‘She didn’t guess who he was?’
‘I don’t think so. He was registered at the orphanage when he was six weeks old.’
‘That’s terrible.’ Rachel whispers the words. ‘Do – do you think she killed herself?’
Zoya shrugs.
Rachel presses her free hand across her eyes, shutting off the tears that are forming beneath her lids. Elena’s child did not die in those Nazi murder pits on the edge of the city. Mykola’s lie had been unspeakably cruel.
‘How did you find out?’
‘Elena told me she had a child,’ says Zoya. ‘One afternoon while we were folding sheets. I think the burden was too much. So I started looking. It was difficult, but I know who to ask. And this man was following her. I made the connection that Elena could not. He left horrible things on her doorstep. He tied dogs together to make them bark all night, or paid Stepan to do it for him.’
‘Stepan?’
‘Stop repeating. Yes, Stepan. He does anything for money. He is spy!’ Zoya makes a sour face. ‘Well, I have Elena’s rent money, she left it in a box under her bed, five thousand dollars, and you know what I am going to do with it? I am going to buy a lawyer who will dig up the crimes that Mykola Sirko has done. He does not deserve your pity, you understand?’
‘Shh, Zoya, please…’ Rachel sees a baby in her mind’s eye, falling, falling. Maybe it is Mykola, or maybe another. She blinks. ‘It is Stepan I wanted to talk to you about. Look after him. Elena loved him, like a grandson. We can’t abandon him.’
Now there is a glint of triumph in Zoya’s eye. ‘But you can – you are disappearing! Poor little Snegurochka!’
Rachel’s heart is thumping. She fights back the urge to count the cars, count the passers-by. In three days she will be on a plane. In four days she will visit her own mother, still the same daughter, now with different knowledge inside her. She takes a breath. ‘Sometimes you say I have no business being here; then you say I am wrong to leave. Well, I didn’t ask for things to happen, but there are consequences, they pile up even when I do nothing. And if I ask for your help, that’s something, isn’t it? It’s not everything. I am leaving. But it’s something.’
Zoya turns her head and looks out of the window. She is frowning, as usual, and in the glare of sunlight Rachel sees a woman who might be thirty, or fifty, with dark roots showing through her bleached yellow hair.
‘I won’t give him Elena’s money,’ says Zoya.
‘That’s not what I meant—’
‘So you might as well know. Stepan is already sleeping at my flat. In my grandfather’s bed.’ Zoya covers her mouth with her hand, but her glistening eyes betray her. ‘The little rat tells me it smells of piss. Ha! I tell him it is better than the other.’
Chapter 27
THE DAY BEFORE Lucas and Rachel are due to leave Kiev, Rachel goes for a walk. It is the first day of September, a Sunday. The summer has been hot and dry since the early rain in June; already the horse chestnut leaves are starting to curl at the edges. There is a tang in the air, almost acidic – a whisper of coolness. Ivan doesn’t want to be in the pushchair, but it is after lunch and he will sleep soon – precious time she ought to use for packing. She isn’t ready to leave, though. Not until she has taken one last stroll. The pavements and footpaths are woven through her now, their circuitous routes bound to her nerve-endings.
Rachel pauses at one of the new craft stalls outside the monastery. The table is laden with wooden toys, some brightly painted and gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. Others are plain, cheaper, the do-it-yourself variety of stacking dolls – one for papa, one for mama, one for baby, or two or three. She is tempted by a bell-shaped figure with intricate gold and blue patterns on its skirt that tinkles when she lifts it.
Ivan reaches forward, his sunhat tipping back from his head as he strains at the belt of his pushchair. His clothes are summer-thin and he isn’t wearing shoes, so the woman behind the table scowls disapprovingly, but Rachel doesn’t care. She asks the price of the toy, counts out the right money and when it is handed over she pops it into her bag. Another souvenir for her son, she thinks. He is too young to remember their walks, the things they’ve seen. It will keep him entertained on the plane.
She turns the corner and heads along Lavrska Street towards the top end of Tsarskoye Selo.
Mykola crosses himself three times as he emerges from the little church in the Lower Lavra and exits the monastery via a gate in the wall. His car is parked a short distance away near the bus stop; he prefers to approach and leave the monastery on foot, to spend a few minutes alone to consider his petitions to Our Lady of the Dormition. His bodyguard, loitering in the trees, flicks away his cigarette when he sees him, and Mykola tries not to show his irritation as he climbs the steps at the edge of the park. The practicalities are distasteful to him, but security has become a necessary evil. These days paying the hospital bills of the local police chief’s daughter won’t keep the snakes in the sewers. He knows someone has opened a file on him down at the Justice Ministry.
Today he has business to attend to, an appointment in town. The thought distracts him from more recent preoccupations: a certain breathlessness, an inability to sleep. His doctors tell him his heart is healthy, but in the church just now he had to put his hand on the wall to steady himself. He’s a businessman, yet he also sees ghosts.
At the top of the hill, Lavrska Street is full of trucks and trolleybuses. It takes him a few seconds to adjust to the traffic, though he doesn’t resent the pollution or the sense of organised chaos around him: it is always good for cash-flow, for progress.
Then, just as his bodyguard opens the door of his silver Lexus, he notices a woman with a pushchair on the opposite side of the street.
He gestures to his man to wait for him at the car and walks south-east, in the direction of the river.
Ivan starts wailing as soon as Rachel turns into Panfilovstev Street. He wants to walk, his new obsession, but he likes to touch everything and there is broken glass amongst the weeds along the fences.
‘Let’s go to Elena’s house,’ Rachel murmurs, unwilling to return to the apartment just yet, and as she pushes her son down the rutted lane that dwindles between the cottages and the noise from the main road fades and the stones beneath the buggy’s wheels crunch and pop, he sits up. Eyes wide, he grips the sides of his buggy like an infant prince to whom all things – the insects, the overhanging branches, the weeds in the potholes before him – are both fascinating and unworthy.
The house, when they stop in front of it, has been transformed. A triple-glazed veranda runs along the front, with white wicker furniture just visible beyond the toughened glass. The path to the front door is paved with marble and security lights stare, blankly, from their steel mountings beneath the eaves. To the right sits a brand-new garage, its door open, empty, a dark maw. Beyond it Rachel can see the tiled roof of the sauna. The workmen haven’t quite finished yet; their tools and some bags of sand or cement lie beneath a tarpaulin.
The house itself is quiet. Deserted, even. The upstairs shutters are closed. If Suzie were here, Rachel would be embarrassed to be found outside, uninvited, but the stillness convinces her that no one is home. Turning left, she pushes Ivan slowly alongside the old blue-painted picket fence that marks out the property’s perimeter. The fence seems out of place now. Rachel recalls talk of a wall or something more secure, more private. She peers at the once-neat vegetable beds, already a tangle of bolting carrots and leeks, and wonders when these, too, will be concreted over.