Chelsea Mansions

SIXTEEN

T here was a confused interval in which people tried to behave as if everything was completely normal, while they secretly observed themselves and each other for symptoms-a gleam of sweat, the pulse of a headache, a twinge of nausea. Locked inside the Queen Anne’s Gate offices, they were obliquely aware of the turmoil going on outside as messages flew in from Personnel, the Press Bureau and senior management. Towards evening a team from the Hospital of Tropical Diseases arrived to take temperatures and blood. Their appearance, in face shields, impermeable tunics, leg and shoe coverings and double gloves, gave rise to black, self-conscious jokes from the police and some jittery looks between the civilian staff. Soon after the medics left with their samples, shrink-wrapped platters of sandwiches and cartons of soft drinks were deposited on the front doorstep of the building, as if the occupants were plague carriers, which of course they were.

Kathy and Bren, as senior officers on the premises, went around the offices trying to exude confidence and encouraging people to concentrate on the work they’d been doing. They met up at Dot’s office, where Bren was having a smile with Dot about some trait of the old man that had always irritated her. Kathy watched them through the open door, Dot wiping a tear from her eye with a tissue and Bren, like a younger version of his boss, big and gentle, putting an arm around her and giving her a hug. Though Kathy and he were of the same rank, Bren had been an inspector for much longer and was senior to her, and it suddenly struck her that she shouldn’t have taken over the way she had earlier. When he emerged from Dot’s office Kathy apologised.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he growled. ‘You did well. We’re a team, right?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘You’re worried about Deanne and the girls.’

He nodded.

‘I suppose I’m lucky,’ Kathy said. ‘I haven’t got anyone close I could have given it to.’

He gave her a look and said, ‘No, Kathy, I don’t think that’s lucky.’

Later, Kathy rang John Greenslade’s mobile. She explained quickly that she wouldn’t be able to go with him to speak to Moszynski’s secretary. She gave him the name and contact phone number and said he could speak to her on the phone. He said he would, sounding eager, and began telling her enthusiastically about his first impressions of the letters, but she cut him off and said she had to go. Then she added, ‘Are you feeling all right, John?’

‘What? Yes, sure, why?’

‘Um, there’s a bug going around the office. I just hoped I hadn’t passed it on. How about the other people in the hotel?’

‘No, everyone’s fine. But are you unwell?’

‘No, I’m okay.’

‘What kind of bug is it? Swine flu?’

‘Something like that. Let me know if you hear of anyone getting sick, will you?’

When she hung up she realised she hadn’t asked him how his paper had gone that morning.

Feeling suddenly low, she forced herself to think about the next task. In the drawer of her desk were the four files, two from MI5 and two from MI6, that had been delivered that morning, for her eyes only, and reluctantly she unlocked the drawer and pulled them out.

She had never seen security service files on individual subjects before, and was impressed by their orderliness and terse insights. They followed a common format that she guessed had been developed over thousands of other such studies, with a physical and psychological profile followed by an ongoing biographical summary of the subject’s career, backed up by sheafs of supporting material-agents’ reports, photographs, transcripts of phone taps and conversations, photocopies of official documents, press cuttings, ticket stubs. She imagined that Mikhail Moszynski and Vadim Kuzmin were not really that important in the hierarchy of surveillance subjects, and that others would have much larger files, running to many volumes, but all the same, the scope was impressive.

She began with the MI6 file on Moszynski. It filled out the summary of his life in Russia that Sean Ardagh had given them, including his family background. There was a reference to a file on his father, Gennady, and to a KGB investigation into the family which had identified both Gennady and his wife Marta as Jewish. There was a rather detailed medical history of Mikhail which looked as if it had been taken from hospital records, noting a severe allergy to a number of common foods, particularly peanuts. His school record referred to his unremarkable academic performance and lack of interest in sports. The only distinguishing feature was a modest competence on the violin, which was apparently abandoned when he left school. Translations of other official documents also included his record of compulsory army service in the North Caucasus Military District and his academic record at St Petersburg Technical University, where he met his first wife, with whom he had a son who died at birth, followed by his sole surviving child, Alisa.

