Page 24 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

"Ninety pounds under. Which is nothing."

"It's nothing this week." I go down the column with my finger anyway, because a man who steals from you slowly is the only kind who lasts. Since Tolya Semenov, every ticket in this yard gets read twice, and the drivers know it.

Semenov himself is on the floor by six, loading, which is where he's going to stay until I decide otherwise. He comes up the stairs at half past with an envelope and stands in the doorway holding it in both hands like a man at a graveside.

"First payment," he says.

I count it in front of him because pretending not to would insult us both. It's four hundred short.

He starts talking before I've finished. His wife's hours were cut, the boiler went, the younger one needs shoes, and every word of it is probably true and none of it changes the facts.

"Four hundred goes on the end," I tell him. "It doesn't disappear. You'll pay it next month or the month after, and you'll tell me before you're short, not after, because the next time you make me count an envelope twice I'll take an interest in why."

He nods hard enough that his glasses shift.

"And Tolya." He stops in the doorway. "Fenn Road does a shoe voucher through the office. Ask to talk to my sister, Yulia Federova, she works there."

He looks at me for a moment too long, the way people do when they can't work out which version of me they've just been handed, and then he goes back down to the floor. Mechislav says nothing at all.

The rest of the morning is ordinary work. A refrigerated unit that has been reading two degrees warm since Tuesday and needs a man out from the city who owes us a favor. A camera at the north gate pointing eleven feet to the left of where it should be pointing, which I have moved myself, standing on the roof of my own car, because it will take a contractor three weeks and a discussion. A driver called Kolya whose timings have slipped by twenty minutes on the same run four days running. Natan wants to put him in a room. I sit in the cab with him instead and findout his mother is at St. Anne's and visiting hours end at seven, so I move him onto the early route where he'll be done by four, and he grips my arm at the elbow and can't speak for a second.

Eduard arrives at eleven with Dmitri behind him.

We walk the floor together. The Marchetti buyer is closed, confirmed by two separate people, and the route over the bridge stays ours, and there's a question about the eastern lot that will take a month and a conversation neither of us is looking forward to. Business, in other words, all of it exactly as dull as I need it to be.

At the door of the office he stops and looks at the shoebox on top of the filing cabinet.

"You bought running shoes."

"I did."

He waits. Eduard has never in his life had to ask me a second question, and he doesn't now, he simply stands there with his hands in his coat pockets and lets the silence do the work, and I discover that I have nothing at all to put in it.

"Bill has instructed me to accompany her," I say eventually.

"Bill." He nods slowly. "Bill has instructed you." Something moves at the corner of his mouth. He says one short thing in Russian on his way out that I choose not to dignify with a response, and I hear him laughing about it with Dmitri all the way across the loading floor.

My phone goes at half twelve.

Delilah: Kimmie has increased the order to a hundred and forty buns

Delilah: I said yes before I did the math

Delilah: Jasper I have made a terrible mistake

Me: How many can you make in a day

Delilah: Sixty. Maybe. If nobody talks to me.

Me: Then you’ll have three days and I'll keep people away from you

Delilah: This is why I keep you

I put the phone face down on the manifests and get on with my afternoon.

The shoes cost more than I expected and the man in the shop asked me a great many questions about my gait.

I sit in the yard at five with the engine running and the gate open in front of me. I don't move for a while. The glovebox has the registration documents in it and a small box that has been living underneath them since July last year, when I walked past a window on Halstead Row for the eleventh time and finally went in.