Motherland

by G. D. Abson

  This was bad news. Vasiliev, the head of the city’s Criminal Investigations Directorate, wasn’t on duty until Monday and he didn’t do social calls. He was also close to retirement, preferring to delegate while he planned his next European vacation.

  His voice had an icy tone, ‘Captain Ivanova, are you having a nice time over there?’

  Her car was still parked outside Renata Shchyotkina’s apartment and she marched there, anxious to get away in case she was spotted by Zena’s elderly neighbour. ‘I was asked to look at something urgently.’

  ‘You were asked by Major Ivanov. Is he your direct supervisor?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So do you always do what your husband tells you?’

  The traffic was noisy and she cupped a hand over her free ear. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But in this instance you chose to.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was in the neighbourhood. Mikhail heard the girl’s father is wealthy. If she has been kidnapped or killed it could have political consequences.

  ‘Well, what have you found out?’

  ‘Nothing yet, Colonel. As far as I can determine, there are several possibilities.’

  A pedestrian crossing displayed five, then four, then three seconds in large green numbers. She jogged across it as the cars started to nudge their way over the line.

  ‘Then what do you think?’ she heard him say.

  She stood next to a chemist’s windowpane and pushed a palm against her ear to blot out the noise of the traffic. ‘If the friend is telling the truth then she had an accident that night, or something worse has happened.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. Well, as you say, it might be political. I’ve already asked Sergeant Rogov to check local hospitals and I understand Mikhail is trying to find the girl’s parents. In the meantime, I’d like you to speak with this Yulia, the one who reported her missing.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘See what you can find out by midday then we’ll regroup. If there is no obvious criminal element I intend to give it back to the local menti.’

  She frowned. ‘May I ask who is leading the investigation?’

  ‘You are.’

  She had expected to hear Mikhail’s name or that of the new major, Dostoynov, and almost asked him to repeat it. ‘Thank you, Colonel.’

  ‘I suggest you to speak to the girl’s family first – once Major Ivanov locates them.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  He hung up.

  She continued down the street, located her Volvo outside Renata Shchyotkina’s apartment, then climbed inside and called Mikhail. He answered after two rings. ‘Misha, you bastard, what have you done to me?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘How did Vasiliev find out I went to the girl’s apartment? I was supposed to be doing you a quiet favour.’

  He chuckled. ‘The Colonel called in and spoke to Rogov. He wanted me to handle it but I said you were the best we had…also Swedes don’t usually speak Russian.’

  So that was the answer, and it had nothing to do with her superior skills of detection.

  The girl’s father needed regular updates with the person in charge of the investigation. Most of the men in headquarters spoke basic English at best, whereas she had studied it at the Leningrad Oblast Pedagogical Institute and was near fluent. Mikhail’s was good enough to establish contact with Zena’s parents but to conduct interviews and maintain a relationship, it had to be her.

  She heard a clatter of plates and guessed Mikhail had made it as far as breakfast.

  ‘What did Vasiliev say?’ he asked.

  ‘Prove there’s a crime or he’ll give it to the locals…I guess he doesn’t want an open-ended missing persons case.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He told me to find the girl who reported Zena missing.’

  Mikhail mumbled.

  ‘Are you eating?’

  There was a chewing noise that made her grimace. ‘Breakfast, and I’m having fried eggs before you ask. We need to do some shopping. Have you got a signal on your mobile?’

  She held it close to the windscreen then brought it back to her ear. ‘Four bars.’

  ‘Good. Can you put me on speakerphone and log onto VKontakte?’

  ‘Misha, I’m busy.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  As soon as she clicked the speaker icon, the sound of chewing filled the car, making her feel queasy. She tapped the blue VK symbol on her mobile and the social network software filled the screen, listing recent updates from her friends and pages they had liked.

  ‘Now what?’

  The chewing stopped and there was a slurping noise.

