While pleased with his killing of the unclean whore, he was annoyed with himself for having failed on other counts. The wiretap that had been placed on her landline phone had indicated that soon after her return from Tripoli she had attempted to make contact with a woman called Françoise. That was all the information they had on her, no surname. But the phone message that Romy Juneau had left for her suggested that the woman was someone with whom she was keen to share information. A reporter or journalist, maybe. Which made her potentially highly dangerous to their plans, if their suspicions about Romy Juneau were correct. The wiretap on the landline have yielded nothing more, which implied that Juneau might since have been in contact with this Françoise by mobile phone, whether spoken or texted.

Hence Nazim’s intention, while inside Romy Juneau’s apartment that morning, had been to obtain her mobile phone in the hope that it might lead them to Françoise. Who would then, naturally, need to be eliminated too. But to Nazim’s deep annoyance, he’d been unable to find her mobile anywhere in her apartment. It wasn’t in her handbag, or any of the other places he’d searched. The dirty infidel bitch must have hidden it. Nazim knew he had made a tactical mistake in killing her without first forcing her to hand it over.

That wasn’t the only troubling matter on Nazim’s mind. Of even more concern to him than the missing phone was the issue of the man he’d seen at her window immediately after the killing, as he stepped out into the street.

Nazim was absolutely certain that nobody else had been inside the apartment during the few minutes of his visit. He had carefully checked every room, not just in search of her mobile phone but also in case he needed to kill anyone else he found there. There was no doubt in his mind that the man at the window could only have entered the apartment after the Juneau woman was already dead and he, Nazim, had left. But the time gap had been very close, no more than a couple of minutes while Nazim rode the lift from the top floor and exited the building.

Thinking back, Nazim recalled the person he’d crossed on the stairs on his way down. He had deliberately kept his back turned, just in case, so as to avoid any potential witness giving his description to the police. Another mistake, one Nazim couldn’t entirely blame himself for. Others, however, might be less forgiving.