by Tom Bradby
She reached the front of the queue and presented her passport, which said she was Ebba Johansson from Stockholm. Every MI6 officer at grade three or above had at least five, under assumed names, to allow them free movement. If pushed, Kate could speak fluent enough Swedish to convince anyone other than a native. But that didn’t stop her chest tightening and her breath quickening as she drove across the tarmac to the Russian side.
There was a short queue there, too. She breathed deeply, and tried to prevent her heart thumping its way out of her ribcage.
As she wound down her window again, the Russian guard, a great bear of a man with a thick black beard and ruddy cheeks, grunted and stretched out a hand.
‘Dobry den,’ she said, as she gave him her passport.
He opened it without a reply, and entered her details into his computer. Kate kept her gaze away from the armed guards sheltering from the rain.
Time crawled by. She closed her eyes. If they had broken her alias and arrested her now, it would change everything.
The guard stamped her visa page violently and handed it back, still without a word. She drove on, relief flooding through her.
The rain strengthened again, billowing across her path, so that the journey onward was painfully slow. But as she turned off the main road to Vyborg and headed towards Sokolinskoye, a shaft of bright evening sunshine suddenly danced across a windscreen soon speckled with grit from the road surface.
As she bumped along the pot-holed track that finally wound through the pine forest to Sergei’s parents’ dacha, Kate felt suddenly, exuberantly, at home. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed this place, which had remained unchanged since the Tsarist era. The track emerged beside the water, which glowed a rich orange in the sunset.
She could see a few brightly coloured dachas scattered through the woods, until the light faded and the sea merged with the sky. And at last she was on the gentle slope down towards the beach. A final turn to the right, and there it was in the sweep of her headlamps, its once neat green wooden cladding, shutters, balcony and white-framed windows faded by neglect.
Kate got out of the car. The night was eerily still. She knocked once, but no lights flickered on, so she opened the door and slipped inside. The interior was damp and chilly. A moonbeam fell across the crowded bookshelves on the far wall.
‘Sergei?’
There was no answer. She slid open the box of matches that lay beside the candle on the table and lit it. The dacha had never had electricity and nothing had changed.
She glanced about her. All along one wall there were pictures of Sergei in various ice-hockey teams, beside those of the St Petersburg squad; his father had looked after their stadium. The gramophone still had pride of place on a wooden bench, with the family’s vinyl records stacked neatly on the windowsill.
The room was dominated by an enormous stone fireplace, which faced a worn leather sofa and two tattered chairs. Someone had laid a fire and left a box of matches there too. Kate lit it and drew the rudimentary curtains to shut out the night.
The fire here burnt better than any she’d encountered before. She lit more candles and it wasn’t long before the interior of the cabin was as cosy as she remembered it. She put on Passion for the Russian Revolution 1917 performed by the St Petersburg Philharmonic and conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, whom Sergei had taken Kate to see on many occasions during that long winter in his city.
She went upstairs, candle in hand. There were two rooms, both with small double beds covered in furs. One was where Kate had normally slept, the other where she had longed all night to join him.
She had taken the precaution of stealing some cigarettes from Julie, and back downstairs, she sat and smoked one by the fire. But the growing warmth of the ancient building, and of her nostalgia, still failed to put her mind completely at rest. Perhaps, she thought, that was his intention.
After a few hours of listening to the crackle of the flames and the rustling of the trees, Kate felt hungry enough to venture into the tiny back kitchen. It was damp, like the rest of the cabin, and looked as if it had recently been cleaned. There was no fridge, but the cool-box contained some borscht in a bowl covered with clingfilm and a bottle of red wine from the Crimea with a corkscrew taped to the side. There was little doubt it had been left for her. There were no curtains at the window, nothing to shelter her there from the looming menace of the forest.
Kate ate gratefully and drank some wine by the fire. And still the night delivered nothing but the occasional plaintive cry of the wind. Once or twice she moved to the front window and pulled back the curtain, but all she could see was the moonlight on the water.
Eventually Kate screwed up her courage and stepped out into the darkness. Though she was certain she hadn’t left it open, her car door was banging against a naked trunk. She circled in front of the vehicle and pushed it shut.
She snapped around.
‘Sergei?’ she yelled, but his name was immediately smothered by the forest.
The shadows were making a fool of her. She walked away from the house along the sand. In the days she’d come here with him, she’d loved the cabin’s splendid isolation, but her surroundings were now closing in on her.
She started to see shapes and faces in the darkness. She turned back. The door to the dacha was open and yet she was certain she had closed that too. This time she locked it behind her.
‘Sergei?’ she called again, but there was no answer.
She picked up the wine bottle as a crude weapon and crept back into the kitchen. Once she was convinced it was empty, she swapped the bottle for a knife and climbed the stairs. There was no one in the bedrooms either.
She took the furs from the beds and carried them down to the fire, curling up in front of it, trying to console herself with the memory of having done so, often, with him. She had cast the die. Now she could do no more than wait.
