A Morbid Habit

by Annie Hauxwell

  They were shown to their table by a Balkan maiden in a charming smocked outfit. Charlie plonked herself into her chair, reeled off instructions in Russian, and within a matter of moments a waiter brought a large carafe of rosy liquid.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Berlin, pouring them a glass each.

  ‘Cranberry juice,’ replied Charlie.

  Berlin took a long drink. She gasped, blinking back the tears.

  ‘. . . and vodka,’ added Charlie. ‘Down the hatch.’

  Utkin held one of the evidence bags up to the light. It was the last from the fifth box. From his pocket he retrieved the cellophane sweet wrapper he had picked up at the airport crime scene. He compared them. It was a match.

  Gently, he opened the evidence bag and peered closely at the small piece of crinkled cellophane. Using a thumb and finger he delicately withdrew it from the bag. He closed his eyes, brought it close to his nose and inhaled deeply.

  He held his breath until he was dizzy, then put it in his pocket with the other one.

  On his way out he tossed the empty bag into a bin.

  By four in the afternoon it was already dark and Berlin had doused her panic at the loss of the buprenorphine with a significant quantity of cranberry vodka. She was on her second jug, and almost beginning to enjoy the place.

  ‘What is all this, anyway?’ she asked Charlie, indicating the timber-panelled walls festooned with bear skins and boars’ heads, the chickens perched on wicker baskets and heavy stone jars.

  Charlie mumbled, her mouth full of little dumplings. She had already made short work of two enormous platefuls.

  ‘Balkan folksiness. Nostalgia for a time none of this lot can remember.’ She indicated the mostly young patrons, all as drunk as she and Berlin. ‘And which probably never existed.’

  ‘Are there Soviet-style cafés with busts of Marx and Lenin hanging from the ceiling?’ joked Berlin.

  ‘What do you know about Marx and Lenin?’ retorted Charlie.

  Before Berlin could mention her degree in political science, the maiden appeared with the bill.

  ‘Credit card,’ said Charlie. It was a command, not a query.

  Berlin put one on the table and the maiden went off to fetch the machine.

  ‘I must call my mother and wish her a happy Christmas,’ said Berlin.

  ‘You can do it from the hotel,’ said Charlie.

  Berlin looked at her steadily. ‘Do you know somewhere that will let me in without a passport?’ she said.

  ‘I have to go to the loo,’ said Charlie.

  Berlin waited until Charlie disappeared behind a barnyard wall, then followed. Beyond the faux wall a long, narrow passage led to the toilets. At the end there was another door. It was just closing.

  Berlin picked up her pace. The bloody woman had got her drunk and now she was going to do a runner. She pushed the door open. Beyond it was a strip of neon-lit concrete, divided from a car park by a shoulder-height fence. She could hear Charlie’s voice on the other side of it.

  It sounded as if she was pleading or complaining. But then, to Berlin’s ears, Russian was a doleful language.

  It went quiet, but no-one responded to Charlie.

  She was on the phone. She had a bloody mobile phone.

  A frigid draught of air cleared Berlin’s head.

  The one-sided argument, which meant nothing to Berlin, continued. Then she heard her name mentioned.

  She backed away from the door, closing it quietly.

  22

  Fagan had just started to carve the turkey when his mobile rang. His wife gave him a look. Fagan put down the knife and took his phone out of his pocket. His sons took this as a signal to leave the table and lope back to their rooms.

  His wife snatched up the knife and for a moment Fagan thought she was going to plunge it into his ribs, but instead she picked up the serving dish bearing the untouched bird, and carried it back to the kitchen.

  The whole thing had been a pantomime anyway.

  As if on some pre-arranged signal Fagan heard a TV talk show, rap music and the sound of a computer game all start up at once in different parts of the house.

  ‘What?’ he hissed to the caller. ‘I was carving the fucking turkey.’

  ‘There’s a problem,’ came the terse reply.

  Fagan listened for a moment and then hung up. On the way down the hall he grabbed his wallet, keys and jacket. He wished he’d stayed in the army. He’d encountered less hostility from the bloody enemy than from his own family. There were no rules of engagement at home. His visits then had been brief and infrequent, which suited everybody.

