He had told the player often enough that his life was sacred, that no risk would be taken with his safety. And he would never know how his player had been discovered. It could have been because of his knowing of the movement of the two Kalashnikovs in the car that had been stopped a month back at the apparently random vehicle checkpoint at which two volunteers had been arrested. It could have been because he had flashed his money in a bar when the whole estate knew he hadn't been in work since he came out of gaol. It could have been because he'd taken drink and the adrenalin of the double life had pushed out some careless remark. Whatever the reason, the player was dead, and the player's life had been his responsibility.

They always hooded them. They always took the shoes off them; in that community it was the ultimate shame to die barefoot. He took the black plastic in his hands and ripped it. He saw the bruising on the face, and the left eye puffed shut, and the front tooth missing. He saw the blood mess of the bullet's entry wound.

He nodded. It was his player. He pushed himself up from the grass.

As he had stepped away they were already bringing the stretcher forward, and moments later the Scenes of Crime men were starting a check of the ground on which the body had been dumped. It had happened before, it would happen again. The handler gazed down into the mutilated and tortured face of his player, and then the face was lost to his view by the slashing zip of the body bag.

He walked fast back down the lane towards the knot of soldiers and policemen. No one spoke to him. He was the handler who had lost his man to the enemy for a week. His man had been beaten and kicked and burned until he shrieked his confession onto the slowly turning spools of their tape recorder. The enemy would know everything of him that Eddie Dignan, codename Tallboy, had known.

Through a farm gateway, he sheltered by the hedge from the wind.