He had the shopping list, and Posie said she'd suffocate if she didn't get out of the bungalow.

They found two Tesco carrier bags in a kitchen cupboard. He supposed it was a mark of trust that he and Posie were permitted to leave by the front door. Or perhaps, they regarded him as incapable of backing his words with actions.

He took the car down to the gates and Posie opened them. He went through and she shut them after him. They passed the big gates, the high walls, the wire and the cameras, and went down the hill.

It was another warm morning, the temperature high for November . . . and the holiday was buggered. He knew it and assumed she did. He drove carefully into the built-up zone. He passed the bus station where he could have bought tickets for Malaga International. When he and Posie had had supper the previous night, an omelette with everything thrown in from the salad box, Loy had come in, pleading a shortage of butter, and apologised for disturbing them. He'd said it was a pleasant evening, not too warm; he hadn't spoken about targets, or cats that tripped alarms, or about a two-way exchange of threats. When they were clearing breakfast, Sparky had knocked on the kitchen door. He'd brought plastic plates and mugs and asked if he could, please, wash them in the sink. In the hallway, looking for the car keys on the table, he had met Snapper.

'Morning, Jonno.'

Grudging, 'Morning.'

'Seems a nice one.'

'In case there could be a misunderstanding, I'm standing by what I said yesterday. Your agenda doesn't include the welfare of Geoff and Fran Walsh. I told you what I thought, and I'm considering what to do.'

'Know them well, do you, the flight lieutenant and his wife?'

'Well enough to argue their corner.'

'See them often?'

He'd thought then that a man-trap yawned in front of him. 'You know the answer?'

'I'm assuming you've not been here before and that you don't know them.'

Jonno had bridled. 'I know what's right for them.'

'I'd say that, for an opinionated young man, you know very little safe, middle-class, privileged and protected, with a meaningless job that does nothing for anyone, and a girl friend to shag which passes the time. You know nothing so I'm trying to teach you that nasty things can happen if important matters are blocked on the whim of a nobody. I'm sure common sense will win through. I hope so.'

There had been a little smile.

They had gone past the bus station and the box-shaped white building that was the police headquarters.

She had seen the sign for the supermarket and pointed, and he'd found the car park. They were like any other couple he carried the bags and she had the list. The woman on the checkout was blonde and spoke to a customer in Russian. There were papers, books and videos from Russia, curry sauces and cooking oil with Russian characters printed on them. They started on the list.

It seemed obvious to him that police doing surveillance from a home endangered the householder, and obvious also that a conviction came higher up the pecking order than the householders. He was rather proud of his anger not much of it had been cosmetic. It was a relief to have the shopping to do. School reports had had Jonno as 'average', as had university lecturers. No one rated him as a man prepared to make waves. Well, he had . . . and it made him feel good. He studied the shelves. Alternatives? If he hadn't been shopping, he would have wrestled with the problem. The difficulty for Jonno was that he didn't doubt himself.

They were all Russians in the shop. The kids made a racetrack of the aisles and had their small fists on the shelves. There was laughter. The world of a long-lens camera and the chugging of the chipper's engine was far off. He didn't doubt that he was right and that his obligation was to safeguard the Walshes' interests. They had no reality for him other than as pictures on the walls. He had no way of knowing whether they were good company or God-awful bores. He saw them coming home from London, the man trying to manage with his crutches or walking sticks; there would be police, maybe a consular official, to explain that their property had been used. They would be under armed guard and would have to throw clothes into old suitcases. Then a van would take them away. Later a removals lorry would come. Their lives would be broken. He didn't know what he could do.

The wire basket jerked down. He had the Tesco bags in one hand and the basket in the other. The weight wrenched his arm.

Posie was in front of him. He turned.

It was the one who had done the jump leads, Marko. He had also shot the cat. Now he grinned and pointed to the new weight in the wire basket: a four-pack of beer. He said, 'In Moscow, many drink Stary Melnik, but it is not as good as Baltika. Baltika is St Petersburg. The big man, for us, is from St Petersburg. You try our beer. It is the gold, not strong, so you will not sleep all night. You will be able . . .' He seemed to strip Posie, peel off her dress.

