When the boat docked, a man came into the cabin, where Anastasia waited. He was short, with fine Slavic hair brushed forward into a point and the air of a busy official. He sat down on the only chair in the cabin, clasped his hands over his belly and regarded her through rimless glasses that were tinted blue, which he then took off. Her hands and feet had been bound just before he entered by the men who had lifted her out of the box and she had shrunk from this man when the door had opened, but he had told her in good English with a Russian accent to relax and listen to him.
‘We do not want to harm you, Mrs Hisami. The captain is fool and treated you badly. There was no need to keep you in container – he should have given you cabin like this, then you would not have wanted to escape. But you have made things very difficult for us because you told others where you were. The crew found the phone you used and we know that you called a friend and gave him all information you had. That phone call identified ship, which is why we were shadowed until we reached our Russian waters. Our plans have been disrupted and we must make certain adjustments for the new situation, you understand.’ She tried to speak but he cut her off, chopping the air with his hand several times. ‘Do not interrupt me, Mrs Hisami. Just listen. Naturally, one option is to dispose of you, and we have considered this, but that would be waste of all our hard work and we still do not have what we want.’
‘What do you want?’ she asked quietly.
He took no notice but looked around. ‘You recognise cabin, no? This is cabin of Chinaman. He sent email to Denis Hisami – email you wrote. Do you see Chinaman now? Do you see Chinaman’s possessions?’ She shook her head. ‘He no longer exists. He is gone. Everything is gone. And no one will ever ask where. A life lost – that is the result of what you did.’
She was appalled. Five people were now dead, but this death was all her fault. The strange little man, so lonely and idiosyncratic, had sent the email, and they killed him. She shook her head, looked down and let out one guttural sob.
‘There are always consequences,’ the man said, examining the palm of each hand in turn. ‘If you attempt to escape or try to communicate with your friends again, be assured, I will kill you. It is not problem for me – you mean nothing to me. You understand? If you behave, you may live to see your husband.’
‘What do you want?’ she asked again.
‘I cannot say that, Mrs Hisami. But I will say to you that things have gone in some ways more easily than we expected, and in some ways worse. It is good that your husband has been put in jail.’
‘He’s not in jail. You’re lying.’
‘If you knew me, you would know that I have come this far in life by telling truth. I repeat so you understand – your husband is in jail in New York, which was reason you could not reach him when you called. Then you called your lover Paul Samson and told him where you were and we assume he alerted Western authorities – NATO, EU, etcetera, etcetera – and ship was followed. That was certainly inconvenient.’
‘He can’t be in jail. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’ Only then did she realise that the man had mentioned Samson. How did he know she had spoken to him?
‘Your husband was arrested on immigration fraud – he lied on citizen application form and did not disclose past as war criminal. I am sure he told you his real name is Karim Qasim. He took the name of his hero, the Kurdish writer Hisami, for the purposes of moving to the United States with his sister, Aysel. They were both involved in the cover-up of the murder of thirty-four Iraqi soldiers in 1995.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That does not worry me, Mrs Hisami. American authorities are in possession of photographs that prove presence at the scene of crime, and Denis Hisami, or I should say Karim Qasim, is now in jail because they know he is war criminal and liar. You see, Mrs Hisami, we have followed your husband’s career since our agents came across him when he was a young man fighting for the PUK. He was brilliant commander but very violent man.’ He looked at her with contentment as she tried to absorb all this. ‘Surely you knew of these things in your husband’s past? A person who witnessed the elimination of IS unit in Macedonia must ask how a man like Hisami, a Californian billionaire, was able to shoot four terrorists – bang, bang, bang, bang – in few minutes: three in barn and one in farmhouse. When we learned your husband was in Macedonia, we knew he was the one to carry out killings. Macedonian security forces, they took credit, but we knew true story, Mrs Hisami. And that is story you know also because you were there, and so was Paul Samson, the man who became your lover in Venice. Yes, we are aware of all these things.’
‘How do you know I called Samson?’
