I wasn’t getting anywhere. My thoughts turned to Slavin - were there any clues there? He had started to say something about Anna before the shots had interrupted him. ‘But she has nothing to . . .’ What? Nothing to do with this? Nothing to gain? Nothing to lose?

The shots. There was a clue. The first had gone through Slavin’s windpipe; the second had nearly taken off my ear. But why had he wasted valuable seconds shooting at me? Simply because I was a witness to murder - or because I was his second target?

A chill went through me. Had Sasha ordered me ‘dispatched’, too?

I would have to make a move soon. I lit a cigarette with one of the dead man’s matches. As I made to put the box in my pocket, I noticed that his scribbled ‘eh’ looked more like a stylized ‘ehf ’. That didn’t help me much: so I knew he hadn’t been an especially literate assassin. But then I saw that two other letters also looked wrong.

I flicked the torch across the surface again.

He hadn’t written them down incorrectly - I’d misread them. The word wasn’t ‘АЭРОФΛОТ’, but ‘АФРОСПОТ’. I was so used to seeing the name of the airline in Section reports that my mind had automatically taken in a similar-looking word and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

So what the hell was ‘Afrospot’?

At the Yacht Club, the party had moved into the bar. Manning was deep in discussion with his wife and Sandy: West Africa, no doubt, was winning again. When he caught sight of me, he nearly tripped over himself running over.

‘Bloody hell!’ he said. ‘What happened? Did you get caught in the rain?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I decided to take a shower and forgot to undress.’

He coughed into his hand. ‘Did Slavin show?’

I took him by the arm and led him down a corridor and into the men’s changing rooms. I gave the place the once over, glancing into the WCs and the shower stalls to make sure nobody else was there. Once I was satisfied we were alone, I turned to Manning.

‘Slavin made contact about half an hour ago,’ I said.

‘Did he have any information about the woman?’

‘I don’t know. Someone put a bullet through the back of his neck before I could find out.’

It took an instant for the words to penetrate, and then his face crumpled and his eyes lost their spark.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That’s rather a blow.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is, rather.’ I wondered if he was so comfortable out here that he’d forgotten what our game was about, or if he was just worried about Pritchard’s reaction, and was seeing his pension float away. I walked over to a basin and washed some of the mud off my hands and face.

‘Did you see the shooter?’ Manning asked.