  He lit a cigarette as he backed the car out of the drive onto Chigwell Road, which was very quiet. Hardly surprising at lunchtime on bloody Christmas Day.

  People took the piss out of Essex – people like his boss. There had been a program on the telly, some BBC thing, which said there were now seven classes in Britain. As far as Fagan was concerned there were only two.

  Us and them.

  23

  Utkin waited patiently in the apartment block’s lobby. The building dated from the fifties; it was solid, secure and very well appointed.

  Twenty minutes later he heard the lift descend. The doors opened and a woman emerged. They shook hands.

  ‘Colonel Gerasimova,’ she said, by way of introduction. ‘Foreign Intelligence Service.’

  Utkin sighed inwardly. Really, that was all she needed to say.

  ‘Major Utkin, Moscow CID,’ said Utkin. ‘Thank you very much for meeting with me.’

  ‘My husband offers his apologies. Business, you know,’ she said.

  She opened a door onto a small anteroom, some sort of receptionist’s cubicle, and invited Utkin to enter.

  They stood awkwardly between a desk and shelves. There were no chairs.

  ‘What’s this about?’ asked Gerasimova.

  This time Utkin did not disguise his sigh. He had not been invited up to the residence, nor offered any tea.

  He kept it brief. ‘Your husband met with an Englishwoman called Catherine Berlin today?’

  Utkin saw a flicker of concern in the Colonel’s cold eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘She attended with an interpreter?’ said Utkin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gerasimova. ‘Is this woman in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘When do you think your husband might be available? I can wait. It’s no problem.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gerasimova. ‘He has left Moscow, as I said, on business. If there is anything else, perhaps you could make an appointment.’

  ‘It’s very important I speak with him,’ said Utkin, ‘in person.’

  Gerasimova folded her arms.

  ‘He could come to the station at any time,’ wheedled Utkin. ‘I would be happy to accommodate him.’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Major,’ she said, ‘perhaps you could ask your superior to submit any further requests in writing through my office.’

  ‘Colonel, my apologies. Just one more thing. Do you know if any vehicles have been stolen from your husband’s company?’

  ‘Are you implying that I make his business affairs a matter of my professional interest?’ said Gerasimova. ‘That is a very serious accusation, Major.’

  Utkin retreated, before he made things any worse.

  Climbing the stairs to his apartment – the lift was out of service again – Utkin contemplated the prospect of asking his boss to write to the Foreign Intelligence Service to request a meeting between the spouse of a colonel and one of his grubby little homicide detectives.

  He didn’t contemplate it for long.

  The padded front door closed behind Utkin with a soft sigh. The hooks that lined the tiny vestibule were crowded with bulky coats and jackets, although he lived alone.

  He sat down on a low wooden bench and leant in among the winter garments as he dragged off his boots. The coats still held faint traces of his wife and son, preserved in the stuffy airlock. He bur
ied himself beneath them, pressed the coarse fabric to his face and inhaled deeply.

  Utkin enjoyed eating, so he’d learnt to cook. The kitchen was tidy and well equipped. His younger colleagues ate out at restaurants with decor that evoked an era they couldn’t remember and offered poor approximations of dishes their grandmothers had once served.

  Expensive food and wasted sentiment – he could do better at home.

  He put a pot of water on the stove to boil, then went into the living room and sat down at his desk.

  The small apartment had come with the job. Promotion brought with it bigger apartments in nicer locations, but his wife had liked this estate, her friends were here and she knew the best stalls at the nearby market.

  He had wanted to move. She hadn’t. They had argued about it endlessly – that, and everything else – but now she was gone he was glad they had stayed.

  He opened one of the desk drawers and pushed aside the coiled lengths of string he kept there. His wife used to laugh at the way he carefully unpicked the knots on a parcel to reuse the string, but it always came in handy.

  He reached into the back of the drawer and found a small sandalwood box that had once held his son’s crayons. He took it out and lifted its lid.

