After a minute or two the heat was already almost unbearable, despite the air-conditioning.

She wanted to call out, and scream, and beg, and plead, but she knew that it would not help.

She told herself to stay calm.

Breathe.

Started whispering a mantra: ‘You’re going to be alright, Charlotte, you’re going to be alright.’

Somehow, she had to get through this – one second, one minute, one hour, one day at a time.

What was to come she did not know. All she did know was that she was alive, and her friends were dead.

She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and concentrated on how she might kill these evil bastards.

And, strangely, she felt her pulse slow a fraction, and her strength return.

Revenge is a powerful incentive.

36.

A LITTLE WHILE earlier, the police had finished with John Carr.

The main development was that they had been able to locate a shot of the man with the dark eyes, taken from a CCTV camera at the marina, for Carr to identify.

It wasn’t very clear – the best angle was a three-quarter face, shot from above – but it was a start, and it was now being flashed to every friendly security service and police force in the world, to see what came back.

Inspector-Jefe Javier de Padilla had arranged for Carr and his son to be dropped back at the villa.

As soon as she saw her father, Alice flew at him, throwing her arms around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder, sobbing.

It took a while to calm her down, but eventually she settled.

‘What happened?’ said Carr, to Chloe.

‘When you and George went, we went for a swim,’ she said. ‘We’d only got in up to our waists when they started shooting. It was… There were bullets everywhere. A little boy was killed just in front of us. We just swam further out and came back in up in the town.’

‘It was horrible, Dad,’ said Alice, wiping away tears. ‘He was a toddler. There was so much blood. He screamed and then he went quiet. I wanted to help him, but I was too scared.’

‘You couldn’t have done anything, sweetheart,’ said Carr, stroking her forehead.

As he spoke, he felt a cold rage building in his soul.

Carr had no qualms about killing those who truly deserved it. Throughout his long career in the Regiment, he had come up against plenty of men who had deserved it, and he had killed them without emotion, and had walked away without a backward glance.

The battlefield had allowed him that space; the civilian world, a world he was still getting used to, was different. It was a world of prevarication and second-guessing, and judgment by men who had never picked up a weapon and stood firm in their lives, and could not and did not know what it meant to look death in the eye and prevail by sheer force of will.