The Troika Dolls

by Miranda Darling

  As she was jostled through the suite door by a team of photographers from Hello magazine, Stevie marvelled at the winds of attention that were needed to fill the Hammer-Belle sails. It had been a charade, a waste of time.

  _____________________

  Clouds of drizzle swept over Green Park. Stevie hurried on past the wet pigeons, the slick bare trees, over the sleeping daffodils buried under the frozen earth. It was only three o’clock and it was gloomy, the day already dead.

  ‘Daylight never even made it today,’ she said aloud, startling the pigeon stuck to the rubbish bin. Looking down at her sodden ballet shoes, she began to regret her impulse to walk back to her hotel. The slimy black boughs dripped water down her collar and she drew her coat more tightly round her shoulders.

  Two girls were sitting on a park bench in front of her. Stevie noticed them because it was odd weather for sitting out. Both were wearing skin-tight jeans, black puffer jackets and large hoop earrings. Their shoes were even less suitable than hers—patent-leather stilettos. They must have been sitting there a while because they were wet through.

  One girl was talking on the phone. She had red hair and she was crying. Mascara and eye shadow had pooled in a bruise under each eye. Her friend had dark curly hair pulled high up off her face. She sat as still as ice, watching the girl on the phone. Even from a distance, Stevie noticed their nails, extraordinary talons, one set painted in fluorescent— almost ecstatic—yellow, the other pure white.

  They might be strippers, thought Stevie, with those nails, those skinny legs and pale faces . . . As Stevie approached, she overheard the red-haired girl, her voice trembling into the phone.

  ‘They know it’s me. They’re going to fuck me up.’

  As Stevie passed, turning for a moment to look into the rain-spattered faces, the smeared eyes, she realised with a shock that the girls couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Stevie kept walking.

  They’re going to fuck me up. She wanted to stop—Who is? What have you done? You’re only children!—but she didn’t. She walked on. It felt horrible.

  What would have happened if she had stopped? And asked what was wrong, offered help? They would probably have snarled at her like frightened dogs. It was too late now. On she hurried, through the damp. And yet, Stevie couldn’t get the girls out of her mind. Fifteen years old—they should be in school, dreaming of their first kisses, shopping with their mothers, not trembling on a wet bench anticipating violence. Much was wrong with the state of the world, she thought, and it seemed like so little could ever be done to fix it.

  Someone else would have stopped and spoken to the girls on the bench but she had passed them by. She had proven herself a coward. She spent her days organising protection for the prominent names that asked for it. Some had good reason, some had a bad conscience; to others security was a symbol of status, a way to show people that their impact on the world was potentially so great that they were wanted dead. Still others felt themselves to be so exceptional that, in an era when random violence was vogue, they would somehow be singled out for misfortune above all others. But it was girls like these, vulnerable and hunted on a park bench, that most needed protection and who were most unlikely to get it.

  Stevie thought of Pound’s famous image from the Paris metro.

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

  Only the picture in Stevie’s head was charged with menace and fear. Girls all over the world were sitting on wet park benches and standing on railway platforms and crouching in the lobbies of cheap hotels, quietly shaking, because no one could protect them. That is what it meant to be utterly alone.

  Stevie looked back. The trees and the girls and the grey paths had melted into darkness. In the distance twinkled the lights of the Ritz, where very different lives were being lived.

  Her mind, trained to assess, placed the Hammer-Belle situation neatly into a package that would be written up, insured and sold to the famous family. If it met with their approval, Stevie might even be able to wash her hands of the whole thing, providing security circumstances for the family didn’t change.

  By the time she had finished thinking through the presentation of their requirements she would give to David Rice later that evening, Stevie found herself in front of Number One, London. It was the residence of the Duke of Wellington and his family. She stopped a moment to consider the miniature palace.

  It had been a warm evening—if you could believe it had ever been warm—and there was a small party in the basement there after a dinner or a ball. Stevie couldn’t remember now where they’d been before, but she’d worn a long dress, silk tiger print.

