn't."

"There won't be much to catch sight of," she said.

When they got back to the deputy director's office the sandwiches had arrived. In Alex's place two files had been placed on top of the Meehan photographs.

They contained ten-by-eight-inch colour photographs taken at the scenes of the murders of Barry Fenn and Craig Gidley, and the respective pathologists' reports.

"None of these to leave the building, please," said Fenwick.

"Dawn will show you a room where you can go through them when we've finished."

Opposite Alex, Widdowes was galloping through his sandwiches as if fearful that they were going to be taken away from him.

Alex picked up one of his own, and was about to bite into it when a thought struck him. He froze and Dawn Harding raised an eyebrow.

"I've just realised something," he said.

"Yesterday morning I left an RUF sentry who can't have been more than eleven tied to a tree. I meant to let him go when we pulled out."

"Sounds to me he's pretty lucky to be alive at all," said Angela Fenwick.

"I doubt he is still alive," said Alex.

"The survivors of the raid will be looking for scapegoats."

"Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," said Widdowes through a yellow-toothed mouthful of bacon, lettuce and tomato.

"Africa's a bloody basket case, anyway. It's not what the rest of the world does to them, it's what they do to themselves. God, the stories you hear."

"Sally Roberts is apparently telling anyone who'll listen that she was carried to safety in the strong arms of the SAS," said Fenwick.

"We told her we were Paras," said Alex.

"Where did she get the SAS stuff from?"

"She told the Telegraph's stringer that none of the men who rescued her had shaved or washed for several days and that they wouldn't talk to her in the helicopter. The Paras always chatted her up."

The ghost of a smile touched Alex's face but he said nothing.

"Right," said Widdowes, placing his sandwich plate on the carpet and wiping his mouth with a spotted handkerchief "Shall I take over?"

Fenwick nodded and glanced quickly at Dawn. Alex sensed a current of empathy between the two women from which George Widdowes was excluded.

To begin with, Widdowes explained, things had looked good. From Meehan's occasional brief reports to Barry, and from information provided by touts and informers, it was clear that he was serving out some kind of initiation period. He was regularly called out for driving jobs, moving other volunteers from area to area, and transporting punishment squads and their victims to locations where beatings and kneecappings were administered. The IRA liked its volunteers to have a clear understanding that severe penalties were handed out to those who disobeyed them.

Meehan was also used as a 'dicker', standing on street corners looking out for manifestations of security forces personnel. Only the more experienced dickers, Alex knew, were used for 'live' operations. If a hit was planned on a border post a series of walk pasts would be organised in the course of which the dickers would look out for any of the tell-tale signs additional sentries, increased patrols and de fences that the operation was known about. A tout might have talked, anything might have happened, but the net result of a security lapse would invariably be the same: an SAS killing team waiting in ambush and a series of funerals attended by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The job of the dickers was a vital one to the PIRA and many operations were cancelled or postponed because of a dicker's instinct, honed to a sensitive edge on a thousand street corners, that 'something wasn't quite right'.

The first indication that Joe Meehan was moving up the terrorist ladder came in August 1990 when he reported to his handler that he'd been asked to act as a dicker on a bank robbery in the Cliftonville Road. The Northern Ireland desk made no move to inform the local security forces and the robbery went ahead. A female teller suffered a badly broken nose when she was punched in the face after attempting to press a panic button and a little over X 8500 in cash was taken.

After the bank job, things went very quiet. In a twenty-second call on a public phone the following morning Meehan informed Barry that he was now being watched round the clock, although he had given his fellow volunteers no sign that he was aware of this. As far as the serious players were concerned, he said, he was still very much on probation. A lot of the volunteers couldn't quite get their heads round the idea of trusting an ex-soldier.

Somebody must have trusted him, however, for he finally got his turn. A three-man team was assembled to recover a weapon from a cache in a churchyard near Castleblayney and Meehan was one of them. Again, he was able to inform Barry of the upcoming operation and again MI-5 allowed it to take place unhindered. In the normal course of events the weapon would have been dug up by an SAS team, bugged for tracing purposes and rendered harmless 'jarked' in special forces parlance, then reburied and left for recovery by the IRA.

On this occasion, however, it was decided that the risk that PIRA might discover the jar king and suspect a security leak was too great. No suspicion, however slight, must taint the Watchman. Whatever the cost, the weapon had to remain intact.

And the cost was very nearly fatal. Within two days a Royal Welch Fusiliers patrol had come under fire in Andersonstown and their lieutenant had had the stock of hisSA 80 rifle shattered by a high-velocity round.

The patrol returned fire but the trigger man escaped across the rooftops. The weapon, later identified from the spent rounds as a US Army-issue M16, was never found. MI-5's silence ensured that no watch was placed on the cache for the weapon's return.

"We were playing a very dangerous game," Widdowes admitted.

"But if the slightest suspicion had attached to Watchman, even long after the event, then we would have lost him. That M16 was our entry ticket, if you like. It's probably still out there somewhere."

From his knowledgeable tone Alex surmised that Widdowes had spent some time on the ground in the province.

"What would you have said if that lieutenant had been killed?" Alex asked.

"I would have said the same thing that I said about the piccaninny in Sierra Leone two minutes ago: that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

We had to get a man into PIRA. He had to be above suspicion. At some stage we were probably going to have to weather a loss." Widdowes delivered himself of an uneasy smile.

"I can see that you disapprove, Captain Temple."

"No," said Alex.

"It's just the way you put it."

"We're in the same business, Captain Temple, and fighting the same enemy by all means at our disposal.

The language is neither here nor there."

Alex nodded. He thought of Sierra Leone, of a Puma helicopter swinging low over the jungle canopy beneath a bruise-dark sky. How would Don Hammond's relatives be weathering their loss, he wondered.

"Moving on," said Widdowes firmly.

"The recovery of the Mi 6 marked the end of Meehan's probationary status. He was in. One of the boys. And slowly, surely, the intelligence followed, increasing in quality as he rose through the ranks. For a couple of years between 1993 and 1995 we had really useful stuff coming in. A little of it we were able to act on; most of it we weren't not without compromising him but it was all grade A information."

"The Cabinet Office was happy?" asked Alex drily.

"The Cabinet Office was very happy," said Widdowes.

"And so were we. He gave us the location of a training camp in County Clare in the Republic, for example, and we were able to establish a covert OP in order to identify everyone who came and went. He gave us details of a PIRA safe house in Kentish Town in London, and we successfully installed a watcher team next door to monitor all arrivals and communications. Both of those represented major intelligence breakthroughs. And he gave us other things: names, vehicle registration numbers, surveillance targets, touts who had been set up to disinform FRU agents.. . It was a rich seam and while it lasted we mined it.

"While it lasted?" asked Alex.

"Sadly, yes. For about two years Watchman gave us 24-carat weapons grade intelligence. And then, over the months that followed we began to notice a decline.

At first it was barely noticeable. The information kept coming in initially via Barry and later via a secure email line to this office and it all continued to look good. Names, possible assassination targets, projected dates for mainland campaigns it was all there. But it had become subtly generali sed. There was a lot of stuff about "policy". It had stopped being the sort of information it was possible to act on.

"Eventually there came a point where Angela, Craig Gidley and myself sat down and went through the message files, did some hard talking and came to the regretful conclusion that, for want of a better expression, we were having our pissers pulled. The general consensus at first was that Meehan had lost his nerve. On the rare occasions where he provided raw intelligence it came in too late for us to do anything about it. For example, there was an RUC officer who died because we only heard about the plan to murder him forty minutes before it took place. We put an emergency call out to his CO but the guy was in his car, driving home, and one of Billy McMahon's boys shot him outside an off-licence. You probably remember the incident."

Alex nodded. The RUC man had been named Storey and it had been his habit of stopping off for a packet of Benson and Hedges every evening that had sealed his fate.

"The intelligence was either too late or it was second-source," continued Widdowes, 'by which I mean that it was information that we were going to get from someone else anyway touts or whoever. It looked OK on paper, but on the ground it was never quite good enough and we were forced to admit that we'd probably lost him. He'd gone native, lost his bottle -whatever."

"Couldn't you pull him out?" asked Alex.

"We tried to but he went silent on us. Wouldn't respond to any request for contact. In late 1995, when it became clear that he'd moved out of his flat, sold his car and gone to ground, we started to close things down. We pulled Barry Fenn out for a start, in case he was compromised, and didn't replace him."

"You turned Meehan loose, effectively?"

"We left the e-mail link open. He could have contacted us any time. But he didn't. By mid-1996 we were sure that he had turned that he was now one hundred per cent PIRA's man. There were two bombs, one in a Loyalist pub in the Shankill

Road, one in a supermarket in Ballysillan, and the word coming in from the FRU's touts was that they'd been set by Joe Meehan. A total of seven dead. Lives might or might not have been saved in the Watchman's early days but now they were most definitely being lost. And the joke of it in the bars in Ballymurphy and on the Falls Road the real hilarious fall-down-laughing joke of it was that we'd trained him. That the PIRA's top electronics and explosives man was British army- trained." He shook his head.

"What happened in February 1996 to the FRU people, Bledsoe and Wheen, you know. They were killed on the orders of Padraig Byrne that was pretty much common knowledge. What you won't have heard is that the man who actually whacked those nails through their heads was to our certain knowledge -Joseph Meehan." Alex winced.