Kathy had an impression of a rather grey and featureless youth until he joined the Young Communist League, in which he seemed to find a role as a back-room organiser and initiator of a number of money-making schemes. Then suddenly, in the early 1990s, the record seemed to come to life. There were pictures of him at the wheel of his first Mercedes, in a fur-collared coat at the gates of a factory surrounded by smiling men in overalls, and seated among men and women in evening dress at a banquet at which his wife wasn’t visible. He had put on weight and become a kind of looming presence in these pictures, and had begun to indulge his taste for strikingly beautiful women and Cuban cigars (Romeo y Julieta or Montecristo for preference, the file noted pedantically). It was at this time that he began to appear in newspaper and magazine articles as one of the new breed of people of wealth and influence. After he left Russia in 2001 the reports thinned out to a few references from the Russian News Agency ARI until 2008, when his marriage to Shaka Gibbons produced a flurry of interest in Russian gossip magazines- Maxim, Profil and Grazia -with pictures of the two of them at movie premieres, Ascot and Wimbledon. No doubt new articles were appearing in Moscow and St Petersburg on his murder and grieving widow, Kathy thought, just as they were in London in the pages of Now, Hello! and OK!.

To Kathy, however, the most interesting thing in the file was an assessment by an unnamed MI6 operative of Mikhail’s relations with the Russian government. Despite his flirtation with the lifestyle of an oligarch, he had taken a lot of trouble to avoid giving offence or aggravation to the political hierarchy, and unlike some of the other Russian expats, like Berezovsky and Deripaska, had never been threatened with financial or criminal penalties. The report referred to a warm letter of appreciation from President Putin following a gift by Moszynski of money for new buildings for School No. 193 in St Petersburg, where both had been students. It also speculated that the marriage between his daughter and the well-regarded FSB officer Vadim Kuzmin had been engineered by Moszynski to maintain a favourable impression in Moscow.

MI5’s file on Mikhail Moszynski was much briefer and seemed to be a matter of routine, given his nationality and wealth. It dealt with his applications for UK residency and then citizenship for himself and his family, his lack of political affiliations, his membership of various charitable, cultural and social organisations, and listed his movements in and out of the UK since 2000. It also tried to grapple with his financial affairs, without, Kathy thought, much success. It listed the properties in Chelsea and the Bahamas as well as recent negotiations for a large country estate in Wiltshire. It also quoted a couple of estimates from the Financial Times of his net worth, of five hundred and fifty million US dollars in 2007 and four hundred and thirty million in 2009, but didn’t attempt to unravel the structure of RKF SA or his other companies and trusts. Under the heading Criminal history was the entry None, with a footnote that his current accountant, Frederick Clarke, had been investigated by the Fraud Squad in 2003 without charges being laid.

Kathy slid the two Moszynski files aside and reached for Vadim Kuzmin’s. She was rather pleased that both MI5 and MI6 had failed to record Mikhail’s enthusiasm for hedgehogs.

She was wading through the MI6 briefing document on the FSB Sixth Directorate to which Vadim was attached when Bren came in.

‘Any news about Brock?’ he asked.

‘Haven’t heard anything. What’s up?’

‘That mobile phone number that Peebles rang…’

‘You’ve got a name?’

He shook his head. ‘No chance, but we’ve got the record of calls it’s made in the past six months.’ He handed Kathy a printout, a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

She scanned it, then frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Only one number?’

‘Right! Apart from Peebles’ call to it, the phone has been used to contact only one other number, which it calls always on a Monday, between two and three in the afternoon.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘Look at the number.’

Kathy stared at it again, shrugged. ‘Should I know it?’

