Instead she smiled, stepped a little closer. ‘Sure, I’d like that, but first could you talk me through how this works, so I can work it for myself next time?’

Roland nodded, and went through a long and detailed explanation about steam, pressure, milk froth, types of grind and beans. Zsuzsa pretended she was paying attention, but was actually watching the clock on the facing wall. Four minutes had now passed. That was plenty of time for the video file to download. Roland handed Zsuzsa her coffee. She thanked him. Now she had to get rid of him.

She looked at the clock again, tutted, shook her head and said, ‘I’m really sorry, I completely forgot. I have to dash, a contact told me to call them before 8.45 a.m. and it’s someone I have been trying to get for ages.’

Roland nodded, the disappointment clear on his face, and began to walk to his office. Zsuzsa quickly crossed the newsroom and sat down at her desk. The RB files had downloaded. She closed the folder, made sure Misc and all the other files were also closed.

She looked at Roland’s office. He was hanging up his coat. Roland walked over to his desk. Zsuzsa cut the connection.

After ten minutes going through more of the material she had downloaded, her suspicions were confirmed. The website’s new owner was a fully owned subsidiary of Nationwide Ltd. She was working for Karoly Bardossy.

FIVE

Dob Street, 9 a.m.

Javitas, next door to the entrance to Balthazar’s apartment house, was the newest addition to the gentrification of District VII, much of which was focused on the streets around its epicentre, Klauzal Square. Javitas meant repairs in Hungarian. Until recently Javitas actually had been a repair shop for everything from typewriters to washing machines, run by Samu bacsi, an elderly Jewish man. Balthazar often dropped by for a chat and one of Samu’s powerful coffees. The two men talked about how the neighbourhood was changing, as it evolved into the buli-negyed, or party quarter, the old shops and cafés slowly turning into trendy bars and eateries that were crowded with tourists every night, leaving the locals with fewer and fewer places to go. Even worse, in the spring and summer the pavements, especially in the morning, were often spattered with vomit or pools of urine.

Several months ago Samu had surprised Balthazar with the news that he was selling up. Balthazar was shocked: Samu bacsi was an institution. He kept erratic hours and charged almost nothing for his repairs, but everyone in District VII knew him. But soon he would be seventy-five, Samu told Balthazar, so it was time to retire properly. Somewhat to Samu’s amazement, the value of his premises was enough for him to retire and buy a new apartment for himself and his wife in one of the fancy riverside blocks in District XIII with a concierge, a balcony and view over the Danube. Even better, the purchaser was his grandson, Mishi.

It was Mishi who greeted Balthazar as he walked into Javitas. The old fading paintwork had been stripped away, the cracked parquet slats and the creaking wooden window frames had all been replaced. Javitas had a new floor of wide grey planks, white plaster walls, and a jumble of used furniture dating back to the 1970s and 1960s. Charlie Parker drifted from a Bose sound system, and the air was rich with the smell of brewing coffee.

Behind the counter was a blackboard with the day’s specials: a new coffee from Ecuador, vegan stir-fry noodles with tofu, a gluten- and sugar-free banana cake. Javitas was a pleasant and welcoming place, the kind of café loved by hipsters from Budapest to Berlin and Brooklyn. But what lifted it from the legion of trendy eateries now colonising the city were the framed photographs of Samu bacsi at work. Some showed him as a young man, others just before he retired. The walls were also bedecked with souvenirs from across the decades: framed newspaper clippings, faded family photographs, posters for films and gigs by long-forgotten Hungarian rock bands. Perched on shelves and in various alcoves were some of the items Samu bacsi had worked on: an ancient black typewriter, an anglepoise-style lamp, a wooden radio. It was a loving homage.

Mishi put down the coffee cup he was polishing as Balthazar walked up to the long, zinc counter. Mishi was short and podgy with black hair tinged with grey, a goatee beard, soft features and shrewd brown eyes. Mishi had recently returned to Budapest after several years living in London, where he had opened several coffee bars in Hoxton, the area of central London known as ‘Silicon Roundabout’ for the number of tech firms that had opened up there.

He smiled when he saw Balthazar. ‘Drink? Eat?’ he asked. ‘We have a fabulous limited-edition new roast from Ecuador. Notes of caramel and burned orange, a long finish.’

Balthazar laughed as shook his head. They both knew that he had no interest in the fine gradations of coffees from different countries. ‘A Samu, please.’

A Samu meant coffee like Mishi’s grandfather used to make: a thick, tepid sludge, brewed from a vacuum-packed supermarket blend of cheap robusta beans.

Mishi pretended to looked pained. ‘OK. If you insist.’ He looked at Balthazar, sensing there was a reason for today’s visit. ‘Something else I can help with?’

Balthazar looked around before he spoke. The only other customer, a teenage girl with green-streaked hair, was sitting in a far corner, deeply involved with her mobile telephone. He leaned on the counter, then asked, ‘Is Vivi in?’

‘So you’re not here for the vegan stir-fry?’

Balthazar laughed. ‘One day. Promise.’

‘She’s in the back. I’ll bring your coffee through.’

‘Thanks,’ said Balthazar, as he started to walk around the bar to the door at the back.

‘Wait,’ said Mishi. He scribbled something down on the back of a business card. ‘You’ll need this. It’s the door code.’

*

There were three back rooms behind the public café space. One had been converted into a kitchen, the second an office. Balthazar glanced inside the kitchen, watching the cook chop, fry and stir by the long cooker range. In the neighbouring space Noemi, Mishi’s younger sister, sat by a computer, taking care of the café’s paperwork. Balthazar stopped in front of the third room, where a large, grey steel door was firmly closed in a metal frame. He looked up to see a small CCTV camera pointing at him, waved and smiled at the lens. A entry pad was mounted by the side of the entrance. He tapped in 05101940 – Samu’s birthday – and gently pushed the door open.

