The Half Truth (15 page)

The sun’s rays danced and bounced off the sea. It looked so blue today, so still. The beach itself was busy with visitors and locals alike, enjoying the warmth of the late-September weather. Tina walked along the promenade, Sasha at her side. They milled in and out families with pushchairs, roller-bladers, dogs and cyclists. Tina thought they probably looked like any other couple that day, taking a stroll along the seafront.

Even though Sasha had put his sunglasses on, she could see from her side-on view that his eyes were alert. This was not a leisurely stroll for him, where he absently took in the views around him. No, his eyes were darting back and forth, checking for what, she wasn’t sure, but she knew there was an anxiety there. As they walked further along the seafront, the crowds began to thin out and Tina sensed Sasha begin to relax.

They found an empty bench and sat down. Sasha fiddled with his black leather watchstrap. Another one of his tell-tale stress habits.

‘Pavel got more heavily involved with armed robberies. The last job they did went wrong. Badly wrong. A policeman was shot and killed. Another was injured. It was all over the newspapers and TV.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Tina.

‘Pavel was there. They had robbed a small private bank.’

‘They never caught who did it,’ said Tina. She knew all this from John, of course.

‘This time, though, I
was
involved,’ said Sasha. ‘Their lookout was sick and Pavel asked me to step in at the last minute. He said I did not have to do anything, only watch the street.’

Tina felt sick. Her stomach churned. John had lied to her. She looked at her husband. He had lied. Two betrayals. ‘You and Pavel, you went to home to Russia afterwards.’

‘Yes. He had some money he had saved over the time. I had a little of mine…’

‘What? Wait a minute.’ Her voice was louder than she had intended and gained her a curious look from a passing couple. Tina modified her volume. ‘You took money? You had a cut? How did that work?’

‘Call it commission, but I got paid to launder the money.’ His reply was matter-of-fact.

‘What did you do with the money?’ She knew they were comfortably off at the time but they certainly hadn’t been living a life of luxury. The feeling of sickness returned – they might have been out enjoying ourselves on what she believed to be their hard-earned cash, when, in fact, it was the proceeds from criminal activity.

‘I saved the money. We never spent it.’

‘That’s something, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I still don’t understand why you faked your own death. You still haven’t told me.’

‘The heat was on all around. The police were getting closer and closer. They had already taken an interest in the deli. They had been watching my every move.’

Tina knew that now. She hadn’t at the time, but Sasha had. ‘And you still never told me.’

‘I was protecting you.’

‘You were keeping me in the dark and treating me with zero respect.’

Sasha leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his hands together as if in prayer. ‘I did not see it like that. I still do not.’

Tina knew this was difficult for him, but not as difficult as it was for her. He was wrestling with his conscience, trying to justify his actions to her. Something he knew he could never really do.

‘Pavel had more than his fair share. He took some diamonds from one of the jobs and he sold them on, getting a large sum of money. The remaining members of the Porboski gang did not take too kindly to this information once they found out. They wanted what they considered to be their cut. We were both coming under threat from them, Pavel and me.’ He was struggling for words now. The effort of speaking in English taking its toll – he had spent five long years away, speaking in his mother tongue. ‘I needed to hide. The word was out that I was on their hit list too. I knew as long as I was alive they would keep coming for me. They had gone after Mario and you know what happened to him.’

Tina certainly did know what happened to one of Pavel’s friends. He was found tied to a chair in a garage in Dalston, beaten and tortured to death. She couldn’t believe that she never made the connection then. She truly believed that she and Sasha had no more of a connection with what was going on other than that Sasha hailed from the same country. How could she have been so naive?

‘There’s something else,’ he said.

‘Oh, God, what?’ She wasn’t sure she could take any more.

‘I had been forced to speak to the police.’

Tina frowned. ‘Speak to the police? I don’t understand.’

‘An informer. The police were blackmailing me.’ He sat back against the bench. ‘They had evidence on me for the money-laundering. They said I could be kept out of prison if I gave them information.’

‘You grassed on the Porboski gang? Your own brother?’ Tina let this new information sink in. John had never told her that bit. He must have known, surely?

Yet another lie.

‘I had no choice. I was stuck in the middle.’ Sasha let out a long sigh. ‘The only way I could stop both the police and the Russians coming for me was if they thought I was dead. The Porboskis wanted their share of the money and they wanted revenge. They wanted my blood.’

‘If you had told me, we could have disappeared together,’ said Tina. There was a bleakness in her voice as she began to understand what her husband had been involved in. How she thought she had known him but really she hadn’t. It hurt. Badly.

