That was when I put my fingers in his jacket pocket. The tips of two were neatly slit open. Yet when I searched the rest of the suit, it had nothing to hide. A nasty trick, Gilles Bertin.

The house was pleasant enough, two storeys, tiled floors, plain unobtrusive furniture. But the wardrobe scared me because alongside the jacket with its secret weapon hung four Galeries Lafayette shirts, two black, two white, identical size and style, all normal enough so far. And then one navy-blue shirt. Cheap cotton. Two sizes larger.

It belonged to someone else. And I could only think of one someone else. A man with pale skin and spiky black eyebrows in a straight line above a large nose. Eyes cold as stone. A man whose name was Maurice Piquet, the bastard who’d wanted to rip my cheek off in the hospital. I slammed shut the wardrobe door.

Hurry.

I raced through the rest of my search. Under the mattress, inside the pillowcase. Behind two boring pictures on the wall. A quick check on the underside of seats and tables. In the oven. The bathroom cabinet. Inside the high lavatory cistern and at full stretch I managed to squeeze a hand behind it.

An envelope slid into my hand.

Dislodged from its hiding place behind the cistern. For a second I stared at it, stupefied. Caught by surprise. Like I was caught by surprise by a grey van one night in Paris. I had a bright red flashback of memory to the strings of blood smacking me in the face as I spun upside down in my car. I blinked hard and wished that just for once my memory would tell me lies.

I slumped down on the closed toilet seat and with no warning my body suddenly ached for Léon. To have him here. Beside me. His grey eyes calm. I murmured his name, like honey on my tongue, and then I removed the contents of the envelope.

A bunch of photographs fell on to my lap. Images of aircraft. Landing. Taking off. Taxiing. Fighters parked on the apron. All at Dumoulin Air Base and I had to stifle a whoop of success. On the back of each was written the date and the name of the aircraft: Boeing B-50, F-84 Thunderjet, C-47 Skytrain. Singly and in formation. All taken in the last week with a long lens. I scooped out my Minox camera from my bag and as I set about photographing each one I had a sense of a suffocating fog starting to lift. A light flickered ahead for the first time because in my hand I was cradling proof that Gilles Bertin was gathering Intelligence information for his Soviet masters.

I would go to Léon with it. He would know who to contact. Gilles Bertin would go to prison, where he would be guillotined as a traitor. André would be safe. It would be the end.