Petra looked up gratefully from her computer as The Shark barged into the squad room. Her head was a slow throb of red-eyed pain from too many hours staring at the screen. Her only break had been arranging the warrant for Tony. Late-night reading of the murder files followed by a morning of assimilating Carol’s reports and cross-referencing them with the existing files on Radecki had left her convinced she could no longer avoid a visit to the optician. This was it, then. The end of youth. First it would be reading glasses, then contact lenses, then she’d probably need a hip replacement. It all felt too grim to think about, so even The Shark was a welcome distraction.

‘Got any codeine?’ she demanded before he could open his mouth.

‘I’ve got better than codeine,’ he said. ‘I know where Marlene’s kid is.’ He stood there grinning, an overgrown child who knew he’d done the one thing that his mother would approve of.

Petra couldn’t stop her mouth falling open. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said.

The Shark was literally bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘No way, Petra. I’m telling you, I’ve found Tanja.’

‘Jesus, Shark, that’s amazing.’

‘It was your idea,’ he said, his words tumbling over each other. ‘You remember? You set me looking for Krasic’s contacts? Well, I eventually found this cousin, he’s got a pig farm on the outskirts of Oranienburg, his son Rado is one of Krasic’s gophers, apparently. So I went over there to check it out. Lo and behold, they’ve got the girl!’

‘You didn’t go near the house, did you?’ Petra felt a moment’s panic. He wasn’t that much of a liability, was he?

‘No, of course I didn’t. I was going to go out there last night, then I thought it’d make more sense to wait till morning. Daylight, you know? Anyway, I got up before dawn, put on my oldest clothes and went across the fields. I found a place where I could see the back of the house and I crawled under a hedge and staked it out. God, it was horrible. Cold and muddy, and I had no idea how much pigs fart. The bastards seemed to know I was there, kept walking right up to me and farting in my face.’

‘Never mind the fucking pigs, Shark. What did you see?’