There was the muffled sound of the toilet flushing. The latch clicked open and a man walked out, placing a folded newspaper down on the desk as he turned to face them. Tall and square faced, he had a thinning head of hair that rose in white waves at the front and then foundered into a black expanse at the rear. He was smartly dressed in a grey Armani suit and gaudy Versace tie with matching pocket handkerchief. The collar of his white shirt, however, appeared to be several sizes too small, as if he had gambled on not buying a new one in the belief that he would lose some weight. If so, it was a bet that he appeared destined to lose, his once sharp cheekbones sinking into his face like smudged lines on a charcoal drawing, a fleshy crevice forming in the cleft of his chin.

The guard handed him the file and the Polaroid. He glanced at each of them, then sat down. Swivelling to face them, he adjusted his cuffs, carefully covering his watch.

‘Welcome to Rome, Signor Kirk.’ He spoke in a thick accent, his eyes fixing them with a cold, mortuary gaze.

‘You know him?’ Allegra’s voice was both angry and disbelieving.

Tom frowned as he tried to place the face, then gave a small shake of his head.

‘Should I?’

‘Should he?’ the man asked Allegra, his face creased into a question.

‘He’s Giovanni De Luca,’ Allegra replied unsmilingly. ‘The head of the Banda della Magliana.’

Tom’s eyes flickered in recognition. So much for tracking the Delian League down and the element of surprise. Instead, one half of it had come looking for them and sprung its own trap.

‘Felix doesn’t know me,’ De Luca said, his flickering smile suggesting he was pleased that she had recognised him. ‘But I had the pleasure of meeting his mother once.’

‘My mother?’ Tom breathed, not knowing whether to sound angry or astonished.

‘A fundraising dinner many years ago. A beautiful woman, if I may say so. A terrible loss. Of course, it was only many years later that I heard of you.’

‘Heard what, exactly?’ Allegra asked, eyeing Tom with the same suspicious look she’d had back in Cavalli’s house when she’d first met him.

‘It’s hard to be good at what Felix does without word getting out. He has a special talent.’

‘Had,’ Tom corrected him. ‘I got out a few years ago.’

‘And yet, from what I hear, you’re still running.’ He nodded towards the scanner.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Tom asked impatiently. His arms were beginning to ache and every gear change and bump in the road was making the cuffs saw a little deeper into his wrists.

‘What’s this?’ De Luca waved the photo at him.

‘We found it in Cavalli’s car,’ Tom explained. ‘We think he was trying to sell it.’

‘What do you know about Cavalli?’ De Luca shot back, spitting the name out in a way that revealed more than he had probably intended.

Tom nodded slowly, immediately guessing at the truth.

‘Why did you kill him?’

De Luca paused, then inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging applause.

‘Strictly speaking, the river killed him.’

‘Did he work for you?’

‘Pfff! He was one of Moretti’s.’

Moretti. Tom recognized the name as the person Allegra had identified as supposedly heading up the other half of the Delian League. De Luca’s supposed business partner.

‘What had he done?’ Allegra asked.

‘I only kill for two reasons. Theft and disloyalty.’ De Luca counted them off on his fingers as if he were listing the ingredients for a recipe. ‘In Cavalli’s case, he was guilty of both.’

‘You mean he’d betrayed the League?’ Tom asked.

‘It seemed fitting to mark his treachery on the spot of an earlier treason,’ De Luca nodded, confirming what they’d already guessed on the bridge.

The van turned sharply left. Allegra slid across the seat, pressing up against Tom.

‘And Ricci?’ Allegra asked.

‘I took care of Cavalli to protect the League. But Moretti, the old fool, got it into his head that I was about to make a move on the whole operation.’ De Luca’s tone hardened, his jaw clenching. ‘He had Ricci killed to warn me off. Argento was me evening the score.’

Tom nodded as the realisation dawned that far from being a conversation the careful echoing and symbolism of the various deaths had in fact been the opening shots of a very public, very acrimonious divorce.

‘And now it seems my accountant in Monaco has disappeared,’ he continued angrily. ‘Well, if Moretti wants a war, I’m ready for him.’ He struck his chest with his fist, the dull thud revealing that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt.

‘What did Jennifer Browne have to do with your war?’ Tom demanded angrily.

‘Who?’ De Luca frowned.

‘The FBI agent you had killed in Vegas.’

‘What FBI agent?’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Tom shouted, his wrists straining against the handcuffs.

‘Cavalli was going to sing, so I clipped his wings,’ De Luca said in a low, controlled voice. ‘Ricci and Argento-that’s just business between Moretti and me. But I had nothing to do with killing any FBI agent. I’ve never even heard of her.’

‘She was closing in on the Delian League, so you had her taken out,’ Tom insisted.

‘Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re here?’ De Luca picked up the FBI file and glanced at its monogrammed cover with a puzzled shrug. ‘Well, then maybe somebody did us a favour. Either way, I never ordered the hit.’

‘Well, somebody in the League did,’ Tom insisted. ‘And I’ll take you all down to find them, if I have to.’

There was a pause. De Luca blew out the sides of his cheeks, clearly mulling something over. Then, with a shrug, he nodded.

‘Yes. I expect you probably would.’

Tom felt the needle before he saw it, a sharp stab of pain in his neck where the guard had stepped forward and pulled the trigger on an injection gun. Allegra was next, her head slumping forward as he felt the room begin to spin and darken. The last thing he was aware of was De Luca’s voice, deepening and slowing as if being played back at half speed.

‘Do give my best to your mother.’

Sotheby’s auction rooms, Quai du Mont Blanc, Geneva 19th March -1.32 p.m.

Short, perhaps only four feet high, she had braided hair that fell across her forehead and down her neck. Dressed in a simple tunic that hung from her body in smooth folds, a hunting strap ran down from her shoulder and across her breasts, pulling the material tight against their firm slope. Gazing straight ahead, she wore a slight smile, lips parted as if she was about to speak. Her arms were cut off at the elbows.

‘Statue of the goddess Artemis; fourth century BC,’ Archie murmured to himself as he looked down from the marble sculpture to the auction catalogue and scanned through the entry again. ‘Believed to be from a settlement near Foggi. Private Syrian collection.’

This last detail made Archie smile. Even if Tom hadn’t asked him to investigate this lot, the fact that it had supposedly come from a Syrian family would have made him suspicious anyway. The simple truth was that, while the contents of most major European and American collections were well documented, little, if anything, was known about the majority of Middle Eastern and Asian private collections. Anyone trying to disguise the fact that an artefact was looted, therefore, was far more likely to tie it back to some obscure family collection where they could convincingly claim it had been languishing for the last eighty years, than to risk the awkward questions that a European provenance might trigger.

He stepped back and pretended to study some of the other lots, ignoring the call on his phone which he guessed, from the New York prefix, was the lawyer they’d met at Senator Duval’s funeral still trying to arrange a meeting with Tom. Next time, he’d know better than to hand out his card so readily, he thought to himself with a pained sigh.