  ‘For God’s sake put me on speaker phone too so I don’t have to listen to that noise.’

  There was a soft knock which she guessed was his phone being placed on their dining table. In the background she could hear cupboard doors opening and a murmur of conversation – Anton was up too and she wished she could be there, enjoying a leisurely breakfast with them.

  She heard a slight echo when Mikhail spoke again. ‘Now look for the missing Sven.’

  ‘She’s Swedish, won’t she be on Facebook?’

  There was another slurp, quieter now. ‘She’s on both. Have you done it yet?’

  ‘Don’t be impatient.’ She tapped in “Zena Dahl” then clicked on the search button. Only one profile image returned – a circular profile image of a skier wearing thick goggles and a woollen hat; a stripe of pink zinc oxide cream ran along the length of her nose. Like that, she was indistinguishable from half the girls in St. Petersburg. Maybe it was deliberate – a rich kid craving some anonymity.

  ‘The skier?’

  ‘That’s her. She has more pictures on her page.’

  Natalya tapped on the image and selected the girl’s photos. She flicked through them until she found a clear one of Zena holding up a glass to the camera. ‘The wine glass?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the best I think. There’s been no activity on VKontakte since Wednesday. I’ve already checked her Facebook account – it hasn’t been updated since March and she only has forty-six friends.’

  ‘A loner?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Another plate clattered on the table, then she heard Mikhail say something indistinguishable. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Anton. I told him to eat his breakfast on the sofa while we finish talking.’

  ‘Hi, Natasha,’ a distant voice called.

  She raised her voice in return, ‘Hi Anton.’

  ‘Haven’t we finished talking yet?’ She asked Mikhail.

  ‘I’ll speak to Rogov and call you back with her address.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Look at your phone again, her security is weak.’

  She got the hint and opened Zena Dahl’s friends list. There were only four on the VKontakte profile and she studied the circular picture of the first one; it was of a pretty, narrow-faced girl with bright blue hair wearing a cowboy hat.

  ‘You see her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Meet Yulia,’ he said, stuffing egg into his mouth, ‘Yulia Federova.’

  Chapter 6

  Natalya squinted in the bright sunshine as she drove along the wide highway with its scrub grass borders and grey and brown twenty-storey monoliths in the background. This was Primorsky District, the home of the people who’d never been invited to sit at the city’s rigged Roulette table where ruthlessness passed for luck. She turned her Volvo into Komendantsky Prospekt and parked under the shadow of a rusting tower crane whose jib, like an accusing finger, pointed at the centre’s Golden Triangle where properties changed hands for five thousand dollars a square metre and upwards.

  Mikhail had offered to accompany her but she had insisted he stay at home in case two detectives intimidated Yulia Federova into silence – the woman’s brief appearance at Vasilyevsky police station suggested she was nervous. There was also the issue of Anton’s university place and she n
eeded Mikhail to check his online account. The consequences of failure were almost too painful to think about: Anton spending years avoiding the soldiers who roamed the city challenging any boy of conscription age. She had heard stories of sons being dragged from Metro trains or plucked from their beds in the middle of the night by uniformed thugs. When she got home, she would check to make sure he’d paid the bribe.

  She unlocked the glove compartment and took out her Makarov in its leather holster. First, she checked the clip and safety before fixing it to her belt along with a pair of handcuffs. The barrel of the gun was pressed against her hip bone, ready to tap out a bruise when she started walking; still, it was better than the shoulder harness she had worn earlier in her career which left painful friction marks on her right breast.

  She was putting her leather jacket in the boot when a girl approached the building, pocketing a pair of sunglasses before switching a white holdall to her left hand to tap out a code on the door’s security pad.

  ‘Wait!’

  The young woman heaved open the metal door and Natalya sprinted for the building, pulling out her police identification card as she ran.

  The door closed on her fingers, its metal edges connecting with bone.

