Charles entered and, at a nod from Gareth, headed left along the parquet-floored hall into a large light sitting room. The single wide window looked across the road to the canal and fields beyond. There were no boats or barges on the canal. A herd of Friesians grazed in the field. Charles turned to face Gareth, his hands in the pockets of his British Warm overcoat. He nodded at the pistol. ‘Does Christine know about this?’

Gareth shook his head. ‘Need to know. Smuggled it back with me from the Balkans. D’you remember I was out there? Exciting times. No end of kit like this knocking around, pistols two a penny. Bigger stuff, too.’

‘Why?’

Gareth shrugged. ‘Well, it was available, it was easy, kind of a memento, really. And I thought, well, you never know, might come in handy one day.’

‘Christine wouldn’t be very happy, would she? Make quite a mess in a nice apartment like this.’ It was a feminine room in mainly pastel colours with a sofa, two armchairs and a polished round dining table and chairs. Two seventeenth-century Dutch interiors hung on adjacent walls in elaborate gilt frames.

‘That’s true, she doesn’t like mess. But there should be no need for it, I hope. Take off your coat and sit down.’

It was more an order than an invitation. Charles took off his coat, folded it over the back of the sofa and went to sit in one of the dining chairs. He could get up more quickly from one of those.

Gareth gestured casually with the pistol. ‘You’ll find an armchair or the sofa more comfortable.’ He sat in a dining chair, side on to the table, facing Charles.

Charles chose the sofa, leaning back against his coat and trying not to appear mesmerised by the pistol. He wanted to appear to concentrate on Gareth’s face as if disregarding the pistol, but in fact he never let it out of his vision. It was squat and black, a semi-automatic, not a model he recognised, probably Russian or Eastern European. ‘I’d forgotten you were in the Balkans. You were head of station, weren’t you?’

‘My first station. Worked closely with the army. Really enjoyed it. Heady times. Where were you then?’

‘Nairobi, probably. Maybe South Africa. No, that was earlier.’ They were eight or nine feet apart, too far for him to leap up and make a grab for the gun. Gareth knew what he was doing. They would have done the same rudimentary self-defence training when they joined, basic stuff but enough to instil a few simple lessons such as that the point of a gun was to kill at a distance and if you let anyone close enough to grab it you had lost the advantage it gave you.