He stopped for fuel, then pulled up in a layby near the filling station and left the motor running while he checked his phone. Still nothing from Keegan about Tyler Roth. No word from Thierry, either. But Ben didn’t have time to feel frustrated. He took out Romy’s phone and looked again at the photo of her and Michel outside the bar. Le Geronimo was a lead that Detective Valérie Boucher didn’t have, and with that he gained a tactical advantage over her.

A quick web search using his own phone threw up the address of the bar, which turned out to be in the same area that Romy’s mother had said she thought Michel lived, Saint-Denis. Which meant the cops might have a rough idea where to find him, but no specific location to begin searching.

Ben slammed the Alpina into gear and took off. Saint-Denis was to the north of Paris, about twenty-five minutes’ drive from where he was now, less if he put his foot down. He picked up the A3 Autoroute and stormed northwards, keeping a watchful eye out for traffic police, then hit the A1 and veered west towards his destination.

As one of the most important historical centres of France, Saint-Denis was named after the great medieval basilica at its heart, whose tower Ben could see dominating the skyline as he approached. He was no historian, but he knew about the treasures that the cathedral housed, like the crown of Charlemagne and the relics of the third-century bishop who would go on to become the patron saint of Paris. The Basilica of Saint-Denis had been a place of pilgrimage through the Middle Ages, and home to the tombs of French royalty dating back to the sixth century, including some of its most notorious players like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Another of its famous incumbents was the Frankish king Charles Martel, ‘the Hammer’, who crushed the advance of the invasion force of the Umayyad Caliphate led by Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi at the Battle of Tours in 732.

But for all its rich cultural heritage, Saint-Denis was far from being a popular tourist spot. Mention its name to most Parisians and the typical response was a frown or a sigh. The place’s reputation for crime and danger had been further tarnished by the terror attack that had claimed the lives of 130 victims in the nearby stadium a few years earlier. The surviving perpetrators of the atrocity had shot it out with the police at a Saint-Denis apartment building. All of which contributed sadly to the negative attitude taken by people like Romy Juneau’s mother against the whole area.