‘I could not take you with me.’ Sasha held Tina’s hand as he had done so earlier. The roughness of his skin still felt alien to her. He felt alien. He wasn’t the Sasha she had been married to. The Sasha she married had never really existed. He was a front, a disguise for the real one. She kept her hands within his. She wanted him to tell her more. She needed to know exactly what happened. ‘If I had taken you with me, you would have given the game away. An English woman in Russia, who could not speak a word of the language, it would have been easy to find me and you would have been in grave danger too. You and our unborn son. I could not put you in that position. I couldn’t let there be any chance that they would come for you. The only way I could escape and keep you safe was if I died. I could not tell you. If you knew the truth you would not have let me go, I know you too well. You would have tried to do something crazy to put it right.

Tina nodded. Yes, she probably would have. She would have done anything to keep the love of her then-life.

‘So you faked your death. You and your brother and your family were all in on it,’ she said, as realisation about the extent of the lie hit her. ‘They all knew. No wonder Pavel didn’t want me to come over for the funeral. There wasn’t one.’

Sasha bowed his head. Shame settled over him like a shroud. At least he had the decency to be ashamed of what he had done. She remembered the pain of the grief. It was still raw, but it was all needless. How tragic.

‘You deceived me. You betrayed me. You have come back and rewritten my history. I can’t just say, “Oh, that’s okay Sasha, don’t worry about it. It’s all okay now”.’

The sound of a car horn, tooting several times, made Sasha look round. He stood up, anxiety etched across his face. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Go? But … why?’ She couldn’t let him go without some sort of resolution.

She followed his gaze. Pavel was sitting in a car, the engine running, beckoning to Sasha.

‘Meet me again,’ said Sasha urgently. He kissed her on the forehead. ‘I will contact you.’

Tina stood and watched as he ran across the grass strip, hop over the wall and jump into the waiting car.

As the car disappeared out of view, swallowed up by the traffic, Tina turned and looked out to sea.

She felt numb. Shell-shocked. Confused. Broken. Betrayed.

She had no concept of time. No idea how long she stood there for. She was vaguely aware of the tide drawing in and the coastal breeze picking up as high tide peaked.

A touch on her arm brought her back from her thoughts.

‘Tina.’

She didn’t move. She didn’t turn. She knew who it was.

‘Tina,’ he said her name again, this time louder. She remained impassive, almost in a trance, looking out at the horizon.

John and the team had driven straight over to Brighton. It was more than a hunch. John knew she had come to meet Sasha. The atmosphere in the car had been tense. Neither John nor Martin spoke as they travelled to the destination, the 4x4 in its familiar position in their rear-view mirror.

Sweeping up and down Brighton seafront in their vehicles, on the prowl for their prey, they had missed him. As John and Martin had cruised along, scanning the faces of the crowd, the people had thinned out and that’s when he had spotted her.

A lone figure, standing still as the people trickled past her. The wind had picked up and was lifting the ends of her hair, cocoa-bean-coloured strands of hair floating up and down, caressing her face and shoulders.

‘You lied to me,’ she said, still not turning.

‘I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘It could have compromised the operation.’

‘Is that all you care about?’ she turned to look at him. ‘The operation. I thought you cared about me. Obviously, not as much as I thought.’

‘I do care about you,’ said John, ‘but I also care about the death of Neil Edwards.’

‘What about the death of my husband? You know, the death that never happened. I suppose you knew about that too.’

‘That came as a surprise to me too,’ said John, the guilt for both his deception to Tina and his loyalty to Neil fighting for pole position. ‘And that’s the truth.’

‘The truth. Dear God! Don’t speak to me about the truth,’ she shrugged off his hand. ‘Your life, your job, brings you into so much contact with lies and deceit that I think you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. You’re surrounded by it all day and at some point it seeped into your soul. You tell lies like some people breathe.’

She brushed past him and began walking back towards the pier.

‘Tina, wait.’ He ran after her.

She didn’t break stride, her eyes once again fixed firmly in front of her. ‘The bottom line is, John,’ she said. ‘You lied to me.’

‘And you’ve been totally honest with me?’ he said, his own indignation surfacing. She stopped and looked at him as he continued. ‘We all tell lies. We all keep things to ourselves for our own personal reasons. I’m not the only guilty one here. Think about it.’

‘Some lies are bigger than others,’ she said.

‘They are still lies. Whatever the size.’ He was being pedantic, he knew, but morally he was right. She couldn’t argue with what he was saying.

He watched her shoulders sag. She looked down at her feet and when she looked back at him there were tears shining in her eyes.

‘All these years I’ve grieved for Sasha, the pain of losing the love of my life, the father of my son, has at times been almost too much to bear. I thought I had lost someone who loved me as much as I loved them. I thought I had experienced the most painful thing possible.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘I was wrong. This is worse.’

She swayed. John drew her to him. He felt her knees give. He held her tight.

Eventually, she pulled away from his hold, the strength returning to her body and her mind.

‘I need to pick Dimitri up from my parents.’ Rummaging in her bag and pulling out a tissue, she wiped at her eyes.

