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

by G. D. Abson

  ‘Your sister left a message with him.’ Mikhail, she noticed, was unable to say Anton’s name. ‘She’s working a night shift in the hospital. She said you can call any time.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Mikhail fiddled with his belt buckle, his hands yanking at it. ‘What?’

  ‘The mess.’

  He glared at his discarded shirt on the floor then realised she was talking about the beer bottles and pizza boxes. ‘Anton.’ He pulled the belt free and shrugged off his trousers.

  She wanted to laugh at the incongruous sight of him being angry in his underwear and socks.

  ‘Your fault,’ he hissed.

  ‘Mine?’ her voice rose in pitch.

  ‘You left that note telling him we were going to the airport. He thought it meant we were going away and he decided to invite some friends around. Luckily they left for a club an hour ago.’

  ‘At least he tried to clean up.’

  He glared at her again, then dropped his underwear to save his socks for last.

  ‘Did you check the bribe today?’

  ‘Because I feel like doing him a favour?’

  She realised he was better left to himself. ‘Don’t worry about it, Misha. I’ll call Klavdiya.’

  She undressed and pulled on a dressing gown before switching the light off. In the living room, she sat on the sofa and dialled her sister’s number from memory.

  ‘Claudia?’ she said, using the Germanic version of the name that her sister preferred.

  ‘Yes.’ Claudia sounded officious and she guessed there was someone close by.

  ‘You want me to call back?’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m giving a patient some water, they are going now.’

  ‘How’s life in Hannover?’

  She heard the sigh. ‘Too many Russians. They hear of a nurse who can speak their mother tongue and all day they want me to tell them what the doctor is saying. I tell them to fuck off and learn German if they want to live here, but they don’t care. They all watch cable TV and speak Russian with their friends. There’s no incentive.’

  ‘Damned Russians.’ Natalya laughed. ‘How’s Papa?’

  ‘Old and cantankerous. He misses his Natashenka – so do I. When are we going to see you?’

  She wondered how long it would take before Claudia brought up the subject. Living in Germany as children, they had both been given dual citizenship but she had relinquished hers to join the police. Despite the complaints, being an expatriate had made Claudia more Russian; returning to St. Petersburg had the opposite effect on her though. The mafia, the chauvinism, the bureaucracy, the incompetence; it made her despair. Spending her teenage years in Germany had turned her into an alien, a fifth columnist.

  ‘Natashenka?’

  ‘I’m still here. Can you wait a second?’

  She crossed into the study and switched on the desktop computer. If Mikhail couldn’t be relied on, she would do it herself. It was late, but another day might be lost before she or Mikhail had another opportunity to check if Anton’s university bribe had been paid. That was another thing – bribes. What sane society was based on paying and receiving bribes? Newly qualified doctors couldn’t locate the body’s organs because they had bought their medical degree; children wanted to be tax officials and prosecutors when they grew up. There was even an app for a mobile phone that calculated the appropriate bribe to offer for a traffic violation. The whole damned thing was ridiculous.

  ‘How’s my favourite nephew?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a little swine. Yesterday an AfD candidate came to our door canvassing for the local elections; Oskar dropped his trousers and did a shit on the hallway floor – right in front of him.’

  Natalya laughed.

  ‘I was scrubbing the tiles all day and I can still smell it. Don’t ever have children.’

  ‘I’m not intending to.’

  Claudia’s voice dropped, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘That’s alright, I’m not offended.’

  ‘How’s Mikhail?’

  ‘Usual. You should come over, we’ve got the space now.’

  There was silence on the other end then an exchange in German. Natalya used the lull in the conversation to enter the Windows password on the computer, then she checked the ring file where Mikhail kept his bank details. She opened the webpage for the North-Western then typed in his account name and password.

  ‘Are you happy, Natalya?’

  ‘I’m tired. There’s a new case: a missing girl, I’ve been working on it all day.’

