And then she reacted. It was just for a fraction of a moment, but her eyes flickered to a spot a few degrees above my head. And in that instant I thought I saw something she’d not wanted me to see: not exactly panic and not quite fear. Confusion? And then she was staring straight at me again, expressionless, as though it had never happened.

I turned to follow the line her eyes had taken. Pritchard. But why would she look at him? And then I noticed that something was hanging on the back of the door, directly behind him. A white sheet, it looked like.

I placed the gun back in its holster and walked over. Pritchard gave me a puzzled look, but stepped out of the way. I unhooked the sheet, and found it wasn’t a sheet at all. It was an apron. Embroidered on one sleeve was a small red cross. It also had a pocket across the front, out of which poked a small piece of white cloth, which I took out. A cap.

The roof of my mouth felt dry, and I could hear a drumming in my head.

They hadn’t been expecting a man to collect the rifle.

They’d been expecting a woman.

I didn’t find out how much more Abigail Thompson-Bola knew - perhaps it was just that there was a nurse’s apron hanging in the green room of her son’s nightclub. But even if she had known more, she wasn’t going to give it to me without a long struggle, and I didn’t have the time for that.

I had until Friday afternoon. Manning’s programme didn’t make clear the precise time the PM was due to arrive at the Red Cross camp in Udi, but the earliest it could be was half past two, so that was my deadline.

Anna had been due to pick up the rifle. She had been a Red Cross nurse in Germany; the assassin was to use the same cover. It couldn’t be coincidence, and explained several other things. Abigail’s odd glance at me when I had entered the green room of the Afrospot: she’d either been expecting a woman or wondered if I was her last-minute replacement, Golf Course Man. And why nobody had searched my room at the hotel, despite my doing everything to try to draw Anna out of the embassy. Because she wasn’t in the embassy, but three hundred and fifty miles away.

But there was a lot it didn’t explain. What had prevented Anna from picking up the rifle and the nurse’s uniform? Why the sudden change of plan? Perhaps she had found out Slavin was about to defect. Panicking that he knew about the plot to kill the PM, she had left for Udi early, leaving one of her team behind to dispose of Slavin and pick up the weapon and apron.