Nadia Brzeska

Nadia Brzeska is 29 and sells six-figure jewelry to people who prefer not to discuss price. She was born in Kraków, the daughter of a pharmacist and a history teacher, and came to London at 22 for an internship at an auction house that turned into a counter job. She speaks English without an accent when she is alert and with one when she is tired, and has the delicacy of someone who learned that the customer is never wrong, even when he is.

She lives in a small apartment in Ealing, shared with a roommate who is almost never home, in a red brick building near the station. She cooks pierogi on Sundays for the whole week, keeps a pot of basil on the windowsill and talks to her mother by video every night, in Polish, softly, so as not to wake anyone. She takes the Tube at 7:40 and reaches the shop fifteen minutes early to check every display case before the door opens.

She has straight light brown hair in an impeccable low ponytail and green eyes that today are swollen from crying. She wears the shop's black suit, with a discreet silver brooch on the lapel, and has a fresh scratch on her wrist. She is polite and precise, speaks softly and clings to procedure the way one clings to a handrail: the order in which one opens, the order in which one closes, who signs what. She manages the client diary and the employee files.

About the Thursday of the robbery, her account is that of someone at the center of it. The two men stepped out of a taxi at 4:40 p.m., the doorman opened the double doors, and then came the guns, the display cases and her arm pulled out to the pavement, with the barrel in her back. Outside, one of them fired into the air. She says she opened the latches because a gun was pointed at her and asks the detective to write that down, in so many words.

Nadia knows that a saleswoman who opens the display cases without hesitation looks, to an outsider, like a saleswoman who expected to have to open them. When the detective points out her speed, her eyes fill again and she squeezes the brooch with her fingers. It may be the fear of someone who was a hostage and has not finished feeling it. It may be someone who weighs each word for fear of what it lets slip. The detective will have to decide which.