The body was of his man. He had felt it necessary to be there. For the first time in his life he knew the responsibility for the death of a man.

He would not have wished to have been anywhere else.

There was the stamping of feet around him, to inject warmth, and shrill laughter, to pretend that it didn't matter and that life went ahead for the living, and coughing and spat phlegm, to clear the lungs before the walk up the hill to inspect a body that was not wired to a detonator and a pressure plate and explosives.

They had two hundred yards to walk up the lane.

He stepped out briskly. There was an army major leading and two police officers and their photographer were behind him. The rain was in earnest. It fell from the brow of his cap, dripped onto his scarf, ran at the collar of his coat, clung at his trousers, squirmed in his feet.

It was eighteen days since he had last seen his player. A meeting like most of the others of the last year. The dark side of a car park, well away from the front entrance of the hotel, at least a dozen miles from the player's own neighbourhood. The player had been fine, had chain-smoked but that was normal, had talked and even made what passed for a joke – and that wasn't normal. He'd got nothing dramatic, nothing that was going to win the war, but nothing either that indicated any specific anxiety. The player had taken his money. He had slapped his player's back, as he always did, to give him confidence. He had waved the poor bastard away, seen the rear lights of his car head off into the dark.

When they were close to it, almost upon it, he saw the white of the flesh of the shoulder and the glistening black of the dustbin bag.