Cold (28 page)

Weaver fired up his computer once more and hunched over it, hauling up more teraflops of computing power than any other single individual on the planet could command. They’d gone off the grid in Windsor Great Park. Clearly that fag Lightfoot had been helping them. What was so extraordinary was that from the day they’d disappeared, there had been no trace. Nothing.

Weaver logged out, yawned, stood up, walked away from his desk, hit a too brilliantly lit corridor, grabbed a cappuccino, sipped it, returned, logged on afresh, and – hey presto – there they were.

He picked up the phone and redialled Grozhov.

‘What?’ barked the Russian.

‘Their passports have surfaced on our grid.’

‘Where?’

‘Manaus.’

‘Where’s Manaus?’

‘Brazil. Put someone good on this. Neither of us wants any mistakes.’

‘I’m sending my best man. He’ll be on the next plane out of Moscow.’

‘Send him now,’ said Weaver.

‘He’s been to the dentist today. Very soon.’

Weaver put the phone down and allowed himself a cautious smile. Things were beginning to look up. There would be no more screw-ups.

NOVO-DZERZHINSKY

N
o, not like that – like this, his trousers had been cut off completely . . . Yes that’s right. He had more muscle on him, he didn’t look so bad for a man his age. Yes, good, good.’

Yellow Face was concentrating, an artist’s pencil in her hand, working on the shading of the drawing of Pyotr, but Gennady couldn’t resist trying to sneak a glance. ‘You can look at it when I’ve finished and not before,’ she snapped.

She was sitting in the back seat of the Volga with Ludmilla, drawing to the old woman’s instructions. They were parked outside the hospital.

When she was content with her work, Iryna angled it so that Gennady could inspect it from his seat behind the wheel.

‘You’ve certainly got a gift.’

‘The likeness is excellent,’ said Ludmilla. ‘That’s Pyotr as I last saw him.’ The drawing captured the victim in his kitchen, an icon on the wall, him lying on the floor, hands cuffed behind his back, half naked from the waist down, his groin a grim pudding of blisters and blood, his mouth, nose and eyes darkened, too.

‘You’ve drawn his face quite dark,’ said Gennady. ‘Was he a drinker?’

‘Yes, sure,’ said Ludmilla. ‘But for a big drinker his nose was not so bad. The making of the drawing reminded me of something, that in death his mouth looked raw, as if maybe they had choked him, gagged him. His eyes and nose were red, too.’

‘His nose was red, not blue?’ asked Gennady.

‘Definitely red – red raw.’

‘Thank you, Iryna.’

‘It’s nothing.’

Yellow Face left him the drawing and disappeared back into the hospital. Gennady offered to take Ludmilla all the way home, but she declined. He had just dropped her off at the bus station when his phone rang.

‘It’s Leonid here,’ said Oblamov. ‘The computer has seven thousand and something cars with the registration plate ending EK61.’

‘So, no joy?’

‘And only three with the wrong-way-round chicken foot of Mercedes. One was in a crash seven months ago, a total write-off. Another is a beige cabriolet. The third is registered at an address in the centre of Rostov.’

‘Come on, Sherlock, don’t tease.’

‘The Tax Inspectorate. The people who did this to Pyotr, they are connected.’

Gennady thanked Oblamov and concluded the call.

The connected weren’t going to help him find his daughter. The cold fact of the dead end left him profoundly depressed. Sitting in the Volga across the road from the bus station, he phoned Venny, but got her answering machine. He left a message saying he would see her soon, and then he thought through what he knew – or, correction, what he thought he knew.

He knew that his daughter was dead, because otherwise she would have called him. He didn’t know that with absolute certainty, but Iryna had always been a considerate daughter. He knew that a grave existed with her name on it. He knew that the body within the grave belonged to an old woman, a total stranger, who had been poisoned with a nerve agent. He knew that the least bent cop in a miserable town had evidence that an old man in the countryside had been murdered in the cruellest way possible, by someone from the Tax Inspectorate.

