“It’s an offense not to keep this on while you’re in the building,” said the man as he watched Petrovitch clip it around his wrist. “Offense as in five years and a ten-thousand-euro fine.”

“Is that all?” said Petrovitch.

“We can choose to shoot you.” His gaze left Petrovitch and slid onto Chain. “He’s all yours.”

“You’re a humorless bastard, George. Give the kid a break.” Chain took Petrovitch by the arm and pulled him away toward the lifts. “Nothing else in that bag I need to know about, is there?”

“Apart from the hole where someone tried to cut me a new zhopu, no.”

While they waited, Chain inspected the damage. “What did they use?”

“A clear plastic knife. Behind the screen, too.”

“Perspex. Covert weapon of choice at the moment.” The lift doors shuddered apart. “Get in, and we can have our little chat.”

Petrovitch and Chain rode the lift to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor until they reached a door marked “DI H. Chain SCD6.” Petrovitch hadn’t seen another soul the entire time. The place was a ghost ship, adrift in the heart of the Metrozone.

Despite his disquiet, he dropped gratefully into a leather chair opposite Chain’s desk, and watched without comment as the detective busied himself with the domestic chore of making proper coffee.

“I like you,” said Chain, once the water had started gargling noisily through the machine. “So I’ll tell you how the conversation with Marchenkho went.”

“Marchenkho? The organitskaya boss?”

“I’ve got him on speed dial. Now Marchenkho might be a vodka-soused old villain who models himself on Stalin, but we go back a long way, so he takes my calls. I tell him that two of his lieutenants are in the mortuary, having been scraped off the steps of a church, and guess what?”

“He already knows?”

“He already knows.” Chain went to the window and peered past the vertical blinds at the face of the glass monolith being erected opposite. “But he’s not apologizing. Marchenkho apologizes a lot, especially when he doesn’t mean it, so I guess he’s livid that his carefully planned, once-in-a-lifetime chance at taking Oshicora’s daughter hasn’t worked out.”

“This isn’t sounding good,” said Petrovitch, slumping further down.

“I mention that I’d talked to some of the witnesses. That I can link all the innocent bystanders gunned down by those two idiot slabs of Ukrainian pork directly to him.” Chain ambled back to the coffee pot, which hadn’t finished, and opened up a packet of nicotine patches lying on the table. “He doesn’t like that.”

“Does that mean the hired help screwed up?”