The Outsiders.

Gerald Seymour.

For Gillian.

Prologue.

It was an awful place it hit her in the stomach as she went through the flapping rubber doors that screened the area from the corridor. The cold air of the morgue played on her skin her cheeks, eyes and mouth. On any normal day, confronted with the damp, the squalor and the indifference of her escort, Winnie Monks would have gazed in front of her and let loose a volley of obscenities. She bottled them.

She heard the doors bluster shut, the sound die. The attendant stood silent she noted his mournful bloodhound eyes and stained knee-length smock. Her muscle, the faithful Kenny, rattled keys or coins in his pocket. In the quiet, the dripping of water was loud, the tiled floor puddled. The iron window frames were flaking and the glass painted over for privacy.

To her left were the steel doors of the bays, on two levels. The attendant lifted his head, caught her eye, shrugged and pointed to a door far down the lower level. She nodded.

It was an awful place that the boy had been brought to, a fucking awful place. She assumed this was where the vagrants who died on doorsteps when the snow came were brought, or the suicides who had no hope, or the drug addicts who had overdosed . . . Maybe it was where the young guys shot down half a century before by the Soviet Army when Budapest was retaken had been dumped . . . The embassy had raised a collective eyebrow when told where he was.

The man dragged open the door of the bay. It squealed. Perhaps the resident dead weren't worth a drop of oil. The name was written on a cardboard label attached with string to an ankle hidden under a sheet. She went forward. She tugged back the sheet. She gasped when she saw Damian Fenby's features.

Behind her, Dottie gave a sob, and the breath hissed through Kenny's teeth. She had been warned what to expect, but it was still hard to look at the boy's face, what was left of it.

They had used Damian Fenby's head as a football. His eyes were closed, but the flesh around them was bruised. There were abrasions on the cheeks, the ears had swelled and the lips were parted she could see the gaps where his teeth had been.

That autumn, Winnie Monks counter-intelligence at Five, in a steadily diminishing corner of Thames House ran the Graveyard Team, the poor relation to everyone else in the building on the north side of the river, their remit Organised Crime Group investigations. Maybe by the end of the year faced with the jihadist lobby that gorged on resources the OCG would be as dead as Damian Fenby. He had gone to Budapest, with the rookie Caro Watson, on her instructions. She was answerable. She had known what to expect when she had eased the sheet off the boy's face he had been gentle and gay, with a good brain and total commitment because she had been driven, with Dottie and Kenny, from the airport to where the bastards had found their football and played their game. The rain had been sluicing down. The local spook had stayed in the vehicle while they slid on the slopes and figured out, with Caro Watson's help, the picture.

The side of her nose itched and she scratched it. She wore flat shoes, dulled by the rain. Her ankles were soaked, as was the hem of her skirt. Water still dribbled off her coat and the waxed cap perched on her red-gold hair. She wore no makeup. She took the sheet to tug it further down, steeling herself because she knew what she would see.

They had been met off the first flight of the day. It had been long after midnight that Caro Watson's call had come through to a night duty officer. She had been near hysterical and making little sense, but she was patched through to Winnie Monks's home.

The telephone had woken her. She had listened to the blurted information and rung off. She had thrown on clothes, splashed water on her face, gone into the kitchenette, taken a plastic bag from the roll and started to search for his things. Did anyone in Thames House, or in the Graveyard Team, know that Damian Fenby was dossing at the home of the Boss, Winnie Monks? No one. She could be open and she could be private. The boy was not a closet homosexual, had outed himself, and a relationship had developed between them. It was no one else's business.

Nominally he was there while his own flat was redecorated. Liaisons did not have to be pigeon-holed or stereotyped, she had told him. He would have gone home when the decorator had finished, but no date had been set. He had left three days ago, taken a bus at dawn, and she'd cursed him softly for not waking her.

She had blundered through her flat, filling a bag with his clothes, clean, dirty, ironed or crumpled, his lotions, spare razor, two pairs of shoes, the old coat he'd have used for working alongside A Branch surveillance, a couple of books and a framed photograph of his parents. She had cleansed him from the flat, and it had seemed a betrayal. Last, she had snatched up his key-ring.

The taxi had taken her through the heart of London to a road behind one of the great railway termini. She'd gone inside his flat with the bag, and found the old actor there, asleep on a camp bed, surrounded by paint pots. He'd blinked in the light and gazed at her with hostility. No explanation. She'd dumped the bag in a wardrobe, said nothing, and gone back out into the night.