"You had proof of that?"

"Everyone knew. Apparently there were at least a dozen people there when it happened. Word is they were blooding all the young guys.

"And Meehan was completely beyond your reach by this time?"

"Yes, completely beyond our reach. There was only one thing we could do and we did it. We fed him into the jaws of PIRA's paranoia. We sent a story to the Sunday Times purporting to have been written by a former undercover soldier from 14th Intelligence's Belfast Detachment. In the article, among a lot of other stuff, the supposed soldier mentioned that for several years MI-5 had been running a senior IRA mole and went on to describe three or four intelligence breakthroughs that the mole had made possible. The stories were true and in each case the information in question was known to Meehan.

"We then immediately went through the motions of attempting to place an injunction on the Sunday Times, but at the same time made sure that the attempt wasn't successful. A few days later we dropped the word in the Falls that Joe Meehan was playing both sides and one of his mainland bank statements arrived at the Sinn Fein office. We pay our people pretty decently and the best part of three and a half K was going into his account every month.

"After that we never heard another word either from him or about him. He just vanished. We had a tout chat to Tina Milazzo but she hadn't seen him for months. Not since he "got weird", as she put it. Our assumption until a couple of weeks ago was that he'd been executed some time in the spring of 1996.

Interrogated, probably, and then shot."

"Until Barry Fenn's murder," said Alex quietly.

"Exactly. At which point we realised that he was alive."

"You were are certain that it's Meehan, then?"

"It has to be him," said Widdowes.

"He knew Fenn and Gidley, he used a hammer and nail, he used entry and exit methods that only a man with highly speciali sed training would use.

"So what exactly do you want me to do?" asked Alex, although he was already certain of the answer.

Widdowes looked at Angela Fenwick and after a brief pause it was Fenwick who spoke.

"There were four of us on the Watchman team," she said tautly.

"And Fenn and Gidley are already dead."

Alex nodded. Despite her professional control he could hear the fear in her voice.

"Basically," she said, 'we need you to kill Joseph Meehan before he kills us."

ELEVEN.

"So give me one good reason why you can't take the whole thing to the police, let them catch the guy and have him stand trial for murder," said Alex.

He and Dawn were sitting in the cafeteria at Thames House. Beyond the armour-plated ground floor window, the river moved brownly and sluggishly seawards. At the end of the counter steam rose from the electric urns as the staff prepared for the four o'clock tea rush. Like everywhere else in the building, the room was stiflingly overheated.

"Too many people would be compromised," answered Dawn, in the tones of one dealing with a child.

"Surely you can see that?"

"I can see that your Service would come out of the whole thing looking bad, yes. The press would crucify them."

"And your Service too," said Dawn patiently.

"We made the Watchman a spy, but your lot made him a killer and it's the killer we're after now. We're in this together, like it or not. If my people go down, your people go down too."

"It'll come out sooner or later. These things always do."

"Not necessarily. No one's seen or heard of this man Meehan for years. We find him, you chop him finito, end of story. He's certainly not going to be missed."

"You think you'll find him?" asked Alex quietly.

The grey eyes hardened a fraction.

"Don't you think we will?"

"If he doesn't want you to find him, he'll go to ground somewhere."

She raised an ironic eyebrow.

"Somewhere that only you Special Forces boys can follow, right?"

Alex shrugged.

"I might be able to help you with the way that he thinks. Give you an idea of the sort of place he'd look for."

She sighed.

"Look, we have the Service's best psych team dealing with the way that this man thinks and our best investigators looking for him. Any suggestions would, I'm sure, be very helpful, but we do, in fact, have the matter well in hand. What we'd really like you to do is wait and, when the moment comes, move in and eliminate him."

"Is that really all you think we're good for?"

"On this occasion, I'm afraid that it's all we need you to do."

They sat in uncomfortable silence. Outside on the river, a succession of interlinked barges moved upstream against the current. She had no real idea, thought Alex, what she was asking him to do. What it was like to look another human being in the eye and then kill him. How, in those moments, a few seconds could stretch into infinity.

It's all we need you to do.

A belated flicker of concern crossed her face. She frowned. She seemed to be aware of the direction his thoughts were taking.

"It's not up to me," she said.

"I'm just here as a go-between."

He nodded. It was as close to an apology as he was ever likely to get.

"So when did you join the Service?"

he asked.

"Six years ago." She forced a smile.

"I answered the same advert as David Shayler, as it happens."

"What did it say?

"Spies wanted"?"

"It said: "Godot Isn't Coming"."

"Who the hell's Godot?"

"A character in a Samuel Beckett play called Waiting for Godot. The other characters wait for him."

"And he doesn't come?"

"No."

"Sounds unmissable. So you knew this was an MI-5 advert?"

"No. But I knew it had been placed by an organisation with a bit of.. . sophistication to it."

"Right," said Alex.

"Because of this Godot stuff' "Exactly."

"We watch a fair amount of Samuel Beckett's stuff up in Hereford. Are you glad you answered that advert?"

"Yes."

"And are you free this afternoon?"

She looked at him suspiciously.

"No. Why?"

"When I've looked through the photographs and the pathology reports, I'd like to go back to Gidley's place. There are a couple of things I need to check."

"I thought we'd established that you were leaving that side of things to us."

"Dawn, I need to see what Meehan's exact movements were the night before last. If I'm going up against him, I have to know how he operates."

"I very much doubt there'll be anything to see.

"That depends on what you're looking for. Trust me, I'm not going to be wasting your time."

She regarded him expressionlessly for a moment and nodded.

"OK, then, but like I said, I'm tied up this afternoon. It'll have to be tomorrow morning."

"I guess that'll have to do. Tell me something off the top of your head."

"What?"

"Why is Joseph Meehan murdering the MI-5 officers who ran him?"

"I heard you ask Angela Fenwick the same question.

She said she didn't know."

"I heard her say it. But what do you think?"

"I think he went native, like George said." She shrugged.

"Why do any terrorists do what they do? It's an armed struggle. We're the enemy.

"But why choose such an extreme method of killing people? And why take out Fenn and Gidley who, let's face it, were pretty much at the fag-end of their careers?"

"He killed the people he knew. To Meehan, Fenn and Gidley represented the heart of the British Establishment. As do George Widdowes and Angela Fenwick, presumably."

Alex shook his head.

"I don't think he killed them for symbolic reasons. As Brit oppressors or whatever. I think he killed them for a specific reason."

She narrowed her eyes.

"What makes you think that you can see inside this man's head?"

Alex shrugged.

"We're both soldiers. Soldiers are methodical. They believe in cause and effect. What's the point of carrying out an elaborate, ritualistic murder that no one will ever know about? That you know will be immediately covered up?"

"Perhaps he's mad."

"Do you know something?" said Alex.

"For a moment there we were almost having a conversation."

Dawn held his gaze for a moment, then reached to the floor for her briefcase. When she straightened she was her usual brisk, businesslike self.

"As well as the photographs and reports on Fenn and Gidley I've got some keys for you. They're for a top-floor flat in St. George's Square in Pimlico. You can stay there if you need to or' she hesitated for a fraction of a second 'you can make your own arrangements."

"Thank you," said Alex neutrally.

Barry Fenn, he saw, had been a weaselly, narrow shouldered man. From the photographs, in which he was wearing bloodstained pyjamas and was sprawled half in and half out of bed, it was clear that he had been woken from sleep. According to the pathologist's report he had struggled briefly and ineffectually before being struck on the back of the head with some sort of cosh. The six-inch nail had been hammered into his temple while he was semiconscious and his tongue, it appeared, had been hacked out as some sort of afterthought. Livid and hideous, it had been placed in the unused glass ashtray beside the bed alongside a book of matches. There was less blood than there might have been.

Looking at the photographs, Alex realised that his earlier identification with Meehan had been dangerous and stupid. Beyond their training and a similarity in age, he had nothing whatever in common with this maniac. Dawn was right: the man was a psychopathic murderer and had to be stopped.

The pathologist's report on Craig Gidley indicated that, like Barry Fenn's tongue, the victim's eyes had been cut out after the fatal hammer blow had driven the nail through his temple. To Alex this confirmed that the mutilations were there for a purpose other than to cause suffering. As a message, perhaps?

But a message for whom? For MI-5 as a whole? For George Widdowes or Angela Fenwick in particular? Whatever the message, it was clear that either Widdowes or Fenwick was next on the Watchman's list.

Would he get them? Alex wondered dispassionately. Would he catch them and kill them? Forewarned and with all the protective resources of MI-5 at their disposal, they would be much harder targets than Fenn and Gidley had been.

But then the Watchman was clever. He had been taught by the best in many cases the same people who had taught Alex and he had clearly forgotten none of it. The combination of professionalism, sadism and sheer insanity he embodied was terrifying.

What did he want? What was the man trying to achieve?

Alex stared at the photographs of Meehan as if his gaze could somehow penetrate their surface and unlock the man portrayed in them. But the more he shuffled them around, the less they seemed to reveal. Just those pale, skinned whippet features and that watchful, guarded gaze.

He looked tough. Not in the sense of being intimidating, but in the sense of being a hard man to break. He'd duck and he'd dive but one way and another he'd keep on going. There were a thousand looking like him on the streets of Belfast dingy, forgettable figures hunched into donkey jackets. Alex could see why he'd been such a perfect undercover man.

