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a tabloid newspaper, and had, late at night, answered the door bell at his mistress's flat. At a range of three feet he had been blasted back across the hallway by five shots, fired semiautomatic from a Kalashnikov rifle. Scenes of Crime had put it together rather well. He had picked up the ejected cartridge cases. He would have been wearing gloves, his hands would have been awkward. Scenes of Crime reckoned that he had shoved the cartridge cases probably into a hip pocket, and in pulling his hand back out he brought with it a £5
    note. Probably his hip pocket because he hadn't seen the folded note fall to the floor. Everybody in the block fingerprinted, every regular tradesman, and the pristine thumbprint sent across the water to the R.U.C.
    " . . . We have a name, we have evidence, we have a four-year-

    old photograph. It's just a matter of time, Prime Minister."
    The Commander saw the tired and wan face of the Prime Minister.
    He sipped quietly at his tea.
    "It's just that we seem so helpless."
    "Oh, we'll get him. Some day, some place."
    The anger started to the Prime Minister's face, the blood coursed through his cheek veins, bulged corridors on his forehead. "When will you get him, where?"
    The Commander had been back eleven days from Belfast. He had been taken for a helicopter ride. Three thousand feet up, rolling in a Lynx, clear of the range of a 12.7 mm heavy machine- gun, he had been shown the small farms, the close-set villages, and the bleak gale-swept landscape.
    "When? When he comes home . . . Where? Where he's from, Altmore Mountain."
    There was no complaint from Ernest Wilkins, just a personal sadness. It was so hard to find the right sort of man to send across. He had thought this man ideal, and the sadness came from the knowledge that he had been wrong. He listened.
    "You can understand this, Mr Wilkins. It's not what I'm supposed to say . . . I cared what happened to him."
    Wilkins understood well enough, and if he had appeared distracted it was probably because he was trying to imagine Brennard in this experienced man's place. It was a hell of a job to fill. He paid close attention, but he said nothing.
    "Most of the time, in the early days, he was so scared that he used to shake when I met him. He was more scared of us than he was of his own, and more frightened of going back inside than anything. He loved those kids. That's what it came down to. I think he'd have topped himself if he'd gone back inside. The money was just gravy, it was the threat of going back inside that held him to us. And then he'd begun to get quite good. It wasn't high-grade stuff because he was only a bottle washer, a volunteer, but he knew what was going on and he drove a bit for them, moving stuff. That's when it starts to get really bloody, when he has something to tell you. It's my fault, you see, I put the report in to Task Co-ordinating Group. Parker wasn't there. God knows where Parker was. So I gave the report to bloody Hobbes, and Hobbes chucked it onto the T.C.G. table. They were going to do a hit. Eddie knew the guns were being moved, but he didn't know the target. It wasn't discussed properly, it was all too fast. They were moving the rifles the next evening, and a V.C.P. was set up. The police wanted arrests. It must have been something said by one of the detectives who questioned them at Gough R.U.C. Somebody slipped up, because as soon as they saw a solicitor the word was back into the system that it hadn't just been an accident. The tout hunt started. The Q.M. knew they were moving the firepower, and Eddie knew because he'd collected them from the cache, and the two guys in the car. It all pointed to Eddie
    . . . You know what Hobbes said? Sorry, but he's such a prick, that man.
    He said Eddie was nothing more than a terrorist, and not worth crying over."
    Late Saturday afternoon. The street lights on. Curzon Street deserted.
    He watched from the upper window of Leconfield House as Faber came out of the main