Over the next five minutes, Ben told Segal everything that had happened since the moment of his chance encounter with Romy Juneau in the street: the visit to her apartment, the sighting of Nazim al-Kassar leaving the building and the discovery of the video footage on her phone. Tears returned to Segal’s eyes and his chin fell to his chest as Ben described finding her dead.

‘It’s all my fault,’ he muttered, struggling to contain his emotion, when Ben had finished. ‘She was … I felt … that is to say, I had no idea she was there in the warehouse. Not until afterwards, as we were due to come back from Libya and she was acting so strangely around me that I had to ask her what was wrong. Then she told me what she’d witnessed. She was furious with me, threatened to resign, called me all kinds of names. I tried to explain myself, but she wouldn’t listen and we argued for a long time. But I swear I knew nothing about a video. She didn’t tell me she had filmed us.’

‘Luckily for you, she didn’t just take it straight to the authorities,’ Ben said. ‘Instead, when she got back home she tried to contact a reporter called Françoise Schell.’

‘I know that name.’

‘I’m not surprised. She wrote an article on terrorist organisations and the antiquities trade. Right up your street. That’s how Romy found her, too. But unluckily for Romy, her closeness to your work made your little terrorist pals suspicious. She was being followed, and her apartment phone was almost certainly tapped. That’s the only way they could have known about her call to Françoise, and the anonymous message she left her saying that she knew about a criminal conspiracy concerning a shipment and some kind of terror plot unfolding.’

‘Oh, God,’ Segal groaned. He wiped a tear. His hand was trembling.

‘At which point, she needed to be eliminated, and fast, before she shared any more of what she knew with anyone. And Nazim al-Kassar was obviously happy to do the job himself. A highly motivated individual, our Nazim. It wasn’t enough for him to kill Romy. The reporter is dead, too. And so would I be, if he’d had his way. Except I don’t kill too easily.’

Segal was shaking his head in anguish. ‘I don’t understand. How is it that you know so much about Nazim al-Kassar?’

Ben said, ‘It’s a small world when you operate in certain circles. Let’s just say there’s history between us. The kind of history that makes him want me dead just as badly as I want to see him get what he deserves. But we’re not here to talk about me, Julien. You have a great deal of explaining to do. Who exactly is Nazim to you, and what the hell are you involved in?’