by John Sweeney
‘It’s hard to work out. He’s saying: What do you mean it’s out of my level of responsibility? We can’t just hand these people over and wash our hands . . . something, something . . . The Americans? . . . Who? . . . Some Irish grunt and a Russian tart for the whistle-blower in Moscow – Comolli? . . . It doesn’t make sense . . . The highest bidder? . . . We’re not taking part in an auction, are we? . . . So we are taking part in an auction? . . . OK, so what about the offer of an angle into Picasso? . . . Why isn’t that of interest? . . . What do you mean the bidding is over?’
‘An auction?’ asked Katya. ‘What are they selling?’
Lightfoot glanced up, saw Joe watching him closely, and walked away out of the line of sight.
Joe turned away from the window and studied Katya. He barely knew this woman and didn’t trust her. She’d tried to steal Reilly and still hadn’t told him why. But he also knew she was impossibly beautiful and he couldn’t lie to her. They’d been through enough together that he owed her the truth, or at least that small fraction of the truth he understood.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘They seem to be talking about a trade,’ said Joe. ‘I think they’re talking about trading Comolli, the CIA man who ended up in Moscow. The Americans think he’s a traitor and want him back, very much. The Russians have signalled they will trade him, and the British will do what the Americans want.’
‘So the Americans get their traitor,’ said Katya. ‘And the Russians, what do they get?’ The darkness of her eyes didn’t quite shield the fear in them.
‘Us.’
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
In pride of place, dead centre at the back of the morgue, hung a picture of Zoba, looking down, with his trademark petulant scowl, on the seventeen young men lying on trolleys, their chests unzipped by a small chainsaw, their ribcages prized open, a flutter of giant pink butterflies. Snow was still falling outside and the morgue was freezing within, but Gennady almost gagged at the honey-sick stink of the dead mixed with a perfumed fixing agent.
Heedless of the blood and stench, the pathologist moved between the bodies, lost in her work. A woman in her fifties, still beautiful, with high cheekbones and something of the aristocracy of the human spirit about her, she seemed utterly at home among the dead. She pierced Gennady with an intense stare and then smiled, mostly to herself. ‘The great thing about my boys is that they don’t answer back.’ Her eyes narrowed yet more. ‘Venny Svaerkova, at your service.’
‘Gennady Semionovich Dozhd, at yours.’ He bowed his head. They could have been in a Chekhov play. ‘What happened?’ asked Gennady, motioning to the pink butterflies.
She handed him a sheet of paper. On it was a list of names, next to them was a box marked ‘Suspected Cause of Death’.
Automobile accident was written in every box.
‘Officially,’ she said, ‘automobile accident, every one.’
He treated her to a look that suggested he didn’t quite believe her.
‘As it happens, all dead in the same car accident, on the same day.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘That’s a very uncouth expression and not respectful of the dead. I don’t know you from Adam, Mr Dozhd. What is the basis for your extravagant statement?’
‘I am a retired general of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.’
‘An Afgantsy?’
‘Correct.’
‘So you’ve seen some dead bodies in your time?’
‘Correct.’
‘And why do you think these seventeen men didn’t die in’ – she paused for a second, her voice going a shade softer – ‘the same auto accident?’
He turned to examine the nearest pink butterflies, to the left and right of him. ‘Depends on what kind of car smash. Head on, if they’re not wearing seat belts, you’d expect the head to go through the windscreen. So faces would be heavily lacerated with glass. Side on, the same. Look at this lad here. His face is smooth as a baby.’
A rough white sheet had been thrown over the corpse’s lower torso.
‘May I?’
‘Go ahead.’
He drew back the sheet to see something that even he, seasoned by more death than he cared to think about, recoiled from. Some great scythe had slit the young man’s abdomen open and his guts, coiling this way and that like some ghastly sightless worm, lay in a frozen writhe.
Gennady felt the urge to retch and he fought it, hard, but it was too strong and he raced over to a bin and emptied his breakfast into it. Gennady continued to heave but his stomach was empty. He managed to get the spasms under control, and raised his head and took a glass of water from her. She disappeared with the bin, washed it out somewhere and returned.
