Moskva (16 page)

The old man looked shattered, on the verge of tears. All the bombast, all the pride in his elite troop had gone out of him. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He gestured helplessly at the cellar beyond. ‘You tell me.’

Tom stepped unthinking over bodies, moving past the ghosts, who shuffled aside to let him through. An officer dipped to retrieve a half-empty Coke bottle and sniffed it, putting it down more or less where he found it. Only the camera flashes and photographers suggested that this was a crime scene.

The rest of them seemed to have forgotten that.

Five more bodies lay in the cellar beyond, one of them dark-haired and on her front with a denim jacket neatly folded under her head, as if she were sleeping. Her arms were pale, her jeans new, her plimsolls undone. The one shaken free said her death had not been as peaceful as her form made it seem.

Kneeling, Tom reached for her.

When he hesitated, fingers gripped his shoulder hard. He could smell Svetlana’s scent and feel the heat of her on the back of his neck. ‘Do it,’ she said.

He rolled the girl over and saw a stranger.

Very beautiful and very young, but a stranger. Unbroken but for the fact she was no longer alive. The police hadn’t let him see Becca. What the paramedics cut from the Mini the authorities put in a box after the autopsy, screwed down the lid and advised Tom not to look. Even now, even this many months later, he felt guilt that he hadn’t made someone show him.

‘Yours?’ Vedenin asked.

Mine’s already buried,
Tom almost replied.

Taking Tom’s silence as a negative, Vedenin followed Tom towards the door to the cellars and stopped to talk to the Spetsnaz officer who had briefed him earlier.

‘Six boys, five girls,’ he said on his return. ‘That’s the lot.’

‘Eleven in total,’ said Svetlana.

‘Twelve,’ Tom corrected her. ‘With Beziki’s boy upstairs.’

Comrade Vedenin stared at him. ‘That’s Gabashville’s son?’ His face, already pale, was unreadable as he reached into his pocket for a cigar, lighting it mechanically, his first puff a stronger imitation of their warm breath in the frozen air.

‘Yes, sir, I think so.’

Vedenin peeled a strip of tobacco leaf from his lip and flicked it on to the crime scene floor. He looked round the room and when he turned back his face was hollow, almost haunted. Dropping his cigar, barely smoked, he ground it under his heel without really noticing, his movements mechanical.

‘At least your girl isn’t here. I suppose that’s something.’

‘I pity her mother,’ Svetlana said.

Both men turned to stare at her.

‘If Alex were here and dead, at least she’d know where her daughter was. As it is, she still won’t know and we’re no closer to finding her.’ She shrugged at Vedenin’s look. ‘A hard truth is better than no truth. You ask her mother.’

‘Svetlana …’

‘I’ll wait outside,’ she told him.

‘Her childhood was complicated,’ Vedenin told Tom, lighting another cigar. ‘Sometimes the ones with complicated backgrounds make the best officers.’ He looked Tom up and down, as if seeking proof of this. ‘I’m told yours was similarly messy?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘People,’ he said heavily.

The way Vedenin kept staring round the cellar made Tom wonder whether he simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing or hoped somehow that if he looked hard enough he might change it. Several times the minister opened his mouth to say something before changing his mind. Finally, he stubbed his cigar out on the wall, barely a quarter smoked and in total disregard of the need not to corrupt evidence.

For a second, his hand hovered over the pocket where he kept his cigar case and then he shrugged. ‘We should go,’ he said.

‘What happens now?’ Tom asked.

‘Svetlana will drive you back to Moscow.’

‘I mean here, sir. What happens here?’

‘I imagine the case will go to the local
militsiya
. I can see no evidence of a cult. Can you? Simply local delinquents squatting in a ruined house and poisoning themselves with homemade alcohol. It happens daily. I shouldn’t say that to a foreigner but you must have heard rumours. They’ll try to match the dead to files on missing children. Well, someone will. I doubt they’ll find much.’

‘And Gabashville’s child?’

‘If this is him, then he obviously fell in with a bad crowd. Given his upbringing that’s hardly surprising. The cult of individuality. First they want rock music, then …’ The old man looked around him. ‘You get this.’

A howl of sirens from the road prevented Tom from answering.

A few minutes later, panting paramedics hurtled in, too late to do anything but kneel by each body to confirm death and decide in which order to load the stretchers. A
crumpled-looking man in a cheap suit came in after them, glowering at the sight of the Spetsnaz.

‘If you’ll excuse me …’ Vedenin said to Tom.

He wandered over and within seconds the crumpled man was nodding seriously, and nodding some more to confirm that he was paying attention and agreed with everything the minister said. It was a surprisingly effective display of power on Vedenin’s part. Vedenin clapped the man on the back one last time, nodded curtly to the Spetsnaz officer and headed for the door, glancing over his shoulder to say Tom should follow.

Outside, the first stretchers were being carried down the track.

Three ambulances were parked behind two VV trucks, the only ones left. Despite a paramedic’s shout, Tom clambered into the first ambulance and began pulling back a sheet. A growled order from Svetlana stopped the paramedic from trying to drag him out of there. She watched Tom go from stretcher to stretcher with something close to pity in her eyes. By the time he’d checked the last of them, a tight knot of fury had taken root. He’d known Alex wasn’t there.

The pain in his chest made him look anyway.

‘Where’s Vedenin?’ he demanded.

‘The minister’s gone home.’

In what?
Tom wanted to ask.

A forlorn man in a crumpled suit by the side of the road gave him his answer. Vedenin had taken the pathologist’s car.

