by Nick Louth
‘Wouldn’t you have wanted Sasha dead?’
‘Sometimes, of course, yes. In past years, but I never stopped loving him, either. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and in that particular currency I am very wealthy.’ Gillard was just about to ask another question when the door opened and three guys in suits walked in. He recognised the first before he introduced himself: DCS Geoffrey Corrigan, the head of Surrey’s Special Branch. He was a rangy and capable-looking fellow, with a stellar reputation. The second man was smaller, bespectacled, grey-haired, his suit a little on the baggy side, introduced as Haldane. The third man was built like a wall and exuded the physical poise of someone who had been in the armed forces.
‘I think we’ve met, Craig,’ Corrigan said, striding forward to shake his hand. ‘These are some of my people. They’re adept at handling incidents that have what you might call ramifications.’
‘We’ll take it from here, detective chief inspector,’ said the military-looking guy, beginning to interpose himself between Gillard and his interviewee. ‘You can have your witness back in a day or two.’ He showed Gillard a security pass which identified him as a member of MI5. The detective gave a silent word of thanks to Alison Rigby for having tipped him off.
Gillard took Corrigan to one side, out of earshot of Ms Yalinsky. ‘Look, sir, I need another half an hour, and specifically I need to be able to swab her hands and clothing for gunshot residues.’
‘We can do that, don’t worry,’ said Haldane, who had clearly been eavesdropping. ‘Let us know any questions you have, and we’ll ask them as well as our own.’ He had a soft voice and cultured tones which only made him sound more patronising. ‘We’ll need to speak to some of the other witnesses too. We’ll let you know in plenty of time.’
‘Don’t let her leave the country,’ Gillard said. ‘She’s got clout. If she leaves, we’ll never get her back. She’ll be given diplomatic immunity by Kazakhstan.’
Haldane chuckled. ‘We can’t stop her leaving, unless perhaps you think she’s a suspect.’
‘She is, obviously, as the only survivor,’ Gillard said.
Haldane laughed again, and Gillard flexed his fists in frustration as he watched Yalinsky pick up her handbag and walk out with him and Corrigan. The big MI5 agent meanwhile stood staring at the detective, daring him to intervene.
‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘Remember. This didn’t happen.’
The detective watched them leave, the big guy gently closing the door behind them. He shrugged and turned to the coffee table.
His notebook and digital recorder were no longer there.
Bastards.
* * *
Furious that he had been so unceremoniously robbed of his evidence as well as dislodged from the case, he risked calling Alison Rigby. Waking your chief constable at gone four a.m. was not to be done lightly, even though she had already rung him at half past one. Rigby was the ultimate workaholic, her car often in the car park at Mount Browne even before the early uniform shift got in at six, and frequently there until midnight. He tried her mobile first, which was switched off. He left a message for her, and then thought about ringing her landline. Very few officers had been trusted with that number, the one which really would wake her up. His fingers hesitated over the keypad. She had already told him she couldn’t do anything, hadn’t she? Only the home secretary could intervene.
He decided against it and put his phone away, then marched out through the open dining room doors onto the first of the three descending terraces. He looked across the snowy meadow towards the library and the CSI tent stuck to the front of it like an unwanted blister. He could see a lot of Tyvek-suited figures standing around drinking coffee. That’s odd, he thought. They’ve got plenty to do, why are they milling about?
He hurried down through the terraces, skirted the ice rink, which was now turning into a slush pool, and made his way across the bridge. Spotting Yaz Quoroshi, Gillard walked straight up to him and asked him what was happening.
‘We’ve been chucked out while a Home Office team looks around,’ he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Not sure they can do anything that you couldn’t.’
‘Well, not quite true. I think it’s Novichok and radioactive precautions, as they are all sealed up in noddy suits. I’m told we can go back in half an hour.’
