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the Atlee and stamps his feet, to keep warm, as he waits for a fragile-looking fellow, probably from Poland or Russia. Josie had said he had a ‘tiny voice, like a girl’s’.
    The locks clatter back and the handle turns; the door swings violently open and Staffe finds himself looking into the broad-vested chest of a brute. The vest sports a gold skull on a Chelsea blue background with HEADHUNTERS writ large. Staffe casts his eyes slowly up, taking a step away as he does. The man has a neck like a 30 K dumb-bell weight; a face like a 20 K. His scalp is shiny, the nose broken and the eyes red, raw, glistening with grief.
    ‘You police?’ he says.
    ‘Are you … Bobo?’ says Staffe, off guard.
    ‘She’s dead? Tell me no. Tell me this not so.’ He talks in fits, starts again with the sobbing, gasping his words out like a child who has fallen badly, is still in shock. ‘I kill the fuck. I kill the fuck.’
    ‘Who’s dead, Bobo?’ You don’t often get moments like this, when the bad guys are on the back foot, when the strong are weak, so Staffe walks up to the brute, crossing the threshold to the flat and saying, in his softest voice, raising it a pitch – as close as he can to Bobo’s falsetto, ‘Tell me about Tchancov, Bobo. I can help.’ Staffe reaches up with his hands and puts them on Bobo’s shoulders, like laying hands on weathered gritstone.
    Bobo has scars all over his head: some deep and long, some fine. It is like the surface of an old and neglected windscreen. ‘My Lena,’ he mumbles.
    ‘Lena who, Bobo?’
    ‘My Elena,’ he says, the words petering to nothing and Staffe sees Bobo’s head come towards him. Staffe closes his eyes, raises his fists, readies himself to fracture his knuckles on this man of rock.
    But Pulford shouts out, ‘No! Sir, no!’
    Staffe feels a great weight on him and, opening his eyes, has Bobo’s face in his, the great weight of the man pushing him down.
    ‘He’s passed out, sir,’ says Pulford, on his haunches, trying to hold Bobo up. ‘Get hold of him, sir,’ he wheezes. ‘He’s crushing me.’
    Staffe puts his arms as far around Bobo as he can, gripping him under one arm and pulling him off Pulford. He tries to lower him gently to the ground, but Bobo crumples to the concrete, makes a sound like a side of beef slapped onto a butcher’s block.
     
    Staffe and Pulford look down at him, then at each other.
    ‘What the hell do we do now?’ says Pulford.
    Staffe peers into the flat. ‘You watch him.’
    ‘You sure, sir?’
    ‘Sometimes you’ve got to take sweets from the baby.’
    ‘Some bastard baby, sir.’
    The Atlee is rough, but Bobo’s living-diner is painted a rich, high-glaze plum, with a long, glass dining table and high-backed chairs with pale pink silk skirted covers. The kitchen is simply one wall of black units and steel appliances. It is sleek and Bobo, for sure, keeps it spick and span. Above the stereo is a large black-and-white photograph of the beautiful woman. Elena. She is laughing and her fair hair is blowing back. She crinkles her eyes against the sun and looks beyond the photographer, as if seeing something unintended. Behind her, white horses in a high, breaking sea. At the corners of her mouth, the smile fragments.
    There is a notepad on the marble counter. The top sheet says ‘ BCTPEчA V. B ’ Staffe lifts it daintily with the very tips of his thumb and forefinger, as if the sound of the paper might wake the dead. The next sheet is blank.
    ‘V,’ he whispers, to himself. As in Vassily. Vassily, as in Tchancov. ‘VB?’
     
    He glances back down the hallway where Pulford looks anxiously up from Bobo, gesturing insistently for Staffe to come, be done with his trespassing, but Staffe sees there are two more rooms to inspect.
    The first is the bathroom, boasting nothing untoward in its mirrored cabinet, save two gramme bags of what he assumes to be coke. There are two bottles of prescription drugs: one an antihistamine, the other