A Morbid Habit

by Annie Hauxwell

  ‘It looks like him, but it can’t be Gerasimov,’ said Berlin, clearing her throat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Utkin. ‘It’s him. Mikhail Gerasimov. Away on business his wife tells me.’

  He took a sweet from his pocket, unwrapped it and popped it in his mouth, then fished out another and offered it to Berlin. On autopilot, she extended her hand.

  The cellophane shroud of the sherbet lemon twinkled in her palm. She stared at it, bemused, then slipped it in her pocket.

  Utkin pointed at Matvienko, then at the other body, sucking on his sweet, contemplative. ‘Both died by same hand,’ he said.

  ‘Forensics?’ said Berlin.

  ‘Detective work,’ said Utkin.

  ‘When was he . . . when was the body found?’ she asked.

  ‘Four days before you arrived,’ said Utkin.

  ‘So the man I interviewed . . .’ said Berlin. The thought drifted away. Something was closing in on her, something indistinct, a grey, menacing shape flitting through a dark forest.

  Utkin clapped his hands. ‘Now the introductions are over,’ he said. ‘A toast.’

  The babushka appeared, bearing a battered instrument tray on which were balanced three glasses and the bottle of vodka. Utkin poured. He handed a glass to Berlin and the attendant took her own.

  To Berlin’s astonishment he began to recite in Russian. The cadence betrayed the source: a poem or incantation. Even in an unintelligible tongue the bitter lamentation resonated. When he finished the deep creases of the attendant’s face were wet with tears.

  Utkin looked straight at Berlin and raised his glass.

  ‘I drink to you,’ he said. ‘And the dead.’

  The glass slid from Berlin’s numb fingers to the floor and shattered. Her knees buckled and she followed.

  She was choking. She gasped for air and lashed out. Something hot dribbled down her chin. Berlin opened her eyes and met those of the attendant, who was peering down at her, clutching a small glass.

  Utkin said something in Russian as Berlin struggled to sit up. The room was small and stuffy. She was lying on a shelf built into the wall, on a thin mattress. The attendant retreated and Utkin appeared in Berlin’s line of sight. He drew up a chair and sat down.

  ‘You have eaten very little. The climate is harsh. You are weak,’ he said. ‘Withdrawing.’

  Berlin attempted to move off the shelf, but Utkin pushed her back. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said.

  Berlin considered asserting her right to silence, but she wasn’t even sure she had that right in Russia. Besides, Utkin had nailed it: she was sick, friendless, and under scrutiny in a country she couldn’t leave for reasons she couldn’t fathom. She had nothing to lose.

  The man who was supposed to meet her at the airport and the man she was to interview were both dead before she arrived.

  The Potemkin village made sense now. Whatever game they were playing, the stakes were high: worth two murders.

  Charlie had seemed equally surprised when they got to the apartment and discovered the couple had done a runner. She was just a minion.

  Utkin seemed to read her mind. ‘Someone did meet you at airport,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Berlin.

  ‘Who?’ said Utkin.

  ‘Charlotte Inkpin,’ said Berlin.

  ‘Tell me about her,’ said Utkin.

  Berlin was aware that the attendant was lurking in the corner, bent over a gas ring.

  ‘Valentina,’ said Utkin. The attendant shuffled over with a saucepan and a wooden spoon. The aroma was tantalising.

  ‘Inkpin is British, about seventy. She defected during the eighties,’ said Berlin.

  ‘So. Traitor. Who does she work for?’ said Utkin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Berlin, ‘but they’re definitely local.’

  She was struck by his use of the term ‘traitor’. From the Russian point of view, surely Charlie was the opposite. A patriot.

  ‘Does she live alone?’ asked Utkin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Berlin, without hesitation.

  She gave him her best level stare.

  ‘What do you want from me, Major?’ she said.

  ‘What have you got to offer, Miss Berlinskaya?’ he said.

