The police chopper seemed to have only just arrived on the scene, its fast-spinning rotors slowing to idle speed. The pilot and five passengers had climbed out and circled the grounded boat. Four of them were clambering aboard and crawling up the sloping deck to check out the contents of its hold.

‘These cops are worse than Texas yellowjackets,’ Roth grumbled. ‘Always buzzing around your head when they’re not wanted.’

The gendarmes were too far away and too preoccupied with what they’d found on the beach to have noticed the car on the track. Ben slammed into reverse and backed up a short distance to where they’d passed a sandy lane off to the left, which looked to him as though it climbed and snaked upwards towards the clifftop overlooking the beach. His guess was right. The rise of the land kept them hidden from below as they made their way up the incline. The track petered out and Ben went bumping and lurching through long yellowed grass and rocky ruts, coming to a halt a short distance from the cliff edge. He turned off the engine, grabbed the binoculars from the glove compartment and stalked from the car to find a good vantage point.

He didn’t have to search for long. About a million years ago part of the cliff had subsided to form a V-cleft and a long, jagged mound of rubble sloping down to the western end of the beach, like a staircase for giants. Flattened on his belly in the reedy grass of the cleft Ben had a perfect sniper’s view of the goings-on below. The chopper’s rotor blades had slowed almost to a standstill. The same four gendarmes were still at the grounded boat and seemed extremely interested in what was inside.

Roth joined Ben, moving through the stiff grass without making a rustle. He lay flat next to him and produced a mini-pair of binocs of his own, apparently out of nowhere.

‘Bet your ass, that there’s our pirate vessel. Looks like she’s been run aground. I can’t believe they had it all planned out this way. More likely they stole her from the port, right while we were sitting talking to Segal in his goddamned hotel room. Can you believe the fuckin’ audacity of these guys?’

Ben was seriously contemplating pointing his pistol at the American and forcing the truth out of him. But he was too intent on what was happening down there to look away. The four cops had lifted out some of the contents of the hold and were obviously in a hurry to unload the rest. Ben could see why. The tide was coming in, each new wave rolling and foaming a little further up the shingle than the last. They didn’t have a lot of minutes before the water’s edge would be lapping at the boat.