“He’s right. But maybe Kerry didn’t realize just how foolhardy. Maybe I didn’t ram the message home to her.”

“It might help if you told Hayley how much you regret that.”

“I plan to, Tim, believe me.” Tozer dropped his cigarette butt onto the ground and crushed it with his boot, then glanced at his watch. “It’s nearly ten. Let’s go.”

They left the garden and headed out slowly along the path beside the ornamental canal, bare-limbed trees to their right, turbid, half-frozen water to their left. The palace had only just opened to visitors and few had made it as far as the park. A woman with a yapping dog was walking along the path on the opposite bank of the canal. But on their side there was no sign of anyone.

“She is going to turn up, isn’t she, Tim?” Tozer asked anxiously.

“She told us to be here, Barney. And here we are.”

“But where’s she?”

“Give her-” He broke off. His phone was ringing.

As Harding came to a halt, Tozer went on for a few paces, then turned to look at him. “Expecting a call?” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully.

“It can’t be Hayley”

“Can’t it?”

Harding grabbed the phone from his pocket and answered. “Hello?”

“Darren here, Mr. H. Calling back as promised.”

Harding swore under his breath. He had completely forgotten Spargo’s squalid little money-making manoeuvre. He had not so much as mentioned it to Barney. “I can’t talk now,” he said quietly.

“Why not? You’ve had a couple of days to sort things out with Megabucks.”

“I’ll phone you back later.”

“Oh no. I’m not being strung along like that.”

Tozer spread his hands enquiringly. Harding gave him a stalling wave and turned away to avoid his gaze while he dealt with Spargo. “This isn’t a good time. I-”

There was a loud crack, like ice fracturing under pressure, but so close to Harding’s ear that he ducked down defensively. “Caught you at the shooting range, have I?” he heard Spargo ask. Then he looked back at Tozer. And the phone slipped from his fingers.

Tozer was on his knees, clutching at his throat, his eyes wide, staring helplessly at Harding. He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth, only a trickle of blood. Then there was another loud crack. Tozer’s head jerked forward. Bloody fragments of brain and bone burst from the back of his skull. He toppled over, hitting the ground like a falling sack, his last breath forced from him in a dying grunt.

For a second, Harding did not react. Then there was a third crack. He dodged instinctively and saw something that had to be a bullet ping off a pebble a foot or so in front of him. There was nowhere to run to or hide. The only shelter was in the trees, where the shots were coming from. The thought formed in his mind, clear and hard and brittle as an icicle, that he was about to die. A fourth crack snapped the thought clean off. He flung himself to the ground, twisting his head and squinting despairingly towards the trees. Hayley could not be doing this. It was not possible. She had not been able to go through with killing Carol. Surely she-

But yes. It was her. A dark shape detached itself from the cover of one of the tree trunks in his lopsided field of vision. She had stopped shooting and was running hard now, deeper into the woods. This time, she did not look back. A black, fleeing figure, moving fast, threading between the trees, like a deer fleeing the hunter. But in this case the deer was the hunter. And she had made a kill.

For much of the rest of the day, Harding dwelt only half in the real world. Part of his mind-and, strangely, it also seemed to him, his body-was absent, banished to some realm where the events of the past twelve days assembled, dismantled and reassembled themselves slowly and inexorably before him, obedient to a logic he had understood too late. Barney Tozer was dead. Hayley Foxton had taken her revenge. And Harding had been there to witness it happening.

The sluggishness of his reactions posed no problem to the Kriminal-Polizei officers who interviewed him at Munich Police HQ for several long, laborious hours. The British Embassy had supplied an interpreter and the translation of the officers’ questions and Harding’s answers slowed the proceedings to a crawl. He told them as much of the truth as he knew. Tozer’s death had rendered any kind of subterfuge or suppression not merely futile, but obscene. Not that the police evinced much interest in the complexities surrounding the case. To them, it was simple. Hayley Foxton blamed Barney Tozer for her sister’s death. Tozer had foolishly failed to take the intrusion at his apartment in Monte Carlo as the danger signal it undoubtedly was. He had even more foolishly agreed to meet Hayley in an exposed and isolated location. And he had paid the price.

Harding emphasized that no one could have imagined Hayley would possess a gun-let alone know how to use it. But the police, it seemed, routinely imagined such things. They pointed out that she could have been practising target-shooting for months with this moment in mind. He was, they implied, lucky to be alive himself; unless, of course, she had missed him deliberately, wanting him to identify her as the murderer, needing there to be no doubt what she had done and why.

The search for Hayley had commenced long before Harding’s questioning had ended. By the time he was thanked for his assistance and sent on his way, late that afternoon, she might, for all he knew, already be under arrest. There was nothing he could do for her now. If they had not found her yet, they soon would. The future she had made for herself allowed for no turning back.

Tony Whybrow was waiting for him in the station’s reception area, a layer of grimness added to his habitual calm.

“I hope they haven’t given you a hard time, Tim.”

“They just wanted as many details as I could supply.”

“You look all in.”

“Shock, I expect. Delayed reaction. Sorrow most of all. I never saw this coming. Not in a million years.”

“Carol and I flew up here on the same plane. She’s at the morgue now.”

“Oh God.”

“You’re going to have to go through it all again, I’m afraid.”

Harding sighed. “We should have contacted the police after she threatened Carol, shouldn’t we?”

“Yes. I blame myself for that.”

“Barney was confident he could come to an understanding with Hayley. He was… looking forward to meeting her, I think, in a strange kind of way.”

“And she was looking forward to meeting him. In a very different kind of way.”

“Yes.” Harding nodded glumly. “Apparently she was.”

Carol joined them in the bar at the Cortiina. She seemed numbed by her visit to the morgue, so overwhelmed by what had happened that she was not even visibly upset. Her face was a mask, her gaze barely focused. She listened to Harding’s account of how her husband had died with little reaction beyond a few faltering questions, though one of those was in its way more difficult to answer than any the police had posed.

“Do you think Barney knew who’d shot him?”

“Maybe. But he only had a second or so to know anything. It was quick, Carol. That’s the only consolation I can think of.”

“It’s not much of one.”

“I know.”

“Do they execute murderers in Germany, Tony?”

“No, Carol. They don’t.”

“Pity.”

“But they imprison them for life. And I’m sure that’s what they’ll do to Hayley Foxton when they catch her.”

“If they catch her.”

“They will, I’m sure. Soon, probably.”

“How soon?”

“The police will let us know immediately if there’s any news.”