  The attendant shuffled closer, scooped up a spoonful of soup from the saucepan and brought it to Berlin’s lips. The rich stock was ambrosia. Borscht.

  Berlin’s senses reeled. The last time she had tasted borscht, it had been Zayde holding the spoon to her mouth. Tears spilled from her eyes.

  She could see Utkin was disconcerted by this sudden display of emotion, but his confusion was nothing compared to her own.

  ‘Enough,’ she cried. She knocked the spoon away.

  The crimson liquid spattered the wall.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ she said.

  Utkin and the attendant stared at her.

  ‘That is very good question,’ said Utkin. ‘Perhaps you should ask your friend Inkpin.’

  46

  The twenty-four hour café was heaving with internet gamers. In the gloom scenes of carnage flickered across the intense, pale faces. It was the middle of the night, but time meant nothing in here.

  Utkin had offered to drive her home, but she had walked – or rather staggered – out and eventually found a taxi. She just needed to get away. The presence of the Hard Rock Café, Dunkin’ Donuts and faux antique street lighting implied that the driver had dropped her in a tourist zone. A sprinkling of shifty-looking touts in cheap suits, enticing obvious out-of-towners into clubs, completed the picture.

  Her first challenge was to sort out the implications of Utkin’s revelations on her own circumstances. If the subject of her due diligence job was dead before she arrived, Burghley’s client clearly didn’t know.

  Or they had another reason for sending her. It wasn’t just to get her out of the way. They could have sent her anywhere. It meant this was their turf, or they were confident they had more control of the situation here.

  What ‘the situation’ might be was another question.

  The youth in charge of the place, barely older than the adolescents he ruled, spoke English with an American accent.

  The gamers ignored Berlin as she wandered among them looking for a spare booth. She didn’t need the huge screens, but she did need headphones. When she found a spot at the back she cleared a space among the crushed cans of energy drink, sat down and fired up her tablet.

  Her email was inundated with spam.

  She flicked to voicemail. Her phone had been crushed into a thousand pieces, but the number was still active and all her messages were available online. Disembodied data found another host. A demon denied one body would possess another.

  There were two messages from Peggy. That didn’t surprise her. But the contents did. Peggy spoke with care, enunciating every word: she was passing on important information from a Mr Magnus Nkonde. It was important Berlin got in touch with him. A matter of life and death. Peggy paused.

  Berlin could hear the fear in Peggy’s voice as she continued: Mr Nkonde wanted her to know that the Russian embassy owned the van. Peggy swallowed hard and repeated it: the Russian embassy.

  Berlin felt her own mouth go dry. That’s why it was Moscow. It confirmed that Hirst, if she was right about their involvement, didn’t simply want her out of London. They wanted her here, because they were working for the Russians.

  Once she would have dismissed ‘life and death’ as Magnus’s usual hyperbole, which had clearly terrified poor Peggy. But given the murders of Matvienko and Gerasimov, his warning deserved to be taken very seriously.

  She had expected a chilly rebuke from Peggy about her failure to call over Christmas, not this. And if this wasn’t bad enough, her second message was even more disturbing.

  Peggy informed her that a man and a woman had come to the house and asked her about Magnus’s telephone call.

  How on earth had they found out about it?

  There was a pause and Peggy sighed
. She hoped that Berlin wouldn’t be too angry. She had been very worried after Mr Nkonde called, so she had rung the police.

  Berlin felt her blood begin to boil, but in the next moment it turned to ice.

  Peggy added that she couldn’t remember the woman’s name, she was a detective, a DCI. But the man who came with her was Delroy Jacobs; she had remembered his name after they’d gone because it had finally rung a bell. They’d shown her a picture of someone called Carmichael. Peggy had seen him on the news. He had been murdered.

  With a tremor in her voice Peggy asked Berlin to please get in touch as soon as she could. There was a pause, as if Peggy wanted to add something else, but thought better of it. Berlin listened to the silence for a moment and her mother’s unspoken fear. Under the circumstances, Peggy had shown admirable restraint.

