Motherland: A gripping crime thriller set in the dark heart of Putin's Russia

by G. D. Abson

  ‘Primakov is still there, he may be able to confirm.’

  ‘Good. Can you call him?’

  She took out her phone and tapped in the number. Somewhere in Zena’s apartment, she imagined Primakov trying to remove his latex gloves then wrestle with his nylon suit to extract his mobile.

  ‘Yes, Captain?’ he sounded breathless.

  ‘Leo, I’m at headquarters. Can I ask you some more questions?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Was there any sign of a forced entry?’

  ‘Nothing obvious. No drilling or I’d have noticed.’ He paused and she assumed he had gone to examine the door.

  ‘Are you still there, Natalya?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up and was conscious of the men in the room watching her.

  ‘Zena’s lock is difficult to bump with a blank key but there are scratches on the mounting. They might be consistent with picking but a professional doesn’t usually leave marks behind.’

  She thought of the story Zena’s elderly neighbour had told about her husband, Andrei, going out on drunken binges with Vitaly, the man who had once lived in Zena’s apartment. On nights out with the other menti in the station, Mikhail struggled in more ways than one to fit his key into the hole when he got home.

  ‘More like a drunken husband I reckon. Also I doubt a kidnapper or murderer knows how to open a door with a torsion wrench and pick.’

  ‘Then, there’s the babushka next door,’ he said. ‘Lyudmila asked if I wanted some tea ten minutes ago. Whoever broke in had to get past her and I bet she doesn’t miss anything. My guess is they had a set of keys.’

  She thought of Zena’s untouched clothes in her wardrobe, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth, offering another reason why the visitor wasn’t a normal burglar. ‘Any idea what they were there for?’

  ‘What does every student have these days?’

  She wasn’t in the mood, particularly with Vasiliev watching her, but needed to humour him. ‘Books, pens, a laptop, writing paper.’

  ‘Try the third one.’

  ‘Computer?’

  ‘Not there, but even poor students have them.’

  ‘It’s a little unnecessary,’ she said. ‘Why steal her computer when we can get the information from her service provider?’

  ‘Maybe there was something stored on it. A document perhaps? The solvent on the door handle suggests they were overzealous so maybe there was nothing.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she mused, ‘or perhaps they were old fashioned and hadn’t realised the extent of technology and police powers. They slipped up in another way.’

  ‘What?’ he asked, and she enjoyed the thought of discovering something the ever-diligent Primakov might have missed. Crime scene investigators and detectives may have discrete job descriptions but they knew enough about the other’s work to enjoy a little second guessing.

  ‘They left Zena’s wall calendar. It’s behind the archway as you enter the kitchen.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that,’ he said, a little unconvincingly.

  ‘Anyway, I’d better get back. Thanks for helping, Leo.’

  She hung up and stared at Vasiliev at the top table. ‘Primakov agrees. Whoever broke in most likely used a set of keys. Zena’s neighbour had some, but she must be in her late seventies.’

  The Colonel rested his elbows on the table and studied her. ‘So whoever let themselves into her apartment took Zena’s keys when they killed or kidnapped her.’

  ‘What were they looking for?’ asked Mikhail.

  ‘Maybe the girl had more designer clothes,’ offered Rogov.

  Vasiliev shook his head dislodging his quiff. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘how many burglars do you know, Sergeant, who are familiar with haute couture?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  ‘None, sir,’ Vasiliev repeated. ‘The father has money so that makes her an obvious target for criminal elements. Major Ivanov, have you been able to make contact with the family?’

  Mikhail straightened in his seat. ‘Not yet, Colonel. The father is a well-known businessman, Thorsten Dahl. I left a message at his headquarters in Stockholm…on an answering machine.’ He shrugged. ‘Last I heard, the Svens were doing a thirty-hour week. Their menti weren’t much use either.’ His eyes flicked up to a wall-clock. ‘They took my number two hours ago and promised to get back to me.’

  ‘Of course,’ began Vasiliev, ‘if the girl has been taken, it’s entirely possible the kidnappers have threatened to harm her if the father cooperates with us or his police.’ The Colonel turned to her. ‘You’ve handled kidnappings before, Captain. How long, in your experience, does it take before they contact the family?’

