Hostage to Murder

by Val McDermid

  Andy Gordon and Tam Gourlay were trying to keep hidden from each other their apprehensions about the next stage of their journey. Tam’s anxieties had been tamped down on the journey by Andy’s calm handling of the boat and apparent lack of concern about navigating the complex route towards Russian waters. But as the day wore on, the thin line of the horizon had gradually swelled to reveal itself as the line of the barrage that cut off Russian waters from the Gulf of Finland. Andy had explained about the massive sea defences the Russians had constructed, which left only a narrow passage for boats to enter Russian waters via the customs and immigration channel at Kronstadt. Tam had understood the principle. But seeing the reality was something else again.

  He couldn’t begin to imagine the feat of engineering that had gone into its construction. Andy had told him about the plans to turn the vast dam into a ring road for St Petersburg. But as with so many grandiose Russian projects, this had ground to a halt for lack of funds. Even the barrage itself, which was supposed to prevent flooding as well as to funnel all sea traffic through one channel, had stopped a single kilometre short of the shore.

  Yet more impressive than the dam was the city of Kronstadt itself, the fortifications unnervingly solid against the sky, their grey stone as forbidding as the steely waves that beat against the shore. Tam could imagine the daunting impression it must have made on the enemy. Even isolated from the city of Leningrad, its sole source of supplies, it had withstood almost three years of pounding from German guns and still remained in Russian hands, its defences largely intact. Above its grim exterior rose the vast dome of the cathedral, somehow incongruous in so obviously military a setting. “We couldn’t have done this a few years ago,” Andy observed. “Because it was a naval base, it was closed to civilian traffic.” He looked at the chart again. “Time to get the sails down, I think.”

  He stayed at the wheel, shouting instructions to Tam, who crawled awkwardly around the deck desperately trying to do what he was told without causing any damage. He felt not so much like a bull in a china shop as a carthorse on a tightrope. Boats were definitely not his natural environment. But he managed to lower the sails without mishap and stumbled back into the cockpit, where Andy was studying the Admiralty chart.

  “We’re aiming for Fort Konstantin. See that unfinished dyke coming out from the south coast of the island? And the buoyed channel? We need to be north of there.” He adjusted the course so that the bows swung round gently. Twenty minutes later, they were tied up on a pontoon, the only pleasure boat in sight.

  “What now?” Tam asked, nervously fingering his passport.

  “We wait for the customs to come on board.” As Andy spoke, he spotted a pair of uniformed officers walk down the quay with the swagger of petty bureaucrats everywhere. He readied his own passport and the rest of the paperwork, and arranged his face into a smile of welcome as they boarded. They made an odd couple. The first was tall, blond and narrow-shouldered, his cheeks pocked with old acne scars. The other was short and swarthy, a heavy black moustache shot with silver completely obliterating his upper lip, the buttons of his tunic straining over a round little belly. The dark one said something in Russian. Andy shrugged. “Niet Russki,” he said in his best Argyllshire accent. He proffered both passports and the boat’s papers. The blond one reached out and began to study them while the dark one continued to ask them something in Russian.

  Andy spread his hands in a shrug of incomprehension. The blond man leaned over and tapped the chart. “Where from?” he said with negligent arrogance.

  Andy smiled and nodded. He pointed to the chart, drawing their route with a finger. “We came from Helsinki, through the archipelago. Then we stuck to the Sea Channel and crossed the Russian border here, near Gogland Island. That’s what we were told to do by the Russian Embassy in Helsinki.”

  The two men conferred, the dark one sounding irritated, the blond appearing completely unconcerned. Eventually, the blond one turned to Andy. “My colleague thinks you entered Russian waters irregularly.”

  “Now, wait a minute, pal,” Tam protested. “We just did what your people told us to do.”

  The dark customs official glared at Tam and let fly a stream of Russian.

  “Take it easy, Tam. It’s OK.” Andy’s relationship with Sasha had given him some understanding in the ways of the Russian world as well as smoothing their path in St Petersburg. He motioned Tam to one side and opened the lifejacket locker. He took out a bottle of VSOP cognac and placed it on the chart table. “I’d like to apologise for any irregularities,” he said.

