A Darker Place

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Katya kissed Svetlana on the forehead. ‘Later, you may tell me all about whatever it is. Now I must go.’

She and Monica went out. There was a sideboard loaded with drinks and glasses. ‘Have a drink, my dear. What is your pleasure?’ asked Svetlana.

‘Scotch whisky in large quantities, I’m afraid.’

‘Which helps with the pain? You have had so many years of it that many drugs have lost their ability to cope, I imagine.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘I’m a sensitive, my dear, I know the most intimate things about people. God blessed me as a child. Two gifts. To act – my abiding joy, my passion – and to heal. Come close.’ He eased the chair round and she took his face in her hands. ‘You have the pain in your head, am I right?’

‘Always.’

‘My hands are cool.’

‘Very.’

‘Now, my fingers on each side of your temples.’ The surge of heat was profound enough to shock him, and the usual tension subsided. ‘See, I told you so. Now go and get your whisky and a vodka for me.’

He went to the sideboard, poured the drinks, and brought them back. She raised her glass. ‘To life, my dear.’

They tossed it down and Monica returned. ‘Katya’s coming back. We got as far as her Mini Cooper and her mobile rang. It was the Slade cancelling her seminar, a water pipe burst or something. Anyway, I’m glad. I must say I like her enormously.’

‘And I like you, my dear. You are happy at the moment, you are in love, I think?’

‘Well, it certainly isn’t with me,’ Roper told her.

‘She will tell me in her own time, for we shall be good friends. Back to business and my nephew. I know his story, you know it, so does the whole world. So, let us start with you, my dear, having only just seen him, as I understand, at the gala cultural affair in New York for the United Nations.’

Katya, entering at that moment, heard her, and Monica hesitated, glancing at Roper. ‘Look, do I tell her where all this is leading? I mean, the most important thing he’s looking for if everything works out is total secrecy.’

Svetlana said, ‘If you hesitate over Katya, there’s no need. She is my most faithful friend and I trust her with my life.’

‘Excellent. I hope we haven’t offended you, Katya.’

‘Of course not. Please continue.’ She went to an easel by a window, removed a cloth, revealing a painting she was obviously working on, picked up a palette and brush and started to work.

Roper leaned over and took Svetlana’s hand. ‘When Kurbsky was seventeen, you came to London to do some Chekhov, met Patrick Kelly and decided to defect, which was a hell of a decision in Communist days. Did you ever regret it?’

‘Never. I fell in love with a good man, I fell in love with London. Life blossomed incredibly, but I see the direction you’re taking here. Alexander wishes to leap over the wall, too?’

Monica said, ‘They control his every move. He told me he feels like a bear on a chain.’

‘I see,’ Svetlana said calmly. ‘Then I suggest you tell me everything, my dear, exactly what he said and what happened.’

When she was finished Svetlana smiled. ‘You perform well, my dear, but then you are an academic, an actor in a way. I feel I know all the people you have mentioned. This General Ferguson and his people, you and your brother, the Member of Parliament. Such a tragic figure. And my nephew – how he feels, what he wants. It’s been sixteen years since he last sat with me, here where you are sitting now. For years, nothing, and then later on, the books, a photo on a cover, appearances on television. The falsity of the internet. To watch him was like watching someone playing him in a movie. In fact, that’s what he looked like to me with that absurdly long hair and that tangled beard.’

‘Tell me about him, please. You raised him, after all.’

‘My brother was KGB all his life, so for his family, things were okay in the Soviet Union. His wife was not a healthy woman. I came to Moscow hoping to act, but he agreed to let me come only if I lived with them and supported her. She shouldn’t have had another child after Alexander, but my brother insisted. Two years later, Tania was born and her mother died. We were all trapped. I was allowed to act with Moscow companies. He used his influence, but always I had to be a mother to the children, not that I objected. I loved Alex dearly.’

Monica said, ‘And Tania?’

‘Never cared for me, but she could do no wrong in her father’s eyes. The years passed, he became a colonel in the KGB, very important. We had a couple living in at the house, so I had more freedom. When the Chekhov Theatre was invited to London to perform, I was one of their lead players, so he agreed I could go. It was a prestige thing. The rest is history. I married Kelly and refused to return.’

‘And the children?’

‘Tania wasn’t bothered. She was fifteen, a wild child, and as always he doted on her. Alexander was a brilliant student, already at Moscow University at seventeen. I took a chance and wrote asking that he be permitted to visit. His father, knowing how close I was to Alexander, allowed him to come on holiday, but ordered him to persuade me to return.’

‘Are you certain of that?’ Roper asked.

‘Yes, Alexander told me, and Kelly. He liked Kelly. They practised judo together. Kelly was a black belt.’

‘All this fits not only with what I’ve found, but with what he told Monica,’ Roper said. ‘About being so happy here with you and Kelly, but then came the serious unrest, the battles with the police and student groups over Afghanistan, hundreds dead in street fighting in Moscow.’

‘And amongst them Tania,’ Monica said.

‘Her father contacted us saying she was wounded. That’s what made Alexander return instantly.’

Monica said, ‘He told me that he arrived too late for the farewell. He said she had a headstone at Minsky Park Military Cemetery because his father used his influence to somehow make her death respectable.’

