Jon Courtenay Grimwood

‘Okay,’ said Bobby, ‘show me how you shot him.’

He handed his .44 magnum to the child and watched thin arms tremble as Natalie Persikov tried to keep the gun steady.

‘Like this,’ Natalie said.

Taking the Colt from the girl, Sergeant Bobby Zha placed it on a table, next to one of the many photographs in her grandfather’s dining room. ‘Now show me.’

The eleven-year old struggled to lift the gun. When she finally did, it was using both hands and its muzzle wavered between the door and a high sash window, which overlooked Tamsin Steps, one of the more exclusive areas of San Francisco’s Russian Hill.

At eleven, Bobby Zha’s own daughter had been wearing mascara and her mother’s Gucci sling backs. Natalie Persikov had sandals, wore her blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail and looked like the child Bobby remembered eleven-year olds being. She was also thin as a stick. The recoil from a Colt .44 magnum would have snapped her wrists. At the very least, it would have sprained them.

‘And he came in that window?’

Natalie nodded.

‘How did you know he was a burglar?’

The child looked at Bobby Zha as if he was stupid. ‘He was wearing a mask.’ This part was true. The dead man had been wearing a Russian ski mask made from black silk, with the label cut out. Forensics were still liaising with Moscow to identify the maker.

Then there was all that stuff with the icon. This sat on a wall by the window, a sour-faced virgin with Christ squashed onto her lap. Opportunistic insurance fraud, Bobby would have said. If not for the fact the family were stupidly rich and Dr Misha Persikov notoriously honest. Apparently, reporting the icon missing had been a mistake.

Outside the window Ozzie, the family’s odd-job woman, continued raking the tiny lawn for cigarette butts and plastic coffee cups left behind by a camera crew, while inside, industrial cleaners had already returned the dining-room carpet to a surgical purity it probably never possessed.

'Did the gun make a loud noise?’

Natalie glanced at where her grandfather had stood until Bobby sent him from the room.

‘Very loud,’ Natalie said, her chin going up.

This was also true.

‘How about recoil?’

The girl looked blank.

‘Gun’s often kick back,’ said Bobby, ‘when you fire them. It’s called recoil…’

Natalie Persikov nodded doubtfully. She knew he was trying to trick her, Bobby could read that in her narrow face. She just wasn’t sure what form his trickery would take.

‘Did the gun move?’

Was that the trick? The police officer was waiting so she nodded, making her choice. ‘Of course it moved,’ Natalie said crossly, banging the revolver back on the table.

‘And did it move up or down?’ He was being unfair, Bobby knew that. The tears backing up behind the small girl’s eyes said she knew that too. Pushing children so far was not something Bobby did willingly, but this was different.

If the girl was telling the truth, then Natalie Persikov had picked up her grandfather’s unlicensed revolver and shot a burglar through the head. She did this from across a dining room bigger than some people’s apartments, at dusk, when the light was almost gone and the victim little more than silhouette against an already darkened sky.

It was either the world’s luckiest shot or someone was lying. And it didn’t help Sergeant Bobby Zha’s nerves that Moscow’s embassy in Washington seemed unwilling to confirm that the amalgam in the dead man’s fillings was typically Russian.

So what Bobby had was one 87-year-old doctor, a pillar of respectability and friend to at least two of the city’s last three mayors, one 11-year-old girl and a dead burglar with every single label cut out of his clothes. The child was adamant she had shot the man. Sergeant Zha’s instinct was that Mihail Persikov had been responsible, but since the doctor was blind that seemed unlikely. 

'Come on,’ said Bobby, returning the revolver to the girl. ‘Tell me, did the gun move up or down?’

Taking the weapon, Natalie held it out in front of her, hands trembling, as if holding it so might give her the answer. A boy of that age would have threaded one finger around its trigger from instinct. Natalie held the gun as she might a snake, barely able to touch it.

‘Down,’ she said.

Bobby smiled. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re done.’ He resisted the urge to ruffle Natalie’s hair, in the way he would once have ruffled the hair of his own daughter, before things changed and Kris grew too old for that. He also resisted telling Natalie everything would be all right, because it wouldn’t. Either the child had killed or she was being used as camouflage for someone who had.

‘I have to go now,’ said Bobby. ‘And fill out lots of forms, like homework.’ That usually earned him sympathy, from boys at least.

‘I like homework,’ announced Natalie.

‘So does Kris, but only sometimes.'

The girl frowned, waiting for Bobby’s explanation.

‘Kris is my daughter.’

She looked at him then, as if to say, you have a daughter? It made Bobby wonder what she saw. A small man, in faded jeans and black tee-shirt, an SFPD badge on a tape around his neck and tinted glasses hiding tired eyes…? Natalie hadn’t wanted to talk to him today, her silence holding until - in the end - Bobby sent her grandfather from the room. 

‘It’s an odd name,’ Natalie said finally.

‘What is? asked Bobby. ‘Kris?’

‘Zha…’

A mixture of Cantonese, Spanish and English, Sergeant Zha looked foreign, no matter where he was or who he was with, whereas the child looked Russian, from her cheekbones and blonde hair to the speedwell blue of her troubled eyes. He was za zhong, which translated politely as mixed race, less politely as bastard. She was born and brought up San Francisco and held an American passport. All the same, she looked as if she stepped out of an old Soviet poster, one advertising determination and youth.

‘My grandfather,’ said Bobby. ‘He came from China.’ 

‘Ahh…’ The child nodded, looked serious. ‘About the gun,’ she asked. ‘You believe me now?’

Bobby debated lying and decided not. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I do…’ Picking up the revolver, he slid it into a holster. The original was in an evidence locker at 850 Bryant Street but this was as near as damn in size and weight, even if it was a replica. Bobby Zha wasn’t the kind of man to put a real gun into the hands of a child. 

‘I did it,’ insisted Natalie. 

‘Gun’s jump up,’ said Bobby, ‘it’s got to do with how your elbow pivots. And if you’d held the gun like that it would have broken your fingers. Someone else shot that man… Was it your grandfather?’

‘No.’

‘Are you telling the truth?’

‘Of course I am.’ There was real anger in the child’s voice. An anger that Bobby suspected she either did not or, perhaps, wasn’t often allowed to release. ‘He’s blind,’ she said. ‘And he’d never shoot anyone anyway.’

‘Whereas you would…?’ Bobby stopped, seeing panic blossom behind Natalie’s eyes.

‘I did it,’ she said, shaking her head.

Conflicted, it was such a great word. ‘You know,’ said Bobby, as he put the holster containing the replica into a carrier bag and put the carrier bag inside a cheap briefcase. ‘There’s one thing that puzzles me.’

‘What?’ said Natalie.

'If your grandfather really is innocent… Why would you take the blame for someone else?’