  “Where to?” the blond one asked, adding something in Russian to his companion.

  “St Petersburg. We’re going to the Navy Yacht Club, like it says in the letter of introduction.”

  The dark one gave a curt nod. He produced a stamp from his tunic pocket, took the paperwork from his colleague and franked their passports and visas. Then he grabbed the bottle and marched ashore. The blond one inclined his head in gracious acceptance. “Have a safe voyage,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the Bénéteau was nosing into the harbour to refuel and fill her water tanks. While he was filling up, Andy sent Tam to the harbour office to change their dollars into roubles. He watched him go, glad he’d been able to find something useful for the big man to do. Andy wasn’t given much to flights of the imagination, but it didn’t take much empathy to understand that Tam must feel on a knife-edge. He knew he’d have moved heaven and earth to get Lindsay back if anyone had snatched her from her home. Nothing would have stood in his way. And he understood that those emotions made Tam a loose cannon. He only hoped Lindsay and Sasha would have everything boxed off by the time they berthed in St Petersburg. Tam was so pent up, there was no telling what he might do if no easy opportunity to rescue Jack presented itself. And Russia was probably a dangerous place at the best of times, Andy thought. Not the sort of environment where you wanted to have responsibility for a guy like Tam on the rampage.

  Not for the first time, Andy Gordon wondered what he’d got himself into. But he knew both his friend and his daughter too well to have stood idly by while they got themselves into trouble. Lindsay’s original idea to get the boy out to Finland on a train had been doomed to failure, he’d known that instinctively as soon as he’d heard it. And his suggestion of doing it by sea could never have worked without him to skipper the boat. He’d had no real choice in the matter. He gave an involuntary shiver and went below deck to pump out the bilges. Keeping occupied, that was going to be the way to get through this. And luckily, on a boat there was always something that needed to be done. Plenty to keep him and Tam from pondering on the illegalities they were about to commit.

  Or so he hoped.

  The waitress in the café bar was starting to give them strange looks. Lindsay, Rory and Sasha had been sitting at the same table for four hours without showing any signs of moving. They’d had coffee, they’d had a couple of beers, they’d had aubergines stuffed with cheese and nuts, they’d had bowls of fish salyanka then they’d had coffee again. “She can’t figure us out,” Rory said.

  “No. But she will be able to give bloody good description to the cops once they start looking for whoever kidnapped that little Italian boy from the international school,” Sasha said dryly.

  “We’ll be long gone by then,” Lindsay said with a confidence she didn’t really feel.

  “You hope,” Rory said gloomily. As she spoke, a dozen children paired up in crocodile formation emerged from the school gates, a teacher at their head.

  Even from this distance, now she knew who she was looking for, Lindsay could make out Jack. She glanced at her watch. It was a couple of minutes after two. “Action,” she said, turning round to catch the waitress’s eye and making the universal sign of scribbling on phantom paper to indicate she wanted the bill.

  The children were walking down the street towards them. But the waitress seemed to be in no hurry. She disappeared inside at a leisurely pace. “You follow the
m,” Sasha said. “If I don’t catch up, I see you back here. OK?”

  Lindsay and Rory waited till the file of uniformed youngsters had rounded the corner before they fell in several yards behind them. At the end of the street, the children crossed a narrow canal. Lindsay pulled her map out of her bag and hastily consulted it. The bridge would lead into a park alongside the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Where else would a bunch of kids be going? “Playtime,” she said to Rory as they followed.

  They found themselves on the fringes of a small park. The children were running and climbing around a decrepit play area. The two women cut across one side of the park and made their way up an overgrown mound with the remains of stone terracing jutting out of the greenery. Lindsay waved an arm at the deep pink and white building nearby and read from the guide book. The church had supposedly been built on the very spot where Nevsky trounced the Swedes back in the thirteenth century.

  “Let’s take it as a good omen,” Rory muttered. “We’re too obvious here, let’s keep walking.”

