by John Sweeney
‘A big Mercedes. Black. Not a saloon, the bigger kind – the four-wheel drive version.’
‘No photographs?’
She stared at him directly. ‘Gennady, what do you do?’
‘I’m retired now. I fish in the ice.’
‘Before. What did you do before?’
‘I was a librarian.’
‘And before that?’
‘I served in Afghanistan.’
‘What rank?’
‘General.’
‘Ah, I thought your face was familiar. Yes, I know you. I’ve seen your face when I was little. So, if I tell you something, it stays a secret, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘There isn’t a photograph.’
Gennady sighed – another dead end.
‘It’s a video. My kid brother Max, he’s eighteen, he films everything on his phone. He filmed the guy in the lift with your daughter. He filmed him getting in the car with her. He filmed the registration plate of the Mercedes, everything.’
‘Where is Max now?’
‘He’s a conscript. He deleted the video from his phone but he put it onto a USB stick that he wears around his neck. So he’s still got it.’
‘Where is he?’
‘That’s the thing. Max has been sent to serve in Ukraine.’
LIVERPOOL BAY
Five, ten, a dozen – no, a hundred men stood in the sea, framed against the rising sun. Lit by a surreal pink light against the pearl-grey, rippled sands of the bay, the men stood immobile, heedless of the incoming tide. As the wind picked up and filled the mainsail, the bow carved through the choppy waters – brown, not blue, from the estuarial mud. To the west, and now falling behind them, lay the sandstone outcrop of Birkenhead; to the stern, the Liver Birds atop their building looking out over the homely sprawl of Liverpool.
‘What are those men doing? What is that?’ asked Katya. She was wearing yellow oilskins, three sizes too big for her, and what looked like a large red sock on her head.
Joe reached for the binoculars that came with the SleepEasy, the yacht they’d stolen, and focused in on the closest man. Looking directly into the sun it was impossible to unlock the mystery immediately, but as the yacht headed out into the Irish Sea, its angle to the men changed and he could make them out more clearly. ‘They’re covered in barnacles. They’re made of iron.’
‘Iron men – so beautiful,’ said Katya.
Joe grinned. ‘Anything like that in St Tropez?’
She scowled at him and vanished into the cabin, only to reappear immediately.
‘It’s making me feel sick. Stop it wobbling so.’
‘Ah,’ said Joe. ‘Boats do that.’
‘I don’t like it.’
Joe had worked on fishing boats out in the Atlantic in the summer holidays from the age of fifteen onwards. That – and his other job – before coming to London.
‘Well, it’s not a flat calm but it’s only blowing force 3. You wait until we get into the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘Isn’t this the Atlantic?’
‘No, it’s Liverpool Bay.’
Katya was not alone in registering her unhappiness. Reilly lay shivering on the foam seat, close to his master standing at the wheel, his brown eyes pained with melancholy. Despite the onset of seasickness, Katya went inside the cabin and came back with a child’s life jacket. She borrowed Joe’s penknife and slashed the bottom third away, and used some sticky tape to mould it into a comfy, small-dog-sized fit. Reilly stayed still while she knotted him in. The ocean-going dog didn’t exactly roll over and ask for his tummy to be tickled, but he would float if the yacht turned turtle. She leaned forwards to kiss the dog on the top of his forehead but he nimbly jerked up his head and licked her on the lips, causing her to yelp with disgust.
‘Stop it you two, you’ll wake up the iron men.’
‘Why do we have to sail? It’s slow. Why can’t you put the engine on?’
‘Because the rightful owner of this yacht was sensible enough just to leave two sips of diesel in the tank. It might get us into a harbour. It won’t get us to where we’re going.’
‘Why didn’t you buy some diesel in Liverpool?’
‘Because credit cards can be traced and we haven’t got any cash.’
The wind stiffened, and as the yacht angled into it, the deck tilted at a steeper angle. Reilly curled into a ball, or as well as he could in his dog-jacket. By the wheel, a red light was blinking in a yellow beacon the size of a thermos flask. Joe used his penknife to open it up, pressed a switch and the red light died.
