It was what he wanted, what he prepared himself for, to be taken onto the team working on DONNELLY JJ. He had spent two and a half hours after three o'clock trying to extract from the computer database any pattern in the present campaign of attacks. It was about all that he had come up with, that there had not been a shooting or a bombing for seven days, the longest clear time in ten weeks.

"You at home over the weekend?"

"Yes, Mr Wilkins." There was a gym near his flat and if he left home over the weekend he would go there, pump weights; he would fight the heavy bag on Saturday for two hours and he would do a half-marathon on Sunday.

"Not escaping to the country?"

"No, Mr Wilkins."

"Thank you, Bren…"

Old men with nothing more in their lives to fear came out to walk behind the hearse to the parish church, and women who had slipped into their shopping coats against the cruel wind, and a few children with them. Not more than 150 souls took it upon themselves to accompany the family of Eddie Dignan, the informer, to the funeral Mass. Most of that tight community in the housing estate stayed indoors, or gathered at their front gates. He was the man who had betrayed his own. Eddie Dignan had taken the Crown's gold. His widow, and she was much liked by her neighbours, walked with her children around her, and those that knew her best said afterwards that her face showed more shame than grief. They walked behind the hearse, the widow of the tout, the children of the tout, the friends of the tout. A little tide of hard, pain-etched faces went slowly past the news cameras, and up the steps into the church.

Across the plain coffin, over the small bunches of fresh flowers, over the heads of the widow and her wee ones, over the bowed shoulders of the few inside the great church, the priest said, "… Eddie was trapped between two groups of unscrupulous men, one of which – as covert agents of the state – has a skein of respectability masking its work of dark corruption.