Tom dutifully shook his head.
‘If I could, it wouldn’t work.’
A dark-skinned man, with the collar of his fur coat turned up against the sub-zero temperatures, looked briefly hopeful before losing his smile when he realized they weren’t buying. Dennisov showed him the photograph.
When that produced no flicker of recognition, Dennisov asked about the address and the man jerked his head towards the far side of the lot, indicating a concrete slum beyond. As they were leaving, he said something Tom missed.
‘What was that?’
‘She’s probably already been sold.’
A bulldozer driver in a puffy orange anorak cleared rubble on a building site, a half-finished cigarette between his lips. He was lost to the scratch of steel on grit and the slow curl of icy rubble his blade drove ahead of him.
When the man glanced up, Dennisov waved.
The driver knew the block well enough, but when Dennisov showed him Alex’s photograph he shook his head, both to say he’d never seen her and at the state of the world. Climbing back into his machine, he clamped his noise-protectors firmly to his ears and returned to scraping rubble.
‘Your boss is important?’
Tom nodded.
‘He might not like what we find.’
When they finally reached the right place, the apartment blocks were even more ruined than Tom had expected. Five-storey Khrushchevkas backing on to a railway track, jerry-built, thrown up in the 1960s as part of a five-year plan to solve the housing shortage. According to Dennisov, the five-year plan never ended, and nor did the housing shortage. Khrushchevkas kept being built. They were still prefabricated, still low-ceilinged and they still leaked.
‘Okay,’ Dennisov said. ‘Now keep your mouth shut.’
An old woman protested as they pushed through a front door reinforced with sheets of blue-painted steel. A crop-haired boy in the hallway took one look and turned for the stairs. Dennisov grabbed him, shook his head and jerked his thumb towards the door. The boy took himself outside.
Inside the communal kitchen, an old Georgian in a string vest sat by a saucepan boiling beef shank. A red onion stood on a butcher’s block next to three carrots and the air was thick with sour steam. He stood when he saw Dennisov, and then sat again. A teenage girl, breastfeeding a newborn, with a toddler at her hip, turned away to cover herself and then shrugged.
Dennisov showed her the photograph.
She shook her head firmly. ‘Nyet.’
The man boiling meat reached for the picture, examining it carefully. He too shook his head. Without being asked, he went to the door and shouted into the stairwell. A minute later, two Tartar women came down. Neither had seen Alex. Nor had the old Russian woman who appeared after that, grumbling about her husband’s shouting.
It was the crop-haired boy outside who gave Dennisov the lead.
One of the men in the block had been having a New Year’s Eve party. The boy couldn’t say it was the right party. It didn’t seem the sort of party a girl like that would go to, but all the same. It had been quite near here.
What did this man do?
Military. Kept himself to himself.
What time did the boy think he’d be home?
Who could say? He hadn’t been seen for two days.
Dennisov asked if anyone else had come looking for him and the boy’s face closed down for a second, then he realized he was too far in to back out and he’d already said too much, or not enough.
‘The police came.’
‘Militsiya. Here?’ Dennisov looked around him.
‘Different police. They took everything. Even his bedding.’
The boy took the packet of papirosa Tom tossed across and gave them the address for the party he’d mentioned. There were no Khrushchevkas there. Only a smoking warehouse beside a shop selling second-hand water heaters. The shop was a scorched ruin, still smoking in places; half the warehouse had fallen in, taking the party wall with it.
A militsiya man stood at the corner, staring uninterestedly at a half-broiled rat that had made it to the road before dying.
‘You’d better wait here,’ Dennisov said.
Taking up position by a fence, Tom tapped a Russian cigarette from its paper packet and glanced casually in both directions. His new shadow was threading his way between an oil drum and a doorless fridge. He stopped the moment Tom looked at him and dipped to tie his shoelace.
Then Dennisov was back, his face grim.
‘There’s a body,’ he said.
