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jacket, trainer shoes without socks, lounged alone. The trouble with Beagle was that he looked not so much implausible as subtly menacing in the context of the National Portrait Gallery. He even attracted the attention of one of the uniformed attendants who spoke to him.
    'I'm unemployed, right? And it's free here, right? Any other questions?' was Beagle's response.
    'You're asked not to touch the frames of the pictures,' said the attendant pleasantly. 'That's right,' said a young man with a rather high voice standing next to Beagle, self-importantly. 'There's a lot of history here, you know, and it belongs to everyone.' It was Fox. Beagle glared at him. Lamb, close to Monkey, felt the older man stir angrily.
    'Just what we don't want to happen,' he muttered, 'calling attention to us. Beagle mustn't do that. And what Fox said was unnecessary.'
    It was then that Lamb came up with the idea of rendezvousing on the Tube, 'where you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it,' as she put it and then blushed (although Lamb rarely blushed). She blushed because Beagle looked at her, a hard slightly mocking look. Afterwards Beagle told Lamb that was when he first decided to have her.
    'You were so sweet and innocent, Lambkin, so polite. One of these days, Beagle to have a taste of Lamb. That was the resolution.'
    At the time Lamb corrected her statement to 'where everybody meets everybody'. And so - after an appreciative hum, hum, a raising of the upper lip and eyebrow from Monkey, the Underground Plan was born.
    It proved strangely easy to carry out, given that Lamb's original unguarded remark — 'you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it' - was undeniably true about the London Underground system; even if opinions might vary as to who 'absolutely anybody' was. The seven members of the cell were all of them physically common or unremarkable types - which was in fact the third principle on which Monkey had selected them originally.
    Beagle for example was, to the outward eye, an apparent loafer of vaguely aggressive demeanour; a prejudiced observer might put him down as unemployed 'and happy with it; the sort who doesn't even want to work.' But there were after all many such travelling by Tube. In essence, Beagle's medium height, his neat features, lightish-brown hair, lightly tanned skin all combined to make him unremarkable: a common type. It was Lamb who knew that the body beneath the T-shirt and baggy trousers was hard, muscular — and scarred.
    Pussy on the other hand had an air of silent self-righteousness, the air of one waiting for someone to light up a cigarette in order to ask them to extinguish it, which made her a common enough type too. She was also the mistress of the uninteresting-looking plastic shopping-bag, providing herself with an extraordinary variety of them as the weeks passed; what the logos of the bags had in common was that you could not possibly want to know more about the contents of any bag emblazoned with them. Pussy, although fat, was not so fat that you would remember her for exceptional obesity; just heavy, in the way that some women over a certain age are inclined to spread in the hips and bosom so that the waist is gradually eliminated.
    In the same way, Fox, although on the short side, was certainly no dwarf; his lack of height was not even particularly noticeable unless he was standing side by side with a girl, say, Lamb. Slender as Lamb was, she topped Fox by an inch or two. The most noticeable thing about Fox originally had been his habit of bringing his mongrel dog, an aged bulldoggish sort of animal, to Innoright meetings. The hairless dog, with its crushed apologetic face, had made an odd contrast with the neatly dressed young man.
    The dog, called Noel - 'for Coward, because as a result of my training, he doesn't get into fights' - had caused some dissension at early Innoright meetings; his continued presence being in the end responsible for the