‘You just told me. Now we have his number, which may be useful one day.’
She shook her head.
‘Ah, I see you do not question these things any longer, and that is because you suspect they are true. Good. We are getting somewhere. How do we know all this? That is easy. We watched Karim Qasim’s climb through American society because we knew he was very smart man. We admired his financial abilities and way he learned how to work system to his advantage, and so quickly, too. But we knew one day we would have reason to disclose what we know about him. His personality and his politics dictated that there would be conflict between his interests and ours. It was written in stars and we were prepared.’
‘Denis is a good person, as his sister was. They would never cover up a war crime. It’s against everything he believes in. Aysel was known for her humanitarian work, her love of humanity.’
‘You believe this, yet you see him cover up the killing of the terrorists in Macedonia. You know your husband covered up killings in Macedonia. This is the way he operates, and his sister went back to front line to fight. She had to be there.’
‘She was a doctor. She was helping the wounded. That’s why she was there.’
‘Believe what you like, Mrs Hisami, but does it occur to you she was atoning for sins in past?’
‘Our organisation is named after her because of her humanity and the sacrifices she made to help others,’ she said with sudden vehemence. ‘I know my husband. He is not a war criminal – he was a soldier.’
He drew a gun from inside his jacket. ‘Lean forward,’ he commanded, and placed the gun at the nape of her neck. ‘Here is where I shoot you. The bullet enters skull here.’ He screwed the muzzle into her hair. ‘Your death will come with no warning. You will know nothing.’
She jerked her head up and strained back to look into his eyes. ‘You enjoy this?’
He shook his head. ‘I just tell you how things are. I am civilised man and I will treat you well while you are with me, but you should know that I will end your life if it is required. Simple as that.’ He stopped. ‘I forgot – my name is Kirill.’
He replaced the gun and went to open the door to the men waiting outside. One of them carried a huge blue bag.
‘We give you shot now,’ he said. ‘Then we have long journey but you will be unconscious for that – your beauty sleep.’
They assembled in Macy Harp’s London office, but without a word Macy beckoned Samson and Zillah Dee to follow him along several corridors to a room in another building. ‘Leave your phones in the wall safe,’ he said, opening a panel outside the room which hid a small green safe. ‘Better to be on the safe side.’
Samson and Zillah decanted their numerous devices into the safe and Macy placed his smartphone alongside them. ‘I thought you didn’t use a mobile phone,’ said Samson.
‘For my bookie and my wife,’ said Macy with a routine twinkle. A woman that Samson hadn’t seen before appeared and settled at a desk beside the panel. They went inside and Macy closed the door firmly. The room had no natural light and Samson noticed there were no desk lights, no electrical or telephone sockets – nothing that could be used to eavesdrop on the conversation. The air-conditioning had chilled the room to an uncomfortable level.
Samson poured three mugs of coffee from a flask. Macy nodded on receipt of his mug, folded his hands under the usually beaming red face and thought for a few moments.
‘The first thing we need to do is to decide what the hell SIS are up to. They know Crane isn’t dead. They probably knew from the moment the body was found. They must have suppressed that knowledge because they have an interest in Crane. Now what could that be?’
‘He’s their man?’ offered Zillah.
‘Doesn’t make sense. He’s the bad hat, surely. He was the one channelling money into London, washing it by various means – including the art market – and moving it to Europe. What do they want with him?’
‘Well, they’ve got to be watching him,’ said Zillah. ‘Then Samson here comes along and spoils it by spooking Crane. So Crane has the poor sap on the balcony murdered and does a vanishing act.’
‘Seems clumsy,’ said Samson. ‘Anyone in that situation would know that the police would eventually identify the body by means of DNA. If I thought of recovering hairs from the shower, so would the police. It’s an obvious thing to do.’