The taxi had taken her on to the airport where she'd met the Graveyarders. It was no one's business that Damian Fenby had lodged with Winnie Monks.

The rookie girl had been at Arrivals, with the embassy staffer and a local intelligence man. They had gone into the city, then up the hill through the trees and had emerged knackered, because crisis seldom came at a convenient hour in a tourist bus park. A uniformed policeman had come forward, the staffer had interpreted, and Caro Watson had murmured in her ear what she knew. Something of the picture was clear: near obsolete and surplus arms stocks behind the old Curtain were still being liberated from weapons and munitions dumps, and OCGs with government approval, of course were flogging them on. They might have been going to Somalia or Sudan, any of the shit-holes where life was cheap, or to the Irish splinter groups who called themselves Real or Continuity. A good source had suggested they were headed for County Fermanagh or County Armagh. A shipment was going through, it was said, from Budapest for onward loading on a Danube barge, then downstream to a drop-off point in Serbia or Bulgaria; the source had promised waybill documentation.

Damian Fenby, the way Caro Watson told it, must have received the alert that the source was headed for one of the kiosks up the hill from the buses. All were open that morning, except one. She'd seen the padlock on its shutter. Any other day or evening, it was used by the source's brother-in-law, cousin or . . .

Damian Fenby and Caro Watson had adjoining rooms at the Hilton by the suburban railway station; the connecting door had not been locked, and the call had come to him. Caro Watson had been in the bathroom, stark naked and washing her hair. By the time she'd wrapped a towel round her he was gone she could hardly chase him down the corridor to the lift and the lobby, and if she'd called him he would only have said there wasn't a problem, he'd be fine on his own. Winnie Monks reckoned the girl would carry the guilt to her grave.

Now she brought the sheet further down. There was mud on his chest, mucus and bloodstains.

She knew that body. Winnie slept alone. The boy had bunked on the sofa. She'd seen most of his body when, a towel around him, he'd gone to the bathroom to shower. She knew it better from three nights before he'd gone. He was a Five man and could collate complicated detail, but he had to sleep with a light burning he'd left on the strip over the bathroom basin. She'd needed to pee. In the sitting room, he'd thrown off the bedclothes and lay on his side. She saw his chest, back and stomach, the skin as smooth as brushed silk, no blemishes. She had stood and stared, and he hadn't woken. She hadn't known where the relationship would take them. Winnie Monks had felt a softness that none who knew her would have recognised. It would have taken them somewhere. She hadn't touched him, and now wished she had.

His small steel case had been beside him, big enough for a Notepad but not for a full-size laptop. That case was Damian Fenby's pride and joy, with its secure lock, and the chain integral to the handle that ran to a handcuff. It was like something a diplomatic corps courier might have used to carry classified documents. Often Damian Fenby had nothing inside the case when he came to work, other than high-energy soft drinks and the sandwiches he bought at the newsagent by his flat. He'd had the case with him. It would have been locked and the cuff fastened.

His arms lay alongside his body. She saw what she had been told she would see. The left hand was attached to the arm. The right hand had been placed near to the right arm. It seemed to Winnie Monks that it had been brutally sawn off; the fist was clenched, gripping mud and grass.

He had been in the citadel which overlooked the city. Most of Budapest was laid out below it and the river, with its bridges, the palaces, churches and the remaining glories of the long-gone Austro-Hungarian empire. The relic of another fallen era dominated the old fortress building: a towering statue of a robed goddess holding an evergreen wreath above her head: Liberty in the Soviet style. It commemorated the defeat of the Wehrmacht and the SS defenders. Behind the citadel, but overlooked by the statue, gardens ran wild around military strongpoints. Damian Fenby would have realised he was compromised, stalked. Not special forces-trained, he had carried no weapon, would have been inept at unarmed survival combat. Dottie had told her about the old actor turned decorator he grappled with, but that would have been the limit of his body-to-body combat. Perhaps near the kiosk before or after the drop he'd seen they had blocked his route back to the hire car outside the closed cafe, and he would have turned for the darkness and cover, but they'd caught him.

She studied the wounds on the arm and the detached hand, and wondered if Damian Fenby had still been alive when they had decided they couldn't break the chain or open the locked case, and had severed it to free the cuff.

