Half an hour later I had five of them – two German, one Italian and two Swiss – from a variety of not very shiny vans parked well out of CCTV range. The trick was never to take both plates from the same vehicle. You could drive legally with just the rear one attached, and if the other was missing, most people assumed that it had just fallen off. Nobody in their right mind would have stolen it on its own.

The only thing you had to be careful about was not transposing Swiss plates. The rear one had country and canton badges; the front one didn’t. And they had different colours for different classes of wagon. Utility vehicles’ were blue. They were cunning fuckers, the Swiss.

I pulled on the hard hat, glasses and hi-vis waistcoat. A glance in the rear-view told me they topped off my whole fancy dress costume very nicely. The Sphinx came out of my waistband and slid under my right thigh. It could almost make that part of the journey on its own.

I was within sight of the chateau by 16:30. I’d reckoned that most if not all the contractors would have gone home by then. One of them was parked about a hundred away, smoking himself to death in a layby.

I slowed as I passed the entrance and liked what I saw.

No Dobermanns on patrol, for starters. Part of me thought, Thank fuck for that, but a small warning bell also started to ring. The absence of the normal often indicated the presence of the abnormal. It was known in the trade as a combat indicator.

The Maserati and the Q5 had also left, unless someone had moved them round the back. They might have been the best of mates, but it looked like a cosy dinner with Dijani and Uran wasn’t part of the deal. All good. I’d like to have got my hands on all three of them, but whatever her portrait said, she was the weakest link.

Five minutes later the gates opened automatically as the last of the vans I’d watched coming in that morning stopped to be frisked on its way out. I gave the boys in black a smile and a wave as I accelerated past them and carried straight on to the wing that was getting all the attention.

I parked behind the monster skip at the bottom of the yellow chute, alongside a gap in the tarpaulin sheeting where the ties had been left undone for easy access. I undid the front buttons of my overall, adjusted the Sphinx in my belt and transferred my shiny new knife from its sheath to the right-hand pocket. I tucked the ether into the left. Then I shrugged off the hi-vis waistcoat, exited the Expert and slipped through the gap.

The scaffolding wasn’t alarmed. That was what the security team and the dogs were for. There was no obvious way into the house on the ground floor. All the shutters were closed, probably to prevent the lads doing the heavy lifting from smashing the glass. I made for the ladder that had been clamped to the horizontal poles and stepped out on to the boards. No joy there either. No breaches in the wall, no empty window frames. Just more shutters. I had to try the roof.

The platform that ran along the guttering on the top level was stacked with tiles. They weren’t patching the holes: they were replacing the lot. And they still had a long way to go. There was a ten-square-metre area that was covered with battens and a waterproof membrane.

I took off the helmet and glasses and dumped them on the platform. Then I stood absolutely still, opened my mouth and listened. I’d expected the security guys to come sniffing round as soon as they spotted the fact that I wasn’t coming straight back out again, but I couldn’t hear any yells or footsteps on the gravel. The tarp overhead rippled in the breeze and the sun shining through gave the space below it the strange, unearthly quality of a hospital corridor.

I took out the knife, pulled it open, sliced a hole in the membrane and peeled it back far enough to scan the attic beneath. There was enough ambient light to see that it was a bit of a mess. The workforce had looked like they were taking the piss through the binos, and this confirmed it. Electricity cables snaked through randomly laid strips of insulation and heaps of sawdust, broken slates and all sorts of other builder shit that should have gone straight down the telescopic chute and into the skip.

There was no sign of cabin trunks filled with family heirlooms or contractors who’d missed the last wagon home.

I lowered myself through and went in search of a hatch that would take me down into the house. Almost immediately, I realized I could do better than that. The joists that paralleled the gable end of the wing were still open to the rooms below. I was going to be able to make entry without the creaking of a hinge or the clunk of a telescopic ladder.

I picked up a length of frayed blue nylon rope as I crept towards the gap and lowered myself on to my hands and knees half a metre short of it. Five minutes of listening satisfied me that either nobody was in the immediate vicinity or they were being even quieter than I was. I moved forwards and craned my neck far enough to check out where I was going next.

The room with no ceiling was as full of construction crap as the place I was about to leave. More cables, some with bare wires, some leading to halogen arc lamps on yellow tripods. Others that led nowhere in particular. Stacks of wood panelling that had been ripped off the walls. I slung the rope over the nearest joist and eased myself into the middle of it.

As soon as my feet touched the floorboards I stopped and listened again. Then I switched the knife to my left-hand pocket, closed my right around the pistol grip inside my overall and brought it up into the aim.

There was no carpet to deaden the sound of my footsteps, so I trod as lightly as the Timberlands allowed. I stepped to the left of each doorway I came to, did the mouth trick and cocked an ear before carrying on.

The doors themselves had been removed, so I didn’t have to worry about squeaking hinges. And I wasn’t silhouetted as I stepped across each threshold: I was moving towards the light, not away from it. But it still took a while. There were a lot of doorways.

The fabric of the place looked like it was in the middle of a major identity crisis. Some bits were covered with fresh gilt and moulded plaster, others seemed to be trying to throw off the bling of the past and go minimalist. There were enough pots of paint and glue and twenty-litre containers of white spirit lying around to last my anarchist mate a lifetime of artistic protest.

The builders’ mess didn’t seem to be confined to the wing I’d infiltrated. Four rooms further on, there was still not much sign of habitation. Then I came to the fifth, where a sheet of clear polythene had been fastened to the double door frame, separating the plaster dust and the lads responsible for it from what appeared to be the Gucci end of the house.

All the doors, hinges attached, had been leant against the wall to my right, opposite the shuttered window. Someone had obviously been busy with a blowtorch here. There was a stack of propane cylinders alongside them.

Keeping the pistol in my right hand, out came the knife again in my left. It made short work of the polythene. I waited again. No hint of movement. I seemed to be the only body fucking about with the air molecules around here. I eased through the slit I’d made, muzzle first.

Lyubova obviously didn’t share Frank’s enthusiasm for grey marble, but she hadn’t stinted on the Afghan rugs. The one that was now beneath my feet was the blood red of a Himalayan sunset, and must have been worth a fortune. I’d seen dozens of women in Kabul sweatshops at work on pieces like this, and only drug barons and dot.com zillionaires could afford to buy them. It stretched at least ten metres from the front of the house to the huge central staircase that dominated the back, and another ten from side to side.