‘It is, it is,’ puzzled by this twist in the conversation.
‘Where will Leandro go next?’
‘Probably not where his friends are going,’ he told her curved back.
‘Perhaps he could be helped?’
Lifting her shoulders, she patted the overcoat like someone still wanting to check the pockets even though she had been through them already. ‘Gennady’s people … they would pay many dollars to discover what Marvar knew.’
His mood had changed, in blade-sharp contrast to the previous moment. He looked out at the Oxford afternoon, not moving his gaze from the window. ‘Maybe they should ask Marvar’s professor. It would be cheaper.’
She shifted her buttocks on the bed. ‘He knows nothing.’
Through the small window, the unflowing canal. A dog was sniffing in the mist at a rubbish bag. The light was fading. It would be time to go soon.
He could taste her cream on his tongue. ‘What about Marvar’s people, what about the Iranians? They might have an idea.’
‘Gennady says only Marvar has this information,’ in her discoloured voice.
A bicyclist pedalled slowly by. Dyer brought his eyes back into the rented room.
‘Why should he think that?’
Her hands were inside the coat, running over the pale lining which had the sheen of something freshly flayed.
‘The Americans. It’s what they believe.’
‘And your husband believes the Americans?’
She made a movement with her head. It was hard to tell what she meant. ‘He believes what he knows.’
‘He knows an awful lot, it sounds.’
Katya shrugged.
He reached for his shirt on the floor. Next to it, her stockings lay crumpled up like a shed skin.
‘The sooner Marvar is found, the better. If you ask me.’
‘Unless,’ she said meditatively, turning, ‘he gave the information to someone else.’
‘Like who?’
He caught the undertow in her eyes. For a second, he saw Vasily’s face.
‘I don’t know. A friend. Perhaps he left it in his coat,’ sliding her hands back into the pockets. She smiled oddly. ‘Perhaps he gave it to you?’
The way she looked at him. With those eyes. It seemed to Dyer that she was concentrating closely on what his answer would be. In that instant, she was a very good imitation of a pit viper.
He felt, as if someone had taken him by the elbow and steered him round, that he saw her properly for the first time. A mighty current of sadness flows through him. He remembers Vivien’s words when he told her about meeting Nissa at the photographic exhibition. ‘Exhilaration, my dear, is the warning of disaster.’
Right now, he doesn’t want to know if Katya is working with Gennady, or if Gennady has made her do this, or how Katya knows Whitton’s most intimate thoughts, or if she slipped something into his half-pint of Old Empire while he was in the gents at the Bookbinders so that she could later search the house. Something had switched off like the TV in his boarding house on Saturday nights. From the boundless distance of six feet, she shrank and shrank until she was a small flash on a dark screen.
‘No,’ he joked, retrieving his underpants, wanting to cover himself, his head still spinning and groggy, ‘the only thing Marvar gave me was a hangover.’
Katya stared at him intently, absorbing what he had said, and then her eyes were swimming away and she was muttering in a language that he didn’t understand. She looked as if she was rewriting something inside herself. Her hardened grey eyes were embers. Something enormous was reflected in them, like the glow of a distant city at night, but she was paying no more attention to Dyer than if he had been a games bag of wet muddy socks or the dead bluebottle on the carpet that had escaped Magda’s hoover.
‘We’d better go and fetch our boys,’ he said.
She pulled off Marvar’s coat and picked up her jersey and underwear and started putting them back on.
He dropped her at the school gates, waiting for her to get out before he drove on to find a parking space.
‘Bye, then.’
‘Bye.’
They didn’t kiss.
It was one of Nissa’s quarrels with him, how he said goodbye without operatics.
Chapter Twenty-seven
DYER DROVE TWICE DOWN CHADLINGTON Road before he found a parking spot. He sat in the car, wound down the window.
The shock. The first sensation is numbness. Then a sharp, burning sear.
It was biting his insides. Her pale nipples, that spectral coat, her eyes hating him. Lacerated, he no longer feels transparent; she had hurled a stone into him – everything was shattered. Beneath the fractured surface, shapes dart off.
