He tried to roll onto his side to face Rossett but couldn’t because of the pain in his busted knee. In the distance the siren of a police car sounded. Finnegan turned his head toward it, then looked back at Rossett.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with. I’m a dangerous man. Take these cuffs off me and I’ll show you—”

“Hush,” said Rossett quietly. He put the cigarette back into his mouth and continued staring off into the distance.

By the time the police car finally made it to them, a few people had interrupted their morning commute to stare at the quiet copper and the handcuffed heavy sitting outside the shop. A slow slick of sticky blood was leaking from the doorway behind them onto the pavement. Rossett ignored it, and the crowd, and just stared into the distance as a sergeant and a young bobby got out of the police car and approached slowly.

The bobby had his truncheon out, ready for trouble, while the sergeant looked past Rossett at the blood on the pavement, then down at Finnegan.

“Who the bleedin’ hell are you?” the sergeant said to Rossett.

Rossett held up his warrant card.

“Rossett.”

“Rossett?” Finnegan parroted from the pavement. “I got arrested by John Rossett?”

Rossett got up from the curb slowly. His bones were already aching from the fight. He flicked the long-dead stub of his cigarette at Finnegan on the ground and looked at the young bobby.

“Look after him.”

“I’ve read all about you, sir. Can I just say—” The bobby looked starstruck.

“No, you can’t.” Rossett stepped past him, over the blood, heading back into the shop.

In the small storeroom at the back he found the old man sitting on an old wooden chair next to an even older table. The room was cluttered with stock for the shop. It smelled of bleach, damp cardboard, and forty years of slaving your guts out for pretty much no return. There was a bulb hanging from two twisted wires, and Rossett could see the steam coming off a fresh cup of anemic tea on the table.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” the shopkeeper finally said, almost to himself.

“Drink some tea.”

“The way you killed him.”

“It’ll help with the shock.”

“I wasn’t expecting it.”

Rossett went to speak, paused, took a look around the storeroom, and tried again.

“What were you expecting?”

“I thought you’d just see them off.”

“I’m not a scarecrow.”

“You’ll make things worse.”

“I’m the law. I live by the law, and the law does what it has to do. I have no half measures; I don’t scare people. I’m a policeman, I do what I have to do, and I do my job properly. That is who I am.”

Chapter 2

“You killed a man this morning?”

“Self-defense.”

“But you killed him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re just sitting here?”

Rossett looked around his office, then back at Kripo Generalmajor Erhard Neumann.

“I think so.”

Neumann shifted on the wooden chair he was sitting on. It was uncomfortable, a little too narrow, so he couldn’t quite relax. He wondered if that was intentional, a way of keeping people on edge when they sat opposite Rossett in his office. He looked at Rossett, who was staring back at him with eyes that were so blue they were almost silver.

Neumann realized the chair wasn’t planned to make people feel uncomfortable. Rossett did that all on his own.

“You were attacked with a razor?”

“Yes.”

“Injured?”

“My coat and jacket took most of the damage.”

“Most?”

“Most.”

“Stitches?”

“In me or the coat?”

Neumann wasn’t sure if Rossett was joking, so he waited for a moment to see if there was going to be a smile.

There wasn’t.

“In you.”

“Just a scratch. I’ll live.”

“Hmm.” Neumann adjusted his balance on the seat. “Someone once told me it would take an army to kill you.”

Rossett didn’t reply. Instead he folded his hands on top of the paperwork that was piled on his desk. Neumann looked up at the small portrait photograph of King Edward on the wall to his left. It was the picture that hung in every civil servant’s office in the country. The king was in full military regalia, staring into the distance with the certainty of someone who was finally in his right place.

On a wall, in a dingy office, with a chest full of medals, holding a hat covered in gold braid.

The medals and the hat were impressive, but it was the Knight’s Cross at his throat that caught the eye. It was out of place, wrong, awkward, put there to make a point.

Nazis choking a king and his country.

The portrait was normally placed opposite one of Hitler. The two men looking wistfully across the grime into each other’s eyes.