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street.
    ‘He going to be all right?’ Ripley asked, pointing at Barker’s receding silhouette.
    ‘Flesh wound,’ Danny told him. ‘Might have to use his left hand to spank the monkey for a while, that’s all.’
    Spud looked meaningfully over at the corpse of the man Danny had wasted. ‘You gave that fella’s mouth a good rinse out with his nine-milli,’ he said. ‘What was all that about?’
    For an uncomfortable moment, Danny remembered the rage that had taken him over.
    ‘Bad breath,’ he muttered. ‘Got a thing about it.’
    Spud raised an eyebrow at the insufficient response, then nodded towards the arm of Danny’s North Face jacket. ‘You’ve still got a piece of the bastard’s brains on your sleeve,’ he said, as if he were pointing out a ketchup stain to a kid.
    Danny shrugged. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The headshed want us out of here. Let’s go.’
    They put their heads down, and walked silently away from the flashing lights and the scene of devastation they’d created. Their own vehicle was an unmarked white Transit van parked up two blocks away. Three minutes later they were climbing into the back, their coats dripping rainwater over the metal floor. They each had a holdall with a change of clothes, so they stripped out of their wet gear and pulled on dry jeans and T-shirts, leaving the wet, bloody garments sprawled over the vehicle’s floor.
    Ripley took the wheel. Spud sat next to him in the middle seat, with Danny by the passenger window. They eased slowly away. After a couple of minutes they came to the police cordon, but the armed officer recognised their vehicle and waved them through. A minute later, they were driving down Lewisham High Street. Danny wiped the condensation away from the inside of his window and stared out.
    The pavements were empty, but it wasn’t just because of the driving rain. There was unease on the streets. He’d been in London after 7/7, and there’d been a similar feeling then. If anything, it was worse in the wake of the Paddington bomb. The death count had been higher – last thing Danny heard, the number of fatalities had exceeded a hundred – and people were scared. Everyone knew someone who knew somone who’d been affected. Barker had a good mate in A Squadron, young bloke called Hancock, whose brother had been on the train and hadn’t made it. Hancock had been offered compassionate leave but had turned it down. Wanted to be around to do his bit as and when the time came. As they passed Lewisham station, Danny saw a group of four armed police guarding the entrance. The sight was supposed to put the public at their ease. Danny wondered if it didn’t have the opposite effect.
    Spud switched the radio on. ‘Bat out of Hell’ by Meatloaf blasted out of the speakers. Spud turned it up even louder. ‘I fucking love this one!’ he shouted over the music, and he started singing along tunelessly. If there was tension on the streets, the inside of the Transit was a little cocoon of released adrenaline. It didn’t matter how many times you found yourself in a firefight, the heady mixture of relief and exhilaration when it was over never got old.
    Meatloaf’s final chords died away. There was a chirpy Radio 2 jingle that grated on Danny’s ears, then a news bulletin. ‘The number of fatalities from the bombing at Paddington station last Friday has reached 107. Buckingham Palace have today confirmed that Orlando Whitby, fiancé of Princess Katrina, is among the dead . . .’
    Spud switched the radio off again. ‘Fucking sick of hearing about it,’ he said.
    Ripley indicated right. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘That’s one for the Princess Di nutjobs to get their teeth into.’
    ‘Hey,’ Spud said. ‘Enough of the nutjob.’
    Danny smiled. It sometimes seemed to him that there wasn’t a single member of the British public who didn’t think the SAS had killed Diana using some fiendishly elaborate plot cooked up by the establishment and sanctioned by