The Road from Midnight

by Wendyl Nissen

  It was now my turn and I looked at Ola.

  We had agreed not to tell them everything. We thought it better to keep my “arrangements” with Nikolai and The Others to ourselves for now. And so they were told the story of Polnoch, my life on the grand estate, an upbringing to rival a princess’s, and my life in Paris.

  Marco and Jane lapped it all up.

  Marco grinned and let go a huge sigh of relief. “Well, what do we do now?” he ventured. “Katya, you obviously have a life here in Paris, with Ola and that man you were with last night. Who is he?” said Jane.

  I simply told them that Nikolai was my father and repeated the story he had told me. That I was an orphan on the streets who he adopted. That story they didn’t lap up so eagerly.

  “You can’t tell me he didn’t know how he got you?” Jane exclaimed, expressing some of the temper I myself possessed in huge amounts. “He is a Russian oligarch from what you have described, he must have connections, he must have known all along!”

  Ola suddenly became animated.

  “I must stop you there, Jane,” she said in her stilted English. “The truth is we don’t know. I will not lie to you, I cared for Nikolai as a child and I know him very well. He is not one for the law, he slips and slides around it, but until we can get more information on what happened to Katya that night, we must not draw conclusions,” she said firmly.

  “But you may be wondering why Katya and I have come to you with our bags. We feel it is best if we leave Paris with you tonight. Should there be anything … how would you say … ”

  “Dodgy,” I helpfully interrupted.

  “Yes, dodgy. Nikolai will act swiftly and he will be very keen to rid himself of anything … Katya what is the word I want?”

  “Incriminating.”

  “Yes, that one. What I am trying to tell you is that all our lives are in danger if he finds out what is being discovered in this room. At the moment he thinks Katya is having surgery to enlarge her breasts, but that only gives us 48 hours.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your breasts,” exclaimed Jane in a motherly tone.

  “I know,” I said impatiently. “We made it up.”

  We all looked at each other. The room suddenly felt very cold. This special moment where mother and daughter were reunited after 15 years of hope and grief had suddenly lost its warmth.

  Then a knock at the door had us all jumping out of our seats.

  “Wait there,” said Marco cautiously. “I will check who it is through the peep hole and see if we are safe,” he said with gravitas.

  He crept over to the door in an effort to make as little noise as possible and peered through the hole in the door.

  His shoulders relaxed.

  “It’s okay, it’s just more coffee I ordered. Act natural everyone.”

  Over coffee Ola and I told them of the plan we had come up with on our way over to the hotel.

  “Ola suggests that perhaps we all leave as soon as possible for New Zealand, because should Nikolai have committed a crime in adopting me, and I really hope he hasn’t, he will have difficulty getting to us there in a hurry and we can conduct any investigation with the authorities when we get there,” I suggested.

  “Oh, yes, well I suppose that is a good suggestion,” agreed Jane. “Marco and I actually live in Europe and we haven’t been home ourselves for years, but it is a good place to be when you need to hide and we have a very efficient police service,” she said, perhaps a little surprised that her reunion with her daughter had suddenly become so dramatic and secretive.

  Marco suddenly woke up from his reverie. “Jane, I think we need to get Agapeto in on this. He is so high up in the Italian police these days he will be able to advise us and get us out of the country quickly.”

  “Charlotte, I mean, Katya, he is an old friend of mine and was involved in the initial investigation to find you. He will be very useful and he is the only person I can think of at the moment who can get us out of here in a hurry and throw some light on what we need to know.”

  “Please,” I interrupted. “I do not want anything to happen to Nikolai. Not until we are sure of what actually happened. I am very close to him, I love him very dearly,” I said, realising how much I would miss him.

  “But he may have abducted you, Katya,” said Jane, suddenly feeling the years of anger and betrayal welling up. “He may have stolen you from me, only a very evil man would do that.”

  I leaned back and gave Jane a long hard look.

  “Please. I will not give you anymore details until we are back in New Zealand and I can ascertain for myself his role in all this. It is my hope that he was unaware of the circumstances and I will be able to return to him at some stage in the future,” I said in a voice which meant business.

  “Okay, I’m sorry for saying that,” said Jane. “I have so much anger inside me for losing you, but I will control it … for now. But I can’t promise you Charl … Kat … oh what the hell shall I call you?”

  “I think Katya would be good for now. It is the only name I know.”

  “Okay then, Katya it is. It’s actually quite pretty isn’t it?” said Jane momentarily caught off guard. “But what I was trying to say is that if we find that this man, this Nikolai had anything to do with your disappearance I will come down on him like nothing he has ever seen in his life before!”

  Ola looked at Jane and laughed.

  “I doubt that very much, Jane,” she said. “That man has experienced more hate and deprivation than the devil himself.”

  “I see,” said a very worried looking Jane before excusing herself to the bedroom to ring her Italian police friend.

  Marco poured more coffee and told us of their life in Venice, his restoration work and Jane’s plans to start writing again.

  Jane returned with some good news and some bad news.

