They flew not into Amsterdam but into Brussels. Louis and Angel had been with Parker at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport when Armitage came to meet them, which meant that their images were on record and might well remain connected to the investigation into the legat’s death. Louis didn’t know how much cleaning up the FBI and its confederates had managed in the Netherlands, but he wasn’t about to bet his liberty on the assumption that it included erasing video images obtained from airport security footage, or advising Dutch law enforcement that the men photographed with Armitage in Amsterdam should no longer be regarded as persons of interest.

They passed through Belgian immigration without incident, helped by the fact that they were traveling on clean US passports under names only marginally different from their own. The passports had cost Louis a lot of money, and had deliberately been kept unused, and therefore untainted, in case of the necessity of sudden flight from the authorities. Now he and Angel were burning these identities not on their own behalf but that of friends. They had no regrets about this.

They collected their luggage and passed through the terminal building to the sidewalk. A light drizzle was falling on a world that bore only a superficial resemblance to their own, for even the air smelled different here. They caught an airport shuttle bus to the Van Der Valk Hotel on Culliganlaan, but did not check in. Instead they walked to the parking lot, where an eight-year-old midnight-blue BMW stood waiting. As they approached, the trunk popped open. They placed their bags inside, closed the trunk, and got in the car, Louis in the front passenger seat, Angel behind him. The driver greeted them.

‘I would say welcome back,’ said Hendricksen, ‘but it seems inappropriate under the circumstances.’

The three men drove to Amsterdam without stopping, Angel napping on and off in the back seat. His recent brush with cancer (no, more than a brush: a head-on collision) had left him with less bowel, more gray hairs, and pain lines on his forehead and beside his eyes. Louis watched him in the rearview mirror as he slept, and thought he looked as though he was suffering, even in repose.

This man, this beloved, infuriating man.

At Louis’s insistence, Hendricksen once again went through the circumstances of his discovery of the bodies, step-by-step. He’d had the foresight to use his cell phone to document the scene before the police arrived, and these pictures he’d printed out and placed in a plastic folder for Louis’s use.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any point in warning you about the contents?’ said Hendricksen.