The Moscow Cipher

by Scott Mariani

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘Whoever they are, I don’t much like people breathing down my neck.’

  ‘Welcome to Russia,’ Tatyana said. ‘Here, there is always someone watching everything you do.’

  ‘Britain is no different. That’s why I don’t live there.’

  The driver’s high-speed sprint through the traffic had started well, but within a minute he was being forced to brake for an ugly snarl-up ahead. A truck had broken down in the middle of two lanes, provoking an orchestra of blaring car horns. ‘Sorry, boss. Here we go again. Roads are very bad today.’

  ‘The roads are always bad.’ Tatyana turned a triumphant glower on Ben. ‘I told you this was a terrible way to travel.’

  ‘I’m all for diversity,’ Ben replied. ‘Let’s try something else instead.’

  They got out of the taxi and threaded a path on foot through the stationary queues of honking traffic. There was a tram lane with a red-and-yellow car going in the opposite direction. Ben quickened his step to chase it, and hopped on board. Tatyana had no choice but to follow. ‘Now we are going the wrong way,’ she complained. ‘Petrov’s apartment is to the east of here.’

  The detour would give Ben a better chance of telling if they were still being followed. As the tram whirred along the tracks he additionally kept an eye open for places of worship, in case he might spot a Catholic church among all the onion-domed Russian Orthodox ones and the occasional mosque they passed. Maybe he’d catch Petrov in the act of attending morning mass. Probably unlikely, but right now Ben was feeling he needed all the improbable good fortune he could get.

  After a few more kilometres, they jumped off the tram and hustled back to the nearest underground station to resume their journey to the eastern suburb where Petrov lived. This time, Ben and Tatyana reached the underground platform just as the train was departing, and had to sprint to catch it. Ben didn’t want to hang around even for a minute to give anyone a chance to catch up with them again. ‘I told you you’d have to keep up with me,’ he said to Tatyana as she jumped aboard after him, flushed and a little breathless from the dash.

  ‘You are crazy.’

  ‘We haven’t even got into any gunfights and car chases yet,’ he said. ‘This is easy, so far.’

  Emerging back into the daylight several stops later, they collared another yellow taxicab to drive them the rest of the way. By the time they had arrived at Yuri Petrov’s apartment building Ben was quite certain they’d given their followers the slip. Now was the test: if anyone was lurking in wait to observe them at Petrov’s place, Ben could be sure Kaprisky had lied about his men standing down.

  Even in the sunshine, Petrov’s apartment block was grey and downbeat and depressing. The rundown suburb was a far cry from the vibrant heart of modern Moscow, with broken windows here and there, garbage piled in the walkways and sworls of graffiti adorning any bare patch of stonework. If not for all the signs in Cyrillic alphabet, it could have been just about any English inner city. No great surprise that Eloise Kaprisky wasn’t too enamoured of sending her daughter here for visits.

  Ben’s spider sense had gone quiet. A few glances around him and at the windows of the surrounding buildings, checking for twitching curtains or the glint of binoculars, and he was pretty confident that nobody, whether Kaprisky’s team or anyone else, was watching them as they approached the building. Had he been imagining the whole thing, after all? Possibly, but he wasn’t in the habit of imagining things. Time would tell.

  Tatyana led the way up a flight of dirty concrete steps and along a walkway with a rusty iron railing. They passed a number of identical doors, all painted the same drab green and made of the same flimsy plywood with rusty fittings. Tatyana pointed ahead and said, ‘It’s that one.’

  ‘Let’s see what’s what,’ Ben said, pushing past her towards Petrov’s door.

  ‘I do not see what the point of this exercise is. I already told you the place was empty.’

  ‘And only the police have authority to take a look inside. I get that. But here’s the thing. I don’t recognise their sole authority.’

  ‘Surely you would not break in, Major Hope?’ Tatyana said, aghast.

  ‘Needs must when the Devil drives, Miss Nikolaeva,’ Ben replied. ‘It wouldn’t be my first time.’ He’d never met a locked door that had stopped him, and going by his wide experience this one wouldn’t take a lot of kicking in. He glanced left, glanced right, walked purposefully up to the doorway.