  “Okay, so Agapeto is onto it. We need to get to Charles De Gaulle airport where a private jet belonging to a friend of his will meet us in four hours. It will take us to Hong Kong and Agapeto will meet us there from Venice. We will refuel and from there continue on to Auckland. He is alerting the New Zealand Police now and they will be expecting us, a safe house will be available and the investigation into your disappearance has been re-opened.”

  We all sat in silence digesting the news Jane had just told us.

  “The bad news is that when I mentioned Nikolai Trubetskoy’s name Agapeto went very quiet. It appears he is familiar with his name because it came up in association with this case 10 years ago. Agapeto says he could never get any evidence to proceed.”

  We were all silenced. Despite my best intentions to protect the man who loved and adored me, who was the only father I had known, I needed to start getting used to the idea that Nikolai was perhaps a very evil man.

  Ola looked at me.

  “I knew it,” she spat out. “I knew he had done something very bad to get you. All these years I knew.”

  We made a very sombre foursome as we piled into the taxi with our luggage and left for the airport. Everyone was lost in their own thoughts. Jane was no doubt wondering how the reunion with her daughter had turned out to be so dramatic. Marco seemed to be deeply concerned with Jane’s well being, fussing over her and holding her hand. Ola just sat and scowled away to herself, and I prepared myself for the worst. In a mere 12 hours I had successfully lost my former life where I wanted for nothing, was adored and pampered and owned one of the most exclusive apartments in Paris. I was heading off with two antipodean strangers and a fuming nanny to two small islands at the bottom of the world where the police would no doubt amass enough evidence to make Nikolai’s life difficult. The one man I loved. Who loved me. From where I was sitting it wasn’t a great outcome. If I had been abducted and turned over to slavery, then okay. But I had the best of everything. The initial warmth and emotion I had about meeting my real mother was fast disappearing. What the hell was I doing?

  Ola and Marco sat at the back of the plane as he charmed h
er and coaxed what little English she had out of her, getting her to share stories about my childhood. Meanwhile Jane and I sat together and talked about anything and everything. My childhood, the estate, Nikolai, my pets. And Jane told me about my father Lawrence Cunningham who I sensed she was not on good terms with but understood to be a celebrity of some sort in New Zealand. I found out that I had no brothers or sisters, but I did have maternal grandparents, Lawrence’s parents had both died. She shared the details of her own life in Venice and how hard she had prayed for my return and how she had never given up hope, while others had assumed I was dead.

  At one stage Jane turned around to look at Marco who gave her a look so full of love and encouragement that I knew immediately how important this man was to my mother.

  When Agapeto Laggièri joined us in Hong Kong, the atmosphere on the plane changed completely. He was a big man, very Italian and very sexy, I thought. But his first concern was to envelope Jane in his arms, shake Marco’s hand and cast his eyes over me with complete wonder.

  “My dear girl, if only you knew the hours I have spent trying to find you,” he said as he shook my hand.

  Agapeto sat down next to me and spent the first part of the 10 hour trip to New Zealand telling me how he had refused to close the case of Charlotte Cunningham even though the New Zealand Police had done so years ago.

  “I insisted on keeping the file open, and kept all the notes updated and in my filing cabinet, much to the amusement of my colleagues, Katya,” he said.

  “Most of it was because of your mother, she is a wonderful woman, but it was also a matter of personal pride. It was one of those cases I was determined to solve.”

  When he excused himself to go to the toilet I leaned over to Jane with a grin.

  “Are you and Agapeto old friends, Jane?” I asked.

  “Yes, we are actually, we became very close in Venice when you first disappeared and he was very kind to me,” said Jane in a matter of fact tone.

  “Ah, I thought so. You have been lovers you two,” I giggled leaning in and nudging her.

  Jane blushed bright red.

  “How on earth can you tell that?” she laughed.

  “So I am right. You would be surprised what I have learned about men and women, Jane,” I smiled. And Jane looked very worried.

  31

  Bringing Charlotte now Katya back to New Zealand was something I had often fantasised about. But in my dreams she was still a little girl and we simply settled back into our old life in the villa on Dryden St. Instead we returned as two grown women, tired and scared, surrounded by police

  The safe house, which was in a surprisingly well appointed old restored villa, was comfortable thanks to Agapeto’s vast funds. I was grateful as I wanted Katya, who was used to the finer things in life, to feel at home. Agapeto had asked the police not to release anything to the media until we knew what was going on. And that included Katya’s father, Lawrence. It had been a long time but I still couldn’t trust him not to turn up with cameras and make a bloody documentary out of it. I felt terrible about denying him this wonderful experience of seeing his daughter after so long but I had never forgotten those last words he said to me:

  “You know she’s dead don’t you? She’s never coming back, Jane, and the sooner you realise that the better!”

  An admittedly cruel part of me reasoned that a man who was so happy to believe his daughter dead could wait a few days to find out she was alive.

  It was by no means the ideal way to be reunited with one’s daughter after 15 years. We both struggled with the confinement and I realised that Katya was mourning the loss of Nikolai.

  “This must be hard for you,” I said to her one day as we were sitting in the garden, bored out of our brains and wanting to move on with whatever our life held for us.

  She turned and looked at me with such pain.

