The great seductress wanted out of the game. But it was too late. Ladoux was convinced she was a German spy, however ridiculous that was. So, too, were the British. For Mata Hari, everything in her tangled life was unravelling dangerously. She went to Vittel and had a blissful interlude in the spa town with her Russian. On her return to Paris, Ladoux sent her on her first mission - to German-occupied Belgium where she said an ex-lover could steer her into the arms of the German military governor. But Belgium proved impossible to reach and she ended up in Spain. There, she turned her charms on a German captain, an intelligence officer named Kalle, and stretched out on a chaise longue as he told her secrets about German manoeuvres in North Africa. This information she triumphantly passed on to Ladoux, believing she was doing his bidding, earning the million francs he had promised her. Instead, she had fallen into his trap. Her meetings with Kalle would be turned against her, twisted to claim that she was handing over French secrets to the enemy rather than teasing out German ones. On February 10, 1917, a warrant for her arrest was signed by the French war minister. Three days later, police officers knocked on the door of her hotel room and found her eating breakfast in a lace-trimmed dressing gown. She was not, as wild rumours around Paris soon claimed, naked. At the Palais de Justice she faced the investigating magistrate, Pierre Bouchardon. "From the very first interview, I had the intuition that she was a person in the pay of our enemies," he wrote later. "I had but one thought - to unmask her." The process was under way that would lead her unfairly but inexorably to her execution. It did not seem to matter that no one had the least bit of evidence against her. Nor could anyone point to a single document, plan or secret that she passed to the Germans. Suspicion, envy and the prejudices of small-minded men would triumph. Only 30 years after her death would one of her prosecutors concede the truth - "there wasn't enough evidence to flog a cat".