Trouble on the Heath: A Comedy of Russian Gangsters, Town Planners and a Dog Called Nigel

Chapter Seventeen

“They what?” said Malcolm.

“They’ve blown up our house,” repeated Angela.

“Our house?” said Malcolm.

“I keep telling you. Yes!”

“Who? The Council?”

“No. They don’t know who. Somebody.” Angela suddenly felt weary. Thank God they’d decided to stay with Glenys in Leicester. Malcolm had been talking about going back, because he was fed up with commuting from Leicester. It was an hour and a half’s train ride.

“That’s three hours a day!” he’d complained.

But they’d stayed on another week. Lucky them.

“Apparently a car drove down the street about 6.00 pm last night, shooting at passersby.” Angela was reading from the newspaper. “Paul Edgar was wounded in the leg. Mr Clarkson received a chest wound, and several people walking their dogs received multiple injuries. Lady Chesney was killed outright, and so was Mr Kendrick. The car drove off at high speed, and then our house exploded.”

“What?! Over a planning application?!”

Malcolm sank into a chair, which had a load of dirty dishes and mugs on it. He didn’t notice.

Then he muttered, “The bastards!” A blinding rage suddenly overwhelmed him.

Three days later, Malcolm found himself on a plane heading for St Petersburg.

Malcolm was not one for heroics, and normally he would have avoided any confrontation, but this was different. His wife and son were being threatened. He had to confront the man or men who were threatening them.

Nobody knew what he was up to. He didn’t even know himself at first. He had cooked up an excuse about a manuscript he needed to look at in Edinburgh, and secretly booked the plane. He already had Grigori Koslov’s address from Anton. All he had to do was find the man and… and then what? Reason with him? Buy him a pair of slippers? Give him a good talking to? No.

As he sat sipping a gin and tonic, a calm came over him. He suddenly understood why he was on this plane, why he was heading for St Petersburg. He knew what his errand was.

He was going to kill Grigori Koslov.

When he first saw the house where Grigori lived, he nearly turned around and went straight back home again.

“Well, I guess I knew the guy must have enemies, but there must be some way to get in.”

The house itself would have been very attractive had it not resembled a concentration camp. It was a light blue colour and built mainly from wood, with pretty pillars at the front. Around it, however, was a five-metrehigh electrified fence, complete with guards who were, at that very moment, staring at him. They didn’t look as if they were going to invite him in for a cup of tea.

“Think!” Malcolm told himself. “What examples from history do we have? Siege of Syracuse 214 BC? The Romans got in during some feast when the citizens were all drunk. But how will I be able to tell when Koslov is drunk? No. I know! Siege of Alexandria 1366!

Someone managed to crawl into the city through the sewage pipes, and then opened the gates at night.”

But a quick tour of the drains around the house soon convinced him that that was not a practical solution. The guards were getting more and more interested in him as he circled the house. Malcolm was forced to walk away from the scene of his intended crime.

A little further down the road was a small line of shops with a run-down café. He sat himself at a table by the window, from where he could just see the main gate, if he leant forward. He ordered a black tea and sat there trying to think.

There’s something obvious I’m missing, he thought. After a short while the gate opened and a car slid out and disappeared down the road.

“Maybe that’s it?” he muttered. “I should let him come to me.” But how could he do that? Write Koslov a letter? Say “Come and meet me or…” Or what? “Or I’ll blow your house up like you did mine? Or I’ll come and shoot everyone in your street?” That would hardly encourage Grigori Koslov to agree to a meeting. Even if he did meet him, he’d have tough guys hanging around, ready to pounce.

As Malcolm was thinking these things a van pulled up in front of the café, blocking his view of the gate. The side of the van bore a crude picture of a bunch of flowers and writing in Russian which read ‘Courtesy Flowers, Kolpino’.

The driver came into the café and nodded at the samovar of tea. “One,” he muttered.

The owner of the café poured some liquid into a cup and pushed it towards the driver along with a jug of hot water. The driver poured a tiny amount of water into the tea and leaned forward.

“I’m looking for the Koslov place,” he said, as if he were proposing a drugs deal.

The proprietor of the café grunted and stuck his thumb in the direction of the blue mansion surrounded by the fence.

“Uh!” replied the driver. “Somebody’s birthday,” he added.

Malcolm, who had been listening to this, nearly jumped up out of his seat and ran to hug the van driver. “Of course! That’s it!” he almost shouted out, but managed to restrain himself. “The Siege of Troy! The Trojan Horse!” Why hadn’t he thought of it? “That’s how I get in.”

