The suburb was asleep. He had walked down the road and round the right-hand bend just before the target's house, in the morning of the day before. He had walked fast and not slackened his speed when he had passed the house that concerned him. The house needed new guttering at the side above the garage, and he had noted the car parked by the front door, and he had seen the bright new burglar alarm box high above the windows on the first floor. There were no lights now in the house.

They drove down the avenue, and then did a figure of eight in the streets at the end. No cars passed them. They came back down the road again.

Two streets away there was a railway station with a sporadic service through the night from Waterloo. The driver parked there, away from the lights. It was the time of night that fathers and brothers and boyfriends would wait outside a station to pick up a girl to save her walking home. Jon Jo rehearsed the driver in his role and then he said,

"Ten minutes, could be fifteen, but you wait for me."

"Good luck."

"Won't be me that's needing luck. You wait, you don't crash out unless there's sirens in my street, you hear me?"

The driver said, "Get the pig."

"You just have the car good and ready." Jon Jo switched off the car's interior light, checked that the car park was empty and slipped out through the door. He closed it quietly behind him. For a moment he saw the driver's face. So bloody young. He walked away from the car carrying a dark brown shopping bag, heavily weighted.

He hugged the shadows. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he could remember.

He was a little over six foot in height, broad and strong because all his life he had known physical labour. He was made more formidable by the quilted charcoal anorak that he wore and the black woollen cap that was pulled down to hide his hair line. Dark clothes, nothing that would catch the eye of a woman letting her cat out, a man taking his dog for a last walk, a taxi driver idling for a fare.