by Val McDermid
“You’re mad,” Rory had objected when Lindsay had first run the outline of her plan past her.
“Why?”
“For one, you don’t even know for sure that Jack is in St Petersburg at all.”
“Cavadino wouldn’t leave him with strangers, and he’s due back at work any minute now. Besides, Maria and her husband have had Jack down on their list of dependants since they first arrived in Russia. Where else is he going to be?”
“That could be a red herring. He could be anywhere on the planet.”
“But on balance, he’s more likely to be in St Pete’s,” Lindsay said reasonably. “And if he’s not, Tam Gourlay will be the poorer, not us. Tam’s prepared to fund it, so what have we got to lose?”
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” Rory hazarded. “Lindsay, it’s like a jungle on the streets of Russia. Do you really think Jack will be running around without protection? These guys shoot anybody that gets in their road. And if the Mafia don’t get us, the cops probably will. I don’t want to end up in a fucking gulag for kidnapping a wee boy.”
“Well, please yourself. It’s a risk I’m prepared to take. If you won’t come with me, I’ll just have to manage without you.”
Now real concern crept into Rory’s voice. “Lindsay, what are you trying to prove here? What’s with the recklessness? You know yourself this is an act of total lunacy. And yet you’re going at it like a bull at a gate. What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on,” Lindsay said gruffly, denying the questioning voices inside her own head yet again. “When I say I’ll do something, I do it. And I said I’d do my best to get Jack Gourlay back. So I’m going to Russia. All right? It’s my life. I can take risks with it if I want. Christ, why is it all the women in my life think it’s their job to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do?”
Two days of frosty silence later, Rory had plonked herself down in the booth, held her hands up in capitulation and said, “OK. Count me in. All for one and one for all, right?”
“What changed your mind?”
“Sandra reminded me that you had been a better reporter than I will ever be and if you thought it was worth going for it, you were more likely to be right than a big jessie like me.”
Lindsay grinned. “Thank you, Sandra.” She remembered the moment now as the line shuffled forward at reasonable speed. Ever since she’d agreed to come, Rory had been reminding Lindsay on a more or less hourly basis of the dangers that lay ahead. But in spite of her apprehension, she was still here, at Lindsay’s side.
After a twenty-minute wait, Lindsay finally handed her passport over to an unsmiling immigration official who seemed to spend forever scrutinising her seven-day visa and entering details into his computer. At last, he stamped passport and visa and she was released into the baggage hall, where a couple of carousels grunted and wheezed under their burden of luggage. The screens that should have indicated which belt carried the bags from their flight were resolutely blank. “You stay by this one and I’ll go over to the other one,” Lindsay said to Rory.
Eventually, their holdalls appeared on Rory’s carousel and they made their way through the green channel into a morass of people peering through the doors in an attempt to glimpse their loved ones. Lindsay pushed forward, craning her neck, trying to find their driver.
They were almost at the doors leading to the car park outside when she spotted a burly old man with a shock of silver hair resembling Boris Yeltsin’s. But there the resemblance ended. This man was clear-eyed, erect and handsome, his skin the weathered tan of an outdoorsman. He spread his arms wide and shouted in a deep voice, “Lindsay! You grow more lovely with every passing year.” He pulled her into a bear hug, smacking kisses on both cheeks.
Lindsay freed herself and stepped back to include Rory in the group. “Honestly, Sasha, age hasn’t slowed you down, has it? Rory, meet Sasha Kuznetsov. Sasha, this is my colleague, Rory McLaren.”
Sasha enveloped Rory’s hands in both of his. When Lindsay had told her she had enlisted the help of one of her father’s friends, she hadn’t known what to expect. She’d imagined the former skipper of a Russian factory ship to be as dark and forbidding as the waters he fished, but this man was as warm and sturdy as a sun-bathed rock. Something about Sasha’s solidity gave her more confidence than anything she’d seen or heard since Lindsay had dragged them into this folly. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, meaning it.
“The pleasure is always mine when beautiful women are concerned.” He winked to emphasise the lack of threat behind his gallantry, then reached for their bags. “Welcome to Russia. Now, follow me.”
