Carr turned left out of the exterior door, and walked along the centuries-old blue-grey cobbles, careful to keep his pace measured and his demeanour relaxed. There was almost no CCTV coverage in the old part of town – which was obviously why Shishani himself had chosen the location – but there was no sense in attracting any undue attention.

At the end of Via Santa Giustina he turned left into Via Burlamacchi, and twenty yards further on he came to his motorcycle, a red, five-year-old Honda CBR600RR, chosen because it was the most common colour of the most common bike in Italy.

Casually, like a guy heading home after a day at work, he swung a denim-clad leg over the seat, and fired it up.

Carefully sticking to the speed limit, he pottered his way out of Lucca, never looking back.

Even when he hit the Strada Statale 12, he fought the desire to open the throttle, and instead kept to a steady 130kph.

As he rode, he examined himself mentally: he felt cool, and good, and his heartbeat was only slightly elevated.

Less than forty-five minutes after he had put Argun Shishani out of the world’s misery, he arrived in the outskirts of Pisa.

Almost immediately, he turned left off the SS12 onto Via A. Paparelli.

He pulled off the road into a car-park and parked the Honda in the same motorcycle bay from which he had collected it earlier that day.

He’d been told to clip the helmet and gloves to the bike, but leaving his DNA attached to his getaway vehicle seemed to him like a very fucking stupid idea, however remote the chances of the Italian police putting two and two together, so he ignored that instruction and walked away from the bike without a backward glance.

A mile on, he stuffed the motorcycle helmet deep down under the garbage in a communal dumpster. A mile further, and he hit the Arno.

He walked onto the Ponte della Fortezza, and, halfway across he stopped, leaned on the railings, and admired the view for a moment or two.

Then, very casually, he dropped the bike gloves into the river.

It was flowing quickly, after a couple of days of unseasonal rain over the Apennines to the east, and they slid straight under the bubbling surface.

Without looking back, he walked on, turned right on the far bank, and strolled on for a few hundred yards, before crossing back over on the Ponte di Mezzo.

A minute or so later, he reached a restaurant with a red awning and a sign which said Il Dado del Lumière.

There were three grey-green tables outside. Two were occupied by young couples and singles. At the third, two men were drinking coffee – a stocky blond guy in his late twenties, and an older man, who had greying, thinning hair cropped very close, and a pair of Bollé shades pushed up over his forehead.