Which left him a number of potential ways to find out who the woman was and where she lived, allowing him to return the item to her personally. Ben was good at finding people. It was something he used to do for a living, after he’d quit the SAS to go his own way as what he’d euphemistically termed a ‘crisis response consultant’. A career that involved tracking down people who didn’t always want to be found, especially when they were holding innocent child hostages captive for ransom. Kidnappers didn’t make themselves easy to locate, as a rule. But Ben had located them anyway, and the consequences hadn’t been very pleasant for them.

By contrast, thanks to today’s technology, ordinary unsuspecting citizens were easy to track down. Too easy, in his opinion.

Feeling just a little self-conscious about intruding on her privacy, he scrolled around the phone’s menus. There were a few emails and assorted files, but his first port of call was the woman’s address book. She was conservative about what information she stored in her contacts list. There was someone called Michel, no surname, and another contact called ‘Maman/Papa’, obviously her parents, but no addresses for either, and no home address or home landline number for herself. But the mobile’s own number was there.

Ben took out his own phone to check it with. Damn these bloody things, but he was just as bound to them as the next guy. He’d got into the habit of carrying two of them: one a fancy smartphone registered to his business, the other a cheap, anonymous burner bought for cash, no names, no questions. Its anonymity pleased him and it came in handy in certain circumstances. But for this call he used his smartphone. He punched in the woman’s mobile number. Her phone rang in his other hand. You could tell a lot about a person from their choice of ringtone. Hers was a retro-style dring-dring, like the old dial phone that stood in the hallway of the farmhouse at Le Val. Ben liked that about her. He ended the call and the ringing stopped. So far, so good.

Next he used his smartphone to access the whitepages.fr people finder website, which scanned millions of data files to give a reverse lookup. When a prompt appeared he entered the woman’s mobile number and activated the search. Not all phone users were trackable this way, only a few hundred million worldwide. Which was a pretty large net, but still something of a gamble. If it didn’t pay off, he still had other options to try.