  He took the two cellophane sweet wrappers from his pocket: one from the alley, the other he had found at the airport.

  What one sought was never in plain sight.

  He picked them both up and laid them carefully beside the one that was already in the box.

  24

  When Charlie returned from the loo Berlin was finishing the dregs of her cranberry vodka.

  ‘I can offer you accommodation,’ said Charlie. ‘And you can complete the final interview with Gerasimov tomorrow and return to London the following day. Business as usual.’

  Someone had given Charlie her orders. It wasn’t Del, or anyone else at Burghley, or she’d have spoken to them on the phone in English. Perhaps she was talking directly to the company in London – the company that was paying both of them – who might employ Russians, or Russian-speakers.

  In theory, she and Charlie were on the same side. But Charlie had lied to her. Berlin didn’t like being treated like a numpty. Perhaps the old bag was just mean, but she didn’t think so.

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a passport.’

  ‘We’ll get onto the British embassy after you’ve finished with Gerasimov,’ said Charlie.

  Berlin thought her other problem might present rather more of a difficulty. She paused and leant forwards.

  ‘Do you know a good doctor?’

  Berlin’s impression of Moscow was fragmentary, but there was a grim, determined grandeur about the place that overwhelmed her. The architecture was alien, apart from a sprinkling of bland shopping centres that wouldn’t have been out of place in Swindon.

  Charlie drove down an elegant boulevard, then turned into a potholed street that wound through block after block of buildings under construction. Cranes reared up on massive sites guarded by roaming dogs the size of wolves. It was seven in the evening and had been dark for hours.

  Unable to read the signs or identify the symbols on buildings, Berlin had no idea of their purpose. Nor of their period. History had deserted her.

  Charlie sped down a narrow road that ran parallel with a waterway.

  ‘Is that the Moskva?’ said Berlin.

  ‘Hardly. It’s the Vodootvodny Canal,’ said Charlie. ‘It loops off the river and meets up with it again at a bloody great statue of Peter the Great. You can’t miss it.’

  In the distance Berlin could see a tiered tower of russet masonry.

  ‘And what’s that? The building with the star on top?’ she asked.

  ‘One of Stalin’s Seven Sisters,’ said Charlie. ‘Stalinskie Vysotki. They say he was embarrassed that Moscow had no skyscrapers.’

  ‘Strange. He usually kept his sensitive side well hidden,’ observed Berlin.

  Charlie snorted, lowered her window and threw out her cigarette butt. The blast of freezing air didn’t diminish the flush of anger that coloured her cheeks.

  ‘That’s absolutely typical,’ she said. ‘Passing casual judgement. Based on what? Cold War propaganda. You’ve not even been in the country twenty-four hours. Bloody cheek.’

  Wrenching the steering wheel to one side, she swerved in front of a minibus caked with dry mud. In the side mirror, Berlin saw it brake hard to avoid a collision. A hundred yards further on, Charlie was forced to stop at traffic lights.

  Berlin could see the vehicle nosing its way through the columns of cars. It pulled alongside them. It was packed with men who were as mud-spattered as the bus. They leant out of the windows and screamed at Charlie. She shouted back in Russian.

  The lights turned green and Charlie put her foot down. The Range Rover surged forwards.

  ‘Tajiks!’ she cried. ‘They should deport the lot of them. Drug dealers!’

  Berlin thought it best not to engage in further political debate.

  Charlie had driven up onto the footpath and squeezed into a line of cars hugging the low wall that bordered the canal, ensuring that any pedestrians would be forced onto the road.

  It was clear the population had no fear of parking wardens. The traffic might have been brutal, but the parking was chaotic: vehicles crammed into any available space, at all angles.

  Once Charlie had managed to squeeze herself out of the car door, they walked along the canal, until finally Charlie crossed the road and stopped in front of a dilapidated four-storey pink-stuccoed mansion consisting of two wings, separated by a once-elegant portico.

  The derelict pile was flanked on one side by rubbish-strewn wasteland and on the other by a collection of ramshackle sheds. The broad front garden, a tangle of snow-laden shrubbery and bare, black trees, was protected by high cast-iron railings.