‘Indeed,’ said Macy, ‘and I suspect they did precisely that, or established in some other way that the body wasn’t Crane’s. That means the Security Service and MI6 leaned on them to keep it quiet. So, yes, Zillah, they are watching something unfold, something current and important. The reason they hauled you in this morning, Paul, was to find out how much you knew and what was on your phones. They weren’t in the least bit interested in Anastasia – right? Then Nyman had to let you go because you threatened his entire operation by promising to go to the media, right? So that means he would rather have you running around with this information than jeopardise his operation, right again? And that leads me to conclude that Nyman is what I believe the experts term fucking desperate.’
‘You understand this?’ Zillah said, turning to Samson.
‘No, but I’m sure Denis Hisami does, and I think I should go to see him.’
‘You okay with that?’ she asked.
‘Sure, he’s employing me, and we both want Anastasia free.’ He studied them in turn. ‘Looks like Crane organised the kidnapping.’
‘How do you know this?’ said Macy quickly.
‘I was paid a visit by the Camorra in the car park at the airport. I guess they were told where to find me by the Carabinieri. They’re angry about two of their men being killed on the ship – the police now assume both kidnappers were eliminated. They wanted any information that I could provide in the future and in return they showed me a photograph of Crane, whom they knew as Shepherd. They said he was connected to the eastern Mafia – part of their world.’ He fished the paper with the numbers, together with the card they had given him, from his top pocket. ‘They put something in his drink and went through his things. These are bank-account numbers he kept on his phone. They want to know what’s in the accounts and who has access to them.’
‘Maybe these are the accounts where the money from TangKi is ending up,’ Zillah said, taking hold of the paper. ‘Can I see what we’re able to find out about them? I think I’ll need to show these to Mr Hisami and Jim Tulliver – you okay with that?’
‘Why don’t you let me do that?’ said Samson. ‘I’ll leave in the next twenty-four hours, so I can ask him.’ He took back the paper.
‘You may have to see him in jail – the outcome of the hearing is not certain,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘The authorities are taking their time to prepare their case and the judge said she doesn’t want to see either side until she has some evidence to assess. This is to determine whether Mr Hisami is a risk out of jail. It’s not a trial.’
Macy waited for this exchange to end before clearing his throat. ‘Okay?’
‘Sorry,’ said Samson, ‘Go ahead.’
‘We have to think of the whole picture. What’s going on here? What’s the end point?’
Zillah folded her arms and focused. ‘By end point,’ she said, ‘you mean what is Crane actually doing? What’s the purpose and why was everything so urgent? Why was the man on the balcony killed? Why are they in such a heck of a hurry?’
‘Exactly,’ said Macy, taking the role of the tutorial supervisor. ‘Peter Nyman came to visit while you were in Italy, and he said something that interested me. He asked me, apropos of nothing, whether I had any interest in certain European extremist political groups. His remark followed some discussion of the money. He was sounding me out to see how much we know, because he basically finds Samson here such a bloody nightmare to deal with.’
‘Likewise,’ said Samson.
‘I wondered about the connection in his mind and whether he thought this money was destined for these extremist groups in Europe. It’s not like Nyman to give away his thinking, but I did note the connection.’
Zillah looked at her smart watch and frowned. ‘I need to make a call to my people in Sevastapol. Is there somewhere I can do that?’
Macy told her to ask Maureen, who was sitting on the other side of the door. ‘Oh, and you can leave that watch in the safe before you come back in,’ he said.
After she had left, he turned to Samson. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ Samson replied.
He frowned a doubt. ‘That call from the ship didn’t bother you?’
‘Yeah, it bothered me because I didn’t like hearing her in distress, but she’s another man’s wife now and I’m working for him and I have it all straight in my head.’
‘There’s always the chance it may not end well. You know that, don’t you?’
This was the unsentimental intelligence officer who had seen dozens of operations collapse and who knew the consequences of failure. To Macy, failure was to be expected.
Samson nodded.
‘If it goes wrong, you’re never going to forgive yourself,’ said Macy sympathetically. ‘I hate to say this, but you have to look after yourself in this affair.’
