Marc sat in the passenger seat. The mix of adrenaline and whisky made him feel better, and regular beatings at the orphanage had left him with an unusually high pain threshold. He was worried about Henderson though. Sweat poured down the man’s face, his driving was crazy and a couple of times his expression glazed over so badly that Marc thought the car was going to end up ploughing into a wall.

They cruised past Hotel Etalon at just six minutes to eight. The private road leading up to its grand lobby was lined with open-topped Kübelwagens and three of the grand Mercedes saloons used by senior German officers.

‘There’s four regular soldiers guarding the entrance,’ Marc noted, as Henderson turned into a narrow side street and pulled up.

‘I saw them,’ Henderson said warily.

He stepped out of the tiny car and looked up and down the street. ‘We’ve got to get in there before curfew or we’re buggered.’

Henderson took out a duffel bag containing the partially-assembled Sten gun and handed it to Marc.

‘How do we get inside?’ the boy asked, as the weight of the bag practically wrenched his arm from its socket.

‘Every posh hotel has a staff entrance. It’ll be around the back.’

‘But they might be guarding that too,’ Marc said. ‘And if we get in, how the hell are we going to get away again when the whole city is under a curfew?’

‘Good questions,’ Henderson said, as they walked briskly towards the back of the hotel. ‘I’ll let you know the answers just as soon as I think of them.’

A left turn took them on to a concrete ramp, misted with steam curling out of the hotel kitchen and stinking of the rubbish overflowing from giant metal bins. Three kitchen staff stood in an open doorway smoking cigarettes and a bored-looking German guard sat on a step behind them.

‘Act as if we do this every night of our lives,’ Henderson said to Marc, as they approached the door.

‘Evening, gents,’ Henderson said brightly, nodding to the smokers.

They looked a touch mystified, but it was a big hotel and they didn’t know everyone who worked there. The German stretched out his leg to stop them and spoke in bad French.

‘My French not too good,’ Henderson said, pointing jovially towards himself. ‘I night porter. My son is shoe-shine.’

The German didn’t seem happy to have drawn guard duty on his first night in Paris and he looked up miserably and pointed into the kitchen with his thumb. ‘Go ahead.’

Savage heat blasted Marc as he stepped inside. A filthy corridor took them into the hotel kitchen proper, where three men as rough as any Marc had seen leaving the Dormitory Raquel stood in front of a trough, scrubbing massive pots. Another man barged past, carrying a crate filled with empty champagne bottles.