Conviction

by Denise Mina

  That’s where the episode ends.

  His story was about killing people, about not trusting the police, about the inevitability of death and punishment. No one heard that in it but me.

  When the laughter died down Demy leaned in and whispered to Fin, ‘I tell you another story, a history story, if you put the recorder off.’

  So Fin turned it off as Zviad poured more vodka into his cup and downed it.

  ‘Who here,’ asked Demy of the company, ‘has heard of Bitch Wars?’

  ‘I have!’ said Zviad. ‘I’ve heard of the Bitch Wars.’

  ‘Of course you have!’ said Demy, waving him away, a salesman dismissing a dependable buyer. ‘But Findlay Co-Hen. Do you know this story?’

  Fin shook his head.

  ‘OK!’ said Demy. ‘All glasses full? All glasses full!’

  He refilled all our glasses. Everyone lifted their cups to their mouths. But Demy and I didn’t swallow. We tipped the cups and smacked our lips but we didn’t drink. He was getting ready to do something but he wasn’t watching me because I am a woman.

  Demy began again, holding his arms wide to the table, inviting us in.

  ‘Once upon a time, far away from here, in the East, some men formed a club! This club had rules. So, these men, clever men, brave men, handsome men.’ He patted his cheek and batted his eyes and we all laughed because Demy wasn’t handsome. ‘These clever, handsome men formed a club to help themselves. There were many rules. Most important rule: no collaboration with the authorities. Not even to pass a policeman his cigarettes, not even to pick up a paper in a prison yard or switch on a light. Never aid the authorities. Thieves’ code. Vory.’

  I looked at Zviad and Fin. They were enthralled by Demy’s story. It frightened and flattered the audience, told them that they had a place among such men, living epic lives, that life and death were in their hands. But they weren’t hearing what Demy was telling us. This was a forbidden story. He shouldn’t even mention vory to civilians like us. He shouldn’t say the words ‘thieves’ code’ or admit that such a thing existed. He was going to kill us all.

  Fin didn’t know that but Zviad should have noticed.

  ‘Vory ran everything. Trains, agriculture, cigarettes–BUT: come the Nazis! Germans! So the authorities says, you! Handsome men! You can get out of prison if you come fight the Nazis! Come out and join the army. Some did do it. Some hate Nazis. Some lose family in the war and are angry. And some are Jews. Nazis are pretty nasty to Jews, I don’t know if you know that…’

  We all nodded to show that we did know that, actually. Demy continued.

  ‘But so: they left gulag. They fight for the government. This broke the club rules.

  ‘After the war, government take them out of the army and when they go back to their normal lives–boom–send them all back into gulag for new crimes, back they send them. War heroes, Nazi killers. Who cares. Straight back.

  ‘So: once they get back in gulag, the pure vory who didn’t fight, they call these men suki–means “bitches”–because they cooperated with the authorities. Those suki men, they’re real tough bastards. They fight all the way to Berlin. You know, four thousand Nazis killed themselves in Berlin at the end because they hear these men are coming. That’s how tough. But they broke the code so …

  ‘So, the pure vory attack the suki and they refuse to work with them, they put them out of everything, beat them up. They treat them as low, like informants to the police.

  ‘Think about that. You go to fight the Nazis, maybe you are a Jew.’ He shrugged and gestured to Fin. ‘Some people are. It is right to fight to protect your people. What else? But afterwards… These are the men persecuted in gulag.’ He looked at Zviad and addressed him specifically. ‘Men are raping you up the ass, other men are mouth-fucking you.’

  Zviad was afraid but Demy wouldn’t let him break eye contact. Zviad tried dipping his head but when he raised his eyes again there was Demy, waiting for him.

  Demy whispered at him: ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘No,’ said Zviad quietly, ‘I did not know that.’

  Demy stared hard at him. It was tense. Zviad tried to act casual. He reached forward to the packet of Paprika Xtreme and opened them, trying to seem relaxed, but visibly trembling. We were all frightened now and too drunk to hide it. Zviad ate a crisp but his mouth was very dry and he couldn’t swallow. Defeated, he put the packet back down on the table.