‘Which is why we have to get her back.’ Samson paused to think. ‘Can I summarise? You think we have American money trying to illicitly influence European politics, is that right?’ Macy nodded. ‘Yet we also have a smooth-talking Ukrainian mafioso – aka Crane – who does deep cover very well. Then we have the obvious Russian connection with the boat and its destination. None of this conceivably adds up, does it?’
Macy rocked back and placed his fingertips together. ‘Well, obviously, these days, there’s less of a gap between the Russian and American regimes than there is, for example, between the two political tribes in America. And, if I read Nyman right, that’s what’s eating him.’
‘“Snow on his boots” is what he said about Crane.’
Macy smiled. ‘Indeed, “snow on his boots”. I’d forgotten that phrase. Nyman is certainly obsessed with Crane’s Russian connections, but I think his attention is focused on the States.’
‘Hisami has all the answers,’ Samson murmured.
‘Yes, he probably does. Look, I should mention something before Zillah comes back. Denis hasn’t paid us yet. He has a liquidity problem, which has nothing to do with this situation. Our friend Denis is a gambler at heart, just like you. I gather he got caught up in a speculative riptide earlier this year, which made a dent in his fortune. He’s not broke but he has temporary cashflow difficulties that he’s finding it hard to address from a prison cell. Of course, he’s very, very rich and we will be paid, but I felt I ought to warn you, given the situation with the restaurant.’
Samson remembered Anastasia asking what he would do with Cedar when his mother had gone. He’d told her he would run it in his parents’ memory. But that was before he knew of the debts his mother had taken on and the way the finances of the restaurant were set up – it was virtually impossible to cover the costs. A payment of £45,000 was outstanding. ‘When do you think we’ll get it?’ he asked.
‘As soon as he’s out of jail. I talked to Tulliver last night. Denis is worth a lot, so there isn’t a problem, but I guess Zillah won’t be using that plane for much longer. Must be costing forty to fifty grand a week.’
Samson was thinking about his own liabilities and made a mental note to call his sister, Leila, after the meeting. Leila had a chaotic emotional life but when she concentrated she was good with figures and far better than Samson at talking with their bank manager, who, after their mother’s death, told them flat out that the only course was to close Cedar. Leila and he had decided that wasn’t going to happen, though, in truth, it would have been far easier for both of them if it had.
Zillah came back with some notes and sat down. ‘So, I have some news. It seems Anastasia was taken off the ship last night, because the Grigori has already set sail for a shipyard at Kerch in Eastern Crimea, where it will be repaired. I have two of my guys there, but the conditions are challenging. They arrived too late to do anything and they weren’t able to get to any of the crew. Jonathan established that a handful of containers were taken off the boat and one was loaded on to a truck almost immediately. He got the registration of that truck and the name of the freight forwarder that operates out of St Petersburg.’ She looked up from her notes. ‘Basically, she’s gone and we have no goddam idea where they’ve taken her, but we start by working on the freight agent.’
Samson shook his head at the hopelessness of the situation.
Macy absorbed the news. ‘My concern is that the Russian government is in on this. If it is, we’re properly jiggered.’
Zillah shook her head. ‘Everything we know about the FSR or the GRU – they’re the only state agencies that would undertake an operation like this – suggests they would have gotten her into Russia far more efficiently. She wouldn’t have been allowed to escape and roam that vessel, stealing phones and persuading the crew to send emails. These people are, relatively speaking, amateurs. This is all about organised crime.’
‘What are you two going to do?’ asked Samson.
‘I’m going back to the States right now,’ said Zillah. ‘Need a ride?’
Samson shook his head. ‘I’d like that, but I’ve got a few things to sort out here. I’ll take the first flight tomorrow.’
They left the room and collected their phones from the safe. Samson’s immediately pinged with a text from Jo Hayes. ‘You owe me dinner – 8 p.m. tonight your place?’
He could do without this, but he owed Jo and he wanted to sound her out.
