Broken Homes

17

Dog fighters don’t see themselves as criminals at all. They see themselves as upholders of a fine rural tradition that dates back centuries and has been unfairly penalised by sanctimonious urbanites. They don’t fight their dogs for the money — although the betting can be brisk and the stud fees lucrative — they fight them for honour, for ego and for the sheer thrill of the combat. The rules of a proper dog fight were codified in the 1830s. The ring is always a square with sides twelve feet long and two feet six inches high, and there’s normally an old carpet laid in the bottom to soak up the blood. It’s really very distinctive and makes them easy to recognise, especially when you’re kneeling in the middle of one with your hands on your head.

The ring was in the old barn, which was much better maintained than the new concrete one and had racks of empty dog cages along each wall. That explained why it had been so securely locked.

They had me and Lesley facing the barn door while behind us stood at least two of the combat trouser brigade — both armed with shotguns. Varvara Sidorovna knew our capabilities and wasn’t taking any chances. We’d been there long enough for my knees to start seizing up and for our guards to forget we were listening.

‘This is fucking stupid,’ said Max, who had repeated this statement at regular intervals since we’d arrived here. By a process of elimination I’d decided this was the round pink-faced guy, and we knew his name was Max because his partner had used it the last time he’d told him to shut the fuck up. I was pretty certain his partner was the squinty-eyed guy and I knew his name was Barry because Max had used it when he told him to fuck off.

‘Shut up,’ said Barry.

‘Well, it is fucking stupid,’ said Max. ‘We should be well out of here by now.’

‘Not until the Comrade Major says it’s time to go.’

‘Fuck the fucking Comrade Major,’ mumbled Max.

‘I wouldn’t try if I was you,’ said Barry. ‘She’ll freeze your balls off.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Max. ‘Seriously frigid.’

‘Look,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s bad enough that you’re holding us prisoner, but can we at least dispense with the fucking sexism?’

‘You’re a mouthy cunt, aren’t you?’ said Barry.

‘What I am is a police officer,’ said Lesley. ‘And if anything happens to me or my partner here I personally guarantee that you won’t survive the subsequent arrest.’

‘What?’ asked Barry.

‘Damage us,’ I said, ‘and our colleagues will fuck you up big time.’

‘Shut up,’ said Max.

‘Yeah,’ said Barry. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Not them, you dickhead,’ said Max. ‘You shut the fuck up as well.’

My stomach was churning. I didn’t want to die in a dog fighting ring. In Essex, for god’s sake, what would my dad say? And my mum would be so pissed off with me. Better all-round if I avoided the whole dying thing altogether.

‘You know, after today you two are going to be disposable,’ said Lesley.

‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘We tracked you here through the van and we reported in before we came here.’

‘She gets you to top us,’ said Lesley. ‘And then she leaves you hanging out for the police.’

My throat was dry and I had to cough before I could say, ‘That’s a bit too risky. More likely she zaps them and then burns down this place with them in it.’

‘People are always setting themselves on fire when they do arson,’ said Lesley. ‘They’ll think you murdered us and then did yourselves in by accident. Case closed, and the Comrade Major gets away scot free.’

There was a long pause and then Max said, ‘We’re not listening to you, you know.’

But I thought they might be.

I think we might have been there for another hour after that. Barry was complaining that he wanted a slash, my knees were killing me and I had shooting pains in my shoulders from keeping my hands on my head. I did wonder, given how long Max and Barry had been standing there, whether they might be equally stiff and unresponsive.

There was nothing in my forward field of view that I could grab with impello and the bloody Comrade Major Varvara Sidorovna had instructed Max and Barry to randomly move around behind my back and stay separated so that I couldn’t just blindly smack them down. Nothing I could do was going to be faster than their trigger fingers — however stiff they got.

Still, when the barn doors opened in front of me I did my best to clear my mind and be ready for any opportunity.

It was Varvara Sidorovna carrying, I couldn’t help noticing, two plastic jerry cans. Judging from the way they weighed on her shoulders they must have been nearly full and I didn’t think it was with water. By the time I’d registered that, she’d walked briskly out of our line of sight.

‘Okay,’ she said from behind us. ‘In a couple of minutes I want you two to shoot these two in the head and douse everything with petrol.’ She spoke English with the deliberately regionless accent of a BBC Radio 4 presenter.