  They headed off into the shade of some trees, where the gloom made them harder to see. At exactly twenty-five past two, the teacher blew a whistle and the children lined up obediently. They headed off towards the bridge, obviously making their way back to school. “Do you think they do this every day?” Lindsay asked.

  “I bloody hope so. Because it’s the best chance we’ve got. A dozen kids running around like dafties, plenty of bushes for cover. It’s tailor made for the job.”

  “We need to figure out the escape route. Let’s see what Sasha has to suggest,” Lindsay said, studying the map with a frown. At that moment, her mobile rang. She rummaged in her bag and unearthed it on the fourth ring. “Hello, Lindsay Gordon,” she said.

  “It’s me.” The familiar voice of her father crackled in her ear.

  “Where are you?”

  “About thirteen miles from St Petersburg, the wind’s a nice force four or five, we should berth in a less than a couple of hours.”

  “No problems?”

  “No complaints. It’s been a braw wee sail. This boat’s a bonnie mover. Everything all right at your end?”

  “Aye. I think we’re maybe sorted. Give me a call when you’re moored up and we’ll come and have a debrief.”

  She heard a snort of laughter. “A debrief. Aye, right enough.” Then the line went dead. Lindsay smiled at the phone and tossed it back in her bag. “The boys are on their way. They’ll be tied up in a couple of hours. So we’d better get a move on and check out the territory.”

  Two hours later, Sasha was driving them down Bolshoi Prospekt towards Lenexpo, the city exhibition and conference centre, behind which sat the basin of the Navy Yacht Club. The combination of heat and humidity was draining but in spite of that, they were in buoyant mood.

  “If they do this every day, we can take the boy tomorrow,” Sasha had said confidently after they’d scouted out the immediate environs of the park. “I can be waiting with the car on the far side, near Nevsky Prospekt. We will be gone before they realise anything has happened.”

  Lindsay couldn’t help feeling a little perturbed. She never trusted easy pickings, and this all seemed to be much too straightforward.

  “What’s wrong?” Rory had asked her on the way back to the car.

  “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Lindsay said. “I can’t believe how everything’s just falling into our laps.”

  Rory shrugged. “Sometimes it goes that way.”

  “You’d think, having gone to all that trouble to get the boy, Cavadino would have made bloody sure nobody could get to him, though.”

  “Maybe he figured that bringing him to St Petersburg just made it too difficult all round. And you must admit, it’s not exactly been a piece of piss to set this up. I mean, how likely is it that somebody looking for Jack would have a reliable contact in St Pete’s? If your dad had been a fireman or a factory foreman instead of a fisherman, we’d have been up shit creek. Me, I’m not in the least surprised they’re being a bit complacent.”

  It made a sort of sense. And since Rory accompanied it with a squeeze of Lindsay’s hand, it performed the trick of reassurance.

  They turned into the road leading to the yacht club, grateful even in the car for the shade of trees whose leaves were beginning to dry to gold and brown. A short drive brought them to a curved gateway in the pale stuccoed wall. Sasha parked and they got out. Their way was blocked by a rope slung across the entrance. To one side, a youth in grey naval cadet’s uniform slouched in a wooden chair. Lindsay looked at Rory and raised her eyebrows. Rory nodded. “Love the security,” she said, as they followed Sasha, who merely stepped over the rope without a word.

  “Just what we need,” Lindsay said. The cadet hadn’t so much as flickered an eyelid at their passage.

  “They are more watchful at night,” Sasha said as he strode ahead apparently untroubled by the heat.

  Whatever they’d expected of the Navy Yacht Club, it wasn’t what they found. There were no retired Rear-Admirals in blazers with brass buttons drinking gin and tonic in the clubhouse here. Actually, there was no clubhouse. A building that looked as if it might once have housed social facilities was now a factory making sailboards. A broad tree-lined path led to the waterfront. Anyone familiar with the glossy marinas of British yacht clubs would have laughed out loud as they emerged from the trees to see half a dozen decaying wooden jetties jutting out into the basin. Tied up on the moorings was an eclectic collection of boats; a few dinghies, a couple of power boats, a handful of small sailing cruisers and one splendid racing yacht. On the furthest pontoon, Lindsay spotted a trim Bénéteau sporting a Finnish flag. On the cabin roof, Tam Gourlay sat in a folding chair, stripped down to a pair of shorts, his limbs already turning pink. Her father was nowhere to be seen.