  Her mouth was drier than the Aral Sea. ‘Two days, maximum.’

  ‘And if the motive was sexual. How long if they had intended to kill her?’

  ‘The same,’ she croaked, ‘often a lot sooner.’

  ‘What about involving the FSB?’ Dostoynov volunteered. ‘I could always speak with my former colleagues.’

  ‘Or there’s the Investigative Committee?’ suggested Mikhail.

  ‘As far as we know, this isn’t political so let’s keep it with us.’ Vasiliev scratched his United Russia badge thoughtfully. ‘All right. Captain Ivanova, overtime is authorised. Sergeant Rogov is assigned to you. The rest of you can enjoy the weekend.’

  The FSB were as likely to find Zena as they were to shoot her and claim she had been part of a Scandinavian terrorist network. As for the Investigative Committee, or the Russian FBI as they liked to think of themselves, the Colonel knew they were too shrewd to get involved in a case without solid evidence or leads. That left two options: Vasiliev burning his budget to investigate what had happened to Zena, or leaving her fate in the hands of the municipal police on Vasilyevsky Island who she expected to dutifully file a missing person’s report then wait for the girl to surface. But Zena Dahl was a wealthy foreigner who had disappeared at the height of Piter’s tourist season; if she really had been murdered or abducted and he did nothing, Vasiliev’s career would sink lower than the Russian flag on the Arctic seabed.

  He caught her staring at him. ‘That will be all, Captain.’

  Chapter 10

  Ever since she had been a child, Natalya thought the upholstered chair with the wooden back resembled a small throne. Apart from her brown eyes and some jewellery that was too dated to wear, it was the only physical reminder of her mother’s existence. After her parents’ divorce, the poor woman had worked herself to an early heart attack and died in it. Mikhail was there now and on the table in front of him were half a dozen shopping bags and a plate with slices of sausage and bread that he was eating with gusto.

  She picked up his dripping raincoat and fixed it to the hook at the back of the apartment door then unpacked the bags by mutual agreement, knowing he couldn’t be trusted to put everything away in the right places

  He asked, ‘How about some tea, Angel?’

  It was an affectation that used to annoy her but the habit was too ingrained. At least she’d managed to stop him calling her “babe”, “little fox”, and all his other annoying epithets. She frowned briefly then smoothed it away. ‘We only have postman’s. We forgot to buy loose leaf.’

  ‘We forgot?’

  ‘OK, you forgot. But apart from that, you did well.’

  There were other things he’d gotten wrong according to Roscontrol, a citizens’ consumer group she followed. The smoked Odessa sausage he was tucking into was made from animal skin and soya; at the onset of winter, the windscreen cleaning fluid he’d bought would freeze in his Mercedes; and most alarmingly, the bottle of Slavyanovskaya mineral water exceeded alpha radiation limits.

  He waved the knife at her. ‘You want some?’

  ‘Not hungry. I’ll eat later.’ She patted her stomach and hoped it wouldn’t give her away by growling.

  While Mikhail had been shopping she had called Yulia Federova and told her to attend police headquarters on Monday morning for a form
al interview. The rest of the afternoon and early evening had been wasted scouring the internet, trying to find a way to contact Zena’s father.

  ‘Where’s Anton?’ he mumbled while chewing.

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe at Dinara’s? According to the terms of your divorce, he is supposed to live there.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he mused, ‘more like Tanya’s. I hope he’s behaving himself.’

  She finished unpacking the shopping then switched on the kettle before retreating to the study. Sitting at their computer desk, she typed ‘Zena Dahl’ on the Yandex search engine but it returned little except for links to the missing girl’s Facebook and VKontakte pages. She switched to Google, but struggled to find her amidst the other Zena Dahls who had a higher net presence. Next, she tried the father, Thorsten, and followed a link to the landing page she had seen earlier for GDH Dahl Engineering. There was nothing of note there and she returned to the search list finding an InformationWeek commentary on the liquidity issues the company was facing due to the oil price collapse and increased competition from China. She grew bored of the article’s dry, financial language and returned to the main search again, this time coming across an image of the company’s main stockholder on the Forbes website. Thorsten Dahl was a blond, big chested Viking wearing a frayed fisherman’s jumper. The only concession to his elevated position in Swedish society appeared to be his neat, side-parted hair.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said aloud. Dahl was sandwiched between a pair of Tetra Pak billionaires under the heading of ‘The World’s Highest Net Worth Swedes.’

