The chill of the night air clawed at her the moment she stepped onto the runway in Moscow. It was nearly 9p.m., five hours since she had made her way up the stairs to the jet at Heathrow, holding the handrail to steady herself against the wind. Once she’d stowed her rucksack in the overhead locker, she pulled out the eye-mask Tom had given her as they’d said goodbye at the doorway to her house, which he would continue to rent from her for the two years that she would be away.
It had begun to rain as the plane took off, the wind causing it to judder as they pushed into the unremarkable afternoon sky. Looking down, she thought briefly of her mother, of how she would always insist they sit at the front of the plane, and then pop a couple of pills from the box in her bag and spend the flight ignoring Gabriela as she flicked through the radio channels, struggling to adjust her headphones.
She had been prepared for the weather in Russia in November, and had packed accordingly back in London, her Teach Yourself Russian CD whirring in the background, refreshing her memory as she stuffed her suitcase with as many base layers as she could feasibly fit in. It would be seven o’clock at home now, she thought as she stepped down the metal staircase onto the tarmac, imagining Tom settling in front of the news with a microwave meal before heading out to his weekly rehearsal, his guitar slung over his shoulder. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the fumes of the plane and smiled.
Her driver, Oleg, was waiting at the Arrivals desk, ready to usher her through the crowds.
‘Have you been to Russia before?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘Never. I hear it’s a beautiful country.’
He said nothing as he pulled open the passenger door for her, remaining silent as the car sped along a single road that cut through endless pine forests. With no streetlamps to light the pitch-black night, the motion of the vehicle lulled her to sleep, and when she woke up to the sound of Oleg slamming the driver’s door closed, she saw that they had arrived, the city lights casting an eerie glow across the sky as she stepped out.
‘You’ve done well,’ he said as he led her towards a luxurious block lining Patriarshiye Ponds. ‘All this used to be communal apartments. You’ve read The Master and Margarita?’
She nodded.
‘Mikhail Bulgakov lived around here in the Thirties and this was where the tram scene at the beginning of the book was set. As you can see, it’s a very different place now.’
Looking up, she took in the tiers of grand windows set within a sand-yellow façade, and felt a shudder that she put down to the cold.
‘Surely, this isn’t …’
Oleg made a face to show that he was as surprised as she was by the scale and grandeur of her sleeping arrangements.
Unlocking the door, he shrugged. ‘Apparently your apartment hasn’t been sorted out yet, so you’re staying here for a few nights. Your boss, Guy Emsworth, it’s his place when he’s in town …’
Noting her expression, Oleg said, ‘Oh, he’s not here now. I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. But I don’t think there’s any hurry for you to leave. He won’t be here for a couple of weeks …’
Gabriela nodded, trying to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘Sure, that’s fine.’
‘You have everything you need?’ he asked, leaving her alone in the flat, her single suitcase in the middle of the room looking pitifully small below the high gilded ceilings.
‘I have,’ she said under her breath, throwing open the windows the moment he left, closing her eyes, focusing on the night air stinging her skin, the distant car horns blaring, the sounds of millions of other lives across the city crushing against one another. In that moment she felt so alive that it was as though, if she jumped right now, she would fly.
It was part of her role with the embassy to help foster good relations at ground level, to befriend local officials with a view not so much to working together as to keeping an eye on who was doing what. The ramifications of the South Ossetia war with Georgia, the closure of two British Council buildings in Moscow, all in the context of the fallout of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the UK’s refusal to extradite the wanted businessman Boris Berezovsky, were contributing factors to a climate of relations between Russia and Britain that was, at the least, cool. To be here now, for her first ever placement, was both terrifying and fortifying and seemed to offer definitive proof that she was trusted in a way that she could barely have dreamed of – a way that perhaps might have made her ask more questions than she did.
When her accommodation was finally sorted a few days later, Oleg returned to move her across town to a more befitting flat above a neon-lit bar a few streets behind Red Square. It was hardly the Art-Nouveau glamour to which she was fast becoming accustomed, but she didn’t care.
People said that everywhere you stepped in New York was like being in the movies, but for her, Moscow, with its austere grandiosity, and its buildings and the sky both steeped in a sense of sorrow-tinged romance, was the perfect backdrop for the film onto which she projected her own life.
It wasn’t easy assimilating herself into a diplomatic sphere still tainted by the suspicion of the Soviet era, and now freshly challenged by Putin, who had come to power a decade earlier. It was a world where strangers avoided eye contact in the street and you learned not to bother asking for directions. A world where you had to treat everyone as an enemy until they were proved to be a friend. And once they had, be warier still …
It was daunting at first, but after a few months she loved it. Day to day, she was notionally based at the embassy, but in reality she spent most of her time attending events on its behalf, shaking hands and smiling until her cheeks ached.
