22

Jean Picaro was relieved to be rid of the girl. There had been something uncomfortable about the whole affair – as if it were tainted in some way. Devil-struck. It didn’t make sense to leave a woman tied up and doped like that, in a sealed room, stuck up on top of a table. What sort of a maniac would do a thing like that?

Privately, Picaro had made up his mind that this would be his last ever job. His wife and son were secure, his business, on the surface at least, was legal – or if it wasn’t strictly legal, at least it didn’t involve breaking into people’s houses and kidnapping sex victims.

He was too old for the action stuff now. Didn’t crave it. He’d experienced enough of that to last him a lifetime, and he didn’t want any more. His conscience was clean. He could have left the woman behind, but he hadn’t. While that didn’t make him a hero, it didn’t make him a total villain either.

He saw the stationary Land Rover first. Then he caught a flash of movement from behind the tree. He was already travelling faster than was strictly wise, thanks to his relief at getting away from the flic.

As a Foreign Legionnaire, Jean Picaro had spent the formative years of his life being trained to look out for – and to counter – ambushes. And he was still hyper-keyed up from the break-in, and angry about the way the woman had been treated, with its revocations of what had happened to the boy at La Santé.

He didn’t even need to think.

As the man raised his shotgun, Picaro wrenched the steering wheel over to the left and headed straight for him.

The man’s mouth dropped open in shock. He didn’t even have time to fire off a single shell.

Picaro’s car careened off a ridge of earth and struck the man mid-thigh. The man’s face and chest slammed down onto the bonnet, the shotgun skittering off to one side.

Picaro backed up and made a second pass over the man’s body. No point leaving witnesses. This one wasn’t going to blab to the flics if Picaro could possibly avoid it. There would be no more prison for him.

Leaving the engine running, Picaro stepped out of the car. He gathered up the Mossberg, checked it for damage, and threw it onto the back seat.

Then, without so much as a backwards glance at his victim, he got into his car, manhandled it back onto the road, and headed off in the direction of Ramatuelle.