"I don't think George wants you doing any more on your own initiative."

"Then he can bloody well tell me so himself. "

"I was under the impression that he had." She grinned suddenly. Her smiles were light, acted expressions, but her grin was wide and uninhibited. "But I'll pass the thought on. " She picked up her jacket and handbag and headed for the distant clubhouse. Behind, she heard another parent swoop on Maxim. "Oh, Major, did you get the message about our little wine and cheese party for…"

Corporal Blagg had spent his childhood – those parts of it the local authority hadn't been able to control – in the courts, alleyways and concrete 'gardens' of Rotherhithe's blocks of flats. He had learned to fight there, to ride there, to play football there, and at last how to get his hand inside Betty Tanner's jeans there. He knew those courts and gardens, not just as places and secret short cuts, but as a whole pattern of life and behaviour. And he knew immediately that the two men walking towards him didn't belong, were wrong. They couldn't have been more wrong if they'd worn Father Christmas suits.

But they'd seen him the moment he saw them, so he kept on walking towards them. They might not know him by sight, or might not be looking for him at all. They weren't police; one of them had a rather foreign look. He put his hand casually into his jacket and touched the butt of the Spanish copy of the Colt.38. They were about five yards apart and he was just deciding they weren't anything to do with him when they both took out pistols.

He shot one twice, in the middle, and he collapsed against the other, blocking Blagg's aim. The second man brought up his gun and fired from the cover of his wounded companion. Blagg tried for a head shot and missed, felt a punch in the chest that made his knees fold, but he fired again and saw the pistol fall loose. Then the man was running, and Blagg could have shot him in the back but he had only one round left.

The first man lay there, moaning. Blagg started to run, too, in the other direction. He moved fast and confidently, but when he had gone only three hundred yards he began to feel breathless, long before he should have done, and realised whatthat one shot might have done. He started desperately to think of a place to hide.

Something in the sea air must act as a mind-blowing drug on English architects, Agnes decided. Mining towns, garrison towns, purpose-built New Towns – all those were fairly hideous in their own ways, but they offered no contest to the English seaside. There, an impregnable first line of defence against any invader with visual taste, stood hundreds of miles of small houses that could have been assembled by retarded monkeys dipping randomly into a box of building styles.

The little semi-det that Maxim's parents had bought when they retired to the outskirts of Littlehampton sported a Georgian bow window, timber cladding above the garage – which had a metal door – and tile-hung patches around the first-floor windows, whose balconies were just big enough for a seagull to stand on. And that was restrained compared with the green pantiles, Spanish ironwork, Provençalshutters and stained-glass leaded windows spattered along the rest of the road.

Or maybe they just didn't have architects within three miles of the sea. Maybe it was all done by builders' baby daughters: "Draw Daddy a nice house and Daddy will build it. "

Maxim's mother was a cheerful, bustling little woman; his father wore a moustache, smoked a pipe and said very little but, Agnes guessed, listened a lot. She learned that Maxim had an elder sister – oddly, she'd always assumed he must have been the first child-who had married a Quaker schoolmaster and lived up North, had three children and didn't work, "Except at disapproving of the Army," Maxim added. They were just finishing the apple pie when the phone rang.

Everybody looked at Maxim. Probably his parents didn't get more than half a dozen calls a week, Agnes realised.

Maxim answered it, then said: "Speaking," and mouthed to Agnes: "It's the Fun Palace," and took the phone into the hallway, out of hearing. Nobody else said anything, and Agnes suddenly saw that Chris was pale and rigid with apprehension as he sensed his weekend turning lonely. But his face said nothing; a soldier's face. You poor little bugger, she thought.

Maximcame back and beckoned Agnes out. They stood just outside the front door.

"A gun battle in Rotherhithe. One badly wounded, police looking for two more, at least one of them thought to be wounded. As much as anything, I think George was just wanting to make sure I was still here."

"I'll give you an alibi. What do you think it is?"

"The same as George thinks it is. I don't know how often Rotherhithe goes in for gunfights, but this could be one of ours."

Agnes nodded gloomily. "It's a bit late for bank hold-ups and a bit early for night-club ructions. "

"I'd better get back."

"Can you give me a lift?"

She let him go in alone to break the news to Chris. Across the street a lace curtain twitched. The neighbours would be interested in whom that nice Major Maxim was talking to on the doorstep, too.

After driving in silence for ten minutes, Maxim said suddenly: "I was a bloody fool. Blagg told me he'd thrown away the revolver that woman gave him. Soldiersdon't throw away guns. They join the Army to^ef guns, and they're always in trouble for possessing one illegally or swiping a few rounds of ammunition. It's crooks who throw away guns. I've been thinking like a crook. "

"Six months at Number 10 would do that to anybody," Agnes sympathised. "Are you a gun nut as well?"

"You can't be a soldier – not an infantryman, anyway -without liking weapons. And liking some more than others. It's like a pilot having opinions about aeroplanes, nobody thinks that's odd. Don't you get any firearms training in your mob?"

"Oh, we're supposed to know something about handguns, and fireoffafew rounds every so often. I usually manage to dodge that. I've only had to carry a pistol once, just a few hours. And I've never used one. "

Maxim nodded. They had passed through Arundel and were coming over the ridge at Whiteways Lodge roundabout,heading for Petworth and then the A 3 at Milford. It was far the best route into London from the South. He was driving fast but safely and, Agnes noted, not as well as she could have done. Still, she had the training and he didn't. Being able to handle a car was for her far more important than playing Annie Get Your Gun.

"If it is your wandering corporal in hospital, what were you planning?" she asked.

"Oh, I wasn't thinking it would be him. "

"Really?" Without glancing at her, he knew she had her eyebrows at full stretch.

"I'd back Blagg at any fun and gamesofthatsort. He could be hurt, but he wouldn't be the one left behind. "

"I forgot, he's one of your Hereford Superstars. But even so -"

"I assume whoever-it-was wanted to capture him, not kill him. If they'd got him badly wounded, they'd have taken him away, wouldn't they?"

"Much in what you say," she agreed reluctantly. "So do you have any ideas where Blagg could be?"

"None. I'll just have to go looking."

"Of course. I suppose that would be the one way to make things worse. I should have had more faith in you. "

This time Maxim did glance at her; she was staring straight ahead, nodding gently to herself.

"What do you mean?"

"Harry, do you have any conception of the strife you have caused so far?"

"By thumping those two gits from Six?"

"Not just that. If that were all, I'd applaud it as a wise and public-spirited action and I hope it starts a trend. But it was very far from all, wasn't it? Until you came along, Century House was right out on a limb. One of their sections had gone hog barmy and set up an operation that turned into a shoot-out in a friendly country with an apparently innocent citizen getting killed. They'd followed that up by mounting a major surveillance job in London without clearing it with us or the Co-ordinator or anybody. Their private parts were firmly jammed in the wringer and all it needed was for somebody togive the handle a slight nudge… So then you came galloping to the rescue. You concealed knowledge of a deserter, you actually helped him stay deserted, and They can make out a case for saying you still are. You messed up their surveillance, you beat up their agents, you went in forexactly the same unauthorised adventurism as they had – and so let them off the hook. Now if they pull it off everybody'11 heave a sigh of relief and their methods will be forgiven, and if theydon't then it'll all be Numberid's fault and that would probably suit their book just as much as coming good on Plainsong itself."