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entrance and walked away to find a bus or an underground train.
    He shrugged into his anorak. So difficult, Ernest Wilkins thought, to find men who were not degraded and disgusted by the Belfast work.
    He came out of his office, closed the door and locked it, and walked past Brennard's clean, cleared desk. So extraordinarily difficult to find men who could cope with the Belfast work, and not be scarred.
    He was out to whist that evening and should hurry himself if he was not to miss the first rubber.
    ". . . What I was told to say was that there's a powerful anger here about it. There's people talking on the radio about being ashamed to be Irish. Army Council, Chief of Staff, nobody likes that."
    The woman was making the call because the man who would otherwise have made it believed himself to be under close surveillance. They were uncertain in the Organisation as to the capability of the telephone engineers working for Five to trace calls made from pay phones.

    There was a queue waiting to use the box. She had turned her back on them so that she could not see their impatience.
    " . . . And I was told to say that next time round they're expecting you to be double certain that it's the target, not his wife and not his kids. They said to tell you they're going to put an apology into An Phoblacht. They said you should know that they don't like having to do t h a t . . . "
    She didn't know the face or the name of the man, and he had said nothing beyond the codeword.
    " . . . They also said that what you done up to this last one was just brilliant . . . Oh, and the new money's coming through, and they said like can you spend it a bit slower. It's difficult to come by. That's all that I was to tell you."
    She put the telephone down and the handle of the receiver glistened.
    She felt the sweat in her palm. She was nothing in the Organisation but her brother was in his twelfth year of a life sentence and she was happy to be used. She was sweating because she had had to allow the telephone to ring out at the far end for a full two minutes before it was picked up, before the codeword was given her, and then she had to repeat the message that they had given her. As far as she was concerned, any man who had worked on the mainland was a hero. She thought it quite wrong that he should be slagged for what he had done.
    She walked away up the Andersonstown Road of West Belfast.
    His enemy were the retired and the elderly who walked on the esplanade with their lap dogs that were wrapped against the sea weather with little monogrammed coats, and the teenagers who smashed what they could not steal, and the fishermen off the trawlers who were waiting for the doors of the bars to open, and the driver who took the empty bus from Torquay to Brixham, and the man who stood beside the heaps of his Sunday newspapers that were covered against the spray by plastic sheeting. They were all his enemy. He had chosen this out-of-season resort town, and it was the only place he felt safe.
    Never truly safe, God knows,
    and among his enemies he would never be content. And on Sunday always more alone, more keenly missing his Kevin and his Attracta. In far too long he had had no word from his Attracta, not heard her voice.
    He felt such an ache of homesickness, of longing to be with his boy and his Attracta, it was a physical pain.
    The newspaper seller was smiling at him, friendly. He pointed to the papers that he wanted and he searched out the exact change from his pocket. He spoke as rarely as was possible, and never engaged in conversation with anyone he didn't know. He could change his face and his hair and his clothes, his accent he could not alter. The newspaper seller, his enemy, wished him a good morning and thanked him, and made a remark about the weather brightening from the west. He read the headline of the paper on top, and saw the photograph of the destroyed Volvo. Under it was a quote from a retired Secretary of State, one of the worst of the