Something intangible triggered off his outsize sense of caution. He crossed the road and walked past his hideout without so much as giving the building a second glance. It was three days after Snigger’s visit and the square was in its mid-afternoon peaceful period. The slight young man with long side-whiskers who leant against the railings around the dusty patch of grass looked nothing like a policeman, even to Jacobs. Probably there were fifty such loungers at that moment in London, all reading their newspapers and minding their own business. But a second after seeing him, Paul looked up at the fourth-floor windows and saw that his bathroom curtains were not hanging exactly true. He may have left them like that, he thought, but it was unlikely. He was a man of obsessive tidiness, both in his business and criminal ventures and in his personal ways. He suddenly felt convinced that someone had been into the flat since he was last there – and he had no caretaker or cleaning woman. He crossed the road and walked within a few inches of the waiting man, who took not the slightest notice of him.
