The man had only left the hotel for a matter of minutes. He walked the short journey along the main road and into a side street, where he found Green’s Hardware Store. The place was a cornucopia of screws and nails and duct tape, and replacement parts for lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners. The man found what he was looking for towards the back of the shop: a studded hardboard display of polished metal blades. There were bushcraft and woodcarving knives, machetes and axes. The way they were displayed together, hidden in a dark corner of this unassuming shop, it was hard to believe that anyone bought them for their original and stated purpose.

He chose a matt-black hunting knife that glinted silver along its razor-sharp edge and curved to a vicious point. It looked sturdy enough to do the job, and stealthy enough that he could fold it away and carry it without being noticed. Perfect. An old guy with an impressive grey moustache had been only too happy to remove and box the display model, asking no questions and avoiding all eye contact. His gaze lingered for a moment on the man’s bruised neck, before he dropped the goods into a brown paper bag, which the man tucked under his arm before paying cash and leaving the shop.

Back in his room in the Woodbridge, he unwrapped the box and took the knife in his hand, feeling the weight of it. He liked it almost as much as his old one, which he had lost when the bodyguard had smashed it from his hand inside the tennis club. That had been a close call. And yet he had survived it and here he was, so close to completing the job. He looked at himself in the dull mirror that had been screwed to the wall for at least twenty years. He held the black knife up in front of his face, so that his cold eyes were scowling back at him from either side of the blade.

Until yesterday the mirror had been decorated by the silver chain that he had stolen from Maria Rosario’s neck after he killed her, and he had smiled every time he looked at it, because he had imagined the look of terror he would see in Keller’s face when he put the chain in her hands. Reality had not disappointed.

He had expected to feel guilty about Rosario. In all honesty, she was not to blame for what had happened, but in the end he had not found it hard to kill her. It was all part of the plan. And tomorrow he would do the job for which he had been preparing for the past twelve months.