‘Maybe they didn’t care where they went, so long as they avoided the task force.’

‘But they could have gone south, couldn’t they? It was another choice, to go north. To Yemen.’

‘But they weren’t looking to dock. They just wanted the ship out of the way while they negotiated the ransom. I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill here.’

‘But then they went back to Somali waters,’ Shepherd continued. ‘That made no sense at all. And there’s another thing. Crazy Boy went to Somalia before the ship was taken. Why? Has he done that before?’

‘Not so far as we know, but he’s been taking ships for years and we’ve only been looking at him for six months.’

‘What was so important that he had to go in person?’ said Shepherd. ‘He went to see his uncle, right?’

‘We assume so. He flew to Nairobi and then chartered a small plane to the airfield.’

‘So why didn’t he phone? Or use Skype like he usually did? Charlie, there’s something not right about this. And the key is finding out how he stopped that ship the way he did.’

Button sipped her champagne. ‘OK, I’ll get that looked at. But in the grand scheme of things I really believe it’s a small point, just a loose end that needs tidying up. We got the ship back, we got the pirates and we rescued the crew of the yacht with only one hostage killed, and he didn’t die in the rescue.’ She raised her glass to him. ‘Go home, spend time with your boy. You deserve a rest.’

‘And a pay rise?’

Button’s smile tightened a fraction.

‘I was joking, Charlie,’ he said, and raised his glass to her. ‘You know I don’t do it for the money.’

Lisa O’Hara’s heart began to race when she saw the minicab pull up outside Shepherd’s house. She was parked far enough away that he wouldn’t see her but she still slid down in her seat as she watched him walk towards the front door carrying a black holdall. He let himself into the house and closed the front door behind him.

It was definitely him, she didn’t even have to check the photograph in her handbag. Daniel Shepherd was Matt Tanner and before long he would be dead.

She smiled to herself as she started her car and drove away. She had a call to make but she never used mobile phones so she drove to a British Telecom payphone in the centre of Hereford. The man she called was one of the Real IRA’s top bombmakers. He lived in Cork, where he ran a computer repair business, and he promised to be over within twenty-four hours. O’Hara had already obtained the explosives that he would need for the construction of the device. The Semtex had arrived in Ireland in 1985, a gift from Libya in the days when Gaddafi had been an enemy of the free world, long before Tony Blair had visited the country and British companies had started making fortunes from Libyan oilfields. The Real IRA had received more than a ton of legacy weapons from the Provisionals during the time when the government was demanding that the weapons be handed in and the IRA were arguing that decommissioning was enough. The Semtex had been taken, as had Kalashnikov assault rifles, half a dozen RPGs and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The government had never called the Provisional IRA to account for the missing ordnance; all they had been concerned about was the public relations value of being able to say that the IRA had laid down its arms.