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an antidepressant, Molaxin.
    ‘V,’ says Staffe, making his way into Bobo’s bedroom. He closes the door and drops to his knees, lifting up the valance. Under the bed is a folded-down rowing machine and some weights. Staffe looks in the drawers by the bedside and smiles to himself. Wrapped in black silk ribbon – a stack of letters written on thick, pale lilac paper – almost parchment. Luckily for them, Bobo is a romantic. And his girlfriend, according to the second sheet, is a girl called Elena. Was a girl called Elena. Staffe sits on the edge of the bed and begins to read, but the script is foreign, written in a long and beautiful hand.
    He knows that if he comes back for the letters, armed with a warrant and a translator, Bobo may well have disposed of them. So he looks at the dates and selects two, puts them in his pocket and begins to tie, but he hears a creak. The vast bulk of Bobo fills the bedroom doorway.
     
    ‘What the fuck,’ says Bobo, reaching towards Staffe who shuffles back on the bed, working out whether, if he can roll away from the first punch, he can get away. But Bobo, quicker than thought, flicks his fingers into Staffe’s throat.
    Staffe can’t breathe. He clutches at his neck, dropping the stack of letters.
    Bobo picks up the letters and kicks the door shut in the face of the advancing Pulford. ‘You read these letters?’ he sobs.
    Staffe can smell Bobo’s breath as he speaks. Fish and pickles and woe. ‘Elena had her own place. Where is it, Bobo? I have to know. If you save me time, it will help.’
    Bobo raises his hands to his head. He moans, ‘Livery, she calls it.’
    ‘Livery Buildings? On Cloth Fair?’ says Staffe.
    ‘Now you leave me.’
    ‘Do you work for Vassily Tchancov?’
    Bobo drops his hands. Despite his bulk, and the scars, Bobo’s face is washed over with fear. The blood drains from his face and he looks to the floor. He mumbles, ‘You go.’
    ‘Did Elena know any bankers?’
    ‘Go!’
    ‘She called the Colonial Bankers’ Club, the day … the day it happened.’
    ‘Leave me.’ His voice breaks down. Bobo looks up, as if it takes his last drop of strength, and he reaches for the bed. He sits, lets all his weight go, and curls up like a foetus.
    *
    ‘Just because Bobo called Elena and let us keep a couple of letters doesn’t mean he’s not a suspect, sir,’ says Pulford, sifting through the Companies House secure-access files on Vassily Tchancov’s declared businesses.
    ‘VB.’ Staffe’s finger rests in the margin of the page, next to VodBlu . The registered address is in Jersey. ‘You saw how much he loves her. He’s not our killer,’ he says, typing in VodBlu.com .
    ‘What if the foetus wasn’t his?’ says Pulford. ‘Perhaps you have to love somebody enough, to be able to kill them.’
    ‘Does this look like a crime of passion?’ says Staffe, looking at the ice bar’s homepage. He goes to the window and looks up towards Cloth Fair, trying to pick out Livery Buildings and Elena’s flat. ‘It seems that VodBlu is owned by a company registered in Jersey, run by somebody called Desai. It turns over nine million a year.’
    ‘We should go to Elena’s place,’ says Pulford.
    ‘Tchancov will soon get wind of our visit to Bobo. If we move quick, he might not know Elena’s dead.’
    ‘He’d know if he killed her.’
     
    ‘Why would he kill her?’
    ‘I don’t know, sir.’
    ‘So let’s go talk to him.’ Staffe tosses his car keys to Pulford and makes his way down through the building, scrolling through his phone menus to find the number of his old mucker, Smethurst – over at the Met. ‘We’ll keep Livery Buildings under our hat. I don’t want Rimmer rummaging through Elena’s life before we can.’
    Making his way down Leadengate’s dark corridors and winding stairwells, Staffe thinks of older times, when he was the young pup to Jessop and Smet. Pulford rushes ahead, takes the stairs two at a time and Staffe wonders whether his