Russian Roulette

СЕРЕБРЯНЫЙ БОР – SILVER FOREST

I made my first escape attempt that same day.

I knew I couldn’t stay there. I wasn’t going to play any more of Sharkovsky’s sadistic games and I certainly wasn’t going to swallow his food… not when there was a real chance of my ending up on a metal slab. I had been left alone for the rest of the day. Perhaps they thought I needed time to recover from my ordeal and they were certainly right. The moment I got back to my room, I was sick. After that, I slept for about three hours. One of the twins visited me during the afternoon. He brought more clothes with him: overalls, boots, an apron, a suit. Each piece of clothing related to a different task I would be expected to perform. I left them on the floor. I wasn’t going to be part of this. I was out.

As soon as night had come, I left my room and set out to explore the grounds, now empty of gardeners although there were still guards patrolling close to the wall. It was clear to me that the wall completely surrounded the complex and there was no possibility of my climbing it. It was too high, and anyway, the razor wire would cut me to shreds. The simple truth was that the archway was the only way in and out – but at least that meant I could focus my attention on that one avenue. And looking at it, I wasn’t sure that it was as secure as it seemed. Three uniformed guards sat inside the wooden cabin with a glass window that allowed them to look out over the driveway. They had television monitors too. There was a red and white pole, which they had to raise, and they searched every vehicle that came in, one of them looking underneath with a flat mirror on wheels while another checked the driver’s ID. But when there were no cars, they did nothing. One of them read a newspaper. The others simply sat back looking bored. I could just slip out. It wouldn’t be difficult at all.

That was my plan. It was about seven o’clock and I assumed everyone was eating. I’d had no food all day but I was in no mood to eat. Still wearing the black tracksuit – the colour would help to conceal me in the darkness – I slipped outside. When I was sure there was nobody around, I sprinted to the edge of the cabin and then crept round, crouching underneath the window and keeping close to the wall. The road back to Moscow lay in front of me. I couldn’t believe it was this easy.

It wasn’t. I only found out about the infrared sensors when I passed through one of them, immediately setting off a deafening alarm. At once the whole area exploded into brilliant light as arc lamps sliced into me and I found myself trapped between the beams. There was no point in running – I would have been shot before I had taken ten steps – and I could only stand there looking foolish as the guards seized hold of me and dragged me back.

Punishment was immediate and hideous. I was given to the twins, who simply beat me up as if I were a punchbag in a gym. It wasn’t just the pain that left its mark on me. It was their complete indifference. I know they were being paid by Sharkovsky. They were following his orders. But what sort of man can do this to a child and live with himself the next day? They were careful not to break any more bones, but by the time they dragged me back to my room, I was barely conscious. They threw me onto my bed and left me. I had passed out before they closed the door.

I made my second escape attempt as soon as I was able to move again, the next day. It was certainly foolish but it seemed to me that it was the last thing they would expect and so they might briefly lower their guard. They thought I was broken, exhausted. Both of these things were true but I was also determined. This time, a delivery truck provided the opportunity. I’d eaten breakfast in my room – one of the twins had brought it on a tray – but after I’d finished I was sent up to the house to help unload about fifty crates of wine and champagne that Sharkovsky had ordered. It didn’t matter that I could feel my shirt sticking to my open wounds and that every movement caused me pain. While the driver waited, I carried the crates in through the back door and down the steps that led to the cold storage room. There was a wine cellar next to it, a cavernous space that housed hundreds of bottles, facing each other in purpose-built racks. It took me about two hours to carry them all down and when I’d finished I noticed that there were a lot of empty boxes in the back of the van. It seemed easy enough to hide myself behind a pile of them. Surely they wouldn’t bother searching the van on the way out?

The driver closed the door. Crouching behind the boxes, I heard him start the engine. We drove back down the drive and slowed down. I waited for the moment of truth, the acceleration that meant we had passed through the barrier and were outside the compound. It never came. The door was thrown open again and a voice called me.

“Get out!”

