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country.’
    ‘Darius A’Court is pay as you go, but one of the landlines is the Colonial Bankers’ Club.’
    ‘Is that it?’
    ‘The gold Nokia was bought in Dubai. It’s pay as you go and chipped. And there’s no correlation of the corpse with missing persons.’
    ‘Colonial Bankers. How pukka can you get?’ Staffe looks up at Markary’s apartment. He has had it five years, since he came over from Istanbul. He paid £ 1.5 million for it but that’s nothing compared to his house on the Bosporus and the nightclubs his wife still owns over there. She makes the Mayfair gang look nouveau riche. Some might think Markary a spiv, but his wife’s family has been lording it since the Ottoman empire came home to roost.
    Staffe starts the engine – the wise thing. The next time he fronts up to Markary, he’ll have evidence. ‘Let’s visit this Bobo.’
    Pulford’s Blackberry beeps with another message. ‘It’s Janine.’ He ruffles his hair and says, ‘The forensic archaeologist says your woman was East European – the cranium, the eyes. And the contents of her upper intestine.’
    ‘Lovely.’
    ‘Beetroot and herring bones. She had one of her teeth capped. A classy piece of dentistry, apparently. But no match so far.’
    ‘Tell Josie the victim was East European.’ He sees a woman at a window on the first floor. She has full lips and olive skin, the darkest eyes which appear to have smudged their mascara.
    *
    Josie hears the vibration before the ringtone. She looks at the gold Nokia. ‘The Carnival Is Over’ chimes up and she wishes Staffe was here.
    Bobo calling .
    Trying to calm herself, Josie turns on the interference track on the field recorder and places a tissue over the mouthpiece, clicks green.
    ‘Lena,’ says a man’s voice. He is foreign.
    Josie says nothing.
    ‘Lena, are you there? Hello!’ The man is agitated and sounds young. He says something Josie cannot decipher, presumably Russian or Polish.
    ‘It’s me,’ says Josie, softly, ironing out her vowels.
    He continues in a foreign tongue.
    Josie says, ‘In English, Bobo. You need to practice.’
    ‘Where are you?’ says Bobo.
     
    Rimmer comes into the room and she waves him away but he paces around her. ‘What are you doing?’ says Rimmer. ‘Is it for her?’
    ‘You come over, Lena. You come to me. I am worried. He knows,’ says Bobo.
    Josie checks the prompts Staffe gave her, says, ‘Who knows?’
    ‘Tchancov. You know.’
    She scribbles the name, her heart thudding. Rimmer puts the palm of a hand to his forehead.
    The phone has gone quiet and Bobo says, quieter, more circumspect. ‘Lena? … Lena, is this you?’
    Staffe said to trust her instincts, and she removes the tissue, turns off the interference, says, ‘Bobo? I’m sorry. This is not Lena.’
    ‘What happens?’ He immediately sounds more afraid.
    ‘Was Lena in danger, Bobo?’
    He cries out, like a baby. His breathing is heavy, irregular.
    ‘We are police. We can help you.’
    ‘They kill her?’
    ‘Who is they ?’
    He begins to wail.
    ‘Where does she live?’ says Josie, but all she can hear down the phone is a low sobbing. ‘Bobo? Bobo! What is her name? Her surname!’ But the phone clicks dead.
     
    Rimmer peers at her notes and sits down, says, ‘Tchancov?’
    Josie phones Staffe, says, ‘Bobo Bogdanovich just called her phone, sir.’
    ‘What did he say?’
    ‘She’s called Lena. He knew she was in some kind of danger. He mentioned someone called Tchancov. He said this Tchancov knew something.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘He broke down, sir. Cried like a baby.’
    ‘Did you tell him she was dead?’
    ‘He guessed it.’
    ‘He didn’t know already?’
    ‘I’d say not. Would he have called her if he knew that?’
    Staffe says, ‘A good ruse if he realised he had left her phone at the scene – with him trapped inside it.’
     
    Six

    Snow falls steadily on the city. Staffe knocks on the door of Bobo’s peeling, deck-access council flat on