One thing was clear, though – I’d told Frank not one but two lies: that I didn’t have the note, and that the shooter was dead. But I didn’t, couldn’t, know that for sure and Frank knew it, too. He’d let it go. But I shouldn’t have.

My first job in nearly a year and not only did I let someone get the drop on me, I didn’t go back to finish it off. Finish him off. I knew as I hit the surf that I was saving myself and not the mission. That didn’t bother me: dead men can’t save anything. What did bother me was that from one angle it looked like the shooter didn’t want me dead – he wanted me to run. And I’d obliged.

I looked at the hundred-dollar bill again. Benjamin Franklin looked back at me. Neither robbers nor assassins sit in a room they’ve turned over, with a bag full of cash and a rotting cadaver, for a week. Not the ones I’d met, anyway. I refolded the note up as small as I could and put it back in my pocket.

I got to my feet and walked over to the dresser to see if any of the empties weren’t quite, but I was out of luck.

Max, I said to myself, you don’t know anything.

But I did know I was glad I’d ended up at Doc’s. He always insisted on using my Irish name – a name I never used. It belonged to another time. Another person. When my father was shot down over Angola in ninety-one and reported dead, I made a break for it. Sixteen and on the run. No mother. No father. Nothing to do but keep moving. When I called Doc from a phone box in Liverpool and told him I was enlisting in the Parachute Regiment ‘as Max McLean’, he’d reminded me there wasn’t an English bone in my body. I’d reminded him that both of his parents had been Russian, émigrés from the Communist shitshow that my maternal grandfather had fought to defend. ‘But we’ve Irish hearts, you and me,’ he’d said. ‘We both became proper Irishmen’ – and not, he’d meant, an improper Irishman like my father. Although we both knew that I had always been my father’s son, seduced and repelled in turn as he had been by the false idols of duty and honour.

Doc tried to talk me out of joining up, of course, but in the end he’d given in and faked a letter of consent for me. Thanks to the eminent Doctor Jacob Levy, the British were satisfied that my application was kosher. It most certainly wasn’t.