His voice was muffled as it pushed its way past his palms.

“So you understand the importance?”

Evans lifted his head just enough so that he could look at Neumann through his fingers.

“I already know the importance, but I have to stay here after you’ve gone. I have to live here, and I’ll not risk my life over this. You do what you have to, you speak to who you have to speak to.” He pointed a finger across the desk at Neumann. “But if you try to drag me into this, I’m off. I’ll resign and so will half of my men. Sometimes a job just stops being worth it, and this is one of those times.”

“We’ve got a suspect, we know where he is, so we need to go arrest him,” Rossett said to Neumann. “I’m tired of this.”

“You want to go to an SS garrison and arrest one of them?” Neumann twisted to look at him.

“Yes.”

“Two of us?” Neumann hooked his arm over the back of the chair. “We just walk in and stick on the cuffs?”

“It’s our job.”

Neumann considered the situation for a moment as he smoothed his finger and thumb across his mustache, then looked back at Rossett.

“We may need to plan a method of approach.”

“I’m a detective with a corpse, a suspect, and a location for the suspect.”

“So you want to do your job?”

“That’s why you gave it to me.”

Neumann nodded.

“Okay. We go get him tomorrow.”

Chapter 5

Neumann and Rossett checked into the Adelphi Hotel on Liverpool’s Brownlow Hill at 8:50 p.m. Rossett left Neumann filling in the register at the front desk and drove the Jaguar around to the secure car park at the rear of the hotel.

Three night watchmen were huddled around a battered, soot-blackened oil drum inside of which Rossett could see an insipid smoky fire burning. All three of the watchmen turned to look at him as he lowered the window.

“I need to park the car.” Rossett could smell burning rubber, and he pushed the window back up an inch to try to keep the smoke out.

One of the men, twiglike, wrapped in too-big clothes bundled with a thick leather belt, bent a little at the waist and looked like he was going to snap. He had a salt-and-pepper beard that looked orange in the reflection of the fire. It was so thick it exaggerated his chin’s movement as he squinted through the smoke at Rossett and made it look like his face was folding in half.

The old man pointed to the gloom just inside the entrance of the dark warehouse that doubled as a car park.

“Leave it there, I’ll park it for you.” The fire was lighting the watchman’s face from below, catching sooty shadows that danced around his eyes and made the beard seem to move even more.

A flame flickered and popped its head over the rim of the oil drum. Rossett saw that the light from the fire was pretty much all there was in the garage. He realized that most of the streetlamps outside weren’t working, same as outside the police station.

The place was falling apart.

“I’ll park it,” he replied to the old man.

“We’re supposed to do it.”

Another one of the watchmen wiped the back of a fingerless glove across his face, smearing a little soot like war paint across the bridge of his nose.

Rossett didn’t reply.

“Throw it in the far corner.” The first man went back to staring into the fire.

There was no point in arguing.

The Jaguar’s headlamps cut through the gloom, sharp, straight edges of white pushing back the night as Rossett entered the garage. It was almost empty except for a few cars covered in thick layers of dirt. Most looked like they hadn’t been moved for years.

Rossett parked the Jaguar next to an old Rover saloon in the farthest corner of the warehouse. He got out of the car and noticed that rain was dripping through a hole in the roof and slapping onto the concrete floor. He looked up at the sky through the hole for a moment, then locked the Jaguar.

Rossett strolled the hundred yards back to the hotel slowly, through a rain so fine it was almost mist. It was as if a cloud had descended to take a look around Liverpool’s empty streets, and then stayed the night.

A tram clattered past. Rossett watched as sparks bounced off its roof. It swung around a street corner, then headed away from the hotel. There was a pub on the far side of the road. The lights were off, and the only movement was the slow swing of the sign hanging above the door.

The city was dead.

He stopped at the bottom of the steps that led up to the entrance of the hotel, sparked up a cigarette, then watched the streets. Always the copper, first one way, then the next, eyes everywhere, taking it in, the lay of the land. A shop front was illumined, way off to his left. The light from the window display dashed the wet pavement with a watery yellow of mattes and glosses.

Rossett saw movement. There and then gone. He stepped back into the shadows and watched as another tram clattered past. He didn’t move an inch as the tram whined away into the night and the street fell silent again.

More movement, a shadow at first, then a figure. All Rossett could make out was a bundle of rags tied in the middle. It was a kid, the first person he’d seen since he’d left the garage, sifting through a rubbish bin, picking out random items and dropping them on the ground, then moving on to the next one, coming closer.