So she had made friendships with rich and richer men but even then it did not satisfy the empty spaces in her soul. Being given a new Mercedes-Benz for no other reason that the paintwork matched her eyes was very nice of course, but she remained as much a possession as the car itself.
And as she grew older and the lavish presents came perhaps a little less often it was then Myshka realised that what she really wanted above all else was power. It was better than money because where power went money soon followed. And it was better than sex—which in her experience was all about power anyway.
The acquisition of power was a challenge that sent her pulses fizzing in a way no sexual thrills had ever done.
She stubbed out her cigarette.
“Soon,” she promised her reflection.
She picked up her iPhone, scrolled through the contacts and set it to dial. It took a long time for the call to be picked up with a brusque, “Da?”
“Dmitry,” Myshka said huskily. “I begin to think you not love me anymore.”
“I was in a meeting,” Dmitry said. He had learned his English younger than Myshka and so his use of it was smoother.
Somewhere behind him Myshka caught a sudden burst of loud music and raucous voices.
“Where are you?” she demanded sharply. “It sounds like a peasants’ market.”
She heard him suck in a breath. Dmitry had once worked in just such a market selling cheap western imitations at anything but bargain prices.
“We are at a hotel,” he said. “There is a wedding party here.”
Myshka sniffed. “And he is there?”
“Of course he is here.” Dmitry’s tone warned her not to start anything. “He is my boss.”
“For now, yes?”
She heard him twist as if to cover her words. “Myshka—”
“We may have a problem,” she said switching to Russian.
“What kind of problem?” Dmitry stuck to the language of their adopted country. Sometimes she wondered if he did it just to put her in her place. Or try to.
“Lytton called in cleaners.”
This time the intake of breath was harsher and more apparent. “Instead of the police?”
Myshka rolled her eyes. “Not that kind of cleaners,” she said. “Kind that come after police. They looked at place where she die and somehow they know.”
Dmitry swore low and vicious but she heard uncertainty beneath the anger. “How?”
“I do not know. You make . . . mistake, perhaps?” She only phrased it as a question to salve his ego just a little.
There was a long silence at the other end of the line and she knew he would be pacing. When Dmitry was under pressure he could not stay still. “What happened?”
Myshka was reluctant to let him off the hook so soon but she said, “In end, nothing. “They report, wait for a time and then are told to clean anyway. I am merely keeping you—how do the English say it?—up to scratch.”
“Up to speed,” Dmitry corrected missing the intended irony. “Who are they?”
Myshka lit another cigarette and gave him the details she had coaxed or goaded out of Warwick—and how she had done it. She knew Dmitry did not like to hear such things. He was a man for whom sex and violence did not mix. A pity.
“And will your sick little puppy keep you up to speed?” he asked when she was through.
“He will do whatever I tell him,” she said and gave a throaty chuckle, “just as long also I tell him he is very bad boy.”
Dmitry swore again. “I have to go,” he said quickly. “Keep me informed, hmm?” And he cut the connection without waiting for her to speak.
Myshka pulled a face and put the phone down slowly. “You are welcome,” she said. “But next time . . . get it right, yes?”
8
Kelly arrived home late to find someone had nicked the low energy bulb in the hallway again. It happened regularly enough for her to keep a small LED flashlight permanently on her key ring. That at least allowed her to navigate the tangled assortment of bicycles and pushchairs behind the front door without breaking anything or impaling herself in the gloom.
Her flat was three flights up on the top floor of a shabby Victorian mid-terrace house. The young letting agent had done his best to extol the property’s virtues as he’d walked her up that first day. But by the time they reached the final dirty landing high under the eaves he hadn’t the heart or the breath for what remained of his sales pitch. He’d allowed her to wander through the scant three-roomed flat in silence.
Kelly had made his day by taking on the lease anyway.
The place had been lavishly described as a “cosy studio apartment in need of some modernisation” which translated as “crummy dwarf bedsit” in anybody else’s language. But it was affordable and a stone’s throw from Battersea Park on the south side of the Thames. And besides, Kelly had just been released from somewhere much worse.
After five years in a cell barely ten feet by eleven with cellmates who snored or sneered or ranted—and even one who tried to suffocate her while she slept—the three-hundred-square-foot apartment had seemed like untold luxury whatever its condition.
Her first task had been to tackle the place like a crime scene, suiting up and sanitising every inch, a two-foot segment at a time. She painted it in pale creams and greys and golds that made the most of the modest skylight and the single window. The transformation had taken up an entire weekend and proved a cathartic exercise.
As she slipped inside tonight and re-engaged the locks she reminded herself yet again that she was shutting the rest of the world out not shutting herself in.
She dumped her keys in the terracotta pot in the two-pace hallway, along with the rotor arm from her ancient Mini. Removing it proved the cheapest way to immobilise the car whenever she left it parked on the local streets.
Not that it was worth stealing but people round here were apt to overlook the more-rust-than-paint bodywork and the kerbed steel wheels if a vehicle fired and ran.
And Kelly had taken advantage of the prison educational programmes to learn motor-vehicle maintenance, so for all its sorry appearance the Mini was endlessly reliable and nipped through gaps in traffic like a jet-propelled skateboard.
She switched on the shaded lamps in the living area, one either side of the sofa that folded out into her bed. It didn’t bother her that the flat was tiny. It was her space, her retreat, her solitude. A place where nobody had the right to roust her in the middle of the night to order her outside so they could pick over her belongings at random.