Krasic looked less than his usual imperturbable self. ‘It’s bloody strange, that’s what it is.’ He walked over to a set of shelves where three photographs of Katerina were displayed in silver frames. ‘I finally managed to get some information about the motorbike.’

Tadeusz experienced a convulsion in his stomach, a strange turbulence that seemed to rearrange his internal organs. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. ‘You have a name?’

‘No, nothing that straightforward. Our man went back and talked again to the teenage boy who recognized the bike as a BMW. The kid was really enthusiastic. He kept offering to have hypnosis, to see if he could come up with any more details.’

‘And?’

‘It took a little while to get the session organized, but eventually, he got some woman to come along and put the boy into a trance. And the kid came up with quite a bit more detail.’

‘Such as?’ Tadeusz was leaning forward now, eager as a hound with a scent in his nostrils.

‘Like, he noticed that you couldn’t read the number plate because it was all smudged with mud. He said there was something funny about the number plate. He couldn’t be any more clear than that, but he was very definite that there was something wrong.’ Krasic turned away from the images of Katerina and sat down on the sofa. ‘And he was able to describe the bike much better than he had before. Stuff like the shape of the exhausts, that sort of bollocks. Anyway, our man wrote it all down. Then he got on to BMW and asked what model of bike this matched up with. And this is where it gets very fucking strange.’

Tadeusz drummed his fingers on the wall. ‘Strange how?’

‘According to BMW, the description our man gave them didn’t fit any bike they’ve ever made for sale in Germany. So, our man thinks it’s all been a fucking total waste of time, getting this kid under the influence and picking his brain. Then the man from BMW calls him back.’

‘Christ, Darko, get on with it,’ Tadeusz growled.

‘All right, all right, I’m getting there. The BMW guy had gone and checked with their special projects people and it turns out they did once make a bike that fits the description. It was a limited edition of three hundred and fifty high-performance bikes. Export only. They sold it in the UK and Scandinavia. And get this – almost all the bikes were sold to law enforcement. For traffic cops and special ops.’

Tadeusz looked bewildered. ‘What? That doesn’t make any sense.’