He pointed towards a white concrete angel with spreading wings. ‘This way,’ he said, and took O’Reilly along the grass verge, past the angel and between two waist-high tombs, the sort vampires might lie in to sleep away the daylight hours, safe from sunlight. They walked through the drooping branches of a willow and then Fisher headed over to five tombstones lined up in front of the boundary wall like a stud poker hand. He kicked the one in the centre.

‘There it is,’ he said. ‘Help me get it up.’

They knelt down together, scraping away the soil to slip their hands underneath the stone and then they pushed it up, grunting with the strain until it came off the ground with a wet, slurping sound. They stood the stone upright and then leant it against the wall. The smell of damp, stale earth filled O’Reilly’s nostrils and made him want to gag. Fisher scraped away the soil like a dog looking for a bone. Less than a foot down his fingers touched plastic and he pulled up a polythene-covered parcel which he handed to O’Reilly. There were two other bundles, one of which was obviously a rifle, but Fisher ignored them. All they needed this time was Semtex. They unwrapped the parcel and took out half the packages of explosive, six in all. They took three apiece, rewrapped the rest and put them back in the shallow hole before pushing the damp soil back and replacing the gravestone. They checked the surroundings to make sure that they were still alone in the graveyard, and then they left as silently as they’d arrived.

Nguyen drove his Renault van down the alley behind the shop, the early morning sun glinting off the bonnet. He’d already opened the two wooden gates that led to the shop’s back yard where they usually unpacked deliveries and transferred the food into the freezers in the garage. He parked the van and switched off the engine. He had put on a pair of old overalls after he’d bathed that morning, and he pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. The van was white, three years old and mechanically sound. It had always been parked outside because the garage was used for storage, so it was rusting a little, and it had taken a few knocks from other cars. The name of the restaurant and the telephone number had been drawn in black paint on both sides. Nguyen had painted each letter himself, slowly and carefully, it had taken him hours, but it was the work of minutes to spray over them with a can of white spray paint. He sprayed the paint thinly so that it wouldn’t run and he waited thirty minutes before giving it a second coat, and then a third to make sure that the lettering was completely covered.

While the third coat dried he transferred the tool box, bottles and bags from the garage, methodically crossing the contents off the list in his exercise-book so that he was sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. It was all there, the acids, the bags of fertilizer, the bottles of antifreeze and cans of oil. He’d forgotten nothing. When he’d finished he used a screwdriver to prise the lid off the can of black paint and, resting a brand new artist’s brush against a piece of garden cane, painted on a new set of letters and numbers. As he worked he suddenly felt as if he was being watched and he turned and looked at the upstairs window. A curtain twitched. It could have been Pham wondering what he was up to, or it could have been the wind. Nguyen stared up at the window but saw nothing so he returned to the painting.