‘A general, you say?’
He gave her a look that would have made a more timid creature die of fright. But this place was Venny’s lair and she was in command; she returned his stare with an expression of mild amusement.
‘But a retired one.’
Gennady stood upright, walked back to the corpse and crouched down, examining, as best he could, the back.
‘So?’
‘I’m looking for the entry wound.’
‘You’re looking at it.’ There was a small cut in the lower back by the right kidney, an inch long, if that, in the shape of a scimitar slash.
‘Shrapnel?’
She nodded.
Gennady turned to the corpse on the other side. This one was less gruesome, or Gennady was just getting used to it. Same, same: a small entry wound, this time to the upper leg, and a massive crater of an exit. A third, fourth and fifth all bore the same pattern. A sixth corpse was more charred rubble than human, but the majority of the seventeen dead had been hit by shards of shrapnel slicing through the air. The seventeenth? He had a bullet hole in his forehead and nothing more. Gennady let out a long, low whistle.
‘Conclusions?’ Venny said.
She was treating him like some sperm of a medical student. Still, he was in her mortuary to ask a favour, so he had no choice but to put up with it.
‘This lad? A sniper’s bullet. The rest? They all died from artillery. A couple of the dead were blown to smithereens, but most were killed by bits of shrapnel.’
‘Good, well done,’ she said.
She handed him a small tin tray carrying half a dozen shards of vicious-looking metal fragments wrapped in individual, numbered plastic bags.
‘From your boys?’ he asked.
‘Dead soldiers don’t lie.’
‘My guess, a Grad rocket launcher salvo.’
‘Mine too.’
‘So the official story is a stinking lie.’
‘So you say.’
‘Then what did happen?’
She shrugged, affecting a facade of ignorance like an actor in a soap opera.
‘Ukraine,’ said Gennady. ‘They were killed in Ukraine. Ghost Army – Russian soldiers from a base around here – got hit by a Grad salvo from the Ukrainians, and because the Ghost Army isn’t fighting in Russia, then they all died in a car accident. And all you have to do is to sign off the official version in your post-mortem findings? Yet another moment in today’s Russia when you think all you have to do is to keep your head down and your nose clean, and then something comes along and you either have to tell a dirty lie or be fired. Or worse.’
Venny examined the dirty, cream concrete floor of the morgue for a while before she managed to return his gaze.
‘It’s worse than that,’ she said. ‘The families of the dead men, if they keep shtum, they get four hundred thousand roubles compensation from the army. If they make a fuss, say “My boy, my man, died in Ukraine”, they will be lucky to get four thousand. So my findings matter.’
‘How will you write it up?’
‘If I lie, I help the families of these seventeen dead boys a little. But if they hadn’t been sent to Ukraine, then they’d all still be alive, and the people on the other side too.
So what if I tell seventeen lies? How many are dead so far? Seven thousand? More? How many have been through my morgue here, in this little city?’
‘How many?’
‘One hundred and ninety eight. And if I lie about my seventeen boys here, what kind of scientist am I?’
Gennady sighed. ‘We are a clever people but this crowd, they’re turning us into monkeys. What are you going to do?’
‘I’m sending these shrapnel fragments and the bullet in number seventeen to Moscow, for forensic tests.’
He considered that for a beat and then asked, ‘Where in Moscow?’
‘The Ministry of Defence. They’re the experts.’
‘Without the history?’
‘Of course. Telling the story as I understand it might endanger a proper scientific analysis.’
He allowed himself a rueful smile.
‘Nice. And if the Ministry says these men died in battle?’
‘We shall see. You haven’t come here to make small talk, General. How can I be of assistance?’
‘I have a present for you.’
‘A present for a lady?’
‘A present for a lady pathologist. I’d better go fetch it.’
