‘I’m not hungry. Think I’ll go and take a shower.’

Jeff peered at him. ‘You all right?’ For Ben to turn down a drink was a rare event; besides which, there wasn’t much you could hide from Jeff Dekker. He liked to laugh and mess around, but beneath the laddish façade was a highly astute and perspicacious mind. You didn’t get to spend over ten years in the Special Boat Service, half of them in command of your own troop, unless you were a pretty smart and capable guy.

‘I’m fine,’ Ben said, with not much conviction.

‘Sure about that?’

‘I’m fine,’ Ben repeated. Leaving them to it, he headed upstairs to dump his bag in his room. His quarters were small and simple, with a single bed, a plain wardrobe, a mirror on the wall and very little else in the way of decor. The only luxury was his ensuite bathroom. He quickly stripped off his things and hit the shower. Sixty seconds exactly, ice cold, grimly relishing the shock of the frigid water that jolted his system and helped to keep his mind sharp and clear. He towelled himself vigorously, returned to his room with a towel around his waist, changed into fresh clothing and set about repacking his bag for another trip. Where that would lead him, he still had no idea – but from the information that Saunders had supplied him he knew that his starting point would be London. And he could afford to waste no time getting there.

After he’d finished repacking his travel items, he unlocked the small security safe bolted to the wall by his bedside. The contents of the safe were the reason he’d come home, rather than heading straight back to London the instant he’d touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport. Inside were two handguns with multiple loaded magazines, two burner phones, ten thousand euros in cash, and a manila envelope containing three fake passports.

It was primarily the passports that Ben was interested in. He spilled them out of the envelope. They were the work of one Thierry Chevrolet, a master forger whose expertise Ben had enlisted back during his wild, dangerous days of hustling around Europe chasing down kidnappers and rescuing the victims they’d taken for ransom. For several years he’d kept them in a bank deposit box in Paris, the city that had served as his main European base of operations. Since getting out of that game and reverting back – at any rate, trying to revert back – to being a normal citizen, he’d no longer had any use for the deposit box and brought everything across to Le Val. There they’d stayed, locked up, unneeded and mostly forgotten.