by Tom Bradby
‘What is his name?’
‘Dermot.’
Another silence. This time, it took on a more threatening air.
It’s just routine, Kate told herself. How could they know anything? SIS’s passports and back stories were legendarily efficient. They had to be. There was even a man called Dermot McGillis in Dublin who would agree he was her father if asked, and she had his number in her phone.
‘Is something wrong?’ Kate said. She allowed a trace of irritation in her voice. A real tourist would be annoyed at the delay by now.
‘Wait here,’ the woman said. She left the room, closing the door carefully behind her.
Kate looked up at the clock on the wall. It was seven and the night had long since closed in, the wind rattling the windows and rushing beneath the door. She was cold and longed for a cigarette.
She waited. The deadpan, slow, deliberate obfuscation of Russian officials was designed to unsettle the guilty and she could see no logical reason yet for concern.
Time dragged. Five minutes crawled past, then ten.
Until the woman stood before her again. ‘You may go,’ she said abruptly.
Kate resisted the temptation to ask what that had been about and got back into her car. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling at the woman. She headed off into the night.
The journey on to St Petersburg was long, featureless and sodden from the rain that had recently doused the perpetually potholed roads. But as she closed in on the old Russian capital, the temperature dropped and the episodic bursts of spitting rain became steadily drifting snow. At first, it melted on the damp tarmac, but by the time she had made her way through the industrial outskirts to the city’s grand European centre, it had blanketed its streets in the magical winter coat Kate remembered so well.
She parked outside the front entrance of the hotel, which was right on Admiralty Embankment, and checked into the sleek modern reception area. She asked the valet to take care of parking the car and made her way to her room on the fifth floor.
The décor was a temple to modern Russia’s celebratory absence of taste: a riot of purple, with an expensive television and a cream sofa from which to watch it. Kate pulled back the net curtain and gazed out at the River Neva, almost lost in the blizzard. She glanced up and down the embankment.
She took a small bottle of whisky from the minibar and swallowed two zopiclone with its contents.
All she was aware of, as she turned out the light, was the rapid beating of her heart.
19
KATE DIDN’T BOTHER with breakfast. She put on her coat and the beanie she had stuffed into its pocket and walked out into the Arctic winter chill. She’d been up since dawn had broken and had remained at the window ever since, watching the sun creep steadily across the Neva and the grandiose buildings of Vasilyevsky Island opposite.
Kate walked across Palace Bridge, stopping to lean over the side at its centre. The spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral glistened in the bright sun, the river flowing steadily beneath her, not yet frozen despite the biting cold. Palace Square was almost deserted, the tourists not yet having emerged from their expensive hotels. She lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke with the fumes of the morning traffic. It made her feel resolutely wretched, but she worked her way through half of it before finally flicking the remains into the river below.
She started walking and immediately stopped. What was she doing here? The carefully constructed operational arguments folded in the face of the loneliness that gnawed away at her. She knew damned well why she was really here and it made her feel foolish, nervous and naïve by turns. She was back to being a fourteen-year-old girl preparing for her first date with Pete Carter, the trainee anarchist.
She glanced at her watch. She walked on past the Rostral Columns – once primitive lighthouses for river traffic on the Neva – the great massif of the former Stock Exchange, the honey-coloured buildings of the university and the severe grey beauty of the Academy of Sciences. At this end, close to the Strelka, the island still bore the hallmarks of the grand administrative centre the city’s founder, Peter the Great, had once intended. But the further you walked from the Neva, the greater sense you got of the mercantile past that had been its true destiny. Sergei had liked to summon an image of its Tsarist heyday, when the summer air was filled with the whistling of winches, the cries of seagulls and the shouts of the ships’ crews as an avalanche of varied cargoes was unloaded from all over the Russian Empire and well beyond. The days of a great Russia, he’d said, how different things might have been but for the Revolution.
It was why she’d always called him a dreamer.
