She spoke hurriedly. “There’s a gang on the Estate where we live, these young lads. Local boys. They terrify everyone. They do what they want — cause trouble, steal things, deal their drugs. No-one dares do anything against them.”

“The police?”

She laughed bitterly. “No use to no-one. They won’t even come onto the Estate unless there’s half a dozen of them. It’ll calm down a bit while they’re around but as soon as they go again, it’s as if they were never even there.”

“What do they have to do with Elijah?”

“He’s got in with them. He’s just a little boy, and I’m supposed to look after him, but there’s nothing I can do. They’ve taken him away from me. He stays out late, he doesn’t listen to me anymore, he won’t do as he’s told. I’ve always tried to give him a little freedom, not be one of those rowdy Jamaican mothers where the kids can’t ever do anything right, but maybe now I think I ought to have been stricter. Last night was as bad as it’s ever been. I know he’s been sneaking out late at night to be with them. Normally he goes out of his bedroom window so I put a lock on it. He comes into the front room and I tell him he needs to get back to bed. He just gives me this look and he says I can’t tell him what to do anymore. I tell him I’m his mother, and he has to listen to me for as long as he’s under my roof. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“So he says that maybe he won’t be under my roof for much longer, that he’ll get his own money and find somewhere for himself. Where’s a fifteen-year old boy going to get the money for rent unless it’s from thieving or selling drugs? He goes for the door but he’s got to come by me first, so I get up and stop him. He tells me to get out of the way and when I won’t he says he hates me, says how it’s my fault his father isn’t around, and when I try and get him to calm down he just pushes me aside, opens the door and goes. He’s a big boy for his age, taller than I am already, and he’s strong. If he won’t do as he’s told, what can I do to stop him? He didn’t get back in until three in the morning and when I woke up to go to work he was still asleep. “

“Have you thought about moving away?”

She laughed humourlessly again. “Do you know how hard that is? We were in a hostel before. I used to live up in Manchester until my husband started knocking me about. There was this place, for battered women, we ended up there when we got into London. I’m not knocking it but it was full up. It was no place to bring up my boys. I was on at the social for months before they gave us our flat. You have no idea the trouble it’d be to get them to move us somewhere else. No. We’re stuck there.”

She paused, staring out at the cars again.

“Ever since we’ve been on the Estate we’ve had problems. I worry about Elijah every single day. Every single day I worry about him. Every day I worry.”

Milton had started to wonder whether there might be a way that he could help.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Here I am telling you all my troubles and I don’t even know your name.”

Milton almost reflexively retreated to his training, and to his long list of false identities, but he stopped himself. What was the point? He had no stomach for any of that any longer. A foundation of lies would not be a good place to start if he wanted to help this woman. “I’m John,” he said. “John Milton.”

He approached the junction for the Whitechapel Road and turned off.

“I’m sorry for going on. I’m sure you’ve got your own problems. You don’t need to hear mine.”

“I’d like to help.”

“That’s nice of you, but I don’t see how you could.”

“Perhaps I could talk to him?”

“You’re not police, are you?”

“No.”

“Or the Social?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to be rude, Mr. Milton, but you don’t know Elijah. He’s headstrong. Why would he care what you said?”

He slowed down as they approached a queue of slower-moving traffic. “I can be persuasive,” he said.

6

Control had requested Milton’s file from the archive and, after it had been delivered, he shut himself away in his office with a pot of tea and a cigar and spread the papers around him. It was late when he started, the sun long since set and the lights of the office blocks on the opposite side of the Thames glittering in the dark waters of the river. He lit the cigar and began his search through the documents for a clue that might explain his sudden, and uncharacteristic, decision. Their conversation had unsettled him. Milton had always been his best cleaner. His professionalism had always been complete. He maintained a vigorous regimen that meant that he was as fit as men half his age. His body was not the problem. If it was, he mused ruefully, this would have been easier to fix. The problem was with his mind and that presented a more particular issue. Control prided himself on knowing the men and women who worked for him and Milton’s attitude had taken him by surprise. It introduced an element of doubt into his thinking and doubt, to a man as ordered and logical as Control, was not tolerable.

He held the smoke in his mouth. Milton’s dedication and professionalism had never wavered, not for a moment, and he had completed an exemplary series of assignments that could have formed the basis for an instruction manual for the successful modern operative. He was the Group’s most ruthless and efficient assassin. He had always treated his vocation as something of an art form, drawing satisfaction from the knowledge of a job well done. Control knew from long and vexatious experience that such an attitude was a rarity these days. Real artisans — real craftsmen — were difficult to find and when you had one, you nurtured him. The other men and women at his disposal tended towards the blunt. They were automatons that he pointed at targets, then watched and waited as they did their job. Their methods were effective but crass: a shower of bullets from a slow-moving car, a landmine detonated by mobile phone, random expressions of uncontrolled violence. It was quick and dirty, flippant and trite, a summation of all that Control despised about modern intelligence. There was no artistry left, no pride taken in the job, no assiduity, no careful deliberation. No real nerve. Milton reminded Control of the men and women he had worked with when he was a field agent himself, posted at Station M in the middle of the Cold War. They had been exact and careful, their assignments comprising long periods of planning that ended with sudden, controlled, contained violence.

Control turned through the pages and found nothing. Perhaps the answer was to be found in his history. He took another report from its storage crate and dropped it on his desk. It was as thick as a telephone directory.

In order for a new agent to be admitted to the Group, a raft of assessments were required to be carried out. The slightest impropriety — financial, personal, virtually anything — would lead to a black mark and that would be that, the proposal would be quietly dropped and the prospective agent would never even know that they had been under consideration. Milton had been no different. MI5 were tasked with the compilation of the reports and they had done a particularly thorough job with him. They had investigated his childhood, his education, his career in the army and his personal life.

John Milton was born in 1968. He had no brothers or sisters. His father, James Milton, had worked as a petrochemical engineer and led his family on a peripatetic existence, moving every few years as he followed work around the world. Much of Milton’s early childhood was spent in the Gulf, with several years in Saudi Arabia, six months in Iraq during the fall of the Shah, then Egypt, Dubai and Oman. There had been a posting to the United States and then, finally, the directorship of a medium-sized gas exploration company in London. The young Milton picked up a smattering of Arabic and an ability to assimilate himself into different cultures; both talents had proven valuable in his later career.