Referring to herself only wasn’t wasted on John. She was distancing herself from him. He couldn’t blame her. This understanding didn’t mask the stab of the rejection which sliced through him.

‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he said. There were more truths he needed to tell her. She had more pain to come. He had more confessions to make.

John listened to the soft tones of Tina reading Dimitri a bedtime story. Her voice drifted down the stairs and into the living room like a clement breeze, the pain of what happened earlier, hidden from her son.

A few minutes later she came into the room.

‘He’s asleep now. I think Dad must have worn him out. They’ve been gardening, so Dimitri tells me.’

John smiled. He loved the way she looked so relaxed when she spoke about her father and Dimitri. For a while it was as if she had no troubles whatsoever. He wished he could keep it that way.

He passed her a glass of wine.

‘How are you feeling?’

Tina took the glass and sat in the chair by the side of the fireplace. ‘Confused. Happy. Sad. Ecstatic. Heartbroken. And everything in between. I’ve been duped.’ She took a large gulp of wine. ‘By both of you.’

John crouched in front of her. ‘I couldn’t tell you before. I wanted to. But I couldn’t compromise the operation.’ He took the wine glass from her, placing it on the table, then held both her hands in his. ‘I’m sorry. I truly am.’

She didn’t reply for a while as she looked at him, studying his face.

‘I suppose I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not a nice thought, but I do get it.’

‘It goes with the job, unfortunately.’

‘There’s something else, though,’ she said, leaving her hands within his. ‘I can tell there’s something you’re not telling me. And don’t say it’s confidential or you can’t disclose that information. I’m not buying it. I want the truth.’

He looked at her. There was no easy way to do this, he’d simply have to tell her. Could he tell her everything, though?

‘Sasha was my informant. He passed information onto me about the Porboski gang which meant he passed information onto me about his brother too.’

Her eyes widened. ‘It was
you
who was blackmailing him.’ He could hear the shock in her voice.

‘He was there when Neil Edwards was shot. No, it’s okay,
he
didn’t shoot Neil.’ John fought his customary mental battle, dispelling the images, regaining control. ‘But he was involved with hiding the money from the job. All I want is to arrest Pavel and get the money back.’

‘What about Sasha?’

‘If he agrees to talk to me again, I can arrange immunity for him. I can get him on the Witness Protection Scheme. He can walk away from all this. From the Porboski gang too.’

‘And from me, again,’ said Tina, her voice was bleak.

He chose his next words carefully.

‘I don’t know if he was coming back for you in the first place.’ He felt a complete bastard saying it, but he was certain Sasha hadn’t come back for her. Not with Pavel in tow. No, there was a completely different agenda.

She nodded. ‘In my heart of hearts, I know you’re right.’

‘Did he say why he was back?’ John asked.

‘No. It was him and Pavel who were in the house though.’

‘What did he say they were looking for?’

‘He didn’t. We never got that far. He suddenly said he had to go and that he would contact me again. I don’t know how or when.’

He stroked the top of her hands with this thumbs. ‘I think he’s back for the money. There’s no other logical reason. That’s why Pavel is with him and that’s why the Russians are after him. And after you.’

‘What? I don’t understand.’

‘You are the link to the missing money, whether you know it or not. And all the time it remains hidden, you are in danger.’ He wasn’t sure he was getting through to her. ‘Tina, the Russians think you know exactly where the money is and they want you to share this information with them. They will use every method to persuade you to co-operate. People close to you.’

He watched as realisation dawned on her. ‘Dimitri?’ she whispered. ‘Oh, God, this is a nightmare. I don’t know where the money is. What if they don’t believe me? What if they do something to Dimitri?’

‘Hey, hey, calm down, it’s okay,’ said John. ‘We can sort this. I’ve got it worked out.’

Monday morning finally limped its way round. They had spent Sunday playing happy families for Dimitri’s sake: football in the garden, a walk along the seafront, helping John wash the car and all the time Tina acutely aware that the wrong father figure was there.

Tina waved Dimitri off at the school gates and drove back home with John.

‘Are you going to tell Dimitri about Sasha?’ asked John.

‘Tell him what, exactly?’ Tina fiddled with the wedding ring on her right hand. ‘That his father walked away from him and made a new life. No, what would the point be? It wouldn’t achieve anything.’

‘So you’re going to continue the lie?’

Tina removed the wedding band from her finger. ‘I was brought up to believe there were only truths and lies, nothing in the middle, no grey areas. It’s something my parents instilled in me from a very early age.’

‘And now?’

‘I’m beginning to realise that some lies are good lies. Sometimes it is best to lie than to tell the truth.’ Tina slipped the ring into the interior pocket of her handbag. She looked down at her now-naked hand. ‘Not telling Dimitri the truth will be my good lie.’