Again, it was one of the twins. I don’t know how he’d been so certain that I was there. Maybe I’d been caught by one of the CCTV cameras. Maybe he had been expecting it all along. I felt a weakness in my stomach as I stood up and showed myself. I wasn’t sure I could take another beating. But even as I climbed down, I wouldn’t let him see I was scared. I wasn’t going to give in.

“Come with me,” he instructed.

His face gave nothing away. I followed him back to the house but this time he took me round the back. There was a conservatory on the other side, although actually it was more like a pavilion, constructed mainly out of glass with white wooden panels, at least fifty metres long. It had a series of folding doors so that in the full heat of the summer the whole thing could be opened out, but this was late October and they were all closed. The twins opened a single door and led me inside. I found myself in front of an enormous blue-tiled swimming pool, almost Olympic-sized. The water was heated. I could see the steam rising over the surface. Sunloungers had been arranged around the edge and there was a well-stocked bar with a mirrored counter and leather stools.

Sharkovsky was doing lengths. We stood there, watching, while he went from one end to the other and back again, performing a steady, rhythmic butterfly stroke. I counted eighteen lengths and he never stopped once. Nor did he look my way. This was how he liked to keep himself fit, and as he continued I couldn’t help but notice the extraordinarily well-developed muscles in his back and shoulders. I also saw his tattoos. There was a Jewish Star of David in the centre of his back – but it wasn’t a religious symbol. On the contrary, it was on fire with the words DEATH TO ZIONISM engraved below. These were the flames that I had seen reaching up to his neck in his Moscow apartment. When he finally finished swimming and climbed out, I saw a huge eagle with outstretched wings, perched on a Nazi swastika tattooed across his chest. He had a slight paunch, but even this was solid rather than flabby. There was a plaster underneath one of his nipples and I realized that this was where I must have cut him with the knife. He was wearing tiny swimming trunks. His whole appearance was somehow very grotesque.

At last he noticed me. He picked up a towel and walked over. I was trembling. I couldn’t stop myself. I was expecting the worst.

“Yassen Gregorovich,” he said. “I understand that you tried to leave this place last night. You were punished for this but it didn’t prevent you from making a second attempt today. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” There was no point in denying it.

“It is understandable. It shows spirit. At the same time, it goes against the contract that you and I made between us in my study yesterday. You agreed to work for me. You agreed you were mine. Have you forgotten so soon?”

“No, sir.”

“Very well. Then hear this. You cannot escape from here. It is not possible. Should you try again, there will be no further discussion, no punishment. I will simply have you killed. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned to the twins. “Josef, take Yassen away. Give him another beating – this time use a cane – and then lock him up on his own without food. Let me know when he has recovered enough to start work. That’s all.”

But we didn’t leave. The twin wouldn’t let me. And Sharkovsky was waiting for me to say something.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

Sharkovsky smiled. “That’s alright, Yassen. It’s my pleasure.”

I was to spend the next three years with Vladimir Sharkovsky.

I could not risk another escape attempt – not unless I was prepared to commit suicide. It took me a week to recover from the beating I received that day. I will not say that it broke my spirit. But by the end of it I knew that when I had picked up that gun and placed it in my mouth, I had signed a deal with the devil. I was not just his servant. I was his possession. You might even say I was his slave.

The place where I found myself, the huge white house, was his dacha – his second home outside Moscow. It was in Serebryany Bor – Silver Forest – not that many miles from the centre. This was an area well suited to wealthy families. The air was cleaner in the forest. It was quieter and more private. There were lakes and wooded walkways outside the complex where you could exercise the dogs or go hunting and fishing… not that these activities were available to me because, of course, I was never once allowed outside. I was restricted to the same few faces, the same menial tasks. My life was to have no rewards and no prospect of advancement or release. It was a terrible thing to do to anyone – even worse when you consider that I was so young.

And yet slowly, inevitably perhaps, I accepted my destiny. The injury to my face healed and fortunately it left no mark. I began to get used to my new life.

I worked all the time at the dacha… fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. I never had a holiday and, as Sharkovsky had promised, I didn’t receive one kopeck. The fact that I was being allowed to live was payment enough. Christmas, Easter, Victory Day, Spring and Labour Day, my birthdays – all these simply disappeared into each other.

