Page 18 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

The gray car isn't there.

Nine windows on the front elevation have lights behind them by half past seven. The one I want stays dark, second floor, left of the stairwell, with a satellite dish bolted below the sill and a bedsheet where a curtain should be. A woman on the ground floor puts her trash out and stands in the doorway smoking with her arms folded against the cold. Two boys go past on one bike. The shop on the corner does steady work until nine and then stops entirely, and the man inside comes out to hose the pavement down with the resigned thoroughness of somebody who has been doing it for twenty years.

Waiting is most of this work. People imagine the other parts.

Natan arrives and gets into the passenger seat without a word. He's brought coffee from somewhere that shouldn't be allowed to sell it, and drinks both cups himself when I decline.

"Eduard says you found him."

"Demyan found him. I just made sure he was who I thought he was."

He looks at the building for a while. Natan has a way of assessing a place that involves almost no head movement at all, and when he's finished he settles lower in the seat.

"The one from the papers?" he asks.

"Yes."

I reach into my jeans pocket, take out what's been in there since I dressed in her bedroom, and put it in the glovebox on top of the registration documents. Natan doesn't open his eyes.

The gray car comes down the service road shortly after nine.

He does it without thinking, like he's probably done six hundred times, and I watch the primer stripe slide past under the one working light and feel the last of the doubt go out of me. Ray Mosby gets out with a plastic bag from the shop on Anders Road hanging off two fingers. Early thirties. Softer than he looked in the dark with my hand on his throat. He walks like a man whose back hurts.

He doesn't check the road. Not once.

Natan and I are out of the car before Mosby has even switched his engine off.

The stairwell smells of damp carpet and fried onions. He has the key in the lock when Natan comes up behind him and I come down from the half landing above. The bag drops to the floor and something inside it breaks. Within nine seconds, the three of us are in his hallway with the door shut and the light off.

The apartment is worse than the building promised. Plates on the arm of the sofa, leftover food cartons scattered over the countertops, and a wall of shelves holding boxed model aircraft, forty or fifty of them, dust-free and arranged by wingspan. Somebody in this room has patience and takes care of the things he loves.

He just has no respect for anything else.

The bedroom holds a wardrobe with a false floor which I find in less than a minute.

A shoebox. Two more bottles of the same stuff he dropped last night. A tin with eleven syringes in it. A woman's earring. A hair tie. A library card belonging to somebody named Andrea Carrey, which is a name I remember from one of the articles.

And a phone. Which is not the one in his pocket.

I sit down on the end of his bed to go through it while Natan stands over Mosby who is currently on his knees with his hands behind his head, snivelling.

The photographs start in January. Four women. The towpath in February, taken from behind and low, the way you'd hold a phone at your hip. The park at Bellingfell. Two sets from the north path of Community Park in the weeks I was parked at the eastern gate telling myself I was there for security.

Then eighty-one photographs of Delilah.

Her at the lamp before the bend. Her stretching against the railing at the boat sheds with one heel up behind her, laughing at something in her headphones. Her going in through her own front door at night with the key already in her hand, taken from the opposite side of the road.

Her behind the counter at Purr & Pour, through the window, with Lucifer on the till.

I go through all of them. Every one, in order, with my thumb moving at the same speed the whole way. Then I go out into the hall and crouch down so my face is only an inch from his.

"Why her?"

He flinches.

"Who?" he asks, sounding nasally. I knew Natan would punch him too hard. His nose is probably broken.

"The woman at the café. Did someone send you to follow her?"