I swung out of my parking space and drove past the depot, keeping eyes on their security system. They hadn’t bothered to lash out on state-of-the-art Fort Knox laser beams. Why would they, just to stop people nicking construction kit?

I stocked up on food and drink at a local Casino mini-mart: a fistful of chocolate bars, a bag of sticky buns, a box of cold pizza slices, some bottles of Coke and water. I got back to the motel mid-afternoon, parked up a couple of streets away and staked it out from a distance, but saw nothing that made my antennae wobble. The hairs were still in place on the door of our room, so Stefan hadn’t gone walkabout, and a hostile reception committee inside seemed unlikely.

I knocked three times, then another three.

‘Raskolnikov.’

I only murmured our code word, but that didn’t stop me feeling like a bit of a dickhead.

There was no answer. Maybe Dostoevsky had sent the boy to sleep. I couldn’t blame him for that.

I ran through the whole routine again.

This time I heard movement: the squeak of bedsprings, the creak of the ladder, the uneven pad of small feet. The door opened inwards the length of the chain. One eye appeared at my waist height and looked me up and down.

I held up the bag. ‘Chocolate?’

He nodded. The door closed, then opened again almost immediately and I was invited inside.

We sat on the end of the bed and dug into the pizza. Stefan had finished the stuff I’d bought earlier, so there was nothing wrong with his appetite.

‘Any problems?’

He shook his head. ‘You?’

I shook mine too.

‘There was some shooting.’

I stopped mid-mouthful. ‘Where?’

He gestured up at the TV. ‘In a supermarket. In a city.’

‘A French city?’

‘Yes. Lyon, I think. Is that a city?’

‘Yup.’ I took another bite of my pizza.

‘The police were there. Our police.’

‘Our police?’

‘The ones that came to my dad’s chalet. The GIGN.’

This kid didn’t miss a trick. I was getting used to that now. ‘What happened? Do you know?’

‘Two men took some hostages. They were going to explode them.’

‘And?’

‘The police shot them. With guns. Big guns.’

‘Good.’

I got some Coke down my neck and did some more eating. This sort of shit had been happening every fucking week, ever since IS had started flying the jihad flag big-time in Syria and on Facebook. No wonder the GIGN were jumpy.

We finished the buns and each scrunched our bag into a ball and lobbed them at the waste-bin. His went in; mine didn’t.

He crossed his arms and gave me a grin. ‘So what happens now?’

I told him I needed to go out again later, but was going to get my head down for a couple of hours. ‘You can be on stag.’

‘Stig?’

‘No, stag. It means lookout. Give me a kick if you hear any bad guys.’

I unzipped my jacket, adjusted the butt of the Sphinx in my waistband, lay back and shut my eyes.

19

My internal alarm clock didn’t let me down, and Stefan hadn’t needed to give me a kick. I splashed some water over my face and we went through the ERV drills again. The expression on his face said we didn’t have to, but it made me feel better.

He didn’t ask if he could come too. I knew he wanted to, but he already knew the answer. He was in mini-Frank mode now. Before, he’d been spending some time as an ordinary, vulnerable seven-year-old.

I sorted my shit out and pointed the Polo towards the nearest Géant, one of those megastores that flogs everything from condoms to brake fluid. I was going to hang on to the baseball cap to cover the head wound, but I wanted to ditch the jacket. I didn’t fancy spending the next few days looking like I was on my way to a job interview.

I gathered up a sweatshirt with a hood, a pair of Levi’s, a pack of dark-coloured T-shirts, and a dark brown combat jacket that had more pouches than a fisherman’s waistcoat but didn’t make too much of a statement. I added a box of energy bars and six half-litre bottles of water to my basket before paying cash at the till.

I spotted a phone store on the way out and bought three more bog-standard pay-as-you-go Nokias. Back in the Polo, one went into my new jacket, along with the UZI and a fistful of euros.

I arrived at the approach road forty-five minutes before last light, but there were still enough parked wagons to give me cover. When I was sure no one was taking any interest in me, I took the Pentax binos out of the glovebox and scanned the area, starting with the gatehouse. There was only one lad manning the barrier. Maybe that meant his mate had gone home. Or maybe he’d just gone for a piss. I wouldn’t move in until I was sure.

Two of the warehouses were shut and the third had wound right down. A couple of forklifts were loading the final pallets on to the one remaining flatbed. The rest had obviously been signed off.

The arc lamps that surrounded the yard sparked up before the sun had dropped below the mountains. I wasn’t surprised: dusk didn’t drag on in this neck of the woods. They faced inwards rather than outwards, like in the old PoW movies, which meant I’d have some shadow to work with, but they weren’t going to make my job a whole lot easier.

On the other hand, if they’d come on ten minutes later I might not have immediately IDed the larger of the two figures now making their way down the flight of metal steps that ran from the top floor of the office building on the right-hand side of the complex.

Fuck the database. I didn’t need to track down the truck driver now. I’d found what I was looking for.

The dreads and the sheer size of Mr Lover Man were never going to allow him to merge completely into the background, but he’d left his red and white Puffa jacket and matching trainers in the wardrobe. Today’s combo was quieter.

His companion’s forklift-driving days were long gone, or maybe they’d never been. His sharp suit and tie suggested he’d honed his muscles in the executive suite. He’d taken a lot of care over his facial hair too. Maybe too much. The George Michael look was alive and well in Albertville.

There was a lot of nodding but not much smiling and back-slapping when they reached the bottom of the steps. Then George got behind the wheel of an Audi Q5 with Swiss plates and Mr Lover Man climbed into a Range Rover with French ones. He might have double-tapped his boss, but he’d managed to hang on to his company car. I scribbled both registration numbers in my Moleskine.

The Audi came through the barrier first and steamed past me, its driver staring straight ahead. The Range Rover indicated right. I waited for it to make the turn, then flicked on my dipped beams, eased away from the kerb, pulled a left and followed its receding taillights.

I glanced at the fuel gauge. Unless Mr Lover Man had a hot date north of Dijon, I wasn’t going to have to stop and fill the tank. I held back as far as I could. I didn’t want to lose him, but I didn’t want to follow him too closely either. All I needed to do was keep far enough back to be just another set of annoying headlamps in his rear-view.

After a couple of hundred metres he took the third exit on a roundabout and I let a beat-up Citroën slot itself between us. Half a K further on he suddenly swerved off the road and came to a halt alongside a row of shops, most of which appeared to have stopped trading for the day.

For a nanosecond I thought he might have pinged me, but as I overtook I saw that he wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to his rear-view or wing mirrors: he was too busy waving his arms and having a shouting match with whoever had called his mobile. Something was pissing him off big-time. After what he’d been up to in the last forty-eight hours, he should have been on full alert. And he wasn’t. He was all over the place.