I took the Sphinx out of my waistband, put it on Frank’s old-school blotter and gave my temples a rub.

The gunmetal glinted dully in the flickering light from the monitors. It had done that when Mr Lover Man had handed it to me that morning. Mr Lover Man, not his boss. He’d smiled as he did so.

I picked up the weapon and unclipped the mag. Then I ejected the round from the chamber and held its base up to the light. It didn’t matter what angle I held it at: the copper percussion cap was totally unmarked. The ammunition wasn’t defective. Something else was.

I removed the top slide, turned it upside down and took out the spring and the barrel. With a little help from one of Frank’s platinum-sheathed Mont Blanc ballpoints I pushed out the stub that anchored the firing pin and popped it out of its housing.

Shit.

It didn’t matter how many times I ran through my NSPs (normal safety precautions), I’d just see the base of the firing pin, where it came into contact with the hammer. And the big lad with the dreads would have known that. Only by dismantling the working parts could I tell that it was five millimetres too short to strike the round. These things are made of turned steel. Their tips don’t just fall off, and this one hadn’t. A grinder had taken it down. I’d have bet a fistful of Frank’s euros on where that grinder was kept.

I thought about what might have happened if they’d been waiting for me on the hill. Mr Lover Man had probably saved my life when everything had gone to rat-shit in the barn. But he hadn’t meant to. He had meant me to be the one squeezing the trigger and not hearing it go bang. And by then I’d have been terminally fucked.

Mr Lover Man.

Stefan’s protector.

His dad’s most trusted sidekick.

Someone must have found a way of getting to him. Someone higher up the food chain than Frank Timis. And there weren’t many of them.

10

I reassembled the Sphinx, then bounced the TV from channel to channel until I found twenty-four-hour news. Every bulletin was about bad things happening in Syria, Iraq or the Crimea. Putin was bent on clawing back as much of the old empire as possible, and he wouldn’t stop at Ukraine. He also seemed to be picking off his least favourite oligarchs and rivals, one by one.

The Crimea report was interrupted by a breaking story. Frank’s Range Rover filled the frame, surrounded by stripy incident tape and blue and red flashing lights. I probably should have saved Stefan from having to watch this bit, but it was already too late. He stopped in mid-bite as a body bag was lifted off a gurney and slid into the back of an ambulance.

It was too early for the dead man to have been formally identified, but that didn’t stop the newshounds from speculating wildly about a connection with the still unsolved murder of Saad al-Hilli, his wife and mother-in-law in a layby near Lake Annecy in 2012. Lake Annecy was spitting distance from there.

There didn’t seem to be a mystery biker this time around; the prime suspect, as far as they were concerned, was a man in a Nissan X-Trail, who appeared to have suffered a fatal accident further down the mountain. Cue footage of more flashing lights and charred, mangled wreckage being hoisted on to a low-loader.

With his passport in my day sack, the police wouldn’t be able to ID Frank immediately. But it wouldn’t take them long. He’d kept a low profile, as far as the outside world was concerned, but you didn’t do the things that Frank did without leaving some kind of trace.

And it would also be only a matter of time before the forensics people got busy with what was left of the Nissan and discovered that there was no body inside it.

I bent and sifted through the desk drawers. None of them was locked, but that didn’t surprise me. Anything Frank wanted to keep to himself would be buried in the safe in the rock face behind me, somewhere offsite, or behind a series of passcodes on the razor-thin laptop he always kept within reach.

Always.

I stopped mid-sift and frowned.

He’d been tapping away on it last night. He’d turned the screen towards me, and shown me something.

Something important.

What then?

I hadn’t seen it in the Range Rover.

And it wasn’t here.

‘Stefan …’

He turned.

‘Your dad’s laptop. Did he have it in the car?’

Another slow nod.

So where had it gone?

I riffled through a few sheets of paper in the third drawer: a fixture list for Brindisi Football Club, an out-of-date invitation to the formal opening of some distribution depot in Albertville, a glossy estate agent’s brochure for a Swiss chateau on the shore of Lake Konstanz – the kind of place where if you had to ask the price you couldn’t afford it – and two or three printouts of the kind of puzzles and brainteasers designed to do your head in if a stripy javelin hadn’t done that already. I guessed they were what Frank did with Stefan when he wasn’t reading him Dostoevsky at bedtime.

Something prevented me pushing the drawer shut.

Puzzles …

Brainteasers …

Precision …

Most of us kept out-of-date shit for no good reason. Frank didn’t.

I needed to take another look at that invitation.

The depot was owned by a company called Adler Gesellschaft. Their logo was embossed top centre, inside the card. I rolled back my sleeve, though I didn’t need to. That eagle, with its outstretched wings and talons, was becoming a regular feature in my life. I folded the card in half and slipped it into my pocket.

I left the news rolling. The infrared had kicked in on the security monitor now that darkness had fallen. I told Stefan to keep eyes on while I nosed around. Anything else that might help fill in the blanks in my head was going to pay dividends, so I started with the picture gallery. I needed to fix the images of the key players in my mental databank.

One look and I knew I’d recognize Mr Lover Man and his mate Genghis if I saw them again. I’d spent time with them both in Moscow and Mogadishu, and some other third-world shitholes as well.

I struggled to remember whether I’d ever met Frank’s wife. I didn’t think so. I examined every shot she starred in. Long dark hair. Perfect skin. Catwalk posture. Cheekbones you could cut yourself on. The kind of symmetry that only came with a surgeon’s knife. Strikingly beautiful from a distance, but less so up close.

As always, the clue was in the eyes, and these ones didn’t miss a trick. I saw ambition in them, but not affection. And, judging by the size of the diamonds and rubies she had decorated herself with, her ambition was working its magic.

The TV was telling me nothing I hadn’t already heard so I switched it off. I showed Stefan the remote for the security monitor and began to run through the basic programming options. ‘Look, mate, this is how you shift from camera to camera. And this is the zoom—’

He rolled his eyes and snatched it out of my hand. In case I hadn’t got the message, he went on to demonstrate a whole lot of functions I’d had no idea about. I left him to it, but turned at the door. ‘I’ll be along the corridor. Come and get me if you see anything happening, front or back.’ I gave him a grin. ‘And finish that chocolate bar, eh? Or I’ll eat it.’

From the contents of their cupboards and chests, one of the staff quarters had been set aside for a chef and another for a maid. The remaining two were empty, beds stripped, not even a half-used tube of toothpaste on the glass shelf above the basin.

But this time I spotted another empty Marlboro pack in the waste bin.

Whoever had vacated them wasn’t expecting to come back any time soon. It had been worth the second visit, though. I now knew without a shadow of a doubt who had stayed there.