And I didn’t have all the time in the world.

Most of the traders on the site looked like they welcomed more formal business arrangements than I had in mind. I needed the sort you could find underneath the railway arches in south London, run by lads who felt the same way about cash business as I did. I selected three possible contenders and wrote down their details. If they weren’t right, maybe they had a mate who was.

Finally I scanned the news.

The abductor still couldn’t be named, but they were looking for an Englishman who was rumoured to be connected to the murder victim, and had been seen in the proximity of the abandoned Range Rover. One theory was that a paedophile ring was involved.

My brain had been scrambled big-time up there, and I wasn’t getting everything right, but I didn’t think I’d been spotted – except by Claude the carrot-cruncher, and there was no way he’d ID me as a Brit. So someone on Hesco’s side of the fence had to be feeding the investigation to make my life more difficult and theirs easier.

Mr Lover Man must have been their original source from inside Frank’s camp. We’d spent quite a bit of time together, on and off, both in Moscow and Africa, so he knew I was a Brit. I wasn’t sure if he had ever been given my real name. I fucking hoped not. Not just because it would put us deeper in the shit right now, but because I liked it that way.

The paedophile thing was always a good line to throw to the media. They knew it grabbed the public’s attention like nothing else, and they wanted whoever had taken the kid to have nowhere to hide. But it still didn’t explain who was calling the shots here, and why TIGRIS and the GIGN were out in force.

7

I visited a bunch of holes in the wall over the course of the next half-hour. My magic black debit card did the business, now I remembered what it was for, and my fingertips knew the PIN without having to consult my head. The thing had no limit, but the individual machines did.

Next I checked out the used-car-dealer options. The second of the three was ten Ks from the centre of town, with a couple of rusting diesel pumps under a sheet-metal canopy that had also seen better days.

A row of previously enjoyed but freshly polished wagons stood to one side off the forecourt. The one I needed was a three-year-old Peugeot Expert refrigerator panel van with a fair amount of mileage on the clock, a current Autobahn vignette and a handwritten sign taped on to the windscreen asking for SFr 7,999.

The side door was open so a potential purchaser could share the salesman’s excitement about the business end of the vehicle. And I did. The interior had been fitted out with a plywood floor and walls. The insulation made these things the bike thief’s wagon of choice. You could lift a top-of-the-range Ducati off the street and nobody would hear the alarm going off as you drove it away. Even from the road, it looked perfect for what I had in mind.

I cruised on past, keeping an eye out for somewhere to park. Somewhere close enough to walk back from, but far enough away to avoid linking the Polo, Stefan and the van.

‘Can I come too?’

‘No, mate. Best to keep you out of sight right now.’

‘Not in the boot, Nick. Please. I hate it in the boot …’

I’d never heard him complain about anything before. I thought I might have to start gripping him again.

‘I try my hardest to think about hard routine, but I can’t help thinking about being trapped under my dad instead.’

The gripping idea went out the window.

I found a space outside a newsagent and gave Stefan two ten-franc notes in case he wanted to buy himself a fizzy drink and a sherbet fountain while I headed back to the used-car lot.

A blond lad who’d stood even further away from a razor than I had over the last few days emerged from the workshop, wiping the grease off his palms on the sides of his faded blue boiler suit. He had a wicked smile and spoke even better English than Stefan did. I knew within seconds that we could do business together.

I got him to fire up the Expert and drive me around the block. He told me the cooling mechanism needed some attention, which was why the price was rock bottom.

‘What kind of attention?’

He grinned sheepishly as he threw it around the first corner.

‘It’s totally fucked.’

I told him I’d sort it.

I was no vehicle geek, but the engine did what it was supposed to when you turned the key, and the gearbox didn’t seem to be about to fall apart all over the tarmac. When we made it back to the pumps he slid open the side door and invited me to take a closer look at the load space.

It was even more impressive close up. The ply on the floor was at least forty mil thick, and thirty on the walls. The previous owner had added shelves and a lockable tool chest on the passenger side, and also lined the partition, leaving a small window into the cab. I wondered whether he had lived in it.

Blondie liked the idea of SFr 7,750 cash and, yes, he did know someone who could fix me up with something very nice on the panels at short notice. ‘If you have some more of these …’ He eyed the roll of notes I’d just handed to him.

He tore a page out of a spiral-bound notepad and wrote down a name and address. ‘Klaus has a very big talent. An artist, really. But not mainstream, maybe. He is like your Banksy. An anarchist.’

Perfect. Klaus sounded like he was going to be even less likely to call in the law than this lad.

We shook on the deal and both scribbled something unreadable on the registration document, which I reckoned would go straight into the bin as soon as I’d left. He wouldn’t want to waste any of his valuable time with the tax people, and he knew I wouldn’t either.

Almost as an afterthought, I asked if he had any degreaser or solvent he could spare. I wasn’t going to use it for cleaning, but he didn’t need to know that. He took me into a mechanic’s Aladdin’s cave at the back of the workshop and gestured at a shelf lined with plastic containers of all shapes and sizes. I examined the labels and chose the 200ml bottle with the highest diethyl ether content. It cost me another fifty.

Klaus was only about a K away, in a wriggly-tin lock-up with huge skylights on the other side of the railway tracks. He wore a T-shirt that told me to feed the world over jeans that hung off his arse and were distressed in more ways than one. The whole fuck-you look was topped off nicely by moth-eaten dreadlocks and beard, and an anarchist’s attitude to physical hygiene.

He rested a roach the size of a prize-winning carrot on the edge of an ashtray that looked like a coiled dog turd. This lad was definitely not going to be in a hurry to call in the law. He slid off his stool to greet me. The air in his lock-up was sweet with cannabis fumes, but it didn’t hide the fact that he badly needed a shower.

The samples of his work on display told me that he was up for almost anything from anti-capitalist graffiti slogans and X-rated cartoons to apparently uncontroversial corporate stuff. I showed him Stefan’s drawing and asked if he could scale it up in blue for the side panels.

‘Hochfliegend … I like zis.’

Klaus liked the idea of cash too. For him it was clearly a political statement. So I offered him a bonus if I could pick up the van in an hour.

He pursed his lips, raised his arms and shrugged.

I tried to lure him back to the real world. ‘How long will it take?’

His eyebrows disappeared into his moth-eaten hair. ‘Zis is not rocket science.’ He poked a nicotine-stained finger at a battered laptop and a machine covered with multi-coloured Post-it notes in the corner. He was right. It looked like a Dalek with a letterbox in its chest.