Assassin

28

On their first afternoon in Paris, they got Carver a suit for the wedding. The next morning Maddy went clothes shopping by herself. She said she wanted to give him the morning off. He tried to believe her. A voice in Carver's head told him Maddy wanted to get rid of him so she could meet a contact or speak to her handler, but he was determined not to let his paranoia wreck their trip. If he made himself live in the moment and not think about anything else, several hours at a time could go by without him wondering whether the woman next to him was lying with everything she said and did.

Carver hadn't brought a laptop with him, but there was a computer downstairs in the hotel lounge. He decided to log on to a few news sites and drink a cup of coffee while he worked out how to spend the morning.

The front page of The Times carried the usual mix of economic misery and political bluster. The only news that caught Carver's eye was the announcement that Lincoln Roberts was planning a flying visit to Bristol to speak at an anti-slavery conference. At the bottom of the story there was a link to a related feature. Its headline read: 'Pablo the sex-slave Pimpernel, and…'

Carver grinned: Pablo. It had been a while since he'd heard that name.

He clicked on the link and a page opened up with the full headline. The final words were, 'and a mysterious death in Dubai'.

Well, he could see why people were making that the number-one story. Sex, crime, death, an exotic location and a bloke with a funny name – what more could anyone want?

Carver started reading Jake Tolland's story. It described Lara's enslavement, her rape and her trafficking to Dubai. Then it followed her to a dingy nightclub, where she met an Englishman who was looking to buy a girl of his own. Through Lara's eyes, Tolland described the man. He was slim, not conventionally handsome, but attractive. He had dark hair and green eyes – strange green eyes, said Lara, though she could not describe what precisely was wrong or unusual about them.

By now, Carver was no longer reading for entertainment. As his eyes raced over the following paragraphs, the ache in the guts that he had felt when he first suspected Maddy – and that had hung around him, on and off, ever since – now gripped him more tightly than ever. His throat felt constricted. He felt a stab of pain in his jaw and only then noticed that he had been grinding his teeth so hard that his mouth was virtually clamped shut.

Tolland told how Pablo had freed Lara Dashian, given her money, told her to go to the women's shelter, and then disappeared entirely off the face of the earth. But Lara's pimp had been found shot to death in the hotel parking lot, and Tiger Dey – one of the masterminds of the people-trafficking trade in the whole Gulf region – had been taken to hospital hours later with a fatal attack of what appeared to be ricin poisoning.

'Do you know how it was administered?' Tolland had asked a senior Dubaian police officer.

'Not for certain, no,' the detective had admitted. 'But we believe that the killer may have hidden a small pellet of poison in a cocktail cherry. Mr Dey was very fond of them and ate several while he was in the club that night. We also have witnesses, including Miss Dashian, who testify that the man called Pablo gave Mr Dey a cherry. That may have been the way it was done.'

'But you cannot be certain?'

'No.'

'So you cannot build a definitive case against Pablo?'

'Not at this point,' said the policeman. And then Tolland described the cop as he stubbed out a cigarette, looked up at the reporter and said, 'But I will tell you one thing, Mr Tolland. I believe that this man is a cold-blooded killer, almost certainly a professional assassin. It is my opinion, and that of my superiors, that he represents a significant danger to the security of Dubai and its citizens. And it is my job to protect the people of Dubai. By whatever means necessary.'