The island had been laid out in lines, and from Kadetzskaya down to the fifth line, it maintained a fairly well-bred air. From there to the fourteenth had been the middle class and commercial district, and beyond, the tenement houses of the poor – and each part of the island still bore the mark of its history, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the brutal decades of Soviet rule. Kate skirted St Andrew’s Cathedral and browsed through the rudimentary food on offer in a morning market, killing time.
She slipped into a café that had existed since Tsarist times and ordered coffee. On the walls, there were pictures of the last of the Romanovs at Livadia, their estate in Crimea. Alongside them, in pride of place close to the door, hung a framed portrait of the current Russian president, as if his connection to the former royal family was perfectly obvious.
When she could contain her patience no longer, Kate walked on to eigth line and the still grubby tenement building that housed the apartment that had once belonged to Sergei’s grandfather, an important Communist Party official and officer in the city’s maritime section, who’d somehow managed to keep his head and position throughout Stalin’s reign of terror.
She climbed to the top floor and knocked. She could see her breath on the air. She pushed her hands deep into her pockets.
The door opened just a fraction.
Either Kate’s memory wildly deceived her or Sergei’s mother, Olga, had shrunk dramatically. If never exactly overweight, she had been a well-built, handsome woman far removed from the bent, shuffling figure that peered at Kate now through the mists of time. ‘Yes?’ she asked, with the strong Kiev accent that betrayed her familial origins. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Olga, it’s Kate.’ She spoke in Russian, and stepped backwards into the light from the landing window. ‘Sergei’s student friend from England.’
The old woman’s face lit up. She opened the door wide. ‘Kate?’ The smile had all of its old welcoming warmth. ‘Can it really be you? After all this time? Come in, come in.’ Kate stepped into the gloom. Olga gripped her arms. ‘Let me look at you.’ There was light in those old eyes now. ‘How well you are,’ Olga said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through . . . on business.’
‘But after so long!’ Olga shook her head in confusion. ‘Come in,’ she said again, beckoning her further into the flat.
Kate followed her down the hallway to the living room. ‘What can I get you?’ Olga asked.
‘Whatever you have.’
Olga took her coat, placed it on a chair in the corner and disappeared into the kitchen to put on the kettle. Kate took a seat by the old gas fire. This room was like a step back into Soviet time, the curtains and chairs grey and dark red with an old-fashioned wireless in a Bakelite case. Kate glanced at the walls around her, still filled with pictures of the St Petersburg ice-hockey team, whose stadium Olga’s husband Pietr had managed, and photographs of Sergei, the couple’s only child.
Olga returned with two cups of black tea and a plate of homemade pryanik, a kind of flat honey bread that Kate had developed rather too much of a taste for in her time as a student. She smiled as Olga offered her the plate. ‘You remembered.’
‘Of course.’
Olga spooned sugar into Kate’s tea without question, then leant forward to take her hand again, eyes bright. ‘Tell me everything! Sergei says you
are married.’
‘Was.’
‘Ah, I’m sorry. But these things happen.’ Olga and Pietr’s devotion to each other had been legendary. ‘Children?’
‘Two. Fiona is nearly sixteen and Gus – short for Angus – thirteen.’
‘You have pictures?’ Kate fumbled for her phone and flicked through it until she found a photograph of Gus and Fiona. It had been taken on the terrace of the hotel in Venice. Olga nodded approvingly. ‘Such a pretty girl. Like you.’
‘Ha, I’m not so sure.’
‘Do you work in Russia?’
‘No.’ Kate realized she had lied too quickly. ‘Very rarely.’
Olga’s beady eyes gazed at her steadily. A former teacher, she was a hard woman to fool. She could and did switch from Russian to English and back again, but Kate continued to speak to her in Russian. ‘If only he had won your heart,’ Olga said heavily.
Kate stared at the floor. ‘I’m not so sure he didn’t.’
‘I mean truly.’
‘Perhaps if I had not been already committed to someone else . . .’
