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was arriving, but the police made no attempt to interrupt its departure.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The journey downhill was even more rapid than the journey up, but it still gave Canny time to think.
    Had he noticed anyone in the casino who might be the spotter for the thief? No.
    Could it possibly be anyone he knew? Certainly not.
    In another life, Stevie Larkin might easily have become a petty criminal, but in this one he was a star; he probably didn’t know what Canny knew about the casino’s security, but that wasn’t an issue.
    Could the cab driver have been involved? No. He would have recognized the bag for what it was, and would have known that it must contain a tidy sum, but he certainly did know what Stevie didn’t about the kind of resources Meurdon could mobilize.
    It had to be someone far less obtrusive than the driver or any of the players at the table, and far more reckless—almost certainly outsiders; almost certainly nomads. What kind of accent had the thief had? Impossible to tell, from just two words, just as it was impossible to be sure whether it had been a man or a woman.
    It wasn’t until all these thoughts had run helter-skelter through his head that Canny began to curse himself, silently, for being such a fool. Even if he had done the right thing in letting the thief take the money instead of chancing the Kilcannon luck in some kind of lunatic defensive exercise, he had been a fool. He had said nothing; he had observed no more than was superficially obvious. If he had only persuaded the mugger to issue a further warning or instruction, he might have had a far better chance of identifying his country of origin. If he had only looked harder, more searchingly, at the cut of the black clothing, or the dimensions of the automatic pistol, he might have identified some telling detail that would assist in the hunt.
    Henri Meurdon wouldn’t come back to him for more information, of course—Meurdon had his pride, and his own brand of serene confidence—but it wouldn’t have done the least harm to his own image had he been able to take out his mobile phone now, call the casino, and say: “Oh, by the way, there’s one crucial detail I didn’t mention before....”
    Mobile phones were banned from the casino, of course, but the spotter must have had one. Whether he had used it inside or waited until he was clear, he must have moved with suspicious rapidity to a place where he couldn’t be observed. Meurdon would surely pick him up on the CC-TV tape—and the casino’s system was state-of-the-art, far more capable of facilitating an identification than anything to be found in an all-night petrol station, or even a bank. If the spotter didn’t get out of Monte very quickly, the Union Corse would be on to him in a matter of hours—and he and his companions would have to travel fast and far to exceed their eager reach.
    Was it conceivable, Canny wondered briefly, that the spotter might be making his escape by the same route as he was? Lissa Lo couldn’t possibly be involved in the robbery, but she must have had her own minders at the casino, who would be with her still. She was too valuable a property, with or without her winnings, to be allowed to wander around the Monte Carlo waterfront at four o’clock in the morning without protection. It didn’t seem likely that her bodyguards would cross that kind of line, though—or that they’d have had some kind of set-up in place, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
    It took a while, but he finally arrived at the logical end-point of the postmortem, which was that he should never have placed the three fatal bets.
    Don’t bring down the lightning . Not, at least, for an item of cheap showmanship like the one he’d pulled. Even a midfielder like Stevie Larkin had been able to see that it was a stupid symbolic gesture—a silly farewell to a childish lifestyle, inspired by the fact that