The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “I am Xenia Chornoroukaya,” she said, also in English. “I am in the third year of the Faculty of Languages at MGU, Moscow State University. I study English and French.” She could quite well use longer and more complex sentences, but she had already found it useful with Naomi to simulate a younger, less fluent self. It gave her time to react; a means of concealment; a reason not to understand.

  “So you said in your letter,” Yevgenia remarked. “Where do you come from? Were you brought up in Moscow?”

  “No, I was born and brought up in a town in Siberia, you will not have heard of it, called Novoleninsk. I only saw Moscow for the first time when I went to university there.” It was only as she saw some tension ease in Yevgenia’s dimly discerned face that Xenia realized that the old woman had been strained as she asked these questions. Her replies so far had been satisfactory.

  “So you came from Siberia.”

  “My town is rather far east. It is very, very cold. Often in the winter we had thirty-five degrees of frost for months on end. It is difficult to describe such cold. Moscow seemed to me to be a very warm place when I went there. My father used to say…”

  “Your father. Who is your father?”

  “My father is dead. He was Alexander Alexandrovich Chornorouky.”

  “Alexander Alexandrovich?” From the small table beside her chair Yevgenia took a packet of black cigarettes and selected one, lighting it with a match held dangerously in her quavering hand. “Well,” she said, as if explaining something to herself, “it is a common enough name. What did he do, your father?”

  “He was a teacher of languages. It was he who taught me French and English himself at home when I was very young. He taught at our Technical High School.”

  Xenia censored her descriptions of her origins as much in England as in Moscow. She had no intention of explaining that her father came to that desolate town not as a highly paid volunteer from European Russia, but as a former camp inmate. He had been released from the gulag which lay in the hinterland of the town and of the consciousness of all its citizens, released, but without the means or influence to return whence he came. She was waiting to hear something from Yevgenia that would tell how to slant her history, to make the links that she wanted to create.

  “He taught you well. I have always understood that the Soviets were excellent in their language teaching methods.”

  Xenia made no protest at her father being called a “Soviet”, an epithet to which he would have vehemently objected; she was building up a sense of Yevgenia’s prejudices. Yevgenia had been relieved at hearing of Siberia; she had tried to discount the significance of the name Alexander; she had called him a “Soviet”. Xenia suddenly understood. Yevgenia did not want them to be related. It was not just that she was suspicious of a claim of relationship; she wished actively to discredit it.

  “My father spoke very fluently; he would often use English or French in preference to Russian.” She did not add, because he thought our apartment was bugged.

  “Presumably he learned them in a Soviet school, rather than in Paris or London.”

  Xenia did not contradict this. Her father had sometimes spoken of Paris, but it was hard to know if he had ever been there or whether he was talking of what he had read in books. She did not wish to quarrel, she wished to soothe. She tried another tack. “My father used to talk of his family and of its great past. He spoke of the Prince Chornorouky who built a convent in the bend of a river, with white walls all round, where the Empress Anna was imprisoned.”

  “Yes, Prince Vsevolod Chornorouky in the eleventh century built the Convent of the Annunciation; the Empress Anna was imprisoned there in the seventeenth century. Both are well-known characters in Russian history.” Yevgenia spoke dismissively, putting out her cigarette; she struggled to rise from her chair, indicating her sticks for Xenia to hand to her. Xenia picked them up and gave them, one by one, to her hostess.

  She is running away from me, she thought. Then, she is afraid; she is afraid of me. This conclusion, so unlikely, intuitive rather than reasoned, became stronger in Xenia’s mind as she thought over the way that Yevgenia had reacted to her letter and her coming to England. She had something to hide, or to fear from Xenia. The girl could not imagine what it might be; at this stage her nostrils simply scented an unease amounting to terror. For some reason Yevgenia did not want her to be a Chornoroukaya, at least not a real one. Xenia built no structure of speculation upon what she sensed; she did not attempt to reason with it. She held it in reserve. She had no idea whether she and Yevgenia were related. Nothing her father had ever told her referred to relatives in England or anywhere else abroad. If it were in her interest not to be related to Yevgenia, Xenia would renounce her claim; she could not care. Her only aim at the moment was to stay in England.

