Krasic arrived at Tadeusz’s apartment shortly after eight with a bag of fresh pastries from the Turkish bakery on the corner of Karl Marx Allee nearest to his apartment. While his boss brewed the coffee, he tipped the contents of the bag on to a plate and absently picked up the crumbs on the tip of a licked forefinger. ‘She’s a dark horse, this Caroline Jackson,’ he said. ‘Nobody seems to know much about her. They’ve heard the name, but not many people have ever met her face to face. I talked again to that dealer that Kramer put you on to. He says he met her first about six years ago, when she was doing some dodgy property dealing in Norwich.’

‘What sort of dodgy property dealing?’ Tadeusz poured the coffee into cups and carried them across to the table. ‘Stop eating the crumbs, Darko, you’re not a peasant any more,’ he added affectionately.

Krasic sat down and took a gulp of the scalding coffee. The heat didn’t seem to bother him. ‘She got a tip about a planned supermarket development that involved knocking down some old houses. Some of the owners didn’t want to sell to her at the rock-bottom prices she was offering, so she used the traditional methods to persuade them.’

‘Violence?’ Tadeusz asked, reaching for a crescent studded with toasted sesame seeds.

‘Only as a last resort. More general domestic terrorism. You know. Break the car windows. Dogshit through the letter box. Funeral wreaths on the doorstep. Taxis arriving every twenty minutes all through the night. She was extremely imaginative, by all accounts. Anyway, they all sold in the end except for one old lady who was adamant that she’d been born there and she was going to die there. Well, she was adamant until she came home from the shops one day and found her cat nailed to the front door.’

Tadeusz sucked his breath in through his teeth. ‘Ruthless. I like that in a woman,’ he said, grinning. ‘I take it she made a killing selling the land to the supermarket?’

‘Kramer’s mate reckons she must have cleared about a quarter of a mil. She used it as seed money for more property deals. She always keeps her own hands clean, though. Does everything at one remove, he says. And she’s not involved in the drugs trade at all. He offered to cut her in on a deal once, but she said she didn’t like being in hock to the kind of gangsters he was hanging with. He’s heard she’s got something going up on an old American base out in the middle of nowhere, but he’s got no idea what it is.’

‘Well, that checks out.’ Tadeusz brushed the crumbs from his mouth with a linen napkin and reached across the table for his cigar case. ‘What about personally? What’s her background?’