He led them outside to an elderly but gleaming Peugeot. It was as warm and sticky outside as it had been inside the terminal. “Is it usually this hot at the beginning of September?” Lindsay asked as they climbed into the car.
“Not always. This year, we have a lot of sunshine. More than normal. Maybe it will be cooler in a day or two.”
“Please God. I don’t know if I can think straight in heat like this,” Lindsay said.
“Let’s hope none of us has too much thinking to do. Now, best if you relax and gather your strength. We have plans, and in the morning, we work. But for tonight, I will leave you in peace to recover from plane.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lindsay said.
As they reached the outskirts of the city, Sasha began to point out sites of interest. “This is the Moscow Prospekt, this triumph arch was once the largest cast-iron structure in the world. Dostoevsky lived here. And here also. He lived a lot of places, I think they paid him to live in their buildings so they could put up a sign saying, ‘Dostoevsky lived here’ and put the rents up.” He guffawed at his own joke. “Senate Square, with the bronze horseman, Peter the Great. The gold dome, that’s the Cathedral of St Isaac. The Admiralty. Palace Square and the Hermitage.”
The names flowed over Lindsay as she drank in the sights. She’d seldom seen anywhere so imposing. Even the apartment blocks were built on a scale to command admiration. The late afternoon sun seemed to pull all the colours out of the buildings, emphasising the ochres, yellows, blues, pinks, sage greens and browns of the flaking and faded stucco. The years of Soviet neglect had left St Petersburg looking raddled and decayed. But it was clear that a massive programme of restoration was under way. There was scarcely a street without signs of building work.
Rory was unusually quiet, clearly struck by her surroundings. “I can’t get over the churches,” she said eventually. “Every time we turn a corner, there’s another one. All those gilded domes and glamorous colours, all those gold crosses. I thought the Communists pulled all the churches down.”
Sasha chuckled. “They never wasted a building. They just used them for other things. Builders’ yards, carpentry workshops, that’s what they turned them into. One of the finest churches in the city, they made it the Museum of Atheism. Now, the church makes them good again.”
“All they need to do now is fix the roads,” Lindsay said dryly as Sasha swerved wildly to avoid yet another pothole. “I thought at first all the drivers must be drunk, then I realised they were avoiding the ruts and the holes in the road.”
“It’s getting better,” he said as they left the grand façade of the Hermitage behind and swept across the steel grey River Neva. “Vasilievsky Ostrov,” he added. “Vassily’s Island, where your hotel is. Also, where I live. When Peter the Great built the city, he wanted the island to be another Venice. All the streets in the main part are in a grid. They were supposed to be canals, but it never happened. There are three big parallel avenues, and the streets that cross them are numbers. You are on the Seventh Line. Near McDonalds.”
“McDonalds?” Rory echoed faintly.
He turned off the wide boulevard into a broad street. “We are here.” He helped them out with their bags and walked them into the hotel. “OK. I go. You need me, you have my number. I am near, on the Tenth Line. But I will be here in the morning at seven. There is good
restaurant up the street, Georgian restaurant.” He gave Lindsay a hug and shook Rory’s hand again. “We will do well. Enjoy your evening.” With a wave of his big square hand, he was gone.
Checking in proved painless, since the reception staff spoke English. Within minutes, they were walking into their third-floor suite. Lindsay didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. The two rooms were airy and spacious, freshly decorated and furnished in contemporary style. “Amazing,” Rory said, wandering through the rooms. “Hey, we’ve got two bathrooms. I thought it would be like some bed and breakfast in Rothesay, all 1950s furniture and no mod cons. But this is lush.”
There was, Lindsay noted, a single divan in the living room of the suite. Just as well, since the bedroom contained only a double. She’d asked for twin beds, but the message had clearly got lost in translation somewhere. “Yeah, it looks like we landed on our feet with this place.” She unzipped her holdall and started unpacking.
“Sasha’s terrific,” Rory said.
“I’ve known him since I was a kid. Luckily my dad and him stayed in touch after he gave up the fishing. When my dad called him and said I needed his help, he jumped at the chance to pay back a wee bit of the hospitality he’s had from his Scottish friends over the years. I’d trust him with my life.”