  The entrance to the basement was down the side. One of his friends played silly show tunes on an old piano. There was a makeshift bar with half-empty bottles of mainly gin and everyone had danced. She’d thought at the time that she was in love.

  Keep walking, Stevie. She forced herself back into the present.

  Rotten Row was lit by lampions. The broad, dirt avenue had once been the place for London society to see and be seen, a constant parade of horse and feather, but this afternoon very few people were out walking, one or two with dogs. She had ridden along here many times, loving the view from high up on a horse—you could almost see into the windows of the first-floor flats. When everything had gone wrong, Stevie had done miles on horseback, galloping through the woods outside Zurich, trusting her horse to find a path, not caring that the branches clawed at her face, that the horse sometimes stumbled on the slippery forest floor, for once not caring about danger. It had helped keep her sane.

  She took a small detour to the right and stopped on the bridge over the Serpentine. The water below was partly covered in a grey, frozen slush. Sleeping white swans seemed stuck in place, beaks tucked under their wings like shy children. The winterscape appeared to mirror a general heartlessness everywhere that was not evil but simply did not care enough.

  Stevie dropped a rock into the river. He just doesn’t love you. It was that easy and that hard all at once.

  She looked around for another rock but there were none. Girls should not be alone in parks at night. Silly thoughts and possibly greater dangers lie in wait.

  Stevie hurried along, past the gold stature of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s tribute to her beloved husband when he died from typhoid at the age of forty-two. Truly, thought Stevie, this is a monument to behold. For all the stiff upper lips and morals and disguise of feelings for which her reign was known, for Queen Victoria to commission a monument the size of the giant Afghan Buddha of Bamiyan was a glorious and unfettered public declaration of love. It was a thing to be greatly admired.

  The evening drizzle was turning to sleet. Her toes were squelching. Stevie crossed the road, passed the Albert Hall, fluttered down through Queens Gate and into her hotel.

  2

  MOSCOW , THAT SAME NIGHT

  So far, Valery Kozkov remained unconvinced of Henning’s idea.

  ‘What reasonably can a young woman do here in Moscow on her own?’ he asked his long-time friend. ‘She won’t make it. Or she’ll get someone killed.’

  ‘The alternative is to wait—’

  ‘I can’t wait. I am the rat in the trap.’ He spoke with his eyes closed. Henning could hardly hear him. ‘Why is no one contacting me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Valery. I can only assume they are waiting for the pressure to build. You have a reputation, deserved, for being incorruptible . . .’

  The other man opened his eyes, rimmed red, swollen with strain. ‘The police are corrupt or inept. The politicians are corrupt or inept—no one can trust anybody. For all I know, either could be behind this.’

  ‘I don’t promise you Stevie can do anything,’ Henning said. ‘But she has some experience in this sort of thing. She is not perfect but she is someone you can trust. That must be worth something.’

  Kozkov’s head fell forward and hung there, too exhausted to finish the nod.

 
; __________

  Stevie was early for her meeting with David Rice but she couldn’t face sitting alone in her room. She ordered a gin and tonic at the hotel bar. The barman at the Gore was quick and generous with his gin. It was one of the many small reasons that Stevie liked to stay there.

  Her home was Zurich but she was in London so often on assignment that the Gore, despite being unfashionably sandwiched between an art school and the run-down Bulgarian embassy, felt almost like a second home. It was also within easy walk of the dinosaur skeletons at the Museum of Natural History and the Serpentine River, and she was highly unlikely to run into anyone she knew. Him especially.

  Not that she cared.

  The high-vaulted ceiling, the wooden floors and walls, the carved staircase, the worn leather furniture felt almost Gothic. The fire was the brightest light in the room. Stevie settled herself in an armchair, stretching her frozen feet out towards the flames.

  Two men in shirtsleeves and braces were sitting on a sofa on the other side of the room. They were staring at her.

  She had always looked quite odd by firelight. Her skin was so pale that she absorbed the glow of the flames and appeared translucent. Her shoulders were sharp and her silhouette narrow; in the shadows she could become invisible. It was a quality she often used to her advantage.