Sharkovsky had told me I would be his food taster but he had also made it clear to me that this was only a part of my work. He was true to his word. I chopped and carried firewood. I cleaned bathrooms and toilets. I helped in the laundry and the kitchen. I washed dishes. I painted walls. I looked after the dog, picking up after it when it fouled. I lifted suitcases. I unblocked drains. I washed cars. I polished shoes. But I never complained. I understood that there was no point in complaining. The work never stopped.

Sharkovsky lived in the big house with his wife, Maya, and his two children, Ivan and Svetlana. Maya had very little to do with me. She spent most of her time reading magazines and paperbacks – she liked romances – or shopping in Moscow. She had once been a model and she was still attractive, but life with Sharkovsky was beginning to take its toll and I would sometimes catch her looking anxiously in the mirror, tracking a finger along a wrinkle or a wisp of grey hair. I wondered if she knew about the flat in Gorky Park and the actress who lived there. In a way, she was as much a prisoner as I was and maybe that was why she avoided me. I reminded her of herself.

The family were seldom together. Sharkovsky had business interests all over the world. As well as the helicopter, he kept a private jet at Moscow airport. It was on permanent standby, ready to take him to London, New York, Hong Kong or wherever. I once glimpsed him on television, standing next to the President of the United States. He took his holidays in the Bahamas or the South of France, where he kept a hundred and fifty metre yacht with twenty-one guest cabins, two swimming pools and its own submarine. His son, Ivan, was at Harrow School, in London. If there was one thing that all wealthy Russians wanted, it was an English public school education for their children. Svetlana was only seven when I arrived but she was kept busy too. There were always private tutors coming to the house to teach dance, piano, horse riding, tennis (they had their own tennis court), foreign languages, poetry… When they were small, each child had had two nannies; one for the day, one for the night. Now they had two full-time housekeepers… and me.

Sixteen members of staff lived full-time on the estate. They all slept in wooden cabins, similar to mine, apart from Josef and Karl, who lived in the big house. There were the two housekeepers – bossy women who were always in a hurry, permanently scowling. One of them was called Nina and she had it in for me from the start. She used to carry a wooden spoon in her apron and whenever she got the chance she would clout me over the head with it. She didn’t seem to have noticed that we were both servants, on the same level, but I didn’t dare complain. I have a feeling that she hated working for Sharkovsky as much as I did. The only trouble was, she’d decided to take it out on me.

Then there was Pavel, about fifty years old, short, twitchy, always dressed in whites. He was very important to me because he was the chef and it was his cooking that I would be tasting. I’ll say this for him, he was good at his job. All the food he prepared was delicious and I was given things I hadn’t even known existed. Until I came to the dacha, I had never eaten salmon, pheasant, veal, asparagus, French cheese… or even such a thing as a chocolate éclair. Pavel only used the very best and the freshest ingredients, which were flown in from all over the world. I remember a cake he made for Maya’s birthday. It was shaped like a Russian cathedral, complete with gold-leaf icing on the domes. Heaven knows how much he was given to spend.

I never got to know Pavel very well, even though he slept in the cabin next to me. He was hard of hearing so he didn’t talk much. He was unmarried. He had no children. All he cared about was his work.

The staff included a personal trainer and two chauffeurs. Sharkovsky had a huge fleet of cars and he was always buying more. Six armed guards patrolled the grounds and took turns manning the gatehouse. There was a general maintenance man, who was always smoking, always coughing. He looked after the tennis court and the heated swimming pool in the conservatory. I will not waste time describing these people… or the gardeners, who turned up every morning and worked ten hours a day. They are not really part of my story. They were simply there.

But I must mention the helicopter pilot, a very quiet man in his forties, with silver hair cut short in a military style. His name was Arkady Zelin and he had once flown with the VVS – the Soviet Air Force. He neither drank nor smoked. Sharkovsky would never have put his life in the hands of a man who was not utterly dependable. He was always on standby in case his master needed to get somewhere in a hurry, so he might spend weeks at the dacha between flights, and once the helicopter had been tied down there was little for him to do. Just like Maya, he read books. He also kept himself fit, doing press-ups and running around the grounds. Sharkovsky had a gymnasium as well as the pool but Zelin wasn’t allowed to use either of them.