  And then stopped.

  Someone else had got there before them.

  The door was open just a crack, maybe half an inch, so that from any distance it looked shut.

  ‘He must have come back,’ Tatyana whispered.

  ‘Then he must have forgotten his key.’ Ben pointed to where the flimsy lock had been forced. The doorframe was cheaply made and the only real damage was a slight buckling of the aluminium casing and a few deep scores where someone had let themselves in with a pry bar. Ben nudged the door the rest of the way open with his foot, then stepped aside quickly in case of an edgy occupant lurking within, clutching a sawn-off shotgun to greet unexpected visitors.

  Nothing happened. Ben listened hard at the open doorway, and all he could hear was the sound of emptiness. If anyone was hiding in there, they were being extremely quiet. He waited ten seconds, then stepped into the apartment. With an anxious look around to make sure they weren’t observed by any nosy neighbours, Tatyana followed.

  The entrance led directly into Yuri Petrov’s living room, which was as poky, basic and modestly furnished as might have been expected from the exterior. It had also been thoroughly and completely trashed. Furniture had been knocked over, drawers emptied all over the floor, TV gone, stereo gone, a bare patch in the dust on a cluttered work table from which an item roughly the size and shape of a laptop computer had been removed. All the classic signs of a burglary, or a fairly convincing attempt to make it look like one.

  ‘When you left here, did Kaprisky’s men all come with you?’ Ben queried Tatyana.

  ‘One or two of them stayed,’ she replied. ‘To watch in case Petrov came back.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Ben took out his phone and speed-dialled Kaprisky once more. ‘Me again. Did you tell your guys to turn Yuri’s place over?’

  Kaprisky sounded as taken aback as he had earlier. ‘Those were absolutely not my instructions. As I told you, they were only sent to observe and ask questions.’

  ‘Any reason why they might have seen fit to ignore those instructions?’

  ‘None. Please explain to me what is going on. Are you getting closer to finding Valentina?’

  Right now, Ben felt as though he was getting further away from that goal with every passing moment. ‘You’ll have a progress report soon enough,’ he said, and put the phone away. He spent the next few minutes scouting through the debris of the wrecked living room, then went up the narrow passage to inspect the rest of the empty apartment.

  Yuri Petrov had not been living in the lap of luxury, that was for sure. The entire bathroom was about a third of the size of Ben’s hotel shower, with cracked tiles and mildew and water stains everywhere. It took Ben very little time to verify that no toiletries, shaving kit or toothbrushes appeared to have been removed. Moving on up the dingy passage to the main bedroom, the few cheap items of clothing bundled into the wardrobe and chest of drawers had likewise apparently been left alone. A pair of reading glasses lay on top of a John le Carré novel in English beside the bed, and an empty suitcase had been stuffed below it.

  The last room he checked was a poky spare bedroom with a bare floor, a narrow wardrobe, a cheap dressing table and no space for much else. Going by the little pink suitcase and items of pink clothing scattered on the bed, this had obviously been Valentina’s quarters on her visits. Like her father’s things, it seemed that most or all of the girl’s possessions had been left behind when they disappeared.

  Something crunched underfoot. Ben looked down, saw the s
mall shards of brittle pink plastic he’d stepped on, and picked up the largest fragment to inspect more closely. It had part of a silver N embossed on it, from the NOKIA logo of a mobile phone. Lowering himself to peer under the bed, he found more fragments among the dust balls on the bare floor, and retrieved them. The fragments amounted to part of the casing of the phone; the rest of it was missing.

  Ben slipped the biggest fragment into his pocket. Sensing a presence behind him, he turned back towards the bedroom doorway to see Tatyana standing there, leaning against the wall of the passage with folded arms.

  ‘What are you making of it?’ she asked.

  Ben thought for a moment, then said, ‘You know what, Miss Nikolaeva? Maybe you can be useful to me after all.’

