‘I have his number,’ said Angel, ‘and the first of the videos of his daughter. I’ll send the footage this afternoon, and a text warning him to resist the temptation to go running to the police – not that I think he will, not with his client list, but you never know.’

‘No,’ said Louis, ‘you never do. On second thoughts, hold off on sending the first video until tomorrow. Let’s give the police twenty-four hours to lose some of their interest in you, because I can’t handle Frend alone. Once Frend has the video, we’ll leave him to stew for a few hours.’

He stared at the girl on the wall, and she stared back. Louis thought he might have to ask for a change of room.

‘I wonder how the Vuksans found Hendricksen,’ he said.

‘Bad luck.’

‘Maybe we brought it with us.’

‘We always seem to have some to spare,’ said Angel. He paused. ‘I liked Hendricksen.’

‘I liked him too.’

‘We’ll make them pay, won’t we?’

‘Yes,’ said Louis. ‘Every one of them.’

Chapter LXI

The French prison system was, by general consent, a mess: a collection of overcrowded, underfunded institutions, with a significant Muslim population that was ripe for radicalization. Baba Diop had spent time behind bars in his native Senegal, most notably at the notorious Rebeuss Prison in Dakar, but even by those standards Fleury-Mérogis, Europe’s largest penal institution, was a grim environment in which to be incarcerated. If Diop was seeking straws at which to clutch, he had at least avoided La Santé. A cousin of his had spent three years there before emerging convinced that the place was both cursed and haunted, a consequence, he believed, of having provided a home for the guillotine until the 1970s.

Diop had passed the days since his capture at Gare de Lyon in a series of French police interview rooms. This had not been a happy experience, not least because he had proven unable to provide his interrogators with the intelligence they required, namely any deep insight into the channels through which Islamic terrorists were making their way into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. All Baba Diop could tell the French was that he had been hired by Aleksej Marković to escort two Syrians – whose names he had never learned – from Port-Vendres to Paris. He had done similar work for Marković in the past, although on those occasions he had been shepherding human cargo from the Serbian border to Paris.