There was always work for the men, precious few women, who were best at ‘shitting in a bag’ and whose creed was to take in and take out: then excrement went into nappy bags, their urine into plastic milk bottles, and they left behind no sign of their presence. Badger and Ged’s stag in the hide had less than fifteen minutes to run. Their effectiveness was already stretched to the limit and they had been there since a little before first light. The darkness was well set now and the rain was coming down hard. It buggered their efforts to keep the ’scope’s lens clear, and the audio stuff was on the blink. He’d give the guy on maintenance, back in the police station at Builth, serious hassle for the audio’s failure and won no friendships there, but he couldn’t give a damn.

They were off the Beulah to Abergwesyn road and overlooked a track that led down to a farm that had a field with a half-dozen fixed-site mobile homes, holiday caravans. Three that week were taken by eight Muslim kids from north Luton. That day there had been physical-endurance stuff, filling big rucksacks with stones and cantering up steep fields, scattering the sheep, and they’d done jerks like they had a physical-education pamphlet around. They must be thick. The farmer who owned the caravans had a nephew in the Birmingham Police and had rung in to report his guests’ behaviour.. . Always the way with town people, believed that the countryside had no eyes. They could have run round the streets of north Luton and not been noticed.

It had been a good stag for Badger and Ged. The hide was close to two hundred yards from the caravans, up the hill on the far side of the valley. They’d crawled into the gorse from where the sheep had grazed in summer and tunnelled through it – it was a useful hide because none of the outer foliage was disturbed. Both wore issue gillie suits that broke up the lines of their bodies, and similar headgear.