They would have knelt over him. He might have been in pain spasms or motionless, in a coma. If conscious, would he have called her name, Winnie Monks, or Denys Carthew's? She hoped it had been hers, thought it likely.

The uniformed policeman had led them to a strip of leaf-strewn grass dominated by an oak. At the edge of the grass there was a bunker's entrance, and under the tree a work of rare beauty: a sculptor had fashioned a foal, its shoulder level with the hip of a rough-cast, angular young woman. Close to it, scenes-of-crime tape marked where the body had been dumped, and the hand.

Kneeling over him, they would have used a pocket knife or a short-blade sheath knife, and butchered their way through the flesh, veins and sinews, then worked apart the bones at a joint. He might have been pray to God he was already dead.

When she turned away, the policeman began to wind up the tape. The rain was heavy enough to have washed away the last of the blood. She thought the statue good, a fine headstone for him.

Precious little dignity was left to Damian Fenby. She pulled the sheet back over him. She could visualise him in her office. Polite as always, with a grin that was his own, his sexuality kept for life outside Thames House; utterly professional, a young man whose company she had valued and whose sense of fun had been infectious.

Winnie Monks's nails ground into her palms. There had been a conversation with the local intelligence man: what business had Damian Fenby and Caroline Watson had on Hungarian territory? Why had there not been contact with the authorities in Budapest prior to a visit by UK agents? Why had Caroline Watson insisted that her colleague's body be repatriated the same day? Why had Damian Fenby been alone at the citadel in darkness? Who had he gone to meet?

Winnie Monks had remarked on the weather, the beauty of the view from the viewing platform, and had spoken of the help that British security officers had given their Hungarian counterparts when the KGB yoke had been ditched. She had asked whether he still had the hammer and sickle embroidered on his underpants. Behind her, Dottie murmured that a hearse had arrived. The intelligence man had accepted that his questions were necessary, that the answers were predictable. He had eyed Winnie Monks, had grinned at his failure to extract information, and had offered her a cigarette probably smuggled, brought in from Belarus. She'd accepted it. They'd caught a sandwich from a fast-food counter and come on to the morgue. He had said that no witnesses had been identified and no evidence discovered at the crime scene. He doubted that a successful conclusion to any investigation was likely.

Lying bastard. Only a Russian-based organised-crime group would have killed the boy in that way. The city was riddled with such people the country was a chokepoint for them and the older spooks were unreconstructed: they had been comfortable with their former masters. He had grimaced, and they'd been silent for the remainder of the journey to the morgue.

She glanced at her wristwatch. 'Get him loaded up.'

A plain coffin, chipboard, was wheeled in, and Kenny came forward with a body-bag. Winnie Monks, Kenny and Dottie lifted the boy and slid him into it. He was light. They did it easily. Dottie, bloody useful kid, would have done the basic paperwork for bringing him home.

The attendant produced a clear plastic sack of Damian Fenby's clothes. Inside it, Winnie Monks made out his wallet and the mobile phone he would have used on the mission. She laid it on the bag, and watched as the coffin lid was screwed down. The trolley's wheels screamed under the weight. The light was failing as they brought him out, and wheeled him to the hearse, a van with tinted windows. Dottie said she'd ride with him.

They headed for the airport.

'They're so arrogant, those fucking people. They think they're untouchable,' Winnie Monks muttered.

They swept out of the morgue's yard into the traffic. The driver hit the buttons for a siren and for the lights to flash. The staffer was behind, and Caro Watson was with him. He'd see them up the steps, watch their boy go through the cargo hatch and think it was good riddance. He'd hope fervently never to see them again. His headlights came through the back window and bounced on Kenny's head.

Quietly Kenny said, 'They believe they're untouchable, Boss, because they aren't often touched.'

She spoke with a rich, distinctive accent, from a South Wales valley in one-time mining country. 'My promise to him, Kenny. I'll nail those who did it. Believe me, I will. As long as it takes, wherever it goes.'

She did not make idle threats. She mouthed it again, sealing the guarantee she had given Damian Fenby: 'As long as it takes, wherever it goes.'

1.

'Jonno, your mother's on the phone for you.'