‘Why did you switch that thing off?’
‘It’s a distress beacon. If we sink, then it lets the world know where we are. The problem is, when this beauty’s owner realises we’ve nicked the SleepEasy, it tells him where we are.’
‘What happens if we sink?’
‘We won’t.’
‘They don’t have to kill us. We shall kill ourselves.’
She sat down on the foam bench by his side and stared out across the bay to the low, glowering mass of Snowdonia, her pessimism, her bleakness, pre-written in rock. The wind soughed and she tucked away a stray bit of hair under the red sock-hat.
Joe felt a sudden surge of tenderness towards her – that he would protect her, as best he could. And to do that, he decided, he had to open up a little about his past.
‘I’ll let you into a secret. Before I was a teacher in London, I worked on the fishing boats in the Atlantic. I can sail this. I can sail anything. I promise you, we shall arrive safe and sound in County Donegal. I promise you I know how to sail this boat.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we’ll get in touch with a man called Seamus.’
‘Seamus. What does he do?’
‘He runs a pub. It’s a nice pub – live music, a fiddler, a peat fire and the best Guinness in the north-west corner of Europe. He’s in a wheelchair but he manages to run the whole place himself.’
She didn’t seem convinced. ‘How can this man Seamus – how can he protect us from someone like Reikhman?’
‘Before he ran the pub, he used to kill people, soldiers in the British Army.’
‘Are you sure this Seamus will help us?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? Because I did something, he believes, that got him shot.’
‘Then why on earth would he want to help us?’
‘Hang on a second.’
Dead ahead, standing proud of the sea, immense blades, two hundred feet long, scimitar-slashed the air. Spinning the wheel, Joe yelled ‘Lee-oh!’ and the bow sliced through the sea, jib and mainsail flapping, then slowly filling with wind as the yacht headed away from the wind farm. Joe busied himself winding up winches as Katya scowled at him, longing for an answer to her question.
‘Why might he help us?’ Joe said, repeating her question. ‘I hope he will. He’s my brother.’
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
Two slight knocks – the prearranged signal from Venny. Gennady opened the door an inch and she sailed into the room. ‘This hotel makes me feel like a prostitute.’
With a pathologist’s eye, Venny examined the room, the view out of the window onto the railway goods yard, the too-narrow bed and its acrylic sheets, the cream carpet quilted with red-wine stains and a brown something that one hoped was coffee.
‘Nice place you’ve got here.’
‘We’re not at home to Miss Sarcasm,’ Gennady said. Her demeanour struck him as aggressively jolly, masking something wrong. ‘What’s happened?’
‘You said you were a general. Are you sure you didn’t mean you were a psychic?’
He repeated his question. Venny sat on the bed, her breezy smile crumpled.
‘I’ve been sacked. Well, suspended from all duties. I’m under investigation for breaching eighteen points of the medical practitioner’s code. I’ve been replaced with immediate effect by my learned colleague, Dr Malevensky of Novo-Dzerzhins
ky – quack, fraud and liar.’
‘I’m sorry, Venny.’
‘This morning I got the results back from the Ministry of Defence in Moscow. They confirm that the shrapnel I collected from the bodies of my boys was from high-explosive ordnance. The Ministry confirmed that the bullet I fished out of the brain of deceased number seventeen was a bullet. The Ministry’s excellent work enabled me to complete my autopsies on all seventeen young men, proving that the assertion that they had all died in the same car crash was a falsification. The evidence points strongly to the majority of the men being killed by shrapnel, and in one case conclusively by a bullet. This suggests that they were killed in a war zone. I was suspended this afternoon.
‘I love my job. I love it that I can use the facts of death, some of the time, to help the living. And now I can’t, not just for the time being, but probably for good. I can’t ever see myself practising pathology in Russia again.’
She paused and wiped tears from her eyes. Something about his expression made her ask, ‘How about you? Did you get any leads?’
‘Iryna is dead,’ he said.
‘Oh Christ, Gennady, I’m so sorry.’
