‘Touchy,’ Roth said, and straightened up in his seat with his head towards the window. The conversation appeared to be over. Ben was resolved to get the truth out of him later. For now, though, they had some distance to cover in as little time as possible and he needed to lay down all of the Alpina’s four hundred horsepower on the twisty coastal road without getting them killed. Big wide open fields zipped by on both sides, the hazy grey sea in the distance; now and then a village that forced him to scrub off some speed before he put his foot back down hard and the Alpina’s gauge needles soared in the dials. Every few minutes Roth was receiving a new text message from some mysterious source, and was reading them with a frown on his face and the phone angled away from Ben like a poker player’s cards. Ben bit his lip, fixed his eyes determinedly on the road and said nothing.

The Alpina rocketed past his old haunt of Étretat. He took the D11 and raced for the home stretch, through the pretty village of Bénouville and then jumping onto a minor road through a valley called the Fonds d’Étigue, running parallel with the coastline. It occurred to him that Roth must have received his tip-off from the same person who’d alerted them to the GIGN raid in Villejuif. But then, how did this person apparently know things the police didn’t even know yet?

At last, they were coming into Vaucottes. Ben had covered the thirty-eight kilometres from Le Havre in just over eighteen minutes, which would have been closer to fifteen if he hadn’t had to slow down for built-up areas. He cut through the narrow country lanes past the scattered homes and farms, heading towards the beach with still no idea of what Roth was leading them into. The bag of guns and ammunition was a reassuring presence on the back seat, ready for action in case they were about to stumble on a war zone. It certainly didn’t look like one. It looked exactly like a quiet little corner of the world that had existed trouble-free for the last seventy-odd years, ever since the final shot of the Battle of Normandy had rung out over the landscape.

But whatever had been happening here earlier that morning, it was all over now. As the Alpina hit the rough track down towards the sea and the beach came into view, they saw that it was empty.

Empty, apart from the Gendarmerie Airbus H-135 helicopter sitting on the shingle, a few metres away from a large boat that was grounded and lying at a tilted angle on dry land.

Roth said, ‘Shit.’ Ben braked the car to a halt on the track, tyres pattering on the rocks.