‘My stepmother beat me.’

It was my turn to shut up. I didn’t have much choice. I spent a minute or two wishing I hadn’t sparked this up in the first place. I pictured him flinching when I’d raised my hand outside the chalet. I should have read the signs.

Then I told myself, Fuck it, why worry about what you can’t change? ‘What did she beat you for?’

He took a long, halting breath. ‘I think maybe because I am not her son.’

He probably wasn’t wrong about that. There was a fair chance that Stefan jumping ahead of her in the inheritance queue and being groomed to take over the business empire had also had something to do with it.

Another of my chats with Frank rose to the surface and swam towards me. On a landing strip in Malindi. We had just snatched Stefan back, first from his al-Shabaab kidnappers, then from the Georgians who were trying to use the kid as a lever against him.

I remembered Mr T leaning in towards me, eyes fixed on mine. ‘My wife’s name is Lyubova. It means “love”. She has much of it.’

I’d admired his optimism. Lyubova knew Frank was a world-class shagger without a doubt, but at that point he hadn’t told her Stefan even existed.

‘I believe she will embrace my son as her own. I hope she will forgive me. I hope that I may become the husband she deserves.’

His words still echoed in my head, even when the image of his precise, sharply chiselled features faded, and was replaced with hers. The portrait on the bedroom wall. The photographs in the green room. Those eyes. That calculating face. They now told me that forgiveness wasn’t high on her list of favourite things.

I took Stefan’s distress about his stepmother seriously. It sounded like Frank’s embracing scenario hadn’t happened. I had no idea whether he had even got close to becoming the husband she deserved. Whatever, the magic hadn’t worked. Had he binned her, or had she binned him? Had he become the ex-husband she wanted to kill?

Ly … u … bo … va …

Had she told Mr Lover Man to pull the trigger? Had she paid him to? Was Hesco her fixer?

I’d already asked myself why the chateau wasn’t Frank’s number-one choice of bolthole as soon as he had perceived a threat. As the tarmac unrolled in front of us, all sorts of possible answers were bouncing around inside my head. They all pointed to the fact that I needed to go and grip the ex-Mrs Timis. And that she would not be laying out the welcome mat.

Stefan reached out and patted my wrist, and I suddenly became aware that I’d been holding the steering-wheel tightly enough to throttle it. I tried to give him an encouraging smile. ‘Mate, I need to pay her a visit. But don’t worry, I won’t leave you without an ERV.’

It sounded pretty weak, even to me.

The atmosphere inside the wagon was suddenly heavy with the things that we weren’t saying to each other. He was the one to cut through it.

‘Nick?’

‘Steve?’

‘How do you know who you can trust?’

Given what had happened to his mum and his dad, he’d already had enough first-hand experience of betrayal in his life for there to be only one answer to that question: You don’t. Ever. So trust no one. But I couldn’t bring myself to say that. It wasn’t my job to tell him the world was a heap of shit.

He was too switched on for me to fudge it. On the other hand, I did want him to know that there was the occasional light at the end of the tunnel. A small handful of individuals had shown me that, over the years. They hadn’t helped me find God or inspired me to rush out and hug some trees, but they had probably kept me out of prison.

‘It’s not easy. I don’t have to tell you that. There are going to be people who … let you down. And people who don’t, however bad things get. The trouble is, you can’t always tell the difference between them – because maybe there’s some shit happening in their world that we don’t know about …’

‘So?’ He wasn’t about to let me off the hook.

‘So … we have to understand that we don’t hand out trust like chocolate bars. People have to earn it. But it’s brilliant when they do.’

‘It’s like being a soldier, then.’

I didn’t answer immediately. I’d known a good few soldiers who hadn’t earned my trust. Ruperts, mostly. And a handful who had, big-time. ‘When you’re in the fight, you do find out pretty quickly who you can trust.’

He nodded slowly. I’d never been around a kid who took the job of decoding life’s mysteries so seriously. I’d been through some gangfucks when I was his age, but I couldn’t remember trying to learn from them until much later.

‘We’re in the fight, aren’t we?’

‘We are, mate.’

‘And I trust you, Nick.’

I hesitated, but only for a nanosecond. ‘Same.’

I sensed him giving the faintest of smiles.

He let another few Ks speed past his window. ‘Nick?’

‘Yup.’

‘Er … maybe you could be my actual dad.’ He paused. ‘Would that work for you?’

He had tried to keep the question matter-of-fact, but failed. Even I could hear the tremble in his voice.

Since we’d exited the chalet, he’d done a really good job of convincing me, most of the time, that he was a tough little fucker. He’d grown up fast – because he’d had to. This was a wake-up call – to remind me that there was still a lonely seven-year-old kid hiding behind the armour plating.

But I couldn’t piss about. I had to leave him in no doubt that extracting him from the gangfuck in Somalia and then the one on the mountain wasn’t the same as doing the whole dad thing. I didn’t know how to look after my own son. Some days, I didn’t know how to look after myself.

‘No, mate. It wouldn’t work for me. And, believe me, it wouldn’t work for you either.’

I gripped the wheel again, concentrating hard on the brake-lights of the wagons in front of me. I was pretty sure he was doing the same. I knew I had to choose my next words with a fuck of a lot more care than usual.

I hoped they’d come out right.

‘The thing is, Stefan, I can do my best to protect you against the bad guys. It’s my job. And us pretending to be father and son is part of that. But it’s an act. It’s a performance. In real life, I’m not your dad. In real life, your dad is dead. Me, I’m a gun for hire. And that works, when it works, because I can’t do all that stuff dads are supposed to do. The stuff your dad did. I can only do what I do. I can’t do the mathematical challenges. I don’t have any of the things a bright guy like you needs. I don’t have the skills.’

I listened to the hum of the engine. The rasp of the tyres on the tarmac. The silence inside the wagon was like the silence that fills the gap between the whoosh of an RPG launcher and the missile sending a jet of molten copper through the side of a fighting vehicle. I felt a sudden need to fill it.

‘Also, I don’t have a home. I have some mates, I have some contacts. I don’t really have friends. A lot of the people I called my friends are dead now, so maybe it’s better that way. Maybe it’s …’

I was blabbering now.

I shut the fuck up.

When I did glance at him, I saw that he was still staring straight ahead, chewing his bottom lip between his teeth and nodding to himself. He was processing what I’d said to him, like he always did.

Eventually, he turned and looked me straight in the eye. ‘So I guess that means we’re both in the shit, eh, Nick?’

‘Nothing new there, mate.’

3

St Gallen was a sizeable place, east of Zürich, close up against the German border. We arrived there shortly before dark o’clock. It was less than forty-five minutes, by my reckoning, from Lyubova’s country pile.

Stefan’s mouth fell open as I headed towards the centre. He pointed at a square in the business district where everything seemed to have been covered with red carpet, including a couple of wagons. A group of teenagers huddled together on big red banquettes, too busy texting to talk. Lights flickered on above them, suspended on wires, like baby barrage balloons.