The alarm kept screeching. Ninety seconds. Ben was calm. His focus was complete. He turned and walked quickly back the other way, and found Segal’s office right at the far left end of the corridor. The door was locked. He crunched it open with his boot, walked in and cast his light around. It was a plush corner office with satin-draped windows overlooking the gardens on one side and the street on the other. The room smelled of furniture polish and leather. Segal had a large and fancy antique desk and a big green leather swivel chair, resting on a Persian rug that had probably once graced some Middle Eastern palace. The walls were covered with prints of ancient artifacts, and display cabinets housed items from Segal’s own collection.

But Ben wasn’t here to admire works of pottery and sculpture. Two minutes and counting. The alarm shrilled on.

Ben strode over to the desk. Segal was one of those guys who kept their desktop assiduously tidy, nothing on it but a phone, a closed laptop and a silver-framed photograph of himself with an attractive middle-aged woman whom Ben presumed to be Madame Segal. The desk had nine drawers, of which three were locked. Ben didn’t have a crowbar, but there were other means of getting into locked drawers, if you weren’t worried about noise and damage. He drew the pistol back out from his belt, took the silencer tube from his pocket and screwed it to the threaded end of the muzzle, then pressed it to each lock in turn and blew it out, keeping his other hand over the ejector port to catch the spent cases which he put in his pocket.

Three drawers, three muted gunshots, a lot of splintered wood, a fine piece of old furniture comprehensively vandalised. He was as bad as the wreckers of ISIL.

He unscrewed the silencer, put the gun away and started rifling through the contents of Segal’s desk. He started with the middle drawer and worked his way outwards and downwards, scanning their contents with the thin beam of his torch. Three and a half minutes gone. The alarm jangling and screeching as loud as ever.

Ben stayed calm as he worked his way through all nine drawers. The locked ones contained confidential business documents like financial statements, invoices and receipts, tax returns, import licences and employee contracts, Romy Juneau’s among them. The other six were stuffed with less sensitive material. Letters from museum curators, transcripts of talks Segal had given, cuttings from magazines and newspapers in which he’d been interviewed, and other assorted folders and envelopes in which Ben came across nothing concerning a mystery cargo of ancient Near Eastern artifacts from Tripoli. Nor could he find any trace of the other key piece of information he was looking for, namely Julien Segal’s home address.