Mr Lover Man, and me.

I returned to the study. Stefan still looked like you’d expect a kid to look when his favourite BG had just shot his dad. But he was taking his security job very seriously indeed. His eyes were glued to the six key screens in which absolutely nothing was happening, and he was juggling between them like he was playing on an Xbox. I let him know I was going back upstairs.

I pressed the remote and closed the steel roller shutters in the master bedroom before switching on the lamp beside the four-poster. Mr and Mrs Timis watched me from the portrait on the wall above it as I whisked through their handcrafted drawers and wardrobes. Something in her expression left me in no doubt she didn’t approve.

The very expensive contents didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know about Frank’s personal tastes, and only one thing about what might have been happening in other areas of his life. Every single item belonged to him. I found nothing that might have been hers.

The same was true of the en-suite bathroom. A lot of Frank’s man stuff, but no sign of the sort of shit women can’t live without. It wasn’t because she hadn’t popped by for dinner last night.

She’d gone.

Was that why Stefan’s face had fallen when I asked him where his mum was?

I caught sight of myself in the mirror above one of the basins. A scab had formed on my forehead, starting a couple of centimetres below my hairline and running back across my scalp. There was a smear of blood on each side. It was ugly enough to make me open the medicine cabinet, where I found shelves of Factor 60, Deep Heat, and all the things you might need to patch yourself up after a fuck-up on the piste.

I dampened one of Frank’s designer face flannels and cleaned myself up as much as possible, then applied three butterfly strips and a dressing to the crusty bit. It would stop it going septic, and made the whole thing look a bit tidier.

I rinsed the flannel under the cold tap, wrung it out and tucked it into my bomber pocket, along with some spare dressings and sticking plasters, and a blister pack of ibuprofen, a crêpe bandage and Tubigrip for Stefan. He appeared at the door in the same instant I heard the sirens whooping up the road from the centre of town.

I flicked off the light and took Frank’s triumph of Italian design and German engineering double quick down to his study. I wasn’t about to stick my head out of an upstairs window to see if we had a drama on our hands. I already knew that we did.

11

I got back to his monitor in time to see four Toyota Land Cruisers screech to a halt outside the front of the chalet. GENDARMERIE was emblazoned across their bonnets and door panels and their anti-riot grilles were tilted back. It was too dark to tell what colour the carriers were, but I knew they were midnight blue, like the Kevlar assault suits of the lads in helmets who started spilling out of them.

These guys weren’t just our friendly neighbourhood bobbies. I couldn’t see their shoulder flashes, but I could picture them: a blue circle with an open parachute, a telescopic sight, flames and a steel karabiner.

GIGN.

A special-ops outfit bridging the gap between the police and the military. Whoever thought the French were cheese-eating surrender monkeys had never seen the Intervention Group up close. I had. We’d served together, back in the day. They specialized in anti-terrorist and hostage-rescue tasks. Which meant they were taking whatever they thought was happening here very seriously indeed.

They normally operated as twenty-man troops, and it looked like today was no exception. Four of them stayed out front, SIG 550 assault rifles in the aim. They’d have Manurhin MR73s – a 357 Magnum revolver that Dirty Harry wouldn’t have sneered at – in their holsters. I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of either. Or the GIAT FR-F2 sniper rifles that would have peeled off earlier, aiming for the high ground. They could throw a 7.62 round 800 metres.

While it was all very well being able to dredge up this shit, I was beginning to regret not having spent more time planning my exit routes.

The rest of the squad spread out around the sides and back. They didn’t have the pass code, but that didn’t seem to slow them down. A couple swung themselves up over the rear wall and took cover where I’d put Stefan, behind the Jacuzzi. So nipping out the way we’d come in was no longer an option.

Blasting through the garage doors and up the front drive in the Range Rover wasn’t either.

I wondered about climbing out on to the roof and launching myself at the next-door chalet.

I’d be quicker on my own.

It would mean leaving the boy.

The GIGN would guarantee him a place of safety …

But I’d be fucked.

They were top of the heap when it came to hostage rescue, but wouldn’t just give him a kiss and a cuddle. It’d take less than thirty seconds for the little fucker to tell them I was alive, put me in the same zone as the killing, and give them a full description.

I scanned the monitors. They confirmed what I already knew. Every option was going to end in a gangfuck.

The boss man with the megaphone certainly felt that way. He told us so in three languages. He was now inviting anyone inside the chalet to come out with their hands raised.

What about staying in? Was there somewhere we could conceal ourselves? I scrolled through the possibilities on the screen inside my head. It was finally beginning to work. But it didn’t give me a solution.

Inside cupboards and under beds were strictly for sitcoms.

And the attic was the first place I’d look.

Did Frank have a panic room? I hadn’t seen any sign of one.

No. Frank didn’t do panic. And neither – I now realized – did his son. Most seven-year-olds would have been flapping and crying and hiding under the bed right now. He just rolled his eyes. The kid seemed to have the same part of his brain missing as his dad.

The megaphone kicked off one last time. Same message, harsher delivery. If there was anyone inside, they had three minutes to make themselves known.

I didn’t want to make myself known. I never had. Not even to the postman.

As the assault team moved in, I went over to his chair and gripped him. ‘There must be a way out, yeah? What would your dad do right now?’

The kid got up and limped towards the left-hand end of the photograph display. He opened the storage cupboard beneath it and reached inside.

The front door burst off its hinges at the third strike of the GIGN battering ram. The speakers in Frank’s hideaway captured the moment in cinema-quality surround-sound. But even if it had been dead quiet, I doubt I would have heard the shelving unit rotate to reveal the mouth of a tunnel that had been bored into the mountain.

I took two steps towards it, then turned back to the desk and grabbed the security remote. Fuck it, this thing had more buttons and icons than an Enigma machine. I didn’t know which ones to punch.

Stefan gripped my arm and tried to pull me away. I shook him off. ‘The security cameras. They would have recorded us coming in, yeah?’

He nodded.

‘And me going through every room.’

He nodded again.

‘I need to wipe the memory.’

He treated me to something very like a smile, and more words in a single sentence than he’d given me since I’d dragged him out of the Evoque. ‘You left me in charge, remember? That was my job.’

We both heard shouted orders and boots on the ground at the far end of the corridor. As we legged it across the threshold, the room was plunged into darkness and a trail of LED lights showed the way ahead. The shelving unit closed silently behind us. There was a touchpad set into the rock for a return journey, and a screen the size of an iPad, which showed an infrared image of the place we’d just left.