He still experienced the sledgehammer blow of shock. He reckoned he always would. He stared grimly across the scene. He had been told in the car coming down that James Tennyson, late of the Northern Ireland Office, now with the Department of Trade and Industry, had been warned that his name was on a list passed from Dublin nine months before, and told also that a local Crime Prevention Officer had been to his home to make recommendations on a security system that wouldn't eat half of a senior civil servant's salary. And he had been told that the man was ill, too ill to go to the office that day, that his wife had taken the Volvo rather than her own smaller car to go with their two children to collect some others for a music class. Tennyson had been taken to a brother's house in Kent.

It was pitiful, they were so naked, these men and their families. The Commander stood alone. He was tall, straight in the back. He tugged continually at his heavy moustache.

The car, metallic grey, was just recognisable as a Volvo. The two nearside doors were completely off. The roof, with the splintered sun hatch at the apex, had expanded to a jagged pyramid. The bonnet was nowhere to be seen and a far-side front wheel was gone. Close to a window frame was the chalked outline of a small body shape and a buckled shoe and one half of a violin case.

The car had cleared the drive, probably bounced in the gutter, and been almost in the middle of the road when the device exploded. The garden fence was flattened back onto the flower bed, the gates were off their hinges and mangled, a bare cherry tree was snapped off at its roots. The front windows of the house were blown in, but the curtains were now drawn and flapping in the wind. He knew the age of the girls, and the name of Tennyson's w i f e… He wasn't even important. He had once been a civil servant doing whatever civil servants do, but in Belfast.