  The street was poorly lit and, as far as Berlin could see, not a single window glowed in any of the buildings that lined this block.

  ‘Up for redevelopment,’ was Charlie’s only comment.

  A pair of rusty gates appeared to be secured by a heavy chain and padlock. Charlie jiggled the chain. The padlock fell open. She gave one of the gates a shove and pushed through the gap that opened up.

  She beckoned Berlin to follow.

  The prospect of sleeping on a park bench suddenly seemed inviting.

  25

  Berlin was astonished when Charlie switched on the lights. The overgrown garden and the bare, decrepit entrance hall on the ground floor had not prepared her for the ‘accommodation’.

  She was reminded of nothing so much as Miss Havisham’s decaying mansion, except here the clocks had stopped at perestroika. The last gasp of communism.

  They ascended a wide marble staircase that led to a long gallery running the length of the building. Charlie unlocked a set of imposing double doors and showed Berlin through a vestibule into what appeared to have once been a grandiose reception room. But the crumbling plaster walls were hung with yellowing posters from the era of socialist realism: heroes of the revolution, proletarians and agrarian workers united in forging a new order.

  Busts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin cluttered rococo marble-topped chiffoniers. Dusty glass-fronted bookcases were crammed with leather-bound sets of their complete works, in English and Russian, it looked like.

  The naked windows, floor to ceiling, were rectangles of darkness.

  ‘It was the residence of a Tsarist functionary,’ said Charlie. ‘Then the Party took it over and installed some apparatchik, who left most of this stuff behind when he was . . .’ She hesitated. ‘When he moved on.’

  To which Berlin could only nod.

  Monstrous walnut dressers, chaises longues, armchairs upholstered in faded gold velvet and a dining table meant to seat the Tsar’s entire court barely occupied the immense space.

  The furniture was dwarfed by the high ceilings and three sets of massive double doors. Berlin looked up. The po
ols of yellow light from the electric chandeliers enhanced the gloom, rather than illuminating it.

  ‘Impossible to heat the whole place,’ said Charlie. ‘I stick to this room. Make yourself at home. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  The grimy stainless-steel sink on one wall was clearly a late addition to the establishment, as was the gas ring and a rickety pot-bellied wood stove in one corner. A hole in the wall, roughly plastered, accommodated its chimney.

  ‘Won’t be a tick,’ said Charlie as she opened a set of the double doors. Berlin caught a glimpse of a long corridor and another set of doors before she closed them again behind her.

  The weak pendant lights created deep pockets of shadow, but Berlin was able to discern the pattern of threadbare rugs, littered with tiny turds.

  The surreal effect intensified as Berlin’s eyes adjusted to the half-light: the Soviet memorabilia was complemented by tawdry souvenirs of London and the English seaside.

  A fly-specked reproduction of The Hay Wain hung between posters of peasants and workers arm-in-arm beneath the hammer and sickle. A collection of English seaside snowstorms sat among the flaking matryoshka nesting dolls.

  A child’s jewellery box, decorated with dusty seashells, lay open to reveal tarnished gilt medals, inscribed with Lenin’s profile, lying on frayed damask.

  Berlin heard a faint scratching sound, followed by whimpering and the double doors creaking as they opened again. A tiny piebald chihuahua came tearing through them and made straight for Berlin, barking furiously. The source of the turds.

  Charlie reappeared, closing the doors behind her. ‘That’s Yorkie,’ she said. ‘I keep him in the other wing. Best not to venture down there. Floor’s a bit dodgy.’ She pointed at the pile of splintered floorboards beside the woodstove.

  ‘Yorkie,’ said Berlin.

  The tiny dog imitated a growl.

  ‘Named after the chocolate bar,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s nothing like English confectionery, you know.’

  Yorkie, who apparently suffered from a skin condition, bounced up and down in front of Berlin, yapping. She was seized by the sensation of having wandered into someone else’s dream – or nightmare. But the insistent, plaintive whine in her blood was hers alone.