  “I see we’ve gone for the high end of the market here,’ Rory said, kicking a tuft of dandelions in the middle of the path.

  ‘We have no commercial marinas in St Petersburg yet,” Sasha said. “This place used to be pretty smart. But after perestroika, the Navy didn’t have money to maintain it.”

  “And anywhere on the water goes to shit really quickly if you don’t do the upkeep,” Lindsay pointed out.

  “Correct. That’s why they started opening it up to private visitors.”

  “Still, at ten dollars a night, they’re not going to make enough to turn it round,” Rory pointed out. They arrived alongside the boat and Tam got to his feet, a bottle of beer in his fist.

  “All right, girls,” he called as they boarded. Lindsay noticed Rory looked extremely wary as she clambered carefully into the cockpit.

  “Have you ever been on a yacht before?”

  Rory gave her a hard stare. “Oh aye. We used to go cruising every weekend in Castlemilk. Of course I’ve never been on a yacht.”

  “You never mentioned it,” Lindsay said mildly.

  “You never asked. Hey, Tam, how’re you doing?” she called up to where he towered above her.

  “What’s the news?” he asked.

  Lindsay introduced Sasha and Tam then asked, “Where’s my dad?” She had no intention of going through the whole thing twice.

  Tam pointed to a vast wooden hangar behind the dock. “He’s in there, talking to some Russian about boats.”

  Lindsay cast her eyes heavenwards. “So, nothing new there, then. I take it this is down to you, Sasha?”

  The Russian grinned. “I told him he’d find a friend of mine in there.”

  “I’ll go and get him, then we can discuss our options,” Lindsay said.

  She found her father with his head in an engine, a gnarled old man standing opposite, hands on hips, a look on his face that dared Andy to work out what the problem was. “All right, Dad?” she said.

  Her father straightened up. “It’s that gasket,” Andy said, pointing to the offending part. “You take that out, and I’d lay money you’ll find a hairline crack running through it.” Andy nodded a greeti
ng to his daughter and headed for the door of the hangar. “So. Are we going to have this ‘debrief’ or not?”

  Chapter 16

  It was just after ten when Sasha dropped Rory and Lindsay off at their hotel. They’d had a council of war and laid their plans, then Sasha had insisted on taking them all out to dinner in a restaurant that boasted the worst cabaret Lindsay had ever seen in her life. The combination of tawdry costumes, Westernised versions of Russian music and a tenor with more eye make-up than Cher had been so bad it was almost good. But the food had more than made up for it, a constant procession of traditional Russian food that had left them all feeling stuffed.

  The only thing that had disturbed Lindsay all evening was a look she’d caught in her father’s eye. She’d been leaning over to whisper some smart remark about the dancers in Rory’s ear when she’d glimpsed him sizing her up. The expression on his face reduced her to childhood. Her mother had always been a sucker for whatever line Lindsay had chosen to spin her, but Andy had always been able to see right through her. That he still had the knack to flood her with guilt infuriated her almost as much as it frightened her how easily he’d figured out that she had something to hide. Something that concerned Rory.

  But he’d said nothing, and the moment had passed. The pressure of Rory’s knee against hers under the table was more than enough to distract her. She’d probably only imagined it, Lindsay told herself. She was subconsciously forcing herself to feel the guilt that hadn’t come naturally.

  They piled out of Sasha’s Peugeot. “I pick you up at eight,” he said. “So don’t go drinking in the bar till late.”

  They waved him off. Lindsay said, “Do you fancy a drink?”

  Rory shook her head. “I’ve had enough. All those toasts. I must have drunk a quarter bottle of vodka. I can’t figure out why I don’t feel drunk.”

  “It’s the way they pace it, with all the food in between. Or so Sasha says.” They turned to go inside.