He knew that none of this added up. He suspected, but did not know, that the disappearance of his daughter, the torture of the old man, and the old woman killed by a nerve agent were all mixed up. But how exactly?

He watched the ordinary people of Russia come and go, passing through the bus station, and the thought of their helplessness in the face of the powers in the land left him defeated and afraid.

THE TRENT AND MERSEY CANAL

R
eilly made a low woofing sound – not a full-throated bark – at middle England, set out like a badly made chessboard, far more white squares than black. Snow quilted the pastures, ice-grime fingered the locks, and frost gripped the rushes on the banks. Only the canal remained unfrozen, black and smooth and viscous.

Never been such a cold winter for years
, thought Joe as he patted Reilly on the head and gently edged the tiller over. The
Daisy
, seven feet wide and sixty long, negotiated a bend in the navigation and plodded on at four miles an hour.

Hunted by the FSB and the CIA, by MI5, MI6 and every police force in Britain, they had ended up travelling more slowly than a toddler could run. Reilly scratched a paw at the hatch and Joe opened it so the dog could return to the warmth of the cabin below. Katya was still sleeping, and the dog curled up at her feet.

Joe ran through the events of the past two days. After Lightfoot had concluded his phone call with the Very Important Person, he’d asked them a simple question: ‘Do you want to go to Moscow?’

‘No,’ said Joe. By his side, Katya shook her head.

Reilly had cocked a leg and started to lick his privates, suggesting that the offer was not to his liking either.

Lightfoot sighed. ‘If you were to go on the run,’ he said, ‘where would you go and how would you do it?’

‘Fly to . . .’ offered Katya.

Lightfoot grimaced. ‘You fly, you die. They’ll be tracking your passports, watching for you. If you fly anywhere in the world, they’ll find you. You’ve got to stay off the radar. No passports, no mobile phones, no calls home. Not all CCTV is connected, they can’t see you all of the time, but they can track you backwards in time and work out where you’ve been. They know where you are now, pretty much exactly. We know the odds are against you, so we’re privately offering you a small head start.’

‘Who’s we?’ Joe asked.

Lightfoot studied him with contempt. ‘Where would you go?’

‘Ireland,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve got some troubles back home, but it makes sense. A good place to lie low.’

‘OK. How do you get there?’

‘Drive? Ferry?’

‘There’s CCTV, connected to the grid, at every ferry port and on every major road to all the Irish Sea ports.’

‘Oh.’

‘I have a suggestion.’

‘What’s that?’ Joe asked.

They listened as Lightfoot spelled it out.

‘That’s absurd,’ said Joe.

‘I love it,’ said Katya.

‘That’s settled then,’ said Lightfoot and stood up. ‘See you in the morning. And if either of you ever breathes a word about this, I will come track you down and—’

‘Oh, join the queue,’ said Joe.

Long before dawn this morning, they’d found themselves walking along a subterranean brick passage from the lodge to a large garage. Lightfoot led them past a number of Rolls limousines of various vintages and a London taxi, to a large black Bentley with thick, armoured glass. He opened the boot and directed Joe, Katya and Reilly inside. The boot closed and all was dark. Then the Bentley started to move.

Two hours later, they heard cheering. The Bentley stopped; the doors opened and closed. The Bentley moved on, stopped again, and then the boot was opened. Light flooded in. They were in the basement of an underground car park.

Lightfoot helped them out, pointed to a door on the far side of the car park: ‘Go through that door. It’s unlocked. The barge is on the other side of the door. The engine’s on, there’s a map. You go north-west, get to Liverpool. How you get across the Irish Sea, that’s up to you.’

‘Thank you, George,’ said Katya. ‘You are a true English gentleman.’

Lightfoot beamed. Joe shook his head at a phrase he could – would – never articulate.

‘By the way,’ said Lightfoot, ‘I’ve posted your passports on somewhere. It should buy you some time.’

‘Where’s that?’ asked Joe.

‘Not Torremolinos.’

