Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(33)

They shook hands and Mr Pasquinel went back up the aisle to the door. He opened it, but instead of leaving he stood in the doorway looking at something outside. Rudi paused in picking up the last couple of bafflers, looked at him for a moment, and then went to join him in the doorway.

A tall woman was standing outside. She was wearing a rumpled three-piece suit, a long grey belted raincoat with its collar turned up, and a fedora. She appeared to have been beamed into rural Suffolk from a Raymond Chandler novel. She was standing looking at them, hands in pockets, smiling broadly. She seemed to be alone.

Rudi and Mr Pasquinel exchanged glances. Then Mr Pasquinel took a deep breath, stepped outside, walked past the woman, and without looking back went out through the gate, turned left, and passed out of sight down the road. Rudi was quite impressed that he managed to resist the urge to break into a run.

The stranger had not moved, not looked away from Rudi, not stopped smiling. They looked at each other for some time.

Curiosity won, in the end. Rudi closed and locked the church door behind him and walked over to the woman and said, “Hello.”

She was in her mid-thirties, fair-haired. She dipped a hand into an inside jacket pocket, brought it out holding a laminated card. “Detective Chief Superintendent Sarah Smith,” she said. “EU Police.” The phrase ‘EU Police’ was the punchline to any number of jokes, but Rudi just raised an eyebrow and said, “You’re out of your jurisdiction, Chief Superintendent.”

“Then it’s fortunate I’m not here in an official capacity,” Smith said. She pocketed the identity card. “Are you interested in churches?”

“All Saints at Brixworth is extraordinary,” Rudi deadpanned.

Smith nodded and glanced in the direction Mr Pasquinel had taken. She said, “I used to date the Rokeby Venus,” and she looked back to Rudi and beamed.

Rudi devoted a few moments to wondering how long that particular phrase was going to dog his footsteps. He sighed. “Chief Superintendent,” he said.

“Will you walk with me?” Smith asked. “There’s a rather nice pub just along the way.”

Why not? “Lead on, Chief Superintendent.”





THE PUB WAS called the Black Ben, and the sign outside was so frankly racist that Rudi wondered how it had not been burned down. Inside, though, it was Generic English Country Pub, all polished wood and horse brasses and carpeting and snug velour upholstery. Rudi glanced at the lunch menu while Smith bought them drinks, considered ordering Crevettes en Croute just to see how badly an English pub kitchen could abuse the dish, decided against it.

They took their pints over to a table in a quiet corner, away from the handful of locals standing drinking at the bar. Smith took off her overcoat and draped it over a neighbouring chair. She had not once stopped smiling, not for a moment. It was beginning to irritate Rudi.

Smith took a printed photograph from her pocket and put it on the table beside Rudi’s pint. It was a full-face shot of a stocky, tousled and confused-looking man of about forty. Rudi gave it what he thought was due attention, then he looked at Smith and said, “I don’t know this man.”

She looked a little disappointed. “That’s a shame, because you might have been able to help us tidy up a small mystery,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, please, don’t apologise.” Smith tried her beer, apparently found it to her satisfaction. She put her glass back down on the table. “He was arrested flying in to Warsaw-Chopin from Moscow a few months ago. Passport Control thought there was something not quite right about his papers so they detained him while they made checks. It turned out he was travelling on very good forgeries.”

“Not that good, if they were spotted,” Rudi pointed out, although Polish Border Security were famously savvy and well-trained, not to mention ill-tempered.

Smith admitted the point with a nod. “He had no luggage,” she said. “No other identification. We’ve been able to trace his journey back to Krasnoyarsk, but before that...” She shrugged.

“Difficult liaison conditions?” Rudi asked.

“You know how it is.” Smith didn’t appear too upset about it. “He seems to be English. At least, that’s the only language he appears to speak. He’s foggy.”

“‘Foggy’?”

Smith sat back and crossed her arms. “Amnesiac. Doesn’t know who he is, where he’s from, where he’s been, what he did there.”

“Is he suspected of some crime?”

Smith shook her head. “We’re at a loss, really.”

Rudi took a swallow of beer. He looked down at the photograph again. “I genuinely don’t recognise him, Chief Superintendent,” he said.

“Then you wouldn’t have any idea why the only other thing he was carrying was an envelope with your name, address and an identification phrase printed on it,” Smith said.

Rudi gave the detective a long, level look. “No,” he said finally. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“One theory we’re working on – the obvious one, really – is that he was coming to deliver the envelope to you.”

“That would follow,” Rudi admitted while parsing the fact that Smith had approached him in England, where she had no powers of arrest, rather than in Kraków, where she did. “What are you playing at, Chief Superintendent?”