He was carrying a latte back into the open-plan work area from the dispenser in the corridor, and he might have blushed. Dessie, at the desk to the right of his, held up the telephone for him. On the other side of his work space, Chloe had twisted in her seat, had a grin, ear to ear maybe his mother was ringing to check he'd put on clean socks that morning. Might have been worse he might have been ignored and his desk phone left to ring unanswered. He gave them the finger and was rewarded with laughter. He could have been like Tracey or Chris, who sat on the far side and worked alone, ate their sandwiches alone and went home alone in the evenings.

For as long as he could remember he had been Jonno: there were documents passport, employment contract with the department-store chain, Inland Revenue where he was recorded as Jonathan, but everywhere else he was Jonno. People seemed to like him and he wasn't short of company in the evenings. He would have said life was good to him and . . . He slapped the coffee beaker beside his mouse mat and took the phone from Dessie. Chloe rolled her eyes.

Jonno said, 'Hi, Ma I'm surrounded here by doughnuts and donkeys. Did you hear manic laughter and think you were through to a nuthouse? Before you ask, I'm wearing clean underpants-'

His mother coughed, her annoyance clear.

'What's the problem, Ma?'

He was told. Not a problem, more of a miracle. His mind worked at flywheel speed as he identified the difficulties; then thought through the lies he needed to dump on the sour-faced woman who oversaw holiday entitlement in Human Resources. She said it again, as if she believed her son, aged twenty-six but still regarded as a child, had failed to grasp what was on offer and why.

'Have you written down the dates?'

'Yes, Ma.'

'Stansted would be best that's where the cheapest go from. Jonno?'

'Yes, Ma.'

'Your dad and I, we've just too much on. Don't ask me to run through it all but the diary's full, and your father won't fly, anyway. It's not so much for your uncle Geoff as for your aunt Fran. They just want someone there, peace of mind, that sort of thing. Enough on their plate without worrying about the cat. It was premature of me but I sort of volunteered you. I think we're talking about two weeks. It's important, Jonno.'

'I'll call you back.'

'You could take a friend. The cat matters to them.'

He sat at his desk and faced his screen. If he had scrolled up or down he would have stayed with the statistics of the company's home-delivery vans, their mileage and routes from the three depots in the south and south-west of England, their annual fuel consumption and the price of the fuel. It was Jonno's job to drive down the consumption and the cost. Dessie did the drivers' wages, and worked out how to get more from their man-hours, while Chloe watched the transit of goods from warehouse to depots. They reckoned, all three of them, that they could have done the business with their eyes closed, but corporate discipline demanded enthusiasm. They both questioned him: had he won the lottery, or had his father done a runner? He smiled, then gave a little snort as if his mind was made up. He left the latte on his desk, with the mileage, consumption and tonnage, and let a sharp smile settle on his face.

He went out through the doors, past the coffee outlet and the cabinet that held the sandwiches, past the notice-boards displaying photographs of employees, the times of aerobics classes, the office choir's practice sessions, and an entry form for a charity half-marathon. It was neither exciting work nor an inspirational setting, but it was a job. His parents lived in a village between Bath and Chippenham, a mile off the old A4 trunk road, near to Corsham. He went home once a month and heard a regular litany: which of their neighbours' kids were on a scrap heap temporary or permanent having failed to find work. Truth to tell, enough of his friends from university were out of a job, pounding the streets, or stacking shelves and looking at dead-ends. He went down one floor in the lift.

How would he have described himself? Better: how would others have described him? Average. Conventional. Normal. A decent sort of guy. He made way for the director who oversaw that floor, and was rewarded with a manufactured smile. He wondered if the guy had the faintest idea who he was and what he did. It was the first week of November, a week when temperatures dropped, evenings closed in, leaves made a mess and rain was forecast every day not the best time to go waltzing into Human Resources and demand time in the sunshine.

Jonno knocked on a glass door. He saw a face look up, a frown form, and matched it with a smile, a sad one. The frown softened. He was beckoned inside.

He was economical.

Jonno said Spain, but did not emphasise that he was talking about the Costa del Sol and the slopes above the coast that were sheltered by the foothills of the Sierra Blanca. A relative was leaving his home to travel to England for a life-threatening operation he did not say it was a routine hip resurfacing with a high success rate. Neither did he say that the 'relative' was merely a long-standing friend of the family, nor that he had never met the 'relative' in question, Flight Lieutenant (Ret'd) Geoff Walsh, or his wife, Fran. He knew they sent a card each Christmas to his parents not a robin in the snow but an aircraft, a fighter, a bomber or a transport C130, of the sort that used to fly out of the RAF base at Lyneham. The last had shown a jet lifting off a runway and had been sold in support of the Royal Air Force Association. He had never even seen a photograph of them. But a distress call had come.