‘That sounds like my brother. He lied about her only being wounded just to draw Alexander back.’

‘And when he joined the paratroopers, what did you think of that?’

‘I was horrified, but by then we’d lost touch. All mail was censored, so I didn’t know about it for a long time.’

‘He told me he thought he’d done it to punish his father, who couldn’t do anything about it because it would have made him look bad, a man of his standing.’

‘I can believe that, but I don’t really know. Everything after that, all his army time, Afghanistan and Chechnya, I know only from his books. I had no contact during all those years, and the years after that he covers in Moscow Nights, the years of his anti-establishment activities. I envy you for having been in his company and I’m grateful for what you have told me.’

Roper said, ‘What do you think about his insistence on total secrecy?’

‘That it might present difficulties for him. But that is a bridge to be crossed at a later date.’ She smiled and said to Katya, who had been working away quietly, ‘Have you anything to say?’

Katya put down her painting things and wiped her hands. ‘Let me just mention this. Svetlana and I first became friends when I was thirty – I’ve never met Alex, but I’m a play designer; a total concept specialist. Not just sets, but people, clothes, appearance, and one thing I can tell you: any problem, however difficult, has a solution.’

‘As she’s proved at the National Theatre on many occasions,’ Svetlana put in.

Katya found a pack of cigarettes in her smock and lit one. ‘Think of this whole affair as a theatrical performance. Alex flies from Paris, you and your people get him to England in one piece, Major, and then what do you do with him?’

‘Help him vanish,’ Roper said. ‘That’s what he wants.’

‘And what would you do with someone you really needed to keep safe?’

‘We have safe houses for situations like that. But for Kurbsky, it would just be a temporary solution.’

‘Here would be an impossibility,’ Svetlana said. ‘I’m sure they’d look for him here. He couldn’t possibly show his face.’

Katya went to the sideboard, poured a vodka and passed it to Svetlana. ‘True – if it was his face.’

Svetlana looked at her. ‘Thank you, my dear. I presume you mean plastic surgery?’

‘Not as such, although it’s a long-term possibility. Making him a new person, totally different in every way, that’s how I would approach it. What is a postman or a policeman? A uniform is what we see and accept, not so much the individual. Take Alex. His persona is like a Hollywood costume actor’s – the hair, the beard, so extravagant. Svetlana has told me of his love as a boy for The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood,the swagger, the boldness inherent in such costume dramas. That is what he projects and what people see in him.’

‘So how would you change him? By cutting his hair?’ Monica said.

‘If you did that and removed the beard, I think you would be amazed.’

They all thought about it and Svetlana said, ‘He couldn’t live in the house, of course. But Kelly used to use the apartment over the garage as a study. They practised judo up there.’

‘Do you still use it?’ Roper asked.

It was Katya who answered. ‘Until three months ago, we had a young Pole named Marek living there, taking care of the garden. He had a sociology degree, but in Warsaw that only brought him two pounds an hour as a teacher. We let him live in the apartment, and as long as he saw to the garden, we never queried what else he did. He was with us for almost a year before he decided to go home again.’

‘There’s another possibility, too,’ Svetlana said. ‘I have a cottage way down by the Thames estuary beyond Dartford looking out towards Sheerness and the Isle of Sheppey. Holly End the place is called, marshland, wildfowl, birds, shingle beaches. You can breathe there.’

‘It sounds nice. Could Alex hide himself there?’ Monica asked Katya.

‘It’s lonely and desolate enough. The problem is if it’s too lonely.’

‘We’ll take a look at it, too,’ Monica said. ‘We wouldn’t want Alex going stir-crazy, though.’

‘There’s an old Russian saying,’ Katya put in. ‘If you want to hide a pine tree, put it in a forest of pines.’

‘What’s your point?’ Roper asked.

‘I may be wrong, but I recall a story about an important letter that was the object of a heated search.’

‘I think I know the one you mean. The letter was in plain view all along, just another letter,’ Roper said. ‘And you think that might work for Kurbsky?’

‘Yes,’ Katya told him. ‘Let me give it some thought. But now, it’s time for lunch.’ She smiled at Monica. ‘If you’d mind helping me?’

‘Only if you call me Monica.’ They went out together and Svetlana reached and put a hand on Roper’s knee.

‘There is much more going on with Alex than it seems, I’m sure of it. I don’t know what it is, but I will find out, I promise you, my dear.’

‘So you and Katya will come on board, help us to find a solution?’

‘What else would I do? Alexander is my blood, and blood is everything. Now – I’m an old woman now and haven’t time to waste, so forgive my directness. When Monica was telling us the story, she mentioned General Ferguson and one of his closest associates, a Sean Dillon, who used to be with the IRA.’

‘Yes. When the General persuaded him, if you could call it that, to join the organization, he said it was because he needed someone who could be worse than the bad guys.’

‘I see. And it is this man whom Monica favours?’

‘You could put it that way.’

‘I look forward to meeting him. Kelly flirted with the IRA when he was a student in Dublin. He once said it brought out the romantic in him.’

‘There wasn’t anything in the least romantic about the IRA in Belfast in the years I was there,’ he told her.

‘But that is all over now, my dear, a long, long time ago.’

That evening, there was a council of war at Holland Park. Ferguson was there, Roper, Monica, Dillon, and Harry and Billy Salter.