Would MI-5 find him? Meehan would have to make a serious mistake first and there was nothing to indicate that that was going to happen. Mad he might be, but careless he clearly wasn't.

Alex turned to the large map of Britain on the wall. Where would Meehan be hiding out? No, turn the question round. Where would he Alex be hiding out if he were Meehan? In a city, among the crowds? No, he'd be in danger if he revisited his old London stamping grounds. He couldn't risk going anywhere there was an Irish community.

The arm of the IRA, like its memory, was long.

Meehan would know that MI-5 would leave no stone unturned in their search and that unless he had built up a completely watertight new identity they would find him. He'd have to have a new passport, driving licence, social security number everything. Just checking in and out of bed-and-breakfast houses was not going to be enough. He'd have a base somewhere. Somewhere he could hide.

Somewhere he could plan the next killing.

Alex arrived back at Sophie's flat shortly before seven, having arranged to meet Dawn Harding at nine the next morning. She'd pick him up, she told him, where she had dropped him off the night before outside the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road.

He found Sophie changing.

"We're going out," she told him, swinging round so that he could zip up the fastening of her cocktail dress.

"One of my clients Corday is launching a new fragrance range and I've helped organise a little party for them. The perfume's called "Guillotine" and all the women have to wear a red velvet ribbon round their necks as if they've been beheaded."

"Do you mind if I give it a miss?" Alex asked wearily, loosening his tie.

"I'm not really in the mood."

"Oh, don't be boring, darling! I'm sure you've had a horrible day doing whatever secret things you've been doing but so have I. It's been impossibly grim at the PR coal face. Come and drink some champagne at Corday's expense, and then ..

"And then?"

"And then you can take charge of the evening. How's that?"

Alex agreed. If Five were going to leave him twiddling his thumbs while they pursued their investigation, then he might as well enjoy himself And he wanted to please Sophie who, after all, was putting him up. He didn't even have to drive the next morning Dawn would be doing that, presumably at her usual infuriating crawl.

So he might as well chill out.

"So where are we going?"

She raised her chin to tie her red velvet ribbon.

"Hoxton Square."

'~W~here's that?"

"Alex, sweetie, which planet have you been living on for the last few years?

Hoxton is only the most desirable quarrier in London. You can barely throw a stone without braining some famous artist, model or designer. It's celebrity city!"

"Right, well, just introduce me as a friend of your brother's. Say I work in security or something."

She frowned and pouted into the mirror, checking her makeup.

"Security's a bit dingy-sounding, darling. Can we manage something a bit more upscale?

Something dot. com perhaps?"

"OK. I'll have a think." He rubbed his eyes. Various subconscious worries were still nagging at him.

"I realised something dreadful today, that I'd left a rebel sentry a boy, can't have been much more than ten tied to a tree in the middle of the Sierra Leone jungle a couple of days ago."

Sophie wriggled her toes experimentally in her raw-silk shoes.

"I know. It's awful how forgetful one gets. Do you want to ring someone about it?"

Alex stared at her disbelievingly.

"He's probably dead by now, or at the very least missing an arm.

"Shall we go?"

As they swerved through the traffic in the silver Audi TT, with Sophie impatiently cutting up every vehicle that had the temerity to draw alongside her, Alex tried to improve his mood. Things could be worse, he told himself He was being paid to waste time in London an opportunity that most soldiers would give their eye-teeth for and he was sleeping with a rich, beautiful and highly sexed girl who gave every sign of thinking he was the cat's pyjamas. He was on his way to a party to drink champagne with said highly sexed girl, and in two or three hours they would tumble into bed and tear each other to pieces.

So what was pissing him off, exactly? Was it that he seemed to be spending his life being shuffled about by women? Alex had nothing against working with women but right now his life seemed to be run by them. In the past whenever girlfriends had started making noises about permanence and commitment, Alex had started making noises about the incompatibility of soldiering and married life.

And he had meant it. He had seen his colleagues go down like ninepins, their tiny independence skewered by the demands of ratty, frustrated wives. The wives hadn't started ratty and frustrated, but they soon got that way when they discovered that the system could only accommodate them and the kids as sideline players. As Stan Clayton had once explained to him: getting the trouble-and-strife up the duff before an overseas posting was like spitting in your beer before you went for a piss!

Seeing the results vengeful, careworn wives, fragged-out blokes worrying about money and their families' security from dawn till dusk Alex had sworn to have nothing to do with any of it. As far as he was concerned the deal was that you promised nothing that you weren't prepared to give, had a good time for as long as it lasted and got out before things turned nasty. He had a sort of honour system, which went something along the lines that if a woman made it plain from the start that she wanted marriage and kids then you didn't waste her time.

Otherwise, you went for it.

Something told him, though, that with Sophie it was going to be different. For a start he was not in control of things. He didn't automatically call the shots, as he'd always done before. She moved easily and fluently through a world in which, if he was honest, he felt insecure. And while she respected his skills and knew that there was another, darker world in which he moved with ease and fluency, she never allowed herself to be overimpressed by him.

Ultimately, he wasn't sure of her. This made things exciting, but it also made things .. . difficult.

As they swerved round a traffic island in the TT, tyres sc reaming, Alex told himself that he ought to take a train up to

Hereford and pick up his car. Behind the wheel of the KarmanChia he could at least pretend that he was in control of his life. For the time being, though... What the hell?

TWELVE.

When they reached Hoxton Square Sophie ignored the double yellow lines and parked right outside the venue. This was a former electricity showroom turned gallery, and paparazzi were already drawn up at either side of the entrance. As Alex and Sophie hurried in there was a brief burst of flash presumably in case they were celebrities whom no one yet recognised.

The party was on the first floor and the place was already crowded. On the far side of the room Alex caught sight of Stella laughing with a group of models. The sound system was playing Juliette Greco, two women in tri colore hats were spraying perfume at anyone not fast enough to get out of their way, and the sharp smell of "Guillotine' cut the air.

"Come and meet Charlotte," said Sophie, taking Alex's hand and sidling purposefully towards a slight, dark-haired woman who seemed to be dressed in 1970s wallpaper.

"She's the oldest of the Corday sisters. You've heard of the Corday fashion house, haven't you?"

"Why don't I go and find us a drink?" Alex suggested, disengaging his hand.

Within moments he had been swallowed up by the crowd. Around him brief snatches of conversation and shrieks of laughter rose like waves above the music and were inaudible again. A gravel-voiced broadcaster whom he vaguely recognised but had never met threw her arms round his neck, kissed him on the mouth and asked how the new restaurant was going. He told her that it was still serving human flesh and moved on, leaving her open-mouthed.

People pushed past, flickered a glance at him in passing to establish for certain that he was not someone that they needed to know and vanished. Alex wanted to speak to none of them -he simply couldn't summon up the interest. Over the months that he'd been seeing Sophie he'd attended quite a few of these occasions and he'd come to the conclusion that London society was peopled almost entirely by fuck wits From the outside it looked glamorous, all late-night restaurants and beautiful girls and champagne, but in truth, he had discovered, it was very, very dull. For every genuine achiever there were a hundred style journalists, fashion parasites and cokehead aristocrats desperately jockeying for recognition. None of them seemed to have any awareness of a world beyond their own tiny circuit, and listening to the endless loop tape of their conversation about clothes, accessories, drugs and parties bored him out of his mind.

There were exceptions. He liked Stella and of course he liked Sophie more than liked her, in fact.

But why was it, he wondered, that the whole scene that she was involved with made him feel so dead inside? And equally importantly why was it that situations involving real death made him feel so acutely alive? How was he supposed to square those facts with the idea of- one day, at least settling down?

"Bloody Mary?"

Alex looked down to see a tiny, large-busted girl in a tri colore cap, holding a tray. She giggled.

"Or Bloody Marie-Antoinette, I suppose I should say."

Alex took one of the glasses and drank. It was almost fifty per cent pure vodka and fiery with tabasco.

"Bloody strong, whichever."

She laughed.

"I know. I thought I'd loosen this lot up a bit. Come the revolution, they'll all be for the chop."

"They certainly need culling," said Alex morosely, taking a deep hit of his drink. It occurred to him a few seconds later that he was feeling rather over-sorry for himself. These people weren't so bad. He threw back the remains of the drink, helped himself to another and took a deep swig. He began to feel very much more cheerful. Get a life, Temple, he told himself Have some fun for a change!

"Shall I just stay here?" she asked.

"Let you help yourself?"

He smiled. Small girl plus big tits equals hard-on.

"You could do worse," he said.

"Are you one of the caterers?"

"Sort of. Part-time. I'm actually trying to get into the fashion business."

"You should speak to Sophie Wells. She's over by the entrance, or was when I last saw her."

"She's a right snotty cunt," said the girl, as Alex took a third glass.

"D'you know her?"

"Mm. A bit."

"Which bit?"

"Go on." He smiled.

"Piss off before we're all in trouble!"

"Hey, Alex from Clacton!"

"Stella! How's it going?"

She gave him an uneven grin.

"All right, apart from the smell of this perfume.

It's like fish guts at low tide."

"I guess the original guillotine wasn't too fresh," said Alex.

"What have you been up to?" she asked.

"I haven't seen you for a bit."

"I've been in Africa," said Alex.

"Yeah? How was that?"

He shrugged.

"Tell me something, Stella."

"OK."

"If you wanted to hide if you absolutely had to hide, life or death where would you go?"

