Page 45 of We Chase Shadows

It is work that someone a great deal more junior could be doing.

‘Always keep your ears open,’ says Ernesto to Clara, who sits in his passenger seat. He waggles one ear for emphasis.

‘And your eyes,’ says Clara. ‘Surely?’

Ernesto shrugs. ‘Eyes are okay, but the ears are the thing. The world is very noisy. It is always telling you something.’

He sees he has a text from Rosie. What fun to have her back in his life. Best not open it in the car though, knowing some of the texts Rosie is capable of sending.

He has a sidekick with him today. His boss had suggested it, and Ernesto had agreed it was a very good idea. Her name is Clara. She is a good investigator, and one day will be a very good investigator. It is Ernesto’s job, and his privilege, to be part of that journey. And, to be honest, it’s nice to have the company.

‘Sometimes even your nose tells you something,’ says Ernesto. ‘I once arrested a drug importer in Vigo because I recognized his aftershave on a bag of heroin.’

On the drive from Pisa Airport to this mountain village, Clara played him a full hour of K-pop songs and carefully explained the nuances of each group and each song. She was very knowledgeable, and Ernesto’s view is that if somebody knowledgeable wants to share their knowledge with you, then you should listen, even if you are finding it physically painful. He is good at remembering new things, and who knows if, one day, his new-found knowledge of the works of BTS and Blackpink might come in handy? BTS had all been in the army, for example, so, despite their music, at least they had that going for them.

‘J-Hope from BTS wears Musc 25,’ says Clara.

Ernesto gives a serious nod. ‘If I ever smell Musc 25 on a bag of heroin, I shall bring J-Hope in for questioning.’

They are parked at the bottom of a flight of long, steep stone steps that themselves lead to a maze of tiny streets and courtyards with plants on doorsteps, washing hanging high across narrow alleys and sounds of life and love spilling from every open window. Also a lot of cats. Another reason Ernesto loves Italy. There is one, even now, curled up on the cooling bonnet of his hire car, big, ginger and unlovable.

Why the enforcer is here, who knows? Who is he meeting? Not for Ernesto to worry about. He simply has to note down movements and take photographs and let somebody else take it over. The enforcer is staying at the best hotels, eating in the finest restaurants. A lesser man than Ernesto might start to think he was in the wrong job. That €300,000 hadn’t gone very far in the end.

The ginger cat stares at him through the windscreen. Ernesto puts his windscreen wipers on, because he thinks the cat will enjoy that. He is right. The cat cocks his head, regarding the wipers as a young prodigy might study a maths puzzle.

Ernesto has his own puzzle to play with.

Jakob Eriksson. The murder of the bodyguard. What a nice thing to have fallen into his lap.

It would be very helpful indeed to catch him and, thanks to Rosie, he has a case that his colleagues know nothing about. A case which his superiors would never have assigned to him. An opportunity, then.

And Eriksson is one of the great prizes.

Since 2001 Jakob Eriksson has been steadily climbing the Interpol league tables. Ernesto hadn’t been joking about that top hundred. It’s unofficial, but once a month it gets updated on the Interpol WhatsApp chat, and they all have a good gossip about it.

There are usually a few showy new entries – a former boxer has murdered a drug dealer, perhaps, or, just to switch things up, a drug dealer has murdered a former boxer – but those guys get caught pretty quickly, marched out of nondescript hotel rooms in cuffs and Calvin Klein briefs by cops in shades. The more interesting names on the top hundred list are the ones who stick around. The men who operate in the shadows. Sometimes they catch one of these men. And when they do, careers are made.

Ernesto, with Eriksson very much on his mind today, is talking Clara through the downfall of some of these criminals. The British call them ‘large dogs’.

Bolko Mladić, he tells Clara, there’s an example. He had been on the list for nearly thirty years, ever since he blew up a plane. Then he started funding and running a gang of jewel thieves, which was less spectacular but a lot more lucrative. If you ever had a very big diamond, then Bolko Mladić knew all about it, and had plans to take it from you. A deputy bureau chief in Tallinn eventually caught Mladić when, on pure instinct, Mladić had stolen a pair of sunglasses from an open gym locker. And now that deputy bureau chief is head of European Operations for the whole of Interpol.

Then there was Paul Butterworth, a financial fraudster who, it was rumoured, genuinely lived inside a volcano, but, it turned out, actually lived in a flat in Glasgow. A Scottish cop caught him trying to use a stolen credit card at a massage parlour, and that cop now heads up the Interpol Tactical Siege Unit. Ernesto could do that job for sure. Was there anything better than a siege?

The volcano thing was interesting though. Ernesto knows that these men often hide in rumours. Rumour can be the greatest camouflage of all. Benoît B, a French arms dealer, had faked his own death three times over, for example, until a young French cop, acting on a tip-off, finally arrested him when he attended the Grammys wearing a neon helmet.

The real goal for Interpol, for Ernesto, is to catch one of these guys. Not the preening musclemen, the Instagram gangsters who let you know where they are every hour of the night and day. They want to catch the guys who live in the dark. You’ll never see them steal the money, and you’ll never see them spend the money. You know these men have killed, but you’ll never see their hands blood red.

And if you catch one yourself, no one ever forgets you again.

There will always be a few who get away, however. Who arrange their criminality in such a way as to enjoy all of the spoils of sin, but pay none of the taxes. If you are clever and resourceful you can get away with almost anything.

But they are just men, they are not ghosts. And men can be caught.

They caught Mladić, and they caught Butterworth, and they caught Benoît B. Who’s to say Ernesto can’t catch Jakob Eriksson?

Eriksson’s name is the one Ernesto doesn’t mention to Clara. Ernesto will not raise the alarm with anybody at Interpol. Will not mention the dead bodyguard at Vern Blackwood’s villa. This one is all his.

‘It takes three things to catch these guys,’ says Ernesto to Clara. He counts them off on his fingers. ‘Patience. Intelligence. And luck.’