‘The brutal fact is, my dear, she’s taken you for the most monumental ride,’ is what his aunt would have said.
The rasp in her voice like virgin snow. He had thought that she liked him; she had never said that she didn’t. Their interactions were friendly before he met Marvar, so that must have been genuine.
How badly he’d underestimated her. He had failed to recognise the warning in her eyes until she stood naked before him with her hands buried in the depths of Marvar’s pockets. Never had he received such a look, it was a horse-kick. He realised, then, how utterly she’d bamboozled him.
Of more urgent importance: had Katya believed Dyer when he told her that all Marvar had given him was a hangover?
‘You English. I only believe when you are joking.’
Suddenly, his fate, Leandro’s too, seemed to hinge on a stupid quip.
Dyer couldn’t see Leandro’s bicycle propped against the wall.
He looked up at the clock. He was late, the playground deserted.
She must have collected Vasily and left.
‘Have you seen Leandro?’ he went over to ask Mr Tanner, who since Tuesday had planted himself in a visible position by the gate.
‘Wasn’t he on his bike?’
If so, Mr Tanner said, he was bound to have left by the exit on Phoenix Lane. He avoided any reference to Samir or to Samir’s father.
Dyer drove quickly home, his mind making odd leaps. Under the lethal stimulation of Katya, he had taken his eye off Leandro. Brushing aside the legality of speaking on a mobile phone while driving, he called Leandro as he turned sharply into St Margaret’s Road. His panic intensified to receive no answer.
He parked beneath the church tower, and jogged along the pavement.
At the far end of Canal Street, his next-door neighbour was stooped over a brown paper bag. Its bottom had ripped, spilling her shopping into the road. The spectacle of Paula scrambling after cans of Co-op beans and pineapple chunks pulled Dyer up short.
Against his every wish to press on and check if Leandro had arrived back safely, he stopped to assist Paula, gathering up the scattered cans, and then carrying them in his cradled arms round the corner, into her kitchen. It smelled of air-freshener and the skirting was painted in blue veins to look like marble. He was set to leave, anxious to be home, when he noticed, through the nylon lace curtains, an unfamiliar car.
The curtains were translucent like the wings of a damsel; he didn’t need to open them. There was a man seated in a parked brown Skoda. He leaned forward far enough for Dyer to see that he was watching his house, but not far enough to see Dyer.
Paula crumpled up the torn bag and dropped it into the bin.
‘How did Leandro’s history test go?’
‘I haven’t heard. Listen, Paula, can I climb over your fence? I’ve locked myself out.’
Seconds later, he was jumping down into the patio and pushing his way past the magnolia, under the washing line, his face slapping against damp socks and shirts, to the French window.
Inside, a light was on. Dyer tapped the glass.
Nothing stirred.
He tapped again.
Silence.
He tried the window. Unlocked.
‘Leandro!’ he yelled, even as he let himsel
f in. ‘Leandro!’ His voice reverberated through the house.
There was no answer.
He ran across the room.
The kitchen seemed as it was when he bundled Katya out less than an hour before. Two mugs of coffee by the sink, undrunk. His shoulder bag on the hook in the hall, doubtless filleted by Katya when she came downstairs. She was unlikely to have had the chance to search Leandro’s games bag, though. Magda had tucked this out of sight into a gap beside the washing machine.
Dyer pulled out the blue bag, unzipped it. His laptop was inside, along with Bunting’s poems, and, right at the bottom, the transparent sandwich bag in which Marvar’s little green folder bobbed rather like a tropical fish. Dyer looked for a moment at the folder as if he had been watching it since a little boy and it was a float that he was waiting to see disappear under the water.
With tender care, he brought out the folder, opened it. The false yellow post-it note was still there.
Packing everything back into the games bag, he hared up the stairs and raced down the corridor, opening doors.
Spread out like a skinned carcass on the permafrost, Marvar’s overcoat was on his bed where Katya had discarded it.
Dyer stepped across the landing into Leandro’s bedroom. He stood by the window and, keeping out of sight, glanced down.
