Cold (23 page)

That was the thing with Mother Russia. The authorities, the connected, they’d screw you around all day, and then you’d meet some piece of human wreckage and they had more humanity and courage about them than you could possibly imagine.

WINDSOR GREAT PARK

T
he herd of deer, randomly dotted around the park, slowly faded to black. Joe and Katya had spent the afternoon sitting in the parlour’s chintzy armchairs, sipping tea and picking over a plate of ham and mustard sandwiches, observing the deer until the light had failed. They had been moved from the castle to a lodge in the park around lunchtime. If this was a prison, thought Joe, he’d been in worse.

Now it was dusk, and a wood fire was crackling in the magnificent fireplace, over which hung a stag’s head. The taxidermist had somehow screwed up with the great beast’s glass eyes. They extruded too far, suggesting that the stag had hit the far side of the wall at great speed and had ended up pop-eyed with astonishment at his fate.

Joe opened a stale ham sandwich, scooped away the mustard, and turned to Reilly, who fell back on his haunches and put out a paw. Joe shook the paw, and the dog leant forwards and the ham vanished. Watching this lamest of dog tricks were two men in black anoraks and black tracksuits, slouching against a wooden table at the far edge of the room. They did not appear to be the slightest bit impressed.

A door drifted open and in walked Lightfoot, a large white bandage wrapped around his head. He sat down on a chair facing the two of them.

‘My head hurts,’ he growled. The polite diffidence had been abandoned.

‘You’re selling us down the river,’ replied Joe.

‘I am not.’

‘It said on the TV that we were suspects in the killings.’

‘That had nothing to do with me. You hit me. That had everything to do with you.’

‘There’s an auction and we’re up for sale.’

Lightfoot was not giving much away, but his natural grimace got that bit more sour.

‘I’m a special educational needs teacher, Mr Lightfoot. I can lip-read. That phone conversation you had, about a bidding war, I could follow most of it.’

‘So that’s why you hit me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You hit the wrong person. You may not believe me, but I’m on your side.’

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Joe, ‘and I won’t do it again.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Lightfoot.

Joe said nothing but treated him to a slight, rather patronising smile.

‘You know for a special needs teacher, Tiplady, you’re taking up rather a lot of everybody’s time. But as you can see—’

Lightfoot’s phone rang. They could hear only his end of the conversation.

‘What? Hunt saboteurs?’ He scowled at Joe and left the room. The two black-clad watchers shuffled their legs; one stifled a yawn. Joe and Katya were free to sit in comfy chairs, but not free to leave.

Lightfoot returned to the room and studied Joe with wonderment. ‘The trick with the fox? How on earth did you do that?’

‘A tinker told me.’

‘Yes, but how on earth did you capture the fox in the first place?’

‘Do you really think that I would ever tell a member of the English ruling class that?’ asked Joe.

Lightfoot, for the first time in their company, broke into something that was close to a smile, his face expressing something less sour than standard, as if he’d stopped sucking on a nettle.

‘You’ve managed to upset a lot of very important people, including a very senior police officer.’

‘There would have been no trouble had they just let the fox be.’

Lightfoot stared down at the floor, hiding a quarter-smile. ‘So . . .’ he said, semaphoring a change in tone.

‘What’s happening? What’s going to happen to us?’ asked Joe.

Lightfoot reflected on something, his eyes trained on the fire. Then he turned to the two watchers at the back of the room. ‘Chaps, I’d like a word with these people here in private. On my head be it. I don’t think they’re going to cause any more trouble. If they hit me again and try to do a runner, shoot them.’

The two men nodded and walked out the door, which closed with a soft click.

‘So, I’m afraid it’s bad news for you both. The auction, which I can assure you I did not approve of, has taken place. You’re to be traded for Comolli, the man the Americans are desperate to get hold of in Moscow.’

‘But why us?’ asked Joe.

‘That’s still a good question,’ said Lightfoot. ‘I can see why Reikhman would want Miss Koremedova back. Any man would. But you, Mr Tiplady? We’ve checked you out and there is nothing we can see in your past that would remotely interest Moscow. We’re interested in your past, very interested, but there’s no reason Moscow should be.’

‘You don’t know, do you?’ asked Joe.

‘No, we don’t,’ said Lightfoot. ‘It is very puzzling.’

‘If you hand us over to them, they will kill us,’ said Katya.

