"I heard it already," the driver muttered, through gritted teeth.

"Did you now?"

"And it was told better the last time."

"Was it now?"

And then the police siren exploded on them and the driver moaned and jammed on the brakes, but the police car was past them, blue lights twirling, and they sat still with the engine off for several minutes, saying nothing.

He had never seen the driver before. He had been given over the telephone the colour and make of the car, its registration number and what time it would pick him up by the taxi rank outside the underground station when he came off the last train of the night. He cuffed the shoulder of the driver to encourage him. The drivers weren't as good as they had been the year before, nor the couriers.

"So just watch the road."

"I will."

The driver's accent was Dublin. Jon Jo Donnelly didn't rate these youngsters from down south. Given his choice, and he wasn't, he would have had boys from his own place, but they sent him drivers and couriers from the south now because they were the ones who weren't on the fingerprint files.

Jon Jo had the map spread across his knees, and he used a torch to track their route into the sprawl beyond Wimbledon. He was wearing pink plastic washing-up gloves. The last thing that he had done before he had identified the car had been to pull on the thin, clammy gloves. It was past one in the morning. He thought the driver was scared out of his mind. He gave the directions quietly and he tried to breathe his confidence back into the kid. They came to the road, the headlights caught the name of the road.

"Well done, that's great."

The driver did not reply.

The road was poorly lit, long stretches of blackness between the street lights. Along the avenue of mock-Tudor homes a very few still showed an upstairs light, and one only had a ground-floor light on.