He didn’t only have one case. He had two. A smaller one in his right hand. He dropped them both and raised his fists.

When you’re being garrotted, your natural instinct is to try to get both sets of fingers between your throat and whatever is about to stop you breathing. Hesco didn’t do that. Only his left hand went for the cling-film. He tried to destroy one of my ribs with his right elbow, then swivelled, brought his arm up and, gripping the ignition key like a bayonet, did his best to bury the metal shank in my ear, my eye, my carotid, whatever – he didn’t much care.

I turned with him, keeping him close, fending off more elbow action with my upper arm and getting another loop around his neck. He didn’t just look like a Hesco barrier, he felt like one too. He’d been filled with sand. He was carrying some surplus weight, but there was no give.

I leant back into the Expert’s load space, tightened the noose and clenched both knotted ends of it in my left hand. While Hesco was flailing, trying to win the gravity battle, my arse was firmly on the lip of the plywood floor, my knees bent, the soles of my Timberlands flat on the ground. I heard a clink as his key hit the concrete and my free hand found the ether-soaked cloth, whipped it out of the mug and clamped it on to his nose and mouth.

I kept it in place long enough for his head and neck to go limp, then the rest of him followed. I laid him out alongside my Fanta trays before retrieving his keys, overnight bag and briefcase, and hurling them into the van.

I closed and locked the door behind me, switched on the interior light and hooked my little finger through the keyring. Then I kicked the bags out of the way so I could reach him and stuff three-quarters of the cloth into his mouth. Keeping the rest over his nostrils, I wound gaffer tape around his head until I’d mummified him from the neck up, leaving only his nose and ears unbound. All I needed was for him to be able to hear and breathe.

I lifted his right hand. It was the first time I’d been able to admire his ring up close. Silver double-headed eagle on red enamel.

I fastened his wrists, ankles and neck with the cable ties. Once all eighteen were in place and Hesco was nicely spread-eagled, I listened at the door again, then jumped out and sifted through the Maserati’s boot and glovebox. Nothing more than car shit.

I’d give him and his bags a closer look later. Right now I needed to get the fuck out of there. I had less than two hours before I should be at the meet, and had no control of what would happen when Hesco didn’t show up earlier. But, fuck it, I just had to get on with what I could control. I pressed his padlock button twice and climbed into my cab.

I didn’t try to beat the Guinness Book of Records for the time it takes to piss off out of a Swiss multi-storey car park. I needed the CCTV to show there was nothing unusual about my journey to the exit.

When I’d checked out Google Earth at the second cyber café, I’d spotted a massive expanse of forestry at the northern end of Lake Konstanz, stretching almost as far as the German frontier. It would be quiet and dark and that was all I needed.

Lights glimmered in the windows of the converted barns and farmhouses of Chatzerüti, the hamlet at the edge of the forest. A dog barked in the distance, but no one paid me the slightest attention as I drove past. I turned on to gravel tracks and doused my headlamps as soon as I was inside the treeline. The deeper I moved into the forest the quicker it would soak up the lights.

The place was probably crawling with wildlife – wild boar for certain, and possibly the odd bear – but none of them seemed to be carrying torches.

I turned down the dashboard display as low as it would go and moved forwards slowly, keeping the headlamps off.

I hung a right after about a K, and passed a wooden hut with the shutters down and a bunch of those bench-and-table combos you find at every picnic spot in Europe. This would be a great place for a Swiss sausage and a hunk of bread at the end of a day’s hiking, but last orders would have been taken well before sundown.

I kept on going another K, then pulled off the track and got out. There wasn’t much more than a glow from the moon down there. I got half a litre of mineral water down my neck and listened to the night sounds. The odd rustle in the undergrowth. The call of an owl. But I wasn’t about to go into David Attenborough mode. I just needed to be as sure as possible that none of them was human.

Locking the cab, I got into the back with Hesco, closing and locking the door behind me. He was still out for the count as I ran my fingers along his belt, wrists and calves. No weapon.

Then I had a good look through his clothes.

He wasn’t sterile. Why would he be? He hadn’t planned to spend his evening strapped to the floor of my van.

I lifted his wallet, his Adler ID and pass cards, and two mobile phones. One was a cheap Nokia with no call or text history, which must have been the twin of the one he had left on the passenger seat of the Polo. The other was an iPhone with a pass code.

I brought out my day sack and stowed all the goodies inside it. Last to go in was the iPhone, after I’d powered it down and removed its SIM card. Whoever was waiting at the City Lounge might just want to check where he was.

I unzipped his overnight bag. A couple of changes of basic kit, a spare pair of deck shoes and a washbag. So he was on his way somewhere, after he’d sorted me and the boy out, and wasn’t planning to stay long.

The briefcase was more interesting. Some routine corporate shit. A bunch of keys. A Space Pen. An unloaded SIG Sauer P226. A 9mm Elite Stainless with a walnut handle. This lad really did fancy himself. It was the perfect weapon for an arsehole who drove around town in a wagon that yelled, ‘Look at me!’

I also found two chrome-plated twenty-round mags and a suppressor, an Albanian passport and a Lufthansa boarding pass for tomorrow’s 06:30 flight from Zürich to Naples – which explained why he had already packed. And although Brindisi was on the opposite side of the southern Italian peninsula, it made me think I was some way towards finding out why Frank had been sad there on his last trip.

The best came last: a thirteen-inch HP laptop in a neoprene sleeve.

There’s no point in breaking down a door if it hasn’t been locked, so I fired it up, in case it wasn’t password protected. It was. I folded it shut, replaced the sleeve, put it down a safe distance from the Fanta zone.

I opened the tool chest, squeezed the bag and the briefcase inside it and put my day sack on top of them. As I replaced the padlock, Hesco gave a low moan from somewhere inside his binding, and seemed to be testing the wrist ties. I gave him a couple of kicks in the kidneys and got nothing in response, so maybe I was imagining it.

15

The ether had pretty much evaporated from the cloth and Hesco was starting to show signs of wakefulness.

I stood over him briefly before collapsing my weight to sit on his chest, driving out what little air was left in his lungs.

His immediate reaction was to try to arch his back and throw me off, but as long as the staples held, the cable ties made that impossible. I still didn’t say anything. He tried sucking in through his mouth but that wasn’t working. His nostrils flared with the struggle for oxygen.

I brought out my knife, unfolded the blade and slid it under the binding below his left ear. I did it slowly, so he had plenty of opportunity to feel the cold metal against his neck. It worked. He went very, very still. Maybe I was right about the scar on his nose.