Thinking I was her relative, they gave me her bag to see if I could make an ID. There was a little book, and the address of a building around the corner from Tolya’s where she had told me she lived.
The bag was made of fancy white and gray snakeskin with a silver buckle which when I looked closely I saw was a fake, a knock-off, a cheap version of the real thing, jammed with make-up, underwear, sweater, a few photographs, a wallet with a couple of pounds in it.
I put the photographs in my pocket and gave the bag back to the policeman, handed over my cell number, and left Gagarin to the cops and medics, and other people who tended the dead and dying.
Dead, with no ID, and only a fake bag, Gagarin seemed to have ceased to exist.
Around eight in the morning, I left the hospital, found a Starbucks-they had spread like a stain all over London-got some coffee, and went over to Gagarin’s place.
A slim pretty woman, half asleep from the look of it, opened the door. She wore jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and yellow flip-flops.
“Yes?”
I apologized for banging on the front door. I said I was looking for Elena Gagarin’s flat, pretending I expected to find her in the house.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “The police have already been. They said she was attacked not far from here. They’ve seen what there is, and it isn’t much. They told me Elena was taken to hospital very early this morning.”
I said I was her cousin and I’d come to get some things for her, to take to the hospital.
“I’ll help if I can,” said the woman. “But she hasn’t lived here for some months. Is she all right?”
I explained what had happened. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “Is this the right address?”
“Yes, number twelve, that’s right, but it belongs to us, my husband and me.”
“You don’t know her?”
“Look, come in,” she said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee? Tea? I’m Janet Milo, by the way.”
I went into the hallway. Inside what had once been a private house and was now divided into apartments was a beautiful winding staircase. I followed the woman in yellow flip-flops to the top floor where there were two doors. One was ajar.
“This is ours,” she said, gesturing at the apartment with the open door where I could hear a radio playing news. She unlocked the other door. “Up top here, there’s a minute little room, I suppose it was once for a servant,” she said. “Elena did rent it from us for a time, oh, six months back, she said she adored the area and she was looking for a place of her own, but she could never quite pay the rent and eventually we asked her to go. We’ve redecorated and there’s a new girl coming to live here.”
“You haven’t seen her, yesterday, recently?”
“No, but she did stop by, asked if we had changed the locks,” she said. “The police asked to see the room where she had lived.” She was pretty cool about it, but maybe it was her style. “I assume that’s why you’re here?”
“Yes, and she’s dead,” I said.
I realized now that I had never seen Gagarin go into the house. She had lied about the apartment.
“I’d like to take a look.”
“I don’t see why not. Coffee?”
“Do you know where she worked? You must have asked.”
“I got the impression Elena was always looking for a job. She said she had prospects at one of the big banks, but I think she survived doing translations. Working at a bookshop. Possibly a club that catered to Russians, a bit of, forgive me, sponging off her friends. Quite a few of them have settled around here, sadly. She left early and came home late, and she was quiet. You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“It was so nice when we had Americans. I adore Americans. Not too many now,” she said. “The dollar, I suppose. For that matter, there aren’t too many English people, either, not round here, anyway,” she added, a wry expression on her handsome English face. “Do go in. Let me know if you need anything.” I thanked Mrs Milo and she said please call me Janet.
The little studio at the top of the house was the kind a student might use. It was freshly painted. Striped curtains hung at the windows, which were open and through one I could see Tolya’s house on the other side of the green square.
A bed, desk, old-fashioned dresser, some lamps, a chair and a little TV completed the furnishings. The bathroom was pristine, and there was no sign anyone had been here.
Where did she live? Where did she keep her clothes?
I went and asked Mrs Milo for the coffee, and followed her into her apartment.
“Elena wasn’t here last night at all?” I said casually.
“No, and we changed the locks when we redecorated. We’ve got a new tenant coming in this week, as I said.”
“So you haven’t seen her.”
“I told the police that she was round several times asking if she could have the room back, that she had some money. But I told her it was already let.”
“Please try to think, did Elena mention anything, did she maybe leave something?”
Janet Milo paused, and something seemed to click, and then she said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You’re right of course.”
“Go on.”
“It was a while back, and she asked if she could store an old suitcase in our storage room in the basement. I completely forgot.”
“You showed it to the cops?”
“I only just remembered. I’ll phone them straight away.”
“Could you show it to me first?” I smiled reassuringly.
In the underground storage room, I crouched down and opened the huge battered green suitcase that had belonged to Elena Gagarin.
Clothes, shoes, underwear were stuffed into the suitcase. There were also envelopes filled with clippings, letters, snapshots. I shuffled through them, including one of Elena herself posed alongside a car that had belonged to Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut. Another of a middle-aged couple, weary-looking people, working-class Russians I figured for her parents. Pictures of Valentina. A picture of Greg.
I began to sweat. I’d been an idiot not to see it before: Elena and “Greg” were related. You looked at them together in the pictures and you could see it. Brother and sister? Cousins? I had been insane not to see it.
Rooting around in the suitcase, I found applications for British citizenship, credit card slips, a small notebook with telephone numbers. I tried ringing a few, including the bank where Gagarin claimed to have worked. Nobody had heard of her. There was an ID card. Her name really was Yelena Gagarin, but it was a common enough name.
This had made it easy for her to imply the connection with the famous cosmonaut, the Soviet hero, Yuri, whose daughter was known as Lena, the diminutive form of Yelena, or Elena of course. This Gagarin had a different middle name, different patronymic, which she had changed to make her game work.
It was a smart move. Elena knew the current generation of young Russians at home and abroad idolized Yuri Gagarin, that he had become a hero to them as he had to their parents and grandparents: the first big modern hero in Russia, even if he did die flying a plane drunk.
It didn’t matter. He got to space first, he beat the Americans, he was young and handsome and a true Russian hero. Elena had borrowed a little piece of him, just the reputation, which was easy since she already had the name. It made her very popular. It made it easy for her to make her way, first in Moscow, then in London. In a small notebook, she had scribbled notes about her childhood obsession with Yuri Gagarin, and how she had visited the town of Gagarin where she posed with his car. In Moscow she went to his statue every year. This stainless steel cosmonaut was said to fly annually and grant you your wish.
From the suitcase diary and notebook and scraps, the postcards and letters in the box-what I could put together-she had arrived in London a couple of years earlier from Moscow, though she had grown up in St Petersburg. She already spoke good English and had worked as a cleaner for a while in a hotel near Heathrow Airport.