And when she catches him, she won’t let go. Kershaw is an ambitious character, with a shattered personal life (as it should be in the case of a policewoman from a crime novel; her husband obviously left because he was fed up with her putting work before family) – she has the potential to stand out in the competitive market of English crime stories. The determination with which she fights for her position amongst her male colleagues (especially considering that she is flanked by two truly buoyant male characters) may definitely help her win readers’ hearts.
Sergeant Bacon, inevitably nicknamed “Streaky” by his subordinates, is an old-fashioned type of policeman. Perhaps he is not familiar with all these modern investigative methods, and sits in pubs in the middle of the day, using a meeting with his informant as an excuse, but he sure knows how to catch a criminal. When Kershaw and Streaky develop a mutual appreciation, the London police can only profit.
However, Kershaw has another main partner in the novel: Janusz Kiszka (his last name translates as black pudding) – a Pole who is introduced to the readers as the unofficial “fixer” of the Polish community in London. A fixer is that person who will exact debts from customers, as well as, upon a priest’s request, venture across London on a search for a missing young immigrant. Kiszka, a muscular forty-something, is a second-wave immigrant to Great Britain (the first one took place after the Second World War). A former member of the anti-communist opposition, and later of Solidarność, he left Poland after Martial Law was instated. Together with his immigrant friend Oskar, he recollects these good old Thatcherite times, when one could work on building sites all day long and not worry about the working conditions.
Nowadays, Kiszka the fixer takes care of minor and major injustices affecting the Polish immigrants who arrived in London en masse after Poland joined the European Union. According to the 2011 census, the Big Smoke had almost 148,000 Polish-speaking residents, most of whom lived in Ealing (21,500, i.e. over 6% of local population).
Janusz is an old-fashioned man in comparison to the newcomers – these youngsters don’t know a thing about Solidarność and Jaruzelski, or what it means to have to win ones' own freedom. They are the first generation to emigrate to Great Britain not for political reasons, but “for bread”. It turns out, however, that shadows of the gloomy past, hidden away in the Security Service’s files, will bring a felony to London. The secrets of the past contained in those files are so precious that anyone who tries to reveal them will be in mortal danger.
Kiszka and Kershaw, initially distrustful towards one another (she believes he murdered a young Pole, while he, a true Polish patriarch, thinks that a woman-detective will only interrupt his investigation), towards the end of the plot join forces in the efforts to put an end to the wrongdoing.