by John Sweeney
But just as the day was over, the pack picked up a whiff of Mr Fox. Off they went, a barking, yelping mass, followed by all the fine gentlemen and ladies in hunting pink, galloping through muddy fields and over a few, not very high fences, the horses exhaling clouds of steam in the chilling air. The scent of fox took them up hill and down dale until the target broke cover and crossed a muddy field that descended steeply to a stream and, on the other side of that, a track.
The pack halted at the stream, confused, uncertain. On the far side of the track, three black Range Rovers were parked; outside the vehicles stood thirteen men, thickset, all dressed in black, several of them sporting dark glasses, entirely wrong on what had become a very English grey day. By the front vehicle lay the fox, still breathing but supine, a tranquilliser dart sticking out of its hindquarters. Seven men carried shotguns, five had light machine pistols, and the other a bazooka. Their firepower was trained on the hunt, fast approaching.
The Master, who in his spare time was the assistant chief constable of the local constabulary, reared to a halt on his magnificent pied stallion. Outraged, he cried out, ‘That’s our fox, dammit!’
The firepower focused on him, twelve muzzles and a rather large and unfriendly looking tube.
‘I say,’ said the Master, ‘I thought you hunt sab people were supposed to be pacifists. You can’t have guns!’
The man with the bazooka called out, ‘It’s our fox. Fuck off.’
And that is exactly what the hunt wisely proceeded to do.
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
In less than one hundred miles, Gennady got stopped by the traffic cops almost a dozen times. The bribes you had to pay to avoid the hassle of a court appearance weren’t big – five dollars’, ten dollars’ worth of roubles a pop – but the cumulative effect was a tax on the poor. The first six times, he could handle it. Seven, eight, nine, ten, it got harder and harder. The eleventh, when a pimply young cop brought out his little lollipop sign to order Gennady to stop, he felt like hitting the guy in the mouth.
The cop was barely twenty, had a big hat, a silly, upturned nose and short little legs, and looked as tough as a show pony at a riding school. He was giving Gennady the works, taking an infinity of time to circumnavigate the Volga, looking for defects, flattish tyres, mud on the brake lights. He must have seen an Alabama cop do it on TV. The acting was bad enough for Hollywood, that’s for sure.
The cop had finally made it round to talk to Gennady when a big black Mercedes zoomed past, dangerously fast, overtaking a tractor pulling a trailer full of manure and forcing the driver of a minibus full of schoolkids coming the other way to brake hard. Gennady and the cop watched the whole thing in silence, Gennady making a mental note of the last line of the registration plate. Disaster averted this time, but the lunatic driver of the Merc needed talking to.
‘You’ve got a radio,’ he said to the cop. ‘Are you going to call ahead, warn your colleagues about that guy?’
The officer studied Gennady as if he were a pig that could talk.
‘That guy almost killed a bunch of schoolkids,’ Gennady said. ‘Are you going to do anything about it?’
The officer said nothing.
‘Are you here to uphold the law, to protect people? Or just to rip people off?’
The officer said nothing.
Gennady turned the key in the ignition and the Volga slowly rolled off towards his destination.
They called this place Novo-Dzerzhinsky, named after Lenin’s head of the Cheka who had thousands – no, tens of thousands – of innocent Russians shot without trial from 1917 on. It would be like, Gennady reflected, finding a town in Bavaria called New Himmler.
He’d arrived at the close of the working day, the light first fading to the tint of cigarette ash, then the sky blackening as it started to snow, thickly, the wipers of the Volga struggling to shift the thick splodges of powder.
By the entrance to the hospital sat a figure in a thin hooded coat, with a bottle of red wine and a plastic bag by his feet, snow riming his hands. He was no old wino. Gennady couldn’t see his face, but from his fingers he didn’t look much older than twenty. People were saying these days that the life expectancy in Russia for men was getting lower and lower, a full third of men dying in their fifties. This guy didn’t look as though he would make thirty.
