a burly man pulled the door open, surrounded by children.
“Mergim Kavaja?” said Cormac as best he could.
The man frowned at him.
“MerGIM KaVAja?” Cormac tried again, with the emphases on different syllables.
The man continued to frown at him suspiciously as a loud stream of questions in a woman’s voice came from behind him. He shouted back noisily, and Cormac simply showed him the name printed on the file, at which he sniffed and pushed open the door.
The tiny flat, with its thin walls and cheap doors, was clean but full. Undeniably full. Through open doors, Cormac saw mattresses on the floors of each room, and in the sitting room, bedding was piled beside two ancient worsted sofas. Men and boys sat around the living room, and where there was space they sat with their heads pressed against the wall. There was a smell of cooking as well as a lot of drying clothes, sweat, deodorant. The shower was running, the washing machine.
“Mergim!” said the man, somehow making it sound totally different from what Cormac had said, and in the corner a man raised his hand. They spoke to each other in an unintelligible string, then the first man turned back to Cormac.
“Doctor,” he said, pointing at him.
“Actually I’m a nurse,” said Cormac, but everyone ignored him as he approached Mergim, who was sitting in the only armchair and had his leg up, his cheap tracksuit bottoms turned up to reveal a skinny white leg thick with black hair.
What Cormac saw was an absolute mess. He looked at it, blinking, for a minute. He had stitches to take out, but the wound itself was a total mystery; it wavered up and around like a whirlpool or a drunk.
“What did you do to yourself?” he asked, undeniably interested. He’d never seen anything like it.
Mergim—he was twenty-four, according to Cormac’s file—didn’t say anything, looked inquiringly out into the throng. Eventually a slender man with glasses who had been sitting to the side reading a comic in English got up, sighing. He hissed something at Mergim—probably along the lines of “Speak English!” Cormac guessed—and reluctantly came over.
“Hello,” he said. “I Zlobdan. I speak English. Everyone else is”—he shot them a look—“very lazy men. Idiots.”
“Aye,” said Cormac. They didn’t look lazy to him. They looked knackered, dusty from building sites, presumably, on-and-off shift work, sharing beds if the amount of trainers was anything to go by. “So what happened?”
“He have accident. With drill on-site.”
“Okay,” said Cormac, taking a closer look at the wound. There were stitches all over the place, gaping holes that had puckered then healed like that. It was fortunate he was young. In an old person, the skin wouldn’t have been strong enough, would have stayed like that. “He get stitched up here by . . . ?”
Zlobdan indicated one of the men, who blushed red.
“Is he a doctor?”
“No! He idiot!”
“Why didn’t he go to the hospital?”
“Because they are lazy idiots and didn’t realize health is free here.”
“You’re European, though, right?”
“Yes! Albanian!”
“And you didn’t know that?”
“I know that! Not lazy idiots know that!”
Zlobdan gave the pair a look of withering scorn, and the poor man who’d done the stitching stared at the floor, still blushing.
“I sent him to hospital. After all the screaming.”
Cormac’s lips almost twitched, contemplating how difficult it must be to share a tiny apartment with at least a dozen other men with whom you had nothing in common.
“We pay tax!” said Zlobdan fiercely.
“I know,” said Cormac, holding up his hands. “It’s okay, I’m just here to take the stitches out.”
He opened his box and took out his disinfectant wipes. Everyone was eyeing him up intensely; it was rather disconcerting. He wondered if there wasn’t much to watch on Albanian TV.
He snapped on the rubber gloves, then fingered the wound. It was a shame; it was a great creeping mess that almost certainly wouldn’t have been if they’d cleaned it out properly and got a professional in. He looked at Mergim, who had now gone white.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m just going to take them out.”
“Drugs?” said Zlobdan.
“There’s no need,” said Cormac, slightly sadly. The nerve endings would have been killed in the botched job, unfortunately. It would all be scar tissue from now on in.
Zlobdan said something to Mergim, who looked as if he was starting to cry. A bearlike man stepped forward and drew out a plain bottle filled with what smelled to Cormac like paint thinner. He passed it to Mergim, who took a huge swig, wincing as