The second speaker pulled off his T-shirt and headed for the water, followed by three of the girls.

Very tidy, thought Carr. Especially the tall brunette, and the blonde girl in the shocking pink bikini.

He could see why the guy with the gammy leg had been gawping at them.

But it wasn’t worth the aggro, not with Alice by his side and George running his gob, so he turned his head and looked conspicuously in the opposite direction.

Way off at the top of the beach, unnoticed by Carr or anyone else, a young man in cut-off denim shorts and a Manchester United replica shirt hung around under a palm tree, and made a phone call.

As he did so, he watched the new arrivals keenly – though he took care not to show it.

The call was answered a hundred metres away, by the man with the dark eyes and the cruel mouth.

He was by now standing on the deck of a powerful white yacht, moored up in the marina at the extreme western edge of the Puerto Banús beach, at the end of Calle Ribera.

The open sea a matter of metres away.

‘Yes,’ said Dark Eyes. ‘Keep watching them, and await further instructions.’

He killed the call, stood up, pulled his Oakleys down from his forehead, and stuck a Marlboro Light in his mouth.

The dark-eyed man did indeed look like a member of the wealthy, leisured Eurotrash, who idled their summers away sailing around the Med, their winters in Klosters and Courchevel 1850, and the rest of the year drinking pink champagne at 38,000 feet.

But the flashy gold Rolex was fake, and the linen trousers stolen, and John Carr was quite correct about the damage to his leg – it had been caused by a piece of red-hot Hazara shrapnel at Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, in 1997.

He was actually a Chechen, called Argun Shishani, and he was not the owner of the boat, the Mistral 55 class Lucky Lady.

He was merely borrowing it from someone – someone who, admittedly, would never need it again.

He had chosen this particular boat because its twin 7,400hp Codag engines made it capable of more than fifty knots – 52kts, to be precise, or 96kph, or a shade under 60mph.

And because it had a mooring ticket at Puerto Banús.

Argun Shishani threw his half-smoked cigarette into the water.

Watched in amusement for a moment or two as a dozen silver sardines flashed in and fought over it.

Then looked up at the endless blue sky, smiled, and went below to make the final preparations.

10.

CARLO ABANDONATO HAD taken time to walk around the sun deck, and all looked in order.

About half of the Windsor Castle’s passengers had gone ashore, and those who had remained were sipping cocktails, splashing in the pool, or slowly giving themselves skin cancer in the roasting sun.

It was a mid-range boat, so they were mostly families and a few pensioners – the bulk of them British with a few Americans, Canadians and Europeans thrown in.