Gorsky

by Vesna Goldsworthy

  ‘What?’ he asked impatiently. ‘What word?’

  I could see that he knew, but I repeated it anyway.

  ‘Yid. You are very fond of the word Yid. What are you hoping to achieve with it? Change Natalia’s mind?’

  He snorted as he changed gears.

  ‘I am sorry about that, Nick, old chap. I am not proud of myself, but I feel safe. I know what I was saying. There is no way she would leave me for that man, billions or not. He will forever remind her of borscht and poverty, and he knows it too. Why do you think she called our daughter Daisy? She doesn’t even like to speak Russian if she can help it.’

  We moved on. A group of young boys emerged from an underpass. Only God and they themselves knew what they were up to at this hour. The railings separating us from them were decorated with metal cut-outs of sheep. The animals were supposed to look jolly, like something in a playground, yet the effect was depressing. You could not but see them for what they were: a dismal effort to evoke the memory of the pastures which had lent the ugly concrete junction their name.

  Five days later, Janice Allaoui disappeared.

  I picked up the free newspaper from a stand at Sloane Square station. At first, I did not even notice the item, buried deep on page sixteen. The following morning, leafing through yesterday’s news in search of a book review I had flagged up, I spotted the familiar smiling face, the picture cut out of a wedding photograph.

  West London woman reported missing: it was the sort of article one ignores every day, and only reads if it concerns someone in one’s own neighbourhood, sometimes not even then. The groom’s shoulder was truncated but an arm was still visible around hers, a male hand just above her elbow. Judging by the skin colour, it wasn’t Allaoui’s. And Janice Allaoui wasn’t wearing a bridal gown but a white jacket. You knew that the occasion was a wedding from the posy of silk flowers tucked into a pile of locks carefully arranged above her ear. The ornament was simple enough to make one uncertain whether she was the bride or an ageing bridesmaid – still lively, still attractive – if plump blondes were your sort of thing, an English tulip rather than an English rose.

  The picture must have been taken some years ago, but Janice was already in her mid-thirties. Slightly flushed or slightly drunk, clearly happy, she looked into the camera with the feistiness and insouciance I remembered from that strange evening in Soho with Summerscale. Her loop earrings reflected the light of the flash so that there was around her neck a sort of halo which merged with the smoke from a cigarette she was holding some inches away from her mouth. Her other hand, arm and most of her left shoulder had been cropped in an editorial bid to get rid of any traces of her companion.

  I phoned Gery immediately. We had just met in a pub when, on a TV screen above the bar, Allaoui appeared in a press conference, looking every inch the wife-beater and murderer. He had probably strangled her and dumped her body into Regent’s Canal, or buried it in an unmarked grave in Kensal Green. He had made no secret of his intentions when I last saw him – he had said that she was lucky he hadn’t got rid of her. His involvement in the murder was so obvious that the police must have interviewed him the moment his wife was reported missing. Why were they letting him parade this pretence of grief?

  The sound was off, but Gery’s eyes were glued to the screen. Allaoui was flanked by a policeman on one side and two official-looking types on the other: detectives, or lawyers, I couldn’t tell. The Met must have played its cards carefully to avoid hurting racial sensitivities. The policeman was an Arab, as handsome as Adonis in his dark blue uniform. The English guys looked like a couple of spuds next to him.

  Allaoui was a good five inches shorter than the shortest of them, and he wore a ridiculous electric-blue suit of some shiny material, unmatched by a green shirt with a big round collar, and a pink polka-dot tie with a wide knot, which looked as though it was about to choke him. He was unshaven, uncombed, red eyed and bewildered.

  ‘This town is nothing, and you and I are nothing in it, my friend,’ I could almost hear him again. The ticker at the bottom of the screen repeated the basic details of the case. Camera lights flashed. One of the men held a sheet of paper and read from it, then Allaoui descended from a kind of lectern-podium, looking even smaller, like a cross between a ten-year-old boy and a pub bouncer. The camera zoomed in on his face and he gazed steadily into it. I felt as though he had intuited that this was a staring contest between him and me. His eyes welled with tears, while he watched, fixedly, for a couple of beats, then crumpled, like a balloon deflating, into the arms of a policeman who guided him away from the crowd and the cameras.

