He was in his late fifties and shortish, no more than five-foot-nine, and these days rather plump, and was wearing his usual round-the-house ensemble of jersey, tracksuit trousers and white tennis shoes. He had a mop of chalk-grey hair and a drooping chalk-grey moustache. Along with his dark-brown, strangely mournful eyes, this gave him the most unthreatening demeanour possible.

‘You missed a target tonight,’ he said, in the low, modulated tone he reserved for business discussions, the dark jewels of his eyes fixed on them. This was one thing about Martin Torgau: his gaze. He almost never blinked, which was an unnerving experience when he was watching you, as if there was nothing you were thinking or feeling that he wouldn’t detect. On this occasion, though, he didn’t seem angry or even particularly inquisitive.

Ivana, who’d already admitted their error by phone, nodded. ‘A police officer intervened.’

‘So you said.’

‘We thought it best just to get out of there.’

He nodded. He’d heard this too, and if he had any concern that a plain-clothes cop on a motorbike was something a little different from the norm, he didn’t let it trouble him for now. There was a more important matter at hand.

‘We had a private delivery shortly before midnight,’ he said.

In Torgau-speak, a ‘private delivery’ was exactly what it sounded like. A private delivery vehicle would have stopped in front of the house, and a man wearing a legitimate uniform would have pushed a package through the mail box.

That package now lay open at the edge of the desk. As usual, it contained photographs of a certain person, taken from various angles to ensure there’d be no mistake, and printed details: that person’s name, address, workplace, the vehicles they had access to, the hours they kept, and any other essential information. At no point in the document were any terms of contract offered; these had been agreed long before. Nor was any reason given as to why the contract had been taken out; all of that was on a need-to-know basis. It was a question Torgau never asked, in any case, primarily because he didn’t care.

The two girls shot glances at the tantalising heap of paperwork. They didn’t reach for it yet. They hoped it was for them, but they couldn’t be certain.

‘I should tell you both that I don’t consider your training complete,’ Torgau said. ‘Not yet. Not quite. However, here’s a chance for you to resolve that in one fell swoop.’

He picked up the main sheet and indicated a row of letters printed along the bottom, grouped in threes. To any ordinary person it would be nothing, a typical array of meaningless computer-generated gobbledegook, but again, that was deceptive. The first three letters were ‘d’, ‘s’ and ‘U’, standing for ‘in due course’, ‘soon’ and ‘urgent’. The u being upper-case was self-explanatory.