Inside the room a tall, pale, very skinny woman in her late twenties with a silver nose ring and buzz-cut black hair sat in front of a large desk. She turned when the door opened and greeted Balthazar with a raised hand. She was speaking on her mobile, he could see.

Balthazar waited a moment, but she gestured for him to come inside. As he walked into the room he caught the tail end of her conversation.

‘Good, good. I told you it would work. Now put it all on the stick, then wipe all the files from your laptop with that program I gave you…’ Vivi listened for a moment. ‘No, don’t worry. They might suspect something but they won’t be able to actually prove anything, make sure you wipe everything from your laptop… OK, come over later.’

A 1980s fake leather armchair stood in the corner by a small wooden table. He sat down in the armchair, his nose prickling at the smell of burned rope that hung in the air. A large blue ceramic ashtray stood on the table. A bent stub lay in the centre, too thick to be a cigarette.

‘No trace… wipe your laptop. That all sounds intriguing, Vivi,’ Balthazar said.

Vivi put her mobile down and turned to Balthazar. The handset, he noticed, was an old-fashioned Nokia candy-bar model. She smiled. ‘Doesn’t it, Detective? Now how can I help?’

Balthazar picked up the remainder of the joint and sniffed it. Hungary had very harsh drugs laws. Mere possession of a joint was enough to earn a hefty fine or even a jail sentence. ‘Firstly, don’t do this in the square, at least for the next few days.’ Klauzal Square was a popular haunt of the local dope smokers. ‘The city will be crawling with cops, because of the Israeli prime minister’s visit.’

‘Thanks. I won’t. But you didn’t come here to tell me that.’

Balthazar put the stub back down in the ashtray. ‘No, I did not.’

Vivi Szentkiralyi was a computer genius and had, until recently, worked as the systems manager of 555.hu. She had rescued the laptops of countless journalists after they dropped them or spilled coffee over the keyboard. She had saved 555.hu from a sustained DDOS attack, a distributed denial-of-service attack, when swarms of computers around the world had been hijacked and ordered to visit the news site and overwhelm its systems. She even knew how to navigate safely through the Dark Web, the secret internet where weapons, drugs, and many more illegal goods were traded, making it a rich source of stories. The new owners, however, had decided that Vivi’s services were no longer required. She was one of many staff members who did not make the move to the website’s new offices overlooking Liberty Square.

Balthazar had once seen Vivi’s workspace at 555.hu: two massive desks, overflowing with hard drives, keyboards, tangles of cables, half-finished mugs of coffee, sandwich wrappers, pizza boxes and who knew what else. Her new workplace was the complete opposite: three sleek brushed-steel monitors and a single keyboard. A large steel cube hard drive with a blinking blue light stood at the edge of the desk, emitting a faint hum. The walls were painted white and the floor was the same wide, grey wooden flooring as the café’s. It looked like there had once been a window on the other side but it had been bricked up and painted over. At the other end of the desk was a heavy, black old-fashioned IBM ThinkPad, which even Balthazar knew was very out of date. Vivi’s outfit, however, had not changed and she wore her usual black long-sleeved T-shirt and ripped black jeans that showed the skin of her knees.

Balthazar looked at the three monitors and her orderly desk. ‘It’s a bit different to 555.’

Vivi smiled wryly. ‘It has to be. I’m a grown-up now.’

She handed Balthazar a business card. He looked down. ‘Information technology and security consultant. Sounds impressive. How is the hacking going?’

Vivi shrugged. ‘Fine, I suppose. Mishi rents me the room. I bought the equipment with my redundancy. They gave us all a decent pay-off so we would go quickly and quietly. Companies pay me to break into their systems. Then I tell them their vulnerabilities. Then they give me quite a lot of money.’ She looked wistful for a moment. ‘But it was much more fun at 555.hu. I don’t get a lot of visitors. In fact I don’t get any. You are the first. That’s it. So here I am. All legal and above board. Sorry I don’t have anything to offer you.’

‘That’s fine, I ordered us both a coffee. Mishi will bring them in.’

‘Great. So, what can I do for you?’

Balthazar leaned forward. ‘I need your help, Vivi. With two things.’

‘You have computer experts at police headquarters. I don’t mean to be difficult, but why don’t you ask them?’

‘Firstly, because they are not as good as you.’ He paused, let the compliment – which they both knew was true – sink in. ‘And secondly, I need these done off the books.’

‘Hmmm, sounds intriguing.’

‘I think so,’ said Balthazar as he reached into his pocket and took out the memory stick that Eva neni had found hidden in Elad’s flat. He walked over to Vivi and showed it to her, lying in the palm of his hand. ‘This is encrypted. I already tried to open it on my laptop at home. I couldn’t get in.’

Vivi eyed the stick suspiciously then sat back for a moment. ‘I don’t mind doing things in a grey area, Detective, but it has to be for a good cause.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘I know you are a decent guy and you used to be Eniko’s boyfriend and you are the hero of Kossuth Square and everything, and Eniko is a good person, so you must be as well, but you are a cop.’ She fixed him with a steady gaze as she spoke. ‘So how do I know I am not going to get someone into trouble?’

Balthazar thought for a moment before he replied. It was a fair point and underlying it – which did not need to be said – was the fact that not all of his colleagues were decent. ‘The memory stick belongs to someone who has disappeared, probably been kidnapped. I think it has some clues about what happened to him. None of that is public and the police have not even opened a case yet, so I am trusting you with that.’

Vivi frowned. ‘Why the secrecy? If someone’s been kidnapped it will come out sooner or later.’