Being held at gunpoint is a police nightmare and you always tell yourself that should push come to shove and some vile scrote is about to actually shoot you, you’d at least make a play. Go for the gun, duck, attack the bastard with your bare hands. I mean after all, at that instant, what would you have to lose? But shove had arrived and I found I couldn’t make myself move, not even a little bit. It was shameful. I had found the upper limit of my courage.

Fortunately for me, there is no known lower limit to human stupidity.

‘They’re police,’ said Barry, just as Varvara Sidorovna had crossed back into view and was heading for the barn doors. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’

Varvara Sidorovna turned and her face was a picture. I’m having a bad day, it said. And now there’s you — thinking!

‘Listen, Varvara,’ said Lesley. ‘You really want to talk to your boss before you do anything hasty.’

I was still trying to make myself move and practically trembling with frustration. It’s not like I’ve had trouble doing stupid things before, I thought. Why am I finding it so hard now?

‘Varvara, call your boss,’ said Lesley, her voice tight.

‘How do we know you won’t get rid of us once we’ve done your dirty work?’ asked Barry.

‘I still need you to carry the gear when we get back to London,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.

‘Yeah,’ said Max. ‘But-’

‘Don’t make me come back there and do it myself,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ said Max. ‘But I don’t think-’

Varvara Sidorovna threw up a hand to silence Max and cocked her head to one side — listening. Then I heard it too. A car engine drawing closer, tyres crunching in the gravelly verge of the farmyard. The engine cut out and there was a creak as a handbrake was applied.

I felt Lesley tense beside me — no modern handbrake sounded like that.

There was the sound of a car door opening and then slamming shut.

Varvara Sidorovna gestured sharply to get Max and Barry’s attention, pointed two fingers at her eyes, and then at me and Lesley. Then she took a couple of cat-quiet steps to the side of the barn doors and I saw her breathe slowly in and exhale smoothly. Her face became calm, still — expectant.

There was a long silence, I could hear Max and Barry breathing through their mouths and shifting from foot to foot and the tik tik tik of something small and clawed making its way down the line of cages — a mouse? Then suddenly there was a brutal crack like a giant stamping on a plate and daylight spewed through a sudden hole in the front wall of the barn — just above the double doors. Dust exploded into the air to hang in a roiling cloud — gleaming in the sunlight. Then the front of the barn literally unzipped — bricks fountaining up and away in two diverging streams and the doors abruptly ripped off their hinges and went spinning off through the air like something from a catastrophic decompression.

Suddenly I could see the farmyard outside, brightly lit by afternoon sunlight, bricks falling out of the clear blue sky like rain, dust puffing up as they landed, thudding, on the track.

And, having made sure everyone was paying attention to the front, Nightingale walked in through the back door.

The first we knew of it was when Max and Barry came flying headfirst into the dog-fighting ring, landing right beside us. I had a brief glimpse of their shotguns scything through the air at head height — aiming right for where Varvara Sidorovna would have been standing if she hadn’t jumped and rolled to the left.

Max turned to look at me and there was a horrible tearing sensation in my shoulder as I swung my fist down to slam into his face. The pain actually made me scream, but it was totally worth it. He slammed back onto the filthy carpet and stayed ducked down there, as it suddenly got extremely dangerous above waist height. Across Max’s quivering bulk I saw that Lesley had Barry in a headlock — his face red, his mouth open and gasping.

I’d expected ice again. But Varvara Sidorovna threw a brace of fireballs across the barn, which exploded amongst the ranked dog cages. There was a rattling thud as fragments smacked into the wooden side of the ring.

Lesley shouted my name and jerked her head at the gaping hole in the front of the barn. I only realised later that Nightingale had done that deliberately to make it easier for me and Lesley to clear the area.

I glared at Max.

‘We’re all going out the front,’ I hissed. ‘But if you give me any aggro I’ll just leave you here. Understand?’

Max nodded, his eyes wide with fear. I was really tempted to smack him in the face again, but common sense prevailed.

‘One,’ called Lesley. ‘Two. .’

A ball of fire the size of my fist ripped through the air over my head and curved away to explode against a ceiling joint.

‘Fuck it!’ yelled Lesley. ‘Go, go, go.’

