He’d been parked for six hours at the end of the street, in the road with which Al-Bayati’s street formed a T, so that he had a clear view of both the Range Rover and of the entrance to the man’s house. Ten minutes before climbing into his parked car to wait, he’d approached the Range Rover, a leather bag over one shoulder. The street was all but deserted at five thirty in the morning, not even an early jogger or dog walker to be seen. Nonetheless, there were bound to be people up at this hour, some of them even looking out of their windows as they sipped their first mugs of tea, so he had to make everything look as natural as possible. Tullivant disabled the Range Rover’s alarm and the locking mechanism with a piece of electronic equipment not widely available commercially. He popped the hood, lugged a bottle of windscreen washer fluid round together with a small package which he’d taken from the leather bag concealed against it, and reached under the raised bonnet as though filling up with the fluid.