  ‘What an act!’ I said.

  ‘You know this man, Nick,’ Gery said. ‘Do you? He looks like a drug dealer. Do you know him?’

  I couldn’t quite work out if she really had no idea.

  ‘Yes. I mean no. Someone I know knows him,’ I stammered. ‘All I know is that I don’t expect his wife is alive.’

  Gery stared at me for a moment, then for some unaccountable reason decided not to press on.

  ‘It’s a cruel city. People do all sorts to survive. They deal, they steal. If they are men. If they are women, they sell their bodies. One way or another, we all end up doing it. We make unsuitable choices, or the sale goes wrong. I expect you are right about her death. They are tough, women like that one, they don’t just run away from home.’

  9

  The next day the ghastly plot took another turn. I was in a department store in Sloane Square. I raised my eyes from my purchase and saw – multiplied on several rows of TV screens of different kinds and sizes – the familiar face of Janice’s sister, red with hysteria and tears. The camera zoomed out to take in her interviewer, a Chinese girl in a pair of vertiginous heels, and I realised that they were standing in the doorway of a block of flats in Covent Garden. I had to get home. I dropped everything and ran down four flights of escalators and along the King’s Road. I was out of breath when I switched on my little TV and collapsed into the chair in front of it. I had a good idea what I was about to hear.

  In a repeat of the interview that was going to play on the hour every hour for the rest of the day, Sal was describing the way she had discovered her sister’s body. She had been reluctant to go to the flat, although she had the keys. She feared that she was being watched. She kept calling her sister’s mobile. She was convinced that Janice was on the run, because of her husband’s threats. She waited for her sister to return her calls. Then, as the days went by, she could wait no longer.

  The moment she opened the door of the flat, she knew. Her sister’s body was on the sofa, face down. The room was a mess of upended furniture and breakages. Janice’s nose was broken, and her face was bloody. She had clearly put up a fight. And she was wearing her favourite red Roland Mouret dress, Sal repeated on the loop, every hour, as though the designer’s name held a vital clue.

  Mahmoud Allaoui was still distressed but there was malicious glee in his misery when the focus of the inquiry moved to Tom Summerscale. He couldn’t have suspected that his wife was having an affair with an English gentleman of Summerscale’s calibre, he said, but he clearly wasn’t astounded either.

  ‘I am devastated,’ he added, in his heavily accented English, ‘to lose my beloved wife in this way. Devastated that she was found in the flat of Mr Summerscale with whom I have had business dealings over a number of years. But if she was unfaithful to me, then I am not at all sorry to see her dead. There is only one punishment for adultery.’

  That last sentence – part accusation, part confession – was replayed many times over the photographs of Janice and Summerscale now set side by side, yet looking like the most unlikely adulterous couple imaginable. They were occasionally juxtaposed with a picture of Natalia and Daisy. Although the child’s face was pixelated, the image seemed like a still from some glamorous Hollywood film, an illustration for the next news item, a mistake.

  I declined the call handler’s offer of an interpreter when I dialled th
e Freephone number provided in the police appeal which followed Allaoui’s press conference. I volunteered to go to the station and I gave my statement to a couple of officers who were an image – a caricature almost – of British decency. A solicitous young policewoman noted my words down. Her handwriting was as round as her waistline. Her body was bursting out of her uniform as keenly as her ginger curls kept escaping the bun at the back of her head. Her male colleague nodded when I tried to explain why I felt that Allaoui was a liar, although I had no evidence for it. I see what you mean, Mr Kimović, he repeated a couple of times, only to follow up with questions which suggested that he didn’t. The cameras buzzed on, but I had become so used to CCTV in those months with Gorsky that I was barely noticing them.

