She re-locked the entrance to the Plage and walked towards the town. The man was gone by the time she reached the Pont des Amours, either off raising the alarm or feeling like a fool for the trick she’d played on him. So was the sun, which was now too low in the sky to reach over the mountains.

She passed the Hôtel de Ville and the Église Saint Maurice and turned onto the Place Saint-François de Sales. Then, where the square opened up next to the Quai de l’Île, she stopped in front of the Auberge de Savoie to consider the simple menu that had been pinned up outside the restaurant and was fluttering in the breeze creeping into the town.

In a few months the Auberge would swell to twice its size, with tables and chairs set out under the trees in front of its varnished wood doors. But tonight the trees were bare and the restaurant was manned by a small staff serving a severely reduced clientele.

To anyone watching, Anna’s decision to go into the Auberge might have seemed spontaneous, but she’d eaten there the last two nights and she’d only paused outside to check that the menu hadn’t changed from the hearty Alpine fare she had enjoyed so far.

Anna’s job regularly took her to some of the world’s finest restaurants, where she was wined and dined by wealthy, powerful people on immaculate morsels of extravagant cuisine that inevitably left her hungry. Anna was an animal; it took a lot of energy to keep her in the athletic shape she needed for her work, and she relished the chance to fuel herself with plates full of meat, cheese, and potatoes for an hour in a quiet restaurant.

After her meal, she descended into the warren of dark, cobbled streets that led to her hotel on the Rue Sainte-Claire.

Les Deux Salons, at first glance, lived up to its name. Beyond its old oak doors were two modest rooms—the first acted as a foyer and was given over entirely to a reception desk, and the second was scattered with chairs for the hotel’s guests to rest over coffee or cognac. But beyond them, corridors and staircases stretched out into the buildings on either side, which Les Deux Salons had spent almost a hundred years cannibalising, room by room.

The hotel was quiet when Anna opened the front door and stepped inside. She hadn’t encountered any other guests in her few days in Annecy, but her surreptitious glances at the board of room keys whenever she came and went had told her that at least three other rooms were currently occupied. They were spread out, far apart from each other—a tactic employed either by the hotel management or her employers to ensure maximum solitude and anonymity.