  ‘Thorsten Dahl is rich,’ she shouted through.

  ‘Yeah, I told you he is.’

  ‘No, I mean he’s rich like an oligarch.’

  ‘The kettle’s boiled,’ she heard Mikhail shout, already bored with the conversation; presumably he knew already.

  ‘Thanks,’ she shouted back, ‘I’ll have tea.’

  She returned to the search results and clicked on a website run by a group of Swedish anarchists. They had posted a picture of Dahl hauling skis outside a villa near Åre and another of him posing with environmentalists in front of an eco-cabin made from recycled glass. She scrolled past photographs of his island retreat on the Sankt Anna archipelago, his six-room pied-à-terre in central Stockholm, and finally, his ancestral pile in Gothenburg. If the online translation was correct, the anarchists were calling him an ugly capitalist boar, but when she looked at Dahl’s picture again, she could have sworn he’d become quite handsome.

  She heard Mikhail talking and wondered if Anton had returned, his finely honed sixth sense telling him the fridge had been restocked.

  The door to the study opened. ‘Is that my tea?’

  ‘No,’ Mikhail sighed, ‘I’ve just had a call from a lawyer.’

  ‘Criminal…or divorce?’ she smiled brightly.

  ‘Commercial, I think. Someone passed on the messages I left for Dahl. He works for him and is based here in Piter. The name’s Anatoly Lagunov.’

  ‘Did you ask him about Zena?’

  ‘He did all the talking. Dahl was on his way to Düsseldorf when he got my message.’

  ‘So what’s the plan?’

  It was nearly eight and she hadn’t started cooking. With Anton away they might find a restaurant, maybe a romantic one if Mikhail could stomach it.

  ‘His lawyer – Lagunov – is coming here.’

  ‘Here?’

  She frowned. To say it was irregular was putting it mildly, but there again the whole investigation had an unofficial tone to it. Until Zena Dahl’s disappearance was confirmed as a kidnapping or murder, there could be no teams working shifts in dedicated rooms; instead, she had her husband – when he didn’t have better things to do – and an unreliable sergeant.

  Mikhail sliced the sausage with the knife. ‘I told him we’d see him at the station tomorrow but he’s briefing Thorsten Dahl tonight and wanted to talk to us first.’

  ‘And you agreed to this?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Mikhail gave her a wolfish smile. ‘I told the lawyer to come here then we’ll all see Dahl together.’

  ‘So when is this happening?’

  ‘As we speak. Dahl’s plane is diverting to Pulkovo. He doesn’t have a visa so this way he can talk to us without officially setting foot on Russian soil.’

  ‘Misha, what are you talking about?’

  ‘We’re meeting Dahl on his Gulfstream, Angel.’

  After fifteen minutes of speed-cooking that produced a green salad and her second pizza in two days, she heard the apartment’s buzzer and stuffed a slice of pepperoni in her mouth as Mikhail left to meet Anatoly Lagunov at the main entrance.

  She was still chewing a few minutes later when she heard the doorbell. A stream of liquid trickled from the tip of Lagunov’s umbrella as he propped it against the exterior wall in the hallway. He was wearing a charcoal suit that fitted his stocky frame and had presumably been tailored. As he looked up, sharp eyes covered by rain-spattered, metal-rimmed glasses met hers. He removed his spectacles and wiped them on a lint cloth from his trouser pocket, then smoothed his damp, grey hair with a hand.

  The impression she had of him was one of negation. Anatoly Lagunov was the type of man the intelligence services liked to recruit: he looked fit as well as intelligent, but more importantly, his face was utterly unmemorable. He was a person who could never light up a room so much as glide in and out of it unnoticed, extracting all the gossip. Zena’s elderly neighbour had offered a similar, bland description of the man who had visited her apartment block the day before.

  She swallowed her mouthful. ‘What have I missed?’

