Cold (14 page)

‘Consider it done.’

‘The proceeds are to be split in the following way. We’ – Reikhman’s black eyes opened a fraction wider – ‘that is, the Tax Inspectorate gets seven-tenths. One-tenth for a German politician who is being most useful, one-tenth for an Italian quack who has been sculpting Zoba’s face, and one-tenth for you. No trace leads back towards the Tax Inspectorate or the other beneficiaries.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Methodology?’

‘The fund is housed in an unsafe building, posing a potential danger to Russian citizens. The fire-safety commission carries out an emergency inspection, removing flammable materials and electronic devices that may ignite. These may include the seals of the company, necessary for any corporate changes, and computer hard drives. The fire-safety commission shares this evidence with the appropriate tax inspector, who is not, of course, me.’

‘Of course not.’

‘The company undergoes restructuring. Concerned about corporate governance, a new board is configured and meets . . .’

‘Where?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘Where is anywhere?’ Grozhov’s intellectual curiosity was like a deformed gland that never stopped pumping.

‘Papua New Guinea, Gibraltar, Sark, wherever.’

‘Where is Sark?’

‘Somewhere near France, an island where cars are banned. The new board moves the assets of the fund to a shell in Cyprus, which moves them to a trust in Guernsey, which shifts them to a totally different company registered in the Cayman Islands.’

‘Why so many different places?’

‘Each jump in jurisdiction makes it harder and harder for the perpetrators of the economic crimes against us’ – Reikhman meant the original owners – ‘to track where the money’s gone.’

Grozhov nodded and seemed satisfied. He scrutinised some paperwork in front of him, tilting his head so that Reikhman could see the heft of fat on the back of his neck rippling.

‘For you, where to now?’ Grozhov asked.

Reikhman sighed inwardly. With Grozhov, the inquisition was never quite over.

‘London.’

‘London?’

‘Yes, that’s where I’m based. Moscow-by-the-Thames.’

‘You shall have to return for the award ceremony.’

‘No problem.’

‘Is London a sensible base? Maybe it would be smarter to go somewhere more controllable, less open. Samarkand? Almaty?’

‘No, London. It’s far safer than you think. The English like to make fun of us, but they want our money. I have acquired a member of the House of Lords for protection, for
krysha
. He’s been on my yacht, in my
banya
. In London, so long as you are discreet, you can buy everything you want. Besides, I miss my dog.’

Grozhov smiled his lizard’s smile and said, ‘From a dog, you get unconditional love.’

The way he said that last word, it sounded like an obscenity.

Grozhov looked at his watch. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said, joylessly.

LONDON

T
he screw cap on the fizzy water was stuck. Alison’s face soured, as if she had sucked on a wasp. She gave it one more twist; it gave, and she poured the water into a glass and put the bottle down. Her nose wriggled slightly as she sifted through the file in front of her. Only then did she look up and consider Joe sitting at morose attention.

Joe apologised for his vanishing act from the previous session and explained that his dog had gone missing, then described finding his dog in Green Park, then losing consciousness in the Isle of Dogs, and losing the dog all over again.

Alison coughed. The other two assessors on either side of her busied themselves in their own paperwork as she began speaking in a low mumble, almost lost in the sound of the traffic going by outside the window.

‘Mr Tiplady, we hear what you say. We’ve noted your apology. But this tribunal does face a serious caseload and your non-attendance added to our burden. I must point out that this inconvenience in no way affects our judgement of your case, which, of course, wholly turns on our appreciation of the facts of the matter.’

He knew what the result was going to be. He just wished they would get on with it. It had been two weeks since Reilly had been stolen from him a second time, a fortnight of unremitting misery. His landlord had raised the rent for his flat so high he had no choice but to move out in the next week or so. He was finding it impossible to get a new place without a solid reference from work. He hadn’t got that many possessions: some books, a few albums of photos of him and Vanessa messing about in Ireland, some bottles of sticky alcohol they’d brought back from Italy. Leaving the flat? Well, that would be it, a complete full stop to their love affair. It had been over four months now, he knew that, but he kept on hoping against hope that she would come back.

