The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  Pete had seen a fair number of valley mornings, although not so many had been as early as this. He shivered a little, and turned up the collar of his suit jacket.

  It didn't make much of a difference. He was standing on the exposed rocks at the highest point of the headland; the ground fell away steeply from here, mostly bare rock and scrub, with just a narrow shelf of land that was almost a beach down at the water's edge. He could see the upturned hulls of a few boats drawn up onto the shore, mostly of fibreglass but some of varnished timber, all of them de-rigged and tied down against the weather. Out across the water, the end of the lake had not yet emerged from the mist, and the mountains above it were no more than a delicate shadow of grey against a deep grey sky.

  Alina was still in the car. Still, as far as Pete could tell, asleep. He'd covered her over with a coat and taken her few possessions inside, and she'd slept on; she'd been the same way for the last couple of hours of the journey, ever since they'd made their final stop at a twenty-four hour garage so that he could fill the Zodiac's tank and buy some tape for a running repair to the headlamp that he'd broken when, lights doused to escape notice, he'd clipped the corner of the garage block on their way out of the parking area. The repair didn't look much, but it would keep the rain out.

  A sound came from behind him. He didn't turn.

  Alina scrambled up alongside, and found herself a rock just a couple of feet lower than his own. She'd brought his coat from the car, and she wore it around her shoulders against the cold.

  They stood in silence for a minute or more.

  And then she said, "This is where you live?"

  He looked at her then. "You like it?"

  "It's…" She searched for the words. "I do like it. I like it a lot."

  "Actually, the house is a dump, but the boss lets me have it cheap. It belongs to his sister's family."

  "I think it's fine," Alina said, and Pete watched her for a moment longer, almost as if he was checking her score on a test.

  "Yes," he said finally. "It's fine." And he turned again to the view. The mist over the northern end of the lake had now begun to clear, uncovering a part of the Liston Estate. A piece of land that had held no particular interest for him at all until the arrival of its new estate manager.

  "This isn't going to work," Alina said despondently. The silver dawn was turning into plain old daylight now, its magic fading and taking her momentary confidence with it.

  "Why shouldn't it?"

  "Because I'll mess up your life. I poison everyone I touch. Look what I already did to your car."

  "Forget the car."

  "I can't even pay you rent."

  "I don't want anything from you. You think that's using me, forget it. You're a guest." Pete stepped down. "Come on," he said, offering his hand. "We'll put your stuff in your room."

  Alina accepted, and he helped her along. "I get a room?" she said.

  "You even get a bed, until you decide exactly what it is you want to do from here. There's more space than I can use. I'll clear it with Ted, but nobody's going to mind."

  They descended to the gingerbread house; Rosedale, the cabin in the high woodland, paint flaking, boards weathered silver, the place that Pete called home.

  She didn't look like someone who could poison what she touched, whatever she might think. Nobody could blame her for taking life as seriously as she'd had to, but the way to some kind of peace and personal balance would surely lie in the opportunity to stop running and relax a little. She could lose herself in a place like this; if not in the valley itself, then in some other part of the region. Tourists passed through here in their thousands, and the face of a stranger would be nothing to remark upon in the approaching season. Even her accent wouldn't give her away; all kinds of nationalities came to take up casual work in the restaurants and hotels. Endless human variety, but on a manageable scale. It would probably be just what she needed in order to find herself again.

  And she certainly needed to unwind, at least a little. He couldn't help thinking of something that she'd said in all seriousness when they'd left the apartment building behind and a lack of any interest from a passing night patrol on the motorway had told him that no, the police didn't seem to be keeping an active watch for his car; she'd looked at him and she'd said, Promise me, Peter. Don't ever try to get too close to me. Don't even think of it. And I promise that I'll try never to hurt you. Is that a deal? And Pete, who hadn't been entirely unaware of some of the paths that such a newly founded relationship might follow, suddenly found himself shifting into back-off mode. Helping her was one thing. But even to consider getting involved with someone who could talk in such a way… well, that would be to enter dangerous waters indeed.

  The room that he'd given her was smaller than his own, but she got a bigger wardrobe. Not that she had much to put in it… the only other pieces of furniture were the bed and an old dressing table with a cracked mirror. Her window looked out of the back of the house, onto what had once been a small garden.

  She sat on the bed, next to her bags. Pete stood in the doorway and watched as she bounced a little and made the mattress creak. When she looked up at him and smiled, he could see that the dangerous edge of last night's exhaustion had been blunted.

  He said, "I only wish I could help you more. But I wouldn't know how."

  "You are helping me."

  "That's not what I mean."

  "I know what you mean," she said. "Please don't worry."

  "There's tinned stuff in the kitchen if you wake up and I'm not around. If I'm not here, I'll probably be down at the boatyard. When I get the chance, I'll show you the sights."

  "I'll manage," she assured him.

  And so he made a gesture as if to say, It's all yours. And then he withdrew, closing the door after him, and went to his own room to stretch out for a while.

