‘Come and have coffee and tell Papa Schmidt all about it. Is Karl Feder annoying you again? Tsk! He should be ashamed, the old rascal. Or,’ – he grinned and winked – ‘or is it another individual who is responsible for the disturbance of your slumber?’

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Gerda was on her feet, leaning precariously across the desk as she tried to overhear. Schmidt had seen her too. Shaking his head, he said disapprovingly, ‘There is no decent regard for privacy in this place. Come into my office, Vicky, where we can be alone, and you will tell Papa Schmidt – ’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No what? It was not Sir John – ’

‘No everything! Nobody disturbed my slumber, no, I will not come into your office, no, Karl Feder is not . . .’ I stopped, clutching at the last ragged strands of sanity. Better to let Schmidt think Karl’s reasons for calling were personal instead of professional. Or was it? The world was dissolving into chaos around me.

‘See you later, Schmidt,’ I babbled, freeing my hand. ‘I have to – I have to – go to the bathroom.’

It was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t follow me. I locked myself into a cubicle and collapsed onto the seat.

My hand was red and sticky. In certain lights, strawberry jelly looks a lot like fresh blood.

John was certainly a reasonable subject for anxiety dreams. He had more deadly enemies than anyone I’d ever met. Sometimes I was one of them.

When I first ran into him I was trying to track down a forger of historic jewels.² I had no business doing any such thing; it was a combination of curiosity and the desire for a free vacation that took me to Rome, and some people might have said that it served me right when I got in over my head. John got me out. He had been an enthusiastic participant in the swindle until the others decided to eliminate me, but, as he candidly admitted, chivalry had nothing to do with his change of heart. He disapproved of murder on practical grounds. As he put it, ‘the penalties are so much more severe.’

I never meant to get involved with him. He isn’t really my type – only an inch or so taller than I, slightly built, his features (with one or two exceptions) pleasant but unremarkable. I don’t know why I ended up in that little hotel in Trastevere. Gratitude, womanly sympathy for a wounded hero, curiosity – or those exceptional characteristics? It turned out to be a memorable experience, and it may have been the worst mistake I have ever made in my life.

Another brief encounter, in Paris, was both embarrassing and expensive. I woke up one morning to find the police hammering at the door and John gone. Naturally he hadn’t paid the hotel bill.

So why did I respond to that enigmatic message from Stockholm a few months later?³ I told myself it was because I wanted to get back at him for Paris, meeting his challenge and beating him at his own game. (That’s what I told myself.) It was a relatively harmless little scheme to begin with – he needed me to gain access to an innocent old gentleman whose backyard happened to be full of buried treasure – but it turned ugly when a second group of crooks zeroed in on the same treasure. That was my first encounter with the hardcore professionals of the art underworld, and I sincerely hoped it would be my last. John was a professional, but compared to Max and Hans and Rudi and their boss, Leif, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. They disliked John even more than I did, and from my point of view he was definitely the lesser of two evils, so once again we were forced to collaborate in order to escape. My negative opinion of him didn’t change, though, until . . .