The group I’d encountered in Sweden were another kettle of fish. They were all professionals and cold-blooded as sharks: big stupid Hans, who wasn’t really bad, just awfully good at obeying orders; Rudi, who was built like a ferret and had the same mind-set (kill things, kill lots of things); Max, who cut silhouettes as a relaxing hobby after a day of bumping people off; and their boss, Leif, the man who had been slashing at me with a long sharp knife before John removed him forcibly from my vicinity. No doubt about Leif’s death; I had identified the body.

I had a couple of Max’s silhouettes – souvenirs, presented to me by the artist himself. Mine had been fashioned of the traditional black paper, and very fine likenesses they were. Occasionally Max used red paper – for ‘a particular collection.’ He was a soft-spoken, harmless-looking little man, and he’d always been very pleasant to me up to and including the moment when I waved bye-bye to him just before they carted him off to the prison. He had even . . . Well, he hadn’t actually thanked me for helping to get rid of his boss, not in so many words, but he had implied that Leif’s death opened up new and interesting possibilities of advancement for him ‘If I can ever do you a favour, Dr Bliss,’ he had said . . .

I had never met anybody who scared me more than Max. I hoped and believed he was still in prison. But in any case, Max wouldn’t have collaborated with John if John had been the only other crook on earth. The antipathy was personal as well as professional. Max had absolutely no sense of humour and John drove him up the wall even when John wasn’t trying to, and he often was trying to.

The Trojan gold affair . . . I could forget about that one. All the villains were dead. Very, very unmistakably dead, including the head villain, who had fallen fifty feet onto a pile of rocks. John had been indirectly responsible for his demise, which had occurred in the course of one of John’s nerve-racking, impromptu rescues.

For the first time I found myself wondering how John had felt about killing those two men. Neither had been deliberate, premeditated murders; he could reasonably claim self-defence or maybe justifiable homicide. But he had always insisted he disliked violence, even when it wasn’t directed at him. Did he ever have bad dreams?

I shifted uncomfortably and then tore the list into a heap of unreadable scraps.

John’s confederate couldn’t be anyone I knew, so it must be someone I didn’t know. (Brilliant deduction, Vicky.) I turned my attention to the passenger list.

I could now attach faces and personalities to most of the names. There were only thirty names in all – twenty-nine, now that Jen had left. I started to cross her name out and then stopped myself. She might not be on the boat, but she was not out of the picture. Difficult as it was to imagine her as a criminal mastermind, I couldn’t dismiss the odd coincidence that had left her on the loose in Cairo.