  Her eyes watered as she strained to pull the door open with her other hand, dropping the identification card to the floor. ‘Damn it!’ she shouted at the retreating girl. ‘Why didn’t you hold it?’

  She stooped to retrieve her card and saw the girl starting for the stairs.

  Mikhail had got the address from Rogov. Yulia Federova was a common enough name but Rogov had got the girl’s birthday from her VKontakte profile and reduced the number of matches from nine to one. She looked around the building’s foyer, sighing at the “Out of order” sign on the graffiti-tagged lift door: the address was on the twelfth floor.

  The girl turned on the landing, the sunshine through a steel-reinforced window framing her fine brown hair like the headshot of a model in a photographer’s studio. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful. The only difference was the hair. In her VKontakte profile picture Yulia Federova had been wearing a wig.

  ‘Stay there.’

  The girl looked down with a frown then her eyes lowered a fraction to take in the gun and handcuffs.

  ‘Yes?’

  She held out the card again, seeing a white line across her fingers where the metal door had closed on them. ‘Senior Detective Ivanova, Criminal Investigations Directorate. I need to talk to you.’

  Yulia Federova took another step and her neat eyebrows rose in an attitude of indifference. ‘I’m in a hurry. Can you come back after lunch?’

  Sure, Natalya thought, and then I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find you. ‘It’s entirely your choice. You can talk now or be charged with obstruction and spend the weekend in a police holding cell.’

  ‘We’re already talking, aren’t we?’ Federova raised her chin in a cocky display that suggested a history with the police. She’d ask Rogov to check Yulia for a criminal record if he hadn’t done already. It could explain the girl’s reluctance to give her full name and address at the police station.

  ‘Why don’t you make some tea?’ she checked her watch, it was a little after ten thirty.

  ‘Alright, alright, but the place is a mess and I’ve only got coffee.’

  By the twelfth floor, she was testing the limits of her antiperspirant. They exited onto a long corridor with identical doors; Yulia Federova stopped outside one of them and took out a set of keys from the side-pocket of her bag. Natalya followed her inside.

  The bedsit had a tiny partitioned bathroom and a double divan arranged diagonally to take up much of the room’s thirty square metres as if the girl was making an ironic statement about the lack of space by reducing it even further. To the left was a built-in wardrobe, incongruously large for the apartment, and to the right, a kitchen with a gas stove and small appliances designed for the single person. Straight ahead, there were windows running along the external wall where a glass door opened to a balcony. Outside, the view was of more tower blocks.

  On the wall behind her she saw a framed photograph of a dancer performing a grand jeté, the legs a perfect line and the face an expression of serenity. ‘Is that Makarova?’ she asked in an obvious attempt to put the girl at ease.

  Yulia filled a kettle and switched it on. ‘You know ballet?’

  ‘I had lessons until I was ten but I hated the discipline. I saw the gala performance they put on for her at the Mariinsky.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said.

  ‘So what do you do, Yulia?’

  ‘I take classes in modern dance and Flamenco.’

  ‘And work?’

  Yulia looked in a cupboard then took out a bag of filter coffee. ‘A boutique on Nevsky called “Noughts and Kisses”. Do you know it?’

  She saw Yulia glance at her peach-coloured, short-sleeved shirt, then at the chain store jeans she’d got in a sale at the Galeria shopping mall.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ the girl sighed.

  She had struggled to place Yulia but now she had her; Yulia was like one of those stick-thin girls who had made fun of her in ballet class until she dropped out because she wasn’t cool enough to fit in with their world. She often wondered what had happened to them, and suspected they were unhappily married to rich men or else, like Yulia, worked with high-end clothes that only came in minuscule sizes. From her time in the police she had grown a skin as thick as a sow’s hide but had once gone into a shop populated by those little bitches and their snide comments had left her fighting back tears.

  She felt herself bristle and glanced at her watch to hide her irritation. ‘How long have you been living here, Yulia?’

  ‘Eight months. Before that I was in Tuva.’

