‘How long?’

‘Twenty minutes, give or take.’

‘You’re still my guy,’ Ben said.

Thierry Chevrolet might have seen better times and lost his sparkle, but the kinds of skills he possessed didn’t fade with age. Ben left him alone to work, and went over to smoke at the window while Thierry hunched over the smartphone at the table. Pierrot was still lurking, silent and morose, in the background. Ben would gladly have sent him out on some errand just to get rid of him, if he could have trusted the idiot wouldn’t return with half the Corsica mafia on his heels.

Eighteen minutes and three more cups of coffee later, Thierry leaned back in his chair, looked over at Ben with a sly grin and whispered, ‘We’re in.’

Chapter 14

‘Don’t get too excited, chief,’ Thierry said as Ben went over to see. ‘It isn’t exactly what you’d call cinema quality.’

Pierrot was suddenly all interested. ‘What is it? Porno?’

Ben gave him a look that made him stay in place and keep his mouth shut. Turning back to Thierry he asked, ‘Did you see any of it?’

‘You’re the client. It’s none of my business what’s on there. I only looked at the first few seconds. Long enough to see what it isn’t.’ Thierry handed over the phone. Ben took it and sat at the table to look.

The video was less than a minute long. That made each second of its duration seem all the more precious, assuming the clip was of any value at all. After the first five seconds, Ben’s heart was beginning to sink, because he could hardly make anything out. Everything was dark and jerky, just a confusion of shapes and shadows. All that was clearly visible was the purple time and date stamp in the bottom left corner of the screen, which just confirmed the date on the file label, from three days ago.

Seven seconds in, something appeared on the right-hand edge of the frame, and moved inwards to fill a third of the screen. It was the vertical edge of what appeared to be a concrete wall, pitted and craggy. The camera’s focus sharpened on that, making the background even more blurry and indistinct. All Ben could glean from what he was seeing was that the person doing the filming – presumably Romy herself, though he had no way to be certain – was shooting the video clip in a furtive, clandestine way from behind the wall, not wanting to be seen. She, if it was her, seemed to be trying to angle the camera past its edge, around the corner, to film something happening further away. But the lighting was just too dark to see what.

Ben said, ‘This is terrible.’

Thierry shrugged. ‘You get what you get, man.’