Venny had hinted that the cottage hospital wasn’t so very good. That was an understatement, and then some. The fancy main entrance was bolted shut. The real one was to be found in a noxious side alley, down a rough concrete ramp, more like a loading bay for cauliflower delivery trucks than for sick people in wheelchairs.
Three youngsters with green-yellow faces were smoking by the door in dressing gowns and slippers. Gennady had heard about the Yellow Faces, kids who’d bought ultra-cheap alcohol – officially, medicinal handwash – on the black market, only to discover that the booze rotted your liver, turned your face yellow, then black, and then you ended up dead. The people who’d made this stuff were well connected. Nothing too bad would happen to them. And the kids? Well, they were poor, from the sticks, nobodies.
Inside, the hospital proper was guarded by an old but not yet dead dragon, a cigarette part of her exoskeleton.
‘And?’ she asked.
‘I have an appointment at the morgue.’
‘Why?’
‘My daughter died. Car crash. I’m identifying her body.’
‘Name?’
He gave his details and Iryna’s, which she scrawled down in a child’s drawing book with a picture of Bambi on the cover.
‘Wait.’
She picked up the receiver of an ancient Bakelite phone and dialled a number. After too short a time, she put the phone down. ‘You’re too late, they’ve gone home. Come back tomorrow.’
‘Please, mother, can you try the line again?’
‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
She wasn’t.
He unfolded a hundred-rouble note, a little more than a dollar, and he was through.
‘Go right down to the end of the corridor. It wiggles a bit, carry on straight.’
The lighting was hit and miss, the darker the corridor the more unhealthy the fug – a mixture of cigarette smoke, boiled cabbage and a special, peculiar stink, the perfume of the sick and dying. A Yellow Face, a girl, was lurking in the shadows by a fork in the corridor.
‘Which way to the morgue?’ he asked. Nineteen, twenty, if that, she might have been beautiful once but was so cruelly jaundiced Gennady felt he was watching a TV with the colour bars gone to pot.
‘You drink what I drank.’
‘I’m sorry, kid.’
‘I’m dying, my mum’s dead, my gran’s dying and there’s no one to look after my little sister.’
He palmed her a twenty-dollar note.
‘To the right, then down the staircase. Follow the smell.’
She wasn’t wrong about the smell. The more he walked down the subterranean corridor, the stronger it got, a noxious pang, not of antiseptic chemicals but of sepsis, pure and foul.
At the very end of the corridor was a thick metal door marked ‘Mortuary – No Entry’, guarded by a metal key code. He tried the door but it was locked. He knocked on it hard. Nothing doing. Suddenly he became aware of someone behind him, moving closer. He’d left his Tokarev stashed at the bottom of his rucksack in the boot of the Volga. Fool, Gennady, fool.
His assailant was a few feet away. Poised to strike hard, Gennady was about to knock whomever it was flying, when he registered the sound he was hearing, the soft flip-flop of slippers on concrete. It was the Yellow Face girl. She squeezed past him and tapped in 1812 on the key code – Tchaikovsky, of course – and opened the door silently, wafting a yellow hand to the way forwards as if she were a magician’s assistant in a spangly leotard. Gennady mouthed ‘Thanks’ to Yellow Face and went into the morgue.
The stink hit him in the nose like a bully. The door opened out onto a long narrow room: down one side, a wall full of met
al freezers; in the centre, one metal table. In the far corner, in a pool of light from a TV, sat a man in a dirty white coat, slumped in a fancy office chair, drawing on a cigarette and sipping a beer. Gennady couldn’t make out his face as he had his back to him, but he had a thick head of hair the colour and texture of wire. He had to be Dr Malevensky.
The TV was blurting out the latest news from Ukraine – fascists this, fascists that, how the fascists had crucified a little rebel boy who’d dared to stand up to them. The camera zoomed in on a female eyewitness who was sobbing at the memory of the horror of it. To Gennady, she seemed unhinged. There was no corroborative evidence, no image to stand up the crucifixion story, nothing. Now the TV was showing dead children lying higgledy-piggledy in the mud. They’d been slaughtered by the fascists, said the presenter, a man with a deep voice and an absence of scepticism that seemed, in the twenty-first century, quite Neanderthal. Any word as to who, exactly, had started this war, who had supplied the tanks and Grads and guns, who was paying the Russian mercenaries over there, that was missing.
