A white and green police wagon, four up, was hot on their heels. One glance at the black combat kit worn by the lads inside it told me they were TIGRIS. They were a long way from home – the Einsatzgruppe HQ was two hundred Ks west, near Bern – but the Zürich canton cops didn’t dress like that, and they didn’t have Sécurité Internationale splashed across their rear wings either.

I heard the rhythmic beat of rotor blades from the south, approaching from St Gallen. The heli might have been carrying a news crew or another TIGRIS team. I’d find out soon enough.

The parking area by the lake had a lot more empty spaces now, and most of the parasols had been taken down. I pulled in a fair distance from the Polo and scanned the surrounding area. Families were being shepherded towards their wagons. Nobody seemed to be there without a good reason, and I couldn’t see anyone dressed for work talking urgently into a mobile.

I got eyes on Stefan’s deckchairs. They were empty. That was when I really started to leak sweat, even from places I didn’t know I had sweat glands. On the way, part of me had still hoped Lyubova was bluffing.

The woman in the sundress was packing up her picnic basket and yelling at her twin girls to come out of the water. They weren’t paying her the slightest bit of attention. I scanned the shoreline to the left and right of them. Stefan wasn’t anywhere in sight.

I climbed out of the cab and checked out the Polo, in case he’d got bored and decided to listen to his Pitbull album, or some other rap on the radio. He’d chucked his towel on to the passenger seat, but he wasn’t in there with it. Nor was his rucksack.

I ran down a gangway on to the stretch of turf, then on to the sand. The sun was low in the sky now, and much of the heat had gone out of it. The place wasn’t nearly as packed as it had been earlier, but bunches of locals and holidaymakers were still intent on having a good time. One or two began to point at the pillar of smoke rising into the sky behind me.

Two girls in wetsuits hopped off their windsurfers as they skimmed into the shallows. Four well-oiled teenage dudes were playing volleyball at the far end of the beach, surrounded by a small crowd of kids. Stefan wasn’t one of them.

As I turned back towards the deckchairs, the mum in the sundress finally lost her patience with the twins and heaved them both out of the water. I almost collided with her as she strode back to her basket, gripping a small female wrist in each hand. She looked up, muttering something in Schweizerdeutsch, then recognized me from earlier.

‘Have you seen my boy?’

Her angry-mum face was immediately replaced by her old smiley one. ‘You mustn’t worry. He has gone with the maid.’

‘The maid? Ah … Natasha …’

‘Very pretty girl.’

‘Did she say where to?’

She frowned. ‘She told me you would know. She said they would see you later …’

I nodded again and tried to react as if this was all part of our plan for the evening. I needed answers, but I didn’t want her – or anybody else – to go on red alert.

She obviously wasn’t buying it. ‘Everything is OK, isn’t it?’

‘Sure. She just called.’ I paused. ‘Thanks for looking out for him.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m a mother. That’s what we do. She was way over there …’ She pointed towards the volleyball game. ‘Then he looked up from his book and spotted her. He waved and ran over. That’s why I didn’t worry. He was very excited.’

‘He likes her. She taught him to swim.’

I tried not to let the smile slide off my face, but my chat with Stefan about trust kept ringing in my ears, and that didn’t help. Next time I saw him I’d tell him the truth. You can’t trust any fucker. Not even nice-looking ones who once taught you how to keep your head above the water.

‘You didn’t see which car they were in, did you?’

She shook her head.

‘Or who she was with? Her boyfriend, maybe?’

‘I think there was a man.’ She gestured vaguely towards the car park.

‘Big guy? Chunky? Pointy sideburns?’ I traced the shape of them on my own cheeks.

‘Sideburns? I think …’ She started to look anxious again. ‘I am so sorry. I don’t know …’

I wanted to ask her more, but her finger was hovering over the panic button.

‘Don’t worry. It’s all good.’

I turned back towards the van, leaving her to gather her gear. I’d gone about five paces when she called after me. ‘Natasha … and your boy … I heard them say something about the cathedral …’

I glanced over my shoulder and waved. I hoped I still looked happier than I felt. The cathedral was our ERV. If he’d told her about that, he was in danger of telling her everything.

My only consolation right now was that although Stefan had drawn the thought-bubble decal he didn’t know I’d bought the Peugeot. And what he didn’t know, he couldn’t pass on.

12

The passenger door of the Polo opened at the press of the button. The towel hadn’t been left there by accident. Underneath it were the car keys and the Pitbull CD. And a cheap Nokia mobile.

I powered it up. A pay-as-you-go SIM, five bars of signal and a full battery. No numbers in the memory, but one voicemail from an unidentified source: ‘You will be contacted at twenty-one hundred.’ A voice like gravel. Heavily accented. Eastern European.

I’d heard it before. ‘Fuck him. He got what he deserved.’ Hesco had been no more than six metres away from me. He’d been talking into a mobile phone then as well.

21:00 made sense. Just before last light.

It gave me two hours.

I pocketed the Nokia and checked out the interior of the Polo – glovebox, door compartments, boot, the lot – to make sure that we hadn’t left anything behind. Now they’d pinged it, I was ditching the wagon here. It was a complete liability.

The only thing I needed was the Swiss map book. But I took the towel and the Pitbull CD as well. I left the keys in the ignition and hoped someone would nick it before the parking Gestapo hauled it on to a low-loader. It would create some more confusion. And if the bad guys had stuck a tracker underneath it, so much the better.

Back in the van, I opened the map book, laid it on the passenger seat, took a couple of deep breaths and focused.

They had him.

And now they were using him to get me.

Once that was done they would kill us both.

So I wasn’t about to settle down with a Starbucks and wait for them to call. And I wasn’t going to wander around the cathedral hoping that Natasha was playing happy families and the boy was telling her everything he knew about ERVs.

I had to strike first.

The security guard at the cash-and-carry tapped his watch as I came through the revolving door. I signalled that I wouldn’t need more than five. He gave me a smile and held up three fingers. At least it wasn’t two.

I had most of what I wanted from my earlier trip to the neighbouring DIY store, when I’d prepared for the possibility of having to lift Lyubova and take her somewhere quiet. Now I needed something more heavy-duty.

I finished my final shopping spree of the day at warp speed. Fifteen hundred metres of meat-packing-grade cling-film complete with metal wall mounting, a nice big mug and twenty-four 20cl bottles of Cherry Fanta on two shrink-wrapped trays.

I didn’t go for the cans. I needed as much precision as possible, and the bottles had a nice narrow neck. I didn’t take the zuckerfrei option either: I wanted this stuff to be as sticky and as fizzy as possible.

I had assumed I could get Lyubova to talk by securing her in my mobile fridge, opening up my clasp knife and threatening to give her some extra plastic surgery. Hesco was going to need a different approach. First I had to catch him. Then I had to get him to tell me where they were keeping Frank’s boy. And what the fuck he and Dijani were up to.