‘It was entirely unintentional. Well, don’t you have an answer?’

‘No, but I have a theory. It won’t make you happy.’

‘I haven’t been happy since Reagan was president,’ said Holt, ‘and I wasn’t even very happy then.’

Ross pushed his coffee cup aside and laid his hands flat on the table, like a man steeling himself to speak, or perhaps to rise and depart, never to return.

‘It’s the timing of the contact that concerns me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Armitage was in regular communication with the Vuksans, but my instinct is that she was not. It would have been too perilous, and I can’t see any significant benefit accruing to her. But Armitage’s disintegration – her absence from work, her illness, psychosomatic or otherwise – appears to have commenced with the arrival in the Netherlands of Parker and his colleagues.’

‘So?’

‘So,’ said Ross, ‘some years ago a Serb named Andrej Buha was murdered in Amsterdam. Buha was also known as Timmerman – the “Timber Man”, or Carpenter, in Dutch – because of his fondness for crucifying Muslims and Croats during the Balkan conflicts. After the war, Buha signed on as an enforcer for elements within the Zemun crime syndicate, which by then had set up a base of operations in the Netherlands. The Zemuns were most upset when Buha was shot – not out of any great fondness for him, but because it made them appear vulnerable, and marked the beginning of a decline in their fortunes in that part of Europe which not even a great deal of bloodshed ever fully arrested.

‘Out of that wreckage emerged the Vuksans: two brothers, Spiridon and Radovan, supported by a cadre of loyal disciples. The Zemun clan is dangerous, but the Vuksans are much worse. The rumor is that for years they’d been working from within to assume control of the Zemun syndicate’s Dutch wing, and its dissolution was less a spontaneous collapse than a controlled explosion planned by the Vuksans and their allies.

‘The three principal Zemun figures in the Netherlands have all since been neutralized in one manner or another. One died of a heart attack in 2010 while awaiting trial on money laundering charges, a second was shot dead in Rotterdam in 2013 by an unknown assassin, and the third vanished in Serbia shortly before the ascent of the Vuksans, and is now assumed to be getting in touch with nature from six feet below ground. Whatever the Vuksans’ degree of involvement in any or all of these misfortunes, it left the way clear for them to consolidate a base of operations in Amsterdam.