‘Yes. I don’t doubt that. But you won’t hurt a hair on my head when you stand face to face with me, nor will you tell a soul about our conversation today.’

He laughed out loud. ‘What makes you so sure?’

Martin gave another start. The lawnmower had fallen silent. But now he heard the scratching noises at the door again, and this time it definitely wasn’t a dog. Someone was fiddling with the lock. He looked around. As it was an open-plan house there was nowhere on the ground floor to hide, particularly not if Elena was watching him via camera. But he didn’t think it was her trying to get inside the finca, and if it was, then she knew he was armed. He pointed the gun at the door, but then had a better idea.

With a couple of rapid strides he made it to the stairs and ran to the upper floor, his pistol at the ready if anyone was lying in wait for him up there.

His mobile rang in his pocket.

Unknown caller.

He answered as he entered the first room at the top of the stairs and shut the door.

‘You won’t kill me,’ he heard Elena say, continuing their conversation while Martin looked around in astonishment at the untidy room. The bed wasn’t made and dirty socks littered the floor. The walls were sprayed with gaudy, but amazingly talented graffiti images, and a laptop with a sticker of a heavy metal band sat on a glass table supported by two beer barrels.

‘How can you be so sure?’ he heard himself ask.

Footsteps echoed in the sitting room below.

Martin grabbed hold of a tennis racket that had been leaning against an open wardrobe. The footsteps were coming up the stairs.

‘Because you won’t shoot the woman who’s been a mother to your son,’ Elena said, and then Martin heard a second voice in the hall beyond the door. The voice of a young man, around fifteen years old.

‘Mama? Are you in there?’ he asked. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back for a fortnight.’

The door opened and two men who resembled each other like father and son, stood opposite each other, paralysed with shock.

76

Elena hung up.

She’d prepared Timmy for this moment. Two weeks ago, when she’d visited him soon after their stop in New York, he’d asked her yet again about his father (he never enquired about his mother) and she showed him the photo that the Polish newspapers had published shortly after his arrest.

Shahla had caught Nadja.

He’d never left the bathroom.

That was the lie she’d dished up to Martin to make him abandon the search for his son. In vain. She’d suspected that he’d get to the bottom of the truth at some point.