Another issue was also looming large in his mind. The KGB man was linking him with Anya’s continued well-being, which was not such a problem. But what would Timur do if they managed to get her away? The post-escape conversation would begin as usual with the words, ‘Did I not tell you to keep an eye on her?’ He would have to ensure, as Grigory had said, that there was no provable connection between him and her defection. Questions would be asked, for sure. And he would be under suspicion. He was her lover after all. Everyone knew that, even the schoolchildren. He could understand how suspicion had so easily fallen on Anya after her husband’s disappearance. Yet, she had the luxury of being able to argue her innocence without lying.
He had a good argument, at least, to defend himself. She had attempted suicide without his prior knowledge. It was not such a stretch from there to say he knew nothing of her plans to reunite with her husband.
The doctor insisted on doing a psychological evaluation of Anya, which was annoying, but understandable under the circumstances. Anya refused to do it unless Yuri was present with her. The doctor did not agree that this was a good idea, but he relented once he realised this was the only way he was going to get to interview her.
Yuri accompanied her to the hospital, and sat beside her on the other side of the doctor’s table. Anya held his hand tightly throughout. She glared at the doctor as though he were the enemy, even though the man had saved her life only a week before. The doctor did not want Yuri there, and Yuri did not want to be there either. But Anya was setting the rules, not them.
First, he checked her heart rate and blood pressure. All was normal. His only concern was some weight loss that she could not afford, given her slender frame to begin with. The doctor advised regular meals, three times a day, every day. She was not to skip any of them.
Then he asked whether she regretted what she had done. The answer came back straight away, as though she had prepared it beforehand.
‘It was a mistake,’ said Anya. ‘I wasn’t myself. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
When asked she denied ever having had suicidal thoughts before. There was something about her over-insistence on this point that made Yuri not believe her. He could see that the doctor was thinking the same thing. Yuri wondered if she had tried it after her husband had left her. This man really did have a lot to answer for.
The doctor opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out an empty bottle that Yuri recognised. It had once contained the antidepressants with which Anya had recently tried to kill herself.
‘Who prescribed these for you?’ the doctor asked.
‘My doctor in Moscow,’ she replied. ‘Can you get me more of them?’
Yuri and the doctor shared a look. Anya saw it, and she let go of Yuri’s hand.
‘They help me,’ she said.
The doctor shook his head. ‘These are very strong. We don’t even keep this type. I can give you something milder, if you like?’
Yuri turned to Anya. She was never pleased when she did not get her own way. Eventually, she nodded that she was willing to accept whatever meagre offerings he was willing to give.
The doctor stood and walked to a wooden unit against the wall. He pulled out a wide, flat drawer, on which were many types of medicines. He picked up the bottle he was looking for, and returned to the table. Then he opened Anya’s empty bottle and dropped a handful of tablets into it, one at a time, from the second bottle. He closed the second bottle and placed it in his top drawer.
‘I’ve given you enough for one week,’ said the doctor. ‘When that’s finished, come back here and I will give you another week’s supply. And so on.’
Anya glared at the bottle, and then at the doctor.
‘You don’t trust me?’ she said.
The doctor did not answer, though he seemed surprised that the question even needed to be asked. She had no credit with anyone now, and she would have to earn it back.
‘This is the way we are going to do it,’ he said. ‘When you are back in Moscow, you can do what you like. But here, I am the physician in charge. All right?’
Anya nodded. However weak these new pills were, she wanted them. The doctor moved on to more probing questions. What had been going through her head when she had taken so many pills? Was she glad when she woke up, knowing that she had survived? Or did she feel she had failed in something she had set out to do? A failure to be rectified later?
These were not places Anya was willing to go with him. She gave yes and no answers to them all, and she added nothing more. By the end of the interview, the doctor was frustrated. He was none the wiser about her mental state, apart from that it was not good. Yuri was glad he had come, though; for him, it had been a very revealing conversation. When it was over, Anya reached across the table to retrieve her newly replenished bottle of pills. The doctor watched her taking it, and for a moment, Yuri was sure he was thinking of taking it back off her. She quickly put the bottle away in her coat pocket. She seemed relieved to have the pills in her possession.
‘One a day,’ he said. ‘At most. So, I won’t be seeing you before next Monday.’
When they walked outside into the afternoon darkness, Anya was furious.
‘Who does he think he is, talking to me like I am a child. I said it was a mistake, didn’t I?’
Yuri expressed sympathy, but he was with the doctor, one hundred per cent. In fact, he wished he could get him to interview her once a week. Anya pulled open the bottle containing her weekly ration of seven pills exactly. She plucked one out with her fingers and placed it on her tongue. It made Yuri nervous that she had managed to hide this habit from him for so many weeks.
‘You really need them?’ asked Yuri.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can live without them. But it’s better with.’
‘How long have you been taking them?’
Anya shrugged.
‘Five years?’ he asked. ‘Since he left you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Longer than that.’
Yuri turned to look at her.
‘You were depressed before he left?’ he asked. ‘Why were you depressed before?’