She had just returned from a week in St Petersburg with local business representatives, her legs aching from the walking tours of the palace, the endless meetings and the nightcaps. Walking through the door, she noticed the red light blinking on the answer machine. Six new messages.
It would be Tom, she thought happily, looking forward to catching up with him. Their regular chats provided the perfect foil for the guarded diplomacy that shrouded her every other interaction. When she pressed play, with each recording Tom’s voice escalated in pitch and intensity so that by the last one he was practically screaming down the phone for her to call him back. The strength of emotion was so at odds with his usual character that she was terrified of what she would learn when she called him a moment later, the foreign dialling tone reminding her of the distance between them.
‘Gaby?’
‘Yes, hi, what’s going on?’
She had barely finished her sentence when she heard a sigh of relief followed by his voice, riled this time.
‘What the hell, are you OK?’
‘Of course, I’m fine.’
‘What do you mean, of course you’re fine? I’ve been out of my fucking mind – why didn’t you call?’
‘What are you talking about? I was on a work trip, I told you I’d be away for a few days—’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did—’
‘No, you fucking didn’t, Gaby. A week I’ve been trying to reach you. After everything you’ve told me about how fraught things are there … You didn’t think it would be courteous to call me, when you’re on the other side of the world?’
‘Oh Tom, for God’s sake, calm down, would you? I’m tired.’
It was unfair to be so dismissive of his feelings, but she resented the implication that she was under some kind of obligation to him.
There was a silence as they settled into their stalemate. She was the one to break first. ‘Look, I’ve just got in, I have to unpack and—’
‘Whatever, fine. I’ll speak to you sometime.’
‘Tom, I—’
But he had already hung up.
When she tried to call back a moment later, he didn’t answer.
Opening the fridge and then the cupboards in search of a bottle, she found nothing. Pulling her coat off the rack and slipping her feet into a pair of heeled boots which would barely withstand the snow that still lined the streets in March, she slammed the front door of her apartment. Several sets of bloodshot eyes looked up at her as she passed the bar below her flat. Pulling her coat around herself as she kept walking, her hood pulled high above her head, she set a brisk pace through the unsettling quiet of the back roads lit with the artificial tinge of occasional streetlamps. Moving on autopilot, she made a beeline towards Red Square and Tverskoi Ryad beyond, where she looked forward to the wide open streets and the reassuring movement of people.
Already her nose was beginning to tingle from the cold, and as she turned to check her reflection in the window of an unassuming bar, she saw him, seated opposite a white woman with long dark hair and porcelain skin, and beside her, a black man in a cream linen suit. Illuminated under the dingy lighting of the bar, Emsworth’s eyes caught Gabriela’s and his look was as though he had been shot.
Stepping forward through the doorway, she watched the woman stand as if sensing her enter, then turning away from where Gabriela hovered and moving towards the bathroom. The man opposite him noticed the young woman enter and looked sideways at Emsworth, who took a long slug of his drink.
‘Gabriela …’
‘I didn’t know you were in town,’ she said and when he smiled, his eyes were cold.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here either.’
It was the first time she had seen him since her arrival in Moscow. Their communication had been surprisingly sparse, just the odd work-related email, and the note she’d sent him thanking him for the loan of his apartment.
‘You’re settling in OK?’ he asked, his voice uncharacteristically brusque. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added, turning to the man in the suit. ‘This is Gabriela, she’s a colleague of mine.’
‘A pleasure to meet you,’ he said in an accent that might have been French African, and Gabriela smiled coolly at him before turning back to Emsworth, an uneasy feeling shunting through her veins, wrong-footed as she was by everything about this interaction.
‘Very much so,’ she said, in response to Emsworth’s question.
Subconsciously, his eyes moved again towards the door where his second companion had disappeared a few moments earlier.
‘So will I be seeing you at the office next week?’ she added, as keen by now as he clearly was to bring the conversation to a close. He shook his head.
‘As I say, this isn’t an official visit. Probably best if you don’t mention it to anyone else. I don’t want the others to feel peeved that I didn’t drop by.’
‘Sure. Well, nice to meet you,’ she replied, turning to the man at the table as she heard the lavatory flush in the direction of where the woman had disappeared.
‘Good,’ Emsworth said with an unconvincing smile. ‘Let’s be in touch.’
As she left the bar, she saw the woman returning to the table, her long dark hair swishing against a poker-straight back. Emsworth leaned in again and the conversation resumed. When she looked back, she couldn’t say exactly what made her do it; she didn’t think it through consciously as she pulled the phone from her pocket and aimed it discreetly at the three of them. The single shot revealing a picture she could not yet understand.