I pulled on a pair of finest silk gloves, opened it and slipped quickly into the beautiful room once more. The tall windows were half-shuttered to keep out the heat and looked out on to a gravelled garden at the back of the building. It meant the light was low but I would be unobserved.

I moved fast. His black desk was my starting point. I snapped open drawers, one after the other, working at speed, delving, sifting and skip-reading each item. Pushing aside packets of Gitanes, notepads neatly stacked, a wooden ruler, an address book, a list of telephone numbers with no names or indication who they might be, and a shaving kit. A framed photograph of his daughter Marianne, sitting smiling on the back of a carousel horse.

A manila folder of letters. I flipped through them. Letters of complaint about the air base. About the noise of the aircraft. About the hell-cursed nuclear bombs. About the American airmen. About the chain-link fences stealing French land. About their guard dogs. About damage to the environment. About the night lights. About the smell.

What smell?

Complaints about complaints.

It was a fat file.

I replaced it and tried the last drawer, bottom right. It was locked. I felt a kick of expectation. He had something to hide. I dropped to my knees on the floor and tweaked the lock with a couple of picks until it obliged, but my expectation hit the dirt because inside lay nothing more exciting than a pistol. Behind it sat a small box of ammunition. I didn’t linger but relocked the drawer and sat back on my heels.

Mayor Durand was not a man with nothing to hide, of that I was certain.

The sound of footsteps hurrying down the hall outside sent me leaping to my feet and my pulse hammering in my throat, but they shot past and in the silence that followed I checked the diary on his desk. His secretary was right. He was a busy man. Meetings. Lunches. Telephone calls. All scheduled. But there was nothing that caught my eye. In my time working for the Clarisse Favre Detective Agency in Paris I had come across more than one man with secrets to hide and I wasn’t about to give up on this one.

‘Think the impossible, Eloïse,’ André had told me in his room, his crutches splayed on the floor between us. ‘Use your imagination. Think one step beyond.’

One step beyond.

I dropped to my knees again and peered into the well of the desk. The underside was black, tucked away in the dark, unaccustomed to scrutiny by anyone. But I wasn’t anyone. I snatched a small torch from my bag, squirmed under the desk and flicked on the beam. I scanned each centimetre of the smooth black surface above my head, craning my neck round to . . .

Smooth?