Cold (18 page)

‘Is that your real name?’ asked Joe.

‘No. Is your real name Joseph Peter Dalglish Tiplady?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were your parents thinking of?’

‘Fuck you. What’s happening? Where are we? Why were the people in the law office shot? Who are you and what are you trying to do?’

‘Too many questions.’

‘Who do you work for?’

‘Her Majesty’s Government.’

‘Do you mean MI6?’

‘I was in the Household Cav.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘No. Answering questions isn’t part of the service we provide.’

‘Where are we?’

Silence.

‘This woman, she stole my dog, she . . .’ For some reason, Joe couldn’t bring himself to describe what she’d done to him the previous night, before they’d burst in through the roof. ‘What is going on?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Lightfoot, pulling up a chair and sitting down. ‘Do you?’

‘If you don’t know,’ said Joe, ‘then what are we doing here? Wherever we are.’

‘Oh, I am most terribly sorry. Would you like to go back to the nice Russian gentleman who was about to deep fat fry your balls?’

Joe was about to say something when Katya cut across him: ‘Thank you very much for all that you’ve done for us.’

‘Thank you, miss.’

‘Why am I still handcuffed?’ asked Joe, needled, needling.

‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise that was the case.’ Lightfoot whipped out a Swiss Army knife and cut the plastic cuffs.

‘Am I free to leave?’ asked Joe, not quite masking the petulance in his voice.

‘Yes.’

Joe stood up, rubbed his wrists, working some blood back into them, walked over to the door and opened it.

‘Goodbye,’ he said, poised by the door, half in, half out.

‘You are free to leave,’ said Lightfoot. ‘But . . .’

‘But what?’

‘May I speak frankly?’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Joe. Lightfoot had a certain quality – arrogance, insouciance – that summed up everything about the English ruling class Joe’s upbringing had warned him against.

‘You’re free to leave, Mr Tiplady,’ said Lightfoot, ‘but in reality that means you’re free to die. If you walk out of here, they’ll kill you.’

‘Joe’ – that was the first time she had used his first name and it pleased him – ‘don’t go. Listen to him. Please.’

Something pitiable, now, in those wolf eyes. He mustn’t leave her, the eyes said. Joe stepped inside, closed the door and sat down on the sofa, as proudly as he could.

‘So,’ Lightfoot continued, ‘you already know this, but you’re still in great danger. Someone powerful, powerful enough to kill three people in the centre of London and not give a damn about it, wants you. They seem desperate to get their hands on you. You’re not out of trouble yet. We’re very unhappy with our Russian friends but we don’t want to go to war with them. That’s off the table.’

‘Is he locked up?’ asked Katya.

‘Reikhman is a fully accredited Russian diplomat. After consultation with the powers that be, we decided that it was in the national interest to release him.’

Katya started to weep.

‘So he can kill again?’ said Joe.

‘We can’t, for the moment, establish a prima facie connection between the murders at the law office and the people who detained you. The killer was a sniper, and a very, very good one at that. But not Reikhman. He was, at the critical time, at a reception at the House of Lords. He has eight witnesses, including a marquess, a duke and the Bishop of Gloucester. If you go home, you may be in grave danger. You both understand that, don’t you?’

She nodded; Joe made a slight inclination of his head.

‘For the moment you are guests of Her Majesty’s Government while we work out what to do with you. If I understand it, neither of you are or have ever been British citizens.’

Joe held his tongue.

‘I’m right in thinking that you, Mr Tiplady, say you are and have only ever been Irish – and you, Ekaterina, are pure Russian, through and through?’

They both nodded. Lightfoot clucked his tongue. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’

‘Ekaterina, it is correct to say that although a Russian-passport holder, you were born in Grozny and that you aren’t Russian but Chechen. That is the ethnic minority most feared by the Russian authorities. Is that correct?’

She nodded.

‘And you, Mr Tiplady, were born in Belfast, which whether you like it or not, was and is part of the United Kingdom.’

‘Screw you.’