He put his cup down and sauntered over to the counter.

“Hi!” he said to the van driver. His Russian wasn’t bad, but they would know he was foreign. “Could you give me a lift to Pushkin?”

The driver shook his head. “I only go as far as Kolpino,” he said.

“That’s half way,” said Malcolm generously. “It’ll do.”

“And we’re not allowed to give lifts,” added the driver.

“It would save me the train fare,” said Malcolm, taking out his wallet. “I’d be really grateful.” He held out a few notes.

The van driver stared at them. Malcolm added a few more, and the van driver took them, paid for the tea with one of them and strode out without saying another word.

Malcolm grabbed his haversack and followed the van driver out.

“You’ll have to get in the back,” said the van driver. “I can’t let anyone see you.”

“Good idea!” said Malcolm. And he really thought it was.

As the van driver closed the doors on him, Malcolm sneezed a couple of times. The pollen count in the back of the van was so high that, if he’d been a bee, Malcolm would have thought he’d arrived in heaven. But he wasn’t a bee. He suffered from chronic hayfever, and, as the van bounced over the pot-holes in the road, Malcolm started sneezing again.

Between sneezes, he felt the van stop and heard the driver explaining his mission to the guard at the main gate. Malcolm was once again overcome with sneezes, and the next thing he knew the van had stopped again, and the driver had opened the doors.

“Shh!” he hissed. “People will hear you!”

“I can’t help it!” Malcolm tried to say between sneezes.

“Then you can get out here!” snapped the van driver, and he pulled Malcolm out of the back of the van. Malcolm stood there in a haze of pollen, still sneezing, as the van drove off round the corner of the house. Malcolm found he had been dropped outside a side door, out of sight of the main gate and the front door.

There was an open window beside the side door. There was also an American pit bull glaring at him from under a lean-to shed across the lawn.

Malcolm sneezed again. The pit bull hesitated for a moment, as if it didn’t recognise such a command. Malcolm took his chance and ran. The pit bull ran. Curiously it didn’t bark, but it ran extremely fast. However, Malcolm was at the window in half a dozen steps and, before the dog could sink its teeth into the flesh and bone of his leg, he had dived head-first through the window. He landed with a crash amongst a pile of empty jam jars.

Malcolm lay perfectly still for some minutes. The pit bull had now started barking, as it jumped up at the window, and Malcolm could hear running feet outside. It was one of the guards.

“You stupid mutt!” he heard the guard say. “You’re always trying to get that pork! You can’t have it!” Malcolm saw the guard’s face at the window.

He lay quite still. The guard glanced in, and then slammed the window shut. “Just forget it, Fido!” he heard the guard say. “You aren’t eating them joints!” Then he moved off, pulling the dog with him.

Malcolm looked around. He had, indeed, landed in some sort of pantry. There were hams and dried fish hanging from hooks. The shelves were filled with baskets of fruit ready for jam-making.

Malcolm inched himself off the empty jam jars, trying to make as little noise as possible. There was a knot hole in the pantry door, through which Malcolm peered into a large old-fashioned kitchen. There seemed to be no one around, although a large pan of fruit and sugar was bubbling on the stove. So Malcolm opened the door of the pantry and slipped quickly across the kitchen. He could feel his heart pounding, as he peered through the open kitchen door into a sort of hallway.

He could hear raised voices coming from one of the rooms. Somebody was having an argument, and suddenly the stupidity of what he was doing hit him.

A strong urge to run back to the pantry and hide seized him. What did he think he was doing? He didn’t even have a plan! But running back to the pantry wouldn’t solve anything.

There was what looked like a cupboard under the stairs. That would give him a few moments to think. He dashed across to it and squeezed in, closing the door quietly after him. The voices were louder and sounded angrier from here. They seemed to be coming from the room across the hall.

He tried to calm himself down. OK. Think. Think calmly.

He was in the middle of some Russian gangster’s house, whom he’d vowed to kill. How? He’d strangle him with his bare hands. How do you strangle someone? Wasn’t there some special trick to it? He’d never even thought about strangling anyone, apart from one or two of the historians who got their work published in History Now!

Calm down! Think. Maybe forget about the killing bit. Maybe he’d just come here to reason with the man, but how could you reason with someone who’d shot most of your neighbours and blown up your house, just because you’d objected to their planning application?

Then the silliness of it all hit him. The man he had to deal with was clearly insane.

“I can deal with that!” said Malcolm to himself, and suddenly he became master of the situation.

He opened the cupboard door and strode into the room where the voices were coming from.

