‘She knows we’re near Antwerp?’ asked Gaston Mehre.

‘She read a sign out when we passed it,’ confirmed Cool, taking off yet again thick-lensed, heavy-framed spectacles for another unnecessary polish.

‘Then it’s madness to keep her alive,’ said Dehane. He was a slightly built, self-effacing man always eager to follow where others led.

‘It’s an unnecessary danger,’ agreed Gaston Mehre. He and Charles had been born just nine months and seven days apart, both red-haired, their features practically matching, even to identically twisted teeth. It was Charles who had been with the rent boy when he’d died. He’d badly hurt another young male prostitute three months earlier.

‘What danger?’ said Felicite. ‘She’s in a cell, where she’s going to stay. And we can’t be traced to the house in which she’s being held.’ It had been Felicite’s idea that the houses they used should be owned by others with the same interests who lived in conveniently close neighbouring countries. The Antwerp beach house was registered in the name of Pieter Lascelles, a sixty-year-old Eindhoven surgeon. Georges Lebron, a parish priest in Lille, owned the country cottage near Herentals where the Dutch met, and Felicite had a bigger house at Goirle for larger parties.

‘James McBride is the American ambassador!’ implored Smet. ‘It’s his daughter downstairs! You can’t imagine what sort of outcry there’s going to be.’

‘Which is precisely why it’s going to be so exciting!’ said Felicite.

‘Before, it was the son of a bankrupt Jewish shopkeeper in Ghent and the investigation was handled by police who would have been overstrained by a bicycle theft!’ argued Smet. ‘This won’t be anything like that. This will be enormous!’

‘You’re just going to have to be as clever as you were last time,’ smiled Felicite, enjoying the man’s terror. She wondered if she would ever weary of the weakness of these men; the ease of manipulating them. She knew Marcel was becoming increasingly bored just before his heart attack. She still missed Marcel, not only for the loss of the sexual avenues along which he’d led her. Marcel would have seen the thrill – the pleasure – in what she wanted to do: might have tolerated this dispute, as she was tolerating it, but wouldn’t have allowed it to go on for so long.