Anna hoped to pass through the foyer in silence, retrieving her key from the old man in the faded black double-breasted jacket who permanently sat behind the reception desk without having to talk to him, but he produced an envelope from under the desk as he slid her key over to her.

‘A telegram for Madame Maier,’ he said in heavily accented English.

Anna had checked into Les Deux Salons under the name Maier. It was the surname in the passport she’d shown when she’d checked in, but it wasn’t hers.

She’d sized up the man as soon she’d arrived at the hotel. He was in his sixties but looked seventy, aged not through exertion but by inactivity. She could tell he was the type of man who twenty years ago would have come up with some excuse to accompany her to her room or drop by and knock on her door at the end of his shift. But, luckily for the both of them, he no longer had the energy or inclination to leave his desk or harass solo female travellers.

Anna made a show of opening the envelope so that he couldn’t see what the note said, and he made a show of looking away, even though they both knew he would have read the telegram when it arrived.

It was an address for another hotel: the Hôtel des Bergues in Geneva.

Anna folded the telegram, slid it back into the envelope.

‘I’ll be checking out this evening, and I’ll need a car,’ she said.

Her soft, rich voice had been cultivated over years of training to make whoever she used it on do whatever she wanted without question. And it worked.

‘Yes, madame,’ the man replied. ‘When will you be leaving for Geneva?’

Anna noted his slip, but didn’t acknowledge it. ‘In an hour.’

‘Very good. Your bill has, of course, already been settled.’

‘Of course,’ she said, then took her key and left him to arrange the taxi that would take her over the border into Switzerland.

Anna’s room was on the elegant side of bare—just a bed, a small table and chair with a mirror, a window that looked out onto a small square, and an equally simple bathroom.

It took her half an hour to shower and change into a fresh set of clothes, and pack everything else including her still-wet swimsuit and cap into a case that she would not be taking to Geneva with her.