He spoke of an elderly couple returning to the UK for surgery, might have implied 'war hero', and their fear of leaving their property unguarded, abandoned, while his uncle went under the surgeon's knife. Jonno's personal file was on her screen. There would have been commendations from his line manager, distant prospects of promotion, his allocation of days in lieu, the statutory bank holidays he had worked, and leave not yet taken. Against that were the pressures of November in the trading calendar.

She pondered. She played on it, miserable bitch, milking the moment. The arrogance of power.

It was done grudgingly. 'I think that would be all right. Don't make a habit of it. The compassion factor is big with the company, but it's not to be abused. It'll mean rejigging your holiday entitlement and we'll probably call you in for the sales and through into the new-year holiday.'

'Thanks.'

'Where exactly was it you were going?'

'Some dump down there nothing too special. I'm grateful.'

The deceit had tripped easily off his tongue. It hurt him, denting his self-esteem. He would have liked to say, 'I apologise for lying to you. I don't know the man who's having his hip chopped around, but the weather here is foul, the job's dead boring, and it's a chance to go to Marbella and stay in a villa. My mum says I can take my girlfriend, and we only have to find the air fares and money for food.'

He thanked her again, sounding, he hoped, as though he'd made a big sacrifice in agreeing to mind a villa in the hills on the Costa del Sol. What did he know about the place? Nothing.

Last year, Jonno and four friends had gone to the North Cape of Norway. The year before three of them had hired bicycles and pedalled round southern Ireland. Before that there had been a coach trip to a village near Chernobyl, in radioactive Ukraine, where a gang had tried to build a nursery for kids on the edge of the zone that had been contaminated by the nuclear-fuel explosion. Jonno liked to get up a sweat on his holiday, not lounge on a recliner.

He went back to his desk and his cold latte. He wriggled the mouse and recalled the figures, but the lines seemed utterly meaningless. He was thinking of a luxury villa with a garden and views to infinity. He considered the chance of Posie taking him up on the offer and . . . His mind darted. Chloe and Dessie were looking at him. An explanation was required.

Jonno said, 'It's a family problem. An old uncle needs an operation, but he and his wife need a house-sitter for the cat. I've drawn the short straw. HR were really helpful about me having some time out . . . Sorry, and all that, but you're going to have to do without my sunshine lighting your lives for a while.' He shrugged. No way he'd let either of them or anyone else in the building know that he was bound for a villa in Marbella, top-of-the-range on the Costa del Sol, or tongues would wag and the gossip run riot on texts, emails and tweets. He wore a sober expression, gave nothing away. Dessie and Chloe had their heads down, expressions to match, and murmured sympathetically. He wished, fervently, that he hadn't had to bend the truth. He was asked where he was going. 'Nowhere either of you would want to be.'

More important was what Posie would say. He went back to his charts and made a pig's ear of it because his mind jerked him back to the Costa del Sol.

At the end of the first year, on the anniversary, Winnie Monks had told the Graveyard Team, 'Always think of the woman, tailored jeans and green wellies, who walks an arthritic retriever in the woods. Focus on her.'

They'd been outside among the burial stones in the garden behind Thames House. The wind had whipped Winnie's cigarillo smoke into their faces. An inventory of investigation avenues had been worked over. An FBI source, Polish, had named a Russian career criminal as the agent's killer. Months had gone into tracking the bastard, and on the relevant dates he'd been having kidney stones extracted in a Volgograd clinic. A French asset had pointed to a flight leaving Budapest airport at the time they'd flown in on that grim morning. The airport cameras were said to have been wiped and excitement had risen, so they'd hacked into the Malev 100 passenger manifest and pushed the names to Six. Six station in Moscow had failed to identify anyone on the list with criminal links.

Another source, in a harbourmaster's office downstream at Csepel, had produced video from a security camera that showed three indistinct shadows boarding a launch late on the relevant night. They were poorly lit, backs to camera, and little was to be gained from forensic study, but that was the best they had. They had gnawed at it, hounds with marrow bones. But they had no name.

Winnie had said, 'The woman in the woods with the dog always finds the body, or the clothing, or the school satchel, or the handbag. It can take a month or a year or a decade, but we'll find it, identify him . . . We have to, because I promised.'

