"Yes."

"You'll go steadily?"

"Yes."

The rain dribbled over Mattie's face, and caught at his trimmed and silver moustache and darkened the front of his shirt. The boy's face was a blur in front of him and masked by the fullness of his beard.

"If anything happened to you, while you're away, Harriet and I, and the girls, we'd be…" Mattie squeezed the boy's shoulders.

"Why should it, sir?"

They parted.

He walked home. Mattie felt dirtied because he encouraged the folly of the boy, and yet he did not know how he could have dissuaded him. And he had the thick bulk of the envelope in his pocket, and the boy had said that he would be going in lor longer, and that the reports would be more regular. He thought that in a decent world Matthew Cedric Furniss would deserve to be flailed alive.

He fervently hoped that Harriet would still be up and waiting for him. He needed to talk to her, play a record, and be warmed and wanted. He had never in three years seen the boy cry, and the boy had murdered two Revolutionary Guards and planned to go back in again with his present in a plastic bag. The boy was talking about stand-off and armour-piercing.

He was talking about war, dammit, and the boy was no less than a son to him.

Mattie said an abbreviated prayer for Charlie Eshraq as he crossed at the traffic lights outside his London flat. And if the boy had bedded his daughters then good luck to him.

He was soaked. His face ran with water. His sodden trousers were clinging to his shins and his shoes squelched. When he looked up he saw the light behind the curtain welcoming him.

There could be as many as 50,000 persons addicted to heroin inside the United Kingdom.

On that night one of them, Lucy Barnes, had failed to compensate for the increased purity of the dose with which she injected herself. Alone, in a coma and on a stinking mattress, she choked to death on her own vomit.