Gillard shook his head. ‘That’s baffling.’ He made his way through the CSI tent until he got to the taped-off doorway of the library. There, just inside the lobby, he saw a large figure in a green inflatable NBC suit with his own backpack supply. He looked like a cross between a Teletubby and a 1960s Doctor Who monster. He was waving around a handheld device.
‘Geiger counter,’ Quoroshi said, having followed the detective.
‘This is farcical,’ Gillard said. ‘All this chemical and nuclear stuff is a smokescreen to keep us off the crime scene.’
‘So do you think we killed them?’ Quoroshi whispered.
‘We?’
‘Britain, the security services. Bumped off two Russian oligarchs.’
‘I wasn’t saying that,’ Gillard said.
Quoroshi shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the only reason I can think of for them to keep us off the crime scene.’
* * *
Once back in the drawing room, Gillard sat opposite Wolf. The unpronounceable Georgian was sprawled in a chair, his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, a big mug of coffee cooling, forgotten, on an adjacent coffee table. He was rubbing his face as if he couldn’t believe what had just happened.
‘I know we’ve taken a brief statement from you already,’ Gillard said. ‘But as you are in such a pivotal position, I do need to ask you some more questions.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, his face still in his hands.
Gillard began by carefully writing down the man’s full name. No easy task. ‘When were you appointed head of security?’
Wolf sat up and rubbed his neck. ‘From start, Mr Volkov arranged for me to get my British credentials when he bought the house here in 2016. I bodyguard for him for a while twelve years ago, when he in Moscow. He remember people, you know?’
‘Were you responsible for security-checking the guest list?’
‘Part, yes. Natasha Fein made list, and I sent list to private security fellows. We had a few come up dodgy on background checks, as you English say, so they left off invitation list. I made own checks in some cases.’
‘Where were you when the shooting began?’
‘In house. I just emerge from control room. In basement,’ he said pointing to the floor.
‘And what is controlled from the control room?’
‘Everything. Light for house and garden, CCTV, remote lock. You name, it control.’
‘Does that include the library?’
‘Yes, normally. But Mr Volkov want library closed off during party. So two days past I set locking system for local control, which means combination of thumbprint and entry code.’
‘Do you know why he wanted that change?’
Wolf shrugged. ‘He give order, I follow. He no want bloke wandering in library, and I think he want show something important to Mr Talin and Ms Yalinsky. That is why internal CCTV cameras also switch off. That is also why his own bodyguard, Bryn Howell, who go him everywhere, he sent away.’
‘Had you ever known him do anything like that before? Sending away his bodyguard?’
A smile slipped across Wolf’s jowly face. ‘When he with woman for shag, always. But otherwise, not much. I don’t ask myself questions. He the boss, he give the order.’
‘So from your initial statement, the first time you were aware of the shooting was when one of the security guards called you on the radio?’
‘Yes. He told me Bryn already gone in, so I think under control soon. I was shock all same. I could even hear shoot over radio.’
Gillard turned off the recorder, borrowed from CSI. ‘All right, thank you for your help. Please don’t go anywhere in
the next day or so. I’ll send someone to get a tour around the control room, to see if we’ve missed anything.’
Wolf nodded.
‘One final question: who do you think killed your boss?’
Another shrug. ‘Talin, maybe. Who else?’
‘You’ve known your employer for a dozen years. Who else had a reason to kill him?’
Wolf blew a long sigh. ‘A rich Russian has more enemies than there are snowflakes in Siberia.’
Chapter Six
The Tangled Life and Death of Maxim Talin
By Michael Rensman, Russians Abroad magazine
Maxim Talin, who died in a shooting on Christmas Day, was born in November 1963 in St Petersburg to a well-connected composer father and ballerina mother. Talin was a gifted scientist and mathematician and studied at Moscow State University from 1981–1984. He was a rising star until in 1982 he sat in class next to Yelena Yalinsky, the daughter of the finance minister of Kazakhstan.