Samson would have asked Jo up to the office above Cedar for a drink so they could talk in private, but he was sure that it had been bugged when he was away. Everything seemed to be in place, but when he phoned Leila to talk about the money, he noticed a slight popping on the landline and moments of interference when she spoke. If the phone was bugged, so were the room and the computer he used for the business. He would eventually have it all swept, but it certainly wasn’t safe to have a frank conversation there with Detective Inspector Hayes.
Jo had the presence of a performer. When she arrived, the eyes of both male and female customers followed her to the table. She wore a dark grey business suit, black shirt and silver necklace and she’d had three or four inches cut from her hair, which made her seem less like the amateur nightclub singer. ‘What do you think?’ she said, flipping it with the back of her fingers, first one side then the other. ‘It’s all in honour of our date, Samson.’
‘Well, I am indeed honoured,’ he said. ‘It looks great – sexier.’
‘It’s meant to make men take me seriously.’
‘They already do,’ said Samson. ‘You’re the smartest person in the Met and they know that.’
‘Thank you! I will have the best chilled white wine that Lebanon has to offer.’
‘Then you shall have the Ixsir Altitudes 2015. It is grown at a thousand metres and goes very well with seafood.’ He nodded to the waiter, who was hovering.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
‘She’s in Russia.’
‘Russia – why? What’s this all about, Samson?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘And not a peep in the media?’
‘If it gets out that she’s been kidnapped at the same time as her husband was thrown into jail, it will be a big story and make it much harder to get her back. I pray that doesn’t happen.’
‘How are you managing? Must be tough.’
She looked sceptical while the waiter poured the wine for Samson to taste.
‘So, thanks for not dropping me in it at the airport,’ she started. ‘They had nothing, as you guessed. But you’re a rascal, sneaking DNA samples from the apartment. That’s how you knew it wasn’t Adam Crane on the balcony.’ She put up her hand. ‘No, I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just telling you that I know you’re a dirty rotten little shit.’
‘Agreed,’ said Samson.
She smiled. ‘The name is Daniel Misak.’
‘Whose name?’
‘Keep up. The man on the balcony.’
‘Right, and who is he?’
‘Well, this is the interesting part. He was a US citizen – from the West Coast. Been in London just a few days when he was abducted and killed. He was tortured in a lock-up down at the rough end of Fulham. Then he was brought back to the flat alive in a chest.’
‘CCTV?’
‘You were right about the artwork. Crane’s people took a lot of pictures out of the apartment and one or two things went in. Misak must have been in one of the larger crates. He was placed on the balcony, probably unconscious, and shot in the face at close range with a silenced weapon that was loaded with expanding bullets. He was shot three times. There was nothing left of his face to identify.’
‘And Crane is the chief suspect for organising the killing, if not actually doing it himself?’
‘I assume so, but I’m not on the investigation.’ She picked up the glass of wine and gave him a sly look over the rim. ‘You’re going to have to work harder for the next bit.’
Samson grinned. ‘Who was Misak?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Well, start thinking about what he was doing with Crane.’
‘Was he a friend?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Did he work with him? Did he work at TangKi – Crane’s company in California?’
She smiled. ‘Warmer.’
‘What did he do? Was he something on the money side?’
‘I would love some more of that flatbread with this delicious cheesy thing,’ she said, turning and searching for a waiter.
‘Shanklish,’ said Samson. And then it fell into place. Misak was Hisami’s source at TangKi. Crane had suspected him, summoned him to London on an urgent pretext and tortured him to find out what he’d told Hisami. When it became clear how much Hisami knew, Crane had decamped with all his artworks.
‘Is there CCTV of Crane leaving?’ he asked, signalling for more bread.
‘Interesting you should think of that. The answer is no.’
‘So he came out the same way Misak went in, immediately after Misak was dumped there?’
‘Was Misak drugged?’
‘GHB and a drug called scopolamine – known in Colombia as the Devil’s Breath. You blow it into someone’s face from your hand and they become a zombie. He wouldn’t have known where he was. When the place had been cleaned out someone came back, propped him up on the balcony and shot him.’
‘Why the display?’
‘Maybe for your man in prison. They were sending a message to him, as if he needed it after his wife had been kidnapped.’
