‘Wait,’ she said sharply. ‘Kick it over here.’

With a shrug, he placed his bag on the floor and slid it towards her with his foot. Keeping her eyes fixed on him, she felt inside it, her fingers eventually closing around a thick file that she pulled on to her lap. Seeing the FBI crest, she shot him a questioning, almost concerned look.

‘Don’t tell me you’re FBI too?’

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Then where did you get this?’

A pause.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘You borrowed it?’ She gave him a disbelieving smile. ‘From the FBI?’

‘When one agent gets killed, another one gets blamed,’ he said, an impatient edge to his voice for the first time. ‘Everyone was too busy covering their own ass to worry about finding Jennifer’s killer. I did what I had to do.’

‘And came here? Why? What were you hoping to find?’

‘I don’t know. Something that might tell me why Jennifer was murdered, or what this symbol means, or who the Delian League is.’

‘The Delian League?’ she shot back. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Not as much as you, by the sound of things,’ he replied with a curious frown.

‘I just know what it used to be,’ she said, his story so far and the reassuring weight of the gun in her hand convincing her she wasn’t risking much by sharing a little more of what she knew.

‘What do you mean, “used to be”?’

‘There was an association of city states in Ancient Greece. A military alliance, formed to protect themselves from the Spartans,’ she explained. ‘The members used to throw lead into the sea when they joined, to symbolise that their friendship would last until it floated back to the surface.’

‘Lead. Like the engraved disc you found on Cavalli?’

‘Not just on Cavalli,’ she admitted, trying not to think of Ricci’s sagging skin and Argento’s tortured smile. ‘There have been two other murders. The discs were found with them too.’

‘Did Cavalli know them?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Cavalli was an attorney based in Melfi. Adriano Ricci was an enforcer for the De Luca crime family. While Giulio Argento worked for the Banco Rosalia, a subsidiary of the Vatican bank. A priest would have more in common with a prostitute than those three with each other.’

‘But the same killer, right?’

Allegra’s eyes snapped to the door before she could answer, the sound of approaching sirens lifting her to her feet.

‘You must have been followed,’ Tom glared at her accusingly.

She ignored him, instead picking up a chair and swinging it hard against one of the sliding glass doors. It fractured on the third blow, the safety glass falling out in a single, crazed sheet. They leapt through the frame as they heard three, maybe four cars roar up the street outside.

‘Here-’

Tom cradled his hands and gave Allegra a boost, then reached up so she could help haul him up on to the garden wall beside her.

‘You’ll slow me down,’ she said with a firm shake of her head.

‘You need me,’ Tom insisted.

‘I’ve done okay so far.’

‘Really? Then how do you explain that?’ Tom glanced towards the muffled sound of the police banging on the front door.

‘They got lucky,’ she said with a shrug, readying herself to jump down.

‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’

‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.

‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’

She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’

Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.

Verbier, Switzerland 19th March-7.31 a.m.

It had snowed last week-recently enough for the village’s blandly functional concrete heart to still be benefiting from its decorative touch, long enough ago for the briefly pristine white streets to have been turned into a dirty river of slush and mud-stained embankments.

Faulks had never seen the point of skiing, never understood the attraction of clamping his feet into boots that in another age would have likely been in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and then hurling himself off a mountain on two narrow planks just to only to get to the bottom so that he could have to queue and pay for the privilege of repeating the whole infernal experience again. And again.

Glancing up from his phone as they drove past, he almost felt sorry for them, a few early starters clomping noisily down the street trying not to break their necks on the ice, skis balancing precariously on their shoulder, their edges sawing down to the bone. It seemed a heavy price to pay to ensure you could hold your own at the school gates with the other parents or be able to join in with the dinner party circuit chit chat.

Still, if there was one thing he’d learnt over the years it was that there was no limit to people’s ingenuity when it came to devising irrational ways to spend their money. And the richer they were, the more irrational and ingenious they seemed to become. It was a status symbol. A badge of honour. In fact, compared to some things he’d witnessed over the years, skiing was almost sane.

Chalet Septième Ciel was perched in an isolated spot high above the village, facing westward and with a breathtaking view over the valley below. Converted from an old school, its name meant Seventh Heaven; strangely inappropriate, given that most of its occupants, Faulks was fairly sure, were fated for a far warmer destination when their time came. Maybe that was why they chose here, Faulks mused. The prospect of an eternity roasting in the fires of Hell was perhaps all the incentive they needed to pay the extortionate fees this place charged. Anything to spend their final days somewhere cold.

Faulks’s silver 1963 Bentley S3 Continental pulled up and Logan got out to open his door for him. A former paratrooper from the outskirts of Glasgow, he’d done two tours in Afghanistan before realising that he could make more in a year as a private bodyguard than ten being shot at for Queen and country. Wearing a suit and his regimental tie, he had straw-coloured hair and a wide, round face, his nose crooked and part of one earlobe missing. His jaw was permanently clenched, as if he was chewing stones.

A female voice answered the intercom.

‘I’m here to see Avner Klein,’ Faulks announced in French.

The door buzzed open and he stepped inside, a dark-haired nurse in a white uniform rushing forward to greet him, a stern expression on her face.

‘Visiting hours aren’t until nine,’ she informed him icily.

‘I know, but I’ve just flown in from Los Angeles,’ he explained apologetically. ‘And I have to be back in Geneva mid morning. I knew that if I didn’t at least try to see him now…’

‘I understand,’ she relented, her face softening as she placed a comforting hand on his sleeve. ‘In this case…well, time is short. I’m sure he’ll see you. He’s not been sleeping well recently. Follow me.’

She led him downstairs and down a long, dark corridor, Faulks marking every third step with the sharp clip of his umbrella against the wooden floor. Reaching the last door she knocked gently. From the other side came a faint call that seemed barely human to Faulks, but which the nurse clearly took as permission to enter, nodding at him to go in.