Seemingly shy, Ms Yalinsky was an ambitious, talented and beautiful woman with whom Talin was to have an intermittent and turbulent relationship for much of the rest of his life. Talin, described by friends as intense and beady-eyed, with a wild head of dark hair, fell head-over-heels for Ms Yalinsky. He flunked his finals and dropped out. She, meanwhile, got top marks at Moscow in chemistry and geology. It was fate that she met the tall and classically handsome Alexander Volkov in May 1983, in the same university course.
For several months over the summer, Yelena had an affair with Volkov, without telling Talin. Leaving Talin in her dacha outside Moscow, she secretly took Volkov with her on a so-called sabbatical back in Almaty. Talin was suspicious, and eventually discovered her duplicity in October. They had an argument on the telephone. ‘You will never amount to anything,’ she told him. She returned to her sumptuous flat in Moscow, overlooking Red Square. It was an apartment that was later to be owned by Kremlin chief of staff Igor Sechin.
‘Maxim was an immensely passionate individual who threw everything into that relationship,’ remarked one classmate of the time, now a top foreign ministry official. ‘He was insane when he discovered what was going on.’
Anna Kirov, a long-time friend of Talin’s, remembered what happened: ‘The doorman was under instructions not to let him in, but the lovelorn Maxim would go into the Museum of the Great Patriotic War across the street, and stand staring out to the balcony of her apartment, hoping for a glimpse. He would embrace the warmth of the huge radiator that ran underneath the museum’s third floor window, and watch the snow drifting down between him and the woman he loved.’
‘We are now separated by a coldness. Between us is nothing but ice,’ Talin wrote to Ms Yalinsky that winter. On a couple of occasions, he saw his rival Volkov on her balcony, staring back towards him.
Within a year, Talin had become active in student politics, and had poetry published in the West. He became known as a dissident, and in 1988 – thanks to the connections of his parents – was allowed to go to the United States, where he became involved in the electronics industry in Silicon Valley. Friends say his English, always good, improved dramatically. It was during the last days of the Soviet Union, in 1991, that Talin returned to Russia and sought out Yelena.
One friend recalled the fateful meeting. ‘They had a meal in a private restaurant in St Petersburg, and he pleaded with her to come with him to California. He thought he had everything he needed to snare her now – the prospects, a life in the most exciting part of America – but alas, she had just got back together with Volkov, and wouldn’t go.’
Talin almost went bankrupt in the tech bust of 2000 but was taken on by a small company planning to revolutionise the world of batteries. At the time, it was considered a niche area, and for a long time nothing happened.
Talin ran into Volkov at the funeral of Volkov’s close friend Pavel Friedman, and after drinking heavily there was a fight. One friend recalled: ‘Volkov broke Talin’s nose, and from the floor, in front of dozens of witnesses, Maxim threatened to kill him.’ For almost a decade the two men didn’t speak.
PC Simon Woodbridge hadn’t reached the end of the long obituary, but he shoved his phone back in his pocket to stop his hand getting cold. He’d read the rest later. He’d certainly drawn the short straw. Only three months on the Surrey force, and here he was at silly o’clock on Christmas morning standing outside a CSI tent, up to his ankles in slush, looking at the aftermath of the party to end all parties. He would have preferred to have been at home with his girlfriend Sally, marking their first Christmas together, planning when he was going to move in to her new flat. Instead, he was shivering in the bitter cold wind, tasked with keeping an eye out for anyone up to no good. To alleviate the boredom, he had been trying to find out what had just happened here at Westgrave Hall by Googling the news on his phone.
Because his superiors had told him sod all.
He was just a basic bloody plod. The famous thin blue line obviously referred to the state of your fingers and toes after a December night shift.
He looked around. It helped that the arc lights suspended from a crane jib for the party had been left on. Everything on the three terraces beneath the main house was still sharply illuminated. He stamped his feet to stay warm. The waterproof reflective jacket and overtrousers helped, as did the long johns beneath. He had a thin woollen balaclava beneath his regulation flat cap. And he was still freezing cold.
