Andy McNab - Dark winter

Suzy looked up and smiled at me lovingly. 'D958?'

I nodded, not that we needed to remember the plate. There couldn't be that many old red Ladas left on the planet.

I took a deep breath. 'My shit-hole was a council estate. They all smell the same, don't they?'

She shuddered. 'Coal fires and boiled cabbage. Hate it, hate it, hate it.' As if I didn't know by now.

Sir Lewis was the next junction right. 'Down that alley?'

We crossed the road arm in arm, turning down the narrow passage a little short of the target road. We could just fit side by side, the backs of the Sir Lewis Street houses on our left. The yards were tiny and washing hung from lines at second-floor level to catch a bit of wind. Old grey vests and very faded blue jeans seemed to be the fashion statement of the week.

Cats or urban foxes had got stuck into the bin-bags, scattering frozen food packets and the contents of hundreds of ashtrays. There was a smell of damp clothes mixed with something like stale tea coming from one of the kitchen windows, and somewhere upstairs a toilet had just been flushed. Some of the yards had doors backing on to the alley, others had been kicked in or rotted away. The houses themselves were just little brick squares.

Walker Street cut across us about forty metres ahead. I could hear TVs in some of the houses, and here and there a dog barked behind a crumbling wall.

We started across Walker, and tried to make out the door numbers on Sir Lewis to our left, but couldn't see any from this distance.

A little half-moon footbridge spanned the stream and led into the vast, bulldozed area of mud, rubbish and heavy plant tracks that ran for about a hundred metres up to the main drag. Beyond that was the fenceline of the docks, where cranes and fuel-storage tanks daubed with the Q8 logo cut the skyline. Hundreds of new joist-sized planks jutted over the fence; someone like Jewsons must have had a bit of a warehouse there. The whole area of the docks was dominated by a huge white rectangular concrete structure. It had no windows, so was presumably some kind of storage facility.

A group of kids came out of Sir Lewis and bumbled up Walker towards us. They all had crewcuts and holes in their trainers, flicked their cigarettes continuously with their thumbs and couldn't stop gobbing on to the pavement. We headed down the continuation of the alleyway, splitting up to get past two abandoned Morrisons' trolleys.

The walk-past would entail far more than just finding the target door. We'd have to take in as much information as possible, because we wouldn't be doing it again. Once we'd walked past the target, the area would be a no-go for us until we went back in to attack the place. We wouldn't even turn and look back: lessons learnt the hard way about third-party awareness ensured that wouldn't happen. Quite apart from curtain-twitchers, we had to assume the ASU had people on stag, looking from windows, or out and about on the street.

Something dawned on me. 'How do you do a walk-past together? I've never done a two-up.'

She seemed quite pleased there was something I didn't know. 'Easy. Don't try to divide up the information. Just do it as if you were on your own. Then we argue later about what we saw.'

We were reaching the end of the alleyway and there was a way out on to Sir Lewis. To our left was Corrie -land, to our right, council bungalows and houses that went on for maybe a hundred and fifty before coming to a dead end. We stayed on the opposite side of the road to keep a better perspective on the target, and therefore more time with eyes on, more time to get the information into our heads. We looked at everything, even if it felt as if it wasn't registering: the unconscious is a total sponge and we could extract stored information from each other.

The first number on the opposite side of the road was 136. That was good: it meant we were at the heavy half of the road. A car drove away ahead of us, scaring a couple of manky old cats.

She pulled gently on my jacket arm. 'Don't forget to count.'

I nodded, and groaned to myself. I hated the counting bit, but it had to be done. Eighty-eight was coming up. It was pebbledashed and had a solid white door. To the right of it was a single bare aluminium double-glazed window, a sealed unit with a smaller skylight at the top, which opened outwards. There was an identical unit on the floor above.

Three cars were parked more or less outside: a red Volvo, P reg; a green Toyota, C reg; and a black Fiesta whose plate I couldn't see, but it had a VDM of two red go-faster stripes down the offside.

No immediate signs of life. The curtains were drawn behind nets. There was no smoke from the chimney, no milk outside, no post or newspaper sticking out of the mail-box, and both skylights were closed.

As we got closer I took Suzy's hand and we crossed at an angle, not looking at the target, just meandering. The nearside of the Fiesta had stripes too. A couple of small house fronts later, we were passing the door. There was no noise, no light, nothing. The windows were grimy, the net curtains knackered. The window lock was a simple handle. The door paint was peeling, and the lock was just a dull brass Chubb lever with an ancient B amp;Q-type imitation brass handle above it – though who was to say there weren't a couple of dead bolts thrown on the other side?

We passed the door and I started to count. One, two, three… each house we passed, I pressed one of my digits into the palm of my hand… eight, nine, ten, and then I started again… eleven, twelve…

We got to the junction with Walker, turned right, and were walking over the little footbridge almost immediately. The stream two metres below us was muddy and rainbowed with oil. We turned right again the other side, on to a worn mud path. I put my arm round her and smiled. 'I've got seventeen. You?'

'Yep.'

'Looks empty.'

'Yep – shut up.' She was counting again and I joined her. One, two, three…

The stream was about two metres wide, its steep bank the other side almost right up against the backyards of the houses, with just a narrow well-trodden path between them. By the looks of it, it was pretty popular with people coming out to toss their garbage into the river. Old cigarette packets and butts, drinks cans and bits of paper were scattered everywhere. The place was a shit-hole.

It looked as if the wasteground between us and the main drag was being cleared for redevelopment. A chipboard fence, painted white, had been erected to keep people out, but it was already covered in graffiti and mostly pushed over.

Nine, ten, eleven… The front of a house might bear no resemblance to the back; the front might be well looked after and painted green, the back neglected and painted red. Terraces can be a special nightmare. Some of these had the same aluminium units as at the front, others still had their old sash windows.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen… We got level with a brown wooden door, set into a crumbling red-brick wall; there was no washing hanging up the other side because there wasn't a line. Old net curtains covered filthy windows.

Suzy jerked her head. 'The one without the washing, with the brown window frames and back door. That's my seventeen.'

'Me too.' We carried on. There were no lights, no steamed-up or open windows, no fresh bin-liners strewn down the bank of the stream.

The door was fastened with a latch, but like the front door there could have been some bolts the other side. The wall was climbable; there'd be no problems with that. I studied the wasteground, trying to get a marker from the docks. At night everything was going to look totally different. 'It's in line with the Q8 oil tanks.'

We continued down the path, the walk-past now finished whether we liked it or not. An OAP was cycling towards us on a very new, shiny mountain bike. We just carried on chatting about nothing until he, and the target, was well behind us and the terraced houses had been replaced by bungalows, then houses.