‘Who else might be there? Does she have maids?’

‘I only know two of her maids. One was very kind to me. Natasha. She’s from Kiev.’ He brightened. ‘She taught me to swim. She loves to swim. I also like to swim, Nick. Very much.’

‘Yup, you told me. Any others?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Rula. She wasn’t kind at all.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if they came here to Switzerland.’

‘Do they usually live in?’

‘It’s possible … When the girls are there, maybe.’

‘Girls?’

‘My two sisters. Half-sisters.’

The pink and fluffy room in the chalet. I’d wondered who that belonged to.

‘They are in Moscow. Until the house is finished.’

I stuck the hair and saliva tell-tales in place before I left, in case the receptionist had been paying us more attention than she appeared to have done. I didn’t plan to be away for more than a couple of hours – long enough to get my bearings in the area immediately surrounding Lyubova’s hideaway – but precautions like that were never wasted.

On the way out of town I passed a bunch of dossers on a stretch of waste-ground, gathered around a flaming oil drum and sipping extra strong lager. I handed them a fistful of coins and bunged in the pharmacy bag with the empty peroxide bottle and the offcuts of Stefan’s hair. I hadn’t bothered to wipe down everything he’d touched in the motel and the hostel, but leaving a gift pack of his DNA lying around was asking for trouble.

The chateau commanded a chunk of high ground between St Gallen and Konstanz. It was surrounded by walls you couldn’t leap over, but enough of its floodlit façade was visible through the entrance to confirm that the estate agent’s brochure hadn’t needed to fuck around. One wing was covered with scaffolding and tarpaulin, but it still looked like something out of a fairy tale. You’d need a really good reason not to want to live there.

I was increasingly sure that Lyubova was the reason, and not only because of what Stefan had told me. When I’d originally thought of hiding him here, I’d reckoned a telephone call and a cup of tea would crack it. Now it was high on my list of hostile environments.

I slowed as I drove past, but didn’t stop immediately. Lights glowed in a number of the upstairs windows to my left. I took that as a good sign. However much you wanted to show off the place, I didn’t think you’d bother to leave them on if no one was home.

There was a patch of woodland to my right, split by a formal avenue that led down towards the lake. I guessed it must once have been part of the estate. The massive trees on either side of it looked like lindens. They might not have been, but they reminded me of the things that lined the main that ran towards the Brandenburg Gate. I’d had a few beers in the bars there when I was a young soldier stationed in Berlin.

I pulled up a couple of hundred further on and walked back, hood up, keeping to the shadows on the far side of the road. The CCTV cameras fixed on each side of the main gates told me to keep my distance, and the pair of Dobermanns that banged against their wrought-iron railings sent the same message, only louder. Someone yelled at them from behind the wall and I decided it was a good moment to fuck off back to the wagon. I was never at my best with furry animals that growled and bit.

I turned left at the first opportunity and circled the plot, looking out for a vantage-point I could employ in daylight without breaking cover. Unless something else presented itself after first light, I was either going to get eyes on the rear, from the top of the hill, or climb one of the lindens and recce it from the front.

I pinpointed the Adler HQ on my way back. It was a much simpler target. The security set-up was bound to be high-end, but those guys weren’t hiding from anybody. Lights blazed on every floor. Everything about the building yelled global domination. And there was a multi-storey car park on the opposite side of the street.

I drove up to the barrier and took a ticket. The Adler executives clearly put in the hours for their top-of-the-range Audis. It was well past the end of the working day, but at least half their marked spaces on the third level were still taken. I followed the arrows to the top, registering the CCTV set-up as I went, then worked my way down and out.

Stefan was channel-hopping between the rolling news and the Russian Premier League on the TV when I returned to the hostel. He hadn’t legged it to the ERV to do his Sitting Bull impression, so I assumed he hadn’t seen anything that put the shits up him, but I asked anyway.

He shook his head. ‘More of the same.’

We watched the highlights of the Spartak Moscow game, which seemed to suit us both fine. I didn’t feel like talking, and he obviously wasn’t keen to ask me anything that might trigger more Lyubova stuff.

I knew he wasn’t settling again when we’d switched off the lights. There was a lot of tossing and turning and sighing.

‘Nick?’

I didn’t answer for a bit, then gave him a drowsy, ‘Early start tomorrow, mate. Best we get our heads down, eh?’

I didn’t expect that to be the end of it, and it wasn’t. He waited about five minutes before coming back for more.

‘Was my mother beautiful?’

‘Very.’

‘When I was younger, I could see her when I closed my eyes. I can’t do that any more. I can’t really remember what she looked like.’

‘Don’t you have photographs?’

‘No. No photographs. My father said they made him sad …’ He hesitated. ‘And my … his wife she said she didn’t want them in the house. Maybe there were some, and she burnt them.’

He might well be right about that, for all I knew. But I doubted there were albums full of the things in the first place. Frank had had a son with Tracy, but waving happy snaps of her in a bikini at Lyubova would only have ended in tears.

Stefan took another of those deep, halting breaths that was always a sign of more bad things on the near horizon.

‘Did she love me, Nick? My father said she did.’

I didn’t really want to go down this road. Cutting away from the emotional shit was always safest. I’d become less able to do that since my son was born, and it wasn’t good. The people who depended on me needed me to keep them safe, not to give them hugs. And keeping them safe meant doing my job, even if that sometimes involved curling up and taking the pain.

When I didn’t answer immediately, he repeated his question. There was no escaping this one.

‘He was right, mate. You meant everything to her.’

‘Why were we in Africa?’

‘She took you away on holiday. A special one. You and her. Together. But some very bad people took you both prisoner.’

That was the simplest version. And it wasn’t a lie, exactly. It wasn’t the whole truth either. Tracy had made the mistake of falling for the wrong guy, and he’d fucked her over big-time. She’d also made the mistake of thinking that she could do a runner with Frank’s son, and that was never going to happen.

‘She died too, didn’t she?’

‘She did, mate.’

‘How?’

‘She was shot, trying to protect you.’ I probably wasn’t doing him any favours by ramming home the idea that everyone who loved him ended up dead, but I didn’t want to dress it up.

‘Like my dad …’

I turned in my bed and propped myself up on an elbow. ‘I’m pretty sure your dad’s last move was to protect you. But that wasn’t your fault either. He died for different reasons. More complicated reasons. And I’m trying to find out what they were. That way I keep both of us safe.’

I didn’t mention my family. I’d already pretty much told him I didn’t have a son.

I don’t know how long it took him to finally fall asleep, but we both went quiet after that.