  Stevie took a sip of her gin, sank into her chair and disappeared. The two men looked away, puzzled at having completely lost her.

  Suddenly David Rice appeared, overcoat slung over his arm, striding to her rescue.

  ‘Ah, Stevie! Hiding?’

  ‘I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.’

  ‘You rarely do.’ He sat down, rested his cane on the armchair and ordered a whisky. ‘Perhaps it’s the weather.’

  He looked at her with his grey eyes. They never flickered—they were as strong as steel and Stevie always felt like they could see right into her.

  She looked away. ‘I met with the Hammer-Belles this afternoon. There have been no specific threats but they feel generally vulnerable and they want people to know they are protected,’ she filled him in on the situation. ‘I get the feeling highly visible security is what they’re looking for: bodyguards, big cars, patrol dogs—the works. I also recommended awareness training but I’m not convinced they will take that up.’ Stevie paused to light a cigarette. ‘I think their whole outfit is a bit chaotic—the entourage especially could present a security problem.’ She went on to describe the situation at the Ritz.

  As she and Rice discussed the details of the package they would put together for their new clients, Stevie felt a warmth spread through her. David Rice had that effect on her: calming, reassuring, comforting. She admired him tremendously.

  Rice had known Stevie since she was a small girl. He’d met her parents in the Carpathian Mountains one particularly rainy spring. They had been trapped together for days in a mudslide and began one of those strong friendships that are forged in adversity.

  When Stevie went to live with her grandmother in Switzerland, she and Rice had all but lost touch. It wasn’t until she was in her fourth year at Oxford that she looked him up again. She had warned him she wanted to come and work for him and they’d met for lunch at The King’s Arms.

  It was pouring with rain that day. Stevie stumbled in, more drowned rat than fiercely competent future employee.

  ‘I’ll have the fish pie,’ she’d ordered confidently, knowing it was important to appear decisive in interviews, because this informal lunch was, no matter how carefully they both dressed it in the guise of friendship, an interview.

  Rice had changed little from the strong, booming presence she remembered from her mother’s kitchen, her father’s garden terrace. The memory was painful and yet pleasantly familiar all at once. Stevie felt her heart beat a little faster and she had the curious sensation, looking at David’s strong hands and broad face, that she had come home.

  She waited for David to speak first.

  ‘My goodness. You’ve changed, Stevie Duveen.’

  ‘Well, you haven’t, David Rice, not a bit.’

  The powerful man sighed and raised an eyebrow. ‘If only that were true.’

  There was another silence. David broke it again: ‘I believe in plain speaking, Stevie. I don’t like the idea of you coming to work for me. Mine is not a pleasant world and it can be dangerous. I don’t think it is what either of your parents would have wanted. Our firm is mostly ex-military. It wouldn’t suit you at all. Surely there are a million other wonderful things you could do with your life.’

  Stevie shook her head. ‘I want to work for you. If Hazard won’t consider me, there are other risk-assessment agencies I can approach.

  As for my skills, I may not have the obvious background, but I can get by in seven languages, and I have very good intuition.’ Stevie paused to take a mouthful of her fish pie and slow her words down. She had to appear imperturbable.

  ‘Surely you have missions that require someone of a rather more unassuming appearance? My greatest advantage is my discretion: I am taken for granted, overlooked, invisible; I slip through the cracks of life.

  What better qualification could there be?’

  Rice fixed her with his granite eyes and said nothing for a very long time. Stevie held her breath and his gaze, every inch of her steel core longing for him to say yes.

  Rice shook his head. ‘A little slip of a thing like you wouldn’t even survive the most basic training.’

  Fury rose in Stevie’s slender throat but she forced it down with a dry swallow. She looked at Rice with clear and steady eyes, and when she spoke her voice was quiet. ‘Don’t forget what I have already survived, David.’

