‘You have to reset it,’ says Stephen. ‘Losing battle otherwise, mind of its own.’
What did Elizabeth know? Precious little. She has seen the Viking, of course. That is an advantage. But that he has let himself be seen suggests he is very safe and secure. He’s somewhere in Staffordshire, for reasons best known to him. And in a very big house. The house has a library. That’s about the extent of her knowledge. She remembers Stephen’s eyes, widening as he scanned the library.
‘What did you make of the Viking’s library?’
‘Come again?’ says Stephen.
‘The Viking’s library? You seemed taken with it. Any reason?’
‘Not getting your drift at all, dear,’ says Stephen. ‘Vikings? Libraries? You been on the gin?’
‘You were looking at his books,’ says Elizabeth.
‘You’ve either got the wrong stick, or the wrong end of the right one,’ says Stephen.
Elizabeth sits up and looks at him. ‘Stephen, the other night. The van, the man with the beard? You do remember?’
Stephen chuckles. ‘Even for you this is a strange one. What are we up to tomorrow? Thought I might pop over and see my mum. You know how she gets.’
Elizabeth tries to control her breathing once more, but she is unable to. She feels like she is going to sob. Stephen puts his arm around her.
‘What’s got into you all of a sudden?’ says Stephen. ‘I’m here, silly one, I’m here. If something’s broken you know I’ll fix it.’
Elizabeth swings her feet out of bed and hurries to the bathroom. She locks the door and slumps back against it. The tears come now. Not easily, because tears never come easily to Elizabeth. Even now Elizabeth remembers crying when her dad would hit her. Because he loved her, because he loved her so. How he would keep hitting, and keep hitting until she stopped. Until one day she stopped crying forever.
She remembers too sitting by her dad’s bedside, many years later, she on leave from Beirut, he dying of cancer in a Hampshire hospice. She held his bony, vicious hand, and thought of everything this man might have had in life. Everything she might have had. But still she didn’t cry, frightened of what he might do if she did.
Will she be holding Stephen’s hand in a hospice someday soon? Of course she will. But she will laugh with him, and she will love him, and she will give thanks for him, and for the woman he has made her. And she will cry the lifetime of tears she has denied herself.
48
Bogdan is in love. There are no two ways about it. He is certain.
Or is he?
It feels like it.
But should you ever trust feelings?
They are off to see Jack Mason. With Viktor in tow this time. Bogdan is driving Ron’s Daihatsu.
Bogdan wishes somebody would just tell him how to handle this. He had been in love at school, he remembers that, but there has been nothing that simple since. He needs to play chess with Stephen soon. Stephen will know.
He certainly likes Donna very, very, very much. But how many ‘verys’ turn ‘like’ into ‘love’? Four? Five? Bogdan wishes there were a definitive answer. There are six bullets in a gun, you can fit twelve bricks on a hod, there are thirteen grams of protein in an egg. But love? Try Googling it. There aren’t any answers, Bogdan has tried.
Ron is in the passenger seat. He turns his head to the back seat to talk to Viktor.
‘You know her from way back,’ says Ron. ‘Elizabeth?’
Viktor Illyich is stretching himself, and clicking his joints. They have just let him out of the boot of the car, and unzipped him from his holdall. They did this on a rutted track in the woods about a mile from Coopers Chase, as soon as Bogdan was sure they weren’t being followed. Elizabeth had given him strict instructions.
‘Way back,’ says Viktor. ‘A different lifetime.’
‘Tell us a secret, then,’ says Ron. ‘Something she wouldn’t want us to know.’
Viktor contemplates this for a moment.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Elizabeth is the greatest lover I ever had.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Ron. ‘I meant something about shooting Russian spies or something.’
‘She was so tender,’ says Viktor. ‘But also a caged animal.’
Ron turns the radio on: talkSPORT.
Viktor is lost in memories. ‘She did things to me that no woman –’
Ron nods down towards the radio. ‘Liverpool are buying Sanchez? Waste of money.’
Bogdan is tempted to join in the conversation. To talk about love. To ask a question maybe? But without giving anything away. Would he look foolish? The big Polish brute, what could he know about love? He decides to say something. He won’t know what it is until it is out of his mouth.
‘How much are they paying for Sanchez, Ron?’ Oh, Bogdan.
‘Thirty mill,’ says Ron. ‘In instalments, but still.’
Bogdan nods. He’s really only here to drive, and to carry Viktor to and from the car.
While Ron is telling a joke about a parrot that used to live in a brothel, Bogdan thinks a little more about the case. Viktor had taken him through a few things before being zipped into his holdall. He now has a cushion in there, and also a copy of the Economist and a small torch.
Viktor had explained the basics of money-laundering, the complex network of anonymous shell companies and offshore accounts that could turn dirty money into clean money via a trail almost impossible to follow. Almost impossible.
Bogdan has missed the punchline of the parrot joke, and Ron has moved on to one about a nun on a train.
The real secret was to dig back in time, to follow the money back and back and back to try to find the original sin. The first transactions were the vulnerable ones. Viktor said it was like pulling up a carpet. You just needed to get your fingernail under a tiny fragment in the corner, and sometimes you could lift the whole thing up in one go. That’s what had happened with Trident: an early transaction, a mistake. But that had led nowhere. So maybe they had to track back even further.
They reach the house at around two. It is an Elizabethan manor perched high on a Kent clifftop, the English Channel stretching off into the distance beyond. They park in a copse around a mile away, and zip Viktor back into his bag. How they will explain this Ukrainian in a holdall to Jack Mason is not Bogdan’s concern. He just has to carry it.
Bogdan drives the Daihatsu up the long drive, and parks as close to the stone entrance steps as he can. The holdall sneezes, and Bogdan says, ‘Bless you.’
If Jack Mason is surprised to see a large Polish man unzip a small Ukrainian man from a holdall, he hides it well.
‘I will come back for you this evening,’ Bogdan tells Ron and Viktor.
‘Thanks, old son,’ says Ron. ‘I’m not going back to Coopers Chase though. Staying at Pauline’s place, but it’s in Fairhaven if that’s easy for you?’
‘Is no problem at all,’ says Bogdan.
‘You’re a good lad,’ says Ron. ‘It’s Juniper Court, just off Rotherfield Road.’
49
Joyce is combining business and pleasure. There was an advert on TV years ago, for sweets maybe, and the song went ‘These are two of my favourite things in one.’ And here she was, about to watch a television show being recorded, and, she hopes, interviewing a murder suspect.
Last time she and Elizabeth were on a train, Elizabeth had had a gun in her bag. Perhaps she has one today? She is certainly looking distracted.
‘You seem distracted,’ says Joyce, as Elizabeth peers up and down the carriage.
‘I seem what?’ says Elizabeth.
‘Distracted,’ says Joyce.
‘Nonsense,’ says Elizabeth.
‘My mistake,’ says Joyce.