"I'd go where I always go," she said, as if the question were the most normal one in the world.

"The past."

He stared at her. Heard someone calling her name.

She smiled and the crowd drew her away.

"Believe me," she said, fluttering her fingers.

"There's nowhere like it."

He found Sophie again and was just about to hand her her drink when something irregular registered at the edge of his vision.

At the entrance, by the glass doors, two tall heavy-set figures were forcing their way past the security guards. The guards were doing their best, but they were no match for the red-faced, guffawing newcomers. One of them, a beef-fed, tiny-eyed giant of at least six foot two inches in height, was wearing a rugby shirt while the other, city-suited, was only a shade shorter. The crowd backed away from them uneasily.

"Shit!" said Sophie quietly at Alex's side.

"Gatecrashers."

She stepped with confidence into the path of the two men.

"Look, guys..." she began.

"This is a private... "Charlie," roared the taller man, throwing a massive arm round Sophie's shoulders.

"Take a look at what I've..

But the other was forcibly slapping a passing guest on the back.

"You, sir!" he brayed.

"Are you by any chance an arsebandido?"

Both gatecrashers had public-school accents, Alex noted. Everything about them spelt money and arrogance. Well, they were about to get what was coming to them.

"So, my darling'." The bigger of the two reached drunkenly for Sophie.

"You were saying... A split second before his hand reached Sophie's chest, a fist crunched into his nose. The blow carried with it every ounce of resentment that Alex had ever felt towards the privileged classes.

"Alex!" he heard Sophie scream.

"No!"

The man turned to Alex, amazed. Blood poured from his flattened nose as if from a tap and streamed down the front of his rugby shirt. The other man stood there, swaying. There was a moment of absolute silence, then the bleeding man drew back a fist the size of a bowling ball.

Alex swerved, felt the wind of the blow pass his cheek and, half turning, seized the oncoming arm by the wrist. Forcing his shoulder into his attacker's armpit, and using the Hooray's own weight and momentum, he threw him hard on to his back.

The giant frame seemed to pinwheel in the air for a moment and then crashed down over a crate of champagne bottles.

"Alex!" screamed Sophie again.

He sensed rather than saw the second man's rush. Grabbing a Bollinger bottle by the neck he turned and swung it with all his strength. The bottle smashed against the man's skull with a crunching, gassy sigh and in a white explosion of foam. With spectacular effect his head turned blood-red, his eyes rolled upwards and he crashed to the floor. Screams joined the spatter of broken glass and the groans of the first attacker who was writhing beneath one of the caterers' trestle tables.

The pushing started, then, and the panic. A drinks table went over, then another, and within seconds the floor was covered in spilled champagne, canapes and broken glass. Someone activated the fire alarm. Hanging over everything was the acrid stench of "Guillotine'.

"Alex!" Sophie screamed for a third time, waving her fists at him.

"What do you think you're doing?" Around them, people were jostling for the exit.

"What do you mean?" asked Alex, dropping the smashed bottleneck.

"Did you really want those pissed-up yobs grabbing at you?"

"They were two boys who'd had too much to drink, that's all. It's you who's ruined the party!" She stared despairingly at the departing guests and then down at the fallen men.

"Could someone please ring an ambulance?" she pleaded.

"Boys?" asked Alex, amazed.

"Look at the fucking size of them. I can't believe you're siding with them." He turned to her thoughtfully and smiled.

"But then I suppose they're your type, aren't they?"

"Don't be so stupid. You totally overreacted and you know it. You could have .. ."

She shook her head, incoherent with anger. Beside her, one of the caterers was dialling 999.

"Killed them?" Alex regarded the fallen and bloodied figures dispassionately.

The first man, still groaning, appeared to have badly injured his back and the second was unmoving and bleeding copiously from the head.

"No such luck, I'm afraid. I'd say your perfume got its publicity, though." He sniffed the air.

"Stella was right, it is a bit fishy."

She rounded on him, eyes blazing.

"And what the hell would you know, you... you psychopathic hoohgan?"

Alex began to laugh. He couldn't help himself.

"I'm sorry!" he managed eventually.

"Really, Sophie, I'm sorry."

Drawing back her hand she slapped him as hard as she could across the face and marched furiously off.

Alex caught up with her.

"Please," he said.

"I'm sorry, Sophie. Really I am. I wasn't laughing at you. It's just the whole thing."

She shrugged him off. Her voice was shaking with anger.

"The whole thing, as you call it, has turned to shit. I open up my life to you, introduce you to my friends, and you just .. . just crap all over them. You can make your own fucking way home and you needn't bother to call me again. Find someone else's life to smash up."

At this moment, as they stood there facing each other, speechless, the little waitress with the big bust appeared at the foot of the stairs.

"So, is this a good moment to talk about work?" she asked Sophie brightly.

Sophie glanced at her uncomprehendingly.

"No," she said quietly.

"It isn't."

The waitress shrugged.

"Told you she was a cunt!"

Alex watched Sophie slam the door of the silver Audi. When the snarl of her exhaust had died away he reached into his suit pocket. The safe-house key was still there.

THIRTEEN.

The first hour of the drive up to Goring in Dawn Harding's Honda was conducted in near silence. Alex had a mild hangover and was feeling a bit guilty about the way the previous evening had turned out. He shouldn't have laughed, he told himself.

The trouble was, the row had exposed all the differences that existed between them. He couldn't be bothered with most of her friends, when all was said and done, and he couldn't be bothered to obey the rules that people obeyed in her world. She considered him an unreconstructed macho dinosaur, and in return he found her spoilt, shallow and over privileged. They brought out the worst in each other.

And yet they wanted each other. Often.

The night in the Pimlico flat had been a cheerless one. A 1970s Bulgarian defector might have felt at home in the place, with its stained orange carpet and fusty, boarding-house smell, but Alex could have done with something a little less Cold War.

He should get some flowers, he told him seW present himself at Sophie's front door that evening with an apologetic face and a big bunch of roses. Would roses do the trick? They were supposed to, but then in Sophie's picky and obsessive circle roses might be considered naff.

"Do you like roses?" he asked Dawn.

She looked at him suspiciously.

"Why?"

"If someone gave you roses, what would you think?"

"A man, you mean?" she asked.

"For the sake of argument, yes.

"I'd think either he was trying to get something from me, or he was apologising."

"Right."

"If they were really special, though.. . I mean if they weren't just those boring, limp, half-frozen things you buy at the tube station in a twist of cellophane but properly scented old English roses grown in a garden, well, I might at least listen to what he had to say." She glanced at him shrewdly from the driving seat.

"In trouble, are we?"

"No. Just wondering."

"Ah. Wondering. Well, my experience is that most girls do, in fact, quite like to be given roses." She narrowed her eyes at the road ahead.

"Even the posh ones like your Sophie."

He nodded. He guessed he was going to have to say goodbye to any kind of private life for as long as he was working with Box.

"Can I ask what you're actually doing to locate this Watchman character?" he asked.

Her expression remained unaltered but her eyes froze over.

"Put it this way," she said.

"We've got pictures, we've got DNA, we've got dabs, we've got handwriting, and we've got vocal and facial recognition systems in place. I think you can say that we're adequately covered."

"And Widdowes? What are you doing to protect him?"

"George Widdowes is an experienced intelligence officer."

"So were Fenn and Gidley. Didn't help them much when laughing boy showed up, though, did it?"

"Forewarned is forearmed."

Alex shook his head despairingly and rubbed his eyes.

"You don't get it, do you?" he said quietly.

"Meehan will kill him. He's programmed to do it and he will do it."

She was silent for a minute or two.

"OK," she said.

"I'll tell you. We're setting up a lookalike at his house. A Special Branch guy. We've got the place ringed with police marksmen. George himself has been pulled out of circulation."

"You think that'll work?"

"Look, I admit we were a little bit slow off the blocks with Gidley, but we're very much on-message now.

"On-message," said Alex.

"Right."

"This Watchman," Dawn went on patiently.

"He's one man, he's on his own, he's got no support system to speak of It's not constructive to be too afraid of him."

"He's a murderer," said Alex.

"He's Regiment-trained. And he's spent several years in the field with the most sophisticated terror organisation in the world."

"You sound as if you admire them."

"Professionally speaking I do admire them. If I'd been born a working-class Catholic over the water I'd probably be a volunteer myself and most Regiment blokes will tell you the same thing. It doesn't mean you aren't prepared to do your job and waste as many of the fuckers as you can, but ultimately when you put a bullet through one of those boys and you look into his dying eyes you can see yourself as you might have been, and that's the truth."

From the long habit of counter-surveillance, Alex glanced up at the rear-view mirror. The small movement and the dizzying motion of the reflected cars reminded him how much vodka was still in his bloodstream and he pressed the button to lower the passenger window. Fresh air rushed in. The sun had not yet burnt off the dew in the fields.

"The PIRA are good," he continued, 'and the thing they're better than anyone else at is security. They won't hesitate to cancel a hundred-man operation if one dicker's instinct tells him or her there's something not quite right that one too many cars has passed or that a man's coat's hanging wrong or there are no birds in a hedge where there should be birds. Our man Meehan will have absorbed all that. He'll wait as long as it takes. That's why I respect him. And that's why you people should respect him too."

"Respect him, yes," Dawn agreed, her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Fear him, no."