  Berlin opened the BBC News site: Jolyon Carmichael had been shot in his own kitchen. A second deceased male in the house had yet to be identified.

  An awful thought occurred to her: it could be Magnus.

  He must have been desperate to warn her if he had sought out her mother, which meant that for some reason he couldn’t contact her directly. He had her mobile number. He’d left a message to call him before she flew to Moscow.

  Alarm bells were going off all over the place.

  She read on. The police had identified the weapon in the Carmichael murder as an Eastern European military sidearm, probably used with a silencer.

  Christ. It’s all about the Russians. Her head was spinning. What the hell had she been sent into and what was in that bloody van?

  There was a link on the web page to a sidebar about Carmichael’s newspaper. Berlin clicked it. The Sentinel had been bought by someone called Kalandarishvili. Great. She took off the headphones and dropped them on the table.

  This was turning into a nightmare of epic bloody proportions. She had stumbled into some serious business involving Russians, who had had her shipped off to the mother country, where they dealt with their problems by incarcerating them. Or worse.

  Berlin bought a can of Red Bull from the young headbanger in charge. He made sad gestures to convey he couldn’t give her change from the five-hundred-rouble note, so she shrugged. Keep it. It would also cover her internet use. His grin told her that she had fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

  Back in the booth she picked up a flyer advertising the tour dates of an American pop diva. She turned it over and began to jot notes on the back, trying to weave the disparate bits of intel into a coherent scenario.

  The van that Hirst’s supervisor had lied about belonged to the Russian embassy; Gerasimov and the interpreter were dead; Charlie, pressured by her krysha, was a substitute; Carmichael, Magnus’s former editor, had been murdered with an Eastern European weapon; Magnus himself, who had identified the van, was trying to get in touch with her; The Sentinel had been bought by a Russian.

  Last, but not least, she was being investigated by a Russian intelligence agency.

  Lies, deceit, duplicity. To hide what?

  The night that she and Del had left Burghley’s Christmas party the City had been full of Eastern European cigar-smoking revellers. Because the Russian president and his trade delegation were in London. How could she have forgotten that?

  She peered at her notes, drawing solid arrows between items where she knew the connection and dotted lines where she didn’t. Two things were immediately apparent.

  First, the events were in the wrong order. The correct sequence was that she saw the van, she encountered the supervisor, she told Magnus about the van and he made enquiries. The term ‘enquiries’ sounded benign, but covered a multitude of sins.

  Hang on. Did she speak to Magnus before or after the party? Christ, it was so recent, why was it so difficult to recall? Then she remembered the taxi that had miraculously pulled up right beside her and Del that night.

  The driver had failed to turn on the meter. Was he waiting for them? Watching her, or Del, or both of them? What had they talked about in the cab? She wasn’t paranoid. That had definitely happened after she’d seen Magnus in the Approach and no doubt he’d already begun to follow up her tip. Somehow, his intervention had acted as a trigger.

  The second thing was more problematic and had nothing to do with her hazy memory. A piece of information was missing from her patchwork of arrows: what was being unloaded from the van?

  There was no way she could work that one out, but the warehouse itself might add a piece to the puzzle.

  She opened Google Maps and cruised around the images of the Park Royal estate. Warehouse 5B came into view. She zoomed in and found a name painted along one side.

  A quick search revealed the company was registered. Her online account with Companies House, a hangover from the halcyon days of lucrative fraud investigations, was still active. She simply ordered the Current Appointments Report.

  A link immediately arrived in her inbox. She clicked it and the document unfurled. Among the filing dates, company registration information and status details, one name stood out. The short list of directors included one M. Gerasimov.

  Raised voices on the other side of the room broke Berlin’s reverie. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there, trying to take in the fact that Gerasimov, the man she’d been sent to interview, and who lay in the mortuary, owned warehouse 5B.

  The voices grew louder. She peered over the partition.

  A man and a woman, their backs turned to her, were arguing with the youth at the front desk.

