‘I met a girl there. Thought it was forever, you know? I guess I’m a romantic. But some things aren’t meant to be. She broke my heart.’ Alan talked about how he’d moved restlessly from place to place after that, never quite managing to find himself. Now he was back in Britain, he hoped to find a way to make more sense of his life. ‘There are so many people in need. I feel it’s my calling to help them somehow.’

‘That’s so lovely,’ she said, entranced by his general wonderfulness as a human being.

‘It’s just who I am,’ he replied.

But it was all a lie.

The name of the man sitting alone with Chrissie in her tent wasn’t Alan. He didn’t speak more than a couple of words of French, had never taught English, and wasn’t searching for his purpose in life – because he already had one. He was an infiltrator who worked for a secret society of powerful men, though he knew nothing about their organisation and worked through a handler. His job, for which he was highly paid, was to search out people who lived on the margins of society: vagrants, rolling stones, runaways, rebels who’d dropped out of the system, anyone who didn’t have too many close social or family ties, wouldn’t be too easily missed and could readily be made to disappear. Hundreds of thousands of people were reported missing every year in the UK and many of them were never found; a few extra here and there, carefully selected, simply went unnoticed.

The infiltrator often targeted alternative communities, because they offered easy pickings. It was a section of society where it was normal and expected for folks to drift in, drift out and never be seen again. And in his experience there was no better source of pretty, single, footloose and fancy-free young women on whom he could use his natural charm and good looks to lure them into his clutches. He generally managed to ensnare five or six a year. Tranquillised and trussed up, they were transported to a rendezvous point where he delivered them to his contact. What happened to them after that, he neither knew nor cared. At ten grand a head, cash in hand, it was all about the money, nothing else.

And he’d decided that Chrissie Cassidy was just what he was looking for. She wasn’t at all unattractive. Whatever his employers had planned for her, he was sure she’d make the perfect object of their entertainment.

‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said.

Now there was no holding back the blush. ‘Me too.’

‘I’m renting a cottage not far from here. Would you like to see it?’

Chrissie’s eyes sparkled in the lantern light. ‘Now? Tonight?’

‘It’s just a simple little place. But it beats a tent.’

She smiled. ‘I’d love to see it.’

Chapter 23