“Good morning,” Malcolm said, in Russian.

A man and a woman were standing by the window, clearly in the middle of a row. The woman was holding a bunch of flowers.

“Who is it?” she was saying, as Malcolm walked in.

“I tell you I don’t know!” the man replied.

The couple turned and stared at him in surprise.

“My name is Malcolm Thomas. I am the chairman of the Highgrove Park Residents’ Association. Am I addressing Mr Grigori Koslov?” he asked in his politest Russian.

“What the fuck?!” exclaimed Grigori, in less polite Russian.

“Get lost!” snapped the woman.

“It’s you?!” said the gangster.

Then something happened that Malcolm had not expected. The gangster sprang across the room and seized him by the throat.

Malcolm tumbled back onto the carpet, and the gangster was still on top of him with his fingers round his windpipe.

So that’s the knack of strangling people, Malcolm found himself thinking, but Grigori was shouting at him in Russian. What was he saying?

“Where is he? You bastard! Where is he?” That’s what the gangster was yelling.

“Who?” Malcolm wanted to say, but he couldn’t because of the pressure on his throat.

Suddenly Malcolm found himself flailing out. He was punching Koslov in the face, and then he had his hands round his head, and his thumbs were digging into his eyes, just as he’d found himself doing with Anton.

Grigori tried to get his face away from Malcolm’s fingers. Eventually he had to let go of his windpipe so that he could grab his hands to stop Malcolm poking his eyes out.

He flattened Malcolm’s arms onto the floor and held them there, panting for breath.

“Who is this?” asked the woman.

“This is the bastard who’s got Anton!” replied Grigori. Then he shouted at Malcolm again. “Where is he? If you’ve harmed one hair of his head you’ll be sorry!”

“He’s fine!” Malcolm could only croak his reply. His windpipe was still sore.

“I’ll kill you!” screamed the gangster. “I’ll kill you if you’ve done him any harm!”

And suddenly he was holding a gun. “I’m going to kill you anyway! But first tell me where Anton is!”

Malcolm wanted to point out the lack of logic in this demand but, in the stress of the moment, he couldn’t think of the right words in Russian.

“Ahh! I’ll find out anyway!” said Grigori. “Goodbye, Mr Malcolm Thomas! I’m sorry we didn’t get to know each other!”

“Why?” screamed Malcolm. “Why are you doing this? All over a planning application!”

“I know you work for Zolkin!” said Grigori. “I know he is planning to muscle in on my UK operation. Well, he’ll learn the hard way!” And the gangster stuck the pistol into Malcolm’s mouth.

“What are you talking about?” cried Malcolm, as clearly as he could with a .44 magnum in his mouth.

“You work for Boris Zolkin! Don’t deny it!”

“I’ve never heard of him!”

“Don’t lie to me!” For a moment Grigori took the gun out of Malcolm’s mouth, allowing him to say, “I represent the residents of Highgrove Park. We’re simply objecting to your plans to build a monstrous house in our road and block the view of the Heath! That’s all!”

Grigori stopped in his tracks. For just the slightest fraction of a second he found himself believing what this man was telling him, but it was impossible! Of course Zolkin was behind it all! Probably that creep Ivan Morozov as well! He might as well shoot the bastard at once.

He jammed the gun back into Malcolm’s mouth.

When he heard the shot, the guard was drinking his thirteenth cup of tea of the day. He leapt so fast out of his seat that he spilt the drink over the table and stained his trousers.

He ran as fast as he could towards the house. The other two guards were doing the same. They all arrived in the living room at the same time.

A complete stranger was lying stretched out on the floor. His face and shoulders were a bloody mess. Sitting astride him was their boss, Grigori Koslov. His wife was standing by the open window. A curtain flapped in the breeze coming in from the garden. In the distance one of the American pit bulls was barking.

The clock on the wall ticked loudly and, it seemed, with deliberate slowness. In the centre of the dial was written “Bristol Temple Meads”. Eva Petrova Koslova had bought the clock as a birthday present for her husband last year. She knew he loved anything English – even though he didn’t speak the language.

At this moment, Grigori slowly toppled forward onto the stranger, who pulled himself from under him at the same time. Grigori fell with a crash onto the hard floor.

The guards turned to stare at Eva. In her hand was the gun with which she had just shot her husband’s brains out. They had landed all over the stranger.

“He didn’t love me!” she said. “He only loved that oaf! That idiot! Anton Molotov!”

The guards looked at each other. It had never been their policy to interfere in a domestic argument.