"Given a choice between fear and arrogance," said Alex mildly, "I'll take fear every time. Nothing gets you killed faster than arrogance.

"We'll see, shall we?"

"I'm afraid we will, yes.

They settled into a sour, antagonistic silence.

When they got to Goring, Alex asked Dawn to park several hundred yards from the house.

"I want to approach the place as the Watchman would have done," he explained.

"See it as he would have seen it the first time he came down here."

"No one noticed any strangers in the village," said Dawn.

"We've asked a few questions about that."

"He wouldn't have been noticeable," Alex told her.

"My guess is that he would have come on foot first time round, probably in hiking gear and on a wet Saturday.

Or by bicycle, perhaps. Anorak hoods, clear glasses, cycle helmets they're all good disguises. Those just-passing-through, rambler-type people are invisible in a semi-touristy place like this. You see them at the side of the road eating a sandwich and swigging a soft drink, but you don't really see them. You couldn't describe them two minutes later."

She nodded. They continued in silence along the roadside.

Dawn frowned.

"But what would he..."

"Shush a minute," said Alex, cutting her off. The Gidleys' house was just coming into view and he wanted to see it had to see it through the Watchman's eyes. At his side, as he marshalled all his senses and instincts to this end, he was vaguely aware of Dawn bristling with irritation.

Women, he thought.

Meehan would want an OP a place he could observe from without being seen.

Somewhere away from the road and out of range of the dogs, but close enough to check out the arrangements. He'd have planned for at least a week's surveillance.

He wouldn't have compromised with just a day or two. He would have gone up with food and water and a bag to crap into, and noted everything. Where would he have watched from? A building? Were there any other buildings in sight? No. No farm sheds, garages, outhouses, nothing. Their absence would have been one of the factors that attracted Gidley to the house in the first place. So was there anywhere at ground level he could lie up? Didn't look like it, because wherever he lay the wall surrounding the property would block his vision. He wouldn't be able to get enough height on the place. The contours were against him.

Man-made OPs? There were telegraph poles running along the road and connecting to the property, and it was theoretically possible that he'd nicked aBT van and overalls to fit the deactivator. But he wouldn't have been able to stay up there for long enough to establish anything worthwhile within moments of his appearing the Box security people would have been on to BT to check him out.

Trees, then. Alex had reckoned from the start that Meehan had gone for a tree, but he'd wanted formally to eliminate all other possibilities. There were a horse chestnut and a sycamore overhanging the road on either side of the Gidleys' perimeter wall, but he dismissed these. Tempting, but just too close to the house and the orbit of the dogs. Besides, in consideration of the security hazard they posed, all the trees near the property wall had had their lower limbs sawed off.

Climbing them would have necessitated scaling equipment and any climber would have had to take the risk of being seen either from the house or the road.

On the opposite side of the road was a field of young corn bisected by a public footpath. Mature trees stood at the side of this path at irregular intervals. Alex scanned them from the road. The ideal observation point was a large beech, from whose boughs a clear hundred-and-fifty-yard sight line on the house and grounds was available. Without a word, with Dawn sighing behind, he marched down the road, swung his leg over the stile into the field and moved at pace towards the tree.

His head was clear now, his brain singing with the pleasure of the pursuit.

"I'll have you, you bastard!" he murmured to himself.

"I'll fucking have you!"

They arrived at the foot of the beech and Alex climbed expectantly over the elephantine grey roots. Meehan, he was sure, would have climbed the trunk on the far side from the road, using ropes and scaling equipment. Carefully, he examined the trunk. Nothing. No sign, no scar. Shit! It had to be this tree. But the trunk showed no sign at all, not a single scratch, scar or abrasion that might have been made in the last month. After searching the fine grained silvery surface for more than twenty minutes he was forced to concede that if Meehan had used this tree he had not climbed it by the trunk. Nor were there any branches hanging anywhere near the ground.

Dawn remained expressionless, but Alex could tell that his frustration gave her quiet satisfaction. Finally, and meaningfully, she glanced at her watch.

"Come on," he said, marching her further up the path.

The next tree that might have afforded a view over Gidley's property was a horse chestnut. Its large leaves and candle-like white blooms made it a lot harder to see out of but at the same time, Alex noted, a lot harder to see into.

Maybe, he thought. Maybe. Warily, he circled the trunk. Like the beech, it was fine-skinned and any scratch would have shown. But once again, there was nothing.

"Is it possible," asked Dawn demurely, 'that you might just be barking up the wrong..."

"No!" he snapped.

"It bloody isn't. He was here somewhere."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure. Now please .. ." Desperately, he scanned the tree's spreading skirts and his eyes narrowed. There was one place, just one, about ten feet from the ground.

"Come with me," he ordered her.

"Step where I step."

Followed by Dawn, he moved into the shadowed, dew-sodden grass. When he was below the lowest point of the bough he motioned her to be still and crouched down. Half closing his eyes, he felt carefully around the wet ground as if he were blind. It took five minutes, but eventually he found what he was looking for: a plug of pressed soil the size and shape of a cigarette packet.

"Got you," he breathed.

"What is it?" asked Dawn.

In answer he felt quickly around and eased another plug from the ground a foot away.

"He had a ladder," said Alex.

"He didn't want to go up the trunk using a scaling kit and leave marks, so he used a ladder and a rope and went up here. Then afterwards' Alex held up the soil 'he filled in the places where the feet of the ladder went. It hasn't rained since then, so ..

"Why go to that trouble?" asked Dawn.

"Since we know it's him and he knows that we know."

"He's a perfectionist," said Alex.

"It's about doing it right, whatever the circumstances. About leaving no trace."

"A sort of Samurai code?" mused Dawn.

"That sort of thing," Alex agreed.

"What I think he did here was to get a decorator's ladder one of those aluminium self-supporting jobs tie one end of the rope to it, throw the other over the branch, pull the branch down and tie off the rope. Then he grabbed the branch and up he went."

"Dragging the ladder up behind him on the rope. Neat. Too bad we haven't got a rope or a ladder."

"We've got me," said Alex.

"And we've got you.

"Oh, no!" said Dawn firmly.

"No fucking way!"

"Way, baby!" said Alex with a grim smile.

"Shoes off."

"Tree-climbing's not part of my job, baby!"

"And saving your colleagues' life? Is that part of your job? Personally I couldn't give a monkey's, but..."

"Why can't you go up alone?"

"I could, but it would mean my standing on your shoulders and I'm not sure you could manage that."

"Try me."

"I'd love to."

"You know what I mean."

They tried it. She genuflected; he took her hands and stepped on to her shoulders with his bare feet.

"Do you have any idea how much I paid for this sweater?" she breathed, trembling with strain.

"Take it off," said Alex cheerfully.

"I won't be shocked."

"Fuck you!"

She couldn't straighten up. She tried gave it her best shot -but in the end she simply couldn't.

"Why don't we try it the other way round?" he suggested reasonably.

"Why don't we just get a ladder from the house?"

"If this doesn't work we will, OK?"

Sullenly she took off her shoes, placed them together on the wet grass as if on a wardrobe shelf, took his hands, stepped on to his shoulders.

"And.. . up." He straightened.

"Take your hands away from mine when you're ready. Grab the branch. Good, now pull yourself up. Try and get your leg over.

"I thought that was your speciality," she gasped. Then she looked down at him nervously.

"What now?"

"Move as close to the end of the branch as possible, so that it's weighed down."

She did so. He took off his shirt and threw it up to her, ordered her to tie it round the branch, which she did.

"And now these. Tie the legs together so that they make another link of the chain." He threw her his trousers. She tied them to the shirt. He was now naked except for his boxer shorts.

"How silly do I look?" he asked.

"From up here? Very."

"You sure the knots are sound?"

"I've done some sailing. Trust me, they're sound."

He hauled himself up as if using a rope ladder, unknotted his shirt and trousers part of the haul he had bought with Sophie and quickly re-dressed.

"OK, do you want to stay here? Or climb with me.

She hesitated. He could see a small muscle working in her jaw.

"I'll come up," she said eventually.

"Right. You know what we're looking for. Anything, basically."

"You really think we're going to learn anything?"

"I think we have to look."

They climbed for ten minutes, the ground fell slowly away beneath them and the dark-green leaves enveloped them. As they moved upwards they found tiny but unmistakable signs that someone else had recently done the same thing and by dint of hard searching were able to follow a trail of lichen blurs, pressure marks and trodden fungi.

"Look up," said Alex at intervals, which Dawn correctly interpreted as "Don't look down.

Finally, breathless, she turned to him.

"I can't get up there."

"There' was the broad junction of several branches with the trunk some thirty feet from the ground.

"He managed it," said Alex.

"Well, I can't," she breathed.

"It's just too long a reach."

"I'll get you up there," Alex said.

"Must you?"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's where he watched from. I'm going to lift you and sit you there, OK?"

"OK," she said uncertainly.

He braced himself opposite her, placed his hands on her waist and looked into a pair of grey eyes from which she was struggling to keep all signs of fear.

Beneath his grip, however, he could feel a faint involuntary trembling. When he lifted her she almost made it she was absurdly light, somehow, for someone so bad-tempered but the fine black wool of her sweater gave a poor grip and she slipped down again between his hands. The sweater, meanwhile, slipped up.

"I'm sorry," he said sincerely, staring at the neatly voluptuous contours of her scarlet satin bra.

