‘Yes,’ she breathed triumphantly as the door closed behind him. He had decided to check her out. Morgan had told her not to worry about the UK end of her cover story; they had, he assured her, been working on it for a while. Her alias was a name that had been fed on to the streets from two directions. Undercover cops had mentioned her as a player in a quiet but powerful way. And the people brought in for questioning after Colin Osborne’s shooting had all been questioned hard about Caroline Jackson. ‘We really leaned on them,’ Morgan had explained. ‘The interviewing officers were all briefed to act as if they couldn’t believe it when the suspects said they’d never heard of you. They planted the idea that you were connected to Colin, that you were in the same line of business, and that you and he had big plans for the future. So when Radecki starts to check you out – and he will check you out, make no mistake about that – you’ll show up as a name that people have heard of. The fact that nobody knows you face to face is something you can work to your advantage. It makes you look as if you’re a completely clean operator, like Radecki himself.’

Morgan had been right about that at least. She was sure Radecki was making those first calls right now. And she had a trump card to play later this evening that should tip the balance and get him as interested in her as a potential business partner as he was clearly intrigued by her as a woman.

Tadeusz was gone for the whole of the second interval, not returning until ten minutes into the third act. Carol deliberately didn’t turn round when he came back, pretending to be entirely absorbed in the music. As the opera drew to a close, Carol wondered if Radecki was seeing parallels between the action on stage and what was happening to him this evening. There was the dying vixen, killed more by accident than design. And there was the gamekeeper, confronted with one of the vixen’s cubs, which he recognizes as the spitting image of her mother. Was all this provoking resonances for him? She could only hope so. The more her resemblance to Katerina was hammered home, the better her chances of success.

As the audience burst into their final round of applause, he pulled his chair forward so it was in line with hers. He leaned close to her. She smelled the faint tang of cigar smoke and the complex notes of an expensive cologne. ‘It has been interesting to meet you. Even though I still don’t understand what you were talking about.’