Marko said, 'We have a good beer in Serbia, but I cannot get it here. You enjoy.'

Posie's shoulder hit a shelf and milk cartons fell to the floor. Jonno looked at the man. He might have said, 'Police from Great Britain have forced their way into Geoff and Fran's home and are using the upstairs attic room as an observation post to watch your villa. They expect a criminal to come and will seek to have him arrested, then extradited to stand trial in our country. Geoff and Fran are in no way responsible for our police being there and spying on you. They are not, in any way, to blame.'

There was a silence, awkward. Then Posie, Jonno and the man were picking up the milk cartons and slotting them back on the shelf. He thought Posie looked terrified, wide-eyed and pale.

The floor was cleared.

Jonno stammered, 'Thanks for that. I'm really grateful for the suggestion.'

A twenty-euro note fell from the man's hand into the basket, and again he pointed to the beer. Clear enough: Jonno was his guest.

He was gone. Posie looked back to their list.

He was on the other aisle, close to the freezer section, and checked his list again. He saw her each time he lifted his eye from the list to look at the shelves. She seemed not to notice that he was so close.

The girl was frightened of him.

Did she know he had seen her while they were playing with the hose? His wife said he was an animal, and obsessed with what he had done long ago. She had told him he was a changed man Alex's wife said the same of her man since they had gone away to fight. The Tractor had found them in Prague. Marko had been twenty-one, Alex two years older, when they had joined the irregular force, and had cleansed the villages and towns of Croatia, then moved into Bosnia. They had been on the forward lines at Sarajevo and at Gorazde, but one afternoon his wife said had wrought the change in him.

The girl had good legs and a good arse. He knew because he had seen all of her. There had been women that afternoon who were old and ugly. One had bitten his lip and bloodied it; another had been heavily pregnant. The prettiest one, a virgin, had fought, using her nails, teeth and knees. She had screamed loudly enough to bring a crowd around them. The cheering had risen to a crescendo when he had punched the fight out of her, then entered her.

His wife and Alex's had come to their village on a summer camp in their mid-teens. They were inseparable, and had found good company with the two farm boys. There had been kissing, hay barns and rules. They had married on the same day, in the same church, and gone to the same seaside hostel in Montenegro. On that afternoon, they had been in the cattle byre where the women had been brought. Alex had been in the next stall to him he couldn't see him but could hear him, and the shrieks his women had made, then the silences broken only by his grunts.

They had left that village, burned it and put the women on the road after the men were bulldozed into the pit. Their wives knew they had been with the enemy's women. They knew that defiling them was the ultimate humiliation for that enemy so they did not criticise. His wife had said he was a changed man when the ceasefire was called and the men came home for a day. It had been said on TV, by an American with the United Nations Police, that 'war criminals' would be hunted down so that they faced justice. He and Alex had fled. They had done close protection for a Ukrainian, then had had a better offer from a Russian. Then, as a favour from a lesser man to a bigger, they had been drafted to the Tractor. They had been with him in Hamburg, Marseille and Warsaw, than had come to Marbella and would never go home.

He was at the checkout, paying, when the boy joined the queue. The girl would not stand beside him. When Marko had paid, he waved, and made a drinking gesture, then went out into the sunshine and wondered . . . He was late, and hurried away.

Xavier thought both parties careless.

He had the photographs. The one of Jonno had been taken from the upstairs window: he was near to the back of the garden and the telephoto lens showed each blemish on his skin, as well as the boy's angst. The girl was shown at the washing line, hanging things out to dry. She was suffering, clearly, conscious of the intrusion, and made sure her underwear was masked by blouses and jeans. He also had photos of the goons who protected Pavel Ivanov. The call from Snapper, scrambled, had been brief.

'I'll handle this. He's only a kid.'

'If you were to ask me to call the Boss on it, what is she going to do?'

'Nothing. I'll field it. I wouldn't normally but I belted him verbally. Gave him something to think about. The girl's not a problem. I reckon my Loy will sort her out. But I wanted you to know where we were. Cast an eye over them.'