"I didn't mean that to happen."

She wrenched down her sweater. Blimey, he told himself Who'd have thought that beneath that stroppy exterior .. . "Try again?" he suggested.

Now sheer anger got her up there. Once settled, she stared out over the fields.

He clambered up behind her and saw what she saw. The trunk and the adjoining branches formed a solid enclosure within which, without too much discomfort, it would have been possible to remain for hours. Before them the alignment of the heavy, densely leaved chestnut branches afforded a perfect longdistance view of the Gidleys' property. Only the area directly behind the house was invisible.

"He was here," said Alex.

"He was here for days. Look, you can see the worn place in this fork where he wedged his foot.

And here, this shined place where he sat. This was where he planned Gidley's murder."

"If I weren't so utterly terrified of heights," said Dawn quietly, looking around her, "I'd say it was rather beautiful up here."

Alex stared at her.

"You're really afraid of heights? Phobic?"

She returned his stare openly and frankly.

"Like I said, terrified. This is the highest I've ever been off the ground outside a house. Skyscrapers make me feel faint. I couldn't even go up the Eiffel Tower."

"So why didn't you tell me?"

She looked him in the eye.

"You didn't exactly make it very easy, did you?"

He was silent for a moment.

"I guess not. I'm sorry. You're a trooper, Dawn Harding, and I'm a bastard."

She nodded thoughtfully.

"Yes, I'd pretty much go along with that. I might add the words "patronising" and "sexist" while I was about it."

"Fair enough."

"And request that if we're going to continue working together you don't take out your frustrations on me every time you get an order you don't like, or your Sloaney girlfriend gives you a hard time, or you don't get laid, or whatever."

"OK."

"And most importantly that you get me to the ground in one piece."

"I promise."

Together, as best they could, they searched the branches around them for anything that Meehan might have left. In the end it was Dawn who found it: an inch-long stub of pencil slipped into a knot hole near their feet. Working it out with his pocket knife, Alex managed to slip the pencil into his shirt pocket without directly touching it.

"Forensics'll be interested to see that," said Dawn.

"Do you think there's anything else?"

They searched every inch, but found nothing else. Ten minutes later they were back on the first branch, ten feet above the ground.

"Ever done a parachute course?" Alex asked her.

She shook her head.

"OK, I'll jump and then catch you."

He hit the ground, rolled and stood himself up. Soon, she was hanging from the branch with her bare feet on his shoulders. One after the other, he took her hands.

She wobbled.

"OK," he said.

"Now put my hands under your arms.

"No funny business?"

"As if]' Gently, he lowered her down the front of his body. When their faces were level and her mouth inches from his, he stopped. He looked into her eyes. Was there the ghost of a smile there?

They had lunch in a nearby pub. Ploughman's lunches, with in his case a beer and in hers mineral water. A sharp morning had turned into a warm day and they sat outside at a bench.

"You did something today you wouldn't have thought yourself capable of," Alex began.

"Oh, spare us the squaddie pep talk, please. I went up that tree this morning because..."

"Because the thought of being bested by a yob of a soldier was something you couldn't face. Worse even than your fear of heights, right?"

She shrugged and smiled.

"Perhaps. I never said you were a yob, though."

"No?"

"No. Though you certainly are one. And proud of it after all, it's a solid-gold chick puller, isn't it, being in the Regiment?"

"Didn't you get laid last night either?"

"As a matter of fact I did," said Dawn mildly.

There was a heartbeat's silence.

"So, who's the lucky guy?" Alex asked, rather more sharply than he intended.

In answer Dawn just laughed and shook her head.

"That pencil was a good find," she said, cutting a pickled onion in half "Forensics can get stuck in. There should be dabs."

"There won't be," said Alex.

"He meant us to find it. It's a message.

"How d'you know that? How d'you know he didn't make a mistake? Just leave it there?"

"He wouldn't do that. He doesn't make mistakes."

"That's just your ego talking. You're Regiment-trained, he's Regiment-trained.

In your mind you can't make a mistake, therefore he can't make a mistake."

"All that I'm saying is that trained guys like him don't make mistakes concerning operational procedure. You arrive at an OP with a pencil, you leave with a pencil, end of story."

"OK. So what, in your opinion, is the message?"

"I think it's part and parcel with the nails. Some kind of reference to the undercover days. That knot hole was rather like a dead-letter drop, didn't you think? Perhaps returning the pencil is his way of saying that things have gone beyond words. That the only possible medium of communication left is murder."

She stared at him.

"My guess is that he's way ahead of us," said Alex.

"My guess is that he knew you'd bring in someone like me and so he put that pencil where only someone like me would find it."

"I found it," said Dawn.

"You know what I mean. It's a message for me. As if to say hello, brother. I was wondering when you'd be along."

"You think he wants to be caught?" asked Dawn.

"I don't know about that but I know he means to do a fair bit more killing first."

Dawn frowned.

"I'm not supposed to tell you this, but there's something that probably wasn't in those reports you were given. They analysed the nails that were used to kill Fenn and Gidley, and found something very strange indeed."

Alex looked at her.

"They were well over fifty years old. Nails haven't been made by that process or of that particular alloy since before the Second World War."

"The pencil," said Alex. Using a paper napkin he removed it from his shirt pocket. It was of dull, plain wood, and bore no marking of any kind.

They peered at it.

"I'll bet you anything you like it turns out to be the same age," said Dawn.

"Any idea what that's all about?"

"Search me." Dawn half smiled.

"Except that you've already done that once today, haven't you?"

"Not as thoroughly as I'd have liked," said Alex.

"I'm sure there are a few more surprises in store."

"More than you'll ever know," said Dawn.

FOURTEEN.

That afternoon Alex took a train to Hereford, picked up his car from the garage where it had been repaired, collected some clothes from his flat and drove out to the SAS base at Credenhill. There he went straight to see Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Leonard, the CO. Howard was expecting him, and the Adjutant showed Alex straight through to the spare, utilitarian office with the steel furniture and the black-and-white photos on the wall.

"So how's it going with the Box investigation?" asked Howard, pushing away the laptop computer at which he had been tentatively poking. The CO was a short, broad-shouldered Yorkshireman with untidy brown hair, an enquiring blue gaze and fists the size of frozen chickens. A few years back he had played rugby for the army and many of his former opponents still bore the scars to remember him by.

Bill Leonard was a far cry, Alex had always considered, from the public-schooled Ruperts who had preceded him. This was one of the reasons why Alex had decided to approach him and to disregard the order from Angela Fenwick not to discuss the Watchman case with hisS AS colleagues.

"They're not letting me anywhere near it," said Alex.

"My job is basically to wait on the sidelines until they find the guy, and then go in and waste him."

"Are they going to find him?"

"Doubt it. He may be nuts but he's still a lot faster on his feet than they are.

They've set up some lookalike in the home of the guy they suspect is next in line, but he'll suss it a mile off."

Howard nodded.

"I've seen his file. He looks pretty switched on. Or he certainly was then. You think he'll whack this next bloke?"

"I reckon I can probably cut down the odds of that happening if they'll let me.

But you know what they're like."

"I know exactly what they're like. What are you doing?"

"Well, I'm doing what I'm told, which basically means fuck all. The trouble is, I suspect this guy's expecting someone like me to come after him."

"He'd be a fool if he didn't expect that," said Howard, studying his massive fingers.

"You think he'll have a go at you?"

"If I get in his way, yes."

"You want to draw a Sig or something from the armoury?"

"It might be sensible. What I'd really like to do is speak to anyone who trained him. Are any of those blokes still contact able

Howard frowned.

"It was a fair old time ago, but you could give Frank Wisbeach a ring. His name's in the file as one of the Watchman instructors."

"Do you know where I could find him?"

"He was driving a minicab in town the last I heard of him, poor old sod. Clarion cabs, I think they're called."

"It might help to have a word," said Alex.

"Anything that gives me an angle on Meehan and on the way his mind might be working."

"If you do get an inside track, there could be a lot we can learn. About agent stress, breaking points and so on. We need a lot more information on that sort of thing."

"Well, if I find myself face to face to him, I'll ask him what exactly turned him into a serial killer," said Alex.

"How many people do you have to take out before they classify you as a serial killer?" Howard wondered aloud.

Alex shrugged.

"Four, I read. Up to that point you're just a killer. After four you're serial."

Howard smiled wolfishly.

"Like us, you mean?"

It was an hour before Frank Wisbeach returned Alex's call and when he did he was apologetic, explaining that he had been on an airport job. He was free that evening after 7.30, he told Alex, and they arranged to meet for a drink at a small pub on the outskirts of the city.

Driving back into town, Alex wondered what he should do about Sophie. For starters give her a call, he thought, and dialled her home number on his mobile. It rang unchecked; she hadn't put the answering machine on. He tried her mobile number but got the message service.

He didn't want to leave a message, he wanted to speak to her directly.

Something about the morning's encounter with Dawn Harding had made him want very much to sort things out with her.

Later, he told himself Later.

The Black Dog was not a pub that many Regiment members went to and this was why Alex had chosen it. It was a dim, dingy sort of place with an over-loud jukebox and the sour smell of spilt lager and cheese-and-onion crisps. Frank Wisbeach arrived shortly before eight and Alex was a little shocked by the sight of the gaunt figure in the cheap windcheater who had been his first Close Quarter Battle instructor.

