The Frenchman picked up the rest of his possessions. The bag, a book, a pair of sunglasses, the cigarettes and a bottle of suntan lotion. In the evening light he put on the sunglasses, like a matinee idol expecting to encounter a herd of paparazzi, and stepped into a pair of deck shoes. He then made his way towards the path that Kell had earlier taken to the beach.

Kell lowered the camera. He walked back into the room, threw the camera on to the bed, picked up his key and went outside into the corridor.

He was downstairs in fifteen seconds. Walking in the direction of the pool, he paused beside Amelia’s lounger, leaned over – as if to stretch a muscle – and removed the bill from the low plastic table. He stood up, placed the piece of paper in the back pocket of his trousers and continued walking in the direction of the lobby.

20

The name at the top of the bill was A.M. Farrell. The room number was 1208.

Kell went back to his room and immediately called Marquand in London.

‘I’ve found your missing girl.’

‘Tom! I knew you would do it. What’s the story?’

‘She’s staying at my hotel. The Valencia Carthage. Malot is across the road.’

‘So they’re shagging and staying apart so that nobody can trace them?’

Kell steered around the theory. He had learned to deal solely in facts. ‘She’s using a legend we haven’t seen before. Farrell. Initials A.M. Can you run a credit-card check? Should be plenty of activity through Paris, Nice, Tunis.’

‘Sure. Did you speak to her, Tom?’

‘Now why would I want to do something like that?’

‘Well, thank God she’s all right.’ There was a delay on the line, as though Marquand was trying to think of the appropriate thing to say. ‘Fucking Frogs,’ he offered eventually, ‘always stealing our best women.’ Truscott and Haynes would surely be told that Amelia was in Tunisia on little more than an extended dirty weekend. ‘Can’t Malot get his end away at home? Aren’t there supposed to be thousands of beautiful girls in Paris?’

‘You tell me,’ Kell replied.

‘What’s the story?’ Marquand asked. ‘Is Malot married as well? We can’t seem to find anything about him on the wires.’

‘Hard to tell. I’ve only seen them from a distance, sunbathing by the pool …’

‘Sunbathing by the pool!’ Marquand sounded combustible with excitement. ‘Imagine that.’

‘He’s what you might call a poser,’ Kell said, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel. ‘Wafts around the place like Montgomery Clift. Not exactly the grieving son.’

‘Perhaps he’s feeling cock of the walk about Amelia. What do they call the older woman nowadays? Cougars?’

Marquand had made himself laugh. It was the relief of a crisis averted.

‘That’s right, Jimmy,’ Kell said. ‘Cougars. Look, I have things I need to do. I’ll take a closer look at Malot. There’s always the possibility he’s DGSE. Amelia might be running a joint op in Tunis.’

‘And screwing a colleague on the side.’

Kell shook his head in disbelief. ‘Have a drink, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You deserve it.’

He hung up, put the phone back on the desk and retrieved his camera from the bed. Looping it over his shoulder, he went outside into the corridor. In the street between the two hotels he found Sami at the wheel of his cab, lazily turning the pages of a newspaper. He tapped on the window.

‘Got something to show you.’ Kell climbed into the passenger seat and handed Sami the camera, showing him how to click through the photographs of Amelia and Malot. A day’s BO hummed around the cab. ‘These are the people I’m interested in,’ he said. ‘The woman is staying at the Valencia. The man is a guest at the Ramada. Do you recognize them?’

Sami shook his head. Two other drivers, standing beneath the bougainvillea, were staring into the car with an almost insulted impatience, like girls at a party who have not been asked to dance.

‘Maybe they’ll go out for dinner tonight,’ Kell said. ‘They left the pool twenty minutes ago. If you see them, be sure to call me. If my phone doesn’t answer, go through the hotel switchboard. I’m in room 1313. Follow them if they get into one of the other taxis. If you pick them up yourself, don’t risk speaking to me in their presence. The woman speaks English, French and Arabic, all of them fluently. Send a text message with your destination.’

‘Of course.’

Kell indicated the other drivers with his eyes. ‘And if those two start asking questions about me, tell them I’m just a jealous husband.’

21

Joan Guttmann had given Amelia the telephone number of the adoption agency in Paris. Allowing for France being one hour ahead, Amelia had rung the agency at eight thirty on Saturday morning, only to discover that the office was closed for the weekend. A second number was given on the agency’s website and Amelia had eventually spoken to a needlessly melodramatic woman who was ‘fully aware’ that Monsieur Malot’s parents had been ‘tragically and senselessly killed in Egypt’ and had ‘furthermore been apprized of the circumstances regarding Madame Weldon’. It was agreed that Amelia should not speak to François by telephone. Instead, she was advised to travel to France, to meet her son in Paris on Monday afternoon, and – at his discretion – perhaps to attend the private funeral service of Philippe and Jeannine Malot, which was scheduled for Tuesday morning in Montparnasse.

Amelia had taken twenty-four hours to carry out her own vetting on the Malots’ murder and on François himself, with the assistance of an SIS asset in the DCRI, France’s domestic intelligence service. When she was confident that he was their adopted child, she considered her strategy more fully. To bring her son into her life was to entertain the possibility that he could ruin her career, ushering in the reign of George Truscott. To travel to Paris with the purpose of consoling François was to risk any number of reactions: his anger, his contempt, his pity. She had no sense of her son’s personality, only the plain fact that he had reached out to her in his hour of need. Yet such was her desire to help, and to encounter her lost child face-to-face, that Amelia quickly set aside all practical and professional considerations. She felt as though she had been given no choice; if her life was to have any meaning, any true and lasting happiness, she had to make her peace with the past.

Locking the Chalke Bissett house early on Sunday morning, she returned to London by car and went directly to Giles’s house in Chelsea. The Farrell alias – a passport, assorted credit and SIM cards – was concealed in a small box behind a panel at the back of her husband’s wardrobe. To access the panel, Amelia had to pull out more than a dozen plastic-wrapped shirts and dry-cleaned suits on hangers, piling them on the bed behind her. The cramped wardrobe had a throwback, post-war smell of mothballs and shoe polish. As well as golf clubs and hardback books, there were dozens of old newspapers stacked on the floor, hoarded by Giles as a means of keeping a permanent record of momentous events in his lifetime: the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Diana car crash; 9/11. The pages had yellowed and they crackled in Amelia’s hands as she moved them. The box safely retrieved, she rang Santander, activating two of the bank accounts for use in Continental Europe, then charged up the battery on the Farrell mobile while packing a bag for France. Ringing Giles in Scotland, she told him that she was going to Paris ‘on business’.

‘How lovely for you,’ he said, greeting the news with a characteristic wall of indifference. Amelia had the distinct impression that her husband was turning the pages of a historical document in some distant corner of Fife, busily filling in another branch of the family tree even as he spoke to her. ‘Take care, won’t you, darling? Perhaps we’ll talk when you get back.’