Ron is in the passenger seat. He turns his head to the back seat to talk to Viktor.
‘You know her from way back,’ says Ron. ‘Elizabeth?’
Viktor Illyich is stretching himself, and clicking his joints. They have just let him out of the boot of the car, and unzipped him from his holdall. They did this on a rutted track in the woods about a mile from Coopers Chase, as soon as Bogdan was sure they weren’t being followed. Elizabeth had given him strict instructions.
‘Way back,’ says Viktor. ‘A different lifetime.’
‘Tell us a secret, then,’ says Ron. ‘Something she wouldn’t want us to know.’
Viktor contemplates this for a moment.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Elizabeth is the greatest lover I ever had.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Ron. ‘I meant something about shooting Russian spies or something.’
‘She was so tender,’ says Viktor. ‘But also a caged animal.’
Ron turns the radio on: talkSPORT.
Viktor is lost in memories. ‘She did things to me that no woman –’
Ron nods down towards the radio. ‘Liverpool are buying Sanchez? Waste of money.’
Bogdan is tempted to join in the conversation. To talk about love. To ask a question maybe? But without giving anything away. Would he look foolish? The big Polish brute, what could he know about love? He decides to say something. He won’t know what it is until it is out of his mouth.
‘How much are they paying for Sanchez, Ron?’ Oh, Bogdan.
‘Thirty mill,’ says Ron. ‘In instalments, but still.’
Bogdan nods. He’s really only here to drive, and to carry Viktor to and from the car.
While Ron is telling a joke about a parrot that used to live in a brothel, Bogdan thinks a little more about the case. Viktor had taken him through a few things before being zipped into his holdall. He now has a cushion in there, and also a copy of the Economist and a small torch.
Viktor had explained the basics of money-laundering, the complex network of anonymous shell companies and offshore accounts that could turn dirty money into clean money via a trail almost impossible to follow. Almost impossible.
Bogdan has missed the punchline of the parrot joke, and Ron has moved on to one about a nun on a train.
The real secret was to dig back in time, to follow the money back and back and back to try to find the original sin. The first transactions were the vulnerable ones. Viktor said it was like pulling up a carpet. You just needed to get your fingernail under a tiny fragment in the corner, and sometimes you could lift the whole thing up in one go. That’s what had happened with Trident: an early transaction, a mistake. But that had led nowhere. So maybe they had to track back even further.
They reach the house at around two. It is an Elizabethan manor perched high on a Kent clifftop, the English Channel stretching off into the distance beyond. They park in a copse around a mile away, and zip Viktor back into his bag. How they will explain this Ukrainian in a holdall to Jack Mason is not Bogdan’s concern. He just has to carry it.
Bogdan drives the Daihatsu up the long drive, and parks as close to the stone entrance steps as he can. The holdall sneezes, and Bogdan says, ‘Bless you.’
If Jack Mason is surprised to see a large Polish man unzip a small Ukrainian man from a holdall, he hides it well.
‘I will come back for you this evening,’ Bogdan tells Ron and Viktor.
‘Thanks, old son,’ says Ron. ‘I’m not going back to Coopers Chase though. Staying at Pauline’s place, but it’s in Fairhaven if that’s easy for you?’
‘Is no problem at all,’ says Bogdan.