  Chapter 13

  They left the apartment, closed the door behind them as well as its buckled frame would allow, then retraced their steps back along the walkway and down the concrete stairs. A narrow archway led through to a lugubrious, dirty courtyard where they found the apartment block’s concierge emptying trash into a row of bins that had been left standing out in the sun and were swarming with flies. The concierge was a brassy-looking, blond-haired woman of around forty or forty-five, dressed in a grey overall and clumpy, oversized shoes.

  ‘Did you talk to her before?’ Ben asked, and Tatyana shook her head. ‘I want to ask her some questions, and I need you to interpret for me.’

  ‘I am happy to be of service.’

  They walked up to the woman, who turned as they approached. She had too much makeup and eyes like a pigeon. She said something terse in Russian, which Ben took to mean, ‘You want something?’

  Tatyana spoke politely and showed her private investigator’s ID card, which the woman scrutinised with great suspicion. After a lot of persuading, she agreed to answer a few questions. The flies buzzed around her as she talked. Ben kept waiting for one to disappear into her mouth, but she didn’t seem to care about them.

  With Tatyana interpreting, the conversation was painfully slow. The woman became defensive when quizzed about the broken-into apartment. She knew nothing about anything. No, she hadn’t noticed the forced lock; now that she was learning of it, she wasn’t very pleased about the hassle of getting it repaired. She was equally edgy when it came to discussing the apartment’s tenant, Mr Petrov. With some effort, Tatyana was able to coax out of her that she’d last seen him eight, maybe nine, days ago though she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘He was home then?’

  ‘He was on his way somewhere.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Not alone.’

  ‘Who was he with? A little girl?’

  The concierge reflected, and replied that yes, she thought so. At that cue, Ben stepped forwards and showed her the photo of Valentina. Was this her? The concierge said she hadn’t got such a good look at her, but it was probably the same child she’d seen leaving with Mr Petrov. What about it?

  Had Mr Petrov by any chance mentioned where he was going? The concierge shrugged and replied that people came and went all the time. It wasn’t any of her business to poke into people’s lives, and she didn’t care anyway. No, she couldn’t remember if Mr Petrov had been carrying a bag, or luggage of any kind. She didn’t watch everything that happened around the place, and why should she? All she knew was that she now had a terrible mess to clear up. She seemed anxious to know whether these two detectives would notify the cops about the break-in, and appeared not to want the law involved. Too much trouble, she kept saying.

  At that point, another woman appeared from a nearby ground-floor apartment. She was a few years older than the concierge, grey and skinny with a shawl wrapped around her bony shoulders, and it quickly transpired that she not only had been eavesdropping on the conversation but had an axe to grind, too. Within seconds, the two women had launched into a heated argument in quick-fire Russian, which Tatyana had to try to keep up with as she related it all to Ben. The older woman claimed that the concierge (who was a rotten bitch and a shameless tart) didn’t want the cops involved only to protect her boyfriend (who was a filthy thieving crook and a drug peddler to boot). This drew an extremely vehement protest from the concierge, and soon the courtyard was echoing to the sound of their furious yelling. The older woman went on to claim that the same thing had happened to her twice last year, and everyone knew who was doing the break-ins in the neighbourhood, but that when she called the police this here dirty cow Rozalina Morozova – thrusting an accusing finger at the concierge, who glared back at her as though she wanted to rake her eyeballs out or kick her to death with those big shoes – stood up for the bastard by coming up with some alibi. He was probably cutting her in on the spoils of his burglaries, and that was why she was afraid of the police.

  Tatyana kept translating at high speed as the argument raged on. Ben, getting all this with about a five-second delay, was in danger of losing the thread.

  The concierge screamed, ‘Nasty old witch, why don’t you go tell your filthy lies elsewhere?’

  ‘You’re not fooling anyone, Rozalina Morozova. I saw Bogdan Lebedev coming out of there with a box this big in his arms. Just a few days ago, after Mr Petrov had already left.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Ben said, raising a hand to interrupt their stream at the mention of this new name. ‘Bogdan Lebedev?’

