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see Sefton, cuffed also, being shoved out of the door, in a line with all the soldiers.
    Suddenly, at the foot of the stairs, Rob made his move. With a great cry, he surged forwards, out of the grasp of so many hands, his own still pinned behind his back, and propelled a uniformed copper into the wall, his forehead connecting brutally with the man’s throat and bringing him down. He bounced off the man, bellowing incoherently at all the others, his red face like that of an animal roaring at its fate, defiant to the last. ‘For you!’ he shouted. ‘For you, if you want, you sow!’ Costain didn’t know if he was talking about luck or about Martha or what, but it was magnificent to witness. He let out a bellow of coke-fuelled laughter, thrashing out again against the uniforms around him.
    A kind of ecstatic yell of triumph rose from the rest of the uniforms gathered downstairs. They piled into Rob, some bursting in through the front door, or rushing back down the stairs, pushing past Costain. Rob was lost in the sea of them, crying out loudly under the blows.
    Resisting arrest. All the abuse coppers took, people spitting in your face . . .
    Resisting arrest. Set off that powder keg.
    Though, while in cuffs, it shouldn’t. Not these days.
    Costain thought – as they heaved him down the stairs soon after, as he still heard the sound of blows and Rob’s cries of protest – of the four years he’d been involved in this. Of the six times during that period he’d been stopped and searched. A patrol officer in Kilburn, just a kid, had called him ‘nigger’ and slapped him on the cheek. The one time, too, that he’d had his warrant card on him, and they hadn’t bloody found it. He still had the young man’s shoulder number scribbled on a piece of paper in his wallet, and he thought of it at times like this.
    Quill was fighting his way into the throng now, physically pulling coppers off Rob’s back. ‘Robert . . . Stephen . . . Toshack,’ he had begun yelling, ‘. . . you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if . . .’
    From the television nearby, Costain heard the New Year’s Day celebrations beginning. A moment later there sounded, from the small of his back, a single loud click.
    He was dragged out through the door, without any eye contact from Quill, and across the huge dark coldness of the morning, and thrown into the back of one of a string of police vans, like all the other soldiers in their beery suits.
    And he let out a breath and closed his eyes, and felt a rush of fear at what was still only in his head and on that tape.
    The police helicopter hovered above Bermondsey, every stroke of its blades swallowing the last available money out of its last operation, the coppers inside it watching not just the raid on the Toshack home but simultaneous assaults on the garages and front-room distribution centres and suburban brothels. They were fully intent on their last duties before they’d be on their way into oblivion. Like the rest of London , they felt – from on high tonight – bitterly. They were too intent, in fact, to notice that, through what seemed to be coincidence, every prisoner taken out of every building was being removed in a south-westerly direction.
    The wheel that was London had started, ever so slowly, to turn once again.

THREE
    In the early hours, Quill watched as the uniforms opened the back doors of each van in turn and led each prisoner into Gipsy Hill police station. Not everyone who’d been discovered at the house was here, because he’d had the prisoners divided up between the secure custody suites at Gipsy Hill, Streatham, Brixton and Kennington, partly to speed up the entire process, partly so that every major player was kept in a cell corridor on his own, and couldn’t get his story straight by shouting to his mates. Harry would be ready to do a bit of sleight of hand so that Costain could slip him the Nagra when he surrendered his personal items to the