The Moscow Sleepers

15

Matilda Burnside stood at one corner of the Grand Place, ignoring the appraising glances of passing men as she waited for her husband Peter, who as usual was several minutes late. She was a tall woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair and the sort of strong features that are often called handsome but in her case verged on the beautiful.

She had been in Brussels for two years, working in the Migration department of the European Commission, and had been married for one. Her husband Peter was in the Foreign Office – or at least that’s what he told people – and was based in the British Embassy, as Counsellor Economic, a job title that gave away nothing at all about his true responsibilities.

Matilda was a Home Counties girl who had discovered a flair for languages at school, and had studied French and Spanish at university, where despite an active social life and a passion for the cinema she had managed a stunning First Class Honours degree and promptly been snapped up by a multinational bank. The pay had been high, the prospects mouthwateringly attractive, but life in the City of London had proved repetitive and dull, and after eighteen months she had jumped at an offer of a position with the European Commission working on the problem of refugees and migrants arriving in unprecedented numbers from North Africa and the Middle East.

The money wasn’t bad, though it didn’t compare with the bank’s offer when it tried to keep her, and the bureaucracy was stifling, but at least her days were spent trying to help people who needed help, rather than padding the already comfortable coffers of the wealthy. And lest she sounded too pious about the merits of her new posting, it had also provided her with a husband – a tall, intelligent and, yes, slightly dashing kind of husband – though one who was always late, she thought with a flicker of annoyance. It was raining slightly and the lights were just coming on in the square. From where she stood just under the arcade in front of the Palais du Roi she could see their reflection sparkling in the wet cobbles. It was beautiful, which certainly could not be said of much of modern Brussels, particularly not of the buildings in the area where she worked.

Her colleagues liked to joke that the B in Brussels stood for ‘boring’. But if anything, Matilda Burnside thought it should be for bouffe – as in ‘nosh’ or ‘grub’. Never had she eaten so well or so much; her husband, Peter, said the food here was better than in France. There were restaurants everywhere and when they met after work in the Grand Place, as they did at least once a week, without walking more than a few steps they could take their pick from haute cuisine in a restaurant with Michelin rosettes to pizza in a bar.

But tonight she fancied nothing more complicated than moules frites eaten at a long wooden table in the cellar bistro of one of the old buildings in the square.

Her mind these days was flooded by images of the refugee camps in Syria and Libya, and increasingly in Italy as well – though at least on the European mainland the refugees were fed. What haunted her most were the children, shrunk like African famine victims, trapped in the Middle East and North Africa, beyond reach of anything she could do, vulnerable to the worst of humanity – the traffickers, the rapists, the killers. And hungry, hungry all the time. Increasingly, Matilda found herself feeling quite ill at the prospect of another splendid meal.

She’d shared this feeling with Dieter Nimitz, her colleague at work; it was unusual for her to share her feelings with him – it was almost always the other way round, especially when he was battling with their department head, the dour Dutchman Van der Vaart. Sometimes, despite being twenty years younger, she felt like an older sister to him. He often seemed stressed, as he had done this week – so much so that today she finally asked him what was wrong. He had started to say it was nothing, then he’d changed his mind and said, ‘It’s Irma,’ in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.

Matilda knew very little about his wife. Dieter might tell her every detail of Van der Vaart’s latest stupidities, and moan at length when Accounts questioned his expenses, but he very rarely talked about his home life. Matilda knew that though married, he was childless, and that he went back home most weekends and seemed very proud of his wife, who was the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But she knew little else, so what he had then said about her was unprecedented – and also rather strange. His wife’s school had seemingly lost one of its pupils – or at the very least allowed one of them to stay behind after a sponsored visit to America.

That in itself seemed mildly peculiar, but Dieter’s account of his wife’s mysterious visitor last weekend was also odd. At first, Matilda thought silently that his wife was simply having an affair – not too unlikely given that she was on her own all week. But the photos she’d seen on Dieter’s desk of Frau Nimitz did not suggest a woman given to philandering; nor, to be blunt, a woman likely to receive approaches. What was odd was that Dieter didn’t seem at all concerned about his wife’s possible infidelity but rather, for reasons she couldn’t understand, he was worried that the visitor had something to do with the missing student.

She’d decided to tell Peter about it. He would know if she was making a mountain out of a molehill; he was always very good at that. And there he was, she thought, seeing the tall figure walking briskly across the square, holding a large, striped golf umbrella. As he tipped it back slightly and saw her, he grinned broadly and she forgot her irritation at his lateness.

‘Hello hello,’ he said and kissed her on the cheek. ‘What a horrible evening. Let’s go somewhere warm. Do you know, I really fancy a nice plate of moules frites.’

‘You must be a mind-reader! That’s just what I want.’

‘Come on then,’ he said, grabbing her hand.

She laughed, and they set off at a trot, sending a pigeon that was pecking at something beside their feet off with a wild beating of wings.

When they were sitting at a table in the cosy restaurant with bowls of steaming moules and a large plate of frites in front of them, he asked, ‘How’s our German friend?’ Peter had never met Dieter Nimitz, but he liked to hear about his contretemps with Van der Vaart, and also delighted in Dieter’s many sayings, expressed in excellent but idiosyncratic English, which were often unwittingly funny.

‘He has what I believe are called domestic difficulties.’

‘Oh no,’ said Peter in mock-alarm. ‘You’d better not be the shoulder he wants to cry on.’

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s not like that. He rarely mentions his wife, so this was quite unusual. She’s very successful – the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But he thinks she’s been behaving strangely.’

‘How so?’

She explained about the letter Dieter had found. Peter said, ‘There could be all sorts of explanations, you know. All of them perfectly innocent.’

‘I know. But that wasn’t all. She had a meeting with someone in the house when Dieter had gone out. But he came back early and she tried to conceal the traces. He’s pretty sure it was a man he saw driving away when he came back to the house.’

‘Ah, so maybe she’s the one leaning on an extra-marital shoulder?’

‘I don’t think so; at any rate, it isn’t what Dieter is worried about. He seemed to think it might have some connection with her work – and with the letter he found.’

‘Why?’

‘He couldn’t say why exactly. He made some reference to the Russians.’ She noticed she had all of Peter’s attention now. ‘But when I pressed him, he just mumbled something about a cigarette.’

‘And that’s all he said?’

‘Yes. I suggested he try and find out more about this missing student from the school. It didn’t sound right to me.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Peter. Though his voice retained its lightness there was a professional crispness to it as well. ‘Now tell me some more about Dieter’s wife.’