‘Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough on the phone,’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘Everything that happened last night was necessary. Everything except for the police shooting at me, that is. That might have been because the nightclub you’d never heard of was a KGB drop.’

He quietened down then. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Jungle dancing’s not really my thing, you know.’ He tried to get a smile out of me, but when he realized it wasn’t going to happen he swivelled his head around the hall theatrically, then leaned over and handed me the newspaper, from one end of which peeked a plain brown dossier. By the time he’d finished the manoeuvre, even the woman cleaning the floor was watching.

‘Turns out we have a dossier on the family,’ he said.

‘Anywhere in here sell food?’ I said, trying to move the conversation to a safer subject. There didn’t seem to be any police around, but I didn’t want to attract more attention if it could be helped - one trip to the dungeons had been enough.

‘There’s a stall in the car park,’ said Manning. ‘Nowhere else is open yet.’

I fished some coins out of my pocket and handed them to him. ‘Fruit if they have it,’ I said. ‘Bananas or citrus. Failing that, anything with sugar in it.’

He didn’t disguise his anger at being ordered around, but I was London - I might be in trouble with Pritchard, but he knew that a few choice words about his cock-up over the Afrospot could force him into early retirement. So he chewed his lip and waggled his eyebrows, and walked over to the exit.

I found a seat and examined the front page of the Daily Times. ‘CORPSES ON THE GOLF COURSE!’ was the headline, and the story contained full descriptions of both men and some lurid speculation from unnamed sources about their manners of death - but no clue as to the perpetrator. I read it twice and decided I was fairly safe: it would be very difficult for the police to prise anything out of the Russians, and judging by the number of other crimes reported in the city on the inside pages, they already had a fair amount on their plate.

I turned to the dossier. It was a dull affair, by and large, filled with lengthy accounts of impossibly trivial matters relating to seemingly every member of the extensive Thompson-Bola clan. After struggling through it, I came out with two files of interest. One involved a Daniel Talabi, the cousin Thompson-Bola had mentioned at the club: he was a writer who had been imprisoned by the government for aiding the ‘rebels’.