They started walking towards the door. As they opened it, they glanced back, but the Bentley had already crept silently away.

At dusk the wooden doors of the
Daisy
’s stern hatch opened, and two long slender arms emerged, proffering a cup of tea in a blue-and-white striped mug.

Reilly, who hated the cold, popped his snout out, surveyed the bleak weather and returned to his berth to coil like a fossil.

‘This is
soooo
slow,’ said Katya, wrapped up in a duvet.

‘We are heading west. For an Irishman, that’s good.’

‘Reikhman had a motor yacht with its own swimming pool, jet skis. We went to St Tropez and everything.’

‘Well, you were snoozing when we went through Wolverhampton.’

‘What is it like?’

‘Very much like St Tropez.’

She pulled a face, not believing him.

‘Where are we? It feels like nowhere.’

‘Staffordshire. I love the slowness of it,’ said Joe.

‘Cold,’ said Katya with an edge of complaint to her voice – like it was somehow his fault – as she let the duvet fall.

‘That’s because you haven’t got any clothes on.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So bourgeois.’

Wine-dark clouds were banking up in the east, daylight a fading memory to the west. Fields of darkening snow stretched up to low, uneven hills on either side of the canal. Lights from a farmhouse blinked a mile away. Joe was navigating the boat by judging the obsidian black of the canal against the lighter dark of the banks, but soon he would have to moor up for the night.

They were alone, but even so what Katya did next thrilled him. Climbing out of the hatch, she knelt before him, shivering, unzipped him, her nipples proud in the freezing air, then sucked his penis until it was hard. She swivelled round, steadied herself against the hatch and arched her buttocks at him. He drove into her, again and again.

The barge, with no one at the tiller, shunted into the canal bank, quivering and shuddering, as Katya quivered and Joe shuddered; they both climaxed, magically, at the same time; she moaned softly, he howled like a wolf and the moon rose, casting its unearthly pale over the night.

They both collapsed, giggling, onto the deck, bathed in the moonlight.

‘They say canal boats are only for old people,’ said Joe. ‘Bollocks to that.’

They tied up for the night and began exploring the barge. Under one seat they found candles, matches, a bottle of peroxide hair dye, scissors, a toiletry kit, two mugs decorated with photographs of the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. In the fridge, chilled meals and a bottle of champagne. Joe lit the candles, poured each of them a slug of bubbly, and they clinked mugs and sat down at a spindly table opposite each other, while Reilly watched, his snout resting on his front paws.

The candles flickered, playing with the harmony of Katya’s face, the shadows deepening her innate melancholy.

‘What’s going on inside that beautiful head of yours?’

She inspected her mug, the royal couple smiling on the balcony at Buckingham Palace on their wedding day. ‘They looked so happy back then. He loved someone else – she died in a car crash. Not so happy.’

Joe pulled a sourish face, unhappy that she dwelled so often on the unhappy.

‘Love sometimes goes wrong. That doesn’t mean it always fails.’

‘Mr Tiplady is an optimist.’

‘Guilty. You can call me Tippy, if you like. But you didn’t really answer my question. What were you thinking then, that made your face look so sad?’

‘Them,’ she said, nodding at the royal couple. ‘Us. This cannot last. And . . .’

‘ . . . and what?’

‘And . . . I don’t want to say it.’

‘Go on.’

‘Sometimes I miss my old life – the ease of it, the comfort. Reikhman was a cruel man but he was away a lot. When he was gone, I had everything.’

‘I miss my old life, too,’ said Joe. ‘Then someone stole my dog.’

‘I am so sorry. I never meant to ruin your life like this.’

‘There wasn’t much of a life to ruin. And we’re both victims in this, you and I – victims of men of power out of control. You haven’t ruined my life. You’ve just made it’ – he hesitated, struggling to find the right words – ‘a little too exciting.’

She giggled at that, signalling to Joe that she had climbed out of her well of sorrow.

Tucked up against a bulkhead was a small library of poetry books. Joe opened one at random and started reading:

Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;