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off-white crystal, nodded, and returned it to Frankie.
    “I think we can take the jellies and the Es on trust. Just see if Amsterdam’s sent us doves or butterflies.”
    “Looks like doves in this one,” said Frankie nervously, peering at a bag of Ecstasy tablets. “Must be using up old stock.”
    The same operation was applied to the other three boxes. Carefully, Frankie packed a rucksack with the bags of Ecstasy, temazepam, and methamphetamine crystal, topping the load off with a T-shirt and a pair of dingy Y-fronts.
    “The butterflies go to Basildon, Chelmsford, Brentwood, Romford and Southend,” said Eastman. “The doves to Harlow, Braintree, Colchester—”
    His phone rang, and he held up a hand, indicating that Frankie should wait. As the conversation progressed he glanced at him once or twice, but Frankie was staring out over the shop floor, apparently engrossed in the progress of a fork-lift truck.
    Was he using? Eastman wondered. Or was it just the gambling? Should he offset the morning’s stick with a bit of carrot—push a couple of fifties into his back pocket on the way out?
    In the end he decided not to. The lesson had to be learned.

 

    F araj Mansoor,” said Charles Wetherby, returning his tortoiseshell reading glasses to his top pocket. “Name mean anything to you?”
    Liz nodded. “Yes—person of that name bought a fake UK driving licence last weekend in one of the northern ports . . . Bremerhaven, I think? German liaison flashed him to us yesterday.”
    “Any terrorist form?”
    “I ran him through the database. There’s a Faraj Mansoor who’s on a long list logged by Pakistan liaison of all those spoken to or contacted by Dawood al Safa in the course of his visit to Peshawar earlier this year.”
    “Al Safa the ITS bagman? The one Mackay was telling us about yesterday?”
    “Yes, that one. This Mansoor—and it’s got to be quite a common name—is identified as one of half a dozen employees of an auto repair shop on the Kabul road. Apparently al Safa stopped there and looked at some second-hand vehicles. Pakistan liaison had a couple of guys on his tail and when al Safa moved on they dropped a man off to list the employees.”
    “And that’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    Wetherby nodded pensively. “The reason I’m asking is that for some reason I can’t presently fathom, Geoffrey Fane’s just called me with a request to be kept in the loop.”
    “About Mansoor?” asked Liz, surprised.
    “About Mansoor. I had to tell him that, as things stood, there was no loop.”
    “And?”
    “And that was it. He thanked me and hung up.”
    Liz allowed her eyes to wander round the bare walls. Wondered why Wetherby had called her to his office for a conversation which could easily have taken place over the phone.
    “Before you go, Liz, is everything all right? I mean, are you . . . OK?”
    She met his gaze. He was someone whose face, try as she might, she could never quite summon from memory. Sometimes she could recall the dead-leaf brown of the hair and eyes, sometimes the wry asymmetry of the nose and mouth, but the precise collision of his features evaded her. Even now, facing him, he seemed elusive. As always, a subtle irony seemed to pervade their professional relationship, as if they met at other times and on some different basis.
    But they never had, and outside the context of their work Liz knew very little about him. There was a wife who was supposed to have some sort of chronic health problem, and there were a couple of boys at school. They lived somewhere on the river—Shepperton, perhaps, or was it Sunbury? One of those Ratty, Toad and Mole places out to the west.
    But that was about the limit of her knowledge. As to his tastes, interests, or what car he drove, she had no idea.
    “Do I look as if I’m not OK?”
    “You look fine. But I know this Marzipan business hasn’t been easy. He’s very young, isn’t he?”
    “Yes. He is.”
    Wetherby nodded obliquely. “He’s