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examination table. Takes him through the normal checks. Blood pressure, cholesterol, finger up the bum … Having his prostate checked always reminds Ruiz of a joke about knowing you’re in trouble if your doctor checks your prostate and has both his hands on your shoulders.
    Doctor Reines is telling him horror stories about fat-choked arteries and how people his age are dropping like flies. Then comes the lecture about him exercising more: walking or swimming - six laps of a pool or two miles on foot.
    He listens to Ruiz’s heart. It’s strong. A champion’s heart. A thoroughbred. Everything else about his body is turning to shit, but his heart is going strong.
    Dr Reines asks after Ruiz’s mother.
    ‘How is her Alzheimer’s?’
    ‘She has good days and bad.’
    ‘Does she still think I’m Josef Mengele?’
    ‘She thinks all doctors are Josef Mengele.’
    Ruiz’s mother, Daj, doesn’t live in the present any more. Most of the time she’s reliving the war, escaping from the Gestapo and SS, surviving the concentration camps.
    Daj met Mengele once. He was standing on a ramp in dress uniform and polished black boots. He wore white cotton gloves and held a cane, directing a sea of exhausted and starving women and children either left or right.
    A handsome man, Daj said. Cold. He looked like a gypsy with dark hair, dark eyes and tawny skin. ‘Perhaps that’s why he hated us so much,’ she said. ‘He was purging the world of the things he hated about himself.’
     
    Ruiz leaves the doctor’s surgery and takes a bus to Victoria, before walking along Vauxhall Bridge Road. He has another appointment, another annual check-up.
    Every year on his birthday, he has a beer with an old mate from the Met, his former second-in-command at the Serious Crime Group, Colin ‘Bones’ McGee.
    McGee was a rising star when Ruiz first met him - one of the university graduates they fast-tracked through training and nudged upstairs after the Flying Squad got disbanded. He topped his class at Hendon, made Detective Sergeant at thirty and Detective Inspector at thirty-five. Then his wings fell off.
    It was 2002 - a sting operation involving twelve million quids worth of cocaine found in a shipping container in Rotterdam. McGee took the decision to leave the container on board and let the ship sail for Felixstowe. He ran the surveillance operation.
    Can you see what’s coming? The drugs vanished. Not a trace. Maybe the haul got tossed into the North Sea. Maybe it was never on board. It was all supposition and it didn’t wash with McGee’s bosses. That’s when he got the nickname Bones because his career was dead and buried.
    Since then Bones has been treading water with the Specialist Crime Directorate, tracking assets and chasing paper trails. It’s a dead end job because no serious player will ever hold assets in their own names. They hide behind shelf companies and dodgy corporations based in the Bahamas and the Caymans.
    Ruiz doesn’t particularly like Bones. Never has. He was always a little too ambitious. Too grasping. But when he left the job, Ruiz handed over his old files - including the Lanfranchi case. He asked Bones to keep an eye on it … just in case.
    They meet at a pub on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Union Jacks hang from the rafters.
    Bones is at a table drinking single malt. He’s lost his boyish innocence, thinks Ruiz - a receding hairline will do it every time - but he still dresses sharply in grey trousers, Italian loafers and a jacket. His copper-coloured hair - dyed most likely - is combed straight back on his scalp.
    ‘How’s it hanging, Vincent?’
    ‘I’m good, Colin.’
    They swap small talk. Retirements. Promotions. Prostate cancer. There’s twenty years between them - almost a generation - but the job doesn’t change, only the rules.
    Eventually the talk gets around to Ray Garza. It’s been years since there was any news on the Lanfranchi case. At past meetings, Bones has made shit up to keep Ruiz