Zelin was one of the few people who bothered to introduce himself to me and I was quick to let him know about my old love of helicopters. He piloted a two-bladed Bell 206 JetRanger with seating for four passengers – Sharkovsky had ordered it from Canada – and although I wasn’t allowed near it, I often found myself gazing at it across the lawn. Escape was too dangerous to consider, but even so, in my wilder moments, it sometimes occurred to me that the helicopter might be my only way out. I couldn’t hide in it. I’d have been spotted at once unless I crawled into the luggage compartment and that was always kept locked. But maybe, one day, I would be able to persuade Zelin to take me with him – if he was flying alone. It was a foolish thought but I had to keep some sort of hope alive in my head or I’d go mad. And so I stayed close to him. The two of us would play Durak together, the same game that I had played with Dima, Roman and Grigory. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to them. But as time went on, I thought about them less and less.

One other member of the staff was important to me. His name was Nigel Brown and he was English, a thin, elderly man with straggly ginger hair and a pinched face. He had once been the headmaster of a prep school in Norfolk and still dressed as if he worked there, with corduroy trousers and, every day, the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Zelin told me there had been some sort of scandal at the school and he had been forced to take early retirement. It was certainly true that Mr Brown never talked about his time there. Sharkovsky had hired him as a private tutor, to help Ivan and Svetlana pass their exams. Other tutors came and went but he lived at the dacha permanently.

All the staff met every evening. Just as I had thought, the brick building which I had seen beside the cabins was a recreation room with a kitchen and dining area, where we ate our meals. There were a few battered sofas and chairs, a snooker table, a television, a coffee machine and a public telephone – although all calls were monitored and I wasn’t allowed to use it at all. After dinner, the guards who weren’t on duty, the chauffeurs and sometimes the chef would sit and smoke. Mr Brown had nothing to say to any of them but perhaps because I was so young, he took an interest in me and decided for no good reason to teach me English. It soon became a personal project and he took delight in my progress. It turned out that I had a natural aptitude for languages and after a while he began to teach me French and German too. Most of the languages I speak today, I owe to him.

While he taught me, he drank. Maybe this was what had led to his downfall in Norfolk, but at the start of each lesson he would open a bottle of vodka and by the end of it I could hardly work out what he was saying, no matter what the language. By midnight he was usually unconscious and there were many occasions when I had to carry him back to his room. There was, however, one aspect of his drinking habit that was useful to me. He was not a cautious man and under the influence of alcohol he didn’t care what he said.

It was Nigel Brown who told me what little I knew about Sharkovsky.

“How did he make all his money?” I once asked. It was a warm evening about six months after I had arrived. There was no breeze and the mosquitoes were whining beneath the electric lights.

“Ah, well, that’s all politics,” he replied. We had been talking in English but now he slipped back into Russian, which he spoke fluently. “The end of Communism in your country created a sort of vacuum. A few men stepped in and he was one of them. They’ve sucked all the money out of your country, every last ruble. Some of them have made billions! Mr Sharkovsky invested in companies. Scrap metal, chemicals, cars… He bought and he sold and the money flowed in.”

“But why does he need so much protection?”

“Because he’s an evil bastard.” He smiled as if was surprised by what he had just said but decided to continue anyway. “Mr Sharkovsky is connected with the police. He’s connected with the politicians. He’s connected with the mafia. He’s a very dangerous man. God knows how many people he’s killed to get to where he is. But the trouble is, you can’t go on like that without making enemies. He really is a shark.” He repeated the last word in English. “Do you know the word ‘shark’, Yassen? It’s a big fish. A dangerous fish. It will gobble you up. Now, let’s get back to these irregular verbs, past tense. I buy, you bought. I see, you saw. I speak, you spoke…”

Sharkovsky must have had plenty of enemies. We lived our life under siege at the dacha, and as I had discovered, painfully, there was no way in or out. There were X-ray machines and metal detectors at the main gates – just like at a modern airport – and nobody was allowed in or out without being searched. The gardeners arrived empty-handed and were expected to leave their tools behind when they finished work. The tutors, the drivers, the housekeepers… each person’s background had been checked except for mine, but then my background didn’t matter. Josef and Karl always stayed close to their boss. The CCTV cameras were on at all times. Everyone watched everyone else. Other businessmen in Russia were careful but none of them went to these extremes. Sharkovsky was paranoid but, as I had seen for myself in that basement refrigerator, he had good reason to be.

