It had been a dreary trip. The ferry from Dover to Ostend full of winter tourists heading for ski resorts in Germany and Switzerland and Austria. A girl with long dark hair and a careless laugh. Perhaps she would spend the cold winter nights in some ski lodge drinking schnapps with friends round a log fire. For she was sure to have friends. A girl like that. She had not noticed him sitting in a corner on a lower deck, listening uncomfortably to the innocent ramblings of an elderly German lady who remembered days in Paris after the war, and the death of her husband nine years earlier on holiday in Majorca. She had not been aware of his invasive presence as others always were, as maybe the girl had been and pretended not to notice. Kale had gone up on deck to escape the old lady’s innocence. There was no place for innocence in his life. It troubled him.

There had been few people on deck and it suited him better. White paintwork streaked with rust, the flaking varnish on the empty rows of wooden deck benches, the lifeboats that had never left their cradles. The cold, clean air had been good to breathe, the wind stiff in his face, the strange warmth of the sun on this unusually mild winter’s day. Seagulls cawed and wheeled overhead against the palest of blue skies. The wash of the sea was green in their wake, England having faded from sight, the Belgian coast not yet in view. He had remained there, huddled in his coat, a solitary figure among the empty deckchairs, away from the warmth below where children wailed and ran between the benches, where their parents drank duty-free spirits and smoked duty-free cigarettes, and young people laughed carelessly, like the girl, and talked earnestly about life. His exile from life, their life, was self-imposed, he thought with some satisfaction, and for always. That way he could be almost at peace with himself in his empty existence.

He finished his beer and left the café with all its staring eyes, turned hard left into the Rue Masui, and walked another hundred metres to the dark little hotel where he had booked a room. The streets were as familiar to him as if he had lived there all his life. Every area of operation in the city had been studied carefully on the town-plan map. Each street and alley he might use was painstakingly etched in his memory.

Kale dropped his passport on the reception desk and watched as the clerk took him in and then glanced at the document. It had been forged by an expert in London. A small, bespectacled jeweller near Leicester Square who was one of the few remaining artists of his profession. Utterly discreet. Kale would have trusted no one else.