Tom was moving before Dennisov could stop him, heading for the door into the smoking ruin. When the militsiya man moved to stop him, Dennisov barked something and the policeman hesitated, shrugged and stood back.
‘What did you just say?’
‘I told him you were KGB.’
The ground under their feet was sodden and the walls damp. There were patches of smouldering rubble but the fire itself was out. The ceiling had fallen in halfway along, leaving a cathedral-like gap to stone beams.
The warehouse was far older and better built than the buildings around it, and its brick walls had helped keep the flames in check. There’d been a party, according to the militsiya man. A three-day party no one had dared ring in to the police.
‘The body’s at the back,’ Dennisov said.
On the floor, almost against a wall, a carbonized figure twisted in agony. Tom knew its apparent anguish was down to muscle contraction but he looked away just the same and had to make himself look back. Fire had eaten eyes, ears, lips and hair. The head was thrown back, the mouth open in a teeth-baring scream.
If there had been any clothes, and Tom’s instinct said not, they’d wicked fat from the body as it burned and long since turned to ash. Even given the state the corpse was in, Tom could see there was something wrong with its arms.
Dropping to a crouch, knowing that he was contaminating a crime scene, Tom supported himself on the wall, finding the brick still warm to his touch.
The figure’s wrists were tied with wire.
Fire had eaten the hands and finger bones had fallen away.
As Tom sat back, a circle of metal caught the daylight coming in from above. Tom shook it free from bone, knowing he shouldn’t, and a half-circle of jade dropped away from the cheap steel beneath.
He was holding Alex’s ring.
He knew it was Alex’s ring. It was the one she’d been wearing on New Year’s Eve … Retrieving the half-circle of burned jade, Tom looked for the other half and realized it would take several hours and a sieve to sort through the rubble on which he knelt. Dennisov was waiting behind him.
‘You think it’s her?’ Dennisov said finally.
Tom did, but he made himself look again.
Then, before he could give himself time to reject the idea, he lay down in the dirt beside the body to judge its height against his and felt relief sweep through him so fast he had to fight back tears. He’d been wrong. It wasn’t her.
‘You all right?’ Dennisov asked.
Clambering to his knees, Tom brushed off his trousers and brushed half-effectually at his coat. ‘Can you find out when the fire started?’
Dennisov vanished to ask.
Tom had regained control of himself by the time Dennisov returned.
‘The coroner’s van’s on its way,’ Dennisov said. ‘I’ll tell you the rest when we’re out of here.’ Without waiting to see if Tom followed, he limped for the street, not wanting to be found at a crime scene, and nodded as he passed the militsiya man, who watched him go with interest. Dennisov might have changed his metal leg for something more discreet but his limp was still noticeable. Tom passed by without acknowledging the man at all.
As he imagined a KGB officer might do.
‘It was called in yesterday by a passing police car,’ Dennisov said. ‘The fire brigade were here until an hour ago. They put out what was left of the fire, called in the body and left.’ He shrugged. ‘This area falls between three distri
cts and is full of undesirables. Our friend back there imagines everyone hoped someone else would deal with it.’
‘How do I find out if it’s Kotik, a teenage boy who liked swimming?’
Dennisov shot him a sideways glance.
‘I was given the name,’ Tom said hastily. ‘By the person who gave me this address. Well, the last address. Kotik is a friend of the missing girl.’
‘Who had enemies.’
‘Someone did, definitely,’ Tom said. ‘Now, how?’
‘Your boss will have to ask the authorities.’
‘What are his other options?’
‘They’ll cost.’
‘Of course.’
‘The KGB don’t drink at my bar. Not that I know. The ordinary police, on the other hand …’
Tom pulled out his wallet.
‘Not here! Your shadow will think I’m changing dollars. America is our enemy. Changing dollars is a crime. Also, their president is a shit who sells missiles to savages.’ Dennisov headed into an alley so overhung with balconies that snow barely reached its floor. ‘I’ll give back what I don’t use.’