So we went, went, went. I kept my eyes on the sunlit farmyard and, hauling Max behind me, I lurched to my feet and ran for it. Outside, the sunlight blinded me but I kept going until I bounced painfully off the Range Rover. I turned as Lesley, pushing Barry ahead of her, caught up with us.

The roof blew off the top of the barn. It didn’t explode. It lifted, almost intact, ten metres into the air before crashing back down and breaking its back. Grey slate tiles cascaded off the slopes and crackled as they hit the ground.

We manhandled Max and Barry around the other side of the Range Rover and pushed them onto their faces in the mud. We didn’t have our cuffs, so we made them put their hands on their heads and hoped they weren’t stupid enough to move. Crouching, I took a careful peek over the bonnet just in time to see the roof of the barn collapse in on itself.

It went strangely quiet as a wave of brown brick dust rolled out across the farmyard, starting to flatten out as it reached the Range Rover. A solitary brick, falling from who knows how high up, thudded belatedly onto the ground.

I heard tentative birdsong beginning again, and the wind rustling in the tops of the hedgerow.

‘Do you think we should. .’ I nodded in the direction of the barn.

‘Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘From a purely operational point of view I believe that would be a really fucking bad idea.’

I noticed then that Nightingale’s Jag, which I swore I’d heard pull up in front of the barn was nowhere to be seen.

I felt a tremor through the soles of my shoes.

A crack. And then the unmistakable sound of breaking sheet glass made me crane my neck to get a view of the bungalow. Left of the backdoor, where I judged the kitchen to be, a picture window had shattered. Chunks of glass fell outwards into the yard. Even as I watched, whorls of frost spread out from the empty frame, the surrounding pebble-dash cracking and flaking and popping off to expose the red brick underneath. Probably improving the value of the house, I thought.

A whimper caused me to check on our prisoners. I finally realised that we were missing one, the guy whose nose I’d broken with his own shotgun. I told Lesley.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Do you think we should go look for him?’

There was a series of thuds from inside the bungalow, then a crash as an old-fashioned white-enamelled gas cooker exited via the window and cartwheeled jangling across the yard.

‘Not just at the moment,’ said Lesley.

A blue 15kg Calor Gas Bottle fell out of the sky, bounced once off the ground in front of the bungalow and came down again with a loud boing sound.

Me and Lesley hunched down and tried to make sure that every bit of our bodies had some Range Rover between them and the gas bottle.

I was just about to suggest that it might be empty, when it blew up — something that Frank Caffrey swears shouldn’t happen spontaneously under any circumstances.

I managed to bang my head against the wheel arch in startlement, the Range Rover’s windows cracked and a chunk of blue metal casing whirred over my head, over the fence, around the yard and off into the field beyond.

I heard a woman scream with rage and frustration and then grunt like a tennis player. The ground trembled again, and what was left of the Range Rover’s windows blew out and showered us with crystal fragments — something I’d always thought couldn’t happen with safety glass.

There was a rapid series of solid thuds like a boxer would make taking out his frustration on a punch bag.

Then silence and then Varvara Sidorovna said, ‘Enough, enough, I surrender.’

I risked a look. She was squatting on her heels in the middle of the farmyard, her face cast down and her hands raised palms forward. Her natty suit had lost an arm and the pale pink blouse underneath was torn and bloodied.

We stood up for a better look, and saw that the bungalow had been cut in two as if someone had driven a freight train through it. Nightingale advanced on Varvara Sidorovna from its remains.

He was wearing, I noticed, a charcoal-grey lightweight worsted suit in a classic sixties cut which he must have acquired about the same time he bought the Jag. It was, I thought queasily, a suit my dad would have been glad to wear. It looked completely pristine and as he approached he shot his cuffs and checked the links — a completely unconscious gesture.

‘Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina,’ he said. ‘I am arresting you for murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder, aiding and abetting before, during and after the fact and no doubt a great many other crimes.’ He hesitated and I realised he couldn’t remember the modern caution.

‘You do not have to say anything,’ shouted Lesley. ‘But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

I cautiously picked my way through the debris strewn across the yard. Nightingale pulled a set of modern handcuffs and tossed them to me. I helped Varvara Sidorovna to her feet and asked her to put her hands behind her back and slipped the cuffs on.

‘For you, Major,’ I said, ‘the war is over.’

Varvara gave me an exasperated look and then sighed.