‘No, screw you. And, in particular, screw you because you have no idea what trouble you are in and how much of my precious time I am spending trying to stop some people above my head, who should know better, sending you back to the people who are trying to kill you. The fact that you were born in Belfast helps me to help you. If you weren’t, then as a servant of Her Majesty’s Government I can’t do much to help you. And screw you twice, Mr Tiplady. Please remember that I work for Her Majesty’s Government and I will do what I am told to. But, speaking personally, I gather your family was heavily connected with the Irish Republican Army, and my best friend in the army was murdered by that organisation. So let’s not mistake working together for anything more than that. Do we understand each other?’

‘We do,’ said Joe.

‘From now, if I ask you a question you tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Immediately. Listen, there are people in my office who are asking me what on earth I am doing helping a Russian tart and an IRA man. Do you understand the thinness of the ice you’ve placed yourself on?’

‘I’m not with the Rah,’ said Joe, using the Belfast street slang for the Provisional IRA. ‘They killed my father. And Katya here wants out. That’s why she’s left the killer. We didn’t want any of this. You’re blaming us for trouble caused by someone else. We haven’t killed anyone.’

That wasn’t, in Joe’s case, strictly accurate. But now wasn’t the time to go into what he did in the mountains north of Pyongyang.

Lightfoot didn’t register any emotion on his face.

‘I must go now. Any questions?’

‘Can you get my dog back?’ asked Joe.

Lightfoot’s sunless face became even less happy.

‘If I’m to stay here, I need to look after my dog,’ Joe said.

‘So you were lying all along!’ hissed Katya. ‘You knew where the dog was.’

‘No,’ replied Joe. ‘Not for certain. I had an idea, that’s all.’

‘Liar!’

‘No, not liar.’

‘Listen, you two,’ said Lightfoot, even more sourly than usual, ‘any more of this crap and I’ll send you to Moscow by parcel post.’ He turned to Joe. ‘Is there no one else who can look after it?’

‘No.’

‘Is it savage, a pit bull or something?’

‘Reilly?’ It was hard to offend Joe, but Lightfoot’s remark came close to it. ‘He’s a whippie-poo.’

‘Very well.’ Lightfoot took down Joe’s address and the details of Reilly’s most likely current abode, at the back of his flat, with the woman with tin hair who fed him sausages.

Lightfoot said, ‘This isn’t over for you. Not by a long chalk. For the time being, you’re pretty safe here.’

‘And where is here? Where are we exactly?’ asked Joe, again petulant.

‘You’re in a safe house.’

Outside, boots slammed down on cobbles, orders barked and obeyed.

Joe walked up to the shutters and pulled them open to look out on a Norman tower, from which was flying a flag divided into four quarters with lots of lions on it. He let out a soft, low whistle.

‘They said that I should put you in a safe house,’ continued Lightfoot. ‘I used my initiative. This is the safest house in the whole of England. Welcome to Windsor Castle.’

ROSTOV, SOUTHERN RUSSIA

S
nowflakes twisted down onto the gravestones of the heroic and unheroic Soviet dead, thick and plump and blue-black crystals. The cemetery stood on a bluff of land overlooking an aluminium smelter, all five square miles of it. During the Great Patriotic Aluminium War, as the wits called the infighting over the factory in the nineties, more than a hundred people – managers, accountants, security men – had been murdered, until the smaller gangsters gave way to a gangster so big that no one dare call him one.

Much of the smelter was now a functionless ruin of metal pipes and brick chimneys and half-collapsed concrete from the Brezhnev era that no one had bothered to bring back to life or knock down for good. It lived on as a mirthless satire on Soviet industry, and on the dead men who’d bothered to kill and be killed for it. But the smokestacks of a third of the smelter still spat out greasy black columns, which knitted into a fresh flurry of snow to fall on those who had gone before.

The dead wouldn’t complain. And the quick? Well, the environmental regulator had mouths to feed – his wife, his children, his mistress, that nark of a local journalist who was blackmailing him – and the money the smelter bosses had to pay him was a trifle of what it would cost to clean up the chimneys, so when it snowed, it snowed black. Bleak wasn’t the word for it.

The gravedigger had a wall eye that, as he leaned on his spade and shook his head, wobbled slightly in its socket.

‘Once buried, job done.’

‘It’s taken me a whole week to find this place where they say she was buried.’

