"Sorry. Go."

"One car left, a green Metro. I can't see anybody around."

"Roj."

The night went silent again. Blagg whispered: "Would they be using radio themselves, sir?"

"Likely enough." Now that CB radio was legal, they wouldn't even have had to pinch sets from the Intelligence Service's quartermasters. But there was nothing he could do about it.

The walkie-talkie suddenly squawked: "Hey, did I hear a good buddy out there ready to shoot the bull? This is the Dog in the Smog tooling down the rip strip and feeling kinda lonesome. Do you copy?" It was an adenoidal Birmingham voice trying to sound like a Tennessee truck driver.

Maxim glared at the radio as if it had bitten him, but the voice came back, jamming the waveband with more verbose CB garbage. Given a pause, Maxim snapped: "You fucking moron," which wasn't military radio procedure either, and switched to channel 5. It stayed silent.

Then at last: "Jim."

"Go."

"I've got Sims and 83 out on the deck. Two others with them. Nobody who looks like Eismark."

"Roj."

"Well, I'm damned," Agnes said. "We're in the right place."

"D'you think the old lady's there already?" Blagg asked.

Maxim and Agnes glanced at each other, then she said: "No. Sims and his bloke will have gone aboard to set up a deal. She's stored away somewhere."

Caswell's voice crackled: "Sims is using a walkie-talkie. sb's getting off the boat. Going for the Metro."

"Roj." Maxim started the engine. "We're going to have to stop him."

"He's most likely going for the old lady," Agnes said. "He could lead us there. "

"He'll talk once I get at him."

"You and your trusty ammonia? It could take hours. "

Caswell reported: "Metro's on its way."

Maxim pulled the radio back into the car. "Wehave to stop him. I can't tail him, not through an empty town, this time of night."

"Of course you can't, but I can. Shift your arse."

Maxim scrambled around to the passenger side as she slid across under the wheel. The green Metro slipped out of the gates and up past them; there was one person in it. Without turning on the lights, Agnes jumped the Renault forward to the edge of the park just as the Metro turned left at the end of the road.

"Stanhope Street," Maxim said, juggling the map, a torch and the radio. "He has to go either left or right in three hundred yards."

Still lightless, the Renault bounded forward and slewed into Stanhope Street; the Metro's tail-lights swung left.

"Bridge Street. Long and looks dead straight. Leads out of town southwards."

It was indeed dead straight – it was the main road feeding the west side of the docks – but became a series of humped-backed bridges over offshoots of those docks. Agnes let the Metro go over the first, out of sight, and then hurled the Renault down to it, jammed to a stop and crept up for a look. And so she went on, driving like a rifleman moving forward under fire, using the car with a skilled savagery that made Maxim and Blagg, men who lived with machinery, wince as they would have done had she used the walkie-talkie to hammer in a nail. But she kept a quarter of a mile back from the Metro yet out of its sight until it crossed the last bridge and turned down the Swinefleet Road along the south bank of the Humber. The soft-sprung Renault screamed around after it.

The radio said: "Jim," already noticeably fainter.

"Harry. We're behind him, going south out of town, by the river. Shin"

The street lights had suddenly ended and they plunged into a moonless darkness and Agnes braked heavily to let the Metro's lights vanish beyond the next corner. Then she snapped on the headlights and tore forward.

"Jim – check in every ten minutes if you can."

"Roj."

One side of the road was a walled dike holding in the river; if the Metro turned, it could only be to the right. That was some consolation for moving in briefly lit rushes and suddenly dark stops as they rounded a bend. But at least the road would be dead flat as long as it clung to the river, and there were occasional tiny villages with lamps up on telephone poles to give them some respite.

Then, inevitably, came the bend which had no tail-lights showing beyond it. Agnes must have been prepared because the lights came on and she changed to an easy cruising drive. "Get your heads down. He may just be checking his back. "

They kept going for another thirty seconds or so, and Agnes said: "He turned off. I've gone past, it should be far enough for him not to hear. D'you want to wait, or walk it?"

The car coasted to a stop and Maxim lifted his head off his knees. "I'll walk it. You follow up in a couple of minutes."

He ran – which he hadn't wanted Blagg to try and do -back the quarter mile to the corner, where a wooded lane led off beside a disused-looking wooden barn. The Metro, unlit, was parked just on the verge; the van, if it was there, would be up the track beside the barn. He waited a few seconds, recovering his breath. As a hiding place it made good sense, since they could have sat on top of the dike a few yards away and watched the Seesperling come chugging upstream and timed their trip into Goole itself precisely.

Gun in hand, and using the Metro as cover, he reached the corner of the barn and paused to listen. There was a mutter, a pause, another mutter. Of course: somebody was speaking German on a radio. He eased an eyebrow around the barn and there was the van, a windowless Bedford of some dark colourhe couldn't make out, with a man perched half on the driving seat under an interior light and using a long-lead microphone. There was no sign of any second man.

Behind, he heard the drone of the Renault heading back. The man with the microphone put it down and shut the door, putting out the light, and the second man came around the back of the van zipping up his trousers. Maxim leaned out around the corner pointing the little revolver and said: "If you move I'll Jh7/you."

He was fairly sure he was starting a gunfight, although he wasn't worried about the outcome. They would be tensed up, almost certainly armed, reckoning on the darkness and a two-to-one superiority… But then the vital first milliseconds flowed away, they felt the surge in their bowels and ideas of pain and death welled up inside them. Then he was herding them against the side of the van, spread your hands and feet, more, more I said, but staying back and waiting for Blagg and the shotgun. A part of his easy victory was explained already: one man had his right wrist wrapped in a rigid plaster bandage right up to the palm.

Blagg noticed that, too. "It looks just like somebody shot you there, don't it? And on account of I'm a great detective, I'd say it happened in Rotherhithe, know where I mean? I'd even say it happened in back of Neptune Court, while you was trying to blow me away. Would you remember that?" He was rubbing the shotgun mu/zle up the man's spine.

"Leave it, Ron," Maxim ordered. The man – 82 – hadn't even been armed.83 had had a Czech VZ5O automatic in his pocket.

Agnes came from the back doors of the van, "She's in there; all right, I think, but…"

"Ron, you're in charge."

"Could I have your.38, Major? The noise of this thing…"

"You're in poaching country here; Lincolnshire starts about ten metres down that road. Nobody'll lose a drop of sleep over a shotgun going off; just stay well back so you don't get splattered." He wasn't talking to Blagg and nobody thought he was.

There was a dim interior light in the van, which was fittedwith a bunk bed on either side. Mina lay on the right one, her head on a grubby flower-pattern cushion and her left hand loosely shading her face. She wore a jumble of old clothes including a stretched woollen cardigan. The van smelt of habitation.

"She's pretty much sedated," Agnes said. She nodded at a box of Valium phials and disposable hypodermics on the other bed. Maxim sat beside them rather than stand in an awkward stoop.