  The conviction that this was what she must do had come to her during that painful day as, from the margin, she had watched the family, talented, various, amid all its riches. She hated them all. She was filled with fury at everything she saw, yet she knew she must find a place here. Immediately, her mind began to search for ways of achieving her permanent escape from Russia. Influence was always needed to gain anything from the authorities. Nothing was ever given as a right, only as a favour, which would one day have to be repaid. But repayment was for later. For the present task Marcus was going to be the key. Yevgenia was too hostile to hope for help from her. Naomi’s active, meddling benevolence might very well be used for her purposes, but she was sure it would have to be Marcus who would deal with the authorities. Naomi worked at home; only Marcus, who went out into the world, would have the influence to fix what she wanted with those irrational powers who rule lives, bestowing or withholding stamps of residence. She had observed, like Zita, that Marcus had been more animated than usual among his family. Unlike Zita, she did not attribute it to Valentina’s presence. She had recognized the interest, quieter, less demanding than Naomi’s, that Marcus had shown in her, and knew it for what it was. She had done nothing to acknowledge it, seeing no use for it, yet she had encouraged it in an oblique fashion, always preferring his company to Al’s. Now she could see what must be done.

  Part Three

  ZITA

  10

  The day after the lunch party Zita returned home from work to find Valentina and Yevgenia sitting together under the horse chestnut tree at the end of her garden. On a table between them were two glasses containing the dregs of tea and lemon and two saucers in which several wasps were paddling in the remains of raspberry jam which had evidently been eaten with spoons. As she crossed the lawn towards them, Zita heard the sound of Russian. If you suppressed knowledge of the modern house behind, of Tom and Lynne, the videos and the electric wheel chair, you could imagine you were looking at two old Russian women exchanging gossip in the garden of a dacha somewhere near Moscow in the summer of 1929, she thought. Valentina had transformed herself into a Russian grandmother, talking about family to a contemporary.

  “Who is Al, by the way, Yevgenia?” Valentina was asking. “Explain him to me.”

  “Naomi told me about him a year ago, when he first appeared on the scene. He is the son of an enormously rich Indian family who is doing his best to annoy his parents. He is a bit old for such behaviour, I would have thought. But that must be the reason for all that hair, and his clothes, and for Rosie too. He went to a good school and to Cambridge to read archaeology. Then when his family wanted him to do an MBA and enter their business he refused.”

  “Poor Rosie,” Valentina remarked. “So difficult to be someone else’s act of rebellion.”

  Yevgenia nodded. “You’re right. My poor Rosie. Although you are so much younger than me, Valya, you are developing that horror of old age, the Cassandra syndrome. You see the disasters ahead with such clarity that it is painful not to call out. But, of course, you must say nothing.”

  Perhaps because her insight was associated with old age, Valentina reversed her opinion. “Sometimes extraordinarily unlik
ely relationships based on most unpromising premises work out. Who can tell? Look at John and me, meeting as we did, hardly knowing one another at all when we married. One disaster I foresee is with Xenia, who is doing everything she can with her Russian charm to make herself beloved by her benefactors, I noticed.”

  “She certainly does not get on with Rosie and Al.”

  “That is pure racism, of course. Russians are the most prejudiced people in the world. I shall never forget coming to England in 1957 and being shocked by all the black men on the buses, not to mention at dinner tables at Cambridge. Do your Cassandra-eyes foresee trouble there? I think she’ll have driven Naomi and Marcus mad within a week.” Yevgenia paused for so long before replying that Zita looked at her in surprise. “No, on the contrary, she will have chained them to her: they’ll be her slaves, both of them. Then they’ll send her here to work on me.”

  Valentina looked sceptical. “I saw no sign of her power of attraction. She struck me as ugly, difficult, badly dressed and awkward.”

  “It’s not power of attraction, just power.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Zita, you saw that ridiculous argument between Xenia and Rosie? It took me back suddenly to my childhood. I remembered an incident, so small at the time, but so important. It was a quarrel between two of… of my friends. And that made me think. What is ‘tape recorder’ in Russian?”

  “Tape recorder?”