  That stopped the argument dead in its tracks, though not for long. The older woman explained, via Tatyana, that Lebedev lived across the way with his two brothers, Maksim and Artem. That was, when he wasn’t shacked up with this one – pointing again at the concierge, who now started screaming and yelling all over again. Mercifully, moments later the concierge had taken enough abuse for one day, burst into tears and retreated to the safety of her little ground-floor office, from which the sounds of objects being furiously hurled and smashed could soon be heard.

  ‘Where across the way?’ Ben asked.

  Tatyana asked, listened and then replied, ‘She says he lives in one of the flats on the other side of the street, but that he is never at home because he and his brothers are always either riding around on their motorcycles, or hanging out at a local vodka bar, a place called the Zenit.’

  ‘How would I know this Lebedev?’ was Ben’s next question. Tatyana related it to the woman, again listened and then translated: ‘She says that unless you were blind, you could not easily miss him. He has a great big spider in the middle of his forehead and one ear missing from where someone slashed it off with a razor. She also says they should have cut his rotten throat while they were at it.’

  ‘That’s all we need to know,’ Ben said. ‘Please thank the good lady for her time.’ He peeled another sheaf of Kaprisky’s rubles from the wad of walking-around money, and offered it to the woman. She snatched the cash faster than the taxi driver had, muttered something in Russian and stalked back to her apartment.

  ‘I do not understand,’ Tatyana said.

  ‘Come on,’ Ben replied. ‘I’ll explain on the way.’

  ‘On the way where?’

  ‘It’s almost lunchtime. Buy you a drink? I happen to know of a bar nearby.’

  Chapter 14

  Tatyana used her smartphone to locate the Zenit, which turned out to be just a few minutes away on foot from the apartment block. As they walked quickly through the streets, Ben took the broken fragment of pink plastic from his pocket and rolled it thoughtfully in the palm of his hand.

  ‘You said you were going to explain,’ Tatyana reminded him.

  ‘Never worked a kidnap case before?’

  Tatyana shook her head. ‘No, and I am confused. Please tell me your thoughts on this situation.’

  ‘When a man takes the fairly extreme step of abducting his own child and going on the run,’ Ben told her, ‘there’s a certain amount of forward planning involved. At the very least, he’d pack a bag of clothing, in which he would probably have put various personal items like a toothbrush, razor, and so on. Petrov isn’t fitting that pattern. His wardrobe and bedroom drawers ar
e still full, and there’s an empty suitcase under his bed. He left behind his reading glasses, too, along with the book he’s halfway through. The same goes for Valentina’s things. If they’re travelling, they’re travelling awfully light.’

  ‘What about that?’ Tatyana pointed to the pink shard of plastic in Ben’s hand. ‘It looks like part of a cell phone.’

  ‘A pink cell phone. Therefore relatively unlikely to belong to Yuri Petrov.’

  ‘Unless he were a—’

  ‘ Goluboi?’

  She smiled. ‘You are picking up Russian very well.’

  ‘Safe to say the phone belongs to Valentina. Or used to, before someone smashed it.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘How do you know someone smashed it? Things break.’

  Ben wasn’t so sure about that. ‘Mobile phone casings are pretty tough things. Designed to withstand everyday accidents, like being dropped onto a pavement. It takes a fair bit of force to shatter one. I know, I’ve killed a few phones in my time. Looks like this one’s been hit with a hammer. Or a good hard stamp or two would do the trick. However it was done, it took more force than a young girl would normally unload on one of her valued possessions. Another kid with her pampered life might have turned out a spoiled brat, but she strikes me as the kind of child who takes good care of her things.’

  Tatyana’s lips downturned at the corners. ‘So you are saying Petrov did this?’

  ‘Or whoever broke into his apartment,’ Ben said. ‘But then it makes no sense for a burglar to deliberately harm an item that could be sold, even for a few rubles. So if it was Petrov, the question is, what would make a man want to go and smash his own kid’s phone?’

  Tatyana thought for a moment and said, ‘Perhaps to prevent her from calling her mother to say what was happening, or to call for help? That would fit with the picture of a kidnapping, no?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Ben said. ‘But here’s another thing. If he stamped on it or hit it with a hammer, or whatever, the rest of the pieces should be here, scattered over the floor and under the bed. They’re gone.’