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as he turned and left the bar.
    Highworth watched him go thinking, as he always did, that you can’t judge a man by his appearance. Richards looked ordinary. His suit was a middle of the range, off-the-peg number from a high street retailer. His shoes, tie and shirt were nondescript and even his face seemed to blend in with the surroundings. He looked middle aged, comfortable and harmless. If you met him for the first time and were asked to guess his occupation, you would probably say that he was an accountant or a sales manager for a multinational. But Highworth was in no doubt that he was the most dangerous man he had ever met. Not only was he a conduit into the murky world of contract killing, but he was also a very hard man himself. During one of their similar meetings a year ago, two local toughs, irritated by Highworth’s cut glass accent and obvious wealth, had deliberately pushed him over as he walked back from the bar with two glasses of wine. Highworth went sprawling, crashing into a table and spilling his wine over the occupants. As he looked round to see who’d pushed him, he saw Richards move in quickly and smash one of the men’s heads onto the bar so hard that the man collapsed with blood pouring from an open wound. The other man threw a massive punch but Richards rolled back on the balls of his feet, easily avoiding the blow. He then stepped quickly inside the man’s arm, turning as he did so to land a powerful elbow strike into the bigger man’s neck. The man hit the ground like a felled tree, struggling to breathe through a crushed trachea that only surgery would repair. Richards then walked calmly over to Highworth, helped him to his feet and quietly suggested that they try a different bar in a more upmarket part of town.

Chapter 5
    The assassin was now back in his flat in Edinburgh’s New Town. He liked the city and had been particularly pleased when he’d been able to buy the flat a few years ago. It had taken him months to find something suitable and this flat ticked all the boxes. It was in the centre of the city and was on the fourth floor of an old Georgian town house overlooking George Street. It had been sensitively renovated before he bought it, retaining many of the period features that he admired. It had high ceilings, large sash windows and polished wooden floors. It was furnished sparsely with rugs from his travels and a few antique chairs and tables that he hoped would appreciate in value. Original paintings from some of Edinburgh’s exceptional galleries adorned the walls, giving the flat an elegant feel. A casual visitor would note the mountain theme linking the pictures. A more knowledgeable eye would admire the two paintings by Alfred de Breanski Senior and the three by Richard Ansell. All five were painted in the late eighteen hundreds and, though not hugely valuable, each would fetch between ten to thirty thousand pounds at auction.
    The assassin sat at an old partners’ desk drinking black coffee and checking e-mails on his laptop. His eyes were drawn to one that he knew was from Richards. Though it looked like yet more spam offering Viagra at a reduced rate, the inclusion of the numbers four, six and nineteen in the e-mail’s title told him that he needed to read on. The e-mail having been sent on the seventh of the month, he read every seventh word in the main body of the message. The instructions were clear: ‘Stay at home. Urgent we meet. Will find you on Thu.’ The assassin didn’t reply. Richards would assume the message had been received and would track him down on Thursday. They had done this so many times before that both trusted the other implicitly.
    He finished his coffee, put on an old t-shirt and cotton shorts, laced up his trainers and left the flat. Ten minutes later he was running along the path that follows the Water of Leith on its journey from the centre of town to the sea. He was deep in thought. Leaving Spain