‘Did he have opportunity? He certainly did. Opportunity in spades — especially as he was apparently the only halfway sober one there that night. He was the guy who screwed up the performance — but didn’t get hit by any bottles. He was the guy with the cocaine but he handed it to Boris — and Anastasia doesn’t remember him snorting all that much. And he was the guy in charge of the guns. To top it all, that unexpectedly locked door just makes it look more like an inside job than a visiting hit man. Locking the door gave him just the few moments he needed to get everything straight. And Fydor benefited, didn’t he? He got the band, he got the girl. And later, when he decided to give both of them up, he suddenly came into a fortune and vanished.’
Ivan stopped in the middle of the compound. He turned and looked down at Richard. The wind suddenly dropped and everything went quiet apart from the relentless tramping of the sentries marching along their patrol patterns. ‘It’s lucky you weren’t the one in charge of the investigation by the sound of things, Richard! You’d really have stirred things up!’ Ivan’s tone was ironic. But was there a hint of threat there? Had Richard rushed in where angels might fear to tread? Further in and more foolishly than even he had calculated?
‘Yes, indeed,’ he persisted at once. In for a penny — in for a pound. ‘And now that you bring that up, we’ve arrived at the cherry on the cake, haven’t we, Ivan? Because who was in charge of the investigation? Why, the federal prosecutor, of course. He took a personal interest, I’m sure. He made sure all the ‘i’s were dotted and all the ‘t’s were crossed before he filed it away and forgot about it, just like Max would have wanted. The federal prosecutor. Lavrenty Mikhailovich Yagula. Max’s secret partner and Felix’s eminence grise. Your father!’
Ivan said nothing in answer to that; nothing at all. And Richard had nothing more to say either. Which was just as well, for they had reached the door of Kebila’s tent.
Kebila’s briefing of Ivan was short and to the point — then it was repeated as Mako arrived, and the pair of them went off to find Max, make certain he was safe, then to make sure that their men were on the alert, in case of a possible surprise attack from the river — and to mount extra guards on the Zubrs to supplement the extra sentries posted along the bankside. Richard left Kebila’s tent as silently as he had arrived there, with the Russian senior lieutenant and the massive colonel. But he parted company with them at the same point Anastasia had left him, preferring to go into the orphanage’s accommodation rather than continue listening to their technical conversation about fields of fire and reciprocal night actions.
He crept along a dark corridor past a door he was sure belonged to Anastasia’s room, then opened his own. He found Robin lying on the bed they were to share, clad in her lightest nightgown, with the sheets thrown over the bed foot to lie piled on the wooden floor. In the hot yellow flame of a smoking oil lantern, the little room was stultifying. There was no air conditioning and no fan. The window was shut and the curtains drawn. There were supposed to be no malarial mosquitoes in the area — but there weren’t any mosquito nets either and fair-skinned, notoriously bite-prone Robin wasn’t about to take the risk. She had a mosquito coil burning in the corner just to make sure, so as well as being stultifying, the room was suffocating. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Lock the door now you’re here. I’m wearing far too much!’
‘My God!’ he whispered as she stripped off entirely. ‘For once in my life I’m afraid I’m just too hot to fool around!’
‘So am I,’ she snapped. ‘Besides,’ she added, lowering her voice, ‘the walls are extremely thin. And we’re surrounded by nuns!’
‘Oh, that does it!’ he agreed, also stripping off as swiftly as humanly possible, already awash with perspiration. ‘Consider me a monk!’
‘If not a eunuch,’ she whispered as his pants came down. ‘Thank heavens not a eunuch. But where have you been? And what have you been up to?’
Richard lay gingerly on the bed beside her. They both shuffled further apart — in the exact reverse of their normal night-time movements. The bed, however, groaned salaciously. Trying not to think what the nuns must be imagining, he leaned over and blew out the lamp. As the air filled with fragrance from the cooling wick, he whispered, ‘It’s too hot to sleep as well, isn’t it?’
‘Damn right!’ she answered. ‘So tell me all.’
‘OK. Right. Remember when Ivan brought Anastasia to our cabin?’
‘Looking like she’d just been shot in the head? Of course I remember!’
‘And she asked me to go to Max and get some vodka?’
‘Stoli Elit. Yes, I remember. She still has the bottle, the lucky girl …’
‘Yes, she does. If you get desperate you can bang on the wall and ask her for some. Well, at the door, I overheard Max and Ivan talking. And what I thought they said was …’
Half an hour later Richard had detailed the whole story, how he had worked it out and who he had told about it. Halfway through, Robin’s hand crept into his and clenched it tightly. And more tightly as the story proceeded.
‘So,’ said Robin when he had finished, ‘let me just get this clear in my mind. You told Ivan that you believed Max had this Boris person murdered because Boris’s drugs had killed his son and heir, and Boris had seduced Anastasia away from him. He did this by arranging the group’s big Moscow concert to be a failure. By supplying drinks and drugs in the expectation that the kids would all get so totally blasted they’d have no idea what was going on. By bribing this Fydor creature — who had a grudge against Boris as well as a strong desire to get hold of his band and his girlfriend — to kill him. That Fydor pulled all of this off, got the group, the girl and the money, in the end. And then the whole thing was swept under the carpet by Ivan’s father the federal prosecutor in return for becoming a silent partner in Bashnev/Sevmash.’
‘That’s about the size of it as far as I can figure,’ said Richard.
Robin lay silent for a moment. Then, ‘And you put this all to Ivan?’ she said incredulously. ‘I mean, you actually went through it with him step by step?’
‘Pretty much.’ Richard nodded, banging his head against the wall that divided their room from Anastasia’s. ‘Seemed like a smart move at the time.’
‘He’ll take it straight to Max. And what then?’
‘Well. Then I was going to suggest to Max that if the secret was out in any case, but it was only hearsay and suspicion, and no one — least of all the federal prosecutor — was going to do anything about it …’
‘Yes, what then?’
‘Then shouldn’t he tell Anastasia what really happened? She’s been blaming herself all these years. Borderline suicidal. And none of it was her fault after all.’
‘You were going to suggest that, huh?’ she said, her voice suddenly throaty. As though she was on the verge of tears.
‘I was going to tell him either he should lay it all out for her, or I would.’
‘You’d do that? You’d run that risk for her?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘Come here, you bloody man. Come here and kiss me!’ She took the hand she had been holding and placed it squarely on her stomach.
‘Now, I thought you said it was far too hot for that sort of thing,’ he whispered, beginning to roll lazily towards her.
‘It was. It is. But I don’t care.’ She arched up off the mattress towards him. The bed groaned suggestively beneath them.
‘The nuns,’ he teased. ‘What about the nuns?’ His hand slid down.