  A page came up and she clicked on a button to show Mikhail’s transaction history. The balance showed 49,534 roubles, less than her monthly salary, and not enough for him to pay the bribe. There was a chance though that the Admissions Head had made a mistake and it had been paid some time ago.

  ‘I know you’d need to reapply for citizenship, but I have a friend at the kindergarten, one of the mothers, her husband is a Russian who joined the police. I can speak to her and find out how difficult it was.’

  ‘I’m nearly forty, Claudia – that’s too old to start again.’ On the screen she flicked through the last month of Mikhail’s transactions. She remembered the bribe had been for five thousand dollars. Since the economic sanctions, the exchange rate had nearly doubled, so she was expecting to find a transfer of approximately three hundred and twenty thousand roubles.

  ‘Nonsense,’ her sister said, ‘I’m sure they’ll take your experience into account.’

  There was nothing in Mikhail’s account for a withdrawal of that size in May, then she remembered they had accompanied Anton to the university last September. He could have transferred the money any time since then and it might explain why Mikhail or the Admissions Head had forgotten about it.

  ‘Claudia, do you remember that wedding you went to in St. Petersburg, sometime in the summer of 2014? Mikhail and I were standing in front of the priest holding candles. I was the one dressed in white?’

  Her sister grunted. ‘Well, I’m sure Misha could get a job too. He might have to learn German but, like I said, there are a lot who don’t and they get along fine.’

  She had a point, Natalya thought; her circle of friends was becoming smaller as people packed their bags for America, Germany, Israel, and Britain. Mikhail was sure to be the last to go though, at heart he was a Russian cop who would never feel at home anywhere else.

  ‘And Anton too,’ her sister said unconvincingly.

  That was fantasy. Anton was legally an adult and he didn’t have the transferable skills to get himself a one-way ticket. On top of that, he wasn’t her son. Mikhail leaving without Anton was a joke, and she wouldn’t go without them.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, to kill the conversation.

  She looked at the screen again and tapped the mouse button to take her to the April transactions. Mikhail’s salary was there, as were the debits for most of their household bills. She tapped the mouse button again for March. Nothing there. She tapped it again, and again. On the January statement she saw it: an amount of three hundred and fifteen thousand roubles leaving the account, no doubt to pay off the Head of Admissions. She looked closer, unable to believe what she was seeing. Her heart started pumping and her mouth felt dry: a few days before, a sum of three hundred thousand had been deposited into his account.

  ‘Well, think about it anyway,’ Claudia said.

  She was confident Mikhail had no other bank accounts, or at least none that he’d mentioned. In addition, he didn’t gamble and had never mentioned receiving a payout. There was no reason for anyone to give him such a large sum of money.

  She clicked on the highlighted transaction to see where it had come from. There was no name, only a long string of digits that she realised was an international payment number: an IBAN. The payment had come from abroad.

  ‘I will.’

  She opened a new tab, and the default Yandex browser appeared. She typed in “IBAN calculator” then copied and pasted the di
gits from Mikhail’s online account.

  ‘Do you know the story of frogs in boiling water?’ Claudia asked. ‘People always leave things until it’s too late.’

  After taking a deep breath, she hit send. A name came up with a fresh link for The Limassol Trading Bank.

  ‘Shit,’ she whispered under her breath.

  The bank’s website opened in a new tab when she clicked on the link. There was a small, square icon at the top of the page; a tricolour of white, blue and red. She tapped the flag and the page translated into Russian.

  ‘Are you there, Natalya?’

  She copied the sort code and account number from the IBAN calculator and pasted them into the fields on the bank’s web page and clicked the ‘Go’ button.

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  A welcome page appeared and she tapped the flag again. This time there was an empty field asking for a six-digit passcode and an account name. She typed in “Mikhail Ivanov” and used his birthdate for the code, then clicked ‘Go’. An error message appeared explaining there was an error in the details entered and she had two tries left.

  ‘You don’t sound there.’

  ‘I was just thinking about the frogs,’ Natalya said, staring at the screen.