He was extremely careful about what he ate and drank. For example, he only accepted mineral water from bottles that he had opened himself after checking that the seal had not been broken. The bottles always had to be glass. His enemies might be able to contaminate a plastic one using a hypodermic syringe. He sometimes ate food straight from the packet or the tin, pronging it into his mouth with no sign of pleasure, but if it arrived on a plate, I would have to taste it first.

Most times, I would report to the kitchen before the meals were sent out and I would eat straight out of the pans, with Josef or Karl watching over me and Pavel standing nervously to one side. It’s hard to describe how I felt about this. On one level, I have to admit that there was a part of me that enjoyed it. As I have said, the food was superb. But at the same time, it was still an unpleasant experience. First of all, one mouthful was all I was allowed and I was always aware that one mouthful might be enough to kill me. In a way, every tasting session was the same as the Russian roulette I had been forced to play on my first night. I learned to attune my senses to look out for the acrid taste of poison or simply the suspicion that something might not be right. The trouble was, by the time I detected it, it might well have killed me.

After a while, I put the whole thing out of my mind. I simply did what I was told, robotically, without complaining. You might say that I had a very strange relationship with death. The two of us were constantly together, side by side. And yet we ignored each other. In this way, we were able to get by.

What I most dreaded were the formal dinners that I was forced to attend in the huge dining room with its brilliant chandeliers, gold and white curtains, antique French table and chairs, and countless flickering candles. Sharkovsky often invited business associates and friends… people he knew well. To begin with, I was worried that Misha Dementyev, the professor from Moscow State University, might show up. He knew Sharkovsky. Indeed he – along with my own stupidity – was the reason I was here. What would happen if he recognized me? Would it make my situation worse? But he never did appear and it occurred to me that he was probably a minor employee in Sharkovsky’s empire and that it was very unlikely that he would receive an invitation. Nearly all the guests arrived in expensive cars. Some even came in their own helicopters. They were as rich and as vicious as Sharkovsky himself.

I had been given a grey suit with a white shirt and a black tie for these events – the same uniform as his bodyguards – and I would stand behind him as I had been instructed, looking down at the floor with my hands held behind my back. I was not allowed to speak. As each course was served, I would step forward and, using my own cutlery, would take a sample directly from his plate, eat it, nod and step back again. There was no doubt that Sharkovsky was afraid for his life but at the same time he was enjoying himself. He loved playing the Roman emperor, showing me off to his other guests, deliberately humiliating me in front of them.

But if the father was bad, his son was much, much worse. Ivan Sharkovsky first became aware of me at one of those dinners and although I wasn’t supposed to look at the guests, I noticed him examining me out of the corner of my eye. Ivan, a year older than me, resembled his father in many ways. He had the same dark qualities but they had been distributed differently – in his curly black hair, his heavy jowls, his down-turned mouth. He seemed to be constantly brooding about something. His father was solid and muscular. He was fat with puffy cheeks, thick lips and eyelids that were slightly too large for his eyes. Sitting hunched over the table, spooning food into his mouth, he had something brutish about him.

“Papa?” he asked. “Where did you get him from?”

“Who?” Sharkovsky was at the head of the table with Maya sitting next to him. She was wearing a huge diamond necklace that sparkled in the light. Whenever there were guests, he insisted that she smothered herself in jewellery.

“The food taster!”

“From Moscow.” Sharkovsky dismissed the question as if he had simply picked me up in a shop.

“Can he taste my food?”