‘Keep –’
‘I’ll give it back,’ Dennisov growled.
They parted at a metro station and Tom headed for Red Square, walking the last leg across a bridge over the frozen river. The sun was lower than ever, the horizon darkening and lights were coming on around him.
In reception, Tom asked to be put through to the ambassador, feeling pompous as he added that Sir Edward would want to take the call. It was the kind of thing his brother-in-law would say. Tom was halfway up the stairs when he met Anna Masterton coming down. ‘Any news?’ she demanded.
‘I’m on my way to see your husband.’
‘You can’t tell me?’
‘I should probably tell both of you.’
Anna turned on her heels and headed upstairs before Tom could say that it wasn’t as bad as it could be. She rapped on the inner door to her husband’s office before his secretary had time to do more than look up. The noise of her golf-ball typewriter stuttering to a halt sounded like the dying throes of a small revolution.
The knock drew a tight-lipped ‘Come in’.
Sir Edward looked no happier to see her than he did Tom, although he took off his spectacles and put down what he was reading.
‘You found the address?’
‘Alex wasn’t there.’
‘Told you,’ Sir Edward said. ‘She’s sulking with some friend.’
He sounded so relieved that Tom glanced sharply across and Sir Edward looked away, checking the time on a wall clock against the watch he was wearing as if that had always been his intention.
‘No one else knew anything?’ Anna asked.
‘We went to a warehouse too. But it was burned out. The police recovered a body … Not Alex,’ Tom added, as Anna threw a hand to her mouth.
‘How do you know?’ she demanded.
Tom prayed he had remembered right. ‘How tall is your daughter?’
‘Five foot three.’
‘Then it definitely wasn’t her. Burned bodies shrink, but even shrunken this one was taller.’
‘Anna …’ Sir Edward sounded as if he was trying to be soothing. ‘It’s going to be fine. She probably wasn’t even there.’
‘I’m afraid she probably was, sir. I found this in the rubble.’
Tom put the remains of the jade ring on Sir Edward’s desk, the half-circle of burned stone coming loose and falling away.
Anna Masterton vomited.
Tom left, having decided not to mention that the body might be Alex’s boyfriend. He’d find a way to tell Sir Edward later, or maybe he’d tell Mary Batten, who would find her own way to let the ambassador know.
Neither Mary nor Sir Edward would need telling that anyone who could wire a boy’s hands behind his back and burn him to death was not someone you wanted to have hold of a fifteen-year-old English girl for long.
10
Not Enough Room to …
Something in his flat was wrong. Tom knew it the moment he opened the door.
It wasn’t the smell, although that was metallic and flat, a slight odour underpinning the sourness of unemptied bins and sheets that needed washing. He’d been planning a bath, hot water allowing, to rid himself of the stink from the warehouse that infected his clothes. But the stench of something older and darker made hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Later, with a whiskey in his hand and his back to the wall in the living room, sitting on the floor in the dark, he came up with a logical explanation for his split second of atavistic fear of what he’d believed an ancient evil.
He recognized, without realizing it, the smell of blood.
That thought held for the time it took him to sip dry his whiskey, time he spent going back over what he’d found on returning home. If you could call a top-floor flat in a Moscow block reserved for foreigners home.
His living room had been undisturbed.
The ashtrays still overflowed. The cactus he’d inherited looked as miserable as ever. His briefcase, with its combination lock, lay exactly where he’d left it. His bedroom was a mess, but no worse than when he’d dragged himself from sleep and rolled out of bed that morning.
Pillows adrift, duvet thrown back, greying sheets.
Tom knew, because his flat at Sad Sam was tiny, and its bathroom door was open and nothing looked different in there either, that what awaited him must be in the kitchen.
He was right.
A dead cat hung above his sink.
