‘Calm down, O’Reilly,’ said the man who’d let him in.

O’Reilly turned towards him, his cheeks flaring red. ‘Calm down?’ he said. ‘Christ, man, you should have been there. You should have seen me. It was fan-bloody-tastic.’ He turned back to look at the television set. ‘Has it been on yet? How many did we get?’

‘Fifteen so far,’ said the man sitting on the leather Chesterfield directly opposite the pseudo-antique video cabinet on which the television stood. ‘You did well, O’Reilly.’ He was the oldest of the group but even he had barely turned thirty. Although he had the broadest Irish accent he had Nordic blond hair and piercing blue eyes and fair skin. His name was also far removed from his Irish origins but Denis Fisher was Belfast-born and he’d killed many times for the Cause. ‘What about the helmet and the leathers?’ he asked O’Reilly.

‘In the boot of the car. Just like you said. It was so easy.’

‘Not easy,’ said Fisher. ‘Well planned.’

‘Whatever,’ said O’Reilly. ‘I deserve a drink.’ He went into the white-and-blue-tiled kitchen and opened the fridge. ‘Anyone else want anything?’ he called, but they all declined. O’Reilly took out a cold can of Carlsberg and opened it as he walked back into the lounge. He pulled one of the wooden chairs out from under the oval dining-table and sat astride it, resting his forearms on its back.

‘What next?’ he asked, grinning.

‘Yes,’ said the man who’d opened the door and who was now sitting on a flowery print sofa by a tall wooden bookcase. His name was McCormick. ‘What do we do next?’

Fisher smiled. ‘You’re so bloody impatient,’ he laughed. He turned to look at the occupant of the chair by the window, the one they called The Bombmaker. ‘That depends on what MacDermott here comes up with.’ The Bombmaker grinned.

The comedy show was interrupted for a news flash and a sombre man with movie-star looks reported that sixteen people had died in a bomb explosion and that the Provisional IRA had claimed responsibility. They then cut to a reporter in a white raincoat standing under a street-lamp in Knightsbridge, who said that police now believed that the bomb had been in the back carrier of a motorcycle and that it had been detonated by a timing device.

O’Reilly punched the air again, and The Bombmaker’s grin widened.

The police car drove slowly down Clapham Road. Constable Simon Edgington’s left hand was aching from the constant gear changing and he cursed the bumper-to-bumper traffic under his breath. It wasn’t even worth switching the siren on because there wasn’t enough room for the cars and buses to pull to the side.

‘It’s getting worse,’ he groaned.

‘Sorry?’ said his partner, a blonde WPC called Susan Griffin who had joined the Met on the graduate entry scheme. One of the high-flyers, a sergeant had told Edgington, closely followed by a warning not to try anything on because she’d reported the last constable whose hand had accidentally slipped on to her thigh during a hasty gear change.