  “Magnyetofon.” Valentina supplied the answer.

  “Yes, that is what I need. I shall ask Lucia to get me one tomorrow. I need a little one, that I can hold easily, and lots of tapes.”

  “And what’s it for, the tape recorder?”

  “I have to record the past. I can’t write or type because my hands can’t cope, so I shall record it. It was that argument between Xenia and Rosie, I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking of it, or rather of the memories it evoked. Or perhaps it was earlier. After I had written to the Club of the Nobility in Moscow, I began to have nightmares. I don’t sleep much anyway nowadays and when I do I dream about when I was a child in Latvia, or worse, about when I was older, during the war. I have read that the only way to rid yourself of these dreams is to write everything down.”

  “Do you dream of the past as it was, or is it just the setting for ordinary nightmares, frustration dreams like missing trains, or punishment dreams of being trapped by a wall of water?”

  “They are not ordinary nightmares, but whether they happened or not, the horrors I dream of, I can’t remember. There were so many it’s difficult to distinguish between the nightmare and the reality. That’s why I want to write it down. From the beginning, to make it straight.”

  The nightmares, it seemed, had no bearing on Woodham and the corpse of the child in her garden. It was curious, Zita reflected at the time, with what she came later to see as exceptional obtuseness, that Yevgenia had so little regard for the skeleton under the roses. Valentina had seen at once what was involved and she had a cruel way of speaking aloud what others would not say, unfolding the implications that they preferred to leave until time or need unwrapped them.

  “What’s the news of the child’s body?” she asked Zita when Yevgenia had left them. “Is it a murder?”

  “Who knows? It could have been an accident, that hole in the back of his head, but there is no doubt it is very odd to find a corpse in someone’s back garden. The assumption is that the explanation is not an innocent one.”

  “How cautious and pompous you lawyers are. How long was she living there, Yevgenia? Forty years, did you say? It’ll have to be pretty old, the corpse, not to involve her. It looks as if Naomi has been digging up the past for her.”

  The problem expressed so bluntly by Valentina nagged Zita all night. If the body was less than forty years old, there would be very unpleasant questions for Yevgenia to answer. The quiet resident of a country town, an elderly widow, and a corpse lying four feet down in her garden made an improbable juxtaposition. Yet Yevgenia would certainly be asked to explain the riddle and it was hard to see how any innocent answer could link the two of them. Having thought the unthinkable, Zita reverted to her original position: the bones were very old, with no relevance to the recent owners of the house. Naomi’s building works had turned up an ancient tragedy that would be of more interest to Reskimer, the archaeologist, than Stevens, the policeman.

  The following day she rang Stevens. His tone was not helpful, but he imparted quite willingly the information, which she knew already from her conversations with the archaeologists at the house the previous week, that a body in its entirety, not just a skull, with some metallic remains, had been found under the last thin covering of earth.

  “What happens next?” Zita enquired.

  Stevens’ voice changed, took on more force. “It is a murder investigation. An incident room has been set up and a couple of officers are working on the case. They’ll be interviewing the owners and the former owner very soon.”

  “Murder?” Zita repeated.

  “How else would you explain a child with its head staved in, buried secretly in an unmarked grave? I’ve got the pathologist’s report here in front of me. There’s little doubt that he died from a blow on the back of the head.”

  Zita remembered the seams of the skull which had had the appearance of being sewn together with strong brown stitches, the way that the head was tenderly propped up. She decided to get hold of the forensic scientists to see if they could tell her anything more. “Who’s the pathologist?” she asked. “Did he have anything to say about the age of the skeleton?”

  “Not much that is useful at the moment,” Stevens replied. His voice had still that combative edge which she had noticed at Asshe House. However, he made no difficulty about passing on the name and phone number of the pathologist before ringing off.

  “Poor Yorick, is it?” he said when she telephoned Dr Pigot and explained what she wanted. “I’ve just finished my report on him. Do you want to come and have a look this afternoon?” he added unexpectedly. “We’re just off the Brighton Road; I’m free about four.”