  ‘Introductions,’ Mikhail offered. ‘This is my wife, Natalya, and Mister Lagunov is Thorsten Dahl’s… what do you call yourself, Anatoly?’

  She bristled, hearing Misha strip away her title. Not “Captain”, not “Senior Detective”, but “my wife”. All authority sucked away by the extractor fan she had left whirring in the kitchen.

  Lagunov flashed a row of neat, small teeth and pulled out a business card. ‘Officially a lawyer, unofficially a fixer.’

  She pocketed the card. ‘Tea?’

  Lagunov sat in her mother’s throne chair then checked his watch. ‘Please… we have a little time.’

  She poured a cup and handed it to him.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Lagunov said, addressing Mikhail, ‘but I’m here because of your messages. You think something has happened to Thorsten’s daughter?’

  ‘Mister Lagunov,’ she began, ‘Zena was last seen around one o’clock on Friday morning. Are you aware if Mister Dahl, or anyone else, has heard of her since then?’

  The lawyer sipped his tea and looked thoughtful. ‘I have spoken with Thorsten briefly on the matter; he didn’t think so, but you are better speaking to him than me. We do appreciate your concern; is there any cause for it?’

  Lagunov removed a wallet from his trouser pocket and placed it on the table as if it had been causing him some discomfort. From her position on his right she could see the notes’ section was at least a centimetre thick. ‘I mean she is an adult with her own mind. Is there a reason to believe something bad may have happened to her? You are both detectives in the Criminal Investigations Directorate. Has a crime been committed?’

  ‘Not to our knowledge.’ Mikhail got up and took an Ochakovo from the fridge. He remained on his feet and eyed the lawyer.

  ‘Then I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. As I said, we do appreciate your concern. Thorsten will thank you himself when you meet him, but the Swedes are more verbal than us when it comes to gratitude.’

  As a bribe it wasn’t the most subtle she had witnessed, but did it really count as one when they were only doing their jobs? Last year, the end-of-term bottle of cognac she had given to Karpov, Anton’s old maths teacher, wasn’t just a gift for a hard-working professional, it opened the conversation and allowed an incongruous link to develop between Anton’s unwritten school report and the cost of winter tyres for Karpov’
s new Subaru.

  Her eyes flicked to the wallet and away – an indication that, if nothing more, she appreciated the offer. ‘Mister Lagunov, can you give me some background on Zena? Did you know Zena personally?’

  ‘We’ve only met on a few occasions.’ The lawyer sipped his tea. ‘I can tell you she came here a year ago to take an undergraduate degree in International Relations at the State University.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about security?’

  She saw his sheepish expression and laughed with incredulity, letting her professional mask slip. ‘She’s the daughter of a billionaire, Mister Lagunov. What were you thinking?’

  The lawyer’s anodyne features sharpened as his small teeth became rodent-like: ‘Don’t lecture me!’ he snapped. ‘You know what the Swedes are like – they never got the message that Socialism is dead. I warned him but Zena didn’t want to be locked away like a princess in a tower; she wanted to be a normal student.’

  A normal student who walked around in designer clothes, she thought. It was as ridiculous as the fisherman’s jumper that Dahl wore to project his man-of-the-people image. ‘What about friends here?’

  Lagunov straightened as he tried to get comfortable; it was a useless gesture. Torquemada might have abandoned the rack had he known of her mother’s throne chair. ‘There’s a student named Yulia; she mentioned her to Thorsten in passing. He doesn’t know her surname.’

  ‘Federova,’ she offered, ‘I’ve already spoken with her.’

  ‘That was quick work,’ there was a flash of intensity from the eyes then he became unremarkable again.

  ‘And has Mister Dahl heard anything at all from Zena?’ Lagunov had already told her the answer, but a kidnapper might have forced Dahl to keep quiet.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it possible he has but isn’t telling you?’

  Lagunov frowned. ‘Possible, but not probable. I’ve worked with Thorsten for two decades and I like to think he trusts me.’

  ‘What about her mother or siblings?’

  Lagunov shook his head. ‘If I may tell you this in strict confidence’ – he shuffled in the chair – ‘Zena was adopted.’