‘Crane organised the kidnap.’
Her eyes shone. ‘How do you know that?’
He told her briefly about his encounter with Camorra but left out the piece of paper with account numbers on it.
‘You get about,’ she said.
‘They found me – your counterparts in the Carabinieri. They want me to help them identify the person who ordered the death of the two kidnappers.’
‘A lot of bodies are piling up – one here, two in Italy, two in the sea. There’s a kind of desperation about it.’
Jo was smart and could look after herself, but she was also a natural companion and Samson found he was enjoying himself, even though the obsession with freeing Anastasia was not far beneath the surface. He asked her about her life, and she told him, without fuss, that she had just been ‘given the heave-ho’, as she put it, by an architect from Sussex whom she had met on a dating site. ‘In point of fact, he saved me the trouble – he needed looking after too much, but it was annoying that he got in first. This bloody job! I didn’t have time to phone and tell him, and then the bastard dumps me in a text.’
‘Miss him?’
‘Nah. It’s nice to have someone to do things with, though. In this line, you’ve never got time to organise things, so you end up dating colleagues, who are just as dull and unreliable as you are.’
‘What about your friends in the Security Service?’
‘To go out with! You have to be joking.’
He smiled. ‘No, what do they think about this story?’
‘They’re interested and they want to know what you know.’
‘Yes, I believe I had a visit when I was away in Italy – the office upstairs. Doesn’t feel right.’
‘Are they here now?’
‘No, Ivan always knows who’s here.’ With business and embassy people from the Middle East dining at Cedar every night, the table plan was a complicated part of running the restaurant. Ivan kept a list of people who could not be placed next to each other and those who required one of the three booths along the side. He was familiar with all the customers and those who tried to book that he didn’t know were either put in the Siberia at the rear of the restaurant or found they couldn’t get a table.
‘It runs pretty smoothly,’ she said.
‘I’ve changed a few things – painted it, lowered the lighting, took down the pictures my dad bought and introduced these,’ he said, tapping the little oil lamp on the table. ‘And those green cushions were my idea.’
‘Your feminine side,’ she said.
He studied her. ‘Have you got anything else to tell me, Jo? Seems like you might.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘You have something, I can feel it.’ He topped up her glass.
‘You’re trying to get me sloshed. You should know that I can drink the whole of West End Central under the table.’
‘Didn’t enter my mind.’ He grinned.
‘You asked me, so I’m going to ask you. Did you miss her when she went off and married Hisami?’
‘Yes, but you get used to it.’
‘Any girlfriends since?’
‘Yep, a couple, but you know …’
‘They weren’t what you were looking for.’
‘Other way round, plus, I have all this to worry about,’ he said, sweeping the restaurant with his gaze. ‘I hadn’t realised what a lot of work my mother did every day.’
‘And she was …’
‘A terrific person,’ said Samson. ‘Always wanting me to get married, though. But the place got on top of her, and that’s probably why she had the stroke that killed her. The problem was that she didn’t share her worries – didn’t want to burden us, and I suppose there was some pride involved. She wanted to make it work and had just about got control of the cash flow and, well, it ran away from her.’
‘You’ve had a rough couple of years.’ She touched him on the arm.
‘I guess,’ he said, and put his hand on hers. ‘Is there something I should know? Nyman warned me off. Why? After all, I’m just investigating a kidnapping in Italy, and they’ve successfully suppressed the identity of the murder victim for the time being. So, what’s he so worried about? All I had to say was that I knew Crane wasn’t dead and he let me go.’
She said nothing but withdrew her hand and continued to eat while flashing him a smile. She waved her knife in his direction. ‘You nearly got me into a heap of trouble in that apartment. How can I trust you?’
‘I’m sorry. I …’
‘You were fucking with my career, Samson, and that isn’t funny.’
He filled his own glass and decided to leave it at that. The more you asked at these moments, the less likely you were to get the answer. She would tell him if she wanted to. No point pushing it.
‘When are you going to the States?’ she said eventually.