‘I met someone,’ he continued. ‘A young mother, who told me.’ He paused a beat. ‘I believe her.’
Lost in despair, they collapsed into each other’s arms.
At nine o’clock in the morning, the sky grey and bleak, Gennady sat in the Volga one hundred yards from the Tax Inspectorate’s regional headquarters, waiting for an idea of what to do next.
The tax office was housed in the main FSB building, not unhandsome if Stalinist kitsch was your thing – which, for Gennady, it wasn’t. Four Doric columns imposed their classical lines over the main street of Rostov, above them four empty plinths. Back in the day, busts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin would have enjoyed pride of place there. Now yesterday’s gods were gone, and only old fools like him registered their absence.
Nothing came to him, so it seemed like a good time to take the Volga for a stately tour of the block. Gennady amused himself that these days you didn’t need to invent an invisible car, just drive a clapped-out old Russian-made one. No one would see you.
At the back of the FSB building was a very large parking lot, almost like a parade ground. A few vehicles stood close by the rear of the building, but otherwise the lot was empty. Coming in the opposite direction was a long line of heavy trucks, freshly painted white, their cabs and awnings decorated with red crosses on white patches. He accelerated away, turned left and left again, and parked the Volga by a kebab shop.
He walked back to the parking lot, to see thirty-seven trucks – he counted them twice, to be sure – lined up in neat rows. Two men wearing civilian jeans and sweaters, but military parkas, headed straight to the rear of the secret-police building. The trucks were clearly destined to supply aid to Ukraine – well, that part of Ukraine that the government was helping split from the main chunk of the country.
Down the end of the line of trucks farthest from the building, a truck driver, again in civvies, was untying a tarpaulin cover to fetch something. The driver flipped back the tarpaulin and Gennady glimpsed a stack of ammunition boxes containing bullets, mortars and Kalashnikovs. Aid of a very specific kind, then.
Carrying on his stroll, he cut through the stationary trucks to get closer to the FSB building. And there it was – a fat black Mercedes SUV, registration plate ending EK61. He was taking a close look at the interior when he sensed a movement behind him.
‘Can I help you?’
His questioner was dressed in mechanic’s overalls, and sturdily built, in his thirties; crew-cut hair, slate-grey eyes, one of them with a slight squint, made no more angelic by the small cross he wore on a leather string around his neck. His question was conversational, but the tone was anything but. Also, he had a wrench in his hand the size of a plank. Gennady treated him with a sardonic smile.
‘I’ve always fancied one of these. Never had the money.’
‘Pricey, these German motors, aren’t they?’
The man’s tone was no friendlier.
‘I’m here to see whether I can volunteer, to help, bringing aid to our people in Ukraine,’ Gennady said. ‘I’m sick of what I’m seeing on TV, the fascists in Kiev killing people, the Americans and the Europeans helping them, trying to do us down. I used to be in the army, I can drive a truck. I can shoot, too. I want to screw the hohols,’ he said, using the zek prison slang for Ukrainians.
The man with the wrench studied him uneasily, not sure what to make of this.
‘You can’t volunteer here.’
‘I wanted to have a word with one of the drivers.’ Gennady gestured to the neat rows of white trucks parked close by. ‘See whether they could give me a tip, tell me how to get involved.’
‘They’re over there, not here.’
‘True. But, as I said, I wanted to check out this beauty.’ Gennady started walking over to the parked white trucks, and made an ostentatious show of hailing the first driver, aware of the eyes in his back.
‘You’re too old, granddad,’ said the driver. ‘And, any road, you don’t want to go where we’re going.’
Gennady whirled round. ‘Listen, son. I was being shot at by the hajis in Afghanistan before you were born. And another thing, the Americans keep on saying that these are all army trucks painted white, that the drivers are all soldiers playing at being aid workers. You take an old guy along like me – that proves them wrong. I could even pose in front of the cameras. Always fancied a modelling career.’
The soldier smirked and said, ‘You might have a point there, granddad. I’ll see what we can do for you.’
