Fire Hawk (36 page)

‘
Too
simple,' he retorted, folding his arms.

‘Too simple for you, you mean. Because you want it to be more complicated than that. You
want
the mystery. Because without it, you'd have lost interest in her.'

He took a deep gulp of his beer in preparation to leave.

Clare crossed her arms as if hugging herself and teased at the lobe of one ear. Her nail gloss matched her lips.

‘I'm
so
glad to have met you,' she preened. ‘You're just as Chrissie described.'

‘Really?' he snarled.

‘She'd got you to a tee. She knew instinctively that divorcing Martin and moving in with you would be a disaster.'

Sam wanted to strangle her. He'd had quite enough of this woman telling him what was right and wrong with his relationship with Chrissie.

‘The other thing she knew,' she added, determinedly twisting the knife, ‘was that on your own,
you
would never be enough for
her
.'

‘Look, I think you really have said quite enough,' Sam snapped.

‘But listen,' she rejoined bitterly, ‘that one wasn't personal to just you, Sam. It applied to all of us.
None
of us was enough for her. Don't you see? Not Martin, not you, not me . . .'

Sam narrowed his eyes. There was innuendo here. For some reason he still didn't understand, the woman was going for his throat.

‘She wanted it
all,
Sam. And all at the same time. The financial and social security of a husband, but her lovers too.'

Lovers. The plural was like a knife. He didn't believe her. He simply didn't believe what she was implying.

‘Designer clothes,' Clare enumerated, tapping fingers against the palm of her hand, ‘always the top hairstylists, that brand-new BMW coupé . . .'

Sam frowned. He knew nothing about the car.

‘And some of her jewellery was exquisite. She said there'd been some inheritances. And of course her husband earns a bob or two. Rather more than you, I should imagine. A mandarin in the Treasury, isn't he?'

‘Something like that.' He'd had enough of her bitchiness. ‘You sound as jealous as hell, Clare.'

‘No
way
was I jealous of
Chrissie,
' she retorted, her face colouring. ‘
I
didn't want what she had. No, Sam dear. You've not understood. But then it's blindingly obvious you never
have
understood about Chrissie.'

He tensed, ready to stand up and leave.

‘Not jealous of
Chrissie,
Sam.' Clare leaned forward, entwining her hands. ‘Jealous of
you.'
She let the words sink in. ‘And of Martin of course. Because you two
men
were each getting a share of something that I wanted for me alone.'

Sam felt the blood drain from his face. ‘What are you talking about?'

Clare's eyes were triumphant. She gave a little laugh. ‘I'm telling you Chrissie was bisexual, dummy.'

‘Bollocks!'

‘It's true, my
dear,
' she answered matter-of-factly. ‘Chrissie and I had sex together at school when we were both seventeen. A crush that
I
never grew out of. She didn't either really, but as I said before, no one thing was ever enough for her. For some inexplicable reason she acquired the taste for men's bodies as well as women's.' Sam gaped. This simply could
not
be true.

‘She had a busy schedule did Chrissie, managing her . . . her little stable of partners.'

Sam was dumbstruck. He would have known, surely. Some sign. Some hint. Some coldness. But there'd been none. No indication to suggest their sex wasn't as satisfying for her as it was for him.

‘Why are you telling me this?' His eyes were like lasers. ‘Why does it matter so much to you that I know?'

For a long time she didn't answer, letting her eyes fill with tears.

‘Because,' she whispered finally. ‘Because I wanted you to feel what
I
have felt for God knows how long. To feel the pain of knowing that you are not enough for someone. And that you never ever will be.'

Sam pushed back the chair and stood up. He couldn't breathe. He felt the dark, soul-crushing confines of the cell in Baghdad again. He turned away, the panelled walls of the pub, the hunting prints, the brass lamps all now a blur.

Legs moving for the door, he reached the fresh air and sucked it in. The ground shook as Concorde flew overhead on its way into Heathrow. Brakes squealed and
a car stopped inches from his knees. He'd stumbled straight into the road.

