'Anything else you need?'

'Can you run a PNC check for me? I need info on a Jovan Bashich in north London and I'd be happier doing it here rather than at my base.' Shepherd stood up so that Mansfield could have his chair back.

'No problem,' said Mansfield, sitting down. 'I'm running a couple of hundred names through the computer today, so the more the merrier.' He turned to his PNC terminal, tapped in the name and sat back. 'There you go,' he said. 'Runs a minicab company in Stoke Newington. Few motoring offences but nothing else.'

Shepherd studied the screen and effortlessly memorised the details. 'You're a star, Kenny.'

Shepherd caught a black cab from outside Scotland Yard and had it drop him around the corner from the offices of Lazami's minicab business. Speed-E-Cabs was above a fish-and-chip shop, its location promoted by a yellow flashing light above a doorway leading to a flight of bare wooden stairs. Shepherd headed up and pushed open a door, wrinkling his nose at the pungent smell of urine, stale beer and body odour. To his left was a wooden bench on which sat two middle-aged women in tarty clothes arguing over a bottle of vodka. When they saw Shepherd's police issue trousers and boots, they quietened and tried to sit up straight. 'Good evening, ladies,' he said. They both studiously avoided eye-contact with him.

Two middle-aged men with greasy hair and pockmarked faces were behind a thick sheet of gla.s.s into which was set a small wire grille. One was talking on a headset while the other was sitting on a plastic chair reading the Evening Standard Evening Standard. Both were wearing scuffed leather jackets with the collars turned up. Pages cut from p.o.r.nographic magazines were plastered over the walls. To the left of the window, a wooden door had been reinforced with a sheet of steel that was dented in several places.

Shepherd went over to the gla.s.s and leaned down to speak into the grille. 'I want to see Jovan Bashich,' he said.

'He's not here,' said the man reading the newspaper, without looking up.

Shepherd held up his Terry Halligan warrant card and pressed it against the gla.s.s. 'Tell him if he doesn't speak to me now, I'll be back with a dozen colleagues and we'll be going through the licences and immigration status of every single one of your drivers.'

The man put down his paper and for the first time noticed Shepherd's white shirt and black tie under his fleece. He peered at the warrant card, then looked at the other man and nodded. The man with the headset tapped out a number and spoke in a guttural language that Shepherd a.s.sumed was Albanian, then said something to the man with the paper. 'What's it about?' he asked Shepherd.

'It's about me not kicking that b.l.o.o.d.y door down and arresting you for obstruction,' said Shepherd, putting away his warrant card.

The two men looked at each other again. Then the man with the paper sighed and pushed himself up out of his chair. He had a bunch of keys hanging from a chain on his belt and used one to open the door. He pointed at a flight of lino-covered stairs. 'Up there,' he said. As Shepherd started up it, the man pulled the door shut and locked it again. Shepherd could hear the two women disputing ownership of the vodka bottle as he reached the top. There were damp patches on the ceiling that had gone black with mould, and holes in the skirting-board. Facing him was a door with 'OFFICE' painted on it in white letters. He pushed it open.

The man sitting behind a large wooden desk was a good ten years older than the one in the photograph he'd looked at in Kenny Mansfield's office, but it was definitely Jovan Bashich, a.k.a. Aleksander Lazami. Lazami was a big man, at least two hundred pounds, balding, with a grey moustache and watery brown eyes. He was wearing a brown suit and a black shirt that glistened with grease around the collar.

Shepherd stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. There was a wooden chair next to the desk and he sat on it and smiled amiably at Lazami. 'Nice place you've got here,' he said. 'Very homely.' There was a framed photograph on the desk next to a pile of timesheets. It was a formal picture, and in it Lazami was wearing a much better suit than he had on now, with a red and black striped tie. He had his arm around a dumpy blonde woman with pearl earrings. Sitting on her lap was a young girl, seven or eight years old with a gap-toothed smile and ringlets. The Lazami in the picture was beaming with pride and wasn't sweating anywhere near as much as the man behind the desk.

Lazami frowned and tugged at his left ear. 'What do you want?' he asked.

'A chat,' said Shepherd.

'You want to shake me down, is that it? You want money?'

Shepherd chuckled. 'You're not in Albania now, Aleksander,' he said. 'We don't work like that in England. Haven't you learned anything since you moved here?'

Lazami's frown deepened. 'Albania? Why do you talk about Albania? I am from Kosovo. Refugee from Kosovo. Now I am British. British like you.'

