The pub was down the road from the launderette, and round the corner, "You know what you are, Penn? You are a jam my bastard." The pub, Basil's 'watering hole', was mean and dirty and dark. There was a table beyond the bar that was his, out of danger from the darts board. Basil, one-time detective sergeant, had made the table his own since retirement from the Metropolitan Police nineteen years back. Most lunch times, Basil was at the table with Deirdre. "You milk that one, my son, because it's cream for the cat. You spin it out, my son." Jim didn't use the pub at lunch time, left Basil clear with Deirdre, but he came by at five most evenings. Jim, one-time detective constable in the Fraud Squad, liked a game of pool in the bar and a swift pint, or three, with Basil. It was where the hard business of Alpha Security was talked through. "They don'c come on trees, young fellow, they're gifts from heaven. You fell on your feet, young fellow." Henry, one-time Telecom engineer, came to the pub only at Christmas, birthday, or celebration time, and nursed orange juice. Henry was valuable, always sober, and spent his drinks money on bug equipment and the gear for tapping hard lines, and the new pride and joy was a UHF room transmitter built into a thirteen-amp wall socket. "Milk it

…" "Run it…" "Enjoy it…" It wasn't talked about, but Penn assumed that Basil and Jim and Henry did odd-job work for Five. Work that was boring and work that was illegal would be farmed out, Penn assumed.