‘And now, it seems, you are free.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Is that why you have come?’
The directness of the question had Kate suddenly lost for words. ‘No . . . I don’t think so. Not specifically, but in the hope of seeing him perhaps. He was always a great friend to me.’ Kate looked at the photograph of Olga’s husband on the dark dresser beside her. It was from his days as a soldier in the Soviet army. ‘How is Pietr?’
‘Only the dead can know.’
‘Oh . . . I’m so sorry.’ Kate could feel her face reddening. ‘When did . . .’
‘A few months ago.’
‘I’m sorry, Olga. I know how close you always were.’
‘Sergei is devastated. I think somehow it is even worse for him. He worshipped his father.’
Olga retreated into her thoughts. Kate turned to the window. It seemed indelicate to intrude further. ‘Is Sergei here in St Petersburg?’ she asked, as innocently as she could manage.
‘He came to visit me yesterday. It is difficult now he has to spend so much time in Moscow.’
‘Do you know where I can find him? It would be great to share a cup of tea at least, for old times’ sake.’
Olga’s expression was inscrutable. Kate had the disconcerting sense this kindly old woman was in some way laughing at her. ‘Where are you staying?’ she asked. ‘I will let him know you are here.’
‘At a hotel on Admiralty Embankment,’ Kate said. ‘But please do tell him. He has my number. It would be great to see him if he has time before going back to Moscow.’ The words didn’t sound like her own. She stood, too hastily, tipping her tea on to the floor. ‘Olga, I’m so sorry.’
The old woman waved away her concern, and as Kate set off to get a cloth from the kitchen, Olga gripped her wrist with surprising strength. ‘It is all right,’ she said quietly, looking directly into Kate’s eyes. ‘It is all right.’
Kate stood, but Olga did not let go of her. ‘Why are you really here, my dear?’
‘Some business. I . . .’
‘After all this time?’
‘After all this time, yes.’
‘You look . . . alone.’
‘I am.’
‘We have one life.’
‘And I have made a mess of mine.’
‘It is not too late. It is never too late.’ Olga released her. ‘I will tell him. What he makes of it I cannot say.’
Kate retrieved her coat. Olga accompanied her to the front door. ‘Be careful, my dear, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’ Kate had no wish to enquire in what way the caution had been intended.
The wind was still biting outside and Kate huddled in a tenement doorway to smoke a cigarette. She glanced at her watch. It was not even ten o’clock.
She started walking again, back to the bridge and the Admiralty Embankment. She headed for Nevsky Prospekt, on the grounds that at least there would be life there at this time in the morning. Shoppers seemed thin on the ground – the Russian economy was all hard grind unless you happened to have an oligarch’s bank account – so she installed herself in the Literary Café, once the Wolf and Beranger, the restaurant from which Pushkin departed for his fatal duel in the 1830s. She ordered coffee and some smoked-salmon blinis, which came with sour cream, gherkins and onions. She pushed them around her plate without much enthusiasm, thinking she was turning into her daughter.
She switched on her phone for the first time since she’d left London. The only messages were from Suzy – a successive string of texts asking where she was and what she was doing, presumably sent at the behest of her friends in MI5. The silence from colleagues in Kate’s own organization was ominous. Sir Alan and Ian must, she surmised, have guessed her intentions. There would be hell to pay when she got back.
She’d not had a single message from anyone else and she couldn’t help drawing a contrast again with the days when Stuart had held the home front, her days and nights punctuated by the steady ping of messages, the sentiments of which ranged from amused to exasperated. No one prepared you for how lonely parenting became with divorce.
She killed as much time as she could in the café, then continued her promenade down St Petersburg’s main shopping street. She was aware that fatigue was making her sloppy, so although she had seen and sensed nothing to rouse her suspicion since she’d crossed the border, she attempted some basic dry cleaning. The Russians were good at surveillance on home turf, and she had to acknowledge they might well have outfoxed her.
