It was amazing that she was the same age as Donna Grodsky. The girl in the George’s Head at Moulsecoomb may have been overweight, but she had been full of life and vigour. Whereas Marina Gretchenko looked as if all youth and energy had been drained out of her. Carole would never have recognized her from the photographs of the cocky, combative schoolgirl that had been all over the media at the time of her disappearance. Her cheekbones didn’t look fine, merely prominent and the dark hair had no lustre. Marina wore a faded blue raincoat with a scarf wound high around her neck. And in spite of the overcast October day, she had on dark glasses.
A child came running up to her and wrapped itself around her legs. She snapped something at him in Russian and he returned to pushing round the elliptical paint-defaced roundabout.
‘Yours?’ asked Carole.
‘Yes.’ The girl’s voice was hesitant and tentative, as if she hadn’t spoken English for a long time. ‘Four of them are mine. The little one’s over there in the buggy.’
In her drive over to Southampton Carole had been trying to plan how she would get into the forthcoming interview, but she needn’t have worried. Marina Gretchenko immediately asked, ‘Does my father know you’re meeting me?’
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘He doesn’t even know you’ve found me?’
‘No.’
The girl seemed considerably relieved by that news. ‘Then why’ve you got in touch?’ she asked.
‘Well, your disappearance was quite a big story.’
‘Was it?’ She sounded genuinely unaware of the media storm she had unleashed.
‘You must have seen the papers, the television reports.’
She shook her head. ‘My husband doesn’t like me reading papers.’
‘You mean you’re completely cut off from outside media?’
‘We are happy together as a family. We do not need interference from the outside world.’ The words were spoken doggedly, like an article of faith.
‘When did you get married?’ asked Carole.
‘Soon after I left home. I moved in with Vladimir for a while, but he said that was not good. We should be married. So we got married.’
‘What, when you were sixteen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you never thought to tell your mother?’
‘Vladimir said I should cut loose from my family. They were not Russian. We did not need them. My job was to be Vladimir’s wife.’
‘But you got in touch with your father?’
The girl blushed. ‘I did not want to, but . . . we were going through a bad patch financially. This was two or three years ago. Vladimir had lost another job, the third baby was on the way, it wasn’t a good time. I thought maybe I could ask my father for a loan, so I contacted him.’
‘How did he react?’
‘He was very surprised at first. He told me he had remarried and had two children. But he agreed to give us money.’
‘Does he still give you money?’
The girl nodded. ‘It is difficult,’ she said defensively, ‘for Vladimir. His English is not so good, it is hard for him to keep a job.’
In Carole’s mind a pattern was beginning to take shape, and it wasn’t a pretty one. ‘Does your father attach any conditions to the money he gives you?’
‘That I should not contact him. Which is why I was so worried when I heard from you. If he finds out you know who I am he will stop paying the money.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to tell him.’
‘You mustn’t ever do it. If Vladimir finds out we have lost the money from my father, he will . . . I don’t know what he will do.’
‘Beat you up?’ suggested Carole coolly.
‘No,’ said Marina Gretchenko immediately. ‘No, of course not.’ But the nervous way the girl pulled her scarf higher on her neck made Carole sure her conjecture had been accurate.
She felt an unreasoning fury mounting inside her. A fury towards Vladimir Gretchenko that she would feel for any man who beat up his wife. But an even stronger fury whose object was Iain Holland.
The cynicism of the man’s actions appalled her. Safe in the cosy world of his new squeaky-clean family, his thriving business, his promising political career, out of the blue he’d been contacted by the daughter he thought was dead. Having discovered Marina’s circumstances, locked into an abusive marriage with a husband jealous to the point of paranoia about any contacts she had outside the family, Iain Holland had realized that that situation suited him very well. Marina was as safely out of his new life as if she actually had been dead. And he could easily afford the small regular payments that would maintain that status quo.
‘There are,’ said Carole gently, ‘places you can get in touch with, people you can ring who can help in your situation. There are women’s refuges and—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Vladimir would find out. It would make things worse. When the telephone bill comes, he checks through the calls I have made and asks me to explain every one. And he will not let me have a mobile.’
‘You could make the call from a public phone box.’
‘No! If Vladimir found out . . . No.’ She repeated her mantra. ‘We are happy together as a family.’
‘Will your husband find out about my calling you?’
‘No. Fortunately when you rang he was out. There is a Russian club he goes to.’
‘But if I rang again?’
‘You must not ring again. All I needed to find out from you is that you will not tell my father what you know about me. If I have your solemn promise on that, there is nothing more that needs to be said.’ There was a desolation about the finality with which those words were said.
‘Marina, isn’t there anyone you can talk to? Don’t you have any friends? I met Donna Grodsky who you were at school with—’
‘Vladimir did not like Donna. He did not want me to see her.’
‘So is there no one else?’
‘Well . . .’ Marina Gretchenko looked across to where one of her children was crying. She barked out something in Russian. The child wiped its nose miserably and moved away. ‘There are not so many people in Southampton who Vladimir approves of. A lot of Poles, but very few Russians.’
‘So you do have a friend?’ prompted Carole.
‘There is a young girl Vladimir does not mind me talking to. He knows her grandparents from Brighton. They are relatives of his and she lives with them. But the old man is suffering from Alzheimer’s, so life is tough for her. Vladimir encourages me to talk to her. He thinks I can perhaps help her.’
‘What’s she called?’
‘Tonya Grace.’ The name meant nothing to Carole.
‘Why does she live with her grandparents? Are her own parents dead?’
‘Might as well be. God knows what happened to her father, he just went off. But her mother got into the Brighton drug scene. I think she’s still living round there somewhere, but certainly in no state to be of any use to her daughter.’
‘Marina, can’t you talk to this Tonya? About the troubles in your marriage?’
‘There are no troubles in my marriage. We are happy together as—’
‘If that’s true,’ said Carole sharply, ‘take off your dark glasses and let me see your eyes.’
But the girl wouldn’t do that. Which was tantamount to an admission that her husband beat her up.
‘Marina, are you sure you couldn’t talk to Tonya about . . .?’
‘No, I can’t. Certainly not at the moment. She doesn’t let me get a word in edgeways because she’s got so many troubles of her own.’
‘Oh?’
‘Usual stuff. Some boy she’s keen on’s been messing her around. Don’t know who he is, she met him through some sporting thing, I think. She’s always been keen on sport. Anyway, if I ring Tonya at the moment, I just get a whole lot of crying about this boy and then she was going on about something terrible she saw, someone getting killed, I don’t know. Anyway, basically, I’m not going to get any sympathy from Tonya at the moment.’ She checked herself. ‘Not of course that I need any sympathy. I only talk to Tonya because Vladimir thinks I can help her, and because she’s a relative, a Russian.’