SEA AREA MALIN, SOUTH OF RATHLIN ISLAND
Out of nowhere, coming at them at bewildering speed, emerged a wall of white surf crashing into black cliffs. Joe spun the wheel, the bow veered away and the heavily reefed jib, the only sail still hoisted after the mainsail had been shredded, snapped into place.
‘What’s that?’ yelled Katya over the rising storm.
‘They call it Rathlin – Reachra in the Gaelic,’ replied Joe.
‘What’s that mean?’
‘The Place of Many Shipwrecks.’
A sparrow, battered by the winds, its feathers fluffed up by too much wetness, flopped onto the deck of the open wheelhouse. Here, there was some shelter from the force of the weather. The bird was unnaturally close to the humans and eyed them with unease but, exhausted, stayed put.
Joe gestured for Katya to take over the wheel, using the angled flat of his hand to emphasise the direction of travel, unclipped his safety line and went below to twiddle with the radio dial, Reilly studying him morosely from the warmth of his berth.
Joe found the correct station, came up out of the cabin and, reaching for his safety clip, almost lost his footing as the yacht slid down into a trench of water, drenching the two of them in the cockpit. The yacht had speakers fitted underneath the benches at the stern so, at maximum volume, they could both hear the shipping forecast.
Five hundred miles to the south-east, a man sat in a studio in the vaults of Broadcasting House, London, W1A 1AA, sipped a glass of water and waited for a light to blink red. When it did so, he intoned the sea areas around the British Isles.
‘We’re in Malin!’ roared Joe.
‘What?’
‘Malin!’
After Irish Sea, Shannon and Rockall, it was their turn. The beautifully modulated tones of the shipping forecast had always cast a spell for Joe, from the very first day he had listened to it.
‘Gale warning: Malin. West or north-west, gale eight to storm ten, occasionally violent storm eleven at first, backing south, five to seven. High or very high, becoming rough or very rough. Squally showers, occasionally wintry. Rain later good.’
‘Rain later good. What?’ yelled Katya.
‘Hush your mithering!’ replied Joe. ‘Welcome to Ireland!’
An hour before, the sea had been choppy, exacting but manageable.
But as the light of the afternoon began to dim, storm clouds reared up from the west and the mood of the sea became angrier and angrier. Now, as they rocked through the furious gap between the north-east tip of Ireland and the southern leg of Rathlin Island, the sea had become a demon: wild, savage, mad.
The North Atlantic poured through the narrow passageway, smashing into the Irish Sea as it stormed out. This was a terrible place to be, and it was just about to get far worse. Joe had been in the North Atlantic in a force 11 once before, but in a trawler the size of a block of flats. And, even then, three sailors had been injured, one poor fellow suffering a broken leg. He cursed himself silently. The logic driving them to run – run without leaving any evidence of their passage – had forced them into this storm. And in this they could very easily die.
A great monster of a wave that had been powering up from Newfoundland three thousand miles to the west hoisted the yacht the height of a house and then dropped it like a toy. The bow was underwater, invisible – the midriff of the boat, too. Through their feet they could feel the fibreglass hull shudder, and then the yacht crashed upwards, like a submarine breaking surface, and started the long slow rise up the next cliff of water. Katya glanced to where the sparrow had been seeking shelter. It had vanished.
SleepEasy, thought Joe – never had a ship been so poorly named. He hadn’t slept since they left Liverpool. He smiled his broadest smile at Katya, exuding a self-confidence he didn’t feel. She reached for his free hand and squeezed it and yelled, ‘I trust you, silly Irishman!’
On Rathlin Island, a lone fisherman got out of his car by Rue Point, hoping to try his luck in a small sea cove, sheltered from the elements. But the wind was so strong it almost blew his car door off its hinges, and he got back in and slammed it shut. No fishing for him, not tonight. Out to sea, he could just make out through the sea spray the lights of a tiny yacht bouncing around in the ocean.
‘Damn fools,’ he muttered to himself. ‘They’re taking a great risk in this.’ And then the yacht disappeared in a squall of sleet. He sat in the car for another half an hour. The squall cleared, but he never saw the yacht again.