In fact, Ostapenko wouldn’t bleed for much longer, because he was already in the process of dying and would be dead long before the KGB cars got back to Vasil’yevka. The savage kicks delivered by the captain to his back and stomach had ruptured the man’s liver and right kidney, causing massive internal bleeding. The combination of shock, pain and cold would do the rest.
At the door, the officer turned and looked back into the bedroom. The young girl, he noticed, had not made a sound since they had burst into the apartment, but had watched everything, with wide blue eyes. She remained kneeling beside her mother, her arms around the older woman, but her eyes were locked on his.
After a moment, the captain dropped his gaze, unable to face her any longer, then shrugged his shoulders and followed his men out of the door.
The officer was a Georgian, who had only been stationed in the Ukraine for a few months. He had never bothered getting to know anything about the local inhabitants, regarding them almost as a conquered people, subjects to be monitored and kept in order by the KGB, who were Russia’s ‘sword and shield’. He knew he would be moving on within a couple of years, his future postings taking him ever closer to Moscow, and that was all he really cared about.
He didn’t know that the Ukrainians can bear grudges, sometimes lasting for generations, and nor would he have cared even if he did. Marisa Ostapenka was purebred Ukrainian, as was her daughter, and, as they tried to rebuild the ruins of their lives in the months and years which followed that dreadful night, they would be driven by a single, unspoken purpose…
Russians may have long memories, but the memories of Ukrainians are longer still.
Chapter One
‘Look,’ Paul Richter said, exasperation showing in his voice, ‘I don’t even know why I’m here.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Baldwin replied. ‘You’re here because you need a job.’
Gerald Baldwin was tall and spare, with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, and he looked like a senior naval officer in mufti. Despite this, he was actually a colonel in a tank regiment, and Richter still didn’t really know why he was sitting in front of him.
In the afternoon sunshine, the room was oppressively hot, for all the windows were tightly closed. Baldwin didn’t seem to notice but, if you’ve spent most of your working life jammed into a tiny unventilated armoured steel box that you share with two or three other men and a twelve-cylinder internal combustion engine, the discomfort of a warm day in London is going to be barely noticeable.
‘Not a particularly impressive record, Mr Richter,’ Baldwin remarked, glancing down at the file lying open on the desk in front of him. ‘Just over twenty years in the Navy, and you leave as only a middle-seniority lieutenant commander. An early promotion to lieutenant, but after that the drive seemed to go, and you didn’t even make it to two and a half until your fourth selection board.’
‘I had some personality clashes,’ Richter said.
Baldwin favoured him with a brief smile. ‘The word used here in your file,’ he said, ‘is insubordination.’
Richter shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter much what you call it,’ he said. ‘I was working for an illiterate idiot. I knew it and everyone else knew it. What I shouldn’t have done was call him an illiterate idiot to his face.’
‘No,’ Baldwin agreed, ‘and especially not in the middle of the Yeovilton Wardroom bar on a Friday lunchtime, with half the senior officers from Flag Officer Naval Aviation standing there watching.’
‘That shouldn’t be on file,’ Richter said.
‘It isn’t,’ Baldwin replied, another smile slowly forming, ‘but word gets around.’
‘So,’ Richter said, ‘good timing was never one of my virtues.’
Baldwin went back to the file. ‘Seems you’ve got no real qualifications,’ he observed.
‘Are you trying to cheer me up, or what? Most of the skills anyone learns in the services are completely useless on the outside.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Baldwin said. ‘You still have some abilities that could be in demand.’
‘Like what?’ Richter asked.
Baldwin shook his head. ‘I’ll come to that later, if I may.’
‘I’d rather you came to it now.’ Richter was looking at his watch. ‘It’s nearly three o’clock, and I was hoping to get back home tonight.’
‘Ah, yes. You live in Cornwall, don’t you?’
As Baldwin had already signed the chitty for his rail fare from Falmouth, Richter assumed that this was a rhetorical question and ignored it.
A colleague had once, rather unfairly, described Richter’s cottage on the east side of the Lizard peninsula as ‘a shithouse with an adjoining ruin’. It was better than that, of course, but not by much. Richter had bought it when it looked as if he would be spending about every third tour of duty at the Air Station at Culdrose, just a ten-minute drive away. After he had exchanged contracts, the Royal Navy had, probably deliberately, then posted him only to the Air Stations at Portland and Yeovilton, or to carrier-based squadrons and staff jobs in the London area.
Baldwin continued turning over the pages of the file, perusing them in a somewhat disapproving fashion. Finally he closed it, tapped the cover in a fatherly manner, and looked over at the stocky and slightly untidy man sitting in a chair on the other side of his desk.
Richter was one of those people who could look scruffy, even in a morning suit. His fair hair had obviously been combed at some point that day, but still looked badly cut and untidy. His suit was clean, but needed pressing, and his shoes definitely lacked the mirror-like polish that a batman laboured to achieve every morning on Baldwin’s footwear.
But the most arresting thing about Richter, Baldwin realized, was his presence. He didn’t seem to blink quite as often as he should, and his blue-green eyes held the gaze of anyone he was looking at perhaps a shade too intently. He seemed to exude an air of stillness and tension that was almost menacing, and the colonel could see why he had sometimes not meshed well with his superiors in the Navy.
‘You’ve had no success yet with finding a job outside?’ Baldwin asked.
Richter shook his head. He had almost lost count of the applications he had sent out, and all of them — apart from eliciting three cautious interviews with insurance companies looking for an employee who could legitimately put the rank ‘Commander’ on his business cards — had been firmly rejected. It had been a very frustrating three months, and Richter didn’t like being reminded of this.
‘If I’d found myself a job outside,’ he replied, starting to get irritated, ‘I wouldn’t be sitting here now in this greenhouse, listening to you pontificating.’
Baldwin gave him an unfriendly stare. ‘Careful, Mr Richter,’ he said, tapping the file again. ‘Insubordination is no more welcome outside the services than within them.’
‘Neither is procrastination. If you’ve got a job for me, why don’t you just tell me about it so I can either take it or leave it, and then get the hell out of here?’
Baldwin eyed him for some moments further, then opened the file again. He leaned across the desk to take a pencil from a small grey plastic tray, minutely inspected the point — presumably to ensure that it had been correctly sharpened, in the proper military fashion — and then wrote a short note on the minute sheet inside the file. Like most Old Admiralty Building staff, he regarded the introduction of the fountain pen as dangerously reactionary, and much preferred pencils.