Rory snorted. “Isn’t that exactly what we’re doing?”
“I think it’s more that we’re putting him on the line. He’s the one that gets left behind to face the music if it all goes sour on us. Which, by the way, it’s not going to do, OK?”
Rory pulled a face and began browsing the Guests’ Guide to the hotel. “Hey, there’s a leaflet here about a Russian banya. It sounds a bit like a sauna. Do you fancy doing that tonight?”
“Is it not hot enough for you already?”
“I wasn’t thinking about the heat, I was thinking about the experience. We’re not going to have much time to do anything touristy, we should at least get a flavour of Russia.” She waved the flyer under Lindsay’s nose. “Look, it’s not a communal thing. We could hire it for an hour. Four hundred roubles, that’s only a tenner, isn’t it? It would give us a chance to talk in private about what we’ve got to do.”
Lindsay relented in the face of Rory’s enthusiasm. Besides, she could use some relaxation. “OK. Let me unpack, then I’ll go downstairs and ask them to book it.”
An hour later, they were standing outside an archway, exchanging anxious looks. “It doesn’t look very promising,” Rory said dubiously.
“It’s the address the receptionist gave me,” Lindsay replied, sounding more confident than she felt. She walked through the archway into a courtyard and found herself in what looked disturbingly like a scrap yard. There was an assortment of vehicles in various stages of dismemberment, a fork-lift and a pick-up truck, and a row of lock-up garages. There was nothing that looked remotely like a bath-house. A man emerged from one of the lockups and said something incomprehensible. Lindsay took a deep breath and said, “Banya?”
The man pointed to a rickety wooden staircase that resembled a fire escape on the point of being condemned. Somewhat apprehensively, they mounted the stairs and arrived at a door with a handwritten sign next to a doorbell. “In for a penny,” Lindsay muttered and pressed the bell.
The door was opened by a young man dressed in a clinical white uniform. Lindsay uttered her one Russian sentence and he nodded. “Angliski, da? Is OK, I do English. I am Dimitri.” He ushered them in and handed them a pair of rubber flip-flops each, then escorted them to what looked like a 1950s family living room, minus the TV. Fake wooden cladding covered the bottom half of the wall, complete with highly visible nails. The top half of the wall rejoiced in imitation stone wallpaper. There was a black leatherette sofa with a couple of tears patched with packing tape, a few hard chairs and a table holding a samovar, some teacups, teabags and sugar. This, it emerged, was the changing room. Dimitri gave them a couple of white sheets each, then disappeared.
“This is a bit wild,” Rory said.
“At least you’re having your post-war chic experience,” Lindsay said, stripping off with her back to her business partner and wrapping herself in a sheet.
When they emerged, Dimitri was waiting. He led them down a corridor and opened a door leading into the business end of the banya. He showed them two wooden cabins—one, a Swedishstyle dry sauna, the other a traditional Russian banya. There was also a plunge pool, inexplicably empty. But he pointed out a row of shower cabinets that would provide the necessary freezing cold shock to the system.
He led them into the Russian banya, pointed to a low wooden bench and said, “You sit here.” It looked like a sauna, Lindsay thought, taking in the brazier filled with stones, and the bucket of water with a ladle. Then Dimitri revealed the difference. He poured what seemed like an absurd amount of water on the coals to activate them. The heat rose dramatically, along with the humidity. But bizarrely, there was no accompanying cloud of steam.
Dimitri left them to it, and inside a minute, the heat hit 80 degrees and the humidity 95 per cent. Within seconds, their bodies were slick with a mixture of sweat and steam. “My God,” said Lindsay. “What a sensation.” Her skin tingled, her face prickled and she could feel her shoulders dropping as her muscles started to relax.
“It’s brilliant,” Rory said, unwrapping herself to let her whole body feel the damp heat. Lindsay leaned back against the wall, allowing her sheet to fall away from her.
“Aah,” Lindsay sighed. “What a good idea this was, Rory.”
“Just what we need to get us in prime condition for breaking the law.”
“Don’t say that,” Lindsay groaned.
