Parker grinned. ‘Got us out of a tight spot in Padua,’ he said. ‘Should work here, too. I’ll go round to the stable now. Our friends don’t know about me, so shouldn’t be any trouble.’

Minutes later, as he waited in the hotel hallway, Rupert heard an altercation in the stable yard. Shouting and the grunts and bellows of a fist fight; a horse was whinnying and there was the crash of hooves on cobbles, followed by more and louder shouts as the hotel’s ostlers joined the fray.

Rupert made no effort to go and investigate, but slipped out into the street and vanished into a side alley. Parker would eventually be explaining how he had seen the man with the red hair sliding his hand into the saddlebag of a mare standing ready, waiting for her owner to set out.

Redhead was denying everything, but he had been detained by the ostlers, who wanted no thieves other than themselves in their yard. After more shouting, and threatened fisticuffs, Jacques Rocher made his way outside. Hearing it was Sir Rupert’s man who had seen the thief and caught him red-handed, he had him searched. When nothing was found on him, Rocher told his men to throw him out of the yard with a farewell boot in the backside and an instruction never to show his face at the Hotel Montreux again.

‘I am so sorry that you should have been involved in such an uproar, Monsieur Parker,’ Rocher said as they went back into the hotel. ‘You obviously caught the thief just in time, before he actually managed to take anything from the saddlebag. But with nothing in his hands or pockets we had to let him go. I hope Sir Rupert was not incommoded?’

‘No, monsieur, I’m sure he wasn’t. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go up to his suite.’

Rocher returned through the old oak door to his quarters, and Parker went up to the empty suite and looked down into the street. There were plenty of people about, but no sign of Redhead, or anyone else idly loitering as if waiting for someone.

Parker went back downstairs and walked away down the road, turning into the Boulevard St Germain and taking a circuitous route to St Eustache. When he was quite sure he had shaken any possible tail, he made his way to the church, where Rupert was waiting.

‘I’m going to speak to someone now you’re here,’ Rupert told him. ‘Keep your eyes peeled and if there’s any sign we’re being watched, simply walk past me whistling and we’ll deal with it.’

While he had been waiting for Parker to find him, he had walked through the marketplace and spotted the poulterer’s stall, where Annette was dealing with a customer. He would go nowhere near her until Parker returned without a tail.

Now, he wandered casually between the jumble of stalls, pausing at several before approaching Annette.

Although she had been expecting him, she only saw him at the last minute.