To accommodate all the personnel involved, the ring had been held in the hall of an abandoned school, Detective Superintendent George Mallory, in charge of the operation, addressing the troops from the small stage on which head teachers since Victorian times had, each autumn, admonished generations of small children to plough the fields and scatter. The fields, that would be, of Green Lanes and Finsbury Park.

Climbing frames, worn and filmed with grey dust, were still attached to the walls. New flip charts, freshly marked in bright colours, stood at either side of a now blank screen. Officers from the Tactical Firearms Unit, S019, stood in clusters of three or four, heads down, or sat at trestle tables, mostly silent, with Maddy's new colleagues from Serious Crime. She had been with her particular unit three weeks and two days.

Moving alongside Maddy, Paul Draper gestured towards the watch on his wrist. Ten minutes shy of half five. 'Waiting. Worst bloody time.'

Maddy nodded.

Draper was a young DC who'd moved down from Manchester a month before, a wife and kid and still not twenty-five; he and Maddy had reported for duty at Hendon on the same day.

'Why the hell can't we get on with it?'

Maddy nodded again.

The hall was thick with the smell of sweat and aftershave and the oil that clung to recently cleaned 9mm Brownings, Glock semi-automatic pistols, Heckler and Koch MP5 carbines. Though she'd taken the firearms training course at Lippetts Hill, Maddy herself, like roughly half the officers present, was unarmed.

'All this for one bloke,' Draper said.

This time Maddy didn't even bother to nod. She could sense the fear coming off Draper's body, read it in his eyes.