The Grande Place was dominated on one side by the ornate splendour of the Town Hall, with its tower and tall tapering spire. It was an impressive square, the heart of the city, full of life and colour and gaiety. The old guild houses, medieval gabled buildings, lined the other three sides. Now they were fronted by souvenir shops, restaurants and cafés, though you could still tell which trades they had once represented; the boatmen’s guild house with its roof shaped like the stern of a seventeenth-century vessel; the archers’ house with its carved statue of St Sebastian holding a bow; the weigh-house with a pair of scales above a balcony supported by two figures.

Across the square, several workmen on ladders were washing down the walls of one of the houses, and repainting its gold decoration. Bannerman took it all in, enjoying it. The sun had lifted him and he felt almost relaxed for the first time in forty-eight hours. He might have been a tourist basking in the winter sun without a care in the world.

But now, as the sun rose higher, the shadow of the awning moved across the table and he felt the cold creep over him. He finished his coffee, then stood up and checked his watch. It was a little after ten. He dropped some francs in a saucer and stepped out across the square. His day seemed clearly mapped out for him. The press conference at the offices of the Judicial Police at eleven. Then his meeting with Tait at the office, and the funeral in the afternoon. And in the evening he would go and see Tania. He found himself thinking about the child often, and with an odd affection.

Then there was Jansen, and of course Lapointe. He would have to decide about them today. And there was some unfinished business with Palin. He thought, too, about Platt. It did not please him to have to think about Platt. For here he might be forced into an alliance. And he preferred to work alone. But on this, he would need someone who knew his way around.

II

There was a great expectancy in the conference room. Reporters and photographers, television crews, radio journalists with recorders slung over their shoulders. Television lights, and the pall of smoke that hung above it all, caught in sunlight that slanted through narrow windows along the back wall. Many of the journalists had been here on Sunday night, their numbers swelled now by newsmen who had arrived from all over the world.

Bannerman pushed his way through the crowd and found a seat. A uniformed gendarme stood by swing doors beyond the podium through which bureaucrats and their boss from the Ministry of Justice would shortly enter. A small, rotund figure plumped itself into the seat next to him.