Not for the first time, Kate found that intense fatigue could overcome even acute fear, and she awoke as the first hints of morning slipped in beneath the simple cotton drapes. She stood. The fire had burnt out. The air in the dacha was damp and cold again. She drew the curtains, to be greeted by autumn sunlight shimmering on a flat, calm sea. The wind had blown through, taking her fears with it.
She stepped out of the dacha and walked past the car onto the beach. There, in the sand, she saw her footsteps from the night before.
And then another set, beside her own, which very clearly belonged to a man.
Kate looked about her. In this still, quiet place, there was no sign of life. She adjusted her clothes and walked on, her eyes fixed upon the path at the end of the beach, which led up a small incline to a clump of trees.
The sand was damp, her footfall heavy, but she could still hear her own breathing. She stopped again and looked back towards the dacha, then checked her pocket to be sure she still had her car keys.
She continued towards the trees, and there he was.
She found she could no longer move as he walked slowly towards her.
‘Hello, my love,’ Stuart said.
Her reply caught in her throat. But the strangest part of it was the feeling of relief that swept over her. She had come here to confront a fear that had been eating her alive. The truth was some kind of release.
‘It had to be you,’ she said. ‘Ever since the appearance of that magically crack-free iPad. And the way you looked at Imogen. I’ve been such a fool.’
‘The sins of the flesh can make fools of us all.’
‘To betray me is one thing, but to betray your country, as you’ve been so clearly doing, is of a different order of magnitude, don’t you think?’ She slowly shook her head. ‘Did the condom wrapper I found in the rubbish belong to you, after all?’
‘No. My … liaison with Imogen … was very brief, and a long time ago.’
‘I guess you owe it to me to explain how you could have been so stupid.’
‘They start in such a small way, Kate. You know how they
work. I guess it’s what you do, too. And you convince yourself it won’t really matter. What was I? Just a civil servant in the Department of Education. Who the fuck cared if, once in a while, I lunched at a good restaurant and shared the Whitehall gossip? They must have heard it from a million different places. But then they have you. And they start turning the screw.’
‘I hope at least you’re going to tell me that Imogen Conrad was the fuck of your life. That the betrayal and misery you’ve unleashed was, on some level, worth it.’
He took a step closer. ‘You’re so inflexible, Kate, so unyielding, so … certain. I—’
‘Stay where you are and just tell me why.’
‘Because I’m human. Because I made a mistake. Because I knew you would never accept or forgive it. Because I didn’t want to hurt you. And because the price I was being asked to pay by the Russian Embassy seemed—’
‘You mean the SVR.’
‘Yes, yes … of course. I didn’t understand at first who I was dealing with, or maybe didn’t want to. But what they were asking for … it seemed a much smaller price to pay than the alternative, which would have been to destroy our love and wreck our family.’
‘How long have you been fucking her?’
He shook his head. ‘I said, it was only ever once – well, a few times, on foreign trips a long time ago. But they had a recording.’ He looked as if he was about to cry. ‘And I couldn’t bring myself to break your heart.’
‘My heart.’
‘All right, my own. The children’s. But what was the alternative? To confess and destroy our family? I just—’
‘To confess and let me make my choice.’
‘But I knew what choice you’d make. You would never have forgiven me, Kate. You know that. And what the Russians were asking for didn’t seem so … serious, so terrible by comparison. I’m sorry, I know I should never have done it. I know you’ll despise me, but—’
‘Don’t whine at me, Stuart. I don’t want to hear that you’re the victim in all of this.’
He closed in on her again, but she raised her hand silently and stepped back. She felt, suddenly, as if the ground was opening beneath her feet.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate. I’ve been a fool. Worse than a fool. Much, much worse. I know the pain it will cause you. But it doesn’t have to be the end of everything we’ve built.’
He couldn’t keep the desperation from his voice now. And it only made it worse. She couldn’t believe that the man she saw and heard was the one she had loved for so long, reduced to a pathetic, whining traitor and adulterer by the brief promise of Imogen Conrad’s loins.
‘There is a way out of this, Kate. It doesn’t have to destroy everything, our family, Fiona and Gus’s health and happiness—’
‘A way out?’ She couldn’t keep the contempt from her voice.
‘Please, Kate. Will you at least listen?’
‘Where’s Sergei?’
‘They said he would come to no harm.’
‘Where is he?’
‘St Petersburg.’
‘The SVR detained him?’
‘Yes … yes.’
‘And they faked the last letter, inviting me here to the dacha?’
‘No, I think the letter was real. They’ve had him under surveillance.’
‘So this is their fight back against the GRU and its influence on the president?’
‘I don’t know. I asked them not to hurt him.’
‘But only if you can get me to agree to what you’re about to propose?’
‘Neither of us has a choice, Kate.’
‘Don’t we? How convenient.’
‘If you agree, life can go on. I know it will be difficult and there will of course be … adjustments. And I’ll have to win your forgiveness. I don’t doubt how tough that will be. But I forgave you your time with Sergei here—’
‘You had nothing to forgive. I was never unfaithful to you.’
He stared at her. ‘If you agree to let me be, we’ll both go home to the life we love. If you don’t, our children will be orphans.’