He missed Vanessa; he missed his foolish dog. Back when they were together, Reilly used to sleep at the foot of their bed, occasionally giving their toes a lick with his tongue. Once, on holiday in Wales, when Joe was a boy, his mother had taken him brass rubbing in an old church. There lay the medieval knight and his lady, and at their feet lay their thin little dog. Vanessa and Joe – well, somehow they had ended up re-enacting that strangely sweet old remembrance of things past. And now he had nothing, not even his job to fall back on.

‘Having considered all the parameters and read the many positive comments by some of the students about you, we take no pleasure in coming to the following conclusion, that in aggressively and forcefully disciplining one of the students you committed a serious failing . . .’

A red spot hovered over her right eyebrow, then jiggled towards the dead centre of her forehead, forming a perfect isosceles triangle with her pupils.

‘Ah!’ gasped Joe.

‘Please don’t interrupt. You had full opportunity to make points at the fact-finder. Therefore, in light of the serious failing, we determine that you can no longer—’

Zssst.

The bullet punched through her skull at Mach 2. Decelerating rapidly, it shunted bone, blood and grey matter out through the back of her head and onto the wall of glass behind, atomising it. The red spot danced around the room. Then, again:

Zssst.

Mr Brooks was poleaxed onto the carpet, the second bullet punching a hole in the side of his neck, puncturing his carotid artery. Thick red blood spurted from the wound, puddling on the carpet and forming a fine pink mist in the air above the gooey mess that had been his head. The third member of the tribunal slowly stood up and started to move, tortoise-slow. The red spot followed him lazily, inch by inch. He’d moved a foot, if that, away from the two corpses when, once more:

Zssst.

It blew the back of his head off, Jackson Pollocking the wall behind. Rendered stupid by shock, Joe had sensed everything in treacle time: the slow, incoming tide of blood staining the carpet underfoot; the shards of glass shattering like fat summer raindrops; the walls splattering with bone and brain matter; the shrieks and screams from along the corridor coming to him thickly as low, abstract moans; the ultra-high-speed
zssst
,
zssst
of the bullets flying past him like the buzzing of a bee. Only the nothingness of death got through to him, that these living creatures so much part of his world a few microseconds before were now irredeemably dead. And, through it all, the horror and the terror, came a dread understanding: had the sniper wanted to, he could have killed Joe in an instant.

He was being spared for God knows what.

He gibbered to himself and rolled onto his side, his clean white shirt and fancy interview suit stippled with other people’s blood. The
zssst
s stopped. He stood up, panting. Nearby, someone was voicing a long, weird, etiolated scream.

Heavy, bloodied, he staggered through the memory of a door and out towards the lift. He pressed the button and the lift pinged its answer, almost instantly. He entered, the normality of that action causing him to doubt what he had just witnessed.

‘Oh, Christ . . .’

The receptionist screamed the moment she saw him, gobbets of other people’s brains and bones and blood bespattering his suit. He stumbled out into the drizzle of Piccadilly and stood on the pavement, breathing furiously, back bent, hands buttressing his knees, out of it, utterly out of it.

A police van screeched to a halt beside him but he was so zonked he had little sense of it. The side door slid open and two officers came out and sucked him in.

Now he was on the floor of the van, his face banging into the metal, his hands being forced behind his back, and with a soft click he was handcuffed.

Someone kicked him, hard, in the head.

‘You’re not the police, are you?’ he said.

He could no more have fought them than a toddler. He felt a stabbing pain in his thigh, and then nothing.

SOUTHERN RUSSIA

T
he babushka was waiting for him at the top of the lane. She didn’t want to miss the policeman but she didn’t want to go any nearer to Pyotr’s place if she could avoid it. The snow was beginning to thaw, just a little, and the policeman could see that the ruts in the hollow ahead were way too deep for his Lada. He parked the police car well short of the hollow, got out, had a quick chat with the old lady, one Ludmilla Estemirova.

She repeated what she had told him on the phone, pretty much word for word. He watched her return to her little timber home, then started walking towards the place, patting his gun in his holster, just for comfort. He’d never used it, never would, God willing.