  “Jane, do you have any idea of the life I lived over there? I wanted for nothing, I was educated by the best tutors Russia had to offer. I speak four languages, I live in one of the best apartments in Paris, I was loved by a man who catered for my every need. How do you think it feels to be stuck in a crumbling old house in the middle of God knows where with nothing to do except wonder what the hell I was thinking?”

  There, she had said it.

  While I was basking in the joy of finding my long lost daughter, my long lost daughter was pining for her life as a princess.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “But there is nothing else I can do. If I had it my way we would have stayed in Europe, you would have come to Venice for a while, we would have got to know each other over some fine food and wine, I would have taken you to visit my Madonnas in all the churches where I prayed for your return and then you might have wanted to come down here to see your father. I’m sorry to disappoint you but quite frankly if it hadn’t been for your sainted Nikolai we wouldn’t be in this position and for all I know you would be a 20-year-old university student living in Grey Lynn!”

  “Wherever that is,” she grumbled before realising what I had just said about the Madonnas.

  “I used to pray to the Madonna too,” she confessed. “We had an old church on the estate and I used to talk to her in there for hours while Ola prayed. I wondered if she knew where my real mother was.”

  I looked at her in shock.

  “And just before Ola and I came to see you we went to Saint Eustache and prayed to her there.”

  “Well, Katya, we already have something in common apart from the Callaway’s Curse on our ring finger. I visited the Madonna every day in Venice. I never missed a chat with her because I felt convinced she could help me,” I said. “Perhaps, after all, she has.”

  We looked at each other and at last there was some warmth, some connection, some hope that we would find each other through this awful mess.

  “Jane, that’s all very well, but where the hell is my father?” she said in the curt manner I was slowly getting used to.

  I couldn’t hide it from her any longer. I talked about Lawrence, about his career, his good looks, his charm and mostly about his overwhelming love for his daughter. I explained his annoying propensity for publicity and she understood. But I sensed a deep bond with Lawrence that throughout the years had remained strong between them. I needed to let her see him.

  “Can you just wait another day?” I pleaded. “Agapeto tells me the investigation has gone amazingly quickly, everyone has made it their top priority here and in Italy and, surprisingly, Russia. I think he will have news for us tomorrow, and then we will bring Lawrence in, before we release it to the media. Is that okay?”

  “Sure Jane,” she said, if a little grumpy. “You know what is best.”

  As predicted the might and brains of the combined police forces of New Zealand, Italy and Russia had solved the disappearance of Charlotte Cunningham in under two days. But nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to hear.

  Agapeto stood before the four of us. Marco, me, Ola and Katya, who was also being called Charlotte by most of the police. We were now getting on surprisingly well, considering just days ago we were complete strangers, and sat down joking with each other about who should sit where and how long this would take. All of us were eager to leave the safe house as Katya wanted to meet her father for the first time, and I wanted to show my daughter her beautiful home country. The beaches, the bush, the lakes and the mountains. And not forgetting her grandparents who were both in a rest home now, and still totally unaware their granddaughter had been found.

  “Well my friends, here we are and thank you for your patience in answering all our questions and agreeing to remain in hiding while we sort everything out. I can confirm that Charlotte, I mean Katya, was indeed abducted off the train from Paris to Venice. You had been under surveillance for some time in Paris by an international paedophile ring operating out of Russia.

  “What!” I shouted, shocked to hear the word “paedophile” associated with my five-year-old daughter. “Was Kat
ya abused at five years old?” I had to know.

  “It doesn’t appear that the ring had anything to do with her except getting her off that train. She was delivered to Nikolai Trubetskoy in St Petersburg within 24 hours and it appears she had been abducted to order,” said Agapeto.

  “Katya, can you remember?” I demanded. “Did anyone hurt you when this happened?”

  She looked at me with frustration. “Jane, how would I know?

  I was five, I have no memory at all.”

  “If it helps,” interrupted Ola. “When she came to us at Polnoch she seemed unharmed. She was frightened, yes, but physically she had a few bruises but no significant injuries. I believe she had not been abused,” she paused, preparing to go on.

  “That’s enough now, Ola,” interrupted Katya abruptly. “There is nothing more to tell.” And with that she gave Ola a stern look which I recognised as my own, when I was trying to shut someone up.

  “Is there something I should know, Katya? Ola?”

  “No, Jane, that is all,” replied Ola looking at her feet. “She was unharmed. Very healthy.”

  “Thank you, Ola,” I said breathing a sigh of relief. Of all the possible scenarios surrounding Charlotte’s disappearance, the possibility that she was captured and used as a sex toy by some sick man or men was not one I could afford to consider for the past 15 years. It would have tortured me beyond any level of endurance, so I simply refused to think about it.

  Agapeto continued: “For some time now we have believed that Katya’s abduction was carried out by a method which was used on trains from Moscow to St Petersburg where thieves would pump anaesthetising gas into a compartment, making everyone temporarily unconscious and then steal their possessions. In this case, Katya, you were the only possession they were interested in stealing on that train that night.

  “That is impossible,” shouted Katya suddenly pale and gasping for breath. “Nikolai loves me, he would never have done something so evil.”

  Ola went to Katya and put her arms around her.