‘Do you think Viktor is an ex-soldier, like the other man?’

‘He don’t look like soldier to me. Gangster. One day one of the men in the apartment say it not right Viktor take everything. Viktor hit him with heavy piece of wood. Beat him bad. Next day the man gone. Viktor say he send him back to Ukraine and keep his money.’ The memory of the event seemed to disturb Slavko further; he stole another glance back at the door the African had left wider open. ‘I go now. I don’t know nothing else.’

‘The address …’ Maria ordered. ‘Give me the address of your apartment.’ Seeing Slavko’s alarm she held her hands up in a placatory gesture. ‘Don’t worry, no one will know anything. I’m not going to visit your apartment or send other police or the immigration people. I just want to see what Viktor looks like. That’s all. You’ve got to trust me, Slavko.’

Again Slavko hesitated, then gave Maria an address in the Chorweiler part of the city. She tried to remember where it was from the maps of Cologne she had sought to memorise.

Slavko went back into the kitchen. Two other Slavic types looked up from their work and eyed Maria suspiciously through the open door. As she walked away, Maria could still see the fear in Slavko’s eyes; his timidity and his hungry gaunt look. Most of all she thought about how she had given him assurances; how she had told him to trust her. Just like she had told Nadja, the young prostitute in Hamburg, to trust her. Just before Nadja disappeared.

CHAPTER FOUR

21–25 January

1.

Buslenko had arranged for the team to assemble at the hunting lodge on the Monday afternoon. He himself had arrived in Korostyshev two days early. Buslenko had been born in Korostyshev and, since it was a hundred and ten kilometres west of the capital, it was far enough away from Kiev for him to feel reasonably satisfied that he could carry out a secure pre-mission briefing. The city lay under a blanket of thick crisp snow as if the buildings were dust-sheeted furniture waiting for summer visitors. The sane inhabitants of the city were indoors or traversed Chervona Plosha with definite purpose: dark bustling smudges over the Plaza’s white expanse. But Buslenko did manage to find a pirog vendor who had been enterprising or mad enough to set up his paraffin-heated stall for the occasional passer-by. Pirog was bread baked with meat inside, and Korostyshev pirog was famous throughout Ukraine.

Buslenko wandered down between the naked chestnut trees to the War Memorial. Behind the obelisk stood a row of sculpted granite commemorative stones, each carved with the face of the officer whom it honoured. He had come here as a child and his father had explained that these were the men who had died saving Ukraine from the Germans. Fourteen thousand had lost their lives defending the city. The young Taras Buslenko had been hypnotised by the remarkably detailed faces, by the concept of being a defender of Ukraine, just like Cossack Mamay. He had been much older when his father had gone on to explain that many more had also died in Korostyshev in nineteen-nineteen, unsuccessfully defending Ukraine against the Bolsheviks. There were no memorials for them.