Kell nodded. ‘It’s fine.’ It was better that she should remain out of the picture once CUCKOO had returned to Paris. If anything went wrong, Amelia needed to be deniable. ‘What about our military options?’ he asked.

‘What about them?’

He tried to plant the idea as delicately as he could. ‘If we find François, it may be necessary to go in with force. If it goes to ransom, they will almost certainly attempt to kill him, whether or not you pay.’

‘I understand that.’ By now, they were halfway through their meal. Amelia pushed what remained of her food to the side of her plate. Kell mistook the silence as she wiped her mouth for disquiet.

‘All I’m saying is, we need to get to them before it gets to that stage. We will need to enjoy an element of surprise …’

‘I know what you meant, Tom.’ She looked across the room, a clatter of plates and glasses being cleared from a nearby table. ‘We have people in France, in northern Spain, who could do a job like that. But I don’t know how to get it past Simon. To use SAS would require … finesse.’

‘Forget SAS. We’d have to go private sector.’

Amelia touched the simple gold chain around her neck, tugging at it for ideas. ‘As long as they’re not gung-ho. Those guys sit around for weeks on end, cleaning their bloody rifles, dreaming of the good old days at Hereford. I don’t want them going in all guns blazing. I want people with experience, people who know their way around France.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’d want you to go in with them, Tom. Can you promise me that? Keep an eye on them?’

It was an astonishing request, not least because, throughout his long career, Kell had never so much as fired a shot in anger. Nevertheless, he was in no mood to deny Amelia what she wanted.

‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Of course, if it comes to that, I’ll go with them.’ He found a half-smile that seemed to reassure her. ‘We will get to François,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, we will bring him home.’

50

Vincent Cévennes arrived at St Pancras station at 19.28 on Friday evening, his appearance noted by an ex-Special Branch associate of Kevin Vigors named Daniel Aldrich, who sent an email via BlackBerry to Kell with photo confirmation of the target passing the statue of Sir John Betjeman on the station concourse. Amelia, reluctant to spend any more time in CUCKOO’s company than was absolutely necessary, had arranged for a taxi to collect him from St Pancras and to drive him south-west to Wiltshire. Standing in a crowd of pedestrians at the edge of Euston Road, Aldrich watched as the driver held out a sheet of A4 card on which he had written ‘Mr Francis Mallot’ in black marker pen. CUCKOO, spotting the message, handed him his bags, which were placed in the boot of the car.

The taxi was soon pulling out into the pell-mell of Friday evening traffic. Aldrich did not attempt to follow the vehicle from London, nor had Kell’s team wired it for sound; it was extremely unlikely that Vincent would risk making a telephone call to his controllers in the presence of a driver whom he would surely assume was employed by Amelia. Instead, Aldrich sent a second email to Kell.

Confirm CUCKOO has two bags. Black leather computer shoulder holdall + black moulded plastic suitcase, wheeled. Carrying m/phone, also Hermes gift bag. Vehicle leaving StP now, 19.46, navy blue Renault Espace n/plate X164 AEO. Driver heading west along Euston Road.

Kell received the email on a laptop in the kitchen of Amelia’s house and announced to the assembled team that CUCKOO would likely arrive in Chalke Bissett at around nine-thirty. Harold Mowbray, with Kell’s assistance, had spent the previous twenty-four hours equipping the house, top to bottom, with surveillance cameras and voice-activated microphones. Amelia had come direct from Vauxhall Cross at lunchtime and suggested that Vincent should sleep in the larger of two spare bedrooms. On the assumption that he might ask to move to a different room, the bedroom to the left of the landing had also been fitted with cameras and microphones, the first in a gilt mirror fixed to the north wall, the second in the frame of an oil painting hanging to the left of the bed.

There were two bathrooms on the first floor of the house. The first was en suite in Amelia’s bedroom, the second located between CUCKOO’s room and a short, wallpapered corridor that connected it to the landing. This was the bathroom Vincent would use and it had also been rigged by Mowbray.

‘My experience, people do all sorts of strange things in toilets,’ he muttered, installing a miniature camera in the socket of a towel rail about six inches above the floor. ‘CUCKOO comes in here, thinking he’s got some privacy, he might drop his guard as well as his trousers. If he makes a call, we can catch it on the microphone. If he’s got stuff in his bags, we might see him go through it. Unless your frog goes looking for this shit, he’s not going to have a clue we’re watching him.’

There was a risk of French surveillance on the house, so Kell remained in the property as much as possible, to avoid being recognized as Stephen Uniacke. Susie Shand, Amelia’s literary-agent neighbour, had given permission for her house to be used as a base by Kell’s team. Shand herself was on holiday in Croatia, a signed copy of The Official Secrets Act tucked into her suitcase. The owners of the third house in this isolated corner of Chalke Bissett, Paul and Susan Hamilton, were used to strangers from London staying at Shand’s home and did not approach any member of Kell’s team to enquire what they were doing in the village. In the event of a conversation in the neighbourhood, the team had been briefed to pretend that they were members of the family visiting for the long weekend.

Shand’s house was a run-down cottage with low, worm-eaten beams about a minute’s walk from Amelia’s front door. Both houses looked out over a lush valley on the northern side and a steep hill to the south. Shand’s garden backed on to the western perimeter of Amelia’s property. The rooms in which the team had installed themselves were damp but comfortable and Kell found that he enjoyed the relative peace and tranquillity of the countryside after days of travel and cities. Their main operational centre was a large library lined with books given to Shand by the cream of London literary society. Barbara Knight, a lifelong bibliophile, found first editions of works by William Golding, Iris Murdoch and Julian Barnes, as well as a signed copy of The Satanic Verses.

It was in this room that Elsa Cassani set up shop, placing three laptop computers on a large oak dining table and nine separate surveillance screens on bookshelves that she dusted and cleared of books. The screens showed live feeds from each of the rooms in Amelia’s house; during a brief rain shower on Friday morning, the images blurred and flickered, but Kell was satisfied that they would have complete coverage of CUCKOO at all times. The only ‘black hole’ was a utility room in the northern corner of the house that he was unlikely to use.

Underneath the main window in the Shand library, Elsa had placed a mattress on which she slept at intermittent hours of the day beneath a duvet without a cover. She kept a bottle of Volvic beside this makeshift bed, some night creams and perfume, and an iPod that screamed and grunted whenever she plugged it into her ears. Harold was billeted upstairs in the smaller of two spare rooms. Kell was across the hall on a mattress that sagged like a hammock. Barbara, on account of her advanced years, was given the master bedroom.

‘The Gillespie’s not a patch on this,’ she joked. She spent the majority of her time alone, sitting in the room, reading a new biography of Virginia Woolf and working through the plan for Saturday morning.