‘How do you know I’m going?’
‘You aren’t in Russia, so you have to be going to the States.’ She turned away from customers. ‘And leave the phone behind.’
‘My phone?’
‘Not your phone, you idiot! Her phone! And hide it!’
He said nothing and she returned to pick a few bones out of the sea bass.
‘They didn’t know you had it when you came through Heathrow this morning,’ she said, with rather too much in her mouth. ‘But the Italian police tipped them off just afterwards. I know because I tracked down the guy in charge in Italy because I wanted to find out a few things, and he assumed I was working with Nyman, so I did nothing to disabuse him of that idea.’
‘You seem to know an awful lot about all this.’
‘I’ve made it my business,’ she said, finally giving up on the fish and leaning close to him, ‘because I want to know what I’m getting into here. You see, the dinner was their idea. They want me to find out if you have the phone and when they can lay their hands on it.’
‘I don’t. It’s on a plane to America right now, so it can be returned to Hisami when he gets out of jail. Whose idea was this?’
‘My old colleagues.’
‘I’m sorry you can’t go back to them with anything.’
It was plain she didn’t believe him, and also that she wasn’t going to push him.
They had Cedar’s famous mint sorbet and a glass of dessert wine. ‘There’s something else,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to have to tell you somewhere very safe.’ She moved closer and whispered to his sleeve. ‘By which I mean in bed.’
Samson smiled. ‘Were you told to seduce me, too?’
‘No, that part was my idea. And anyway, you’re seducing me to find out what I know, in case you didn’t realise. Unless, of course, you’ve sworn a vow of chastity?’
‘She’s another man’s wife and he’s a client. I have that straight in my mind,’ he said for the second time that day, not sure what he was going to do.
‘Liar, but I’ll choose to believe you because, to be honest, Samson, I want you even if it’s only a one-night stand.’
‘I don’t do one-night stands.’
‘All the better,’ she said.
Later, they made love in Samson’s big first-floor flat in Maida Vale. Jo had none of Anastasia’s playfulness in bed. She considered sex a serious subject and at one stage told him to stop smiling and concentrate. He replied that he was smiling because he had not expected a senior police officer to be quite so beautiful without clothes. This made her relent and kiss his eyes. ‘Yes, you will do fine,’ she said, as though concluding a rental agreement, and pulled him on top of her and held his face between the palms of her hands as they began to move together.
‘You were going to say,’ he murmured afterwards.
‘Yes, I was. They know where he is. They’re on to him.’
‘Crane?’
‘For Christ’s sake – are you slow, Samson? Yes, Crane, you fucking bozo!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Simple. They have the number of one of his phones.’ She paused and yawned then kissed him. ‘I like you, Samson, but I’m not expecting anything – understand?’
‘This is a speech I’m getting used to,’ he said, the back of his hand brushing her breast. ‘Anything else?’
‘He used the phone to call Misak when he landed in London, and they found Misak’s phone in the lock-up and scrolled through the recent calls. People always fuck up. Crane fucked up.’
‘How did they find the lock-up?’
He waited until she was asleep then left the bed.
They gave her another shot during the night, at least they thought they had. The needle entered her buttock through her filthy chinos then exited a couple of centimetres away and she felt the liquid shoot down the back of her leg. But she wished that they’d knocked her out. Though no longer trussed up in the bag in which she had been removed from the ship, she was bound and blindfolded and gagged with tape. In her previous enforced confinements – in the container and the box – she had done everything she could to keep track of time and to work out where she was, but now she existed in a state of resigned dread which no thought penetrated, apart from the awareness that it was very cold and she couldn’t feel her hands and feet.
She understood that she was in a truck because she heard the gear changes and the engine labouring as they ground up a hill, but that was all she took in. Like a torture victim, she had got used to the routine of abuse, expected no release from the discomfort and pain, and now could not imagine a future without it. She told herself they wanted to keep her alive, but the appalling Russian creep who called himself Kirill was evidently as happy to snuff out her life as keep her alive, and the realisation of her worthlessness to them had somehow filled her being. She did not think of Samson to distract herself, or of her husband, who seemed a weirdly distant memory. She could not even summon his face, and all the experiences they’d shared in the last two years seemed like a fantasy. The work she had done with his money seemed suddenly futile, ridiculous.
