The Bulgarian newspaper Trud reported that Roma from the Nadezhda settlement protested against recent cuts in electricity. Supplies had been cut to Romani settlements throughout Bulgaria for several hours at a time, every four or five hours. The measure had been taken by the National Electrical Company because of payment arrears by Romani inhabitants. The protest was sparked by an incident involving a ten-year-old Romani girl, who was burned when her clothes caught fire from a wood stove being used in the absence of electricity. The girl’s injuries were made worse by the fact that, because there had been no running water in the settlement for eight months, there was no available water to put out the fire.

Finally, Cooper found a website that gave currency exchange rates and looked up how much seven thousand leva were worth. He imagined it wouldn’t be very much in sterling. But the conversion made it to be more than two thousand four hundred pounds. Surely that couldn’t be right. No one could ‘run off’ with over two and a half thousand pounds worth of sweets and chocolate bars.

Then he saw a footnote to the conversion table. In 1999, the Bulgarian lev had been revalued at the rate of one thousand old lev to one new lev. Well, that was a different story. That meant the Romani man had got himself killed for stolen confectionery worth two pounds forty-five pence.

Oh, well. It was none of his business. Cooper looked across to see what Fry was doing, and peered curiously at some stapled sheets of paper on her desk.

‘What’s this?’

‘An application form.’

‘Oh, I see. For Europol.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What happened to SOCA?’

‘It’s just another possibility to think about.’

Cooper picked up the form and flicked through it, wondering why she’d left it where he was certain to see it. He stopped at the qualifications section. Fry was a graduate, so that was OK. And she had the relevant law enforcement experience. But there was a problem here, wasn’t there?

‘How many languages do you speak, Diane?’ he asked.

‘Languages? Are you kidding?’

‘It says here candidates must be fluent in at least two languages of the European Union, including English.’

‘Oh, damnation.’

Cooper looked down, seeing that she was genuinely taken aback.

‘Sergeant Kotsev will qualify when Bulgaria joins the EU. But I think you’re going to have to do some studying if you want to get into Europol. Which language do you fancy, then?’

‘I don’t have time to learn languages.’

‘Didn’t you see that in the conditions of employment?’

‘They didn’t make it clear enough,’ said Fry.

Cooper decided to leave the subject alone. ‘You know, Henry Lowther said that one of the reasons they trusted Rose Shepherd was because she was British, like them.’