Shakovsky leant forward and jabbed a fork in the direction of his son. He had been drinking heavily – champagne and vodka – and although he wasn’t drunk, there was a looseness about the way he spoke. “You don’t need a food taster. You’re not important. Nobody would want to kill you.”

The other guests all took this as a joke and laughed uproariously, but Ivan scowled and I knew that I would be hearing from him soon.

And the very next day, he came outside and found me. It was a cold afternoon. I was washing one of his father’s cars, spraying it with a hose. As soon as I saw him coming, I stopped my work and looked down. This was what I had been taught. We had to treat the whole family as if they were royalty. Part of me hoped he would simply walk on, but I could see it wasn’t going to happen. I knew straight away that I was in trouble.

“What is your name?” he asked, although of course he knew.

“Yassen Gregorovich,” I answered. That was the name I always used now.

“I’m Ivan.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

He looked at me questioningly and I could feel the sense of menace hanging in the air. “But you don’t call me that, do you?”

“No… sir.” It made me sick having to say the words but I knew that was what he wanted.

He glanced at the car. “How long has it taken you to clean that? he asked.

“An hour,” I said. It was true. The car was the Bentley and it had been filthy. When I had finished with it, it would have to look as if it had just come out of the showroom.

“Let me help you.”

He gestured for the hose, which was still spouting water onto the ground, and, dreading what was to come, I handed it to him. First he pointed it at the car. He placed his thumb over the end so that the water rushed out in a jet. It poured over the windscreen and down over the doors. Then he turned it on me… my head, my chest, my arms, my legs. I could only stand there uselessly as he soaked me. Had this happened in my village, I would have knocked him to the ground. Right then I had to use all my self-restraint to stop myself punching him in the face. But that was exactly what he was showing me. He had complete power over me. He could do anything to me that he wanted.

When he had finished, he smirked and handed the hose back to me. Finally, he noticed the bucket of muddy water beside the car. He kicked out, sending the contents spraying over the bodywork.

“Bad luck, Yassen,” he said. “You’re going to have to start again.”

I stood there, dripping wet, as he turned and walked away.

After that, he tormented me all the time. His father must have known what was happening – Ivan would have never acted in this way without his authority – but he allowed it to carry on. And so I would get an order, usually transmitted by Josef, Karl or one of the housekeepers. It didn’t matter if it was morning or the middle of the night. I would go up to the big house and there he would be with football boots that needed cleaning, suitcases that needed carrying or even crumpled clothes that needed ironing. He liked me to see his room, spacious and comfortable, filled with so many nice things, because he knew I lived in a small wooden cabin with nothing. And despite what Sharkovsky had said, he sometimes got me to taste his food for him, watching with delight as I leant over his plate. Often, he would play tricks with me. I would discover that he had deliberately filled the food with salt or chilli powder so that it would make me sick. I used to long for the day he would return to his school in England and I would finally be left alone.

Three years…

I grew taller and stronger. I learned to speak different languages. But otherwise I might as well have been dead. I saw nothing of the world except what was shown on the television news. The horror of my situation was not the drudgery of my work and the daily humiliations I received. It was in the dawning realization that I might be here for the rest of my life, that even as an old man I might be cleaning toilets and corridors and, worse still, that I might be grateful. Already, I could feel part of myself accepting what I had turned into. I no longer thought about escaping. I didn’t even think about what might exist on the other side of the wall. Once, I found myself looking in the mirror because there was a stain on my shirt. There was to be a dinner that night and I was genuinely embarrassed, afraid I would let my master down. At that moment I was disgusted with myself. I saw, quite clearly, what I was becoming… perhaps what I had already become.

I never thought of Estrov. It was as if my parents had not existed. Even my time in Moscow seemed far behind me. It was obvious that Dima would never find me and even if he did I would be out of his reach. All I could think about was the work I would do the next day. This was Sharkovsky’s revenge. He had allowed me to keep my life but he had taken away my humanity.

And so it might have continued.

But things changed quite suddenly in the early summer of my third year of captivity. Ivan had just finished his last year at Harrow and was due back any time. Svetlana was staying with friends near the Black Sea. Sharkovsky was having another dinner party and I had been told to report to the dining room to help with the preparations.