‘If only that were true,’ she said.

At which point the Essex Police arrived with the fire brigade just behind them and tried to arrest us all, on the very sound policing principle of arrest everyone and sort out the guilty at the station. There was a certain amount of waving of warrant cards, calls to superiors and veiled threats that what had happened to the farm buildings could easily be repeated if someone didn’t starting taking us seriously, thank you very much. They did take Max and Barry off our hands and a couple of hours later they found our third suspect, whose name turned out to be Danny Bates, five kilometres away, having run as soon as the fireballs started flying. Making him possibly the brightest there.

We all ended up at Chelmsford nick, because not only did it have a brand new custody suite but it was also a short walk from Essex Police Headquarters. Which allowed the Local Response Team to quickly shove their problems all the way up to ACPO rank and then scarper back to Epping.

Essex’s ACPO contingent, awed perhaps by Nightingale’s immaculate suit or, more likely, being equally desperate to punt the whole thing back to the Met, agreed to let us conduct our interviews on our own terms once the arrests had all been regularised. They gave us a windowless office to work in where me and Lesley promptly fell asleep. Nightingale woke us up with coffee, assorted fruit, cheese sandwiches and an interview strategy.

We were going to start with Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina before she could recover her poise. And me and Lesley would do it, so we could escalate up to Nightingale if necessary.

Nightingale eyed our less-than-enthusiastic faces.

‘I’ll ensure that more coffee is laid on,’ he said.

‘Can I have a taser as well?’ asked Lesley, but Nightingale said no.

Varvara Sidorovna sat on the other side of the interview desk dressed in the cheap white T-shirt and grey jogging bottoms that have become the uniform of shame now that we’re no longer allowed to put our suspects in paper suits. There were no tapes in the double cassette recorder and while Essex Police might be taping the output of the CCTV camera mounted in a red perspex bubble above our heads, this was officially an unofficial interview. This had become our standard procedure, a chance for us and our interviewee to discuss issues that neither of us particularly wanted on the record.

‘Can you state your full name please?’ asked Lesley.

‘Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina.’

‘And your date of birth?’

‘November the twenty-first 1921,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘In Kryukovo, Russia.’ Which I found, when I looked it up afterwards, was now part of the sprawling Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and, incidentally, the closest the Germans got to the capital during the Second World War.

‘Did you serve in the Soviet Army during the war?’ I asked.

‘365th Special Regiment. I was a lieutenant,’ she said, ‘not a major. Is the Nightingale going to show his face at some point?’

‘He’s about,’ said Lesley.

‘I’d heard rumours about him, but I’d always thought they were exaggerations. Man, he’s something.’ Varvara Sidorovna grinned and suddenly looked eighteen and fresh off the wheat fields. ‘I’ve never met anyone that fast with that much control before. No wonder the fascists put a price on his head.’

It’s important when interviewing a suspect to stay focused on what’s broadly relevant to the investigation, but even so it took a great deal of self-control not to ask about that. I suspected that should we manage to bang her up in Holloway prison, Lieutenant Tamonina was going to have Professor Postmartin as a frequent visitor.

Who would no doubt also ask for more detail about her training, her wartime operations and her capture near Brynsk in January 1943.

‘I didn’t tell them who I was,’ she said. ‘The fascists had orders to shoot us on sight, so I pretended to be a medic.’ Even then she barely survived the initial abuse at the hands of her captors — we didn’t ask for details and she didn’t volunteer any. She didn’t dare use magic to escape because by that point in the war the Germans had started to deploy their own practitioners to counter the Night Witches.

‘They had these men they called werewolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Who were said to be able to sniff out anyone using the craft.’

‘Were they really werewolves,’ I asked. ‘Shape-shifters?’

‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We had intelligence reports that their capabilities were real. But I never encountered one, so I don’t know if they were truly men who became wolves or not.’

She was drafted as slave labour as part of Organisation Todt and found herself, much to her own surprise, in the Channel Islands. ‘They said we were on British soil,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘For the first few days I thought Britain had been invaded, but one of the other prisoners explained that these were British islands that were closer to France than England.’ There were a couple of werewolves on the Island of Alderney, where the concentration camps were, but there were none on Guernsey where she was transferred in order to be worked to death building gun emplacements. But as soon as they were clear of the harbour, she knocked down one of the guards at the end of the marching column and escaped in the confusion.