  ‘But!’ continued Demy, smirking at Zviad. ‘So the suki they think, you know, OK, fuck this. We just kill all the pure vory and take over. Kill them all. So they began to kill them on sight. In prison, in the camps, in the streets, in the clubs. This is the Bitch Wars. Suki Wars. Bitch Wars go on for twenty, thirty years. Suki kill vory, vory kill suki, on and on. Next generation take over from their fathers, split down the middle. They make separate prisons for us, keep us apart.’

  He sat back, and took a long drink of neat vodka.

  Zviad caught my eye. He seemed to understand the threat Demy posed now. Fin still hadn’t a clue. He was so drunk he wasn’t listening.

  Demy opened his mouth to pour more vodka in, must have lifted his tongue in a certain way, because a perfect arc of saliva sprayed from his mouth and landed on the table. He saw it and laughed with surprise, pointing at the speckles on the tabletop.

  Zviad laughed but it came out weak and wrong.

  ‘Yes,’ Demy smirked at him, ‘that’s Bitch Wars.’

  Zviad shrunk in on himself and frowned at the table. The threat he exuded evaporated. We all felt it.

  Fin looked at me and widened his eyes with fairground surprise. He was incredibly drunk.

  ‘So where are you two going on this train, princess?’ asked Demy.

  ‘Paris,’ I lied. ‘We change at Milan. Where are you going?’

  Fin shook his head a little but he didn’t contradict me.

  ‘Paris, same as you, princess. One more hour to Milan.’ He toasted me, his eyes dark and mean. ‘We need more vodka!’

  We still had a third of a bottle left but Zviad leapt to his feet. ‘I’ll go.’ He almost saluted. Stiff with fright, he turned and walked out of the carriage to go to the buffet.

  Demy stood up and said, ‘And I go to piss.’

  Zviad wouldn’t come back.

  43

  ‘THAT WAS CREEPY,’ SAID Fin. ‘The thing about prison? Is that true?’

  ‘Fin, he’s telling the story to psych Zviad,’ I said. ‘Demy’s a hired assassin.’

  Fin was very interested and held his phone up again. ‘Could we ask him about that?’

  ‘We have to get out of here. Demy’s here for us.’

  ‘No. He was already on the train. He’s going to Paris.’

  ‘Fin: he got on after us. Do you remember?’

  But Fin wasn’t sober enough to fit anything together. He blinked slowly and got more confused.

  I explained, ‘He’s a professional criminal. Either he was following us or he happened to spot us and knew there was money in finding me. There’s a contract. It’ll be a lot of money.’

  This was news to Fin. ‘He’s just a businessman.’

  There is a nice way to dispel self-delusion, which is a beautiful thing if you can get it, but this isn’t it: ‘You fucking idiot, Fin.’

  ‘But he’s funny,’ he said, as if that was a defence. ‘Are you sure?’

  It was at this awkward moment that Demy arrived back, walking down the aisle, zipping up his flies and sighing with theatrical satisfaction. He sat back down and poured all three of us all another drink. He didn’t refill Zviad’s cup.

  ‘A toast!’ he said.

  And so began another spell of drinking or pretending to drink.

  Zviad never came back from the buffet car. Demy mentioned that the toilet had flooded and avoid it if you need to piss.

  Over the course of the next thirty minutes Fin’s eyes would flicker to the seat next to him, wondering where Zviad was. Sometimes he even wondered aloud where he wa
s, but Demy would say something reassuring or do something distracting, say that the buffet was very busy, or else he would launch off into another gangster story, not scary this time because he didn’t consider Fin any kind of threat.

  At one point Demy did consider Fin a threat. Fin, very drunk, leaned in too close and whispered. ‘Did you kill our friend Julia?’

  Demy considered the question. ‘Who?’

  ‘Our friend Julia Parker, back in Venice, she was stabbed many, many times.’

  I became aware of a noise, a faint, distant banging sound coming from the disabled toilet.

  Demy chortled, ‘Stabbed? With a knife? Like in a panic?’

  Here he pretended to jab Fin with his finger, giving off little frightened screams. It was funny, the way he did it, but he could see it was inappropriate. Fin laughed uncomfortably: don’t judge him for that. When frightening men make a joke people laugh.