"How are you, son?" asked Wisbeach, transferring a crumpled inch of roll-up to his left hand for the duration of their handshake.

"I heard they made you an officer."

"They did," said Alex.

"I'll be shuffling paper for the next few years.

"Don't knock it, son think of the pension. You're knackered before your time in this game. If it's not your knees it's your back. All those bloody Bergan runs.

Wisbeach certainly looked knackered, Alex reflected as he bought the first round. It was the old story that of the regimental hard-man who couldn't quite hack it without the army's visible and invisible support systems. Frank Wisbeach had left the SAS at the end of the 1980s after a distinguished career as an NCO which had taken in Oman, the Falklands War and several tours of Northern Ireland, and signed up with a private security company with training contracts in the Middle East. Alex was uncertain of the details, but the word was that a big client had then defaulted on months of back pay and expenses, bankrupting the company and several of its employees.

A series of body guarding jobs followed, but by then Wisbeach had been too old a dog to learn the ways of spoilt pop stars and bored Arab wives. A short fuse, an unwillingness to suffer fools gladly and a taste for the drink had ensured a swift professional decline, and by the mid-1990s he was living in a caravan and manning the doors in a provincial nightclub.

"So what brought you back to Hereford?" Alex asked, placing the other man's pint of bitter in front of him.

"I heard you were down in Luton."

"Marriage, mate. Marriage brought me back. I came up for a reunion with a few of the lads from the Regimental Association and somewhere along the line I can't quite remember the details but a pub lock-in was certainly involved I found myself proposing to Della. Arse on her like a four-tonner but a nice smile and a half-share in a hairdressing business on Fortescue Road. Frank, my lad, I thought, it's time you settled down. Ever drink so much you pissed yourself?"

"No, I don't think so.

"I was doing that most nights. And shitting myself too at weekends. There comes a point you review your options."

Alex nodded sympathetically.

"So I married Della fuck knows what she sees in me, but there you go and picked up a bit of cab bing to help with the bills. Best thing I ever did. You ever been married?"

Alex shook his head.

"Take my advice, son, save it. Let the army look after you for as long as it wants to and then find a woman with a comfy pair of tits on her and a bit of money of her own, and hang your fucking boots up.

"Sounds good," said Alex.

"It is good, mate," said Wisbeach, one-handedly rolling himself another cigarette.

"It is good."

The deftness of the gesture reminded Alex of the skilful combat instructor that the older man had once been.

"You taught me a lot, Frank."

Wisbeach shrugged and put a match to his roll-up.

"You were a good soldier, son. Saw that straight away."

"That's not what you said at the time!"

"Well, you've got to dish out the old bollocks, haven't you. That's what you're there for on Training Wing."

Alex smiled.

"I guess. Do you remember a guy called Joe Meehan?"

Sparks of wariness appeared in the other man's eyes. He seemed to sink into his cigarette smoke.

"It's a long time since I heard that name mentioned. A very long time."

"You trained him, didn't you?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Bill Leonard suggested I speak to you."

Wisbeach nodded slowly.

"Did he indeed. What's the whisper on the lad you mentioned, then?"

Alex wondered how much to confide. Sober, Wisbeach retained the Special Forces' soldier's habit of discretion. He hadn't even admitted to knowing Meehan.

But pissed-up . "The whisper is that he went over the water and they turned him."

Wisbeach looked Alex in the eye and Alex saw from the slow freeze of his expression that the former NCO had guessed what he had been ordered to do.

Knew that he was looking for Meehan in order to kill him.

For several moments neither man spoke. Above their heads, a pseudo-Victorian fan paddled stale cigarette smoke around the ceiling. On the jukebox, All Saints sang in mournful harmony.

"I'm sorry for the both of you," Wisbeach said eventually, regarding his nicotined fingers with a kind of depthless exhaustion.

"There's no fucking end to it all, is there?"

"No," Alex agreed.

"There isn't."

"How will you ..

"I don't know," Alex said.

"I just have to locate him." Wisbeach seemed to come to a decision.

"Joe Meehan was very good," he said briskly.

"Technically you couldn't touch him. He was one of those people weapons always worked for. I was the same, so I knew it when I saw it. Mentally, too, he was very tough. Not in a laugh-it-off sort of way like most Regiment blokes more like one of those Palestinian or Tamil Tiger suicide bombers. He was a true believer, if you know what I mean."

"Was that a strength or a weakness?"

"Well, you wouldn't have wanted to go out on the piss with him, put it like that.

He was a total loner and dead serious all the time. But then we weren't training stand-up comedians, we were training secret agents and assassins. In fact, I felt sorry for the poor bastard."

"Why?"

"Because guys like that always destroy themselves in the end. They just bash on and on, never giving up, until there's nothing left of them." He stared at the huddle of customers near the window and took a deep swallow of his beer.

"I'm told they're burying young Hammond in the morning."

"That's right," Alex confirmed.

Wisbeach shook his head.

"Africa, eh. What a fucking dump of a place to cop it. Get you another?"

"Yeah. Same again please."

Wisbeach made his way to the bar. As he returned with the two full glasses three teenagers wearing earrings and flashy sports gear pushed roughly past him, spilling both drinks. None bothered to look round or to apologise.

"Excuse me, lads," said Wisbeach mildly, turning to them.

"Bit of an accident.

Do you mind filling up these glasses?"

The three looked round, incredulous and sniggering.

"Fuck off, Grandpa," said the heaviest, whose doughy features were topped by a greasy centre parting.

Bloody hell, thought Alex. Here we go.

"Forget it, Frank," he called out across the room.

But the ex-NCO was not of a mind to forget it, and placed the spilt drinks carefully on the bar.

"Come on, lads," he said, the ghost of a smile touching his features.

"Don't let's spoil the evening with bad manners.

At waist level, where the barman couldn't have seen it even if he'd been looking, there was the flash of a blade.

"You heard me," said greasy-head.

"Now fuck oil!"

Wisbeach frowned, as if disappointed. Then a heavy-knuckled hand shot out, grabbed the knife-wielder's neck and squeezed hard. There was a moment's absolute stillness. The Baha Boys boomed on the jukebox.

Wisbeach's knuckles tightened. The knife dropped to the floor and its owner's mouth snapped convulsively open, issuing a spray of half-chewed potato crisps and phlegm on to Wisbeach's sleeve.

The ex-NCO grinned.

"Good here, isn't it?" he said to the other two louts. His tone was conversational. For the first time that evening, thought Alex, the old bugger looked genuinely cheerful.

As anoxia kicked in, greasy-head's eyes crossed, the shiny nylon of his Adidas track pants darkened with urine and he sank half-conscious to his knees.

When Wisbeach finally released him he lay retching and sobbing on the floor beneath the bar. If the barman had noticed anything, he showed no sign of having done so.

"Two pints please, lads," Wisbeach said quietly, addressing the two survivors of the incident.

"You can bring them over to our table."

Stunned by the sight of their leader's humiliation, they nodded their agreement.

"Better?" Alex smiled when they had taken delivery of their drinks.

"Much," said Wisbeach. He leaned forward.

"Listen, son, don't go around saying you got this from me, but if you really want to know about Joe Meehan, the person to talk to is Denzil Connolly. Denzil was on one of those Khmer Rouge RWW training packages with me a really shit-hot instructor and he was in charge of Meehan at Tregaron before they dropped him over the water or whatever the hell they did with the poor sod. The two of them spent two or three months living in each others' pockets. So if anyone knew him..."

"Any idea where I'll find Connolly?"

"Sorry, mate. Not a clue."

Alex nodded and the two men drank their beers in silence.

"Want another?" asked Alex eventually.

"I won't, thanks," Wisbeach replied.

"I've got a couple more hours' driving."

He stood up, gaunt and tall, and extended a hand to Alex.

"Fuck of a business, son.

"Yours or mine?"

The ex-NCO smiled.

"Watch yourself, OK?"

FIFTEEN.

Five minutes later Alex was walking towards Hereford city centre. The encounter had depressed him, Don Hammond's funeral was tomorrow and he felt like cheering himself up.

As he left the outskirts of the city the streets got busier. There was a slight drizzle but this hadn't deterred the good-time crowd and noisy groups were swinging from bar to bar along the shining pavements, anxious to pour their salaries down their throats as rapidly and with as much shouting and laughter as possible. As the noise and the Friday night smell of beer and cheap perfume swallowed him up, Alex felt his spirits lift. A fat blonde girl winked at him and her friends giggled and screeched he recognised them as part of the troopy-groupie crowd that often hung out at The Inkerman in the hope of being 'trapped' by young SAS troopers.

"Yo, Alex!" It was Andy Maddocks from "D' Squadron and Lance Wilford of the RWW, dressed to kill in their civvy going-out clothes.

"Hey!" said Alex, moving out of the way of the lurching crowd on the pavement.

"What are you flash buggers doing back here?"

"Big turnaround after the hostage-rescue," said Andy Maddocks.

"They're sending another squadron out next week."

"And the RWW team?"

Lance Wilford shrugged.

"You disappeared, Don's dead, Ricky Sutton's having his arse mended in hospital... I guess they felt they ought to send in a new lot. Give the SL government their money's worth."

Alex nodded.

"They pulled me out for a liaison job," he told the other two men in answer to their unspoken question.

"I'm up here for Don's funeral tomorrow."

