‘I lived in the Dominican Republic for three years and in the city hospital there treated more refugee children from Haiti who’d been raped than the head of the Hamburg women’s clinic will have seen in a lifetime…’

‘Anyone who’s been on holiday here knows how lax the immigration controls used to be. Especially if you were stepping off a ship. I shouldn’t have let on to you that I’d been living on an island where until a few years ago you could do almost anything with bribes, so long as you knew the right people. The easiest thing of all was to get a house in a different name.’

The slatted blower of the air conditioning unit changed the direction of the airflow at regular intervals. At the moment it was blowing straight into his face.

‘I didn’t come here to discuss your conjuring tricks,’ Martin said.

‘I know. You want to kill me because I killed your family.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But it’s not going to come to that, Martin.’

‘I might not have got you here. But, believe me, I’ll hunt you around the world. I’ll find you and bring you to justice, if it’s the last thing I do.’

‘You’d be making a mistake.’

‘I don’t think so. Anouk herself told me that you abducted her.’

Can you tell me the name of the person you’ve been with all this time?

‘I analysed her secret language. She wrote your name down when I asked about the culprit.’

Martin heard Elena clap her hands.

‘Bravo. But you’re wrong about one fundamental thing. I didn’t abduct Anouk. She came with me willingly. I looked after her.’

‘While torturing and killing her mother.’

‘No, that was Shahla.’

‘Don’t talk crap. Shahla was just your pawn. You’re behind all the killings that you blamed on her.’

Unnerved, Elena blew air from her pursed lips, making her sound like a snorting horse. ‘For a detective you’re rather slow on the uptake. Shahla was anything but innocent.’

‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying,’ Martin objected. ‘The notes on the computer, the conversation with Naomi, you cobbled that all together.’

‘Partly, yes. But I only wrote down the truth.’

The cold waft from the air conditioning unit wandered across Martin’s face again, making him shiver. Outside, by the front entrance, he thought he could hear a scratching. Or footsteps? Martin stood up from the sofa and grabbed his gun.

‘Shahla really was a boy who’d been abused by his mother,’ Elena said. ‘I was never raped, I’m not a crazed, deluded victim who lets people suffer. My interests are quite different.’

‘What are they?’

Martin went to the door and peered through the spyhole. Nothing.