‘Now?’ said McCormick, licking his lips nervously.

‘No, Fisher said we wait until we’re on Shooters Hill Road,’ replied O’Reilly.

‘Let’s go then.’ McCormick put the car in gear and drove to the main junction and indicated before he turned. He pulled the car to the side some fifty yards down the road. O’Reilly nodded and opened the glove compartment and took out a small walkie-talkie. It was an Icom IC2 transceiver, a hand-held model. There was another in the camera bag, though it had been modified. The Bombmaker had attached a relay switch to the loudspeaker circuit which was connected to a second circuit, containing a 1.5 volt battery and a gunpowder detonator. The detonator was embedded in twenty-five pounds of Semtex explosive, around which was wrapped a cluster of three-inch nails. There was no timing device because the bomb would be detonated at a safe distance by the transceiver in O’Reilly’s hand. And there were no booby traps because they weren’t sure when he’d be able to put the bag down.

O’Reilly saw the avaricious look in McCormick’s eye, the pleading of a dog begging for a bone. He handed it over. McCormick handled it reverently like a holy icon.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Go for it,’ said O’Reilly.

McCormick switched the control switch to ‘send’ and held the transceiver to his mouth. ‘Bang,’ he said, and they saw the flash of light followed quickly by the thud of the explosion and felt the tremor through the car seats.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ said O’Reilly.

They were driving along the A102 heading for the Blackwall Tunnel by the time the first white-coated doctor reached the blood-soaked pitch.

Sir John Brownlow was getting irritable, so Ellen brewed him a fresh cup of coffee and placed it on the desk in front of him. He smiled his thanks and she could read his discomfort in his eyes. Ellen Howard had been the MP’s personal assistant for almost three years and she’d reached the stage where she could pretty much judge what he was thinking by the look on his face. Today he was wearing his professional, caring mask but she could tell that he was far from happy. He hated the regular constituency surgeries where the punters queued up to present him with their problems and to ask him to put their lives in order. The ones at the local party office weren’t so bad because they were mainly an opportunity of pressing the flesh with the party faithful, it was when he had to go out and about that he suffered. Ellen knew what the problem was, though she would never dare tell the MP to his face. It was that Sir John simply did not care about the man in the street, and he sympathised even less with their trials and tribulations. But he was all too well aware of how narrow his majority had been at the last election, and he had resigned himself to the fact that being seen helping his constituents with their problems was a vote-catcher. Holding the surgery in a local citizens advice centre eased some of the pain as it meant he could usually pass them on to someone else. Teflon Time, he called it. The trick was to make sure that nothing stuck and that the punters went away thinking that their MP had done his best and was worth supporting.