‘It’s not like the Great Escape or Colditz,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t hang around setting up escape committees or any of that nonsense. Any moment of the day some pig-faced guard might just shoot you in the head for the joy of it — you took your opportunities as soon as you could.’

Varvara Sidorovna cheerfully admitted that she’d been totally prepared to off some locals to make good her escape, but fortunately for everyone concerned, except the Germans, she was spotted by an old lady and guided into the arms of the resistance.

‘They called me Vivien,’ she said, after the actress, and provided her with false papers. ‘And taught me to speak English with my beautiful proper English accent.’

After Liberation in 1945 she made her way to London with her new English name and identity and parlayed that into an official identity in the general post-war confusion. She said she got married in 1952 but refused to give any details about her husband.

‘But in any case he died in 1963,’ she said.

They lived in a semi off the High Street in Wimbledon. There were no children.

‘You’re very well preserved for a woman in her mid-nineties,’ said Lesley.

‘You noticed,’ said Varvara Sidorovna turning her head and striking a pose.

‘Do you know why?’ asked Lesley.

Varvara Sidorovna leant forward. ‘I discovered the elixir of youth,’ she said. ‘In an Oxfam shop in Twickenham.’

‘Are you sure it wasn’t Help the Aged?’ I asked, about a millisecond before Lesley could — she booted me under the table in revenge.

Varvara Sidorovna waited patiently for us to behave ourselves.

‘Was it something you did to yourself?’ asked Lesley.

‘God, no,’ she said. ‘One day I was getting older and the next day I wasn’t.’

So Nightingale wasn’t the only one, I thought.

‘Can you remember roughly what year it happened?’ I asked.

‘August Bank Holiday 1966,’ she said.

‘That’s a very precise date,’ said Lesley.

‘I have a very clear memory of it happening,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. She’d still been living in the house in Wimbledon and she’d been hanging up washing in her back garden.

‘It was as if someone had opened a door into summer,’ she said. ‘I felt suddenly filled up with’ — she waved her hands around vaguely — ‘honey, sunlight, flowers. When I went to bed I dreamt in Russian for the first time in years. I wanted to go dancing and I wanted to get laid really, really badly. The next day there were thunderstorms.’

‘So you knew you were getting younger?’ asked Lesley.

Varvara Sidorovna laughed. ‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I thought I was having the menopause.’ When it became obvious she wasn’t, she decided to take advantage.

‘I went out dancing and got laid and very, very drunk,’ she said. And then she moved to Notting Hill, experimented with LSD and listened to far too much progressive rock than was good for her. ‘Take my advice and never try casting a spell while listening to Hawkwind,’ she said. ‘Or when you’re on acid.’

‘How were you earning a living?’ asked Lesley.

‘You could drift in those days, there were squats and communes and groovy friends. People were always setting up co-operatives, bands and experimental theatre groups. I worked at Time Out magazine although that might have been later on — there’s a couple of years I’ve lost track of, 1975 in particular.’

‘When did you meet Albert Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked — the original Faceless Man had dropped out of sight in the early 1970s so it was possible they might have met then.

‘Much later,’ she said. ‘That was in 2003.’

Varvara Sidorovna was already firmly back in the demi-monde by that time.

‘You two must know what it’s like by now,’ she said. ‘Once you know it exists it’s always there in the corner of your eye. Plus I wanted to see if it was possible to go home, to Russia.’ She knew that most of her old wartime comrades would be dead, those that hadn’t been killed by the Germans were most likely liquidated by Stalin. She was a little surprised to find that the Nauchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Neobychnyh Yavleniy, the Scientific Research Institute for Unusual Phenomena had been revived and that they even had agents operating in the West.

Me and Lesley nodded sagely as if we knew all about this, while I imagined Nightingale adding the fact to his rather long list of things he should have known about but didn’t.

But SRIUP being active in the Soviet Union could only mean that practitioners were still being tracked, and Varvara Sidorovna had no intention of coming under anyone’s control ever again, not even the motherland’s. So she spent the 1980s and 90s rediscovering her skills and picking up new ones. ‘Here and there,’ she said. ‘You’d be amazed.’

‘And how did you get involved with Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked, because I was beginning to think that Varvara Sidorovna was messing us about.

