But Alice, seventeen years old, and sixty-two kilos wringing wet, could bring him to heel with one withering look and a few choice words.

He wasn’t sure what they were filling her head with at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, for his thirty-five grand a year, but a lot of it seemed to revolve around the patriarchy, feminism, and the objectification of women.

It mystified Carr, who’d grown up in the 1980s on the streets of the rough Edinburgh suburb of Niddrie: he respected birds, right enough, but since when had it become a sin to fucking look at them?

Still, better safe than sorry.

He rubbed the livid, inverted-crescent scar on his chin, and stared dead ahead.

They were twenty metres from the sea.

It really was beautiful.

Shame about those screaming kids.

One of them was really wailing now – he’d dropped his ice cream in the water, snot was bubbling from his nose, and his fat, orange, German dad was trying to calm him down.

Shame about the kids, and a shame about the sand in Carr’s shorts, too.

And in the crack of his arse, and between his toes, and gritty in his mouth.

He sighed, and looked to his right.

His son George – seven years older than Alice – was eyeing up a couple of pretty Spanish girls, his own girlfriend face-down on her towel and oblivious.

Beyond George, a couple of older blokes casually ogled Alice as they trudged by.

Carr stared at them, hard, and once they caught his eye, and clocked his menacing physique, they looked quickly away and moved on.

He glanced down between his legs and flicked at a piece of dried seaweed with a grey driftwood twig.

Funny how life turns out.

You grow up in a council tenement block, surrounded by concrete, broken glass and graffiti, you don’t expect to find yourself rubbing shoulders with Europe’s filthy rich on a beach at Puerto Banús.

Back home in the UK, Carr’s day job was as head of London security for the Russian oligarch Konstantin Avilov. Earlier in the year Carr had taken out a Ukrainian hitman who had tried to kill his boss on the streets of London, as part of the ongoing, low-level power struggle which increasingly stretched out from Moscow in every direction around the globe.

As a thank you, his boss had given him a big payrise, and a Porsche Cayenne – bit tacky, for Carr’s taste, so he’d quickly swapped it for a classy 5.0L V8 Supercharged Range Rover, in Spectral British Racing Green.

Avilov had insisted, too, that he take a couple of weeks at his Marbella villa, a ten-bedroomed, chrome-and-white monument to vulgarity, in a gated community five minutes away at Vega del Colorado.

Take the family, Johnny. It’s a thank you for everything what you done for me.

Including saving my life, he hadn’t said.

But both men knew.

A woman in her early thirties came into his eyeline, canvas bag in hand and diaphanous sarong hugging her hips, and gave him a long look through her Dior shades as she passed by.