Sure enough, moments later Ben heard a muffled yell through the door. ‘Oy! Ken! Get your arse up here now!’

The crashing and banging down below paused, and then there were more running footsteps on the stairs. Wolf came to join Ben to listen at the door. Another muffled voice on the landing – Ken’s, Ben presumed – said, ‘What’s up, Frank?’

Frank, the first guy, said, ‘It’s not fucking here!’

‘What’s not fucking here?’

‘His fucking computer. It’s missing. And someone’s been here before us. A desk drawer’s been jimmied. Whatever was in there is gone, too.’

Ben and Wolf exchanged glances. Wolf raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Oh-oh.’

Ken’s voice said, ‘What about discs, hard drives, other places he might’ve stored the file?’

So the file on Abbott’s laptop was definitely what they were looking for.

‘Can’t see anything in there,’ Frank’s voice replied. ‘Same bastard as took the computer could’ve removed them, too.’

‘Shit. We gotta find that computer or it’s our arses on the block.’

Frank paused for a moment, then made a decision. It seemed as though he was in charge. He instructed Ken, ‘You and Terry carry on downstairs for a bit. I’m going to search the rest of the upstairs. Maybe Abbott stashed the gear somewhere.’

Ben and Wolf heard Ken thundering back down below. The banging and crashing downstairs resumed in force. Meanwhile Frank would be ransacking the rest of the study, but it wouldn’t be long before he gave up and started trying other upstairs rooms. Just a matter of time before he came through the bedroom door.

Wolf tapped Ben on the arm and pointed at an internal door at the far side of the bedroom. He beckoned Ben over, opened it, and Ben saw that it was a walk-in wardrobe, like a small room in its own right. There were racks of inbuilt shelves and a row of suits hanging on a rail, wrapped in protective plastic. Ben and Wolf slipped inside and eased the door closed after them. It was dark in there, with just thin slits of light shining around the edges of the door. Listening. Waiting. Barely breathing. Ben’s skin was crawling with agitation, as if ants were swarming all over his body. It felt all wrong to be hiding like this. Normally, a bunch of rent-a-thugs like Frank and his colleagues crossing paths with a pair of SAS-trained pros would have been dead before they even knew it. Ben and Wolf would have breezed through them like two hungry foxes in a chicken run. But here they were, cowering in a wardrobe for fear of being discovered.