Romy’s building had an art deco archway, once grand, now slightly grungy, on which someone had recently sprayed an obscene slogan about the president. It had tall carved double doors, firmly locked, with a smaller inset door, also firmly locked. On the wall by the door was a buzzer panel with twelve buttons, one for each apartment, each with a corresponding name plate with the initial and surname of the resident. R. Juneau was in apartment 11.

He pressed the button for apartment 6, labelled J. Vanel, waited for some guy’s voice to crackle ‘Qui est-ce?’ out of the speaker grille, and said he had a delivery for Vanel that needed signing for. A moment later the buzzer buzzed and the inset door clicked open, and Ben pushed through into a brick foyer that led to a small interior courtyard. A short, stumpy concierge lady with curlers in her hair was sweeping the floor and barely glanced at Ben as he walked in. The hallway walls were streaked with dirt and a row of wheelie bins smelled of mouldy garbage. Not the best-kept apartment building in Paris, but not the worst either, not these days.

To his left was the door to the concierge’s ground-floor apartment, to his right a spiral stairway with a worn antique banister rail. Set into the centre of the stairway was an original period cage lift apparently still in service, all ornate black wrought iron. A Gothic death trap, to Ben’s eye. On the opposite wall were fixed twelve separate grey steel mailboxes, one for each resident, marked with their names. He took Romy’s phone from his pocket, along with his notebook and pen. He wrote a brief note to the effect that he was returning her property, signed it, folded it inside the phone’s leather wallet and was about to pop it into her mailbox when he noticed that two of the other boxes had had their locks forced open with something like a screwdriver, the grey paint scratched through to the bare metal.

Hardly the most confidence-inspiring level of security. The building was obviously a little too soft a target for thieves, unlike Ben’s place which had a hardened steel security door you’d need a cutting torch to break through. He didn’t want to have gone to the trouble of returning Romy’s phone to her, only for it to be nicked by some light-fingered opportunist punk before she could get to it. He decided to hand it to her in person, face to face. She’d surely realise she had nothing to be frightened of, if he smiled a lot and acted his usual charming self. If she asked how he’d found her address, he’d admit the truth and advise her to erase her own number from her contacts list because it made her far too easy to track online. There were too many suspicious characters around these days to be taking risks.