The Boat House (19 page)

Belov said, "This girl was small, and very fair. They say she looked like an angel." He waved his hand. "Now, see this house. The Markevitch family lived here, very big family, lots of sons. Not enough brains to go around, though, according to the neighbours, and the youngest boy was out of luck. He was born a simpleton. When he was seventeen years old, he was still playing with wooden blocks. But happy. His name was Viktor."

They moved on, out toward the fields, and Belov continued with the story.

"He followed the girl around all the time. He was like a puppy, completely devoted. She was only nine years old and she wasn't much of a size for that, but everybody knew that Viktor was harmless. A lot of the time she just seemed to forget that he was there, and he'd shamble along behind her just happy to stay close."

"How long ago was this?"

"Quite a few years. The girl's still alive, but Viktor was drowned. I'm going to show you where."

They came to a simple fence which was crossed by a stile, and here Alina rested for a couple of minutes before going on. The place that Belov had in mind was just a couple of hundred meters further, he told her. It was reedy marshland here, the grasses awash in several inches of diamond-clear water. The path zigzagged between dry rises in the land. On one of these, Belov stepped down from the wooden rails.

"A lot of this would have been different then," he explained. "The shape of the marsh has changed over the years, but we're somewhere close to the spot. They came out along the track we just followed, the very same one. Only the girl came back, and she was soaked and muddy and she could hardly speak. Two of Viktor's brothers came out, and found him."

"How could he drown?" Alina said. She was looking down at the water, which was only inches deep.

"Nobody knows. It could have been that someone forced him down, and held his face under. But that wouldn't have been easy. He wasn't bright, but he was big and he was very strong. He'd have struggled hard." Belov looked thoughtfully at the ground around them, as if he might still read signs that had long ago disappeared. "They called the doctor in from the nearest town, and the local militia chief questioned the girl. I've seen both of their reports - the file on the case has never been closed, in all this time. They asked her what had happened, and she said that a
Rusalka
from the lake had hurt Viktor. You know what the
Rusalki
are?"

Alina peered toward the lake, which was hardly more than a sliver on the horizon. She said nothing.

"They're an old superstition, lake spirits in female form. Very beautiful, very dangerous. Men can't resist them. They're supposed to bring a strange kind of ecstatic death by drowning - although it isn't really described as a death at all, more a passage from one world to another. There's something like it in the folklore of just about every culture. And no matter how many times they asked the girl, no matter how many different ways they approached it, her story was always the same."

"So nobody believed her."

"She was a child. She looked even younger than she was. What were they going to do, beat it out of her? Maybe they even tried that. They didn't put it in the records, if they did. But the harder they pressed her, the more confused she would have become. Children's fantasies are as real to them as anything else; but not many get thrown up against them so hard."

"What happened?"

"Officially, it became an accident. What else could they say? There was nobody else in the area, and there were no other tracks through the reeds. The girl became so ill that she had to be taken away. She stayed in the city and never came back. And that's all anyone knows… except for the girl herself."

Alina looked at him, but his face gave nothing away. He seemed open, empty of guile. She said, "I think you're trying to tell me that I should remember something of this."

"And do you?"

"No."

"Then I'm saying nothing of the kind."

They went back. The subject wasn't raised again.

That evening, Belov set the fire as Alina opened some canned stew. She was feeling as if she'd made a long, exhausting hike instead of just the kilometre or so that she'd actually walked, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Most of the food was of a kind that she'd never seen in the shops; there was no wine or beer, but Belov had a hip flask of vodka.

There was no electricity, either, but as night fell they lit candles. Belov chatted easily, although his real talent lay in persuading her to talk without her realising that she'd been persuaded. All that she really learned about him was that yes, he was a psychiatrist - 'one of the dissertation writers', as he referred to himself - and that his wife had died after an illness about five years before. Through all of this there was a shadow falling across the conversation, and it was a while before Alina could bring herself to give it a name.

But it had to be faced, and so she finally said, "How long can I stay here?"

It seemed that Belov had only been waiting for her to ask. "What you're really asking, is whether you'll have to go back."

"Will I?"

"In theory, yes." But there was a faint glimmer in his eyes, like those of a favourite uncle hiding something unexpected behind his back. "I may be able to arrange something. It's mostly a matter of timing… but I'll do what I can. Please don't get your hopes up."

There was a long pause.

And then Alina said, "Who was the child?"

But now it was Belov's turn to say nothing.

Some time later, she lay in her bed without sleeping. She was wondering if it was true, if he could somehow arrange her release; doctors had ordered her internment, so surely it was possible for another doctor to end it. But did Belov have the power? Borrowing her for dissertation research was one thing - she was sure now that this was the reason behind her removal from the hospital - but a release seemed, frankly, unlikely.

She'd seen no trace of anyone else in the village, and no sign of anyone along the afternoon's walk. There were no locks on the farmhouse doors. Perhaps, when she'd grown stronger, she could slip away into the night and keep on walking… after all, what was the worst that could possibly happen to her? The answer to that was, nothing that hadn't happened already. If they caught her, they caught her. And if they shot her instead - well, perhaps that wouldn't be quite so bad. With this thought in her mind and the sound of Belov's restless pacing on the boards up above, she finally drifted away.

When she awoke late in the morning, Belov wasn't there.

She checked his room, but his bed was cold. His small suitcase had been packed, and looked as if it was ready to go. She went straight back downstairs, got her own clothes together, and made a bundle with some of the provisions. Then she let herself out of the farmhouse, and started to walk.

There was nothing to indicate that he was anywhere in the village, and she didn't want to waste time on being any more thorough than this. She struck out across-country, heading away from the marshes and the distant water with its old-time tales of death.

