Jack sat in the café, wearing a battered old baseball cap and nursing a cup of tea. He wasn’t actually drinking, because he didn’t know how long the surveillance would last and he didn’t want to have to keep going to the toilet. By eight o’clock, the emporium shop owners began filtering in to receive deliveries and stock shelves. By nine, most shops were open for business. The emporium was an impressive glass-fronted building with advertisements in the windows for all of the shops inside. The advertisement for De Voe’s Jewellers marketed him as a ‘high-end dealer and maker of new and redesigned second-hand pieces’.

There was a security guard on the main door and a second security guard stood outside the attached underground car park.

Jack had Charlotte’s description of Michael De Voe, but no photo; he’d seen several men so far who could possibly have been De Voe, but he’d only know for sure by going inside and heading for shop twenty-one.

Jack left the café with the intention of first of all wandering around the emporium to get a sense of the layout and where all of the exits were on the off-chance that something had already gone wrong and they knew he was coming. He didn’t want to be stuck inside a rat-run with no way out. He decided that, once he felt safe, he’d do a couple of passes of shop twenty-one, before actually going in. He didn’t want to look purposeful; he wanted to appear as though he was browsing and had no specific destination.

As Jack stepped out into the street, he heard the unmistakeable deep throbbing of a Ferrari. Like most other people in the street, he stopped and stared to watch the red 375 MM Coupe Scaglietti slow down and pull into the underground car park. And there it was. A personalised number plate: VOE 1. Behind the Ferrari was a white convertible Mercedes. Both cars paused just outside the car park and waited for the barrier to rise for them. The female driver of the Merc got out of her car, strode over to the Ferrari, and bent down to speak to the driver. As she did so, her short, figure-hugging red dress pulled tight across her backside, briefly drawing all the male attention away from the cars. All male attention, that was, except Jack’s. His eyes were fixed firmly on the driver of the Ferrari. But from where he was standing, all he could see was the back of the driver’s head. The woman then returned to her Merc, allowing the Ferrari to drive down the darkened slope and disappear into the underground car park. She then did a clumsily executed U-turn, temporarily stopping all traffic in both directions, and sped away.

As the Merc disappeared, Jack took a quick snap of the number plate, then headed back into the café and ordered another cup of tea.