I went to the red room’s door, held my breath, and listened. I could hear nothing but silence, but I didn’t doubt that they were probably talking about me; I’d given the Englishmen a great deal to discuss. And even if they didn’t believe a word of it, at least I’d managed to upset Anne French. That alone would have been worth the effort. After a while I lay down on the floor by the window and closed my sore eyes. I’m not sure how long I slept but it was still dark when I awoke and for several pleasant minutes I stayed there with no knowledge of who or where I was. According to Betty Cornell’s Popularity Guide, you should always be yourself, but a lifetime’s experience had taught me differently. With my background, being yourself can easily get you killed. Minutes passed and I got up and made a token effort to push the shutters again, but they were just as unyielding as they’d been before. So I walked back to the radiator and managed to find what was left of the water they’d given me earlier. I drank it and returned to the door and listened. This time something was different. The house remained silent but now I felt a cool draft of air on my feet and when I dropped down onto my stomach to peer under the doorway I felt it on my face, too. A door was wide open somewhere. The front door perhaps. And an old prisoner’s instinct told me that if the front door was open then maybe another was, too. I stood up, grasped the brass handle, turned it gently, and pulled. The red room door was unlocked and opened with barely a creak. At the end of a long, unlit corridor I’d paid little attention to earlier, the main door was standing wide open. I waited for several long, frigid moments to see if someone came in, but I had a strong feeling that no one would and that the British had gone. I walked to the front door as quietly as I could and stepped outside onto the terrace, into the overgrown front garden, still half expecting that someone would emerge from the shadows and hit me, or worse, put a bullet in me. But nothing happened except I learned where I was. The house was situated somewhere on the slopes of Mont Boron, just to the south of Villefranche and overlooking Nice, to the west. It was a typical three-story bastide with peeling yellow walls and blue shutters. There were no lights on in any of the windows and no cars parked on the drive. The place looked deserted, almost derelict. For a moment I considered making a run for it down the graveled drive. Instead, curiosity got the better of me and I went back inside the big house. The room with the cobwebbed chandelier was deserted now except that my shoes lay on the table, next to my watch, a packet of cigarettes and some matches, and a set of small keys on a ring. I put on my shoes, grabbed the keys, and started to explore. Gradually it became even more obvious that the house was empty. I even risked switching on some lights, and it wasn’t long before I found Harold Hennig, chained to a radiator in one of the larger bedrooms up on the first floor like some forgotten prisoner in the Bastille. I decided that if I looked anything like him I was in bad shape. He was unshaven and had a blue eye the size of a beetroot from when he’d been slugged.