This third incarceration delivered a profound depressive shock, as well as much physical pain. She could not bring herself to acknowledge that she was starving and desperately thirsty. They clearly didn’t believe she needed food and water so she concluded she probably wasn’t worthy of them. Only when she asked herself if the drug they had given had caused the terrible blackness in her mind as well as the toxic feeling all over did she begin to think that it was reasonable to expect food and water. She had long given up trying to hold her bladder, yet urinating did little to relieve the persistent ache in her stomach, which she realised must be constipation, possibly brought on by the terror and anxiety. She didn’t know, she didn’t care – she supposed she couldn’t give a shit. That joke to herself generated a tiny light in her mind, and she tried desperately to think of other humorous things, but she was soon back in the deathly trance, lying there for mile after mile, hour after hour.
She was asleep when the brakes screeched and the truck pulled up. The whole vehicle shuddered then bounced a little with the sudden halt in momentum. She expected nothing. They were getting fuel, she told herself, but a moment later there was some clanking and she smelled food – she was certain of it, a kind of sausage smell, onions maybe. Her empty stomach began to rumble. Then she felt hands all over her. She was pulled upright and the blindfold was removed. She saw three figures in the dim overhead light. A man took hold of her head and ripped the tape from her mouth. He forced the nozzle of a water bottle between her teeth and squirted a jet so she had to jerk her head away to avoid choking. He kept doing this until she had finished the bottle. In the background she recognised Kirill’s voice murmuring instructions to the man in Russian. Kirill came forward, bent down and cut the plastic tie from around her wrists. He picked up a tray that he had placed on the floor of the trailer. ‘You will eat hot dog – make you feel at home.’
She rubbed her hands and tried to knead the blood back into her fingers. ‘I can’t feel anything I’m so cold. Why are you doing this?’
He guided her hands to the oblong tray, in which lay a spiral-cut sausage covered in sauce inside a bun.
‘We have microwave on truck,’ he said. ‘Best hot dog in Russia.’
She bit into it and looked up. ‘Why are you treating me like this? What have I done to you?’ she said, her mouth full.
He didn’t answer.
She felt the warmth spread through her hands and her stomach, and some of her strength returned. ‘I can’t escape. Look at me. I’m too weak and I don’t know where I am. For God’s sake, don’t tie me up again.’
‘It is necessary. You bang side of truck and make noise and people think migrants are inside and police come and find you.’
She shook her head. ‘Please! It’s too cold and I’m sick.’ It was true she felt so lousy she wondered if she was coming down with an infection. She looked up at his portly profile and his breath smoking in the cold of the truck. ‘You need to treat me better if you are going to get what you want from my husband.’
‘Eat, or I will take hot dog,’ he snapped.
The only thing she had control over was the speed of her consumption. She ate slowly, chewing every mouthful far more than necessary. He grew impatient, stamped on the floor of the trailer and in the end tried to seize the tray from her, but she was too quick for him and clasped it to herself so he couldn’t get it without a struggle. She knew that Kirill probably thought it was beneath his dignity to wrestle with a woman over a half-eaten hot dog. He walked the few paces to the tailgate and exchanged some words with the men, then let himself down into the dark and lit a cigarette, which made him cough in the cold air.
She had eaten as much as she wanted and let the tray slip to the floor, and then, quite suddenly, she found herself silently crying with anger at her powerlessness.
One of the men came towards her and held her arms together while he slipped and tightened a plastic tie around her wrists. ‘Four hours,’ he murmured. ‘Four hours max.’ He pushed her down gently on her side and covered her with an unzipped sleeping bag, then left the trailer and closed the doors. She might have a friend among the people who held her, at least someone whose heart could be moved by her plight.