It was suspended by its back legs from a string tied to the fluorescent tube above. Tom knew it was Black Sammy, the cat he’d seen the night he came back from the New Year’s Eve party, because whoever had skinned it had left its pelt on the worktop.
Thinner than blood and thicker than lymph, the liquid that pooled in his sink told him the animal had been alive when the torture began. Rigor was well set in though, stiffening the carcass. Tom cut it down with scissors.
He used scissors because his only kitchen knife rested on the folded skin, where it had been placed after it had been used to flay the animal. Under the knife was a photograph of Tom on the corner by the Khrushchevka, with his shadow away to one side and an old woman he didn’t remember huddled in a doorway.
Picking it up, Tom took the photograph into the hall where the light was better.
The depth of field was so flat it had to have been taken with a telephoto lens. From high up, looking down. If it was taken from the top of a block of flats, then the photographer must have been there waiting, which meant he had known where Tom was headed. Someone didn’t want questions asked about Alex.
For all Tom knew, that same someone was watching his flat now to see how he’d react. Would he call his embassy? Would he simply wrap the poor bastard cat in newspaper and dump it in the communal bins? He could imagine the children of one of the journalists who lived in a bigger flat below finding it.
Returning to his kitchen, Tom took down the chopping board left by the previous tenant and ran the cat under cold water to make it less slippery. Then he began with the head, which he removed by putting the knife on the back of its spine and smacking the blunt edge of his blade. It was the most noise Tom would make that evening and the action he found hardest.
Dealing with the carcass was easy enough after that.
Having split the head down the middle, he rinsed and flushed both pieces, before filleting the rest and jointing it cleanly, running each piece under the tap before flushing it down the loo. He opened the ribs with scissors, washed the contents of the stomach down the sink, and flushed out the viscera.
Tom thought he was beyond shock. But unfolding Black Sammy’s pelt, he discovered he had exactly half of it. That was when he realized the pan he’d left dirty had been neatly washed up. As had a spatula and fork. Plus, his olive oil was out, along with his salt and pepper. A neat little threesome on the countertop.
Like a small family.
<
br /> Tom took care not to clog the lavatory with flesh or fur and to leave long enough between flushes to keep what he was doing from being obvious to those below. What had happened never happened. He wanted anyone watching to know that.
When he was finished, Tom scrubbed the board and hung it back on the wall, washed the knife and the scissors, rinsed out the sink, put away his olive oil and salt and pepper, and poured himself another whiskey, taking it through to the darkness of his sitting room.
The alcohol would help, but it wasn’t enough to dull the rage at what some bastard had done to the poor bloody cat, and he knew he’d still be seeing its carcass hung above his sink as he tried to sleep.
11
Cross Hairs
He’d looked lonely in the cross hairs. So lonely that Wax Angel wondered if he’d welcome a bullet. When it came to it, people often did.
‘You …’
‘Me what?’
The militsiya man had looked sharply at her dishevelled state. So she’d glanced sharply back and made a point of buttoning the front of her dress. Only when he’d turned away did she return to the ancient Zeiss F-4 sniper’s sight she kept hidden in her clothing. It had been black once but in the last ten years its paint had begun to peel away in scabs. She still had the leather caps that fitted on either end though.
She’d watched the foreigner and his friend move through falling snow, his head down and his shoulders hunched, his thoughts a black cloud above him.
One hundred paces.
Two hundred paces.
If the snow had been heavy, she’d have lost him by now.
If the snow had really been falling, she’d have lost him before he travelled the distance of his own arm. At four hundred paces he’d begun to blur, vanishing at five. And Wax Angel realized the snow settling on her was camouflage. No need now for the white uniforms they’d worn and the sniper rifles wrapped in rags they’d carried through the smoking ruins of Stalingrad.
After the Englishman and his friend had gone, the coroner’s wagon had arrived. The woman driving had glanced over, made to turn away and then headed in Wax Angel’s direction. ‘Are you all right?’ she’d asked.
Moskva Page 6