‘Piss artist!' yelled the driver.

Sam reached the river path and turned right. The track dipped onto a boat-launching ramp, slippery with mud and strewn with tree branches and litter left by the tide. Beyond it, the path would take him back to Barnes. He marched ahead, oblivious of the filth spattering his shoes and dark trousers. All that mattered to him was to get away from there. From the satanic woman who'd poisoned his mind, and from the furnace that would soon be turning Chrissie's remains to vapour.

BLOCK 16 OF
the Krystal residential complex in the sprawling Leningrads'kyi district of the Ukrainian capital was identical to the fifteen others that lined the broad highway leading westwards out of the city. Sixteen floors of dilapidated two-and three-roomed flats with walls so thin that residents learned intimate details of their neighbours' lives without the need to hold their breath.

Oksana Ivanovna Koslova stepped out onto the paved area between the blocks, glad to be free of the disinfectant smell that clung to the stairwell and lifts in the tower that had been her home for fifteen years. She had a broad, open face, and dark hair that was almost black. Small gold hoops hung from her ear lobes. Lines at the sides of her lipsticked mouth and around her surprisingly blue eyes belonged to a woman older than her thirty-eight years. Since her husband's lingering death some five years earlier she'd lived alone here with her daughter Luba, a troublesome fifteen-year-old who took a far stronger interest in pop icons than homework.

Oksana Ivanovna felt the first spots of rain and extracted a flower-patterned scarf from her shopping bag to cover her head. Overnight her life had changed. It was as if a hurricane had blown into the tedious monotony of
her daily existence. Instead of being a woman of no consequence except to herself and marginally to her daughter, she now had three terrified people depending on her to save their lives.

She tightened the belt of her chocolate-brown raincoat and took the path that ran parallel with the highway. Horse-chestnut trees, planted when the tower blocks were built in an attempt to brighten up the harsh concrete, cast off their yellow leaves like the worn-out soles of boots. The Metro station was a five-minute walk away.

This morning the inside of her head was like a cavern of twittering bats. She felt desperately frightened by what she was about to do, but also guiltily excited by the drama that had burst into her life. It had been a shock seeing her bruised and bandaged niece when Lena and Misha had turned up with Nadya at seven that morning, all of them ashen-faced after a sleepless night on the train from Odessa. Nadya had big grey smudges under her eyes and fell asleep the moment they'd cleaned her grazed face with fresh disinfectant and settled her in her own daughter's bed. Luba had grumbled fiercely at being turned out of her blankets so early on a Saturday.

Their arrival was expected, because Lena had phoned from Odessa late last night, but it had been impossible to prepare for. What do you do for a family fleeing for its life? Shelter them, of course, because they were flesh and blood, but also make every effort to get them out of your home again as soon as possible in case the taint to their lives threatened yours. Moving them on was what she was now trying to organise.

It had shocked her that it should be Misha who'd fallen foul of the Mafiya, always the steadiest of her two brothers and herself, never stepping out of line, never doing anything to offend. And now here he was, under
threat of death from gangsters. He'd refused to explain why, saying it would be safer for her if she didn't know.

All he'd revealed was that secret information had come into his possession which could be of considerable importance both to Ukraine and to the rest of the world. He'd told her that their own government's authorities were too corrupt to be trusted with it and he had no choice but to pass on what he knew to a western nation. In return he hoped for a visa and asylum. And since Oksana worked as a receptionist and telephonist at the British Embassy in Kiev, it was the British authorities he'd decided to approach, counting on her to furnish him with the contacts he needed.

At the head of the steps down to the Metro, two old country women in knitted cardigans sat on wooden boxes displaying a meagre spread of vegetables to sell.

‘
Pajalsta
,' one of them begged as Oksana passed.

‘Not today, babushka,' she answered. Not
any
day for her, because with the family dacha an hour's bus ride away, and she the only able-bodied family member still living in Kiev, she had all the fruit and vegetables she and Luba could possibly need.