‘We should leave,’ Svetlana said, heading for the Zil.

To Tom’s puzzlement, she opened the heavy rear door for him and he clambered in, feeling the cold leather like ice through his jeans. The huge car coughed into life and the paramedics and Spetsnaz stood back to let them edge out of the lay-by on to the empty road beyond. ‘Better,’ Svetlana said.

A mile later, she pulled off the road, hard ruts frozen to the sharpness of stone juddering under her wheels. She killed the lights, leaving the stars needle sharp now that the clouds had passed. Leprous moonlight lit the hills to one side.

Tom reached for his door handle, wondering if she’d already drawn her sidearm. When she didn’t turn, he clambered out, slamming the door with a thud so loud it dislodged snow from a fir behind him.

Now was when she should drive away.

Then reverse fast and hard.

He’d seen a man killed that way.

That had to be what this was about. Vedenin leaving so he didn’t have to be around when the rubbish was tidied.
I’m shivering,
Tom realized. Alcohol, or the lack of it. Cold perhaps. God knows, it was cold enough. He refused to accept that it might be fear. The car didn’t move and Svetlana remained where she was.

Eventually, Tom realized that he was meant to take his place up front.

Shaking imaginary drops from the cock still safely in his jeans, as if he’d been pissing a bucketful against the Zil’s back wheels, he slid himself on to its front seat. His heart racing, his nerves shot. One hand was shaking so fiercely it wouldn’t go in his pocket. His certainty that she’d been about to kill him seemed suddenly pitiful.

‘How long has it been like that?’ she asked.

‘The hand? Six months.’

‘What does your doctor say?’

‘Nerve damage from a bullet to the shoulder made worse by a badly repaired vertebra and a trapped nerve.’

‘Do you believe him?’

‘No.’ Tom shook his head.

Svetlana smiled grimly and said she wouldn’t either. If
they were good doctors, proper doctors, what were they doing in the army anyway? The local bars were shut, she added, but a military base on the way back had an officers’ mess that was bound to be open. He’d be able to get vodka there. Without waiting for his reply, she put the Zil into the first of its two gears and the huge car moved away, steady and remorseless as a festival chariot dragged by an elephant.

Tom waited for her to mention what had happened at the ruined house.

He waited long enough for the road to widen and become dual carriageway and then single lane again. He waited while road signs counted off the miles to Moscow and villages became towns and then fields again.

Too much was wrong with what had happened.

How had the VV known Alex was there? If she’d ever been there. And what evidence was there for that? Tom waited, and he waited.

And she said nothing.

They slowed at the sign for a military base and Tom shook his head, the guards on the gate turning to watch them as they cruised by. The roads were long, Svetlana’s driving uncharacteristically careful and the hour late, and Tom found his head nodding and jerked himself awake time and again. When sleep came it was welcome, until the dreams came too. He woke to find Svetlana watching him.

‘What did I say?’ he demanded.

‘You said nothing.’

‘Then why are you staring?’

Leaning across, she put her fingers briefly to Tom’s face and her fingertips came away wet. ‘You cry in your sleep,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know people could do that. Perhaps they can’t. Perhaps it’s just you …’

The hand Tom lifted to his own face shook badly.

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to find you some vodka?’

‘This isn’t about alcohol.’

Svetlana sighed.

‘It’s not,’ he insisted.

‘Whatever you say.’

‘Have you heard of
Macbeth
?’

‘One of your generals?’

‘A play by one of our great writers. Shakespeare.’

‘I know Shakespeare. Tchaikovsky turned his
Romeo and Juliet
into a fantasia and Prokofiev wrote a ballet. I saw that traitor Nureyev dance it in London when I was a child.’

‘Why go if he was a traitor?’

‘Because he could dance. So, this play of yours …’

‘A woman has someone killed and believes her hand is cursed.’

‘Your hand is cursed?’ She slowed the car and for a moment Tom thought she was about to pull over. Instead she kept the speed at a steady thirty and waited. When he didn’t say anything, she asked, ‘This curse is something you did?’

‘Something I did. And something I didn’t.’

‘The didn’t has to do with your daughter?’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘Sir Edward sent your file across. We insisted. We didn’t expect it to be quite so comprehensive. What was the did? That bit was missing.’

‘I doubt the ambassador knows. In fact, I doubt it’s on file anywhere …’ That was the truth of it. The only way it would ever find its way into his file was if the powers that be decided to hang him out to dry. And if they wanted that, he’d have been under oath in London preparing to face a select committee.

‘I killed two people.’

‘People you shouldn’t have killed?’

‘So I’m told.’

‘Then why aren’t you in trouble?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘I mean real trouble.’

‘Because they can’t prove it.’

‘Or don’t want to prove it,’ Svetlana said.

Somehow Tom had known she’d understand.

‘So,’ Svetlana said, ‘vodka no longer helps?’

‘Vodka always helps. But tomorrow I’ll have to tell Alex’s mother about tonight. And Alex’s stepfather will be on to Vedenin asking what happens next.’

‘I’m not sure he’s the right man to ask.’

‘Who is?’

Svetlana dropped down into first to take a corner so tight the Zil only just fitted around it. She was negotiating tight bends on a country road that obviously hadn’t seen a snow-plough in weeks, and Tom realized they were off any route he recognized. They were heading east of Moscow, which had to be that low glow in the distance, like a fire.

‘I’m taking you to him,’ she said.

‘Where does he live?’

‘At home.’

‘Whose?’ Tom asked.

Svetlana smiled. ‘Mine.’