Frend summoned a taxi to pick him up from the shadow of the silos. The app suggested it would be a twenty-minute wait, and he suddenly felt very exposed. Damn Kauffmann and her cemetery theatrics, and damn her, too, for making him doubt the wisdom of staying in Vienna once the Vuksans were gone. A bus was idling at the stop, and the driver was putting his phone away in preparation for departure. Frend decided to cancel the taxi. He did not wish to be out here with only birds and the dead for company. He took a seat behind the driver and was the sole passenger for the journey back to the tram terminus at Kaiser-Ebersdorfer Strasse, the trip offering him only a glum vista of warehouses, fields, and farm equipment. This was not Frend’s Austria. It was the preserve of those who ate lunch standing up.

He distracted himself from the landscape with his phone, where he learned of Hendricksen’s murder. So absorbed had he been by the presumed surveillance of the previous evening, and the impending meeting with Kauffmann, that he had failed to keep up with the news, which was unlike him. He could have lied to himself and pretended that he had not known how the Vuksans would react to Hendricksen’s involvement, but such dissembling was beneath him. He would have preferred them to have gone about their business in a less gruesome and more private manner, though. The Vuksans appeared intent on making an already precarious position more unstable still.

The burner phone he used to remain in contact with the Vuksans beeped as he stepped from the bus and waved down a passing taxi. The message was a short, simple text: We need to talk. It was, Frend considered, a little late for that. The time to talk would have been before Ilić and the girl – because it was surely their handiwork – had set about torturing Hendricksen in the bathroom of a city hotel before leaving the dying man to be discovered by some unfortunate chambermaid or duty manager.

It was as Frend climbed into the taxi that he realized the implication of one element of the story: the dying man. Did Hendricksen remain conscious for long enough to supply information to whomever had found him? More to the point, how much had he shared about Frend with whomever had engaged him to make the trip to Belgrade to begin with?

Which was when Frend noticed a new email in his in-box, containing a video attachment. When he opened the message, three lines of text greeted him.

We have your daughter.

Wait for a call.

Breathe a word, and she dies.

Angel was waiting for Louis in the doorway of the Oswald & Kalb restaurant when the latter emerged from Kaffee Alt Wein.