Jake’s relieved. He didn’t know Dr Varma, but he’s still shocked by the news of his death, feels guilty about their encounter in the street. Bex will be even more upset. She liked Dr Varma. So did Kate. Bex has gone back to Wiltshire to relieve her neighbour of Stretch and sleep for a few hours before being on hand to help. It was an early start. He’s knackered too, knows he must keep going.

‘There’s more bad news, I’m afraid,’ Hart says. ‘Kate’s already in Brittany.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I wish I was.’

Hart explains how the Eurotunnel plan was a deliberate misdirection and that she flew out on a private helicopter from Battersea. Right under everyone’s noses.

‘No one was there to stop her?’ Jake asks incredulously.

He has already had his passport checked once in London. His face too, ironically. According to the investigative website he was trawling earlier for information on Rob, the Paris Eurostar terminal is one of only three places in France where the government allows facial-recognition cameras. The other two are Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports.

‘Stay safe,’ Hart says. ‘And keep in touch. We’ve flagged up Varma’s death with Europol – they’re putting out an arrest warrant for Gilmour Martin.’

After signing off with Hart, Jake calls up the investigative website again. He will tell Bex about Dr Varma in a while. It’s not the sort of news anyone wants to be woken up to hear. Dr Varma’s murder will soon be on the news and he needs to alert the website to the connection between Dr Varma and Rob. But then he sees a small story about a super recogniser who has gone missing in France. According to the report, she was part of a secret surveillance unit in Paris that had been set up to target the gilets jaunes, the yellow-vest protestors who’d been bringing Paris to a standstill in their calls for economic justice.

The story is full of indignation that such a unit even existed – further proof that France, champion of civil liberties, is becoming a Big Brother state – but Jake is more interested in the missing woman. She doesn’t look like Kate, but she’s of similar age and was the unit’s star super recogniser. And someone thinks they might have seen her after she disappeared – in Brittany.

95

Kate