I moved to the nearest window. It was the first I could see through beyond the scaffolding. The shutters were open. So were the curtains. Standing far enough back to avoid being spotted from the garden, I looked towards the main entrance. I needn’t have bothered. There was no one there.

The now perfectly mown lawn was as deserted as the house seemed to be. The gates were shut, but unmanned. Unless the boys in black were tiptoeing around below me, with weapons at the ready, they’d taken an early bath. Even though the water was a couple of Ks away, the boats scudding across it seemed to be within touching distance.

I turned back to the staircase. It rose from the entrance hall to a gleaming glass dome four storeys above. If the security boys were down there, they were as still as statues. Nothing moved beyond the banisters at every level.

The doors into the first Gucci room had both been thrown back. This was no building site. It was flooded with sunlight, some of which seemed to be bouncing straight off the surface of the lake. Every piece of furniture had probably been made for Napoleon personally. The mahogany gleamed and the velvet looked like it had never been touched. I couldn’t see Stefan having much fun here, beatings or no beatings. It felt like a museum.

I was about to move on through when I heard a sound behind me. A creaking board. A misjudged footstep, maybe. I swivelled 180 degrees and brought up the weapon.

Nothing. Nobody. Maybe I’d imagined it.

No, I hadn’t.

The same sound again.

Not a creaking board. A low groan. From somewhere overhead.

I filled my lungs with oxygen, melted back through the doorway, and raised the muzzle of the Sphinx as I raised my eyes, following the staircase.

A muffled cry echoed through the empty space.

A female cry.

Not the kind of cry you make when some fucker has broken into your home and you’re desperate to alert the men you’re paying to keep you safe. The kind you make when you’re trying to fight your way out of the deepest of sleeps, but the nightmare won’t let you go.

There was no sign of the hired help hurrying to the rescue. So, staying close to the wall, I climbed towards the cry one step at a time. I had to move around a marble bust on an ebony plinth halfway up. Fuck knew who it was. Could have been Lenin, for all I cared. Or Dostoevsky. It certainly wasn’t Frank, even though he’d paid for all this.

I slowed almost to a standstill as I approached the second-floor landing, and stopped short of the corridor that ran off it. There had been no more cries, but I thought I could hear breathing. Irregular, husky rasps. Then nothing.

I didn’t wait any longer. Weapon up, I spun through the first door I came to. A bedroom, nearly twice the size of the master suite in the Courchevel chalet.

Two windows ahead of me, overlooking the lake.

A three-sided, gilt-framed mirror between them, on a dressing-table lined with designer make-up containers and sparkly stuff hanging from gold stands.

A bed, built on the same scale. Covers thrown back. Head-shaped dent in the pillow on the far side of it.

So, slept in recently.

Two more windows behind it, above the tarpaulin tent that sheltered the roof I’d cut through. Separated by an enormous wardrobe with a mirror front.

Another fucking great mirror on the wall to my right, beside the half-open door to her bathroom.

Lyubova clearly liked her mirrors.

I took another step forward and caught sight of a bare foot in the one on the dressing-table. A body in a leopard-print skirt lay between the bed and the side window.

It wasn’t moving.

9

I slapped the pistol back into my waistband and piled in.

When I got closer, I could see that Lyubova wasn’t breathing either.

She was on her side, left arm outstretched, right hand clutching at the bare skin above her breast. Raven hair glued to the sweat on her face. A thin strand of mucus linking the lower corner of her mouth to a pool of vomit on the white sheepskin beneath her head.

I knelt beside her, swept her damp hair aside and felt for her carotid pulse. It fluttered under my fingertip. I glanced at her bedside table. An empty brown bottle, lying on its side. A glass of water, half full, with lipstick on the rim. I wasn’t going to need the ether.

I hooked my index and middle fingers into her oral cavity and scooped out her tongue and another gob of grey gloop, flecked with crimson. I rolled her on to her back, put one hand on top of the other and, allowing my body to rock for maximum force, compressed the centre of her chest. Once. Twice. Three times. Then again. And again. I wanted her groggy, but I didn’t want her to die on me.

I felt one of her ribs crack fairly early in the process, then another, and kept on going.

After thirty compressions I took a deep breath, squeezed her surgically enhanced nose and gripped her perfectly sculpted chin, sealed my lips over hers and tried to fill her lungs.

I caught a hint of no doubt incredibly expensive perfume from near the base of her neck, but it was no match for the acidic taste and stench of her mouth.

Somewhere in the background I could smell alcohol. Not sixteen-year-old single malt or seven-star brandy, more like raw ethanol. And that didn’t strike me as something that Lyubova would go for if she had a choice.

I leant forward and gave her another blast.

She arched her back. It was almost impossible to spot, but she did arch it. Then she retched weakly. Took a breath. Exhaled. But she was still pretty much unconscious.

I shoved both my arms under her like a forklift. Carried her through to the bathroom. Held her head over the toilet and shoved my index finger down her throat as far as I could. The drug and alcohol combo she had taken – or been given – needed to come out again, and fast, before her stomach had fully digested it. She gagged and gave another low moan, but nothing much ended up in the bowl.

I needed something more heavy duty. I grabbed the toilet brush handle, reversed it, and repeated the process. This way I got in deep, and wasn’t going to have her chew my finger off.

That didn’t work either.

I laid her down on the tiled floor, in the recovery position. Turned on the hot tap and found a plastic beaker. Ran through her medicine cabinet for anything I could mix into a warm saline solution. It contained every upper and downer the Swiss pharmaceutical industry could provide, and a few that it probably couldn’t.

The bad news was that there wasn’t a grain of salt to be seen.

Or anything else that I could use to make her puke her guts out. The medics didn’t like doing that sort of shit, these days. If the patient inhaled, you could fuck them up big-time. But it was a risk I was going to have to take. And Lyubova hadn’t earned any special treatment.

I checked her pulse again and decided to look downstairs.

The set-up on the ground floor was pretty much the same as on the first. One side of the house was gleaming and fully functional, the other still under wraps. I glanced through another polythene screen on my way past. All I could see close up were two or three more propane cylinders. They lay at odd angles on the floor, like torpedoes.

The kitchen was on the opposite side of the entrance hall.

This was where Frank’s taste and Lyubova’s did gel. Acres of polished granite and state-of-the-art stainless-steel cooking equipment and an island with a sink unit. There was only one gadget missing. She had settled for a little George Clooney coffee machine instead of one the size of a nuclear reactor.

Boiling water would dissolve the salt quicker than the stuff that came out of the tap. I’d dilute the mixture with cold when I got back to the bathroom. I filled the electric kettle and pressed the on button, flooding the surrounding area with blue light.