Simon really wanted to see the fossil. When he was a young lad he had wanted to be a palaeontologist. Even learned to spell it at the age of seven. He’d read all about the famous relic. There were two CSI officers still working inside the library, but he didn’t dare ask them to show him around. There were still a few of his colleagues in the distance, by the house. But nearby there was nobody. He watched his breath plume in the light.
God. He was dying for a fag.
Not allowed on duty.
To take his mind off it, he walked backwards and forwards along the flagstoned terrace that surrounded the library on its little island. The remains of the snow still lay in drifts in the shallow grassy moat. To the left, 200 yards away, was the road and the little village of Steeple Risby, nestled among the tree-lined lanes. In the other direction, maybe quarter of a mile away, was Westgrave Lake, a mist hanging over it, and beyond that the forbidding darkness of Westgrave Woods, ancient woodland undisturbed since the time when King Richard I and his cronies used to go hunting there.
He could feel a packet of cigarettes in his breast pocket underneath his cape, right over his heart. No, mustn’t think about it.
He walked up and down a bit more briskly now, stamping his feet to keep warm. Peering out over the lake again, he thought he saw movement on the shoreline on the far side. Whatever it was was obscured by the fountain, whose noisy jet shot water high into the air and created a mist downwind. But beyond the tendrils of curling vapour he saw what looked like a teenage girl, slender and ghostly, her existence proved only by a long finger of shadow cast by the arc lights onto the woods behind her. He could almost feel his heart beating, tapping against the cigarette packet.
The mist shifted, and he lost sight of her. He blinked to fix his focus but could see nothing for a minute or two. Checking furtively behind him to see if anyone else was around, he fumbled in his pocket, withdrew his cigarettes, put one to his lip and felt for a match. He cupped his hands to obscure the flare of light as he struck it. The first familiar inhalation calmed him, the burn in the throat and the lingering taste. He exhaled gradually. Once the smoke cleared, he saw her again. She was closer, making her way towards him along the edge of the lake, her gaze turned wistfully towards the water. He couldn’t see her feet through the mist. He tried to banish from his mind enticing Arthurian tales of ladies in lakes.
This was certainly a real person.
She must be freezing. She didn’t appear to be wearing a coat, only some kind of oversize green cardigan, and below it a thin thigh-length dress or nightdress. As he took
another drag on his fag, he could see her peering out into the lake, then down to the reeds at her feet. She was still a couple of hundred yards away at least, but something about her radiated melancholy. She stared into the water, and her shoulders shook. She was crying. An enfolding premonition began to build in him. She took a first step towards the water, her face distending as if about to cry.
Oh fuck. Don’t do it.
‘Hey there,’ he bellowed. ‘Stay out of the water.’
She seemed not to hear, but slowly and deliberately shrugged off the cardigan, and stepped into the water.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he muttered to himself. He called into his radio, alerting on all frequencies to anyone near Westgrave Lake to assist. But he knew it would be down to him. He didn’t have time to cross on the bridge, which was in the wrong direction. Instead he ran down the embankment into the snowdrift on the moat, waded across the rapidly melting snow, and clambered up the other side, using his hands on tussocks of grass to make his way up. The control room came back to him, asking for more detailed information, but he didn’t have much time. ‘The lake north of the library at Westgrave Hall. We might need an ambulance too.’
By the time he clambered up the slope onto the path around the outer edge of the moat he was freezing. Snow had got up the trousers and into his shoes and was melting. He set off across rough pasture towards the lake. When he got within fifty yards of the water’s edge, he pulled out his torch and shone it across the vapoured surface.
No sign of her.
He sprinted along the rough track which ran around the lake towards the place he had last seen her. Clouds of mist obscured the surface and there was no sound but the taunting laughter of ducks. He called out to her, his voice sucked into the cool night air. Scouring the water’s edge with the harsh LED light, he spotted fresh bare footprints in the mud. Then a few yards further on, he heard coughing, and saw her in the water, struggling in a bank of reeds, up to her waist.
