Slowly he gazed around him. There were young soldiers from a Fusilier regiment kneeling in the water-filled ditches beside the lane, aiming their rifles and their machine guns out towards the further hedgelines that were now blurred by the first rain spits of the squall that rushed to meet them. There were policemen, encased in their all-weather clothing, clutching their clipboards and Scenes of Crime notebooks, and talking with urgency into their radio sets. There were the small white bungalows further up and further down the hillside, with closed front doors, and peat smoke streaming from the chimneys, where the answer of the farmers and their wives and children would be that they had seen nothing and heard nothing and knew nothing. There were two men, huge in the body armour that they wore under their camouflaged combat uniforms, walking back down the lane, and the one passed the other a bright cigarette packet and dropped the cellophane and gold paper wrapping onto the tarmac, and took a box of matches from his colleague. He saw it all and he hated it all.

There was a stirring of the soldiers and policemen in front and behind him.

The cold bit into him. He had wrapped his scarf tight around the lower part of his face and pulled his flat cap down over his forehead, not against the weather but so that his identity and his features would not be seen by the priest who had earlier been allowed to go forward up the lane to whisper the Last Rites and the Act of Contrition into the ear of the body.

It was three days now since the report had reached his desk of the finding of the body. He hated everything that was around him. He knew, of course, the name of the man who lay dead halfway between where he stood and the horizon of the lane. The fields on either side of the lane had long since been swept by the electronics that the military used, and the hedgerows had been pronounced clear of booby-trap explosives and command wires. The helicopter's vantage point ensured that the high ground to the right of the lane and ahead was free of snipers, and now the bomb men, ambling back down the lane, had passed the body as safe for inspection.