'Did he really?' I said, knowing that Henry Tiptree, an employee of the Department, a man with whom I'd crossed swords more than once, was even more excitable and unreliable than Dicky. 'But what's this got to do with George Kosinski? He left on Saturday.'

'Yes, Kosinski saw it coming. He sold out everything before coming to live here.'

'He said he had to do that. It was a necessary part of his changing his tax residence.'

'He cleared out and gave you his London apartment.'

'That was in Tessa's Will; a gift to Fiona,' I protested. I didn't like the way that Dicky was implicating me in his theories about George. 'But why would he run away? These money men like George have all their assets in companies. And George has companies that are registered all over the world. What would he run away from? No one is going to knock on the door and arrest him.'

'It's a well-known fact that, severe psychological stress often provokes people into physical action. Spontaneous physical action.'

'Not George,' I said.

'He's a dark horse,' said Dicky with cautious admiration. 'And you thought he came here as a reaction to his wife's death? But he started to sell off his companies two months back. He must have seen this crash coming for ages. Didn't he warn you about it?'

'He doesn't confide in me,' I said. 'George is his own man.'

'I'd love to know what he's up to,' said Dicky, and stared at the phone. 'I'm running a credit check on him but this stock market thrashing is going to delay things like that.'

'What about his lovely house on the lake?'

'Rented on a monthly basis. I checked that before we came. He never owned it. Not even the furniture.'

'And you think he ran because he's deep in debt?' It seemed more likely that George had found some artful advantage in having corporations own his house and contents.

'Now you see it, do you?' said Dicky, treating my question like an endorsement. 'It fits together doesn't it? You've got to know how these financial wizards think. He's bust. Now you see why he would clear off without notice and leave no forwarding address.'

'Poor George.'

'Yes, poor George,' said Dicky in a voice not entirely devoid of satisfaction. Dicky loved dramas, especially tragedies: and especially ones that brought disaster to people he envied. He relished reciting it all, and now his tone reproved me for not mirroring his delight. 'Are you listening, Bernard?'

'I'm listening.'

'Well, don't sit there with your head in your hands, as if you're about to break down and weep.'

'No Dicky.' But the truth was that I did feel concerned about George. It wasn't just a matter of money — George would probably find money from somewhere, he always had done. But George had enough worries already. The news of Tessa's death had made him talk of revenge, and disturbed him in a way I would never have thought possible. All that, and a financial crisis too, might be more than he could handle.

'So you want to go to Warsaw?' said Dicky.

'Not particularly. But if you want me to go and find him, that's where I would start.'

'You have contacts there?'

'Yes, but I'm not much good with the language.' I didn't want Dicky expecting miracles. If George had fled to Poland it was because Poland's state of chaos provided a promising place in which to hide. Finding him would not be easy.

'Who is good with the language?' said Dicky blithely.

'It makes it difficult to work on an investigation if you can't understand what anyone is saying,' I said. 'Polish is not like Italian or Portuguese, where you grab at the root of a couple of words and guess the rest. Polish is impenetrable.'

'We'll manage,' said Dicky. 'I know you; you can always manage in any language. You've got a knack for languages.'

'We?'

'I'd better come with you. Two can always do better than one . . . on a job like this.'

'Yes,' I said. He was right: unless of course the other one is Dicky. He looked at me and then, after catching my eyes, looked away again. I said, 'Is this something to do with Daphne?'

'No. Well, yes. In a way. She has a very nervous disposition,' said Dicky, his eyes narrowing as if suspecting me of being in league with his wife. 'Edgy. Bitter. Full of wild talk. She keeps digging up silly things that are ancient history. It's better if she's on her own for a week or so.'

So that was it. We weren't going to Warsaw to hunt down George Kosinski, we were going there to provide a divertissement that might smooth over some domestic rift between Dicky and his long-suffering wife. I had other worries too. Ursi's facial was going to cost ten times as much as I'd anticipated; I wondered if I could persuade the hotel cashier to pay it, and charge it somewhere deep in Dicky's room service bills.

2

Warsaw.

September is the time many visitors choose to visit Poland. It was during September half a century ago that German visitors, with Stukas, Panzers and artillery, came. So devoted were they to this ancient kingdom that they wanted to own it. They chose September because the heavy summer rains had passed by then and the land was firm; the skies were clear enough for the bombers, and the working days were long enough for them to fight their way deep into Poland's heartland.

But once September is gone, the days shorten suddenly and the temperature drops. This year, like an omen, the first snow had come unusually early. As the thermometers hovered at zero, the moist air produced the heavy wet snowstorms that come only at the very beginning of the bad weather. The snow and sleet would eventually disappear, of course, as snow, visitors and invaders had always eventually done, but that did not make such chronic afflictions easier to suffer.

Warsaw is not an old city, it only looks like one. In beauty it is eclipsed by its rival Cracow; its lop-sided high position on the west bank of the Vistula exposes it to the harsh east winds, and it has no backdrop of hills or mountains or attractive coastline. But for Poles, Warsaw has a significance that is not explained in either political or cultural terms but is inextricably linked to Polish nationalism. Perhaps the Germans knew this, for when the German army retreated from Warsaw they destroyed it in a way they did no other capital city. They razed it not by haphazard bombings or shellings but stone by stone, as an act of deliberate and vindictive devastation. The steel streetcar tracks, the drains and even the sewers were ripped from the cobbled streets like the guts from a plucked chicken.

But with the same sort of determination, the Poles built it up again stone by stone. With the fastidious zeal that only hatred can feed, they scoured the museums and the archives to look at old paintings and drawings, and they copied the nineteenth-century plans of Corazzi. And using the skills of architects and historians, carpenters and artists and masons and laborers, and the contributions and good will of Polish men and women throughout the world, they built Warsaw again the way they remembered it.

It was October when we arrived. Generals loyal to communism had appointed themselves to government, the nation was deeply in debt, virtually everything was in short supply, and Warsaw's streets were grizzled by snow that, despite being unseasonably early, fell without respite. Dimly lit windows of shops on the Nowy Swiat were displaying a final few miserable heirlooms, and there were people huddled on every comer accosting any well-dressed passersby and trying to swap their last treasures for anything edible or combustible.

In the gloomy entrance hall of the Europejski Hotel there was less evidence of such deprivation. Crowding around the bar at the side of the lobby — their waistbelts straining, and faces flushed — black marketeers were mingling in noisy accord with army officers and surviving elders of the Party faithful. Behind the bar at busy times like this there was the regular barman. He'd been there for years: a jovial retired member of the ZOMO, the widely feared antiriot police. Stuffed behind the vodka bottles, and in plain view, he always kept a copy of Trybuna Ludu, Warsaw's Communist Party daily paper; it was in effect a proclamation warning one and all Of the political climate to be found there. But that didn't preclude jokes, and this evening he was getting anticipatory grins while telling a long involved story about how scientists in the government laboratories were working hard to transform the nation's vodka supplies back into potatoes. The same joke was being repeated everywhere, but outside in the streets it was received with laughter less hearty.