He’d parked the Volga saloon a block away from the morgue. He’d bought it from a dealer for four hundred dollars at Rostov-on-Don railway station. It resembled an infant’s drawing of a car: three boxes, four wheels, the engine borrowed from a fancy tractor. Gennady liked its solidness, the layout of the dashboard, the cheesy Bakelite radio, the inner and outer rims of the steering wheel. Most of all, he liked the smell of the upholstery. To him, a Volga was a holy relic of the old Soviet times and an addiction he couldn’t – didn’t want to – give up. Iryna had always mocked him: ‘Why do you drive these dinosaur cars?’
Lost in his thoughts, suddenly all his strength left him and he half slumped by the side of the car. In his day, in Afghanistan, Gennady had been as fit as some of the nineteen-year-old recruits. Now he was past seventy, an old man getting older by the day, his daughter vanished and a morgue full of dead soldiers whose families couldn’t mourn their deaths in battle.
Better get on with it, he thought. Since that first phone call, he hadn’t been able to sleep more than an hour or two. He had to find out what had happened to Iryna. Once he knew, he could rest all he wanted, and then some. He took out the bucket from the boot and walked slowly back to the morgue, a black cloth resting across the top, hiding its contents. He found Venny and she gestured to a clean steel trolley. He placed the bucket on that, moved the cloth and held up the head of the old woman they’d found in the grave marked with the name of his daughter. The blueness of the nose was still striking, her face even in death still intelligent and thoughtful, requiring respect, the butchery to flesh and bone and arteries where the gravedigger had sawn off the head less so.
‘Your relationship to the deceased?’
‘On the gravestone my daughter’s name, inside the grave, this.’
‘But she’s old enough to be your mother.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Name? Real name, that is?’
Gennady told her that he had no idea. Then he coughed, a supplicant: ‘First thoughts?’
‘Can often be wrong and it’s foolish to utter them.’
‘Please. My daughter, Iryna . . . I had word that she was dead – a phone call in the middle of the night – but nothing more. She worked at a tax office in Moscow. I went there, started asking questions, they threw me in the slammer. I got out, went to her flat, the place had been stripped bare, as if she had never existed. A neighbour told me that Iryna told her she was going to Rostov. Eventually I find her grave, but she’s not in it.’
Asking for pity didn’t come easy to him, but for Iryna’s sake, he had to do it. ‘Help me, please.’
Venny fiddled with her glasses and seemed to make a decision, maybe not a good one, but one that helped her to sleep less badly at night.
‘Poisoning, obviously,’ she said. ‘The cyanosis’ – the general was dumbfounded – ‘that is, the bluey-green colour of the nose, indicates loss of oxygen. It’s a classic indicator of cyanide poisoning but it’s extremely rare for the symptom to continue long after death. And this lady has been dead for at least a fortnight, at a guess.’
‘So?’
Her eyes were intent on the severed head in front of her. ‘I can’t say for definite until some laboratory tests can be done. And then some phone calls – I have a friend in St Petersburg, he knows the latest gossip in this area. This is poison, but a very unusual one, something I’ve never come across before, and I know my way around the ways of the dead.’
She told him to come back the following day, at the end of the working day – ‘No, better at nine at night.’ He grunted a thank you and started to leave.
Her head tilted up, observing him as he began to walk off out of the morgue. ‘General,’ she called out after him. He stopped and turned, taking a step towards her. ‘General, take care. I don’t know what this poison is, but whatever it is, the people who did this, they didn’t buy it in a shop.’
WINDSOR CASTLE
Joe snapped on the TV set and found himself staring at a split screen of himself and Katya. The sound was muted but the tag line spelt it out: BREAKING NEWS: POLICE HUNT SUSPECTS IN LONDON SNIPER ATTACK. Katya stared at the screen, shocked into silence, and held her head in her hands.
‘They’re going to kill us,’ she whispered, then repeated herself.
‘Not if I can help it,’ said Joe.
Lightfoot didn’t reappear for an hour, but when he did he was expected. He swung open the door and stepped into the room, saying, ‘I need to see that dog’s collar,’ to be met by Joe, who had been hiding behind the door and angled the edge of the heavy metal tea tray into the side of Lightfoot’s head with all his force. The blow didn’t knock Lightfoot out but he staggered forwards, groaning.