Xavier gaunt and spare, with close-cut greying hair had done undercover before Thames House and the Graveyard Team. He understood the art of moving on streets and on transport, being seen but not remembered. He had been in through the shop door.

He knew that the meeting between the shelves had not been pre-planned: the girl had backed off, as if she'd been hit, and the boy had looked ill at ease. Xavier had hovered and sucked in the necessary information they had met before, reason unknown, but neither had anticipated meeting there. From watching, inside and out, he had enough, he thought, to calm Snapper.

The Mercedes had been parked on that street, Avenida Arias de Velasco, near to a motorcycle business. The second guard was in the driver's seat, smoking, and hadn't used his mirrors. As a young detective constable, Xavier had infiltrated crime groups, had played the small-time dealer or the hood who was trying to break into a bigger league. From what he could remember, they all feared the big players they would be tracked. Not by the police they expected police tails but by their own. They faced more danger from being targeted by other criminals than by the police. Were they complacent? Stupid? Or unprofessional? If Xavier had shown out to the one coming out of the store with his shopping or the one in the car, he would have considered retiring and begging his wife to let him help at her florist business in north London. And the kids?

Jonno and Posie knew nothing. Snapper had told him of the stress and the arguing. In his hire car he had picked them up when they'd driven past the crumbling hotel, followed them and seen where they'd parked. He'd eased out of his vehicle and done some window-staring at the motorbike shop. He'd used a couple of the old tricks that surveillance people did and villains practised when they were checking for watchers. First he'd stood on the pavement and made a pretence of answering his phone. He put it to his ear, then swivelled and spun because that was what people did when they talked on the phone. That way he'd had the best view of the bad guy's car and the front of the shop. When he had come out he had gone to the back of his Seat and lifted the boot, which masked his face, to watch the Mercedes leave and the kids coming out into the street. He had their faces in view, and would have bet his shirt that they had made no call while he couldn't see them. The atmosphere between them was unhappy, as Xavier read it.

He told Snapper that the kids wouldn't give him hassle, and that the bodyguards were flaky they had lost the art of suspicion: they might have forgotten who they were, where they'd come from and what their reputation had been.

She was shop-soiled. Tommy King couldn't claim she had had 'one careful owner'. And there was the problem of her eye, but makeup could camouflage the bruising. He was selling his girl. During the night, when he had been dozing in the car and had thought she was asleep, the interior light had come on because she had opened the door. He'd had the back of the convertible, and she was in the front passenger seat. She'd bloody near done a runner.

He had left his normal haunts and hit the road for Mijas. A track had snaked off to his right, then gone through a forest of close-planted pines to a cul-de-sac of villas. Tommy King had heard that the Albanian who lived there had bought it dirt cheap off an Irishman, who was now in HMP Belmarsh and unlikely to be wanting it any time soon. Two or three years ago the property would have fetched more than two million euros but the market had plummeted. It was still worth good money, though. It had high granite walls, with coiled wire on top, and a camera tracked him to the gates. Dogs barked. He'd told the girl that if she tried another walkabout he'd mash her face do it seriously, not just a slap.

She'd perked up when she'd seen the size of the gates and the height of the wall might have thought she'd landed on her feet, not her back. She was smoothing her hair while Tommy King was speaking into the intercom, and she was straightening her dress when the gate opened enough for them to walk through. The villa was white stucco. Flowers sprouted from pots and there wasn't a leaf on the patio. Two Mercedes were parked at the front, one low-slung, which showed it was armour-plated. That meant the Albanian's brothel chain was holding up well in the hard times. He thought that until they were ready to put her in the marketplace in Fuengirola, or Benalmadena or Calahonda, she'd be in a shed out the back, near the kennels.

If it had not been for her age, still young, the Albanian wouldn't have entertained buying her. The bitch had a nerve she walked ahead of him swinging her hips. He carried her bag with what she owned. Two men stood at the side of the patio, their eyes on her. They might have been at a meat market. Actually, Tommy King would be sorry to see the back of her he'd become fond of her. With a drink in her she went like a fucking rattlesnake. He'd take what he could get and had no bargaining chips. He was broke, near destitute, and there was a contract out on him. The radio had said that a boat was being escorted into the port of Cadiz. His wallet was empty, and the ATMs all spat back his cards. He dropped her bag. One of them took him aside.