“So, tomorrow we’ve got to find Jack, right?”
“We’ve got to find him and figure out the best way to get him on his own so Tam can move in on him.”
Rory stretched luxuriously. Lindsay couldn’t help noticing the line of her small breasts tapering into her ribs, the almost imperceptible swell of her stomach, the triangle of dark blonde hair between her legs. It was oddly asexual in this context, she realised. “When will Tam and your dad get here?”
“They left Helsinki at dawn yesterday. My dad reckons they should be here tomorrow evening, provided they get decent winds.”
Rory shook her head. “I can’t believe they’re doing this. Sailing a boat from Helsinki to St Petersburg to kidnap a wee boy. Your dad must be some guy.”
Lindsay nodded. “He’s sound. Doesn’t have much to say for himself, but he’s always been there for me. Never criticises, just accepts whatever daft thing I do. As soon as I told him why I wanted to speak to Sasha in the first place, he made me tell him the whole story. And he pointed out that my original idea of taking Jack out of the country on a train was stupid. And then he announced he had a better idea but it would only work if he came too. And that was that. Fait accompli.”
Rory closed her eyes and let the sweat and steam run down her face. “You don’t know how lucky you are. My father is a boil on the bum of the universe. He’s a drunk and a waster. I never saw the bastard from one year’s end to the next till he heard about me winning the money. Now he turns up on the doorstep every few weeks, bubbling and greeting that he loves his wee lassie, and could I see my way to slipping him a few hundred quid. I tell you, I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, not unless I’d been drinking lighter fuel.”
“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said.
Rory smoothed back her dripping hair. “Don’t be. I’m not. After what he did to me, he’ll go to his grave without a penny of mine.”
“What did he do?” It wasn’t her natural curiosity that prompted Lindsay’s question; it was more that she sensed Rory wanted to be pushed into revelation.
“In a minute,” Rory said, pushing herself upright. “I need to cool off.”
Lindsay followed her to the showers, admiring the shift of Rory’s muscles as she walked. Grateful for the cold shower, she stood under the stream of water, gasping at
the change in temperature, convinced she could feel her pores snapping shut.
Back in the banya, Rory ladled more water on the coals, pushing the temperature up another five degrees. “Magic,” she said, returning to the bench. “So, you want to know what my piece-of-shit father did to me?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I came out when I was at university. Well, when I say I came out, I only came out in Edinburgh. The last people I would ever have told were my parents. I knew what his homophobic wee soul would make of it. And I knew it would break my mother’s heart. She was a good woman, my mother. She worked double shifts as a cleaner all her days to keep him in money for beer and bookies. She took the beatings he handed out when he’d lost on the horses. And he lost plenty, believe me. But she never complained, she never spent a penny on herself, bought her clothes from charity shops so I could have the latest fashions. She always encouraged me to get an education, anything to avoid having a life like hers. But she was a devout Catholic and she’d never have been comfortable with the idea of a dyke for a daughter.
“Anyway, one night my girlfriend persuaded me to go to Glasgow for some lesbian benefit. I didn’t want to go, but I let her talk me into it. We were staggering down Argyle Street, heading for the station for the last train back to Edinburgh, arms round each other, probably snogging every few yards. And my father walked out of some shitty dive where he’d been knocking back the pints and the whiskies and practically fell over us. Can you believe it? My one trip to Glasgow, and we walk smack bang into him. He was pissed, but not so pissed that he didn’t understand what he was seeing. He called me all the names under the sun. And I just stood there. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Lindsay wanted to reach out and hug Rory, but in the absence of clothes, it felt too intimate a gesture. “That must have been horrible,” she said, settling for the inadequacy of words.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been all. But he rang me the next day. He said he’d told my mother and she was broken-hearted. And because she was a good Catholic, she wanted me never to darken her door again.” Rory’s face crumpled in bewilderment. “I look back at it, and I can’t figure out why I believed him. Because my mother wasn’t like that. She’d have been hurt, but she’d never have rejected me. I should have realised he was lying to drive a wedge between us. He’d always been jealous of the fact that she loved me more than him. But the bottom line is that I did take him at his word. So I stayed away.