‘Bloody Paris, Max! Before you meet this – what did you call him, “bad Bulgarian”? – no one knows you’ve even got the banknote. And then you tell … Ah, what is his name?’

‘Lukov, Sergei Lukov.’

‘Right. You tell Lukov, and he tells bloody everyone, and the next thing you know Bob’s your bloody uncle: the whole city’s a war zone, and some Russian bastard is trying to drown me in the catacombs.’

He had a point. Until Lukov started the auction, the only people who’d known I’d laid hands on the hundred-dollar bill were Frank and the shooter in the cottage. I’d told Frank I’d lost it, and the shooter had no way of knowing whether I’d managed to hang on to it in the surf. Prior to Lukov going public, my connection to the note rested on whether Frank bought my lies – or, maybe, whether the shooter had survived.

The waitress arrived with more drinks. We both fell silent and looked awkwardly out to sea while she refilled my coffee cup and poured tea for Baaz.

‘So,’ I said quietly, ‘Rachel uses her colleague Amos Stein to send a message to her father. But nobody, not even Moshe, knew she had. Maybe not even Doc knew it. To everyone else it would just look like she was sending him cash. Like you do, to your auntie.’

‘Will do,’ he corrected me, blushing. ‘Totally unremarkable.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The gunman in the cottage was waiting for someone, not something. Otherwise why stick around?’

‘Well done, Maximilian. Professor Bhavneet Singh awards you an A-minus for effort.’

‘Yeah, but who the hell was he?’

‘That,’ replied Baaz, ‘is one hundred per cent your department. But from what you’re saying, he can’t have been a Russian. The dates don’t work, do they?’ He looked around for the waitress again. ‘I wonder if they have bagels? I mean, it’s Israel. They’ve got to have bagels, right?’

He was right. The shooter in the cottage couldn’t have been one of Avilov’s men. The dates didn’t tally. Until my name and face had popped up in The Times, Avilov hadn’t even known what to call me – at least, he hadn’t spoken my name in the ship’s hold.

The same couldn’t be said of Doc. He could have been killed on Avilov’s orders – though my money was on one gunman, with that signature shot to the heart. Most terribly of all, if the shooter in the cottage had survived, and then killed Doc, I’d led him straight to my oldest friend’s door, after all.