The Weatherman had met the Albanian on several occasions now, and had yet to hear him speak. He wondered sometimes if he was deaf and dumb, but didn’t think so. Walking through the doorway as he was bid, he entered a much larger room in the centre of which the grossly overweight Mr Smith was seated on a sofa, his back to the French windows which overlooked the sea, concentrating on a bank of four computer screens on the coffee table in front of him and biting at a fingernail as if he was chewing a chicken bone.

He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt open to the navel, revealing folds of hairless, pale flesh that made him look as if he had breasts. The top of his blue slacks stretched across stubby legs the width of mature tree trunks. By contrast, his tiny feet, in monogrammed velvet Gucci slippers, without socks, seemed dainty, like dolls’ feet, and his head, coiffed with immaculate silver, wavy hair bunched into a short pigtail at the back, was even more out of proportion, as if it belonged to someone twenty sizes smaller. He had so many chins that until his minuscule mouth opened and the muscles around came into play it was hard for the Weatherman to see where his face ended and his neck began.

‘You want lunch, John?’ Jonas Smith said, in a sharp Louisiana drawl that contained not an ounce of warmth. He jabbed a porcine finger, the skin around the nails bitten raw in places, across at a room-service trolley laden with plates of sandwiches and aluminium food covers.

Staring down at the eau de Nil carpet, the Weatherman said, ‘Actually, I have my sandwich.’

‘Huh. You want a drink? Order yourself a drink and sit down.’

‘Thanks. Um, OK. Right. I don’t need a – um, drink. I – um…’ the Weatherman looked at his watch.

‘Then fucking sit down.’

The Weatherman hesitated for a moment, contained his anger and moved towards the nearest chair.

The American resumed gnawing on his nail and fixed his small, piggy eyes on the Weatherman, who unhitched his rucksack and perched himself on the edge of a chair, his eyes scanning the pile of the carpet as if searching for a pattern that was not there.

‘Coke? You want a Coke?’

‘Umm, actually, umm.’ The Weatherman looked at his watch again. ‘I have to be back by two.’

‘You’ll go back when I fucking tell you.’

The Weatherman was hungry. He thought about his tofu and bean-shoot sandwich in the plastic box inside his rucksack. But the problem was he didn’t really like people watching him eat. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which helped with his anger. ‘Fisher, German Bight, south-west four or five, veering north-west, six to gale eight. Showers. Moderate or good.’ Opening his eyes again, he noticed a glass ashtray, containing a half-smoked cigar that had gone out, on the table next to the sofa.

‘What’s that?’ Mr Smith said. ‘What d’you say there?’

‘Shipping forecast. You might need it.’

The American, whose real name was Carl Venner, stared at the geek, well aware that he was part genius, part two chips short of a circuit board. A hostile little fuckwit with a major attitude problem. He could handle that; he’d handled worse shit in his life. The thing was to remember that right now he was useful, and when he stopped being useful, nobody would miss him.

‘Appreciate you coming at such short notice,’ Venner said, his mouth forming a brief smile, but there was no thaw in his voice.

‘Um, right.’

‘We have a problem, John.’

Nodding his head, the Weatherman said, ‘OK, right.’

There was a long silence. Sensing someone behind him, he turned his head to see the Albanian had entered the room and was standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, watching him. Two other men had joined him, flanking him. The Weatherman knew they were both Russian, although he had never been introduced to them.

They seemed to materialize out of the walls for every meeting he had with Venner but he hadn’t figured out where they fitted in. They were unsmiling, lean, sharp-faced, with topiaried hair and sharp black suits; business associates of some kind. They always made him feel uncomfortable.

‘You told me that our site was not hackable,’ Mr Smith said. ‘So you want to explain to Mr Brown and myself how come we got hacked last night?’

‘We have five firewalls. No one can hack us. I had an automatic alert come through within two minutes that we had someone making an illegal access, and I disconnected them.’

‘So how did he make that access?’

‘I don’t know; I’m working on it. At least,’ he added petulantly, ‘I was until you interrupted me and called me here. Could be a software glitch.’

‘I was eleven years head of network monitoring for Europe for US Military Intelligence, John. I know the difference between a software glitch and footprints. I’m looking at footprints here. Come and take a look.’ He pointed at one of the computer screens.

The Weatherman walked round until he could see the screen. Rows of digits, all encrypted, ran down and across it. One group of letters was blinking. Studying the screen for some moments, he then carefully studied the other three screens. Then back to the first one, to the steady blink-blink-blink.

‘Um, there could be a number of reasons for this.’

‘There could be,’ the American agreed, impatiently. ‘But I’ve eliminated them. Which leaves us with just one possibility – someone unauthorized has gotten hold of a subscriber disc. So what I need you to do is provide us with the name and address of the subscriber who lost it, and this person who found it.’

‘I can give you the user ID of the subscriber – that will be on the login details. Um, the person who found it – er – um, might not be that easy.’

‘If he was able to find us, you’ll be able to find him.’ Mr Smith folded his hands, and his lips parted into a fleshy smile. ‘You have the resources. Use them.’

Roy Grace was in a muddy field, waist-high in rape, in a white paper suit pulled on over his clothes, and protective overshoes. For some moments he just stood in the rain-spotted wind and watched an ant steadfastly making its way across the female human hand that was lying, palm down, among the stalks of brilliant yellow rape.

Then he knelt and sniffed the flesh, flapping away a bluebottle. No smell came from the hand, which told him that it must be fresh – in this summer warmth probably less than twenty-four hours old.

Years back, as a fledgling detective attending a murder scene – a young woman found raped and strangled in a churchyard in the centre of Brighton – he had been approached by an attractive young red-headed journalist on the Argus who had been hanging around outside the police cordon. She had asked him if he felt emotions when he attended a murder, or whether he regarded it as just doing his job, the way anyone else did any other kind of job.

Although happily married to Sandy at the time, he had enjoyed his flirtatious chat with her and had not wanted to confess that this was actually the first murder he had ever attended. So, trying to be all macho he had told her that yes, it was a job, just a job, that was how he coped with the horror of murder scenes.

Now he was thinking back to that moment.

To that bravado lie.

The truth was that the day he turned up to a murder scene and it felt no more than just doing a job, the day he did not care deeply for the victim, would be the day he would quit the force and do something else. And that day was still a long way off. Maybe it would eventually happen to him, the way it had happened to his dad and the way it seemed to happen to many of the old sweats on the force, but right now he was feeling a whole bellyful of the same emotions he had each time he came to a murder scene.

It was a potent mixture of fear at what he was going to have to look at, and the awesome burden of responsibility that fell on his shoulders as Senior Investigating Officer – the knowledge that this dead woman, whoever she was, had parents, maybe siblings, maybe a husband or lover, maybe children. One of her loved ones would have to identify the body, and all of them, in a state of grief and shock, would have to be interrogated and eliminated from enquiries.