  ‘You’ve come a long way.’

  Yulia spooned coffee into a cafetiere and added boiling water. ‘Piter’s the only place if you want to dance.’ She pushed the plunger down without waiting; keen to be rid of an unwelcome guest. ‘Why don’t you ask me?’

  ‘What about?’

  Yulia kept her eyes down as she poured the coffee into a single cup then took a Coke Zero for herself. ‘Zena. That’s why you’re here isn’t it?’

  Natalya took the cup. ‘Thanks. You got any milk?’

  ‘Only almond.’

  She shook her head and watched Yulia sit on the edge of her bed and toy with the ring-pull of her Coke.

  Natalya stood, sipping her coffee; it was very strong and she felt an instant buzz. ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘She was browsing in a boutique I go to sometimes. I can’t afford to buy anything but I like trying the clothes on. Zena was shopping there and we got talking. She’s interested in fashion so I offered to take her to a few places local designers use.’

  ‘How long have you known her?’

  ‘We met in early February. Zena had just returned for her second semester.’ She tugged on the ring pull and sipped the Coke. ‘She wore this puffa jacket that made her look like a man. I told her she needed a fur but she thought they were cruel. I suggested she get one anyway and donate some money to an animal charity if she felt bad about it.’

  ‘Has she been here?’

  Yulia shook her head and snorted. ‘Are you joking? Look at this place, it’s a heap of shit. I mean it’s only temporary until I get something better but it’s embarrassing.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Nothing…I mean—’

  ‘You were too embarrassed to bring a rich foreigner here?’

  Yulia nodded then sipped her Coke. ‘Well, wouldn’t you be?’

  She ignored the question. ‘So you’ve always known Zena had money?’

  ‘The first day I met her, she wanted to buy a pair of Ulyana Sergeenko sunglasses. I showed her where to get them. She didn’t even check the price. It was like she was buying an ice cream.’

  Natalya put the coffee on a ledge cluttered with magazines then took out a notepad and pen
. ‘So, you went out on Thursday together. Whose idea was it?’

  ‘Hers. She always calls me at the last moment and assumes I’ll drop everything when she does.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘Why?’

  Yulia reached into her sports bag and pulled out a pack of Karelia Menthol Slims; she tapped one into her hand and lit it, tilting her head back as she blew the smoke upwards.

  ‘If you must know it’s because I can’t afford to go out and Zena pays for everything. She was shy and didn’t know many people. I didn’t have any plans that evening though.’

  ‘So where did you meet? In town?’

  ‘Her place. She called, I came running. Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, isn’t that what friends do? Would you call her one?’

  ‘Zena? Sure, she’s a friend.’

  ‘What time did you go to hers?’

  ‘Around 8 p.m. We had a beer then went out.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  Yulia didn’t need to think. ‘A powder blue dress made from wild silk and a baby blue Hermès Sellier Kelly.’

  ‘That’s a handbag, right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She wrote “Hermès Sellier Kelly” in her notepad. ‘Describe her apartment.’

  ‘Clean. Really clean.’

  Natalya picked up the coffee from the ledge and had another sip before putting it down; the caffeine hit her like a line of cocaine. ‘Yours is nice. You’ve tried hard here. It’s easy in a place like this to let go.’

  ‘Yeah well,’ Yulia sniffed, ‘just because I live here it doesn’t mean…’

  ‘No,’ Natalya said, not unkindly. ‘So where did you go after that?’

  ‘A few bars in town. There’s a new one on Ligovsky called Cheka. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘No.’ She wrote the name down. ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Nine or ten…more like ten. That’s where we ended up. First time I’ve been there too. The staff wear uniforms and call the customers “Comrade”. There’s the glass bit of a jet—’

  ‘A cockpit?’

  Yulia inhaled again. ‘Yeah, one of those. They’ve got it hanging from the ceiling with a dummy inside holding a hammer and sickle.’