  They offered telephone numbers and leaflets explaining what to do if I was summoned to provide a longer statement, or if I was called to court. If I felt I needed someone to talk to, they said, they had trained counsellors offering their services in a range of languages. The only psychological advice I am likely to need, I mused sourly, was how to live with a feeling that I might have just made Natalia’s life harder than it was already.

  Details about Tom Summerscale dribbled out. His career as a legal advisor to powerful Russian business interests, his glamorous lifestyle, his young Russian wife, even his first wife and her undeniably decent Englishness: at first everything seemed to indicate that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with a murder as sordid as this. And Summerscale himself denied it adamantly. Yes, he knew her. Yes, they had even had sex on one or two occasions. It was pointless to deny that now, although a gentleman should never tell. Yes, she had the keys to his Covent Garden flat. Of course she did: she was looking after it. A caretaker. A cleaner, if you will. It did not need much cleaning because it was uninhabited. No, it wasn’t unusual to own a house in Chelsea and a flat in Covent Garden. He had meant to let it out but had forgotten to do so. That wasn’t unusual either. London property was a good investment, it did not need to be put to work. No, he hadn’t been there in weeks. And no, he had no idea how often Mrs Allaoui went there alone or how much she was paid for her caretaking duties. One of his managers took care of that.

  I remained convinced of Summerscale’s innocence even after the victim’s sister gave another interview, adding to her original story and implicating him further, allowing the media reports to continue titillating their audiences while stopping short of any formal accusation. It is a lie that Janice was just some servant, just a cleaner, Sal said. You don’t take cleaners to expensive restaurants and present them with designer clothes: at that she waved a picture of Janice in a pink Chanel suit she claimed was a gift from Summerscale. She also asserted that he used to buy birthday presents for the spotty boy and girl whose photographs I had noticed on the wall of Janice’s kitchen, the children of her first marriage. He might have had other lovers but Janice was, for many years, and long before he married the Russian and she married Allaoui, very special, almost, you could say, the perfect wife he had never had. She certainly took better care of him, Sal ploughed on, than the Russian, who couldn’t look after a guinea pig if you asked her to.

  Three or four ‘friends’, all flunkeys like me, came out of the woodwork to confirm the truthfulness of Sal’s story. Like me, they were all at some point or other entertained by Summerscale, part of the same strange ‘happy household’ routine he seemed to have indulged Janice with. It was both deeper and stranger than the usual tales of extramarital sex. He enjoyed being mothered and pampered by her, and he was generous in return, taking her out, sometimes with her sister, to the kind of smart places where a woman like her stood out more than a glossy model. He was also, it seemed undeniable, sexually attracted to her, in spite of – or perhaps because of – her cheerful commonness. Why would he keep her as his mistress otherwise?

  Sal’s claims provoked more public animosity directed at Summerscale’s life of thoughtless privilege than there ever was for Allaoui’s pleas of an immigrant’s hard luck, which he used to justify every unsavoury move he made. Who else could have killed the poor deluded woman, suddenly everyone seemed to ask, but Thomas Summerscale? There was no sign of forced entry to the flat and he was the only person who both had the keys to it and knew that Janice would be there. His DNA was all over the place. An obvious motive was still lacking, but he was the obvious culprit.

  The most unexpected response to such allegations came from Summerscale’s first wife. While Natalia remained, for public purposes, unavailable and aloof, her photographs flashing intermittently like sightings of Yeti footprints, her predecessor agreed to be interviewed in front of her Gloucestershire cottage, under trailing wisteria, the image of a gracefully ageing Home Counties belle in a green waxed jacket, stroking a chocolate Labrador as she spoke. She asserted that Tom Summerscale was a 24-carat cad but no, not a murderer, definitely not a murderer. No, not even in the heat of passion. Never.

  In spite of her valiant effort, he was taken into custody.

  The completion of my Gorsky assignment could not be deferred for much longer. I still walked dutifully to work from my now rent-free accommodation every morning but, once inside the Barracks, I spent most of my time by the library windows, looking over towards The Laurels, hoping to catch sight of Natalia or Gery. Although I knew they were there, the house looked completely deserted. Even the paparazzi now lingered aimlessly by their stepladders, smoking and dropping empty crisp packets on the pavement.