‘It was a job,’ she said. One not all that different from those she’d been doing since the late 1970s. ‘People like you and I straddle the mundane and the demi-monde. We make excellent middle men and go-betweens,’ she said, but refused to give details.

‘Client confidentiality,’ she said. ‘You understand.’

Obviously she didn’t consider the Faceless Man, mark two, as a client any more because she was quite happy to explain how he’d started employing her for various jobs, most of them dull. ‘Finding people and things in the demi-monde,’ she said and we made a note to track back later and get a list. She was adamant that she’d never met the Faceless Man in person. Everything had been arranged over the phone.

‘I was the one that found old Albert for him,’ she said proudly. ‘Took me six months — he’d been warehoused in a private care home outside Oxford.’ It had been the Faceless Man who arranged the flat in Shakespeare Tower. Varvara Sidorovna took advantage of its location to spend more time at the theatre.

‘And you did that for, what, nine years?’ asked Lesley.

‘Not full time,’ she said. ‘I had a couple of properly trained care nurses to look after the poor soul much of the time, and in the first couple of years he spent most of the day out.’

‘Out where?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘A very quiet young woman used to pick him up in the morning and return him in the afternoon.’

‘Do you know where she took him?’ asked Lesley, and as she did I wrote Pale Lady = no driver = FM near BARBICAN? On my pad where she could see it.

‘I was specifically being paid not to ask questions,’ said Varvara Sidorovna.

She hadn’t known about the demon-trap planted in the flat, but it didn’t surprise her in the least. She’d moved Albert out of the place as soon our visit had finished and she suspected the device had been there as much to keep him under control as it was to catch someone like Nightingale or us.

We asked her about Robert Weil and his body-dumping activities, but she denied any knowledge. Did she know why the Faceless Man might want to shoot a woman in the face with a shotgun?

‘If he wanted to delay identification,’ she said. ‘Or perhaps to cover up work he was doing on her face.’

I felt Lesley stiffen beside me.

‘What kind of work?’ she asked.

‘You’ve met some of his menagerie,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Perhaps he’s looking to create new creatures.’

Officially unofficial the interview might have been, but Varvara Sidorovna wasn’t going to incriminate herself beyond what she thought we already knew. She claimed to know nothing of County Gard and laughed out loud at the idea she might have offed Richard Dewsbury, the drug dealer, by inducing a breakfast heart attack.

‘Not my style, darling,’ she said.

Nor was she forthcoming about what exactly they’d been up to with their dogs at the Essex Farm. When we asked her what she’d been doing there, all she’d tell us was, ‘Tying up loose ends. Imagine my surprise when I found you two poking your nose in.’

I glanced at Lesley and she shrugged. It was obvious to us that the tying up of loose ends, had we not intervened, probably would have proved fatal for Barry, Max and Danny. We questioned her about that, and she asked whether the world would really be worse off without them.

‘Did you know about the wood nymph?’ I asked.

‘What wood nymph?’

‘The one that lived at the base of Skygarden Tower,’ I said.

‘I know a great many things,’ she said. ‘You’d be-’

‘Did you know about Sky?’

I felt Lesley’s hand on my arm, and I realised I’d half risen from my chair. A white Styrofoam coffee cup rolled around on the table between us — fortunately empty. Varvara Sidorovna had flinched back and was giving me a wary look.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

I took a breath and sat myself down.

‘I’m going check on that,’ I said. ‘If you do know, then it would be better to tell me now.’

Varvara Sidorovna looked to Lesley, who gazed impassively back.

‘Somehow I doubt that,’ she said, and then held up her hand. ‘I swear I did not know. But it does explain what Max and Barry were burbling about when I picked them up this morning.’

‘You seem very relaxed,’ said Lesley. ‘Considering the severity of the charges against you.’

‘I have a longer perspective on life than you do,’ she said. ‘I was held prisoner by the SS — do you really think the Met frightens me? Or even the Isaacs? I love that nickname, by the way. “The Isaacs.” So very quaint. You must know that no conventional prison could hold me if I chose to escape. You’re not about to summarily execute me. And it would be an enormous waste of your time to guard me. No, sooner or later, we shall come to an arrangement. And in any case, I may yet prove useful.’

‘But you were going to kill us,’ said Lesley. ‘Remember?’

‘If you’re afraid of wolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna, ‘don’t go to the woods.’