The policeman was Latvian, on contract to the Europol offices in the Dutch capital, The Hague. He briefed visitors politicians, public servants, opinion formers. That afternoon a Czech foreign ministry functionary sat in front of a screen. The policeman used a zapper to put up his bullet points. The first showed a map of the European landmass, the zone of interest for the men and women co-ordinating the activities of disparate law and order agencies.

'In our Organised Crime Threat Assessment we speak of "hubs", each with heavy influence on the criminal dynamics of the European continent. With its huge wealth, Europe is centre stage: the consumers' shopping mall. The north-west hub, the first of our five, is the Netherlands and Belgium and is based on Rotterdam. The second is the north-east hub and works around the Russian harbour of Kaliningrad in the Baltic. For the third, we take the south-east hub currently a source of anxiety on the Black Sea. A Romanian harbour is a centre for considerable smuggling activity . . . heroin, people-trafficking, illegal immigration, sex-industry workers. The southern hub is the one that we're most familiar with, the Italian problem and the trading in and out of Naples the familiar names of Cosa Nostra, Camorra and the OCGs of Calabria and Puglia. Our analysts believe the old Mafia clans are in slow but irreversible decline.'

The Latvian gave his presentation on at least three days in every working week. It took an hour, and afterwards individual officers would be assigned for more detailed explanations of the Europol targets. A few he talked to seemed interested in the threat assessment, but most came with the intention of ticking a box on the career ladder not a prominent one. He ploughed on, comforted in the knowledge that when he had finished and the Czech had left, he would be able to slip into the building's Blue Bottle bar and enjoy a pils or three with colleagues who likewise fought the unwinnable war.

'Fifth, we have the south-west hub, the Iberian peninsula, with particular emphasis on the docks of Cadiz and Malaga, either side of the so-called Costa del Sol. It's the most significant of the five hubs, the prime gateway into Europe for all forms of hard drugs, class A, immigrants, trafficked humans, weapons. And, because of lax banking regulations, for laundering money. Into that zone has come an influx of foreign criminals, not merely foot soldiers but leaders, men of influence, huge power, vast wealth. The south-west hub represents our greatest challenge.'

Another year, and Winnie Monks had said, 'We have to believe.'

And another candle had burned, small but bright, on her windowsill.

'It'll happen. It'll drop into our laps. One day.' There was power in her voice, authority and sincerity. None of her seniors her own chief, the Branch director, the deputy director or the great man himself would have dared to tell her the investigation was losing impetus and should be scaled down. They might have murmured it in an executive dining room or in a club's deep armchairs but they wouldn't have said it to her face. In her office, pride of place on a bare wall, was the outline of a head and shoulders, white on granite grey, no features filled in. Winnie maintained it was important to have it there. Beside it hung the horror-film image of Damian Fenby's ravaged face. None of her seniors would have said to her that it was mawkish and in poor taste to display the photograph.

'We have to believe. It's owed him. Life does not "move on".'

She slid her chair back from her desk, swung it round and stood up. There was little lustre in her face.

Winnie Monks was a stone too heavy, and the skirt she wore was a size too small. Her blouse strained and a cardigan that should have been loose was tight. She coughed, hacking. Her window, on the fourth floor of Thames House offering a view of a narrow street showed that the evening light was dropping, and the rain was steady, spattering the panes. The blastproof glass distorted the reflections from the streetlamps. She reached into her handbag and scrabbled for the packet of cigarillos and her Zippo lighter, which stank of its fuel. The wall that had once carried the pictures now accommodated a leave chart, but the Sellotape scars remained. She slipped on a raincoat, long, heavy, proof against the weather, and pocketed her necessities. There had been a time when, on a dank evening, the sight of Winnie Monks putting on her coat, or rifling the smokes out of her bag, would have been enough to get the outer office on their feet, donning raincoats and retrieving umbrellas. Not now. The Graveyard Team had not survived the new-year reorganisation, launched with dreary fanfares on 2 January 2008.

She went past the PA's desk. She had not chosen the girl but had been allocated her: there was no way Winnie Monks would have plucked out of the applicants' list anyone who was an alcohol abstainer, a vegan who seemed to survive on what her sisters' rabbits, long ago, had lived off. From behind her, 'Going for a comfort break, Winnie? If there's any calls for you, I'll say you're back in ten minutes.'