  Alina stayed where she was, her eyes closed, almost as if she was listening to the silence. Pete must have dropped onto his bed without undressing, he made so little sound. Then she turned to the much-travelled carrier bag on the bed beside her.

  From it she took a book, which she carried over to the dressing table. It was a cheap scrapbook, coarse paper between cardboard covers, so well used that some of the pages were starting to fall out. She laid it flat and opened it up.

  The book was filled with photographs. A few of them would have been a serious giveaway in any frontier search, but these she'd covered over with postcard views bought from the Europiskaya Hotel.

  She began to take out the postcards, revealing the snapshots underneath. When she reached a particular one, she stopped.

  It was a group view, slightly blurred, a dozen friends on a day in the country. They were in rows like a football team, the people in the front row all kneeling on the ground.

  Old times, sad times, a million miles away. For a while Alina sat looking at her younger, unmarked self. She was in the back row, lifted higher than anybody by the boys on either side of her.

  That was how she'd been, back then. Open, smiling, everything before her.

  Lifted on the arm of a boy named Pavel.

  SEVEN

  Pavel's was a city dawn, seen from the rear seat of the unmarked car as they circled back in on the motorway network toward their base near the airport. The night had not been a success. He knew that he'd been close, but then somehow it had all slipped away from him; when Alina hadn't come out and the three of them had finally gone into the building, it was to find incomprehension from the woman who lived alone and an empty flat where she said she'd gone for help. Pavel had no names, no numbers. He could go no further.

  And his two escorts had shrugged and sympathised, and called it bad luck.

  A couple of years ago, he'd never even have been able to get this far. The notion of such international cooperation would have been unthinkable even at senior Investigator level; but here the arrangements had been made and he'd been on a plane within a matter of hours. He had no official status and no power
s of arrest, but once he'd identified Alina then the two officers along with him would have been able to detain her on immigration charges. Since she'd entered the country on stolen papers, she could then be deported back to Russia and the knotty question of extradition would never have arisen. An appeal for political asylum would have been likely to get her nowhere; Alina wasn't political, and never really had been. By most people's definition, she was a common criminal and nothing more.

  For most people, but not in the eyes of Pavel. To Pavel, and probably to many of the others who'd fallen under her influence, she was the most uncommon criminal ever.

  The Finns had found the boy within half an hour. He'd been hiding in a woodland graveyard, only half-heartedly concealed behind one of the leaning roofed crosses. He'd known almost nothing. Nothing of her true nature, not even — and here Pavel had been holding his breath at the back of the Border Control's interrogation room — where she'd been living for the past two years. The boy's eyes had met his own, and for a moment Pavel had been afraid; but the boy hadn't said anything, and after a moment he'd looked away.

  An example of her power: scared as he was, the boy Nikolai had managed to hold out against telling them of her destination until it was too late for them to prevent her from reaching it. She'd used him and then abandoned him, and yet still he'd continued to protect her.

  It was an impulse that Pavel could understand only too well. And compared to some in her past, the boy had been lucky.

  The car rolled into the police yard, a hurricane-fenced compound within sight of the main runway and with a constant background of big jet engines racing up to power. There were a few marked vans here, but most of the cars were officers' private vehicles. As Pavel stepped out onto the asphalt, he could see the takeoff of a Cathay Pacific 747 through the chainlink and across a few hundred feet of grass; it seemed shockingly, dangerously close, and he turned his face away to look toward the main building. This was in four storeys and in a no-frills, prefabricated style that could have been anything — a tax office, a really dull hotel, a leaking hospital doomed never to come fully into service. Only the crest over the entrance door gave it away and that didn't entertain the eye much, either.

  "I'll tell you what," one of the two men said. His name was Roger, and he'd made a few stabs at conversation in the course of the night. Pavel knew that he'd not been the best company but then, they hadn't been treating this job as anything particularly special. Some novelty value because he was the first Russian they'd ever had in the car, but that was all. Roger went on, "Why don't we put you in the canteen for a while, and I'll go and look for my boss. He's the one who's going to have to decide what to do with you now."

  And Pavel said, "What's a canteen?"

  They grinned as if he'd made a joke, and they walked him inside.

  Pavel sat alone at a table in the corner of the police cafeteria. He bought nothing, because he'd no English money. Only half of the counter had opened up at this early hour and there were no more than half a dozen people in the place, most of them in uniform. He idly pushed around the salt and pepper to avoid meeting anyone's eyes, and then he took out a sachet from the sugar bowl and looked at it with curiosity. The label read Sweet'n'Low but the sachet appeared to be empty. He tore it open and found that it wasn't empty, just that the fine powder inside took up so little space. He tasted it, and then he put a few of the sachets in his pocket.

  A policewoman came to get him. Her uniform shirt was crisp and her red hair had been tied back and she had a hint of an overbite. She said "Are you the Russian officer? I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce your name," and Pavel said, "Please don't worry about it," and got to his feet to follow her.