A dog barked as darkness fell on the street. Over the canal came the sound of a train. The brown Skoda was parked opposite, the lean face inside outlined by the glow from a mobile phone.
Dyer thought: That’s what they do in Brazil if they want to roll you – they watch you till they know the pattern on your wallpaper, the colour of your shirts. And then, when you least expect it, they strike.
Had someone kidnapped Leandro?
He sat on the bed, his hands fumbling as he redialled his son’s number. In his impatience, he left out a digit, and had to start again.
Nissa smiled down at him while he waited for the purr of the ringing tone. He pressed the phone to his ear and listened. One, two, three, four times.
Again, no one picked up.
Mad thoughts of ringing the police, Updark even, were interrupted by the sound of the front door slamming.
Downstairs, Leandro was surprised to be enfolded by his father in a very tight hug.
‘Hey, Dad! What are you doing?’
‘When did you get back?’
‘About twenty minutes ago.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘I popped out to the corner shop,’ and held up the Match Attax cards to which he had decided to treat himself after all his hard work. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Helping Paula. I’m sorry I missed you. I was running late …’
‘I called you,’ said Leandro. ‘Mrs Updark lent me her phone. I don’t know what happened, but it was weird.’
‘I’ve changed my number. Here, let me give you the new one.’
He wrote it down and handed it to Leandro, whose perplexed expression hadn’t changed.
‘Dad, the landline wasn’t working either. Magda had unplugged it …’
‘That was me.’
Leandro frowned. ‘I thought it was Magda. Oh, and she didn’t make your bed.’
‘She made yours,’ said Dyer, not wanting to open that can, and walked over to the fridge and looked inside.
Four bare shelves glared back. He hadn’t bought dinner. He hadn’t bought anything.
‘Dad …’
He tensed. What was Leandro going to say? ‘Are you having an affair?’
‘My history test—’
‘And I want to hear how it went.’
Dyer closed the fridge and turned, he had remembered his promise. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it at Peppers Burgers?’
Less than a quarter of an hour later, after Leandro had changed out of his school clothes, and both of them had taken a shower, Dyer called in a sharp voice as his son headed towards the front door: ‘No, Leandro, wait! This way.’ He opened the French window and stepped into the patio. ‘Let’s invite Paula. She’ll want to hear, too.’
The brown Skoda was no longer there when the three of them returned, shortly before nine o’clock. Paula said goodbye with a little bow. Her husband had been a submariner; he had taught her not to waste words. ‘Thank you, both. What a nice surprise. You’re welcome to climb over my fence whenever.’ She was glad the key had been found, though.
Dyer unlocked the front door. He had left the lights on downstairs. He came into the kitchen. Quick look round. All in order.
After Leandro disappeared to his bedroom ‘to read’, but most likely to play Fifa 18, Dyer took out his laptop and put it on the kitchen table. Ever since he’d dropped her off, he had been champing to look up Katya Petroshenko.
It was a risk, his searches could be traced. Yet as with Marvar, he might raise more suspicion if he showed no interest.
Not knowing how to say anything in Russian, not even hello, he typed Katya’s name into his browser. A sweep of Russian websites yielded one hit: a reference to Gennady Petroshenko, associate director of GAZPROM (m. 2004 Katya 1 s).
Without her maiden name, Dyer was not going to discover more. Frustrated, he replayed their conversation in his head. She had been more miserly with her details than Marvar.
He went to the loo, then tried again.
In the forgotten footage, a phrase came back. ‘I’m my father’ – whatever that meant – was virtually the only information she’d given away. That, and a town near Moscow which wasn’t Murmansk.
She had mentioned a poet. Tyutchev. Dyer looked him up. Feodor Tyutchev. From Muranovo. That was it.
It was a swing in the dark. Dyer called up scientists born in Muranovo. And straight away there he is, Vasily Lavramarov, b. 1941. Looking just like his grandson, like Katya.
