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Chapters (45)
  1. The Man With No Face
  2. Also by
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. INTRODUCTION
  9. CHAPTER ONE
  10. CHAPTER TWO
  11. CHAPTER THREE
  12. CHAPTER FOUR
  13. CHAPTER FIVE
  14. CHAPTER SIX
  15. CHAPTER SEVEN
  16. CHAPTER EIGHT
  17. CHAPTER NINE
  18. CHAPTER TEN
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  24. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  25. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  26. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  27. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  37. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  42. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Bannerman shrugged. ‘Just pricking a few reporters to see if they bleed.’ He looked at the distraught Slater, a small man – five feet eight or nine – painfully thin, curly red hair and beard, an open-necked white shirt, its collar out over a faded blue denim jacket. And he relented a little. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m just a bit pissed off at being here at all. How about lunch?’

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Kale got his holdall down from the rack and pulled on his coat as the train braked coming into the Gare du Nord, drawing up alongside great long trolleys that stood on the platform piled high with mail bags. A sullen youth who had sat smoking Gauloises all the way from Ostend, and a fat ruddy-faced Belgian peasant woman whose knitting lay in a shapeless grey heap on her lap, both watched him curiously. He was a foreigner. They knew that, even though none of them had spoken through the hour and a half to Brussels when darkness had fallen over northern Belgium. A wordless communion had passed between the youth and the old woman, two Belgians in a railway carriage with this stranger who carried about him an air that was more than just foreign. Both felt something akin to relief when Kale slid the door open and stepped out into the corridor. A strange tension that had been a presence among them, like the clicking of the old woman’s needles or the impatient tap of the youth’s foot, seemed to blow away with the cold rush of air that swept into the carriage with the opening of the door. The old woman smiled at the youth, who shrugged, almost imperceptibly, and lit another Gauloise, turning his sullen stare out of the window.

Kale shivered in the cold night air and walked the length of the platform. He seemed to be the only passenger to alight here. A guard nodded and the railwayman at the barrier waved him through. Down steps into a shopping concourse and out through glass doors into a great empty marble hall, his footsteps echoing back at him. He followed a sign out into the Rue du Progrès and headed north along the dark, cobbled street past crumbling tenements with steel-shuttered windows and doors. A tram emerged from an underground tunnel that led to the prémétro and rumbled past below the railway line that ran along the top of the embankment. Three scruffy kids on bicycles raced past in the opposite direction.