  Her mind was reeling. Was this Mikhail’s account or did it belong to someone who owed him money? If it belonged to him then it was clearly illegal – public officials were banned from having overseas bank accounts. Worse than that, it was an offshore one of the type the mafia used to launder their dirty money. If it belonged to Mikhail then he was corrupt. There was no doubt about it.

  ‘What about the frogs?’ she heard Claudia say.

  ‘It’s not true,’ Natalya said after a moment. ‘The frogs don’t leave it too late. Some twisted scientist tried it with live ones. They all jumped out when it got too hot.’

  Chapter 14

  She heard the alarm on Mikhail’s phone but it sounded distant; an echo in another room. She yawned, keen to dispel the nightmare floating inside her head: Anton in danger and she unable to do anything about it.

  The alarm stopped. She was tired and sensed a cool trail of saliva running from the corner of her mouth to her jaw line. Without opening her eyes, she wiped it with the back of her hand but it came away dry. What time had she returned? Around four she guessed. It was coming back to her in flashes. She had left the apartment; too shocked at seeing the offshore bank account to climb into bed with Mikhail and pretend nothing had happened. There was another memory – she had gone to the Cheka bar and Semion the barman had flirted with her, offering free vodka. She had driven home drunk. Her fingers made contact with an upholstered wall as she reached for Mikhail, wondering what to say to him. She opened her eyes, puzzled, and stared at the edge of the sofa bed. She frowned, then remembered assembling it and lying down fully clothed because the bedding was at the top of the wardrobe in Anton’s room and she hadn’t wanted to disturb him.

  At least it was Sunday and she could afford to deal with it all later. She closed her eyes and drifted off. There was a noise in her face, a metallic whine of a fly. She opened her eyes and saw Mikhail standing over her, an electric toothbrush in his mouth.

  ‘Oh God, what time is it?

  ‘Nearly ten,’ he mumbled.

  She felt stiff and in need of a hot shower.

  He was wearing the grey shirt his ex-wife Dinara had bought for him in the dying days of their relationship; it was a bad omen. ‘What the hell happened to you?

  ‘I couldn’t sleep so I went to the bar…the one Yulia said she had gone to with Zena.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I wasted my time. No witnesses and the security tapes have been reused.’

  ‘You told me that last time.’

  ‘This time I checked with the manager.’ She yawned to cover the lie.

  He switched off the toothbrush and gave her a look that was more sad than angry. ‘Then why didn’t you come to bed?’

  ‘It was late and I didn’t want to wake you.’ Another lie, Mikhail could sleep through the tank section of a May Day parade.

  ‘Do we have a problem?’ he asked.

  The question wasn’t a surprise considering she was exuding vodka from every pore and Mikhail was no fool.

  Anton stepped into the living room wearing a pair of yellow boxer shorts. ‘Natasha, have we got any juice?’

  ‘No,’ she said, addressing no one in particular and watching Mikhail frown as he wondered whom she had replied to.

  Outside it was overcast and Natalya took the Metro to Vasileostrovskaya station then walked for a kilometre along Sredny Prospekt before turning onto Veselnaya Ulitsa. It was quiet outside Zena’s apartment; there was no twitch of the curtains from the neighbour, Lyudmila Kuznetsova, and she let herself in. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looked around. The food in the fridge, what there had been of it, was starting to smell and she was glad Primakov had taken the rubbish away. The heavy green curtains that had come with the apartment were still drawn but now the room felt like a mausoleum – a tomb without a body. It was hard to imagine the girl coming back to breathe life into the place. She stepped into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe, surprised to find the designer clothes still there. If Zena didn’t return, one day they too would disappear, leaving another mystery to solve.

  She heard the door in the adjacent apartment open and called out, ‘Mrs Kuznetsova?’

  ‘Yes?’

  There was a shuffle and in the hallway she saw the old woman wearing a black headscarf and clear plastic glasses. ‘Still no news?’