Until the moment he saw her father’s face, Dyer refused to believe what he had already guessed. But his doubts evaporated when he read that the atomic physicist Vasily Lavramarov was a member of the 1969 nuclear fusion delegation which had been responsible for building the T-3 tokamak. His old newspaper might have demanded a second source; Dyer needed no further verification. Katya was a child of nuclear fusion. She must have been spying on Marvar since the day she arrived in Oxford, and reporting back to Mr Putin’s chum, Gennady.
Dyer didn’t know how to feel. In his pride, he hadn’t wanted to believe it was all a ruse, her admiration for Leandro, her hurt over Vasily, her attraction to Dyer. The fact that she was sitting seductively in a pub by herself at lunchtime.
She had observed him talking with Marvar, and, after that, wearing Marvar’s coat, and in concert with Gennady had taken the decision that Dyer was a stone that needed to be turned.
Once she had decided that Dyer knew nothing, he was what he said, a washed-up journo desperate to find relevance in a sixteenth-century Portuguese colony in Latin America, then he was history, as unnecessary and pathetic to her as his subject.
Dyer closed his laptop. Yet it didn’t stop the roar in his head. The din was like the tune of that homeless accordionist, the same questions going round and round and round.
If he was to believe Katya, the Russians weren’t holding Marvar. But neither were the Americans, because Updark wouldn’t be looking for him if so. And nor were the Iranians – if indeed it was the Iranians who had tried to grab Dyer. Who, then? The Israelis? The Saudis? The Chinese?
Or was this a wild-goose chase, and Marvar remained at large?
Dyer didn’t want to admit to himself that Marvar might be dead. His essential innocence could not be violated, somehow it would endure. Then he thought of the overcoat upstairs on his bed, like the hide of a hunted mammoth.
But whether Marvar had been captured or killed or was treading the moors around Fusedale was somehow irrelevant. The scrap of paper that he had buried for Dyer to find had made him more alive.
Marvar’s worn face, the pain in his eyes, had affected him. Dyer might be impotent to protect Marvar, yet in respect of his
post-it note he was not powerless. Marvar’s strange conviction that Dyer would know what to do with this had motivated every stubborn and perverse atom in Dyer’s nature to safeguard the information that Marvar had risked his life – and his family’s – to put into Dyer’s hand.
Dyer didn’t for one moment believe that he himself wasn’t in danger as well. From the instant that he lifted the Ziploc sandwich bag out of the sandpit, a persistent fear had stalked him that he never expected to feel in Oxford. The pull in his gut when walking at night, the only white face, through the favela, past the flickering gauntlet of milk-tin braziers, followed by eyes that tracked his smallest movement.
His fear was a hook that dragged him through the water. He couldn’t shake it off. Even if Updark and Katya believed that he had no further light to shed on Marvar’s breakthrough, behind them other silhouettes – malevolent, dark – flared up and vanished before he could identify them.
Who was telephoning the house? Who had left that neat scratch mark on his car like a hieroglyph? Who were the men in the Passat? Who was the man watching in the Skoda with the serrated intensity of a shoeshine boy, his lean face ghoulishy underlit from his phone?
Those who needed convincing that Marvar hadn’t given his algorithm for whatever odd reason to Dyer …
By appointing him custodian, Marvar had exposed Dyer to a hounding pack of invisible but ferocious savages who, were they ever to suspect Dyer of deceiving them, would stop at nothing to bathe their spears in his blood and in his son’s blood too.
Leandro’s lava lamp was off when Dyer went upstairs. In the dark, he peeped out between the curtains, and saw that the Skoda had not returned. He kissed his sleeping child goodnight, closed the door gently, then crossed the corridor into his bedroom and switched on the light. Marks on the furrowed sheets triggered a quick memory. But something was wrong.
Marvar’s coat is not on the bed.
He runs downstairs, three steps at a time.
On the hook in the hallway, Dyer’s leather shoulder bag. Beside the washing machine, Leandro’s blue canvas games bag from which he had retrieved his laptop less than half an hour earlier. He opens it, rummages inside. His fingers pull out Bunting’s Collected Poems and the Ziploc sandwich bag with the green folder.
The Sandpit Page 19