‘Tell me, Miss Koremedova – your former boyfriend, Reikhman. Anyone who he is afraid of, that he fears?

‘Russian?’

‘Anyone.’

‘The others who work alongside Reikhman, they are afraid of him. I don’t know who, exactly, he works for, but he is well connected.’

‘I’d say that he is extraordinarily well connected, to be honest with you, Miss Koremedova. What did he tell you he did?’

‘Officially, he is a tax man, with an interest in modern art. He has a joke, that he collects Klee, Klimt, Koremedova. But the modern art, that’s a pretence. The paintings are, to him, like bars of gold. He likes the money they represent, not the art. But what does he really do? He keeps everything to himself and tells – told me very little. But you live with someone, you find out some things, a phone call overheard. I think Reikhman is a
reider,
he reids for the connected.’

Lightfoot said, ‘Yes. We think that, too.’

‘A what?’ asked Joe.

Lightfoot explained: ‘Quite the most common form of stealing – sorry, corporate takeover – in Russia these days is reiding
.
Businessman A wants to take over businessman B’s company. Rather than offering to buy it, A gets the tax police or the FSB, the secret police, to arrest B on false charges. While B is locked up, A moves in, uses its corporate seals to rebaptise the company, shifts the money elsewhere, sometimes through multiple jurisdictions. When B finally pays off the officials who have locked him up, he gets out to discover that his company is now an empty shell, the value of it magicked elsewhere. The very best reiders are the ones closest to power, who can resolve disputes in what they call the power vertical, and Reikhman is, by all accounts, very good at that.’

‘But that’s just stealing.’

‘Stealing billions. And some of the time, the reider has to kill to close the deal. Reikhman has people killed, or does he kill people?’

The wolf eyes considered Lightfoot for a second or two, then: ‘Both.’ She paused. ‘He likes killing.’

‘Fuck,’ said Joe.

Lightfoot ignored the interruption. ‘So no one ever scares Reikhman, not even a little bit?’

‘A man called Grozhov, a high-up, somebody in the Kremlin. He is fat and . . . strange. A couple of times, on the phone with him, I could see Reikhman getting nervous.’

‘He’s of no use to us. Not if he’s in the Kremlin.’

Reilly crept a dog’s length closer to the fire, arched his hindquarters up, dog yoga, stretched and then coiled himself into his favourite fossil position.

Katya tapped the side of her head. ‘I almost forgot. An American. We met him in Moscow. He said something to Reikhman that he found very troubling. It made him bite his finger.’

‘Go on,’ said Lightfoot.

‘I can’t remember his name. Such a strange little man, physically nothing to be afraid of. Old, maybe in his sixties, a beard but no moustache, and a big gap between his teeth. When he smiled – he smiled a lot – he appeared a bit stupid. For an American, he spoke Russian beautifully, but bad Russian, common Russian, like a prisoner, like a zek, with a funny Siberian accent. You wouldn’t know he was a foreigner at all. Oh, I remember—’

‘His name?’ snapped Lightfoot.

‘No, sorry, I remember that he was one of those Mormon people from Utah. Reikhman was mocking him, laughing at him, saying that he believed Jesus Christ came to America and he got some silly angel, Moron, to leave golden plates, and that he was a moron himself to believe in such made-up nonsense.’

Her mind flashed back to the old man smiling that simple, clever smile of his and saying to Reikhman, ‘Yes, you’re probably right. What I believe in may be foolish. But what do you believe in? You believe what you do is right and if someone gets in your way, you kill them. And there is no future in that. Because one day someone will end up killing you.’

Reikhman had laughed at him, as if he were pathetic. And then the American said, ‘I’m not psychic and I’m no gambler. But my guess is the man who will kill you is Grozhov, even though he loves you. No, because he loves you. Enjoy the rest of your evening.’

‘And then he left,’ Katya said. ‘Reikhman, he couldn’t sleep that night. He bit his finger so bad it ended up bleeding, and then he hurt me, because he was so angry with the Mormon guy. He knew something about Grozhov and Reikhman, some big secret. He got to Reikhman in a way I’d never seen before or since.’

‘Did you get an email? A phone number?’

She stared at the floor, shaking her head.

‘What about Picasso?’ asked Joe.

Lightfoot’s eyes floated across to the closed door, with the watchers on the other side of it, then swept the room. His voice grew quieter: ‘Rubbish artist, horrible junk, my mother could do better.’