‘Yah English bastard, selling us out,’ hissed Joe, and made to bring down the tea tray on Lightfoot’s head again. But the Englishman hunkered down, grabbed Joe’s arm, bringing him somersaulting down to the floor, face up, and yelled, ‘Fenian bastard!’
Joe grabbed the silver teapot lying on the floor and tried to clobber Lightfoot’s temple, but the Englishman moved his head and the blow was glancing, not serious. Fists, knees, elbows came into play as the two men fought. Lightfoot punched Joe in the face. Joe got a hand to Lightfoot’s arm and twisted it, kicking up with his right knee into Lightfoot’s groin, hard. Joe was the heavier man, shifting his weight fast, and now they were rolling on the floor, shards of broken crockery crackling under them.
Something about the fluency of Joe’s movements caught Lightfoot by surprise. The Englishman had been trained in the dark arts of hand-to-hand killing by the SAS. Either the discipline at Joe’s special educational needs school was very, very tough or an accomplished killer had taught the Irishman a thing or two. Lightfoot got a knee to Joe’s throat and put his heft on Joe’s windpipe. The noise of a man being choked to death is grim indeed, and it was that, more than anything, that turned Katya from being a passive spectator to a participant. With both hands she picked up a sturdy wooden stool and brought it crashing down on Lightfoot’s head, knocking him out.
Joe wiped away blood from his mouth and studied Katya with some amusement over the prone form of Lightfoot. ‘I guess you left finishing school a term too early.’
Reilly was cowering in the corner, shivering. Joe grabbed his collar, found the old string from the balloon in his duffle-coat pocket, tied it round the collar, and the three of them were out of the room and tiptoeing down the stairs to the keep.
Joe stuck his head out, saw a clump of guardsmen marching towards them, and they retreated back into the stairwell until the redcoats had trooped past. They filed out in the opposite direction, towards the outer keep, going downhill on the cobbles. A soldier leading a beautiful black horse turned a corner and walked towards them. They exchanged good mornings as if
they were engaged on a country walk in Royal Berkshire, which was true enough, but the affectation of innocent activity was slightly belied by Joe’s black eye, going blacker by the instant.
They were going downhill on the cobbles, a conical tower to the left, a high brick wall to their right, set into which was a small green door. Joe turned the handle and the door opened into a secret garden, which, even in the very dead of winter, was a place of tranquillity.
Man, woman and dog hurried underneath a tunnel of yews that led to a small hollow in a dead end, the ground landscaped so that it formed a natural bench for two, or three people at a pinch, with a magically engineered overhang of honeysuckle, witch hazel and clematis, all in bloom, sheltering sitters from the weather. Not only was it a place of perfect calm, it was probably the best hiding place in the whole of southern England.
Joe knelt down and unfastened the red collar around Reilly’s neck, replacing it with the balloon string held by a knot. He gave the string to Katya and told her to stay put.
‘What are you up to?’ she asked.
‘Lightfoot wanted to have a look at Reilly’s collar. I suspect there’s a tracker in it. So I’m just going to do a wee tinker’s trick. I won’t be long.’
He retraced his steps down the yew tunnel and scouted for another entrance to the secret garden. Hidden by a buttress of red brick was a second small door. He opened it an inch and peered out; ahead of him was an asphalted area, dotted with a few outhouses. Beyond that was a ha-ha and beyond that the great openness of Windsor Great Park and freedom, of a kind. He slipped out of the door, dog collar in hand, knowing exactly what he was looking for.
Twenty minutes later he was back in the secret garden.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Katya.
‘We run, they’ll find us. We stay put here until dark, then we move.’
‘What do we do until then?’
‘Talk. Tell me about you, Katya. Before Reikhman. What did you do and how did you do it?’
‘You tell me first, Joe. What are your secrets?’
‘I’m a stupid Irishman who ended up teaching special needs kids in London.’