Moskva

22 Mary’s Room

The rooms in the embassy became less grand the higher you climbed. That was the nature of mansions. Rooms to impress, rooms to live in, rooms for those who served those who lorded it below. If William Morris, the socialist scion of a famous banking family, could build his red-brick mansion to that pattern, why should a tsarist shipping magnate be more modest?

In Morris’s case, the windows in his servants’ quarters were above eye level to stop them looking down on what he and his pre-Raphaelite friends were doing in the gardens. Sleeping with each other’s wives, mostly. The only reason Tom knew this was a school trip to Red House at fifteen. He’d tried and failed in the gardens to do to a girl called Jane what Rossetti undoubtedly managed with William Morris’s wife, Jane’s namesake: get his hand up her skirt.

‘You’re looking thoughtful,’ Mary Batten said.

Tom’s gaze was impassive.

‘Do I want to know what you’re thinking?’

‘I doubt it,’ he said.

Mary Batten’s office was in the attic of the embassy. It was small and narrow-windowed, with little in the way of view. What interested Tom was not the things an estate agent would have to twist to make them sound palatable but the fact someone like Mary Batten, who could have an office next to the ambassador’s if she wanted, would choose to exile herself here.

‘It’s quiet,’ she said, before he could ask. Adding, ‘Sir Edward thinks you’re trouble. Is he right?’

‘Trouble and me are first cousins at best.’

‘Don’t be flippant, Fox.’

‘I’m not. You might want to read this…’ Tom handed her a sheet of paper.

It was not the report he was meant to be writing on the place of religion in Soviet culture, and whether it could be leveraged to the West’s advantage. To which the answer was yes, obviously. If Stalin could rip down a cathedral and replace it with a swimming pool, then, with the right leverage, the country could be persuaded to fill in the swimming pool and put up a cathedral. What he gave Mary now was a step-by-step walk-through of everything he remembered about the fuck-up that was the infiltration of the ruined house by the lake. With a postscript pointing out that Sir Edward had only Minister Vedenin’s say-so that Alex had been there at all.

Mary skimmed it, stopping twice.

‘You’re saying they attacked early?’

‘I’m saying they didn’t need to attack at all.’

She grunted to herself, reached for a mug of coffee that was already empty, then nodded her thanks when Tom refilled it from a Cona machine on a side table. Wincing at its bitterness, she reread the final three paragraphs. The ones about elite VV Spetsnaz troops trampling a crime scene as if they were teenage delinquents kicking over sandcastles. Looking up, she said, ‘I probably won’t make copies of this.’

When Tom snorted, she smiled.

‘Anything else?’ she asked. That was his cue to leave, but there was something.

‘Is there anywhere we can get decent coffee?’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘So you can report back to Sir Edward on my mental health?’

‘Report,’ she said. ‘You don’t need “back”.’

‘Have you ever met my wife?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I knew her at school,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a close friendship. You don’t strike me as Caro’s type.’

‘I’m not,’ Tom said.

‘If you’d wait outside…’

A couple of secretaries used the corridor as Mary made a call, put down the receiver, hesitated for a moment, then made another. She kept her voice too low for Tom to hear more than the occasional word.

‘Right,’ she said, appearing in her doorway.

Instead of leaving the embassy, she led the way down to a kitchen he hadn’t known existed. Inside the little room was an espresso machine of the type Tom recognized from Bar Italia in Soho. It looked like an engine from a fifties’ idea of a space rocket. ‘The diplomatic pouch has its perks,’ she said, seeing his surprise.

Less than a minute after they’d arrived, the tiny room cleared without Mary saying a word. It couldn’t be easy being black, a woman and, if rumour could be believed, single.

‘So,’ she said, ‘how are you?’

Tom looked puzzled.

‘So I can report back to Sir Edward.’

‘I found a cellar full of dead children. How do you think?’

‘Fair enough. What do you really want to talk about?’

‘Minister Vedenin. He was shocked. Properly shocked. The more I think about it the more certain I am that he expected to find Alex there. Instead he found no Alex and a dozen dead children. So perhaps someone took Alex before we arrived?’

‘Assuming she was there at all.’

‘Vedenin thought she was.’

‘You think Vedenin thought she was.’

‘I’m certain of it,’ Tom said. He was too. Writing out his account of the attack on the house had helped him put his thoughts in order. Vedenin had been confident, almost smug in his belief that Alex was about to be saved. Tom was pretty sure that was the word he’d used. Vedenin’s shock at finding a cellar full of dead children had deflated not only his confidence but his entire being.

The man had looked as if he’d been sucker-punched.

Perhaps he had been, politically at least. The question was by whom?

And Tom couldn’t shake his feeling that Vedenin’s son was involved somehow in Alex’s original disappearance. He’d been so certain of it that he’d wondered for a moment, back in the burned-out warehouse, whether the boy he’d found with his wrists wired behind his back could be Vladimir Vedenin.

Instead of whoever ‘Kotik’ had really been.

Mary snorted when Tom said this.

‘They’re untouchable. The Vladimirs of this world. As long as their fathers are alive. Even after, if they’re already on the ladder, they’re probably well placed enough to protect themselves. How much do you know about the Mafia?’

‘Beziki…?’

Mary Batten picked up the tiny cup of coffee she’d made and sniffed the espresso inside. ‘The real Mafia,’ she said.

‘I’ve watched The Godfather.’

‘That’s probably good enough. Now imagine a whole state given over to Vito Corleone’s children and grandchildren. Vedenin’s no worse than the rest. Special schools, special shops, a different class of travel. He’s young, spoilt, indulged. But so are rich kids everywhere. The difference is that here the law really can’t touch them. He ran down his father’s chauffeur; it was recorded as an accidental death. One girlfriend had a breakdown. Another needed an abortion…’ Mary hesitated, sniffed at her espresso again. ‘That last rumour might have been spread intentionally.’

‘In God’s name why?’

‘To make his interest in girls seem stronger. Vladimir did a year in London at the LSE, during which he kept his nose clean. No drugs. No gambling. He was at a party in Chelsea where a rent boy drowned, but there was no suggestion he knew the boy. Being photographed with Marlene Dietrich is about the most exotic thing he’s done. Oh, and hunting wild boar with a crossbow.’

‘No unhealthy interest in young girls? No interest in cults?’

‘That’s all we have on file. You really think Vladimir’s involved in Alex’s disappearance?’

Tom nodded.

‘But you have no proof?’

Beyond the way he’d touched Alex’s wrist at the party? The arch, almost contemptuous way he spoke to his father? The way his gaze slid across people without really seeing them? Something about the young man made Tom’s skin crawl.

And there was his mocking comment about the soldier who ran his father’s security. Dmitry left us. The sharpness of Minister Vedenin’s look.

Tom thought of the body found after the fire.

‘How do I get to question Vladimir?’

‘You don’t, unless Sir Edward agrees. Even then it would need to be arranged through his father. I doubt Vedenin would allow it and if he did, I imagine he’d want to sit in on the meeting himself. More likely, he’d question the boy himself without us being present. That’s if he allowed questions at all.’

‘The minister’s protective?’

‘He’s his father.’ Finally sipping her espresso, Mary closed her eyes. When she opened them again it was to fix Tom with a steely gaze.

‘The boy’s handsome, charming and able to work a room. He probably touched the wrists of a dozen women, mine included. Find me another one who’s disappeared and I’ll put in a formal request to talk to Vedenin about his son. But if you go after the boy, you need to understand you’re on your own.’