‘I presume you asked Rose to step in and look after them? Or did you get on a plane and leave them to fend for themselves?’
‘Of course I didn’t. I dropped them at her house in London after you’d left.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘That I had to do something to help you.’
‘And as Viper, it’s been your job,’ she said, ‘and I guess will now be mine – if I fall in with your plan – to support the foreign secretary once he walks into Number Ten.’
He didn’t answer her.
‘I assume he is the Russian spy we’re really looking for?’
Stuart just stared at her, the colour rising in his cheeks. It was a question she knew he would have been instructed not to answer.
Kate breathed in deeply. She thought of Lena’s naked body on the slab in Athens. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered. ‘You weak, pathetic bastard. Lena is dead. Rav is dead. And now you have the gall to stand here and ask me to betray my country as the price of your sins.’
‘Kate …’ He took another step closer.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘Come on, Kate. This is our life. The whole world is a cesspit. They want very little of us. Just to help, once in a while. To give their interests a hearing. Is that so bad?’
Kate stepped back. She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye and tried to clear her mind. ‘I’m wired. And your masters must have known I would be, which is why you were instructed not to answer my question on the foreign secretary. Even now they’re too smart to give me the proof I need.’ She looked out across the water. ‘Danny is over there, the other side of the Gulf, recording it all.’ She turned back to him. ‘So what now, Stuart? My husband, my love? Are you going to shoot me – and orphan our children, as you said? Are you really going to do that, with the world still listening? No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. Even you’re not that much of a bastard. You came to say goodbye. And as for your people listening and mine recording over the water, we’re at check, and checkmate will elude us both. For now, at least.’
She turned and walked away.
‘Kate!’
She climbed into the car, turned the ignition and drove away. She saw a lonely figure stranded on the sand in her rear-view mirror, but she didn’t turn back.
She remained staunchly upright all the way into the forest. Then she stopped, bent over the steering-wheel and cried until her stomach hurt.
She took a T-shirt from the bag she had never unpacked and wiped her eyes, then pulled the car back into the centre of the track and began the long journey home.
Epilogue
As school plays go, it had been tolerable. Kate and Fiona chatted politely to some of the parents over warm white wine afterwards. Despite the presence of many of her own friends, Fiona had not strayed much from Kate’s side all evening as they waited for Gus to emerge.
By and large, both children had responded to the events of the last few weeks as well as Kate could have hoped. She had told them the truth – what other choice did she realistically have? – and had tried her level best to make Stuart sound like any middle-aged man having a rush of blood to the head, a spin that she thought neither of them bought, but which had perhaps allowed them to lock away the darker elements of his behaviour in a place where they could deal with it another day.
Or, at least, she hoped so.
Kate had consulted a child psychologist about it, and a bereavement counsellor. They’d done their best, but neither of them could claim any experience of a man who betrays his family and his country.
That said, they’d already progressed quite substantially on the practical arrangements. Kate had stressed that Stuart’s decisions did not change his love for them (how she’d hated having to give that speech) and she knew, despite her inner rage, that she had to do something about it. So, at some point in the future, she would facilitate the children flying to see Stua
rt at a neutral, pre-agreed location far from his new life in Moscow.
In the meantime, she’d had to tell them both that their father would never be able to set foot in the United Kingdom for as long as he lived, which they had found extremely hard to take.
‘So he’ll never be able to come to another rugby match?’ Gus had asked.
Fiona had enquired, later, if he’d be able one day to walk her down the aisle.
‘Only if you get married somewhere outside this country,’ Kate had said. The bereavement counsellor had advised her never to lie to the children, difficult as that would undoubtedly be.
It was in the nature of her work, perhaps, that small-talk about school runs and the inadequacies of various teachers or individual school policies frequently seemed like tales from a different planet, but today Kate found it especially difficult to concentrate. She sipped the wine and nodded a lot. Gus came running in to say he’d like to go home with Pete Markell and she said that would be fine.
She noticed Fiona’s gaze continually flicking back to her and took it as a sign she wanted to leave. She picked up her coat and came to retrieve her daughter. As they walked down the endless hallway, Fiona slipped her hand into her mother’s.
They continued in companionable silence until they reached the entrance lobby. There, above the coat pegs, was a widescreen television, sometimes tuned to a school policy notice but otherwise defaulting to Sky News. As they passed, they saw the new prime minister, James Ryan, sweeping into Downing Street.
Kate and Fiona stopped to listen. For a man with the undoubted gift of the gab, it was a pretty uninspiring speech. ‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to govern for all the people of this country, which is going to require some bold and visionary thinking.’ It was a version of governing for the many not the few that they all trotted out. For all she knew, they might even have meant it.
Another woman had come to stand alongside them. Maggie, or perhaps Marjorie – Kate’s memory failed her – a fussy mother of one of the many academic geniuses in Fiona’s class, a woman whose horizons had never stretched far beyond Fulham. ‘Didn’t the press say he was a Russian spy?’ she said. ‘Honestly, what nonsense they do come up with!’