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suitcase was
missing.
    “Her dresses are gone. Her underwear, too.”
    Frank felt weak.
    “You should never have told her she couldn’t see
him.”
    “Don’t worry, love.”
    “Look what you’ve done!”
    “I’ll find her.”
    o         
o          o
    THE BOY’S ADDRESS WAS A TERRACE in Saffron Hill.
Right in the middle of the Italian enclave. Early risers wandered around
anxiously. Men would have been pulled out of their beds last night, taken away
and locked up. Anti-Italian graffiti had been daubed on the walls of buildings.
Windows had been put through.
    Frank parked the Wolsley and got out. He walked up
to the house, kicked the door down and went inside.
      An old
matron––the boy’s mother, probably––screamed. Frank pushed her aside and took
the stairs two at a time.
      Joseph
Costello was in bed. Frank threw the covers aside, grabbed him by the throat
and tipped him onto the floor, naked, face down. He put his knee into the small
of his back and pressed his weight down so that bones cracked.
      “Jesus
Christ, that hurts!”
      “Where’s
Eve?”
      “What?”
      “Where’s
Eve?”
      “I don’t
know.”
      Frank
pressed down harder on Costello’s back and yanked his wrist up towards his
shoulder blades. Costello yelped. “Where’s Eve?”
      Costello
whimpered, the words coming out fast and high-pitched. “I don’t know where she
is.”
      Frank pulled
a finger right back, close to snapping it. “And I won’t ask again. I don’t
believe you. Where’s Eve?”
       “I
swear on my life, I bloody swear it, I don’t know where she is. She came around
here. This morning, bloody early.”
      “How long
ago?”
      “A couple of
hours ago.”
      “What did
she say?”
      “That you
told her we couldn’t see each other no more. She said you’d had a barney. She
had a suitcase, said she wanted to run away with me. I told her that wasn’t a
good idea. You’re a policeman, for Christ’s sake, it’s not like we could just
disappear.”
      “Keep
going.”
      “I said what
you said was probably for the best. I told her we ought to stop seeing each
other.”
      “And this
was when?”
      “An hour
ago?”
      Frank ducked
his head and hissed straight into Costello’s ear. “You better not be lying.”
      “I swear I’m
not.”
      Frank went
back down to the car. He drove up and down, then turned off the main road and
traced a path around the criss-crossed thicket of side-streets. It was still
early: a horse-drawn milk-float rattled along the kerb and a handful of
pedestrians went about their business. Frank feathered the accelerator,
crawling the car up and down, staring into the faces of the people passing by.
They looked at him nervously, probably making him as Old Bill.
      There was no
sign of her.
      He turned
the car and headed back towards home.

  9
    CHARLIE REACHED THE SIGN OVER the pavement of Berwick
Street: Bloom’s Sausages. A Jewish business: smoke oven in the basement,
snack-bar on the ground floor, dressmakers upstairs. A metal urn held gallons
of tea, a hob curled smoke into a blackened vent and the griddle spat burning
fat. A dozen stools were fixed to the floor around a central table and booths
were fitted to the wall, the red leather upholstery held together with
criss-crossed grids of black tape. A half-dozen punters were eating breakfast:
workers from the warehouses, blokes off the markets. Plates full of kosher
smoked meat hash, challah toast, shakshuka, pickled cabbage, diced cucumber and
tomatoes.
      Nerves: he
knew what he had decided to do would be unpopular; with the men at the nick,
with his father, with Frank. Tough––there was nothing else he could do. It was
this or the Labour Exchange. A difficult conversation, a couple of months lying
low––it’d be worth it. If he played his cards right, he stood to do more than
just keep his job.
      Bloom’s was
on the other side of Regent Street to the