One of the neighbours in the block of flats near Babushkinskaya station in Moscow, a schoolteacher, had whispered to Gennady through a half-closed door that she had bumped into Iryna in the lift shortly before she disappeared. Iryna was carrying a suitcase. The neighbour had asked where she was off to and Iryna had told her Rostov, a city in the south of Russia, close to the border with Ukraine.

Gennady had asked the neighbour: ‘Who cleaned out her flat?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing, I saw nothing,’ she said, and started to pull the door shut.

‘Was it the Cheka?’

She said nothing, but just before she slammed the door she nodded, twice.

The gravedigger was promising to be even less obliging.

‘Who is it you’re after again?’ he asked.

‘Iryna Dozhd.’

‘Well, here she is.’

The gravestone was charcoal grey, the top slanted diagonally in the old Soviet fashion, to distance the graves of the Modern Man from the old Christian tradition. Iryna’s name was plainly written on the stone, that and her date of birth and date of death. Nothing more.

‘Did you bury her?’

‘Yes. Well, I dug the hole, my mate and I lowered the coffin. Dunno what’s in the coffin, do I?’

‘Who came?’

The gravedigger grew still. He was beginning to smell trouble.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘She was my daughter. No one told me about the funeral. I want to make sure it’s her.’

‘Nothing doing.’

The gravedigger had never seen such a fat fist of roubles before in all his life. And there was something about the man – his eyes seemed to be laughing at him, at the world – something tough about him as well, that he wasn’t afraid of the authorities. He’d led men once, you could tell.

‘If the boss finds out, my head will be on the chopping board.’

‘Does the boss come out in the snow?’ Gennady asked.

‘No.’

‘Better get going then.’

It took an hour and a half. The earth had not quite frozen solid but it had the texture of half-set concrete. It took an age for the two of them to get two ropes underneath the wooden coffin and then struggle to get the thing up onto the black slushy earth. The gravedigger took a crowbar to the coffin and popped open the lid.

‘Well, take a look.’

Gennady found himself staring at the corpse of an old woman, the flesh mottled, blue-black with necrosis, but there was a startling bright blue about her lips and nose.

‘So?’ asked the gravedigger, curious.

‘This isn’t Iryna. I don’t know who she is but I know enough about the dead to know that this old lady didn’t die naturally. Poison, looks like. We’d better call the police.’

‘Ah,’ said the gravedigger. ‘Well, you asked me before, who came to the funeral, and I didn’t say.’

‘Well, who was it then?’

‘The police.’

Gennady laughed to himself, a joke but not a funny one.

‘Why bury the wrong woman?’ Gennady said. ‘Cremation would have been smarter.’

‘Ah,’ said the gravedigger. It was clearly his favourite expression.

‘Ah?’

‘Crem isn’t working. The furnace has broken, they’re waiting for a new boiler. They paid for a new one but the company turned out to be a shell, so they wasted hundreds of thousands of roubles on nothing.’

‘Anyone else at the funeral, apart from the cops?’

‘Fat bloke, stank of perfume, nice suit. When he stared at you, he gave you the creeps. Spoke funny, too. Squeaked.’

‘Oh,’ said Gennady. ‘There’s just one more thing.’

The gravedigger listened to his request, then walked to his lean-to shed by the entrance of the cemetery where he kept his wood saw and a bucket.

MOSCOW

W
ishy-washy sleet – not proper snow – was falling on the square outside, falling on the stupid lump of stone the Democrats had placed when they were in their pomp back in 1991, when the coup against Gorbachev had failed so ignominiously and Grozhov had found himself on the run. He’d buried himself in the backstreets of Havana for a couple of years, until the political weather changed again.

Back in the day, the view from his office in the Lubyanka was of ‘Iron Felix’, all fifteen tons of it. It had been erected in 1958, to honour Lenin’s great Chekist. The Democrats said that Felix had killed – or, more correctly, supervised the killing of – hundreds of thousands.
Hmm
, thought Grozhov,
the old country had balls under Lenin and Stalin. The West was afraid of us
.
Then there was all that rubbish about reform and democracy. Say what you like about Zoba – under him, Russia is strong again.

There had been a grave security breach. Grozhov had forgotten the name of the old Roman who spouted it, but ‘
quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
’ Who watches the watchmen; who guards the guards? They were always the weakest link, the soft underbelly the enemy probed.