Chapter 2

"It was Swindon. Definitely Swindon. Just look at the place!" Bodie glowered out of the car window, his flared nostrils and elegantly arched eyebrow conveying a depth of contempt too great for words. "If ever a place would benefit from a few bombs..."

"I'm telling you, it was Slough." Doyle was sticking to his guns. "It's Philip Larkin: 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough'."

"Well, that's only because he never saw Swindon. And it's Betjeman, you berk."

Doyle had long since discovered that his partner was more cultured than he liked to let on. Bodie was right about Swindon – it was a dump. And damn it, he was right about Betjeman too.

"Hold on." Bodie was abruptly serious. He adjusted the rear view mirror to give him a clearer view of the figure leaving ARC Defence. "That's our girl." By unspoken agreement, Doyle hopped out of the car to follow on foot while Bodie pulled smoothly out into the slow, early evening traffic.

When ARC's director had discovered that the woman copying his research data was not who she claimed to be, it had taken all Cowley's powers of persuasion to stop him charging into the computer room and having her arrested on the spot. Only the suggestion that she might already have removed some disks the previous day – and Cowley would bet his best single malt that she had done so – had scared him into allowing her to leave unhindered in order to find out where she went. Hence Doyle and Bodie's careful tailing.

A sudden rash of brake lights ahead brought the Capri to a halt. Bodie stuck his head out of the window, and saw a van that was clumsily executing a three-point-turn. "Come on," he snarled under his breath, as the woman who was not Holly McCabe disappeared from view into a street lined with shops, Doyle strolling casually behind her. As he reached the corner, a backward glance at the car and the merest nod indicated that he understood his partner might be a while catching up.

The van driver was making the biggest dog's dinner of the manoeuvre, not helped by the hooting of horns and the suggestions shouted, with varying degrees of politeness, by his fellow drivers. It was fully five minutes before Bodie was able to turn the Capri into the road by the dry cleaners where Doyle and their quarry had headed. There was no sign of either of them. Bodie snatched up the RT.

"Four five," he called. Silence. "Four five, this is three seven. Where are you?" He scanned the pavements, the shops, the pub where a few office workers had spilled outside to enjoy the weak evening sunshine. No sign. He spoke more forcefully. "Four five come in!"

The static hiss of the RT was his only reply.

Doyle kept his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, seeming to look everywhere other than at the woman who was the sole focus of his attention. She turned right into a flight of concrete steps that led up between the buildings to an open walkway and some flats above the row of shops. Checking that she had rounded the first bend, he followed.

Kendal leant moodily over the brick balustrade, flicking cigarette ash onto passing pedestrians in the street two floors below. He wished Jacobs wouldn't make him leave the flat to smoke – it made him feel like a child, sent outside for being bad.

He glanced around, half looking out for the girl with the briefcase. As she came into view at the corner, his mouth twisted with dislike. Smug bitch. She thought she was so much better than him, just because she knew about computers and disks and stuff. But he knew something she didn't – that when Jacobs sold the data to his contact, they had no intention of sharing the proceeds with her. So far, Kendal had thought of three different ways to kill her, and he was trying to decide which one to use when the time came.

She reached the foot of the steps and passed out of his line of sight. Leaning forward, Kendal dropped his still-burning cigarette end and was delighted when it landed in the basket of an old woman. He was about to go back into the flat when he noticed someone else below him looking up the stairs – a bloke with curly hair and a leather jacket. The man glanced both ways before heading up.

No-one who looked like that lived in these flats; that was why Jacobs had chosen them. There were a few junkies and squatters, and the tart up the far end, but most of them were empty. The one next to theirs had some broken-down scaffolding around it from a half-hearted attempt to make it habitable. Pulling a short length of pole free, Kendal positioned himself at the top of the stairs, and waited.

Doyle leapt silently up the steps three at a time and had almost reached the turn at the top when what appeared to be a scaffolding pole swung into view at head height. He flung up an arm, partially deflecting the blow so that instead of smashing his skull it glanced off with a still-sickening crunch. Flailing for purchase Doyle fell back down the stairwell, instinctively tucking into a ball but feeling each step as he bounced off them. Coming to a halt at the half landing, all the breath knocked from him, Doyle's blurred vision made out the shape of the maniac with the scaffolding pole leaping down to finish the job.

"Don't!" the woman called out. "We need to know who he is, what he knows." The boy with the pockmarked face glanced regretfully at his weapon, but contented himself with stamping on Doyle's guts with his heavy boot. Doyle heard the sound of the RT in his pocket being smashed into a number of expensive pieces. He just had time to consider that Cowley would probably have it deducted from his wages before the boot connected with his face and blackness overtook him.

Bodie had been involved in more than a few frank exchanges of views with his boss, but today Cowley's ire had reached almost unprecedented heights. Outside the room that CI5 had commandeered in the local police station, the curious officers who had been loitering slunk quietly away, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire between these two hard cases. It was fair to say that the Chief was less than impressed that one of his supposedly top operatives had lost the girl, the disks and (least significantly, to Cowley's way of thinking) his partner, all because of a Transit driver's inability to find reverse.

"We've got nothing now – nothing at all," Cowley snapped. "The only lead we had was the girl and you lost her. And I gave ARC my personal guarantee that nothing would happen to those disks."

"I could have another look in their computer room..."

"Ach, there's nothing there, you know that, man." Cowley threw his glasses impatiently down on the desk. Bodie was scowling mutinously, bouncing on the balls of his feet, a barely contained explosion of frustration in his eyes. "Get out of here. I don't care what you have to do. Find her. Find those disks."

"And Doyle?" Concern for his partner made Bodie's tone savage.

"Aye. You'd better find him too."