‘I’ve come about my daughter,’ said Gennady, loud enough to be heard above the racket from the TV.
‘Sod off,’ said Malevensky without moving his eyes from the TV screen. ‘Can’t you read? It says “No Entry”. Come back tomorrow, make an appointment.’
Gennady had been famous in Afghanistan for his forbearance, for his patience, for his sense of humour when everything else was going so very badly. But this was Russia, not Jalalabad, and he’d not had a good day.
He pulled the electric plug out of the socket. The TV died but Gennady wasn’t done. He wrapped the flex around Malevensky’s neck, stuck his knee in the back of the chair, and Malevensky, bottle of beer and chair all tumbled to the floor, followed by the TV set. Gennady picked up the bottle, emptied the dregs on Malevensky’s face, smashed the bottle on the concrete floor and held a shard of broken glass up against his nose.
‘Now, Dr Malevensky,’ said Gennady, ‘have I got your full attention?’
He had. Gennady asked him, politely, to get the mortuary records for the past thirty days. He picked himself up rather adroitly, put the chair back upright and used his feet to sweep away the shards of glass.
‘The records, Doctor?’ prompted Gennady.
Malevensky opened a desk drawer, retrieved a thick green file, spotted with blood, and dropped it on the desk. He then walked down to the other end of the mortuary to pick up a dustpan and brush to sweep up the shards from the broken television set, which he did ill-temperedly. Gennady ignored him, opened the file and went back a whole calendar month, just to make sure he didn’t miss anything. He was looking for one death, that of an old lady, not of old age, but a car crash or similar unexpected accident. At the first flick-through of the pages he went straight past it, but caught it on the second run. The pages for December twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth had been cut neatly out of the file. A soft hissing, bubbling sound could be heard from the other end of the room, where Malevensky was fussing around.
‘Hey, someone’s taken two pages out.’ Malevensky shrugged, as if to say it was nothing to do with him.
‘Is there a copy? Is this the only record?’
The pathologist turned his back on him; behind his broad back, Gennady’s eye caught something he hadn’t properly clocked before: an elderly computer. He pushed back the chair and ran down the length of the room. Malevensky moved out of his way. A fizzing noise was coming from a stainless steel container marked ‘DANGER! CORROSIVE ACID’. Gennady lifted the lid and a bilious cloud of vapour puffed into the room. The smoke dispersed and Gennady glimpsed the top of a computer drive, its plastic case bubbling in its very own acid bath.
‘Bastard,’ said Gennady, and walked out of the morgue before his anger and loathing for Malevensky made him do something stupid. In his rage, he almost collided with Yellow Face. ‘Bastard,’ he said, jerking his head back towards the morgue.
‘He’s a slug,’ said Yellow Face. ‘But you need him? Why?’
He hesitated. He didn’t know this mutant from Adam, but there was something about her intelligence and earnestness that made him believe that he could trust her.
‘I’m trying to find my daughter – or, to be honest, my daughter’s grave. She’s vanished off the face of the earth and I think he knows what happened. But two pages have been removed from the morgue file for the last month and he’s just dumped the computer hard drive in acid.’
‘How very convenient.’
‘Can you watch him? Keep your ears open?’
‘Sure.’ He gave her his number, said thank you – and meant it very much – and hurried along the corridor, desperate to breathe some fresh air.
That was the thing with Mother Russia. The authorities, the connected, they’d screw you around all day, and then you’d meet some piece of human wreckage and they had more humanity and courage about them than you could possibly imagine.
WINDSOR GREAT PARK
The herd of deer, randomly dotted around the park, slowly faded to black. Joe and Katya had spent the afternoon sitting in the parlour’s chintzy armchairs, sipping tea and picking over a plate of ham and mustard sandwiches, observing the deer until the light had failed. They had been moved from the castle to a lodge in the park around lunchtime. If this was a prison, thought Joe, he’d been in worse.