  They smiled at each other politely in the lift, but nothing passed between them. Pavel was feeling as loose and unconnected as a bag of spanners, and with about as much energy. He looked at the floor. He'd closed his eyes once in the last forty hours, and that had only been a restless doze in the back of the car on the way to the border. He hadn't been able to sleep on the plane at all. He'd been wound-up and anxious ever since he'd come home from his shift and discovered her missing, an empty space under the bed where her bags had been and her photograph album — probably the most precious single item that she owned — gone. His first reaction had been one of panic. But Pavel was level-headed, and he knew that he had a certain inner strength; nobody could have kept her and cared for her in secret and for so long without it. After he'd found the half-burned counterfoil slips from the railway tickets stuffed down the back of the apartment's disused fireplace, his next move had been to return to his Militia post and report that an anonymous source had given him some information on the whereabouts of Alina Petrovna, escapee from the prison hospital and probable murderer of the psychiatrist Belov.

  What else could he have done? It was this, or lose her completely with certainty and forever — a prospect that he couldn't even begin to face. He loved her too much even to be able to imagine such a thing; Pavel's was the love of Judas, a devotion so great that it encompassed even betrayal.

  The Chief Superintendent had a corner office with a view down onto the place where tenders took on loads of aviation fuel from huge land-based tanks. The Chief Superintendent was a man in his forties, with thinning hair and pale blue eyes that didn't seem to blink. Pavel sat gazing out at the loading area as the man looked through a small number of memos and facsimile messages. All pipelines and white stones, it had the look of an alien landscape. The Chief Superintendent looked from one sheet to another and then back again, as if there were certain connections that he was looking for and was unable to find.

  Pavel was calm. He was here, and the hardest part was over; he was on the soil where Alina walked, he breathed the same air again. There was no doubt in his mind that he'd find her. A few hours' sleep, and he'd come up fresh and begin to learn the system around here. They'd no internal passports in this tiny country, but from what he'd seen of this building they had computers the like of which the Leningrad Militia could only dream about. He knew her, he knew her ways, he could guess how she'd operate.

  With luck, he might even get to her before somebody else died.

  "Look," the Superintendent said, "I only just came on and I can't make head nor tail of this. I don't understand why they sent you."

  "I'm the only one who knows what she looks like," Pavel said.

  "Couldn't they just have sent us a photograph?"

  "There are none." There were none because, after volunteering to bring Alina's file from the records department up to the Chief Investigator's desk, Pavel had quietly removed them in the corridor. "I know her because I'm the one who first arrested her."

  He'd been sent to escort her back after that first long-ago attempt to cross the border; and with that, it had begun. Belov had studied her and contrived her release… and for him, it had ended with his body face down in the icy waters of the Neva.

  "The best chance would have been to grab her on the way in," the man said. "But it was too late for that. All this business last night was an obvious waste of time; it probably wasn't even her and if it was, she could have had five different rides before daylight. The way I see it now, it's best treated as a problem for Immigration. You say she's got no friends or contacts here so she can't get work, and she can't get money — sooner or later, she's going to surface."

  Pavel was nodding.

  "So when she does, we'll get in touch. I understand there's a return flight booked for you this afternoon."

  For Pavel, it was as if his thoughts had skipped a beat.

  "A what?"

  "There'll be a ticket waiting at the check-in desk. You've to pick it up and then make yourself known to the check-in supervisor. He'll walk you through the formalities and then he'll sit you somewhere and tell you when it's time to board."

  Pavel stared, saying nothing.

  The Superintendent said, "I think that's all. Why don't you go and get some breakfast? You look as if you need it."


  Pavel couldn't get any breakfast, because he still didn't have any English money. He had ten roubles and some change. Other than that, he had the clothes he was wearing.

  And they were sending him home without her.

  A couple of people got into the lift as he was riding down. They glanced at him curiously. Both of them got out on the restaurant floor, but Pavel carried on down to the entrance lobby.

  There was a Dan Air flight coming in as he crossed the asphalt lot, dropping like a gull with its undercarriage outstretched. He was close enough to hear the skid of rubber on tarmac, and then it was past the building and away out of sight. The grass waved in the morning breeze, the yellow frames of landing lights rising from it at intervals like isolated rigs in a weed choked sea.

  He glanced back. One of the bigger vans made an effective screen at the end of a line of the unmarked pool cars, meaning that he could look them over without being seen from the main building. Two of them were locked, including the vehicle in which he'd spent most of the night cruising. The third was locked as well, but the keys were in the tailpipe.

  He sat in the driver's seat to get the feel for a few moments before he started it up. A hell of a car. Armrests, and everything. When he switched on the ignition, he saw that the tank was more than three-quarters full. After resetting the rearview mirror, he turned and looked through the back window toward the entrance to the compound. There was a security booth at the gate and a drop-down barrier, but when he'd arrived the booth had been empty and the barrier had been up. That situation hadn't changed in the past hour.