'I know who you are, Aleksander,' said Shepherd. 'Don't play the fool with me.'

'My name is Jovan Bashich and I am from Kosovo.'

'I know who you really are. And I know you're not Kosovan. Your name is Aleksander Lazami and you're an Albanian. You're wanted for extortion, possession of arms and attempted murder.'

Lazami's eyes hardened. 'What do you want?' he said. 'You want to send me back?' He slapped his chest. 'I am British now. I am as British as you. And nothing was ever proved. Nothing!'

'The Albanian government has started extradition proceedings, but you already know that.'

'My solicitor says that the British government will never send me back,' said Lazami. 'There is no evidence against me. And I have a family here now. A wife and a son. They were born here. No one will send me back.' He sneered at Shepherd. 'If you want to talk to me, you can talk to my solicitor. I have nothing to say to you. You will go now. You will leave my office. I have rights here. If you want to talk to me my solicitor must be here to advise me.'

'I'm not here to send you back. I'm just here to talk about what happened to your daughter.'

Lazami's jaw dropped and he sagged in his chair as if he had been punched in the stomach. 'What do you know about Zamira?' He mopped his brow with a grubby handkerchief.

'I know everything, Aleksander.' Shepherd pointed at the framed family photograph. 'Your family here, do they know about Zamira?'

'They know nothing about me, other than what I've told them,' said Lazami. 'They know me only as Jovan Bashich from Kosovo. My wife, she is from Wimbledon. She has never been outside England.'

'You married her for a pa.s.sport?'

'I married her because I needed a wife,' he said. 'After Zamira was killed, I had n.o.body. I had nothing.' He stood up and went over to a rusting green-metal filing cabinet. He grunted as he bent down to pull open the bottom drawer from which he took out a bottle of slivovitz and a couple of greasy gla.s.ses. He put the gla.s.ses on the desk and kicked the drawer shut, then sat down and poured two slugs of the plum brandy. He pushed one across the desk towards Shepherd.

'I'm in uniform,' said Shepherd, gesturing at his shirt and tie.

'You don't look like a man who cares about his uniform,' said Lazami. He picked up one of the gla.s.ses, raised it in salute, then drained it. 'He raped her, then killed her. He raped my angel and then butchered her. He strangled her with his bare hands and then gutted her like a fish. For what? So she wouldn't identify him? He left his s.e.m.e.n inside her and even the Albanian cops know about DNA.' He refilled his gla.s.s. 'You know what Zamira means?' He shook his head. 'Of course you don't. Why would you? It means "good voice". And she had the voice of an angel, my little Zamira. She was always singing and I swear she could sing before she could talk.'

Shepherd picked up his gla.s.s and took a sip of the brandy. It slid easily down his throat and a warm glow spread through his chest.

'The one blessing, the only blessing, was that my beloved wife wasn't alive when it happened,' said Lazami. 'You British, you complain about your National Health Service, but you have never been at the mercy of Albanian doctors. If Elira had been in England, she would be alive now but she was in Albania and...' He shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished. 'After Zamira died, I knew that I couldn't live in Albania any more. I wanted a new life, and I found it here in England. Getting here was easy refugees were flooding in from Yugoslavia, and I used the papers of a man that had been murdered outside Sarajevo.'

'The man who killed your daughter, you know who he is?'

'I found out afterwards who he was. He had done it before, raped a girl. I paid the cops for a look at his file. But he's nowhere to be found. They think he left Albania after he killed her.'

'Imer Lekstakaj?'

'Yes. May he burn in everlasting h.e.l.l.' Lazami banged his gla.s.s down on the desk, hard. 'I call them even now but the case is cold. They don't know where he is.'

'They don't know where he is, Aleksander. But I do.' Shepherd took another sip of his brandy.

Lazami leaned forward. 'Whatever you want, I will give it to you,' he said, his eyes burning. 'You want money? I will give everything I have. Just tell me where he is.'

'I don't want your money. This isn't about money.' He reached into his pocket and took out the three photographs that Kenny Mansfield had given him. He slid them across the desk one by one.

Lazami stared at the photographs but made no move to touch them. He nodded slowly. 'That is him,' he said, his voice a hoa.r.s.e whisper. 'That is the man who killed my daughter.' He looked at Shepherd, his eyes watering. 'You have to tell me where he is.'