The others nodded soberly and then, brightening, Maddocks turned to Alex.

"Why notjoin us for a few bev vies. And possibly a chat about the weather with a trio of nymphomaniac nurses, preferably still in their uniforms?"

"And suspender-belts," added Lance wistfully.

"Sounds good to me," said Alex.

A few minutes later they were crammed into a smoky corner table with pints in front of them. Andy, unwilling to waste time, was craning his head from side to side, looking for spare women.

"I thought you were married, Andy," murmured Alex.

"Separated. Wendy bin ned me when the squadron got back from Kosovo."

"Any particular reason?"

"Mental cruelty's what she told the lawyer. Which I suppose is as good a way as any of saying that she was shagging a foot baller

"A foot baller. You're kidding?"

"No, she and some friend of hers who goes out with one of the reserves took to going to all the United home games. With predictable fucking consequences.

"Manchester United?" asked Lance.

"No, you womble, Hereford United."

Lance reflected.

"I was going to say, if it'd been a Man U player it'd almost've been worth it. I'd let Ryan Giggs shag my wife."

"You haven't got a wife. Giggsy wouldn't want to shag any woman that'd marry you. What'd he want to bother with some slag from..."

"Are you calling my future wife a slag?"

"Well, she is, isn't she? Be honest."

They all laughed, Lance loudest of all.

This is good, thought Alex. This is real.

"So, do you reckon you'll be getting any Hereford United tickets?" Lance asked, after a short drinking break.

He ducked just in time to avoid Andy's fist.

"Where did the mental cruelty come in?" asked Alex.

"Told Wendy I didn't want kids," said Andy.

"Couldn't bear the thought of having a son or a daughter who lost its dad. It's one thing being killed, it's another lying there knowing you're going to break your child's heart.

"So why d'you marry her in the first place?"

"Price she put on her virtue. No white dress, no snakeysnakey."

Alex nodded.

"Where did you go on your honeymoon?"

"Belfast," said Andy.

"With the rest of the squadron... Lance, mate, I think we're in business. Go and ask those three to come over. Her in the blue top and the two with her."

"Why me? You go!"

"You're a fucking corporal, now get your arse over there." Alex would have said it was impossible to get anyone else round the table but somehow the three managed to jam themselves in. One of them, a cheerful, round-faced girl with what Frank Wisbeach would without question have called 'comfy tits', was practically sitting on his knee.

"Whassat?" she asked, squirming uncomfortably.

"My mobile," said Alex apologetically.

"What's your name?"

"Gail," said the girl, snapping her lighter beneath a king-size Pall Mall. She smelt of make-up and Pernod and synthetic perfume and her hair inches from his face was a curtain of wheatish blonde, as flat as if it had been ironed. Next to him, Andy Maddocks was very seriously informing the girl in the blue top that the three of them were gay.

"Bollocks!" said the girl in the blue top.

"We know what you are. We sussed you ten minutes ago from the tans."

"And the muscles," said Gail, reaching across the table to tweak Lance's tattooed bicep.

"And the crap haircuts," volunteered the third girl to shrieks from the other two.

"We're not fucking stupid."

"It was worth a try," said Andy.

"I was going to suggest you try and convert us to heterosexuality."

"And just how would we do that?" asked the girl in the blue top.

"Well..." began Andy.

For an hour the six of them sat, drank and laughed. Alex could feel himself getting drunker and drunker but the fact didn't worry him in the least. He had never been a regular pub- goer but right now he was having the best time that he could remember. This was the reality, this smoky bar corner and the press of the crowd and the laughter of his mates and the weight of Gail's thigh against his and the tableful of empty glasses. If he was going to take his officer status seriously, he supposed glumly, he was going to have to wind this sort of activity down.

So how should he play it? Up or out? Stay with the army in the knowledge that the best was behind him or bale out and take his chances in civvy street? The latter sounded more tempting but what would his life actually consist of, given that soldiering was the only trade he knew? Babysitting overpaid celebrities who at best would treat him as a paid accessory? Waiting in the rain outside the fashionable restaurants where Sophie and her friends went? He couldn't see himself taking that route. He didn't want to end up like Frank Wisbeach, taking his frustrations out on delinquent teenagers.

Contract soldiering, perhaps. Working for the highest bidder. Fucking up the lives of third-world citizens on behalf of multinationals like Shell or Monsanto?

All in all, he thought, he'd rather go back to Clacton and take the garage off his dad's hands. But then he couldn't quite see Sophie hunched up against the sea wind eating haddock and chips from the bag, or chucking a rubber bone for the dog, or watching Eas tEnders

Sophie. He should give her a bell.

"You're a quiet one, aren't you," said Gail.

"You haven't said a word in ten minutes."

"Sorry," he said.

"I was thinking."

"What about?"

"The future, I suppose.

"Well, we could start off with another drink." She glanced at her two friends, who were subtly but definitely paired off with Andy and Lance.

"Same again?" he asked her.

"Pernod and black?"

"Yeah. I'll come with you."

On their unsteady way to the bar, he found his arm encircling her waist and her body moving into alignment with his. He felt her hip-joint articulating beneath his hand, the soft weight of her breast against his side.

"You're an officer, your mate said."

"Er, yeah."

"You don't sound like an officer."

He grinned.

"What do I sound like?"

She frowned and pouted up her lips.

"Oh... I don't know. Like the others, I s'pose."

"Well, that's what I am like."

"You're not, though. They're, like, dead lad dish and up for a laugh, and you're not like that at all. You just pretend to be." She narrowed her eyes, leant against him and lowered her voice.

"I bet you're a right hard bastard. Have you got a girlfriend? Don't answer that of course you have. Just don't tell me about her."

"As long as you don't tell me about your boyfriend."

"I haven't got a boyfriend." The crowd propelled them forward against the bar.

"I've got a bloody husband, worse luck."

Alex turned to stare at her but at that moment the barman materialised in front of them, eyebrow raised. Alex ordered himself a sixth pint and ajameson's whiskey chaser, and Gail her fifth Pernod and black currant

"Married?" he asked flatly.

"He's away. With someone else." She glanced up at him.

"Don't ask, just be nice to me.

She was pretty, he thought. Pretty eyes. And a mouth and body to chase the ghosts away. He slipped his hand under the bottom of her sweater, felt the taut waistband of her jeans and the warm flesh above.

The drinks arrived and they backed away from the bar.

"Where d'you live?" he asked her.

"I don't want to go there," she said. She touched his cheek with the back of her fingers.

"What about you?"

"Walking distance."

In the flat he bolted the door and closed the curtains as she walked slowly around, touching things.

"There's dust everywhere." She smiled.

"I've been away. Coffee? And I've got some Bushmills somewhere?"

"Sounds good."

In the kitchen area the strip light was on the flicker. Alex was kissing her against the wall and she was running her hands up his back when the kettle boiled.

In the bedroom there was a jumble of mostly green kit against the wall waterproofs, thermals, medical packs, a water purifier, sleeping bags and stuff sacks into which, earlier that day, Alex had tossed the shoulder-holstered Glock pistol and accessories he'd signed out of the armoury at Credenhill.

If Gail noticed this, she made no comment, just lowered her drink and kicked off her shoes.

"Music?"

In answer Alex directed her to the miniature sound system and pile of CDs that sat, as dusty as everything else, on a shelf.

"This is the strangest collection I've ever seen," she said wonderingly.

"Miles Davis, Britney Spears, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Teletubbies, Bridget Jones's Diary.

"It belonged to a guy who got killed last year," said Alex.

"I think there were some Christmas presents for his family among it.

She shook her head.

"The lives you people lead." She switched the system on and selected the Britney Spears CD.

On the bed, or rather on the double mattress that served Alex as a bed, they undressed each other. She was wearing a tight lilac sweater which she pulled away from her face as he took it off so as not to smear her make-up. Beneath it, she amply filled a black lace bra. Smiling, she allowed him to search behind her back for a moment before pointing to the rosebud clasp at the front. He undid it and lowered his head. Her fingers knotted in his hair.

Finally they were both naked. She was pale-skinned and soft as ice cream, and there was a dreamy-eyed passivity about her which he found a vast relief after Sophie. She was his all of her, unconditionally and for as long as he wanted.

Breathing in her muskily synthetic aura part pub, part Boots perfume counter he ran his hands over the impossible softness of her breasts. When he reached the inside of her thighs she gasped and drew her knees apart.

She tasted, in some curious way, of Alex's memories of his childhood, of sweat and closeness and sea spray, of the time before he had killed anyone. She moved like the sea too -slowly and from somewhere deep within herself After a time he moved back up her body, manoeuvred himself inside her and forgot about Sophie altogether.

SIXTEEN.

She left early, while he pretended to be asleep. He woke for a second time to find a note on the pillow and a daytime telephone number a work number, he guessed.

Why had she left? Not wanting to spoil things with the awkwardness of a morning after? He smiled in many ways theirs had been the perfect relationship.

He shook his head and immediately wished he hadn't. It felt as if there was a cannon ball rolling around in it. The inside of his mouth was parched and sour, his stomach felt uneasy and he had a morbid thirst. Not for the first time he reflected that it wasn't the drinks that made you pissed that fucked you up, it was the completely unnecessary ones that you drank when you were already pissed. It was those Scotches that you ended up with just because it felt right, somehow, to wind the evening up with a glass of spirits in your hand.