She passed the Stroganov Palace and moved at leisure through the Lutheran church. She crossed the road and wandered through the grandiose Corinthian columns of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, then walked on over the Griboyedov Canal and turned into the striking arcade of Gostiny Dvor, St Petersburg’s main bazaar since the mid-eighteenth century. The shops and stalls here were more sophisticated than she remembered. She bought some retro Soviet-era T-shirts for Gus, Fiona and Jed, and then crossed Nevsky Prospekt again to the beautiful Style Moderne building that housed the delicatessen Yeliseev’s.
She took her time there, then emerged again to cross the Fontanka river. She walked through the Moscow railway station before returning to Gostiny Dvor and installing herself in one of its corner cafés. She was just resisting the temptation to look at her phone when it finally pinged.
It was a WhatsApp message from Sergei. Hey, hear you are in St Petersburg. Great news. A bit pressed today and have to catch the night train to Moscow tonight. You want to come with me?
Kate stared at it until her vision started to blur. Why not? she replied, before she’d had time to consider the impli cations.
Great, he pinged back. See you on the station’s central concourse at 11 p.m.
20
ST PETERSBURG’S MOSCOW station had changed markedly since Kate’s last visit; the triangular Soviet-era ceiling that had once seemed so gloomy was leavened now by modern lighting. But the map of the rail network of the old Soviet Empire still had pride of place, and Kate was gazing up at it when she heard the familiar voice behind her: ‘Look who it is . . .’
She spun around. He stood before her, every inch the student she remembered. He wore black jeans, a dark blue T-shirt and a black leather jacket, with expensive-looking suede loafers on his feet. He hadn’t shaved, the stubble along his handsome jaw the same lustrous black as the thick, wavy hair on his head. He was wearing glasses for the first time, with a tortoiseshell frame. ‘Nice shoes,’ she said, looking down at his feet. His love of expensive footwear had been a private joke between them as students, since he’d once admitted to stealing more than a few pairs on his trips to the West.
‘Tod’s,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘And what is more, I paid for them myself.’ He glanced at a bar in the corner. ‘Come on, let’s celebrate.’ He moved to a steel table, dropped his bag on the floor and leant over the bar to order a bot
tle of vodka.
‘What are we celebrating?’ Kate asked.
‘Our reunion. Here in Russia. After all this time.’ He smiled again. ‘You must be mad to come here.’
‘Or desperate,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘Let’s not go there.’
He poured two glasses. They toasted each other. ‘Nostrovia,’ they said together, downing the shots in one.
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘I look knackered, clapped out and old, but nice try.’
‘You haven’t changed.’
‘Liar.’
‘Same smile, same angular cheekbones, same delicate nose.’
‘More lines, more bags and a hell of a lot more baggage.’
‘That makes two of us.’
‘Oh, yeah? Do you have an ex-husband?’
‘No, you have something on me there.’ He refilled her glass. They drank again.
‘Are we going to carry on like this all night?’ she asked.
‘Why not? Moscow always looks better with a hangover.’
Kate glanced up at the board above her. ‘Why are you taking the train?’
‘Have you flown Aeroflot? Besides, I love the night sleeper. It reminds me of childhood holidays in Yalta. The romance of the long journey, the sense of freedom in time suspended . . .’
‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember you invited me.’
‘Balmy nights, ethereal light, the magic of old Russia. I was convinced you would finally succumb.’
‘Perhaps I would have done.’
‘So close and yet so far.’
This time it was Kate who refilled the glasses. She suddenly had an overpowering urge to get wildly, blindly drunk. ‘Do you ever think of what might have been?’ she asked.
‘Not as often as I used to. I mean, not more than once a month.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘Leading you on. You would have had every reason to hate me.’
‘But I loved you. And I still do.’ His megawatt grin – its evident sincerity, the way it seemed to transform his face – still had the ability to floor her. ‘But it has been so long. I’m not saying I have been waiting for you. There have been other women. Just none who matched up.’