'That's why I'm here,' said Shepherd.

First thing on Tuesday morning, Shepherd phoned Jack Bradford and told him to drop the surveillance on Lekstakaj and watch over Shepherd's house instead. Jack hadn't asked for an explanation. Shepherd spent the day with his team, prowling around north-east London, breaking for lunch at Harlesden police station. He was called a racist at least half a dozen times. Shepherd no longer took the insults personally no one wanted to be stopped and searched and it was natural to blow off a little steam. Like all the members of the team, he simply smiled and let the insults wash over him.

Back at Paddington Green at the end of his shift, he stripped off his stab vest and flopped onto one of the sofas. Kelly was making tea and he handed Shepherd a mug. 'Okay, Three-amp?' he asked, sitting down next to him and swinging his feet onto the table.

'Do you ever get fed up with the abuse we get on the street?' asked Shepherd.

'Water off a duck's whatsit,' said Kelly.

Richard Parry walked over with a mug. Kelly slid across the sofa to make room for him. 'Carpets here gets called a racist as often as I do,' he said. 'It goes with the turf.'

'We know we're not racist,' said Parry. 'That's all that matters.'

'I don't care what colour the sc.u.mbags are,' said Kelly. 'Black, white, green with yellow spots, if they break the law they should get what's coming to them. We don't care what colour the victims are and we sure as h.e.l.l don't care what colour the bad guys are.'

Simmons walked over, biting into a ham sandwich he'd picked up from the canteen. 'What's up?' he asked.

'Three-amp's fed up with being called a Klansman,' said Parry.

'I'm okay,' said Shepherd. 'It just gets a bit old, being told I'm picking on minorities.'

Simmons laughed. 'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l where we were today, we were the minority.'

'You know what happens when we have a serial killer?' said Kelly. 'Some talking head will appear on television telling us what we already know, that in all probability the killer is a white middle-aged male who used to set fire to pets when he was a kid.'

'Because that's the profile,' said Shepherd.

'd.a.m.n right it's the profile,' said Kelly. 'Serial killers are almost never young and black and they're as rare as hen's teeth. But what happens when we get a kid knifed in Brixton? Or a kid gets shot in Willesden? Suddenly we get all coy and we start talking about knife crime and gun crime and how something must be done and how society is falling apart when what we should be talking about is black crime. It's young black men who use knives and guns and the sooner we accept that and get it out into the open the better. But we can't because it's racist so we pretend it's not black crime and we talk in code. We say that the case is being investigated by Operation Trident, which is just a clever way of saying that the a.s.sailants are black. But every cop who has ever walked a beat knows that when it comes to knives and guns, it's young black males that are the problem. If you removed every young black male from the streets of London tomorrow there'd be no knife crime and no gun crime.'

'You're not saying it's only blacks that carry knives and guns?' said Shepherd.

Kelly nodded enthusiastically. 'I'd say seventy-five per cent of knives and guns that we find are in the hands of blacks,' he said. 'And the whites are carrying weapons because they're scared of the blacks. But do you know what would happen if I ever went public with those observations? Or mentioned it within earshot of a senior officer?'

'You'd be out,' said Shepherd.

'd.a.m.n right I'd be out,' said Kelly. 'My feet wouldn't touch the ground. And that's the state we've reached. You can't speak the truth any more. You have to run everything you say through a PC bulls.h.i.t filter.'

'So what's the answer?' asked Shepherd.

Kelly shrugged. 'We wait for the backlash, I guess.'

'The backlash?'

'It's got to happen, sooner or later,' said Simmons. 'The system's a pendulum, taken over the long term. Swings and roundabouts.' He took another mouthful of his sandwich.

'And what do you think will happen?' asked Shepherd.

'We'll start getting tough when it counts,' said Kelly. 'When we start putting people away for life, we'll mean life. When we catch a g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger with a gun, he'll go down for ten years and he'll stay behind bars for ten years. We'll stop putting pensioners in prison for not paying their council tax or overfilling their wheelie-bins and we'll only incarcerate the people that deserve to be incarcerated.'

Shepherd grinned. 'And when's that going to happen? The next millennium?'

'It can happen quickly, providing there's the will,' said Parry. 'We've got enough prisons, just filled them with the wrong people. We've more than enough cops, just got them in the wrong jobs. You know the Met's got more officers dealing with racial awareness than rape?'

c.o.ker walked in with a carton of milk. He drank from it and wiped his mouth. 'What are we talking about?' he asked, collapsing onto a chair.