  It was during one such moment that Gorsky walked in on me. He seemed startled to see me. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. His entire body exuded tension. His hands were tucked into his coat pockets at an unnatural angle. His white shirt was unbuttoned and his clavicles seemed raised, with deep dark pools behind them. They made the base of his neck look bruised, as if someone had been attempting to strangle him too. He apologised for disturbing me, absurdly, for I was clearly not working while supposedly still in his pay. I stammered something apologetic in turn.

  ‘No matter, no matter …’ he interrupted me and stepped nearer to the French window.

  ‘She …’ he started.

  I waited. I hadn’t spoken to him since the body was found. ‘She’ was likely to be Natalia. I knew from Gery that he had been on the phone to her practically all the time, begging to take her away from London. Antibes, Yalta, Eilat, Samarkand: she only needed to name the place. Instead, she just sobbed.

  Late at night, I had seen him leave the Barracks on a motorcycle and disappear into the empty streets. Once, after Summerscale was arrested, I stayed by my window long enough to witness the motorcycle return an hour later. Gorsky parked across the road, made a phone call and the gate opened. It was an inconspicuous sight, a helmeted man on a motorcycle in unremarkable bikers’ leathers – but for the oddness of the hour you would assume it was a courier coming to deliver something. Yet the sight of him alone out on the street was almost shocking. He must have dispensed with his bodyguards on his excursions for Natalia’s sake. She did not conceal that she disliked the Russians in his entourage because they witnessed and understood more than she wanted anyone but him to know. That he would make himself vulnerable like that seemed to me a more solid testimony of what she meant to him than even the edifice we were standing in.

  ‘She …’ He continued after a long pause: ‘She tells me that she knows that he had been unfaithful. That she had known all along. That it did not matter to her. That she knows he isn’t the killer. That he couldn’t have been. That he was with her every night and every day since that day at the pool. That he clung to her because he sensed that he was losing her. She had told the police already, but an alibi provided by his wife is not enough, it seems. They will – she believes – soon find something to nail Allaoui. And I am trying to help with that. But she is not helping me to help her. We must wait until this is over, she says. I must wait. So she says …’

  He flinched when he uttered the word ‘wife’ and he swung the French doors as though
he was going to shatter the glass, but then, at the last moment, caught them, gently brought them back together and walked out of the room.

  The following day was to be my penultimate working day at the Barracks. In truth, calling it work had become even more of a misnomer than that military name was for Gorsky’s sumptuous Schloss. After the sun went down, the maid brought in a tray of sandwiches and a silver teapot, part of a continuous array of treats Gorsky had arranged to make my so-called toil more bearable. I was aimlessly pacing up and down the vast room when he returned, looking even more tortured than he had on the previous day. He continued his speech almost exactly where he had left it.

  ‘You may think me an idiot, Nikolai, a holy fool. I remember her at nineteen, the prettiest, cleverest girl you could imagine, all the more beautiful for remaining so noble in those hideous surroundings. Only in Russia – and God knows why – do you find such women. I was already beginning to mean something in business. The Yeltsin times were difficult, chaotic. It was easy to make money under Boris Nikolaevich – irresponsible drunken oaf that people now say he was – but just as easy to lose it, and more. Human life was cheaper than a gallon of oil. Natalia’s father saved my life a couple of times. I owed him loyalty. And she was meant for me: this was a simple mathematical equation, something stronger than us. I owned a small flat in St Petersburg, a secondhand Mercedes, even some decent clothes – too ostentatious, perhaps. We all were in those days. What was the point of being rich otherwise? we thought. I was a child myself, I had no concept of modesty. I went around in an astrakhan coat which I received as a present from someone in the Kremlin who got it from the president of Azerbaijan, can you imagine? I went into diplomatic stores – they still had them – using a stolen Israeli passport, just to be able to purchase silk ties and Italian shoes. Would you believe it? Volkov asked me to look after her, and I promised I would. I am not sure I ever kept that promise.’