Now it was dusk, and a wood fire was crackling in the magnificent fireplace, over which hung a stag’s head. The taxidermist had somehow screwed up with the great beast’s glass eyes. They extruded too far, suggesting that the stag had hit the far side of the wall at great speed and had ended up pop-eyed with astonishment at his fate.
Joe opened a stale ham sandwich, scooped away the mustard, and turned to Reilly, who fell back on his haunches and put out a paw. Joe shook the paw, and the dog leant forwards and the ham vanished. Watching this lamest of dog tricks were two men in black anoraks and black tracksuits, slouching against a wooden table at the far edge of the room. They did not appear to be the slightest bit impressed.
A door drifted open and in walked Lightfoot, a large white bandage wrapped around his head. He sat down on a chair facing the two of them.
‘My head hurts,’ he growled. The polite diffidence had been abandoned.
‘You’re selling us down the river,’ replied Joe.
‘I am not.’
‘It said on the TV that we were suspects in the killings.’
‘That had nothing to do with me. You hit me. That had everything to do with you.’
‘There’s an auction and we’re up for sale.’
Lightfoot was not giving much away, but his natural grimace got that bit more sour.
‘I’m a special educational needs teacher, Mr Lightfoot. I can lip-read. That phone conversation you had, about a bidding war, I could follow most of it.’
‘So that’s why you hit me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You hit the wrong person. You may not believe me, but I’m on your side.’
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Joe, ‘and I won’t do it again.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Lightfoot.
Joe said nothing but treated him to a slight, rather patronising smile.
‘You know for a special needs teacher, Tiplady, you’re taking up rather a lot of everybody’s time. But as you can see—’
Lightfoot’s phone rang. They could hear only his end of the conversation.
‘What? Hunt saboteurs?’ He scowled at Joe and left the room. The two black-clad watchers shuffled their legs; one stifled a yawn. Joe and Katya were free to sit in comfy chairs, but not free to leave.
Lightfoot returned to the room and studied Joe with wonderment. ‘The trick with the fox? How on earth did you do that?’
‘A tinker told me.’
‘Yes, but how on earth did you capture the fox in the first place?’
‘Do you really think that I would ever tell a member of the English ruling class that?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot, for the first time in their company, broke into something that was close to a smile, his face expressing something less sour than standard, as if he’d stopped sucking on a nettle.
‘You’ve managed to upset a lot of very important people, including a very senior police officer.’
‘There would have been no trouble had they just let the fox be.’
Lightfoot stared down at the floor, hiding a quarter-smile. ‘So . . .’ he said, semaphoring a change in tone.
‘What’s happening? What’s going to happen to us?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot reflected on something, his eyes trained on the fire. Then he turned to the two watchers at the back of the room. ‘Chaps, I’d like a word with these people here in private. On my head be it. I don’t think they’re going to cause any more trouble. If they hit me again and try to do a runner, shoot them.’
The two men nodded and walked out the door, which closed with a soft click.
‘So, I’m afraid it’s bad news for you both. The auction, which I can assure you I did not approve of, has taken place. You’re to be traded for Comolli, the man the Americans are desperate to get hold of in Moscow.’
‘But why us?’ asked Joe.
‘That’s still a good question,’ said Lightfoot. ‘I can see why Reikhman would want Miss Koremedova back. Any man would. But you, Mr Tiplady? We’ve checked you out and there is nothing we can see in your past that would remotely interest Moscow. We’re interested in your past, very interested, but there’s no reason Moscow should be.’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ asked Joe.
‘No, we don’t,’ said Lightfoot. ‘It is very puzzling.’
‘If you hand us over to them, they will kill us,’ said Katya.
‘Tell me, Miss Koremedova – your former boyfriend, Reikhman. Anyone who he is afraid of, that he fears?
‘Russian?’
‘Anyone.’
‘The others who work alongside Reikhman, they are afraid of him. I don’t know who, exactly, he works for, but he is well connected.’