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About ten minutes later he returned and passed us without saying a word, returning to his festering hovel he probably called a desk. Occasionally, again appearing quite disgusted, he would look up as us in the corridor through a window. About twenty minutes later, in Russian, we asked the girl what was happening? “He will get back to you,” she said; clearly she was not supposed to chase him up. Another twenty minutes later, a large, again overweight (they were all overweight), officer rather aggressively bellowed at us: “Why are you doing still standing there? Sit down there [pointing at a row of metal chairs down the hall], you’re waiting for the right man to come, he may be longer than you think.”

This was all we wanted to know, but we had just waited where we were told to wait; another ten minutes later the original officer, the obese one, passed telling us something similar. Gee, thanks fuckwit.

About an hour later the Fraud Detective took us to his office. At first things seemed just as bad as he grilled Mrs. tyger on the specifics of her complaint. She had used a cash machine (ATM) several times, and had been refused money (either declined or the machine declared itself “empty”); yet online the money had left the account. Barclays were cool, we just had to fill out a form they would send to our house (in England) and they would put the money back (they could see on the system something wasn’t right). Halifax on the other hand were being quite arsey, probably thinking we were part of some fraud, what with Mrs. tyger’s Russian accent (her English is exceptional though). They demanded that we reported the crime and got a “crime number,” before they would sort out the lost money, which in their case was a quarter as much as we lost on the Barclays account. This was why we were sitting in the Fraud Detective’s office.

When a clear crime was outlined, and he had seen that we weren’t a couple of chancers, his serious bad-cop routine changed, and he became an amiable and charming man eager to sort out the problem. In fact, he was rather animated by the episode, keen to learn and resolve the issue, beyond what were interested in, which was a simple number. He phoned the bank in question and they said because we weren’t their customers they wouldn’t help, from that moment, suspected fraud became a bona fide crime. The guy seemed quite exited.

If was being cruel I would say his office was a shithole, but as I’m being my usual benevolent self, I will say his office was a bit like an abandoned caravan you may find on an allotment. The only thing it didn’t have were random wildlife living in the cupboards, or maybe it did, I didn’t check. I sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair and Mrs. tyger, bizarrely, was on some large upholstered sitting-room chair, the sort that is abundant in nursing homes for the elderly. In the window were about four hundred cacti of various sizes, in various plastic pots. On the walls, where the wallpaper was peeling off, were a couple of pictures from the Soviet times with dramatic propaganda about crime against the people. An electric socket, right behind the detective’s chair, was damaged and had exposed wires showing. On another wall was a painting of the first commissar of the police (and KGB), from just after the revolution. The detective got rather exited when he explained to this Englishman who he was, he had a visible sense of pride. There is something endearing in such open displays of pride (not the conceited variety mind), do you not think? He sat at a black ash desk that looked completely out-of-date in his 1940’s era office, and around the single door had been constructed several ill-fitting cupboards, which added to the caravan feel of the place. We sat there for a couple of hours while he wrote his report, made a few phone calls, and generally chit-chatted with his new friends from afar. He even printed off a map from his PC, so he could show us where a bowling alley was. Good food too he promised.

He then led us back to the obese bastard’s reception and we waited at the same metal chairs, waiting for the promised crime number. About ten or twenty minutes later the detective asked us to trudge back up to his palatial office suite. Mrs. tyger’s statement, which he had spent hours typing precisely on his computer, had to be written by Mrs tyger herself (why didn’t he know this?). I sat while she copied the text word by word. He then asked a few more questions. It was about an hour later when we went back again to the metal chairs, to wait for our crime number. The same large aggressive officer who had shouted at us earlier demanded we come back into the Bastard’s reception, although I was halted, again with pointless aggression (remember tyger is not a small or placid man himself) at the door and ordered to wait outside, my angry glares had obviously unsettled the obese Bastard’s sensibilities.