It didn’t work.

‘Nick …’

I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do that. I didn’t know why. Normally I had no problem letting people know when I’d had enough of them. Even ghosts.

‘I like it very much in Italy, Nick. My dad is … was … always happy in Italy. Except the last trip …’

‘Mate, I’m pretty sure I’m about to find out why. It’s a bit late for you, but I need to get myself out of this shit and find the fuckers who killed you and your dad at the same time. Not all bad, eh?’

That was my voice. Inside my head.

Or not.

Maybe I said it out loud. Who cared?

He seemed to like what he heard, though. He turned and gave me a slow smile. ‘Know your enemy, Nick. Know your enemy …’

And then he disappeared.

But his words still hung in the air.

Know your enemy …

He wasn’t wrong. Sun Tzu hadn’t been either. And I found myself thinking that if Frank had taken his own advice we wouldn’t have been in this shit in the first place.

7

I hit the town centre and carried on going, bearing left wherever I could, and took the first exit off a roundabout, which pointed me towards something that called itself the Sant’ Apollinare quay.

I passed what had once been a public park but had morphed into a migrant camp. Families in rags stood round the kind of pop-up tents you see at Glastonbury, or makeshift structures cobbled together from wood, wriggly tin and blue plastic tarpaulins. The human nightmare was shrouded in a haze of woodsmoke as they tried to cook whatever the charities had given them. And these were the lucky ones. The only ones laughing were some of the kids in the swing and slide enclosure.

The only light source on the road down to the quay’s entrance was the massive sign to its left, which announced that this was the place to be if you wanted a ferry to or from Greece.

I parked fifty metres short of it and walked up to the gate. Another sign on each pillar told me there was a strong chance my wagon might end up in the water if I wasn’t paying attention. And that wasn’t the only reason to fuck off out of there. Yet more signs warned me that the complex was crawling with police and Customs officials, and that I was approaching SECURITY LEVEL 1.

Before I had a second to wonder what that meant, a guard with a big nightstick and an even bigger gut emerged from his hut and stationed himself on the other side of it. I had my answer. There was only one of him.

He gave me the once-over with his torch, and it didn’t feel like the warmest of welcomes. I didn’t have a problem with that. The quay was deserted, and the pictogram above my head made it pretty clear that, even when it wasn’t, it catered for cars and pedestrians only. I raised my hand to let him know that I’d come to the wrong place, and wasn’t going to climb over the fence and shake up his pasta dinner.

The next exit off the roundabout looked more promising: Turkey, Greece and Albania. And the road was lined with containers, stacked two and three high. The lighting was more generous here, but there were still plenty of nice, comfortable shadows to get lost in.

A big brown panel welcomed me in five languages, but everything else in the main access zone to this part of the docks yelled, ‘Fuck off!’ Men in uniform carried pistols on the hip, automatic number-plate recognition cameras clocked every vehicle on entry, and if you drove your wagon off the quay, the water was even deeper than it had been at SECURITY LEVEL 1.

I kept my distance and swung the wheel towards the terminal building instead. It promised coffee and a restaurant for anyone going to Greece or Albania. I guessed that the Turks had to bring their own.

A couple of lads in an MPV pulled up in front of a row of artics and container-lorries, opened their boot and started to hang out a display of blue and white football gear for sale. It wasn’t yet 04:30. They were obviously keen to make the most of the early trade. A white Fiat stopped alongside them. The blue stripe across its door panels said SECURPOL PUGLIA and the lettering on its windscreen – ISTITUTO DI VIGILANZA – reinforced the message. But these guys were obviously old mates who shared a bit of banter every morning.

I cruised the length of the parking area, scanning my surroundings for another route into the docks. A covered conveyor, mounted on pylons, dominated the skyline in front of me. It took grain or gravel or cement or whatever to the quay from a storage facility across the dual carriageway that bordered the complex. Some of the pylons had rungs from top to bottom, to allow maintenance engineers access to the working parts. If all else failed I’d climb one and get inside that way.

I turned on to the dual carriageway. The conveyor ran alongside me for a couple of hundred, on a gradual downward slope, then took a sharp left to the loading bays.

From what I could see in the wash of my headlamps the chain-link security fence beneath it was a whole lot more secure than the one I’d wandered through in Naples. It was reinforced every so often with prefab concrete panels, and there wasn’t a hole or a tear in sight. But after another two hundred it seemed to come to an abrupt halt by some kind of currency-exchange kiosk, which wasn’t as eager for business as the lads in the MPV.

I parked up further along the road and grabbed my binos. After I’d checked in front and behind for approaching vehicles, I put on my jacket. It was wet and cold and heavier than I needed it to be, but the less skin I had on display, the better. I chucked the day sack in the boot, locked the wagon and crossed the central barrier.

The turning beside the kiosk was a dead end, and I wasn’t wrong about the fence. It stopped at the top of a bank, covered with bushes and scrub, which ran steeply down to a train line. The track emerged from a tunnel to my right and paralleled the road to my left. A spur curving towards the dockside was still under construction.

The open ground between it and the water was only illuminated by the ambient glow from the main cargo quays to my half-right, the world’s biggest gantry to my half-left, and the lamps running along the top of the conveyor that divided this side of the port from the heavily manned access point.

The railway was sporadically lit as well, but once I’d crossed it there would be plenty of cover. Earth from the freshly dug cutting had been piled up on the far side of the conveyor. A pair of king-size mobile hoppers towered above stacks of sleepers and lengths of track waiting to be laid.

There were endless stretches of that orange plastic netting too; the stuff that’s meant to warn you about a big hole in the ground, then does fuck-all to stop you falling into it.

I always felt safer when I’d had the opportunity to do a close target recce, but I was here now, the sky had already turned a couple of shades paler than it had been when I got there, and if Minerva had arrived at its parking space, it wouldn’t just sit and wait for me to come aboard.

Fuck berthing: I liked parking.

8

The soles of my Timberlands were clogged with soil as soon as I’d taken a couple of steps down the slope, and I slithered most of the rest of the way, grabbing the odd branch to steady myself. My plan was to start looking at the far end of the port, and work back through the forest of cranes and gantries until I was as close as possible to the sector patrolled by the police and the Vigilanza.