Lost

Aleksei smiles. I have seen the same indolent, foreknowing expression before. The silence grows too long. He doesn't believe me. Bringing a hand to his forehead, he grips the front of his skull as though trying to crush it. He's wearing a thumb ring—gold and very thick.

“Do you always forget your failures, Inspector?”

“On the contrary, they're normally the only things I remember.”

“Somebody must take responsibility for this.”

“Yes, but first help me remember.”

He laughs wryly and points at me with his hand. His right index finger is aimed at my head and his gold thumb ring is like the hammer of a gun. Then he smoothly turns his hand and frames my face within a backward “L”.

“I want my daughter or I want my diamonds. I hope that's clear. My father told me never to trust Gypsies. Prove him wrong.”

Even after Aleksei has gone I can feel his presence. He's like a character from a Quentin Tarantino film with an aura of violence held barely in check. Although he hides behind his tailored suits and polished English accent, I know where he comes from. I knew kids just like him at school. I can even picture him in his cheap white shirt, clunking shoes and oversize shorts, taking a beating at lunchtimes because of his strange name and his peasant-poor clothes and his strange accent.

I know this because I was just like him—an outsider—the son of a Romany Gypsy, who went to school with ankrusté (small balls of dough flavored with caraway and coriander) instead of sandwiches, wearing a painted badge on my blazer because we couldn't afford to buy a stitched one.

“Beauty cannot be eaten with a spoon,” my mother would tell me. I didn't understand what she meant then. It was just another one of her queer sayings like, “One behind cannot sit on two horses.”

I survived the beatings and the ridicule, just like Aleksei. Unlike him I didn't win a scholarship to Charterhouse, where he lost his Russian accent. None of his classmates were ever invited home and the food parcels his mother sent—with their chocolate dates, gingerbread and milk candy—were kept hidden. How do I know these things? I walked in his shoes.

Aleksei's father, Dimitri Kuznet, was a Russian émigré who started with a single flower barrow in Soho and cultivated a small empire of pitches around the West End. The turf war left three people dead and five unaccounted for.

On Valentine's Day in 1987 a flower seller in Covent Garden was nailed to his barrow, doused in kerosene and set alight. We arrested Dimitri the following day. Aleksei watched from his upstairs bedroom as we led his father away. His mother wailed and screamed, waking half the neighborhood.

Three weeks before the trial Aleksei left school and took over the family business alongside Sacha, his older brother. Within five years Kuznet Brothers controlled every flower barrow in central London. Within a decade it held sway over the entire cut-flower industry in Britain with more influence over prices and availability than Mother Nature herself.

I don't believe the urban myths or bogeyman stories about Aleksei Kuznet but he still frightens me. His brutality and violence are by-products of his upbringing; an ongoing act of defiance against the genetic hand that God dealt him.

We might have both started off the same, suffering the same taunts and humiliation, but I didn't let it lodge like a ball of phlegm in my throat and cut off oxygen to my brain.

Even his brother disappointed him. Perhaps Sacha was too Russian and not English enough. More likely Aleksei disapproved of his cocaine parties and glamour-model girlfriends. A teenage waitress was found floating facedown in the swimming pool after one such party, with semen in her stomach and traces of heroin in her blood.

Sacha didn't face a jury of twelve. Only four men were needed. Dressed in balaclavas they broke into his house one night, smothered his wife, and took Sacha away. Some say Aleksei had him strung up by his wrists and lowered into an acid bath. Others say he took off his head with a wood-splitting ax. For all anyone knows Sacha's still alive, living abroad under a different name.

For Aleksei there are only two proven categories of people in the world—not the rich and the poor or the good and the evil or the talkers and the doers. There are winners and losers. Heads or tails. His universal truth.

Under normal circumstances, better circumstances, I try not to dwell on the past. I don't want to envisage what might have happened to a child like Mickey Carlyle or to the other missing children in my life.

But ever since I woke up in the hospital I can't stop myself going back there, filling in the missing hours with horrible scenarios. I see the Thames littered with corpses that bob along beneath the bridges and tumble in the wake of passing tourist boats. I see blood in the water and guns sinking into the silt.