Hyperventilating? An epileptic fit? Diamond looked to Ingeborg for assistance.
Then Olga found her voice and laughed heartily. “Worst for Konstantin, best for Olga.”
She was rejoicing in the prospect of her husband being banged up for years.
“What will you do?”
“I stay here in Bath. Enjoy myself.” She was fitting in the words between bursts of belly laughs.
“That may not be possible. Your house could be seized if it was bought with laundered money.”
“No problem. I buy another. Great Pulteney Street is nice.”
“Can you afford it?”
“Sure. I have money in bank, my money, clean money. Why do you think Konstantin marry me? My daddy he is capitalist pig, top businessman in Russia, has many companies. I ask, I get.”
“Won’t you be lonely?” Ingeborg asked.
“What for, be lonely? I have friends. Friends at church. English friends like Maeve.”
There was another sound from upstairs like a chair being moved.
They all went silent. And now heavy footfalls crossing the bedroom floor removed all uncertainty.
“Someone’s up there,” Diamond said.
“Is Maeve, I think,” Olga said.
As if on cue, Maeve stepped into the room with a tray of steaming coffee cups. “Did I hear my name?”
“Who’s upstairs?”
Diamond didn’t get an answer and didn’t expect one. He’d see for himself. He almost knocked the tray from Maeve’s grasp in his hurry to get out of the room and check. His damaged foot pained him but didn’t stop him from taking the stairs two at a time. He crossed the landing to the bedroom above the living room and immediately saw a window fully open, the stay unfastened, the curtain flapping in the breeze outside. Below the sill was a chair that must have been put there to climb out.
He went straight to it and looked down. In the time he’d taken on the stairs, nobody could have got far. He was expecting to find someone hanging from the sill or clinging to a downpipe or even standing on the small square of lawn at ground level.
He was wrong.
Across the street was Keith Halliwell.
Diamond called out, “Did anyone jump for it?”
Halliwell shook his head.
“Then how the hell—”
He didn’t get the question out. He was silenced by a sharp hit from behind. His right kidney took the force of it and before he could react to the pain, he was gripped in a tackle as ferocious as anything he’d ever felt in his rugby-playing days. He was dragged back from the window, flung on the bed and pinned to it. A forearm pressed his face into the bedding and a massive hand grabbed his arm and jerked it upwards behind his back until he yelled for mercy.
34
“Murat!”
The word meant nothing to Diamond. He had almost passed out from shock, suffocation and the near certainty that his arm had been wrenched from its socket.
“Murat!” The voice was Olga’s and she was bellowing her disapproval in words he took to be Russian. They needed no translation.
Diamond’s attacker got the message and acted on it, relaxed the hold, removed the shoulder choke, released the suffering arm and rolled off the bed.
Diamond still couldn’t move. He lay winded, wounded, inert and angry with himself that he’d stupidly walked into the trap. The open window and the chair beneath it had so taken his attention that he’d not checked to see if anyone had been waiting behind him poised to attack.
Ingeborg’s voice broke through the ringing in his ears. “Are you okay, guv?”
Dumb question in the circumstances, but what else could she have said?
“I’ll let you know.” He tried to extract his face from the bedding, felt an explosion of pain in his neck and flopped down again.
“Maybe if you roll the other way,” Ingeborg said.
He wasn’t willing to try.
“Who the hell was that?” he managed to say.
“I’ve no idea.”
Then Maeve’s voice joined in. “Murat is Olga’s boyfriend. He must have thought you were up to no good, coming up the stairs like that.”
Boyfriend? Olga was a married woman.
As if she read his thoughts, Maeve said, “He’s a lovely guy. A gentle giant really.”
“Really?” Diamond said with as much irony as he could express with his face flat to a mattress. Giant, yes. Gentle, no.
“He’s staying here, helping Olga get over her shock of being made homeless. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Now Olga spoke some words in English. “He is professional wrestler.”
Diamond needed no convincing of that. At the cost of more pain spreading from neck to shoulders, he managed to roll over as Ingeborg had suggested. She propped a pillow under his head.
“Try that, guv.”
He could see them now, the three women and his tall assailant standing over him like witnesses at an autopsy. The image was so disturbing that he wriggled into a position against the headboard that left no doubt he was a living being.
“Is he Russian?”
“Albanian,” Olga said.
Albanian. A memory stirred in Diamond’s befuddled brain, but he wasn’t ready to make connections. It was easier to listen than speak.
“But I speak to him in English.”
That was English? You could have fooled me, Diamond thought.
Big Murat gave a nod. He didn’t have any difficulty understanding her. The pair were intimate companions.
“We meet in St. John’s,” Olga added.
Diamond was no wiser. Could be anywhere. She might as well be talking about the capital city of Newfoundland.
Maeve filled in some details. “The Eastern Orthodox church, St. John of Kronstadt. They’re so hospitable. They gave him a place to sleep. Before that, he was living rough, poor man.”
The truth was coming together in his head now. Murat had been one of the two Albanians who escaped from Pinto’s basement prison in Duke Street. One had been recaptured and the other was unaccounted for.
Maeve added, “Now that Konstantin is out of it, Olga has invited Murat to move in with her.”
Simple as that. To a smart woman like Olga, there’s no such thing as a setback; there are only opportunities.
“Why did he attack me?”
“He thought you were a Border Force officer, I expect.”
And I should turn him in as an illegal immigrant, Diamond felt like saying. He was getting his head straight. But there was a more urgent matter to be settled than Murat’s status. “Help me up,” he told Ingeborg, offering his good arm and swinging his feet to the floor.
The room started spinning. He took a deep breath and stabilised himself as much by force of will as the blood flow to his brain. He moved to the open window and looked for Keith Halliwell.
Keith wasn’t in the street any longer.
“I’m needed downstairs.”
“You’re not safe to move yet,” Ingeborg said.
“You go first. I’ll steady myself with a hand on your shoulder.”
With reluctance, she allowed herself to be used as a prop. They got to ground level and he stood unaided.
“You can’t take anyone on in this state,” Ingeborg said.
“Watch me.” Brave words, but he knew she was right.
The terrace opposite was a mirror image of the building they were leaving. He crossed the street, taking in as much reviving air as he could. And when he reached the door of the house that faced Maeve’s, it was ajar, so he pushed it fully open and stepped inside.
The first person he saw was Halliwell. With him was a small, smiling man in a pink long-sleeved shirt and tight white jeans.