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no more than a foot from his flesh. Malachy watched: the penis had shrivelled, the knees were closer and the hands were clasped. The eyes stared at the drill, but the man didn’t flinch.
    Brennie said, like it was conversation, ‘If I get a bad smell about you, it goes into you. If I reckon you’re a tout, it’s the drill in you. At the first touch of it you’ll be blathering to me the names of your handlers and where they are down the road. You’ll have an hour to live, but you’ll be telling me about your handlers or it comes into you again. You’ll get the drill every time your tongue stops flapping. You with me?’
    The man nodded.
    ‘And if I’m liking what you say, you get to have your trousers. If I’m not liking it you get the drill and the cigarettes. . . . It stinks when skin melts from a cigarette burn. Why’ll you do this?’
    The man bent and reached for his clothes. ‘Did I get it wrong? Seems I did. I thought you were in the market for assaults, launchers, commercial bang stuff and perhaps some mortars. If you want to go through this charade with me, forget the goodies.’
    The man gazed into Brennie Murphy’s face. Then he put on his vest, then his underpants, and picked up his shirt.
    Brennie Murphy hissed, ‘Don’t get cheeky with me—’
    ‘I’m talking of assault rifles, launchers, grenades, mortars, military explosive, and the groundwork’s done.’
    Malachy saw the flick of the fingers. Brennie Murphy’s order was obeyed. The drill whined close to the man’s ear. He kept his expression impassive. He didn’t know of any stranger who had given lip to Brennie Murphy without a self-loading rifle in his hand and a section of paratroopers or Special Task Force police. The man didn’t bother to button his shirt and slid into his shoes. He folded his arms across his chest. Time to talk business or to call it off.
    Brennie Murphy took a step sideways, grasped the cable and yanked it from the wall. The drill was off. ‘Why would you do this for us?’
    ‘There’s a recession on where I live, and I’ve a family to keep. You pay me. Good enough? I need the money.’
     
    His backside was lower, his shoulders had subsided further and he pulled his knees closer to his chest. He was still whimpering.
    She was ashamed to be with him. Hugo Woolmer was superior to Gaby Davies in the Service hierarchy, and had outperformed her with a first-class honours degree at an Oxford college while she had a lower second from a provincial university. His family had connections and she was a ‘token’ from a sink school in the north-east. If it would have silenced him, she would have kicked him, hard, in the groin. When they were back at Toad Hall, as the local guys in Belfast called Thames House, home of the Service, she’d knife him. It was, she accepted, a unique moment for her: she had never before seen a man disintegrate in nervous collapse.
    ‘We’ve killed him. He trusted us.’
    She’d make certain he was dead in the water as far as his future went with the Service.
    ‘He was paid peanuts, manipulated and compromised, and we betrayed him.’
    She’d go down in a week’s time, two maybe, and watch when he went through the barriers at the main entrance for the last time. His ID would be shredded.
    ‘It should never have been allowed and we’ll carry the burden of it to our graves.’
    She liked the man who had driven away – without cover or back-up – into the cloud that had grounded the surveillance helicopters. He made her laugh. There was mischief in his humour and he was frank about the bullshit he peddled in his business dealings. Gaby Davies liked him – but he was an agent, a Joe. It wasn’t for her or Hugo to call him off when a meeting was arranged. She’d thought him more remote the last week, vaguer in spitting out the detail of what these people wanted of him but . . . She thought, looking out of the hut and through the trees, that the rain had eased. There might even