5

The next morning I flicked on the news as Stefan took a piss.

The latest report about the missing child began with film footage of the border guards in action at the Geneva airport crossing. Every car and every coach was being given a proper seeing-to, passengers and contents on the pavement, sniffer dogs, the lot.

I was glad I’d had second thoughts about going that route. Especially when I spotted the lads in black combat gear wielding Heckler & Koch MP5s in the background. The Einsatzgruppe TIGRIS were an elite paramilitary force. They operated in tandem with the canton police, but only on high-risk special ops, so covert that the federal authorities had only admitted to their existence nearly a decade after they’d been formed. Their PR claimed they hadn’t fired a shot in more than a hundred and twenty ops. They probably thought we believed in Santa too.

First the GIGN. Now TIGRIS. What the fuck were they up to?

We hit the road before first light. I wanted to be in position before too many people – dog walkers, personal trainers, hikers, sightseers, whatever – were up and about. Even the sausage stands weren’t open for business. I told Stefan we’d have breakfast later. Right now we were going to have to make do with an energy bar or two and one of my remaining bottles of water.

‘Hard routine, Nick?’

‘Yup, hard routine.’ I aimed for the chateau, but this time followed the route alongside the water. ‘How do you know about hard routine?’ I didn’t want to prolong the conversation, but I had to ask.

‘It’s what soldiers do, isn’t it? When they’re on ops, and don’t want to light a fire or do cooking and stuff. In case they give themselves away. I read about it.’

‘In Dostoevsky?’

‘No!’ He was wearing his serious face. ‘I don’t only read Dostoevsky, you know. I read all sorts. My dad said I must. He said knowledge is power. He said that I have to know my enemy.’

‘I told you he was smart.’ I figured Frank had been quoting from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, not the Manic Street Preachers album or the song by Green Day. Either way, it was good advice. It was why I planned to spend however long it took scoping Lyubova’s place instead of steaming straight in there.

He spent the next five Ks listening to Pitbull and grappling with the disciplines of hard routine. I left him to it. Then he turned the volume down on the CD player and sparked up again.

‘You have to go to the toilet in a plastic bag, don’t you, Nick? When you’re on hard routine?’

‘Yup. Wherever you lie up has to be left sterile.’

‘Does that mean no toilet paper?’

‘It means no anything. No trace of you ever being there.’

‘Wow …’ He whistled softly. ‘That’s great …’

This wasn’t helping me get in the zone. I didn’t shut him up, though; at least it was keeping his mind off the wicked stepmother.

‘Nick?’

‘Yup?’

‘I think maybe I’d like to be a soldier …’

‘Not a footballer?’

‘I’m not joking, Nick.’

Fair one. I hadn’t meant to sound like I was talking down to him. When I was a kid, I’d hated it when people did that to me. It had made me want to hit them. And sometimes I did.

‘Mate, you’d make a brilliant soldier. A brilliant officer, probably. There’s a whole world out there for people like you. You’re clever. You’re already more educated than I’ll ever be. You’re rich. You can be anything you want. But right now there’s a job to be done. We’re closing on our target now. And I need to focus on it.’

I saw him nod at the periphery of my vision. Then he started murmuring the hard-routine mantra to himself. ‘No fires, no toilet paper. And no talking …’

I hung a left a hundred short of where I thought the avenue of lindens began and scanned the area ahead of us for a secure place to leave the wagon. The houses along there were few and far between, and had no shortage of land around them. I turned into a designated parking area at the edge of the patch of woodland, which seemed to cater mostly for walkers and anyone who didn’t want to pay the outrageous charges for a space by the lake.

There were only three other vehicles there so I pulled up between two of them, got out and had a good look around. When I was sure there was no one else around, I tucked Stefan into the boot with my day sack and gave him the torch. We were close enough to the wicked stepmother for him to be safer out of sight. And I was planning to stay in cover while I did a more detailed recce of her HQ.

We didn’t bother with the Dostoevsky jokes. I fished out my binoculars, closed the hatch and headed into the trees.

The sky was blindingly blue. There was still a chill in the air, but it would be stiflingly hot later.

The whole area, as far as I could see, was deserted, apart from one dog walker to my half-right. And it didn’t look like a real dog: it was one of those small, smooth-haired things that yapped a lot and belonged on the end of a cocktail stick. By the time I reached the edge of the avenue, he and his owner had found their way back to the parking area.

Staying inside the treeline, I walked up the slope towards the chateau until I found a linden whose lower branches were within reach of the ground and whose higher ones promised a combination of good cover and a wide enough field of vision.

I swung myself up into the foliage. My eyes started to leak almost immediately, and I had to stifle a sneeze. It was definitely a linden. The spores from those things could give you hay fever even if you didn’t suffer from it. Its bark was smooth, but sticky with sap. As the temperature increased, that would only get worse.

I gripped my nose between my thumb and forefinger and managed to strangle another sneeze at birth. I kept the trunk between me and the target until I was about fifteen metres from the ground. Then I worked my way round and climbed high enough to see over the wall and into the chateau grounds.

I raised the binos and scanned as much of the front of the building and its surroundings as I could through the leaves. We weren’t talking Buckingham Palace here, but all told, it wasn’t much smaller than the south London council block I’d grown up in.

The main part of the house had four storeys. The shutters on the upstairs windows were all open but the curtains behind them were mostly closed. As the Google Earth imagery had shown me, it was flanked on each side by a two-storey wing. The one on the right was encased in a scaffolding frame, covered with blue tarpaulin. A yellow plastic telescopic chute ran from the top floor to a skip on the ground.

The Dobermanns were still mooching around outside, hoping for somebody to sink their teeth into. The two beasts that had bounced against the railings last night had been joined by a couple of mates, and they were a mean-looking gang. I couldn’t see any sign of a handler.

As seven thirty approached, a guy in black combats and polo shirt appeared from the back of the house with a pile of metal bowls and a bucket. I had a really close look at his face, but it didn’t trigger a memory.

The guard dogs bounded towards him and I soon saw why. He put the bowls on the ground and filled them with enough raw meat to feed a battalion. Maybe it was to stop them eating the tradesmen who appeared at the entrance during the next half-hour.

Lyubova was clearly in makeover mode. Plumbers, decorators, electricians, roofers and chippies in shiny white vans with corporate logos were waved through the electronically operated gates by another couple of uniforms.

The security people had a good poke around inside the first vehicle to come out, so it looked like they were more concerned about the contractors helping themselves to Lyubova’s jewellery collection than someone or something being smuggled inside.

I swept the binos from window to window as a squad of identical blonde women in cream shirts drew back the curtains and raised the sashes to let in the morning air. It was like Downton Abbey on fast-forward. Lyubova hadn’t made an appearance yet, but I didn’t expect her to be doing much of her own housework.