'The unfairness of the criminal justice system,' said Shepherd.

'Don't get KFC started,' said c.o.ker, waving his carton in the air. 'He'd clear the prisons by bringing back capital punishment.'

'Come on, we all know there are sc.u.mbags out there who'd be better off dead,' said Kelly.

Parry laughed. 'Strictly speaking, I think you mean that society would be better off. They wouldn't be better off they'd be dead.'

'I'm just saying that we need to get our courts working for the victims and not the criminals,' said Kelly. 'And if that means bringing back capital punishment for paedophiles, serial killers and terrorists, then so be it.'

'I'm with KFC on this,' said Simmons. 'Everything's geared up to helping the criminals. No one gives a s.h.i.t about their victims. Look at that Libyan, the one who brought down the Lockerbie plane. He kills two hundred and seventy people and does eight years in prison. Then the Jocks let him out because he's sick.'

'I think the word is that he didn't do it,' said Shepherd. 'Our masters wanted him out of the country so he couldn't appeal his sentence.'

'Maybe, but that's not the point,' said Simmons. 'The point is that a court found him guilty of ma.s.s murder but he was released after eight years. And look at those two kids in Edlington, the ones that tortured those other kids. Okay, they got sent down but as soon as they reach eighteen they'll be released and relocated at a cost of millions, same as those little s.h.i.ts that killed Jamie Bulger.'

'Nipple's right,' said Parry. 'Everyone forgets about the victims and their relatives but they bend over backwards to help the criminals. The world's gone mad.'

'So what's the solution?' asked Shepherd.

'It just needs someone at the top, someone who can lead, someone who can make changes,' said Kelly. 'Blair was too interested in his own future on the public-speaking circuit, Brown is a simpleton who couldn't even manage the economy, David Cameron is just Blair wearing a different hat. We need a leader, a leader with b.a.l.l.s, a leader who isn't afraid to do what's necessary.'

Shepherd grinned. 'Boris Johnson?'

Kelly laughed and banged the table with the flat of his hand. 'You know what we need? We need a Margaret Thatcher, that's what we need. She had b.a.l.l.s.'

'That much is true,' agreed Shepherd. 'Blair or Brown would never have fought for the Falklands.'

'One day,' said Simmons. 'One day we'll have a leader who'll do what's necessary to let us take back the streets. Until then...'

He left the sentence unfinished. 'Until then what?' asked Shepherd.

Simmons shrugged. 'Until then we do the best we can,' he said.

Fogg appeared at the door, with Castle at his shoulder. 'Where's Colgate?' he asked, looking around the room.

'Canteen,' said c.o.ker. 'He's on his way.'

'Fill him in, will you? I'm heading home. We've got an early-morning rapid-entry to do for the borough,' he said. 'I want everyone in here at six sharp, no excuses. We'll be rolling out at six thirty.' Kelly groaned. 'Don't worry, KFC,' said Fogg, 'overtime's approved. Time and a third.'

'That's more like it,' said Kelly. 'What's the story?'

'We won't know until tomorrow,' said Fogg. 'They're giving us the mushroom treatment. Last time the place was raided they were tipped off, so this time they're taking no chances. So tomorrow, six sharp.'

Kelly raised his mug in salute. 'We hear and obey, O Master.'

Shepherd's alarm woke him at five o'clock on Wednesday morning and by six he was parking his bike next to Fogg's Ducati. He hurried upstairs to change into his uniform. Kelly and c.o.ker were in the locker room, fastening their ties. 'Still riding that death trap?' asked Kelly, as Shepherd took off his leathers.

'Yeah, I'm starting to think the same,' said Shepherd. 'I might come in on the Tube that way at least I can drink after my shift without worrying how I'll get back.' He hung up his jacket. 'Any idea where we're off to?'

'Mum's the word,' said c.o.ker. 'Foggy won't say.'

'Does this Secret Squirrel stuff happen a lot?' asked Shepherd, pulling on his police boots.

'A fair amount,' said Kelly. 'Don't take it personal. The borough leaks, that's the problem. Drugs Squad have got their contacts, so have most of the CID, and they don't want their informants caught up in anything so they'll tip them the wink.' He slapped Shepherd on the back as he went out.

Carolyn Castle rushed in, her kitbag on her shoulder. 'Overslept,' she said.