Anya did not answer, and kept on walking.
The first Yuri heard about it was from listening to two waitresses gossiping in the canteen. One of the miners had been arrested for burglary, and was being held in the single available jail cell in Pyramiden. When he questioned the women they had no further details other than the bare facts. It was most unusual news. A winter of strange events. Yuri went looking for Grigory to find out exactly what was going on. As it turned out, the tall Lithuanian had been arrested by Timur. Yuri knew what had happened without having to hear the rest.
‘Timur found him in his office. He had broken the lock on the door, and apparently he was searching the place for something,’ said Grigory. ‘I don’t know what.’
‘Semyon had informed on him to Timur,’ explained Yuri. ‘Him and his friends are Lithuanian nationalists. He was looking for the file.’
‘How on earth do you know all of that?’ asked Grigory.
‘Because I told him it was there,’ replied Yuri.
‘And you knew this because …?’
‘Same way I knew Semyon had informed on you. Because I took the file myself,’ he admitted. ‘Don’t worry, I put it back. I went in with a key too. That man is more of an idiot than I thought.’
Grigory walked quickly from behind his desk and closed his office door.
‘Damn it!’ said Grigory. ‘You are supposed to be keeping a low profile, until we can get this job done. What were you thinking?’
‘It was a couple of weeks ago. And I wanted to see if the Lithuanians had anything to do with Semyon’s murder.’
‘Semyon’s murder? What are you, a policeman now? Everyone thinks that was an accident except you.’
‘It was no accident,’ said Yuri. ‘Someone killed him. I know it.’
‘You have some evidence to support this?’
Yuri looked
away, knowing the answer was going to sound stupid.
‘A feeling,’ he said.
‘A feeling!’ said Grigory, throwing his arms in the air. ‘That’s just great. A feeling. What if this Lithuanian starts blabbing about you? What will we do then? You are putting this operation at risk. I already told you that I am not doing it without you. If you get arrested, then Anya stays here.’
‘He won’t say anything,’ said Yuri. ‘He’s scared of me.’
‘I’ll bet he is,’ said Grigory. ‘Right now, I’m scared of you. OK, from now on, no more Mr Detective, all right. No more taking files that don’t belong to you. No more giving information to people who don’t need to know anything. Just keep your nose clean.’
‘Agreed,’ said Yuri.
Grigory poured himself a glass of whiskey and drank it in one go. Yuri declined when he offered him one too.
‘And pray tell, what has your detective work uncovered about Semyon?’ asked Grigory.
‘Nothing,’ said Yuri. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Perhaps because there is nothing to be found. Did you ever consider that?’ asked Grigory.
Yuri was beginning to come round to that way of thinking. Surely if Semyon had been killed, the reason would have revealed itself by now. Perhaps it was just a ridiculously simple accident, after all.
At least he didn’t have to worry about the Lithuanians any more. The tall one was the leader. Without him the other two were unlikely to cause any trouble for anyone. Besides, they would be keeping their heads down, hoping that Timur would not be arresting them too. The KGB man would not be releasing the tall one in the meantime. He would be the first passenger on the spring boats. Until then, he would be out of Yuri’s way, under lock and key. The man would be no loss to the Lithuanian nationalist movement either, if he could not carry out a simple burglary without getting caught. And he had done for himself now. A spell in one of the interior ministry’s psychiatric hospitals would be considered too lenient a penalty for this crime. A more likely sentence for the burglary of a KGB office would be a long holiday in a penal prison, if he was lucky. Yuri was not going to shed any tears for him. The man had it coming.
‘From now on, I want you to look on me as your boss,’ said Grigory. ‘In future, if you want to do anything other than your normal work routine, I want you to clear it with me first, OK? And I mean everything.’
‘OK, fine,’ said Yuri. ‘Whatever you say, boss.’
His life was becoming one long round of reporting to other people. To Timur about Catherine. And now to Grigory about everything else. He decided not to let the party man know what he was doing for Timur.
He was tired of playing detective too. Life would be a whole lot easier if he allowed himself to accept that no one else had been involved in Semyon’s death. Right now, he had too much in his head. He needed to make his life simpler. Although, he considered it unlikely that was on the cards until Anya was out of his life.
The next day, Yuri worked with Catherine on an electricity junction box. He allowed her to take the lead on the work, because he was too distracted. The way her technical skills had come on in just a short space of time impressed him. And he no longer had to double-check anything she did.
He was juggling so many things that for the first hour he hardly said a word. But then, with his last conversation with Timur in mind, he began to ask Catherine a series of personal questions. His hope was that one last thorough report would see him released from any further informing about her. This is what Timur had implied, and he intended to hold him to it.
He quizzed her about her early boyfriends. College life. Her family circumstances. How she had become interested in communism. The various other English communists she had met. These turned out to be mostly fellow students and union organisers, none of whom seemed to live up to the high standards she expected of them. Her stories of her time in the New Left movement always ended with words of disillusionment. He expected she would feel the same about the USSR, as soon as she got to know it.