At any moment he expected to hear his voice behind her, calling her back. If it came, she wouldn't respond. There was a woodland of spruce and pine ahead, where the ground began to climb toward a low, sinuous ridge that was the only feature on this otherwise flat horizon; it rose like a shadow from the plain, dense with trees but delicately etched around the edges.

It took her an hour to reach it, and a patrol was waiting.

There were three of them. With the binoculars that they carried, they must have been able to see her from the moment that she set out. Two of them stood with their rifles levelled at her and the third raised his palm and made a short, brusque, fly swatting kind of gesture. Not a word was spoken, but the meaning was clear; go back, or else.

The 'or else' was a possibility that she'd already considered and decided to embrace, if it came.

But she turned around, and began the long, slow walk back to the village.

There was a red car waiting outside the farmhouse when she reached it; the car's wheels had cut deep tracks through the long grass, tracks that were only just beginning to fade as the plains wind breathed across them. Belov was loading up, getting ready to leave, and he seemed to be in a hurry. He showed no surprise at her obviously unsuccessful attempt to run, nor did he even comment on it.

Instead, he said, "In the car, quickly. We have to go back to the city." And then, when she only stared at the car without responding, he added, "I said it was a matter of timing. Trust me."

What else could she do? She trusted him, and climbed in. As they left the village and found the dirt road by which he'd arrived, she could see that he was nervous. The road was crossed by a locked-down barrier about two kilometres further on, but Belov had a key and the barrier hardly slowed them at all.

Somebody was out of town for two days, he explained, somebody who would block any proposal for her release as a matter of course. They'd have to move fast.

Alina said, "Are you taking a risk for me?"

But instead of answering, Belov said, "Is there anyone you can contact? A friend you can stay with? It's better that you shouldn't be too easy to find."

Alina didn't have to think for long. She said, "There's Pavel."

"What does he do?"

"He's just… well, he's someone I know. He offered me a place to stay, if ever I should need it."

Her nerve almost failed her when, more than three hours later, they came into the city along Karl Marx Prospekt and made the turn towards Arsenal Street, where number nine waited for her like the transit house to a hundred-year-old hell. Belov warned her that she'd have to go in, but he promised her that she'd be going no further than the administration block on the street. She followed him obediently, out of the daylight. Once inside he left her in a dim, dingy room where she sat with her bundle and the firm belief that the cruel joke would soon be over and she'd be taken back to her ward. It had all been a dream; perhaps she'd never even left it. She signed the forms that he brought her to sign, even though the name on them wasn't always her own, and then Belov slipped them into a file under a stack of others and took them away again.

Half an hour later, he was back. He led her to a door; the door opened out onto the street. "Hurry," he urged, checking behind him for witnesses, but she had one more question.

"Why?" she said.

But even his eyes gave her no answer.

She saw him once more, a couple of months later. Somehow he'd managed to trace the block where Pavel lived, and he stood in the stairwell and called her name. This was all that he could do, because the numbers on the apartment doors had all been defaced by the people who lived behind them.

He was turning to leave, when he heard a door opening somewhere above.

They found her file lying open on the desk in his office. They'd suspected him of rigging her escape, and now their suspicions were confirmed. They found no mention of Pavel in the file, nor any address for Alina.

Nor did they find one on Belov's body, when they pulled it out of the river the next morning.

PART SIX

Rusalka (2)

TWENTY-SIX

Dimly doing her best to remember what they'd taught her at school, Diane believed that she'd managed to work out the map reference by the time that Ross Aldridge arrived at the hall. She'd left a message for him about an hour before, within minutes of receiving a call from the foresters' agents. Together they climbed into her Toyota and, with Aldridge keeping the map open on his knees, they drove down toward the lake shore.

Instead of taking the boat house turning, they followed the shoreline in the opposite direction. After a few minutes they passed the first of the estate workers' cottages, two-storey, stone built, and around three hundred years old. After the last of these (which, being the keeper's, now stood empty) the road degenerated into a track, and the track degenerated even more over the next mile until it was only twin ruts with grass between them. Roots had split the ground in places, and the thickest of these jarred the Toyota so hard that Diane had an uneasy vision of the entire truck falling apart as every spot-weld gave at once, leaving her sitting in the driver's seat with the steering wheel in her hands and nothing but open air all around.

Aldridge, hanging on grimly, said, "Does it get any worse?"

"Don't ask me," Diane said. "I never came this way before."

What looked like another fifty yards on the map turned out to be another quarter mile of cart track. It brought them out into a grassy clearing by the lake, a shallow bay with a fringe of stony beach. Diane pulled in as soon as the ground was level enough. 

They got out.

This was one of the older parts of the forest, and its silence was a thousand-year atmosphere so distilled that it was almost physically affecting. There were high dark trees on every side with slanting shafts of late morning sunlight, with the lake beyond flat and faintly glittering like a slow moving mirror.

"Hardly anyone ever comes out this far," Diane said, walking toward the middle of the clearing where about half a dozen mounds of earth appeared to have been dug over. "We lease the land out to the forestry people, and they've been doing a helicopter survey."

"When did you get the call?"

"This morning. It showed up when they looked at Friday's photographs."

Diane stopped by the first of the mounds, not too close, and waited for Aldridge to catch up. She already knew what she was going to see, but the knowledge didn't make it any less unpleasant. The mound was no mound at all, but actually a deer; a very dead deer, and a long way from fresh. Its eyes and part of its face were gone, and its belly had swollen up hard and tight.

"You explain it," Diane said. "I can't."

Aldridge glanced around the clearing at the others. "You'd do better to ask your gamekeeper," he said.

"I would, but he quit just after I got here."