‘I meant—’ started Joe.

‘Shut up.’ Lightfoot rolled his eyes around the room, then leaned into Joe and whispered, ‘Don’t mention that name. Don’t.’

‘We’re not being bugged here, are we?’ asked Joe.

‘To ask the question without knowing the answer is to show the depth of your stupidity.’

Joe wanted to hit him, but held himself in check.

‘Mr Tiplady—’

‘Call me Joe . . .’

‘Mr Tiplady, a lot of this stuff is going on way above my head. I’m in personal protection, that’s my speciality. I have a one hundred per cent record, of which I am rather proud, and that gives me a certain independence from the office. To begin with, the office was most interested in that artist Katya mentioned to us and they wanted the best for you, which is how I was called in to look after things. Now, it seems, that decision has been rather dramatically reversed. No interest in the rubbish artist – the trade is on. The challenge is that it’s not just the Russians who are after you. The Americans are so desperate to get their hands on their traitor in Moscow – that’s how they see it, they might be wrong, not the first time, they bombed my father on D-Day – that they are happy to send you east. And Her Majesty’s Government pretty much does what Washington wants.’

‘So we’re screwed.’

‘Quite.’ In Lightfoot’s marbled diction, the word sounded like a pistol shot.

‘Can you figure it out? Have you some idea of what’s going on?’ asked Joe.

‘No. The Russians are taking fake brass and giving up silver. But they – and now we – are being offered a pot of gold and no one is interested. It’s mad. And maddening.’

‘When?’ asked Joe.

‘The handover is at noon tomorrow, at a cargo bay at Heathrow. You will arrive in a large wooden box, effectively a coffin for two.’

Lightfoot’s phone rang again.

‘Sorry, I’m going to have to take this.’

‘I do hope it’s from somebody important,’ said Joe, coldly furious that their fate took lesser importance than a phone call.

‘It is, actually. It’s the Queen.’

NOVO-DZERZHINSKY, SOUTHERN RUSSIA

A
goods train clank-clanked through Gennady’s brain. Sleepless, he lay prone on the bed of his overheated room, the curtains drawn, telling himself that he’d slept in better style in Jalalabad.
There he goes again
, he argued with his restless self,
bringing up the good old, bad old days of Afghanistan
. Why couldn’t he give it a rest? Why couldn’t he accept that he was no longer a warrior, merely a bad-tempered old librarian whose daughter had gone missing? His un-sleep was interrupted by a row down the hallway, a woman laughing, shouting ‘You’ve got such a small prick I need a magnifying glass’, a slap, hard, a scream, then the sound of someone vomiting.

Saving money for God knows what, he’d checked into one of the cheapest hotels in town, part brothel, part goods yard. The only virtue was that the hotel receptionist wasn’t in the least bit interested in checking the name he’d given – fake – against his ID card – real. Just a thousand roubles in cash in return for a key.

The vomiting from down the hallway eased and the train was gone, its whistle blowing from a mile off, maybe two, a long, mournful sound that pierced the quiet of the night.

Gennady remembered not sleeping at night when he was a boy, seven, eight years old. His mother had checked up on him, and brought him a glass of milk, and then they heard that sound, a train whistle, from far off and she started crying. Tough as nails, his mother was, but her whole body had quivered with grief.

‘Mum, what’s the matter? Please, Mummy, tell me,’ said Gennady, and eventually she had wiped away her tears with a musty-smelling old handkerchief and started to talk.

‘Back in 1933 I was little, as young as you are today, Gennady. The police came in the morning and assessed our farm. We had three cows, not one, and they said that meant we were
kulaks
, enemies of the state. They took my grandfather and grandmother, my father, my uncle Sasha and my aunt Maria, and all my seven cousins, including Evgeny, a sweet little boy with beautiful blond curly hair who I had a crush on, my first love.’

‘Why didn’t they take you?’ asked Gennady.

‘Because my mother had an uncle in the police, so he protected her and me, her only daughter. But his protection was only so strong, and eleven of my family, the heart of it, my papa too, were lined up, the police kicking them with their shiny boots and waving their guns. They shot all three cows. Then the town butcher, one of them, a big Soviet he was, came along in his cart and started hauling the carcasses onto it and my grandfather, who was a big man, he’d fought for the tsar against the Germans at Tannenberg in 1914, told the butcher he was a thief and a pig, and was going to hit him and then one of the police shot him dead.