She booked an evening ticket on the Eurostar and cancelled all of her appointments for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Personal emails were sent out to senior colleagues explaining that she was required to attend the funeral of a close friend in Paris and would be returning to the Office on Thursday. Jimmy Marquand was the only top-tier officer to respond to these messages, expressing ‘my condolences for the loss of your friend’.

Finally, at around three o’clock, Amelia walked up the King’s Road to Peter Jones and bought two new outfits, one for the meeting with François, another for the funeral. Back at the flat, she packed them in a large suitcase, throwing in a couple of Ian McEwan paperbacks and a recent edition of Prospect magazine. She then walked outside and hailed a cab.

Sunday evening traffic, sparse under light rain. Within twenty minutes Amelia Levene was standing beneath the great vault of St Pancras station clutching a Business Premier ticket to Paris. The atmosphere in the station acted upon her like some romantic dream of the past: monochrome couples snatching final weekend kisses; liveried inspectors ushering passengers along the platform. Then a queue and the rigmarole of security, a female guard waving Amelia through on the assumption that she was just another chic bourgeois housewife shuttling between the two capitals. Amelia found her seat in the carriage, a forward-facing window at a table of four, and made a point of avoiding eye contact with any of her fellow passengers. The fewer people that noticed her, the better. She didn’t want to be drawn into a conversation with a stranger. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

She had bought a copy of the Sunday Times at St Pancras and opened it up as the train pulled away from the platform. There was a story about alleged British Intelligence complicity in torture at the bottom of the front page and she immediately thought of Thomas Kell, but found that she could not concentrate on anything more than the opening paragraph. She knew the background to the case, knew that the story had been scheduled to appear, and would ordinarily have been interested to see how the facts had been reported. But it was as though François had switched off her professional antennae; none of it seemed to matter any more.

Amelia looked out of the window and might have been nineteen again, such was her sense of anticipation at the prospect of travelling to Paris. Over a period of more than thirty years, she had constructed a new personality around the wreckage of her teenage self. She caught her own reflection in the glass and wondered at the loss of Amelia Weldon. Did she even exist any more? The next twenty-four hours would provide some sort of answer. She was going on a journey into her future. She was going on a journey into her past.

22

Kell was shaving in his room when Sami called from the taxi rank.

‘The Frenchman just came into your hotel. I asked him if he wanted a cab when he comes out. He said “yes”.’

‘That’s great, Sami. Thank you. You’re doing a terrific job.’ The small compliments of agent-running were second nature to him. ‘Keep in touch, OK? He’s probably gone inside to collect Amelia. Let me know where they ask you to go.’

‘Sure.’

The conversation had left a smear of shaving foam on the mobile phone. Kell wiped it clean and, with half a dozen sweeps of the razor, cleared his chin of stubble. He dried his face, sprayed aftershave on to his chest, and looked back at his own reflection in the mirror. A momentary reckoning before moving on. He found a clean shirt on a hanger, locked his passport in the safe and picked up the key card for the Renault. As soon as Sami called to let him know that Amelia and Malot were on the road, he would follow in Marquand’s car. If they were meeting third parties, Kell would need to get a look at their faces. That was basic operational behaviour, a tidying up of loose ends.

He sat on the bed and waited. His heart was thumping and Kell tried to remember when he had last felt such a rush of adrenalin. Not for months now. He took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap with his teeth, a party trick he performed, even in private. Claire always used to say: ‘You’ll lose your fucking molars.’

The text came through just after eight fifteen. Sami had written it in English.

Man and woman both. La Goulette.

Kell typed ‘La Goulette’ into a search engine on his phone and discovered that it was a coastal suburb between Gammarth and downtown Tunis with restaurants and bars that were popular in the evenings. Amelia and Malot were doubtless heading there for supper.

He grabbed the camera and walked quickly towards the entrance of the hotel. The same bellboy who had earlier accompanied Kell into the hotel was still on duty. This time there was no lobby smile, no courtesy; he clipped past bearing a tray of mint tea and biscuits. Kell, grateful for his own anonymity, went out into the sun-baked car park, unlocked the Renault from twenty metres, plugged the keycard into the ignition slot and threw the camera on to the seat beside him.

The car wouldn’t start. He tried a second time, pushing his foot down on the clutch and again pressing the button marked ‘Start’. Still no luck. For a moment he considered the possibility that he had been spotted by Amelia and that she had disabled the car, but the notion seemed too far-fetched for serious consideration. This was more likely an electrical failure. Kell tried a third time, removing the card, putting it back into the slot, pressing the clutch and again pushing ‘Start’. Nothing.

‘Why can’t they just give you a fucking key?’ he muttered, resolving to take a taxi to La Goulette.

There were no cabs on the rank. Worse still, eight pensioners were huddled beside the traffic barrier at the entrance to the Ramada, each of them seemingly impatient for a cab. Four guests from the Valencia were also lined up. One of them – a man of about Kell’s age wearing chinos and a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt – began to walk towards the main intersection, in the hope of flagging down a taxi on the highway.

‘Where are all the cabs?’ Kell asked in French, rephrasing the question in English when he drew blank stares from the geriatrics.

‘Something is happening in La Marsa tonight,’ one of them replied. He was a genial, white-haired retiree with a walking stick and sweat patches under his arms. ‘Some sort of festival.’

So Kell went back to the Renault. He tried the keycard one more time, to no effect. Finally, swearing at the windscreen, he gave up on the possibility of making it to La Goulette. Sami could keep an eye on them. He had proved nerveless and efficient thus far; there was no reason to think that he would suddenly abandon the job, or confess to Amelia and Malot that he had been paid a small fortune to follow them. Besides, Malot’s absence from the hotel had presented Kell with an opportunity.

He returned to his room and retrieved the copy of the Herald Tribune. He then walked across the street to the lobby of the Ramada and installed himself on a sofa with clear sight of the reception desk. His plan was simple. He needed to be seen. He wanted the staff, albeit unconsciously, to think of him as a resident, perhaps a husband waiting for his wife to come downstairs for supper. To that end, Kell began to flick through the pages of the newspaper. He read an article about post-Mubarak Egypt, another on the forthcoming elections in France. Behind him, installed at a grand piano in the centre of the lobby, was an elderly British guest, pink as a balloon, playing Cole Porter tunes with the lifeless accuracy of a retired music teacher. She appeared to be a fixture in the hotel, attracting smiles from passing staff. Beside her, a letter on SAGA writing paper had been tacked to a notice board: ‘Film Night. Monday. Billy Elliot.’ Kell began to feel as though he had signed up for a week at Butlins. On the stroke of nine o’clock, a small crowd gathered around the piano and the pink lady was encouraged to embark on her pièce de résistance: a rendition of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’. Kell decided to make his move. He tucked the newspaper under his arm, checked that the desk was clear of guests, and walked towards the receptionists.