There were two of them, a man and a woman. Working on a hunch that the woman looked more likely to cooperate, he stood in front of her and rolled his fingers on the desk.

‘Bonsoir.’ Eye contact, an easy smile. Kell spoke in French. ‘I checked in this morning. Could you tell me what time the restaurant stops serving food?’

The receptionist could not have been more helpful. Drawing out a sheet of notepaper, she scribbled down an expansive summary of the hotel’s mealtimes and amenities, suggesting that ‘Sir’ might like to take a drink at the bar before dinner, and hinting that breakfast was often extended into the morning beyond the official cut-off time. Kell was even given a map. He listened intently, expressed his gratitude, and returned to the sofa to read his newspaper for a further fifteen minutes.

At nine twenty, he enacted the second phase of his plan. Again, the strategy was simple: to give the impression that he was a guest in the hotel, returning momentarily to his room. He walked towards the bank of escalators on the north side of the lobby, waited until he was certain that he had been spotted by the receptionist, then made his way to the second-floor landing where he killed time by telephoning Sami.

As usual, the call was greeted not by a ringtone but by a cacophony of North African music. Sami’s voice only became audible after several seconds of sustained wailing and screeching violins. It transpired that Amelia and Malot had arrived in La Goulette at half-past eight. Sami explained that they had gone for a drink at a bar on the beach and had asked him to wait until they had finished supper so that he could drive them back to the hotels.

‘That’s ideal,’ Kell told him. ‘Anybody else with them?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And are you OK? Have you had something to eat?’

‘I am well, thank you.’ Sami sounded guarded and tense, as though he was experiencing a sudden crisis of conscience. ‘We had a long conversation while they were in the back of the car.’

‘I’d like to hear about it.’ Kell peered over the balcony and saw that the reception desk was clear. ‘We can have a meeting in my room when you get back.’ A teenage girl emerged from one of the lifts and looked at the ground as she passed him. ‘Try to remember every detail of what they talk about on the way home. It could be important.’

‘Of course, sir.’

Time to go. Kell took the lift to the ground floor, timed his approach to the receptionist, and produced a weary but apologetic smile.

‘I have a problem,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I can’t find my room key. I rented a donkey on the beach this afternoon. I think it may have fallen out on to the sand. Would it be possible to have a replacement?’

‘Of course, sir. What was the room, please?’

‘Twelve fourteen.’

The receptionist keyed the number into the computer.

‘And the name, sir?’

‘Malot. François Malot.’

23

He was conceived as an act of love; to destroy him would be an act of hate.

Amelia remembered almost every word of the long-ago conversations with Joan, the to-and-fro of their arguments, her own steady conviction that she had no right to abort Jean-Marc’s child without his knowledge. Joan had at first advised her to terminate the pregnancy, to fly back to London and to chalk up the experience to the cruelties of youth. Once Amelia had convinced her of her determination to give birth to the child, however, the American had proved a priceless ally and unshakeable friend. It was Joan who had installed Amelia in a one-bedroomed apartment just two blocks from the Guttmann residence, an arrangement so secret that only David, Joan’s husband, had known anything about it. It was Joan who had put Amelia to work on American consular business so that she would have something with which to occupy herself in the seven months of the pregnancy. A few weeks after moving her into the apartment, the Guttmanns had taken Amelia to Spain for a fortnight, treating her as the daughter they had never had, showing her the treasures of the Prado, the splendours of Cordoba, even a bullfight at Las Ventas, during which David had rested his hand gently on Amelia’s stomach and said: ‘You sure a lady in your condition ought to be watching this stuff?’ And it had been Joan, once they were back in Tunis, who had first floated the notion of adoption through Père Blancs, an idea that Amelia had grasped at perhaps too readily, because she was so ambitious for herself at that age, so hungry for life, and terrified that a baby would rob her of all of the experiences and possibilities in her future.

Paris seemed to have been waiting for her. The humid summer streets were crowded with tourists, the pavement cafés alive with bustle and conversation. Sometimes, arriving in a new city, Amelia would feel an immediate and underlying sense of threat, as though she had been displaced into an alien environment, a home to bad luck. She was well aware that this was not much more than a hunch, a superstition, the sort of thing that her colleagues would laugh at if she had ever shared it with them. Yet a sixth sense – call it intuition – had been with her throughout her career, serving her, for the most part, very well. As an SIS officer working under diplomatic cover in Cairo, for example, or during her years in Baghdad, Amelia had reckoned that she needed fifty per cent more cunning and persistence than her male equivalents, simply to survive in such hostile environments. But France had always embraced her. In Paris she was always something close to her old self, the self before Tunis, the twenty-year-old Amelia Weldon with the world at her feet. As soon as they had taken François from her – it had been an immediate thing, she had never held or even seen her own child – the process of constructing a new and invulnerable personality had begun. Lovers were betrayed, colleagues discarded, friends forgotten or ignored. The double life of SIS had presented Amelia with what she looked back on as ideal laboratory conditions in which to re-make herself in the image of a woman who would never fail again.

Yet she was failing now. Failing to keep calm, failing to maintain whatever decorum she had brought with her across the Channel. She longed for the slow hours to quicken and to be in a room with her boy, just the two of them, and yet she dreaded what she might discover: a person unknown to her, a young man with whom she had nothing in common but their shared contempt for a mother who had abandoned him at birth.

There was a message waiting at her hotel, sent by the adoption agency and addressed to ‘Madame Weldon’. The concierge had been reluctant to hand it over, because Amelia had booked her room under the name ‘Levene’, but when she explained that ‘Weldon’ was her maiden name, he relented. François had contacted the agency and requested that Amelia go to his apartment at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. He did not wish to speak to her by telephone beforehand, nor to communicate with her in any way prior to their first meeting. Without hesitation, Amelia rang the agency to confirm, because she was predisposed to cooperate with all of their instructions, yet she worried that the arrangement was a sign of François’ anger. What if he told her, face-to-face, that she could never replace the mother who had been killed? What if he had lured her to Paris merely to wound her? All her life, Amelia had been blessed with an ability to assess people and to develop a quick and intuitive understanding of their circumstances. She could sense when she was being lied to; she knew when she was being manipulated. Some of this gift had been taught, as a necessary skill for a career in which human relationships were at the core of the work, but mostly it was a talent as innate as the ability to kick a ball or to capture the play of light on a canvas. Yet now, faced with what might become the most important relationship of her life, Amelia was almost helpless.