  The boy gamers were paying attention to the altercation; they understood what was being said, and the looks on their faces indicated it wasn’t good.

  The woman began to wander among the booths, peering at the occupants. Berlin heard a crack and glanced up to see the youth at the front desk clutching his face.

  Her colleague was enjoying himself.

  One of the boys muttered something to Berlin in Russian. She shook her head and frowned, indicating she didn’t understand. Another boy leant over and whispered in her ear.

  ‘Go,’ he hissed. ‘They look for foreigner.’ He pointed at an exit in the back wall.

  This she understood.

  She slid the tablet in her pocket and dropped to her knees. She wasn’t the only one on the floor. A couple of blokes were weaving between the booths towards the exit.

  Berlin followed.

  The door was already swinging shut behind other fugitives. A shout indicated that someone had noticed.

  Berlin had no idea if they were looking for her or pursuing illegal immigrants, but in the circumstances it seemed sensible not to hang around to find out.

  47

  Magnus had moped around the house all day. The evening he had spent drinking, and dozing on and off, on his sofa. There wasn’t much else he could do; Green wouldn’t let him out of his sight, wouldn’t let him go upstairs to bed, had even followed him into the toilet.

  He opened one eye and looked at his babysitter, sitting upright in the armchair opposite. The man was a fiend. Magnus could see the sweat standing out on his brow, the slight but persistent twitch of his knee.

  ‘Nasty cold, is it?’ said Magnus.

  Green scowled.

  Magnus thought he should know better than to provoke a man with a gun, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘How much longer is this going to go on?’ he said.

  ‘Not long,’ said Green.

  ‘You mean until the talks are over, the trade deals are done, the prime minister and the president shake hands and the delegation flies out,’ said Magnus.

  ‘You should never have stuck your nose in,’ said Green.

  ‘That’s my bloody job,’ exclaimed Magnus. He stood up, fatigue fleeing as indignant rage swept through him. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he shouted. ‘This is England!’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Green.

  ‘What if I won’t?’ bellowed Magnus. ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Green. He stood up, walked over a
nd shoved Magnus in the chest. Magnus fell back onto the sofa with a soft whump. It was the sound of his token resistance evaporating.

  A mobile phone ringing caught them both by surprise. It was coming from Green’s pocket, but it was the phone he had taken from Magnus.

  Green took it out, glanced at the display, accepted the call and switched the phone to speaker. He handed it to Magnus and raised a finger in warning.

  ‘Hello?’ said Magnus.

  ‘Magnus! Christ! I was almost convinced you were dead. Thank God. I got your message. What the hell’s going on?’

  The voice was distorted, but unmistakable.

  ‘Oh, hello, old darling,’ said Magnus. ‘Have a good Christmas?’

  Berlin crouched beneath the booths, between the legs of two lanky youths, trying to ignore the smell of their trainers. In turn, they were ignoring her.

  She had let the back door close with a bang, while she stayed inside. The woman had dashed for it. She shouted something and her colleague had run out the front.

  Meanwhile, Berlin had crawled back between the booths.

  The denizens of the café resumed their activities in stolid silence. She began to appreciate that a habit of passive resistance, grounded in a deep mistrust of authority, was not readily turned around. A regime may change, but the instincts of its subjects do not.

  ‘There’s a terrible echo,’ said Berlin. She was calling on Skype, crouched over the tablet, which was balanced on her knees, but the echo wasn’t at her end.

  ‘I’m in the bathroom,’ said Magnus. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Moscow,’ said Berlin. ‘What’s happening, Magnus?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ he said.

  ‘But you told my mother it was life and bloody death,’ hissed Berlin.

  ‘Oh, you know, I do carry on a bit,’ said Magnus. He chuckled. He was almost certainly drunk.

  ‘So the van belongs to the Russian Embassy,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Magnus.

  ‘Well, here’s the thing, Magnus,’ she said. ‘The warehouse belongs to Gerasimov.’

  ‘Who?’ said Magnus.