I went out into the corridor, and through the fire door. I heard the unlocked door to the roof bang open. I crept carefully up to the bottom of the stairwell. The door at the top was open and daylight was streaming in. He was up there, busy discovering that I wasn’t. I hadn’t expected him to be quite so careless – it obviously hadn’t occurred to him that I might have a gun, and he displayed no caution at all when he decided that either I had jumped off the roof or I hadn’t gone up there at all, and started to come back down. He stepped into the doorway, silhouetting himself against the sky. As he stared down the stairwell, I was the last thing he saw on this planet. He evidently didn’t like what he saw. Whether it was me, or my Beretta 93R, I never did find out, because as he tried simultaneously to aim his gun at me and get back out onto the roof, I pulled the trigger, despatching three bullets up the stairs to greet him at a rate of twelve hundred feet per second. They didn’t travel particularly quickly in terms of the speed of light, but they travelled quite fast enough to reach him long before he had the chance to pull his own trigger.

The three bullets hit him in the chest, putting an instant and irrevocable halt to that organ, essential for the pumping of blood around the body, about which so much good, bad and indifferent romantic literature has been written. The force of the impact carried him four feet backwards across the roof, and draped him in not the most elegant of poses across the raised portion of an air-conditioning extractor vent.

I cursed. I hadn’t wanted to leave any mementoes of my visit behind. Dirty dishes can be washed, beds can be made, ashtrays can be emptied. Corpses are altogether more a problem. Fortunately it was dusk, and it would have been impossible for anyone to see what had happened – not that it was likely anyone would have seen even if it had been broad daylight. All the same, I pulled the man’s body into the staircase. He was a large thug of a man in a cheap brown suit, with crew-cut hair. He looked like a low-grade bodyguard, no doubt part of Sleder’s private army of henchmen and thugs. There was a plastic ID card in his wallet. It stated that his name was Kurt Bruhnler, and he was an authorized security guard at 101 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. I searched through the rest of his wallet. There was no gun licence and his driving licence was German. Evidently Sleder imported his own thugs in preference to using the local brand. This particular one was going to require an import-reject sticker.