  Natalya shook her head. ‘May I ask you a question?’ She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice – it was the first lead she had on the case. Following regulations, she ought to bring Lyudmila Kuznetsova to headquarters and present her with a range of images but she sensed the old woman spoke more freely at home.

  ‘May I?’ The soft wrinkles on Kuznetsova’s face cracked into a smile as she impersonated Natalya. ‘You are so polite. Are you sure you’re a ment?’

  ‘I wonder it myself.’ Natalya took out her phone. ‘I’d like to show you someone. You said a man came to Zena’s door two days ago.’

  ‘The bureaucrat, yes. He was waiting for me to leave.’

  Natalya flicked through the saved pictures and selected the one Mikhail had taken of Anatoly Lagunov on Dahl’s Gulfstream. She kept her voice level, ‘Is that him?’

  The old woman pulled off her glasses then peered at it. ‘Can you make it bigger?’

  Natalya tapped the image twice and it enlarged. ‘Is that better?’

  ‘These phones are a miracle.’

  ‘Yes they are. Is that the man you saw?’

  ‘Wait. Patience and work will grind down everything.’ Lyudmila Kuznetsova squinted. ‘I knocked on the window and he looked up.’ She put a thick hand over the phone to push it away. ‘My eyesight isn’t so good now but I’m sure it was him.’

  She was walking halfway along Sredny Prospekt when her phone started ringing. She fumbled for it in her handbag then pressed her palm against her exposed ear to block out the surrounding traffic. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Primakov, Captain.’

  ‘I can see that.’ His VKontakte image showed him running; the photograph taken mid-stride as if he was floating on air. She tried to shake the tiredness out of her voice. ‘Sorry Leo, how can I help?’

  ‘Major Ivanov asked me to call.’

  ‘He did?’ A driver beeped his horn at the car in front for being a millisecond too slow at pulling away from the traffic lights.

  ‘I left a preliminary report on my findings on your desk. Mikhail saw me, he was in his office.’

  She thought hard to remember what Primakov must be calling for. There had been a conversation in the plane. Where was her notepad?

  ‘Leo, can I call you back? It’s hard to hear you—’

  ‘He asked about bank details.’ Primakov got in fast before she ended the call.

  Not Mikha
il’s surely. Something to do with Zena. An image flashed in her mind of sitting in the staff room behind the bar in Cheka bar and one of the doormen telling her something. She had written it down.

  ‘Zena’s bank details,’ Primakov said. He was always polite but there was a hint of exasperation in his voice.

  She stepped inside a café and felt a chill of air conditioning. A waitress approached and she waved her away. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Mikhail asked me to let you know. There was nothing in her apartment. No statements, cards or bills. She was tidy, so maybe everything was online.’

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You hate mess. If a burglar broke into your place would they find your bank details?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  On Monday, she’d ask Rogov to call the main banks and see if any held Zena’s checking account. He was off duty now and only she had been authorised to continue working. Mikhail shouldn’t have been in either but he often used the weekend to catch up on his paperwork when the office was quiet.

  ‘Leo?’ She took a table by the window and mouthed “Cappuccino” at the waitress. ‘I need some advice.’

  ‘Captain?’

  She had little reason to doubt that Primakov was on her side, he had never done anything to make her think otherwise, but he was a very private individual and she wondered how much to tell him. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

  She heard heavy breathing on the other end of the line. ‘Leo, what are you doing?’

  ‘Going up the stairs.’ She heard a door close. ‘Now I’m home.’

  She shook her head. It felt too ridiculous to voice her thoughts. Inexplicably, there were tears forming and she blotted them with her fingertips, annoyed at her emotional incontinence. ‘If I ask this, promise it will go no further?’

  ‘Unless you’ve killed someone.’

  ‘You watch too much TV.’

  ‘True.’

  She looked around to make sure no one was in listening range then dropped her voice to make sure. ‘I have a friend, she’s worried her husband has got another woman set up in an apartment. She’s found a secret bank account but can’t get past the security questions.’

  ‘Then what do you want me to do?’