She splashed down the steps into the station avoiding the worst of the puddles on the landings and entered the grim, concrete ticket hall. Then she held out her monthly travel pass for inspection and passed through.

The escalator to the platforms stretched into the earth like a sloping mine-shaft, its cavernous roof glazed with off-white tiles and the flat space between the up and down sides sporting lamps in the shape of flaming torches. Oksana idly watched the defeated faces on the up-staircase, knowing that their numbed misery matched her own.

Except not today, perhaps. Because today she had hope. Just a glimmer of it, something as frail as a sickly child, but hope nonetheless. Just what it was she was
hoping for she wouldn't have been able to say if asked, except that it could involve a change to her life, a life that had stagnated for years.

She reached the bottom of the escalator and directed a friendly smile at the
dezhurnaya
in her glass-fronted box whose day-long job was to stare upwards at the moving stairs, her hand on the stop button ready for trouble. The girl was in her twenties, with a lifeless, pointy-nosed face, its skin the pallor of a creature that never sees daylight. Still, thought Oksana, it was a job. Enough to pay for food for herself and her child if she had one.

The wide platform had a huge arched roof covered with mosaics, its grandeur a monument to the time when the Soviet Union had been something to be proud of. The train, when it came in a few moments later, was almost full. Oksana squeezed in between the bodies, trying to keep beyond the reach of any slob who might try to take advantage of the crush. She had a shape she was quite proud of, but since the death of her husband had not let any man touch her sexually. The doors closed and the train moved on, the silent, uncurious faces waiting patiently for their destinations to arrive.

It had been eleven o'clock when she'd left the apartment. She knew from past experience that First Secretary Mr Gerald Figgis dropped into the embassy every Saturday morning at around midday to pick up messages from London. And she knew, because everybody in the small embassy knew, that Mr Figgis was the representative in Ukraine of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

She left the Metro at Universytet and walked a block and a half along the wide boulevard Tarasa Shevchenka keeping the Botanical Gardens to her right, until she reached the junction with Volodymyrs'ka. In front of her loomed the classical red bulk of the Shevchenko University. She sighed as she always did, reaching this point in her journey to work, because it had been during her
student days at this very university that she'd met the man who became her husband. She in the final year of an English language course and Sergeyi a bright spark in the university's physics department, they'd been married after she graduated. Their daughter had been five years old when the Chernobyl reactor exploded in 1987 casting a pall of death over their country. As a physicist, Sergeyi had been enlisted for the clean-up team. He'd spent twenty-five days breathing the radioactive dust, then another four years waiting for the cancer to kill him.

She turned her back on the academic buildings and crossed the boulevard at the traffic lights. She could easily have walked the rest of the way to the embassy, but the bunion on her left foot was painful this morning and there was a tram drawing up at the stop on the corner opposite. She ran the few metres to reach it, her not entirely sensible heels clacking on the cobbles.

In front of her on the tram's steps was a young couple eating imported ice-creams out of bright foil wrappers. The girl, who was pretty with long brown hair, held a baby of about nine months in her arms. All the seats on the conveyance were taken but Oksana found a handrail to grab. The tram doors hissed shut and the elderly machine lumbered up the hill towards the old town, its steel wheels clunking over the joints in the track.

An elderly woman with an official badge pinned to a woollen jacket worn over pullover and skirt was making her way back through the tram checking tickets. Oksana dug her pass out from her bag in readiness.

‘And yours?' the woman demanded of the couple with the baby. ‘Why no tickets?'

‘Because it's more than three months since we've been paid any wages, old woman,' the young man protested. ‘It's the law. When the government won't pay our salary we travel free,' he reminded her defiantly.

‘Oh yes? Too bad,' the inspector snapped. ‘If you can
afford those ice-creams you can afford a tram ticket. You'll have to get off.'

The tram had reached its next stop and she pushed them towards the door.

‘That's not fair,' the long-haired girl protested.