  And so, a few weeks later, she found herself on Bodmin Moor. It was a freezing day, all sleet and mud and grey skies. There were five of them on the Hostile Environment training course, designed to prepare people for work in conflict zones.

  On Day Two, they were driven to a massive underground bunker.

  At the far end, three walls had been constructed, one of bulletproof glass, one of brick and one of breezeblock.

  ‘Which one,’ the muscled instructor asked the group, ‘would you feel safe behind if shots were fired?’

  One man, a reed-thin journalist in spectacles with a formidable reputation, bravely answered, ‘All three.’

  Shots suddenly rang out. The first hit the bulletproof glass, pockmarking it softly like a raindrop on a pond; a second, a third— the journalist began to smile—until the fourth shot shattered the entire wall. More shots, the tang of gunpowder, booming echoes of violence in the empty hangar. All three walls smashed.

  ‘People,’ the instructor barked. ‘It takes four shots to shatter bulletproof glass, only two shots to smash through a brick wall, and a single shot will pass through a breeze block. Conclusion: you are not safe.’

  Stevie shivered: no one was.

  There was a night of drinking at the local pub. The journalist, it turned out, had written a stinging exposé on a particular group of rogue soldiers in the military. He was heading to Gaza the following week and he was joking about how he would be glad to get away from England: he was more frightened of the rogue soldiers and their friends in England than the missiles in the Strip.

  Day Three found the five of them on a defensive driving exercise on some wild country roads in the moors. It was Stevie’s turn at the wheel of the massive jeep; she was sitting on a pile of folders and coats so she could see clearly over the steering wheel. The heavy tyres skidded and churned in the mud as she fought with the gears for traction on the slippery roads. The rain was now pouring down and it took all her strength just to handle the wheel and gear stick at the same time.

  From behind the curtain of rain, Stevie suddenly saw another 4WD parked on the road, blocking access. She slowed down. Rocks on either side of the track meant she couldn’t pass without going some way back and onto the moors. All at once, the back doors of the parked jeep were flung open and four men in black balacl
avas raced towards them.

  Stevie instinctively hit reverse and shot off backwards down the treacherous road. The pursuers dashed back into their vehicle and followed, gaining fast. Stevie spun the wheel and shifted gears again, this time shooting off-road into the moor, running parallel to the road.

  ‘Aren’t there dreadful bogs on these moors?’ she shouted above the roar of the engine.

  Mark, the journalist, nodded. ‘Big enough to swallow a car.’

  Stevie glanced into the rear-vision mirror: the jeep was close behind. She floored the gas, skidding on the wet grass. ‘Do you think those men are part of the course?’ she asked nervously. They had been warned to expect surprises throughout the day.

  The pursuers were driving them towards the rocks, knowing a jeep had no hope of passing there. Stevie looked over to the left and onto the moors. It was too risky to take the jeep across them if this was just a training exercise. There was a real risk that she would drown everyone in the car in a bog. She came to a halt at the rocks.

  ‘I guess we are about to find out.’

  The five were hooded and bound; their attackers didn’t speak a word. It was terrifying. What had they said in the briefing on interrogation? Accept your situation; your captors have physical control and there is nothing you can do about it.

  Stevie fought to keep her mind clear of fear, concentrating on the beating of her heart, the sound of the rain on the car roof, the fact that this was just an exercise . . . It felt very, very real.

  The interrogation started in an old farmhouse somewhere. Stevie had focused her energies on remaining very still, becoming very small, disappearing from the radar. Their captors had so far ignored her and directed their attentions to the belligerent tattooed oil worker, and Mark, the reedy journalist.

  The two men were now standing in stress positions up against a wall. Stevie wondered how far the interrogators were allowed to take the exercise.

  Only one of their captors remained to conduct the interrogation; the other men went to play cards in the next room. Stevie soon noticed that the interrogator—an ugly bulldog of a man—had taken a specific interest in Mark. He began asking him questions about his sources, about the rogue soldiers. Mark was foolishly trying to talk back, perhaps buoyed by the confidence that this was just an exercise.