  She found her way easily. It was on the route to her dressmaker’s and she recognized immediately the sprawling complex of local authority administrative offices. Dr Pigot, waiting for her in the reception area, was the model of an old-fashioned country practitioner rather than the modern forensic scientist. He was dressed in what Zita thought of as mouldy green: ancient green-brown corduroy trousers, brown-green tweed jacket in spite of the warm weather, Tattersall check shirt and a green woollen tie. She recalled descriptions of operations performed in morning dress by Victorian surgeons and wondered whether Dr Pigot, too, ever bothered with a white coat or rubber gloves. He led her down lengthy corridors to a room whose chill immediately struck the skin.

  She had been asking herself why she had come and why he had invited her; all the information she needed could be supplied by telephone. When they entered the laboratory she realized why she had wanted to see for herself and not simply hear the results of Dr Pigot’s researches. The skull lying on its pillow of earth under its duvet of soil had reminded her of Tom, his bony face, with its huge eyes and sharp little chin. She wanted to see the rest of the body, uncovered; she wanted to know who it was.

  Although Pigot conjured up the earthy, more careless medical past, there was nothing primitive about his laboratory, which was scrubbed and bare. On one long table lay the skeleton, a collection of unconnected bones, arranged like a puzzle successfully completed. Pigot was walking round to the far side, already talking with enthusiasm. He was dealing with points in an orderly manner as though ticking off numbers on a standard questionnaire that he had to fill in.

  “There was no doubt at once that it was human and one corpse.” He was spreading his hands in the air above the body as if officiating at some arcane ritual. They were broad and fleshy, very white with silky black hair between the knuckles and first joint. “And that’s not always obvious, I can tell you. We have p
eople bringing us animal bones, thinking they’re human. And I’ve had times when I’ve been faced with a graveful of bones and I’ve had to work out how many individuals there were. But this was very straightforward. It was laid out very nicely for the archaeologists to do their excavations and it was evident at once that it was a human child. After that things got trickier.

  “Sex. Almost impossible to tell in a child. This is the manubrium,” another pass of the palm, “which is proportionately larger in males than females. The formation of the pelvis is the other area which is conclusive, in adults. But here we have to look at other factors, to give us the answer on that one. Age at death is the next question. Size and age go together in a general way. What would you think?”

  Tom never stretched out like this full length, the tension in his limbs bent and contorted them; only for moments in the swimming pool did he ever attain some kind of relaxation for his body. Then his long, skinny body was just this length. “Seven,” Zita said decisively. “He was seven.”

  “Do you think so, now? Interesting you should say that. At first, I’d have said older. Measuring what we’ve got here (and we’ve got almost everything) we have one metre thirty-one or, if you’re old-fashioned like me and still work in feet and inches, that’s four foot four. Now that’s a little bit above average for a seven-year-old, even today when children are bigger than they used to be. At first, I put him at about eight and a half or even nine. I checked the height, by the way, on several other tests, not just reassembling him. Best to try everything. One rough and ready method is the outstretched arms, you know, like the Leonardo drawing. You’ll find that putting your arms like this…” he formed his body into a crucifix, “… gives you the same measurement as your height. Except with this one they didn’t. A bit less. And there are formulae for applying to the long bones to give you an estimate of height. I used the femur and tibia and both came within a centimetre of what I’d reconstructed, so the height is right. But I digress. Because you’re right about his age. When I started on that, I found he was definitely younger than I thought. For age we look at ossification, the fusion of the epiphyses of the bones to their shafts. This occurs in a given order, and when I examined this child I found considerably less ossification than one would expect in a nine-year-old. And, of course, teeth. He had only four permanent teeth. Both lots of markers indicate a lower rather than greater age. So, a tall seven-year-old, and the combination of size and age make me think we have a boy here. It’s not conclusive, but I would put my money on its being a boy. Whether he was English I am not absolutely sure. There are certain features that suggest that, though he was Caucasian, not Asian, not African, he was not necessarily English. I’m still thinking about this: it’s all to do with the proportions and shape of the skull, but when you’re talking about a child you haven’t got the final result as it were. Dental data are very good.” He bent his head as if to look in the mouth. “No fillings. Strange, that, for the days before fluoride. Perhaps he came of a very strict family, or was alive during the war when sweets were a rarity.”