‘No. Definitely no,’ said Smet, leading the opposition. He was a tall, thin, smooth-skinned man whose receding hair was greased straight back from a long-ago forehead.

‘Yes,’ insisted Felicite mildly. The side of the lounge to her left, overlooking the river, was glass and the shutters weren’t closed. It was double glazed, keeping out most of the sound, but the waves churned and crashed to the boundary wall, throwing up spray against the outside pane. Idly, with no intention of provoking any of the men – with all of whom, except Charles Mehre, she’d had sex – Felicite unbuttoned her shirt. She was not wearing a bra and just as casually as she’d unfastened the shirt she began massaging her nipples.

‘She’s seen us, you and me,’ protested Cool, a burly, disordered man whose clothes never fitted. ‘She could identify us. And she was paying attention to how we got here, from Antwerp. I saw her in the mirror.’

‘Who said anything about letting her go?’ demanded the woman.

‘Henri’s right,’ said Blott, a glandularly fat man whose eyes blinked in constant nervousness behind wire-framed glasses. ‘It was a mistake, easily made. It’s no one’s fault. But now she should be killed.’

There was no shock from any of them at the easy insistence upon murdering a child, as there hadn’t been when Cool and Dehane had made the same demand earlier. A year before a boy they’d snatched had died during a party in the house. Since then they had used child prostitutes, usually brought in from Amsterdam. Perhaps, she conceded, the idea upon which she was by now quite determined stemmed from the excitement she’d got then, knowing she was being hunted but always able to evade suspicion or capture because of how cleverly Smet had inveigled himself. Which he could do again now.