Snapping on his phone light again, Roy ran back towards the drawing room across the hall from the dining room. The room that was hung with photographs of past guests, including all the many famous names. And there, beneath the photographs of Peter Sellers and the footballer George Best, was one of a thuggish man in his fifties. He had almost no neck, short gelled hair and he stood with his arm around the woman with the thick eyebrows. A scrawled message beneath – ‘What a gem we’ve discovered!’ – followed by the date.

With a chill, he now knew for sure who they both were – how had he missed it earlier? Probably too struck by the other famous faces.

And he knew that distinctive voice.

He remembered all too clearly where he had last heard it. In Courtroom One of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales – the Old Bailey.

And Cleo had been right when she said she did not believe French was the woman’s first language. It wasn’t – it was English. And she wasn’t Monique, she was Monica.

He looked at the date. They must have stayed here just four months ago.

Curtis Esmonde.

One of the nastiest villains he’d locked up in twenty years of being a copper. Esmonde’s speciality, together with his evil sidekick, Monica Stokes, had been terrorizing helpless elderly people in their homes. They would torture them to get their pin numbers and clear out their bank accounts, sometimes even cutting off fingers to get their rings. If any resisted, they would beat them unconscious.

Staring at the image, Roy remembered the case so well. And, of course, he would. It had been his detective work that had led to their arrest, and which had caught the eye of his then Chief Constable, leading to his fast-track promotion. First to Detective Inspector and soon after to Detective Chief Inspector and his move to the Major Crime Team.

He remembered taking the witness stand in the scary grandeur of the Old Bailey, as a young DS. He had told the judge that in all his six years as a police officer, Esmonde was the vilest piece of low-life he had ever met. As was his partner, Monica Stokes. They’d seen themselves as a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, but in reality they were nothing more than a pair of cold-blooded scumbags.

How on earth were they here now?

How could they be here?

There was a window to his left. Snapping off the torch, he ran over to it. But as he reached it, a powerful beam shone in, dazzling him. Something hard and metallic tapped on the windowpane. He could just make out the twin muzzles of a double-barrelled shotgun. He threw himself down below the sill an instant before there was a massive explosion, followed a moment later by another, as glass showered down on him.

Jesus.