‘It’s Gloria Cummins. The Chelsea madam. It’s her number. This bastard rings Gloria’s knocking shop practically every Monday afternoon.’

‘Hell.’

‘Isn’t that bloody wonderful?’

‘What do we do?’

‘Well, there’s no point confronting Gloria. I spoke to the local boys. They know her well and confirmed what I suspected-she’s tough as nails and won’t give us anything on her clients if she can help it. If we approached her she’d just tip this bloke off, and then we’d be lost.’

‘So?’

‘We tap her phone, listen in.’

Kathy nodded. ‘So we have to wait. He doesn’t ring every Monday though, does he? But he did last week.’ She thought. ‘That was the day Vadim returned from Russia.’

‘That’s true.’

Kathy shook her head in frustration. ‘By Monday we could all be in hospital… or worse.’

‘By Monday we might be begging to go to hospital. They’re talking about sending in sleeping bags for us for tonight. I thought my days of kipping on the floor were over.’

‘That’ll be fun. We’d better put an armed guard on Brock’s stock of booze in the basement.’

‘Or drink it all ourselves first. What do you reckon, Kathy? By Monday we’ll have reverted to savagery in here. Lord of the Flies in Queen Anne’s Gate.’

Kathy laughed and he ambled off. She went back to the file she’d been reading, turning to a picture of Vadim Kuzmin, apparently one he was proud of. He was standing among trees, hands on hips, a chilly smile on his lips, and dressed in the black uniform of the Spetsgruppa Vympel special forces which came under the control of the FSB, specialising in counter-terrorism and assassination.

It was nearly eight when Sundeep phoned again. He had some news, he said. The Marburg diagnosis had been confirmed. Brock and the others were reasonably comfortable and receiving the best possible care, and it was now a matter of waiting. The good news was that Kathy’s test results, taken at the same time, had also come through, and she was clear, as was Sundeep himself.

‘This is a good result, Kathy, the best we could have hoped for. We’re very lucky that Brock kept himself pretty much to himself the last few days. You’ve seen more of him than anyone, so the chances are that the others will be okay, but they’ll have to stay in isolation until we know for sure, probably some time tomorrow. But you’re free to leave.’

There was a smell of fish and chips coming from the entrance hall as the evening meals were brought in. A mocking cheer went up as Kathy appeared and relayed the latest from Sundeep, and Bren said something about rats leaving the sinking ship. By way of compensation she promised to visit the off-licence and get them a case of red before she left.

On the way she stopped to buy an evening paper with the headline new shock for shaka, reporting that the model had been put in isolation as a precaution after being in touch with someone infected with a mystery disease. Kathy wondered how long it would be before the full story broke.

At the hospital she found Suzanne sitting at an observation window looking into Brock’s isolation ward. There wasn’t much of him to see and he seemed to be asleep as a nurse, dressed like a mortuary assistant with face mask and double gloves, made notes on his clipboard.

The two women hugged and brought each other up to date. Suzanne said that she’d been told it could take another week before they knew if Brock would pull through. ‘They’re contacting research teams in America and Switzerland that are working on new drugs which might help.’

She looked strained, her face tight with worry, and Kathy thought, with a little tug of regret, that there would have been no one to look like that for her if she’d caught it.

As if she’d read Kathy’s mind, Suzanne reached for her hand and said, ‘I’m just so relieved that you’re in the clear, Kathy. They say you saw him most during the past week.’

Kathy described what had happened and his refusal to let her contact Suzanne.

‘Stubborn as always.’ Suzanne sighed.

‘There’s nothing that we could have done. Someone slipped up when they identified the carrier-they should have warned us then. But even so, it would have been too late for Brock.’

She regretted the choice of words, and began to add, ‘I mean…’ but Suzanne squeezed her hand and said, ‘I know.’

They sat together in silence for a long while until Kathy, exhausted by the events of the day, began to nod off. Suzanne roused her gently and told her to go home.