For some reason, I arrived early. As I walked up to the house, a car passed me and stopped at the front door. A man got out, rang the bell and hurried inside. I had seen him before. His name was Brodsky and he was one of Sharkovsky’s business associates from Moscow. The two of them owned several companies together and they were connected in other ways it was probably best not to know. I went into the kitchen and a few moments later, the telephone rang. Mr Brodsky wanted tea. Pavel was busy preparing the dinner – a broiled Atlantic salmon, which he was decorating with red and black caviar. The housekeepers were laying the table. I was there and in my suit so I made the tea and carried it up.

I crossed the hallway, which was now so familiar to me that I could have made my way blindfolded. The sweeping staircase, the marble pillars, the huge bowl of flowers and the chandelier no longer meant anything to me. I had seen them too often. The door to the study was half open as I approached and normally I would have knocked and entered, set the tray down on a table and left as quickly as I could. But this time, just as I drew close, I heard a single word that stopped me in my tracks and rooted me to the floor.

“They’re asking questions about it again. Estrov. We’re going to have to do something before the situation gets out of hand…”

Estrov.

My village.

It had been Brodsky who had spoken. Estrov. What could he possibly know about Estrov? Hardly daring to breathe, I waited for Sharkovsky to reply.

“You can deal with it, Mikhail.”

“It’s not as easy as that, Vladimir. These are Western journalists, working in London. If they connect you with what happened…”

“Why should they?”

“They’re not stupid. They’ve already discovered you were a shareholder.”

“So what?” Sharkovsky didn’t sound concerned. “There were lots of shareholders. What exactly am I supposed to have done?”

“You wanted them to raise productivity. You wanted more profit. You ordered them to change the safety procedures.”

“Are you accusing me, Mikhail?”

“No. Of course not. I’m your closest advisor and your friend and why should I care if a few peasants got killed? But these people smell a story. And it would be seriously damaging to us if the name of Estrov were to be mentioned in the British press or anywhere else.”

“It was all taken care of at the time,” Sharkovsky replied. “There was no evidence left. Our friends in the ministry made sure of that. It never happened! Let these stupid journalists sniff around and ask questions. They won’t find anything. And if I do come to believe that they are dangerous to me or to my business, then I’ll deal with them. Even in London there are car accidents. Now stop worrying and have a drink.”

“I ordered tea.”

“It should be here. I’ll call down.”

It was a miracle I hadn’t been caught listening outside. If Karl or Josef had come down the stairs and seen me, I would have been beaten. But I couldn’t go in quite yet. I had to wait for the echoes of the conversation to die away. I counted to ten, then knocked on the door and entered. I kept my face blank. It was vital that they should not know that I had heard them talking. But as I crossed the carpet to where the visitor was sitting, the cup and the saucer rattled on the silver tray and I’m sure there can’t have been any colour in my face.

Sharkovsky barely glanced at me. “What took you so long, Yassen?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “I had to wait for the kettle to boil.”

“Very well. Get out.”

I bowed and left as quickly as I could.

I was shaking by the time I returned to the hall. It was as if all the pain and misery I had suffered in the last three years had been bundled together and then slammed into me, delivering one final, knock-out blow. It wasn’t enough that Vladimir Sharkovsky had been endlessly cruel to me. It wasn’t enough that he had reduced me to the role of his mindless slave. He was also directly implicated in the deaths of my mother and father, of Leo and of everyone else in the village.

Was it really such a surprise? When I had first heard his name, it had been at the university in Moscow. He had been talking to Misha Dementyev on the telephone and Dementyev had been implicated in what had happened. Nigel Brown had warned me too. He had told me that Sharkovsky invested in chemicals. I should have made the connection. And yet how could I have? It was almost beyond belief.

That night, as I stood at the table watching him tear apart the salmon that I had just tasted in front of all the other guests, I swore that I would kill him. It was surely the reason why fate had brought me here and it no longer mattered if I lived or died.

I would kill him. I swore it to myself.

I would kill him.

I would kill.