Notes were peeled off a wad. He did the shrug that queried, but the amount was not topped up. There was only the car now.

He walked away. Her clothes were on her bag. Without a stitch on, she was in the pool, swimming, and the other man was watching her. Perhaps they'd keep her at the villa for a week or so before moving her to the clubs on the coast.

The gate closed after him. He went to see his uncle.

'What do you expect me to do for you?'

'I've only enough cash for a month and I need more.'

'Do what the rest of us do go hungry,' Mikey Fanning snapped.

'And I need protection.'

How Edith Fanning had produced Tommy remained a mystery to Mikey, and there were none like him on Myrtle's side. 'We live like paupers. If we want something and we don't have the cash, we do without. You face it or are you too yellow?'

'That's not fucking called for.'

'It's the last time I'm saying it. You don't want to listen, then you're not welcome here. Don't think you can run back to me and Myrtle, snivelling. Either get on a plane, or face it and deal with it.'

'Nothing else to offer?'

'You know what we call you, Izzy Jacobs and me?'

'What?'

'A gas-meter hood. You'd shoot me or stab Myrtle for a hundred quid. Your generation, you're fucking animals, and you've ruined this place. You take my advice or you should start running and not stop.'

'So what's your advice?'

Mikey Fanning told his nephew what to do, where he should go, when ('about as soon as he'll see you') and how ('down on your bended knee and in your best suit, all humble'). He spelled out how it would be if Tommy King was not heading for Malaga International and a flight to Bangkok or Costa Rica. The kid went. He didn't creep away, but sort of sauntered. The swagger hadn't been scrubbed off him. Ought to have been with the size of his debt and who he owed.

He had had a coffee and had bought his nephew's. The shit had passed the girl on and been paid for her. He would have had some banknotes in his pocket but he hadn't offered to pay. That generation had screwed up Paradise. In their wake, the Russians, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians had arrived. Now there were Mexicans and Colombians too. The place was wrecked. There was nowhere for him to go, nowhere that would welcome back him and Myrtle, and nowhere new they could put down roots for the time left them. There was concrete all around him, more half-complete blocks than there had ever been, and more cranes that no longer swung. It had been wonderful, a dream. Myrtle's people used to come out from Bermondsey and visit quietly, with all the precautions taken against the crime squads tracking them and they'd thought Mikey was top of the bloody tree and that Myrtle had fallen on her feet. They didn't come now because they weren't invited: the apartment was too small and he and Myrtle too proud to tell them that life had gone down the drain. His hip hurt this week but he didn't let on because the painkillers came pricey.

He knew one thing and didn't know another. Mikey knew that his nephew, Tommy King, was deep in the shit with his debt round his neck. He didn't know how deep in the shit, with that debt, he was himself. He didn't like to think about that.

'What does "cabin fever" mean?' Winnie asked.

Dottie didn't look up from her screen. 'Boredom, restlessness, irritability, Boss, and being generally foul-tempered.'

Kenny had his chair tilted back and balanced his feet on the rim of a wastepaper bin. 'Or being stuck up a mountain in a tent above the cloud ceiling with no view, Boss, or shut in a room without a window.'

'What's the cure?'

'Me staying in and you hitting the road, walking or riding,' Dottie said.

She would go out with Kenny. She had used up the sights in the cemetery a funeral party, a column of mourners, the team of gardeners and the old women, head to toe in black, who brought flowers. She had exhausted any interest in the occasional flights that came in or left. She had kept an eagle eye on the phones and on the screen of Dottie's laptop but nothing had come in. No one, she thought, needed her.

'That what you want to do, Boss?'

She nodded.