  The banging noise was getting louder. A guttural sound, like a low growl or groan, caught Demy’s attention and his eyes flicked to the carriage door.

  ‘Men don’t stab,’ he said. ‘Why you ask me this? Where did your friend get killed?’

  But his attention was on the toilet door.

  ‘In Venice,’ said Fin.

  ‘Very sad!’ Demy nodded. ‘A toast!’

  A sudden loud thud from down the corridor made Demy flinch. It sounded like someone falling against a wall. Fin didn’t hear it. He put his head down on the table and fell asleep.

  Demy stood up clumsily, knocking over and spilling the last of the vodka on to the table. He said oh! Don’t worry! He would go buy more, don’t worry. I said OK and shut my eyes, making sure Demy saw me fall asleep. He walked away and I watched through my lashes, saw him walk away, out of the carriage, and then saw the toilet door open. Demy slid in and shut it behind him.

  We were drawing into a deserted concrete platform. The train slowed. The station signs slipping past the window read ‘Brescia’. Fin was asleep on the table.

  ‘Get up, Fin!’ I shook him but he was out cold. I tried to lift him but, thin as he was, I couldn’t. He was a dead weight. He slithered from my arms to the floor, slipping under the table. The train stopped in the empty station. I tucked his arms in under the table, pulled all our stuff underneath to make it look as if we had left the train. I hurried along the carriage to the toilet.

  The door was locked. I could hear faint banging against the inside wall, a head being slammed hard. I put my ear to the door and heard a grunt.

  I opened the door to the platform and waited, listening as the banging slowed down, getting softer and softer and then still.

  I threw the bag of Paprika Xtreme on to the platform, aiming for the exit, and it emptied as it flew, scattering crisps in a long arc, making it look as if we had dropped them as we ran away from the train.

  I hung out of the carriage door and shouted at the outside of the toilet window, ‘FIN, HURRY!’

  I bolted back through the carriage and clambered under the table, tucked myself tight in around Fin.

  I could see along the dirty carpeted floor to the bottom of the toilet door. It opened. Zviad’s legs lay still on the floor. Demy stepped over him, kicking the feet behind the door and locking it from the outside with a coin. Then his feet disappeared in the direction of the exit. He must have been looking out on to the platform.

  The doors beeped a warning but Demy was still on the train. The beeping ended.

  I closed my eyes. The carriage doors slid softly shut and the train took off.

  44

  AS THE TRAIN JOLTED away I looked up and Demy caught my eye. It was only for a moment. I unfurled from under the table and he watched me through the glass, wind whipping his hair up as the train pulled away.

  I stood in the aisle, hands trembling, heart cantering in my chest. I thought I would be sick but then I wasn’t and then I thought I might be sick again. This went on for some time while Fin snored sweetly on the floor.

  I sat down.

  Twenty minutes later the train pulled languorously into Milan. I didn’t know how often the trains ran from Brescia. Demy could already be here.

  I dragged Fin out from under the table, stood him up and half carried him off the train. We staggered along the platform and into the main hall. I swear he fell asleep on his feet as I was reading the departures board. I found the platform number for a fast train to Lyon and made Fin run.

  We caught the train by a hair, boarding as the doors were shutting, working our way through the carriages and sitting in the middle this time. I don’t think I’ll ever sit at the end of a train again, or in any carriage with only one way out.

  It was a six-hour unbroken journey. The chairs were uncomfortable. The carriage reeked of chemical toilet. I have never been more pleased to be anywhere. We slumped and I passed out, waking with a start twenty minutes later, clammy and shaking. Fin was wide awake, still quite drunk but happily playing on his phone. SNCF did have Wi-Fi. It was while I was asleep, I should say, that Fin tweeted the podcast episode with Demy’s story in it. I didn’t tell him what had happened to Zviad until afterwards.

  ‘Why did you think he was going to kill us?’

  ‘He was telling us.’

  ‘No he wasn’t.’

  ‘He told us, Fin. The story about Yergey? The Bitch Wars.’

  Fin blinked hard. ‘They were just stories.’

