the other men who weren't laughing and shouting already started teasing Partridge; Partridge started trying to wrestle Steven to the ground but Steven had got free and clouted the other man with the shovel, which was still bloody from hacking the cat to bits, and after that, with the magazine coming apart as the other men grabbed at it and Partridge rolling about dazed on the towpath in the cat's blood and almost falling into the canal, Dan Ashton had said soberly that enough was enough and they'd better go and see Mr Smith the supervisor because they just couldn't go on like this. They weren't getting the work done.

It was all horribly sordid, but the more he thought about it, the more he became certain that, far from being a disaster, leaving the Highways Department was in fact a real step forward. It hadn't been much of a job after all; he had thought at first from the sound of it that it might mean travel, but it didn't.

He would definitely go to the pub later, he decided. It was a day to celebrate. For two reasons, he reminded himself. Not that it meant very much, because when you thought about it it wasn't something really to celebrate, but today, June 28th, was his birthday.

He stopped, opposite a car, of course, and looked at his reflection in a shop window. He was tall and thin. He had longish, lank dark hair he didn't wash often enough. It stuck out from under his red hard hat in scrappy curls. His trousers were slightly too short, and showed off his purple nylon socks and his tar-stained desert boots. His Paisley pattern shirt didn't go too well with the greying Marks & Spencer pullover he wore instead of a jacket, and he knew his fingernails were dirty. But it was a good disguise, he told himself. Great Warriors didn't want to attract too much attention to themselves when they were trying to think their way out of their penalty period in the ultimate war.

A young woman who was dressing the female dummies in the lingerie department window Steven was looking at frowned at him and gave him a suspicious, disapproving look which he noticed her just in time to see. He saw the half-dressed models then, and quickly walked away, only just taking a deep breath in time as he walked out from the cover of the parked car.