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around.”
    Her rebuke stung him. It was so unfair. He took his hand away quickly, as if he had received an electric shock. “Your choice, not mine.” He paused. “Why did you want to meet me today?”
    “I need to talk to you, Enzo. There’s stuff we have to discuss.” There was a coldness now, in her tone.
    Even as he moved imperceptibly away, he knew that she would pick up his body language, the psychologist’s eye detecting all his
micro signes
. It annoyed him that he should be so easily read. “I’m listening.”
    But she shook her head. “Not now. Not like this. What I have to say is far too important to squeeze in between a glass of wine and a dash for a train.” She abandoned her Perrier and stood up. “Let me know when you’re in town again, and I’ll apply for an audience.”
    And with a swirl of her coat she was gone, leaving Enzo to sigh in exasperation and pick up the check.

Chapter Six
    Île de Groix, Brittany, France, October 28, 2009
    Enzo gazed from the window of the
gare maritime
across a grey expanse of water toward a dock where container ships were lined up in serried rows, tall cranes breaking low cloud. The rain was so fine it was almost a mist. In Scotland Enzo would have called it a
smirr
. The wet, the cold, the brooding and bruised skies, all were reminiscent of his native country. He should have felt at home. Instead, he felt miserable. And a little guilty. If only by association.
    Lorient was a dull town, characterised by the unimaginative postwar architecture of the 1950s. It had once been a thriving port on the Breton coast, a destination for the fleet of the French East India Company bringing goods from the Orient. But the Germans had commandeered it as a base for U-boats employed to attack allied convoys in the Atlantic. Over four hellish weeks in the winter of ’43, allied bombers had completely destroyed the town. Enzo had read somewhere that thousands of French civilians had been killed during the raids.
    The irony was that the heavily fortified submarine base had survived intact. It was now a tourist attraction.
    As he walked with the other passengers down the ramp to the jetty and the ferry beyond, the wind tugged at his jacket, blowing stinging rain into his face, and he hurried up studded metal stairs to the warmth of the passenger deck to find a seat. Rain smeared the view across to the distant Larmor-Plage, where the German commander, Karl Dönitz, had installed his headquarters. From there he had no doubt watched in awe as sixty thousand incendiary bombs fell on the city, his own private fireworks display.
    The water in the bay was choppy, the colour of pewter, topped by occasional flashes of white. Demented seagulls wheeled and screeched overhead, like scraps of paper blowing in the wind. As the ferry sounded its horn and chugged slowly toward the defensive outer walls of the harbour, Enzo could see the formidable concrete construction at Keroman that had housed the U-boats, dark and sinister still on this most inhospitable of days.
    He glanced around him, at the faces of his fellow passengers. Pale Celtic faces, buried in books, or glowering under skipped hats and anorak hoods. Island faces, shaped by race and climate, indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the Scottish west coast, sharing a common heritage, and a kinship that transcended language and national borders.
    It was about halfway across the strait when he realised that each time he turned his head, other heads dipped into magazines, and faces swivelled to look from windows. And he was struck by the strange and uncomfortable sensation that people were looking at him. He was not unused to the curious stares of the French. A tall man, big built, with his dark hair and silver streak pulled back in a ponytail, he cut an unusual figure among the slighter-built, Mediterranean races of the south. But here, among fellow Celts, he had not expected to feel so conspicuous. And yet, no doubt about it, surreptitious