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  I told him about Zviad in the toilet. Fin insisted that we call the Italian police, Zviad might still be alive, we didn’t know, but a decade of avoiding the authorities makes you skittish. So Fin called, spoke for a bit, louder and louder, looked increasingly exasperated and then handed me the phone.

  The operator didn’t speak English or attempt to moderate his heavily accented Italian. I didn’t even try to use my broken Italian. I knew the call would be recorded and it would show us trying to inform the police of the murders of Julia and Zviad but failing. It was good. We could use it later to prove that we were innocent. I kept the call going for as long as possible and then hung up. I didn’t know they had CCTV on all train carriages and had film of Demy dragging Zviad into the toilet.

  I don’t think I have ever been so tired in my life. Every cell felt depleted but I was too wired to sleep. I lay my head on the window and watched the mountains glide by in the grey dawn and missed my girls as Fin played on his phone.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Anna…’

  He showed me the Twitter feed. The Demy episode was already raking in the RTs, but one comment came in every thirty seconds. It was bot-generated. Untraceable. It was a photo of my girls.

  I had never seen this photo. It was the girls in Halloween fancy dress costumes they’d worn to the school. It must have come from someone else’s Facebook post. They were grinning in front of the gates with their arms around each other. Lizzie had no front teeth. Same photo over and over again.

  The picture was captioned ‘Call me, DL x’.

  45

  AT LYON WE CHECKED into a bland corporate hotel a mile or so from the station. We got one room. Neither of us felt safe enough to be alone. Or sleep. Or even lie flat, actually. We were both, in the parlance of the street, fucking terrified.

  I ate all the complimentary biscuits, stared out of the dirty window and drank watery hot chocolate. When I couldn’t take any more and had to walk, we went out. We went to find Sabine’s bakery.

  We walked fast for an hour. It felt good. We were in a posh clothing street off the Place des Jacobins when I saw Fin turn to look in a shop window and the skin on his neck folding in five straight lines. He was thinner than he had been when we set off. God, I missed Hamish. I missed his beautiful hands and his flaws and his uncomplicated selfishness. I missed fighting with him about Candy Crush. I missed my face buried deep in his faithless chest and my nose brushing his hair.

  ‘Here.’

  Fin was staring into a shop window full of beautiful cakes.

  ‘Re
ally?’ I said, stupidly thinking he was hungry.

  ‘This is Sabine’s bakery.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He took out his phone, fitted the mic and turned on the voice recorder. Then he smiled at me, slipped the phone into the top pocket of his tweed jacket, mic sticking out, and walked boldly into the shop.

  It was a sombre room of bare pink plaster with brightly coloured tiny cakes, pink and green, brown and blue, tiny éclairs and millefeuilles, all the classics, done in miniature. They were little works of art. Behind the counter were two women, both in white chef jackets. Sabine was blonde and looked remarkably like Amila. We knew it was her immediately, even though we had never seen a photo of her, because she knew us.

  She crossed her arms and spoke to us in English. ‘Get. The. Fuck. Out.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fin, surprised by the level of aggression. Awkwardly, he raised a hand as if he was waving hello to her on a bridge a mile away. ‘Um. Hi.’

  ‘Out!’

  She lifted the counter and came out, arms wide, shepherding us towards the street. It was a bit frantic. She was moving very quickly, having been in a hot kitchen, and we were sloping about like a pair of hipster bums who hadn’t slept, were hung-over and felt sorry for themselves. Somehow there was a consensus that if she got us as far as the street we would never have the chance to speak to her again. We resisted.

  I stood on her foot. She narrowed her lips and turned to me, wide-eyed. Sabine was tiny, I should say, so she was looking up at me at quite an acute angle. She could have bitten a chunk out of my shoulder if she had been so inclined.

  ‘Amila is innocent,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want her free?’

  She shook with anger. ‘Amila is ill. Amila is very ill and was misdiagnosed in prison. Now it’s too late. They can’t treat her without killing her but you don’t care about that because it’s not in your story.’

  She tried to wiggle her foot out from under mine but I pressed it harder. ‘What if we can get her out?’

  She stopped. ‘Like, a jailbreak?’

  ‘Like, prove it was someone else.’