Sergeant Leonid Leonidovich Oblamov wasn’t quite the lowest of the low in his division, but he wasn’t far off. He’d been in the old Soviet militia for all his adult life, and when they mucked about with everything and it became the new democratic
politsiya
, he joined that, too. Still, he did the same damn thing. He’d go out onto the main road and flag down fancy cars, make up an infringement against the law – going too fast, going too slow, not having the right papers – take a few roubles, depending on how fancy the car. His friends, the locals, when they drove by in their old bangers, as fast as you would please, he’d give them a little wave and let them go on their way.

When drunks fell asleep on their way home after a big snowfall, he would try hard to find their bodies, knowing that if he didn’t their families would give him hell until the big spring thaw. Fights, punch-ups, Oblamov did his best to look the other way. He was no Sherlock Holmes, but hey – this place, it wasn’t exactly London either, tucked away in the middle of nowhere.

The stink of it hit him in the nose. Gingerly, he pushed open the door with the tip of his boot. Someone had half-heartedly tried to torch the place. Not that difficult, one would have thought, because it was built of wood, but they’d made a hash of it. A few timbers were blackened by fire but the thing itself was pretty much intact. He crossed himself. Out on the main road, you saw the aftermath of crashes. He’d seen what a big lorry could do when it fell on a family car. This was different.

He’d never seen a sorrier sight. The old man, Pyotr, his face covered in a gas mask – ‘the Elephant’, they called it in the army – but the rest of him naked from the belly down, his cock and everything burnt, boiled somehow. Oblamov had known Pyotr a little: a bit of a bully, his woman ran out on him. Sweet Christ, whoever did this to him was one sick man.

He found a blanket in Pyotr’s bedroom and put it over the corpse, to hide his nakedness, more than anything. When he got back to the station, he’d call the gravedigger, talk him through what he would find, take the shock out of it for him.

Oblamov walked back up the lane and knocked on the old lady’s door. Ludmilla was so old, they said, she could remember the great famine, back in Stalin’s day, before the war. After a bit of scrambling around with the door, she opened it, and somehow what he had seen got to him, and despite his fifty-odd years, he found that he was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks.

‘Mother . . . what they did to that poor man, it’s . . .’

‘ . . . the work of the devil himself,’ she completed his sentence. ‘Do you want a drop? I’ve got some moonshine, if you’d like it. Don’t tell the militia.’

She had a wry way with words, this one, but God,
yes
.

‘Thank you, mother, I think I could use it.’

The two of them sat in her gloomy kitchen, close to the stove. A big black cat eyed him, disapprovingly. The hooch, when it came in a none-too-clean teacup, scarred his throat. Still, it hit the spot.

‘Another, mother, please.’

Ludmilla poured him a second slug, and as he knocked it back his mobile rang. He stiffened to attention when he heard his boss announce that he was being put through to the regional inspector general of police, no less, a man who had never bothered with lowlifes like him before. The instruction was simple and final. The call ended and he put away his phone and studied the whiskery, threadbare carpet at his feet.

He tried to figure out how they knew what he knew. He hadn’t made a report about finding Pyotr’s body. His mind creaked over the last two hours or so, when he had been sitting in his shabby office, and the phone rang, and it had been the old lady calling.

Now it came back to him. After the phone call, on his way out, the office manager, that creep Prezhinsky, had lifted an eyebrow, and Oblamov had told Prezhinsky what the old lady had said on the phone: a corpse, weird stuff, handcuffs, half naked. Prezhinsky had smirked and gone back to his paperwork. ‘So?’ asked Ludmilla.

‘Suicide.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the house containing the half-boiled corpse with his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘I’ve been ordered to report it as a suicide.’

‘That is a stinking lie and you and I both know that.’

Oblamov studied his boots and said nothing. The silence of Ludmilla’s disapproval lay on him, as heavy as the snow on the birch trees all around.

‘Mother, I don’t know who did this, but they’re bad people, people who don’t give a fuck, God forgive my language.’