She liked Kenny for his loyalty, dedication and his ability to flicker an eyebrow when she was in danger of either pomposity or a rant. He was good for her. There were fewer of his type in the Service now because the Turks and Tyros all graduates looking for career success had squeezed out the old guard. His hair had already greyed and was thinning, his suit was shiny on the thighs and his plain green tie was frayed. She reckoned that when his time came he would be beating at the door of HR and demanding to stay on she didn't know of anything in his life that would compensate for working at Thames House. He never criticised her decisions in front of an audience but would do so in privacy.

'Where we going, Boss?'

'Anywhere.'

'You good for a slog?'

'That'll do me fine.'

They went past the Shell garage, and all the pumps were busy. They stopped on the pavement. It had been before her time that a Special Forces unit had shot down three Provos on the pavement. The Irish had been on a bomb-laying reconnaissance and the troopers did not know whether their targets were armed or unarmed or whether they had left a bomb in place. She did not voice her own view on the killings. Winnie Monks accepted that men and women on the ground had to make macro-second decisions, then have them forensically examined by outsiders who had not been there, had not seen it, knew fuck all but were happy to pass judgment. It was not often that a boss was criticised when a mission went pear-shaped. Usually the bottle-washers caught the flak. Winnie Monks didn't allow that. She and Kenny went through an arch and down a tunnel in what had been the old defensive walls of the colony, across a square, where a few hardy tourists ate ice cream or fish and chips, and into Main Street. It was crowded, and Kenny said one of the last cruise ships of the season was in harbour.

'They seem to be doing well here.'

'They are, Boss.'

'Tourism hasn't fallen off?'

'No, Boss, nor money-laundering. It's awash with dirty cash. Thirty thousand population, Boss, but thirty-five thousand companies are registered here. It's rotten, and nothing's done.'

They went left, into the back-streets, and had to edge on to pavements to let cars by as they climbed.

She wheezed and cursed the cigarillos she smoked, a blister was coming and . . . Kenny told her that the tower of the Moors' castle was fourteenth century. They went as far as a heavy cannon, newly painted. It was aimed across the harbour to the airport's runway. She gazed away from the block where Dottie was in the camp, and the terminal building for the flights, and tilted her head so that she saw far beyond the community of La Linea Kenny told her, 'The town's even worse than the rest of Spain, is so bankrupt, Boss, that they can't pay the wages for the council workers' and she saw little clusters of white houses going east down the coast to the Costa del Sol.

She thought of them Sparky, Snapper and his camera, and Loy. They were on her watch.

With big binoculars, she could have seen Marbella. The wind came sharp round the vertical cliff edge, wrecking her hair and flattening her skirt against her hips. She had to grasp the rail to steady herself. For fuck's sake, Winnie, she told herself, get a grip.

She turned to Kenny and beckoned him back to her side. 'Is that all they do in this place?'

'Launder dirty money? Yes. And they do it very well.'

She said they'd go further, higher, the next day, and set off down the hill.

An inquest would apportion blame.

She was in the sand, had gone forward with the driver.

The driver, in Caro Watson's opinion, was a jewel. He did skilled vehicle surveillance and had kept well back so that the dust plume was faint, distant, but always visible. It had died.

She had left Barry and David, tasked with her protection, flushed and angry, with the Six man, and gone with the driver. They had binoculars and a couple of brown rugs, suitable for a desert picnic but better as camouflage. They'd walked out to the east of the road, then cut back towards the north and headed for a group of low dunes.

The factors that could be laid against her at an inquest were that she had not brought a shortwave radio with her to communicate with the Six man's vehicle; she had encouraged the driver to take them between two of the dunes, along a shallow valley of loose sand, and to the top of a bluff, so preventing a view of their rear. She had not reckoned that camels, big, with huge hoofs and weighed down with cargo, would move so silently. Her attention had been on the group sitting perhaps four hundred yards ahead of her and she was lying on her stomach. She had had no training in surveillance on that terrain. She had not seen the camels before the first was within spitting distance and coming from behind. Winnie Monks, the Boss, would have called it a 'shambolic fucking cock-up'.

She had seen two boys with herds of goats in scrub to her right and far beyond the dunes, and a bird that might have been a vulture had circled them. She had seen the meeting that the Russian was at the boy sat away from him and looked desolate, but she had not seen the caravan of camels that came behind them.