He asked her anything and everything and, as instructed, he followed the trail of her answers to see where they led. After an hour of this, he was confident he had built up a large enough store of harmless details to get Timur off his back for good. He would have done his bit for the secret service, with no real harm done. And he intended to never breathe a word about it to anyone else for as long as he lived.
Catherine had been behaving oddly all morning too, he thought, answering his questions in short sentences followed by long pauses. She had also been giving him long searching stares. He had smiled at her when their eyes met, without being quite sure why she was looking at him in that way. He wondered if what he was doing was obvious to her. But then, he thought, it was really just idle chit-chat. The only unusual thing about it was that he had never shown so much interest in her before.
Now they were working side by side in a cramped space, and he found her staring at him again. He turned and held her gaze, expecting she was about to ask him something important. When she leaned in to kiss him on the lips it caught him completely by surprise. He stepped back, almost falling over in the snow, and she flushed with embarrassment. He had never witnessed anyone’s cheeks going quite so red so quickly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘My mistake.’
He considered saying something, but nothing appropriate came to him quickly. And he guessed whatever he said might only make the situation worse, so he remained silent until she spoke again.
‘You’re still with her?’ she asked. ‘With Anya.’
Yuri nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’
She avoided his eyes, trying to hide her disappointment. Yuri was surprised at how many signals from other people he was managing to miss or misinterpret at the moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You wanted to know so many things about me, my boyfriends, I thought …’
‘I didn’t mean to give the wrong impression,’ said Yuri. ‘Really. I was just being curious about you. I didn’t mean to pry so much.’
He wished he was brave enough to tell her the truth. It should not be her apologising to him.
‘No. No. It’s not your fault,’ she insisted. ‘Just me being stupid. Again. I’ve gone and made a mess.’
‘No,’ said Yuri. ‘Forget it. Please. It was nothing.’
Both of them looked for things to do, so they would not have to look at each other.
‘I thought you two might have split up after what happened,’ said Catherine. ‘You know how rumours start here. People were saying this and that. By now, I should know better not to listen. It wasn’t to do with your relationship that she did that thing … putting herself in hospital?’
‘No. Did someone say that? That incident was nothing to do with me and her. Nothing at all, I hope,’ said Yuri. ‘No. Me and Anya, it’s complicated. But she needs me now, more than ever, after what happened.’
Catherine nodded. ‘I can see how she would. She is lucky to have you. What a fool I am!’
She was eager to get away, he could see, but they were stuck together until the junction box was fixed. Another hour’s work, at least.
If ever there was a time when he should come clean to her about what he was doing for Timur, this was it. He took a deep breath.
‘There’s something I should tell you, Catherine—’ he said.
‘You don’t need to explain,’ she interrupted. ‘Just me being an idiot. Not for the first time. Let’s just forget it happened. Can we?’
The opportunity was lost in a moment as his courage left him. He had guessed she liked him, but not in a romantic way. She was only slightly more than half his age. He was sure he had not given any fuel to the notion that something might happen between them. As if his life could not get more complicated.
Sentences entered his head that might mend the situation, and make her feel better. He rejected all of them, and the best he could come up with was, ‘I hope we can still be—’
‘Of c
ourse. Of course. We are friends. Just friends. Aren’t we?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. Although he knew that she was a better friend to him than he was to her.
‘I hope this won’t change anything between us,’ said Catherine.
‘Why would it?’ said Yuri. ‘I’ve already forgotten it, like it never happened.’
And that was that. They carried on working in silence, and spoke no more about it.
Secrets were a burden. Yuri did not want to learn any new ones. He was already overloaded. The more secrets he came across, the more he became convinced that this was how Semyon had met his end. Informers traded in secrets after all. It was their currency, which they exchanged for money or favour. There was one clear option that could have led to the Latvian’s early death, as far as he could see. A person Semyon was informing on found out, and was not happy. Unhappy enough to murder. He wondered whether Semyon had known that he was in danger.
Yuri woke to a morning sky that was the same deep black it had been the previous night. He longed for the time when he could open his curtains and see the dawn light over the fjord. In this midwinter period, he did not close his curtains at night. There was no light to keep out. Today, he did not bother drying the river of condensation on his windows. It formed a pool on the windowsill and dripped slowly on to the floor.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Then a folded piece of paper in front of the door caught his eye. It was tempting just to ignore it. What people could not say to your face was better left unheard. But he walked over and picked it up. The message was short and to the point. And it sent a shiver up the back of his neck.
Whaling House, 8pm tonight.
He could not go. It was his choice. Whoever had written this had some connection to Semyon. If he went there, he could easily end up having an Arctic funeral too. It would be stupid to even consider it, but he knew he would.
The moon was bright in the sky as he drove out there on a snowmobile. He stopped several hundred yards away on a ridge, and watched the whaling house for signs of life. There were no lights, nor smoke from the chimney. And no vehicles outside. He checked his watch. He was on time. The minute hand had just passed the hour.
The Reluctant Contact Page 16