Jack Grimwood - Moskva

Tom had no real desire to go back to Sad Sam, and there were things he needed to say. Things it was important for Caro to hear.

‘This means nothing,’ she said.

He nodded.

Undressing, Caro hesitated only once, when she saw the two plasters crisscrossing Tom’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Someone shot me. With a crossbow.’

She sighed, looked at him and moved in for a proper kiss.

The sex was slow and quiet. They stood in the window with the curtains drawn back, the room lights off, snow falling in fat flakes past their window and Manezhka Square spread out below them. Her body was as perfect as ever. She let him raise her foot on to a stool and slide into her, her breasts lifting in time with his thrusts. She had cried the very first time they made love, and she cried this time. Tom had no more idea why she’d cried then than now and knew that was his failure, not hers.

Before they slept, when all Tom really wanted was sleep, when his happiness was losing out to loneliness and he’d decided he didn’t need to say the things he’d thought he needed to say, she asked about Alex. He couldn’t even remember mentioning Alex. But apparently he had, the night she telephoned after he’d called Charlie.

‘Tell me,’ Caro ordered.

So Tom did.

From Alex cadging a cigarette on the balcony at the party, and what he’d said about cutting her wrists, through to his being arrested as he tried to board Yelena’s train and Sir Edward’s fury afterwards. Then, because he’d started being honest and didn’t know how to stop, he told her about Northern Ireland, about what he really did for military intelligence, about the people he pretended to be.

He touched her fingers to bullet scars in his leg and back, and they both understood what her not knowing said about when they’d last seen each other naked. And she lay, very still and very quiet, as he told her about being hunted across the hills above Crossmaglen and why he really hated multi-storey car parks. What she said when he was finished was not what he expected her to say.

‘Did it ever occur to you that Becca’s death might have been accidental? That she might genuinely have dozed off and hit a tree? That her being pregnant could have had nothing to do with it, that she simply hadn’t told us yet?’

‘Caro. How do you –’

‘How do you think I know? I demanded a copy of the report. Tom, I don’t need protecting. Rebecca was mine too. She could have been waiting for the right time to tell us. She might have had a clinic fixed. Ten weeks is early days.’

‘It wasn’t her boyfriend.’

‘I know, I asked him.’

‘I bet you didn’t kick the living shit out of him first.’

‘Charlie says Becca talks to him. He wakes up and she’s on the end of his bed. They have to keep their voices down so as not to wake the other boys.’

‘Dreams,’ Tom said.

‘You don’t think…’

‘That it’s somehow true? No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’

‘He says he thinks about her all the time.’

‘I know.’

‘How can you possibly –’

‘Because I do too. And if I do, you two must.’ Tom thought about it a little more. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like the idea of Becca talking to Charlie. If you talk to him, and it seems appropriate, please tell him to send my love.’

‘You’ve changed.’

‘After something like that, how can anyone stay the same?’

‘Becca told me once that she didn’t believe in time. Days were dams that failed, hours sticks thrown into the water to measure its speed. Minutes little better than seconds, dust on life’s surface, swept away before we could notice.’

‘Caro, what happened?’

‘To Becca? I don’t know.’ She buried her head in Tom’s shoulder while he pretended not to feel her tears. ‘Who knows? A stupid argument with… A party he didn’t go to. It could have been a one-night stand.’

‘She didn’t drink.’

‘You can have them without drinking.’

‘It helps,’ Tom said, feeling her withdraw slightly, and then her hand reached for his and gripped it tight.

He said, ‘I worry that…’

‘I have to believe she’d have told us if that had happened.’

‘Told you…’

‘Told one of us,’ Caro said, smoothing the creases from Tom’s face and kissing his neck as if the bad years had never been. Tom wanted to ask – so badly that he framed the words in three different ways, and held them all back because none were right – if the tenderness behind her kiss meant I remember you or goodbye.

‘Go back to Alex,’ Caro said.

So he described searching her room, his voice breaking as he told Caro about taking Alex’s Smash Hits , Jackie s and NME s from her bedside cupboard, then carefully replacing them. How he’d found the postcard, D and five kisses. How Davie Wong turned out to be a dead end, in not being her boyfriend, but how he’d given Tom an address for the party. How Alex had been long gone, but what remained of the boyfriend was there, tied with wire and quite possibly burned alive…

‘Tom,’ Caro sounded scared. ‘Who are these people?’

‘Monsters,’ Tom told her.

She hugged him tighter. ‘Don’t be so blasé about it.’

‘I’m not. But monsters are what I do.’

Sighing, Caro said, ‘I think I preferred it when I thought you were wasting your time with computers, microfiche and old books…’

He told her about being shot by Vladimir Vedenin with a crossbow. How he’d been moved from hospital to hospital, until the commissar had extracted him and had him put, under guard, in a hospital for senior KGB officers. Tom even told her about making Vladimir Vedenin drive across the ice. That surprised him.

He hadn’t intended to tell her that.

‘He died?’

‘He drowned.’

‘Do you regret it?’

She listened in silence as Tom told her why not. His points weren’t always in order. He doubted that many of them were very clear. He ended with what he’d been trying not to remember, what he’d originally thought the ultimate dead end, the reason he’d gone back to the supposed cult house.

The dead children in the cellar.

Then it was his turn to cry.

She held his head against her breasts, and when he was done, she asked if there was anything else. So he told her about Beziki’s suicide. The way Beziki had spun the revolver’s cylinder before he fired, the photographs of a boy being tortured to death in Berlin, and the sins of the fathers being visited on their children.

About the dead girl dumped in front of the House of Lions. How badly that had shaken the commissar. How badly that had shaken him.

About attending her autopsy.

‘This is about Becca, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it’s about Becca.’ Tom reached down to find her hand, holding it tight. ‘Well, it started out being about her. Now…’

Caro nodded. He didn’t need to say it.

Now it was about Alex.

‘You know what you haven’t told me?’ Caro said first thing next morning, when they woke to daylight streaming through curtains they’d left undrawn. ‘Why it is that you can’t spend the next few days with me in Moscow.’

So he told her what he’d told no one else.

About the deal he’d made with General Dennisov on the observation platform of the train. What the general had promised to let Kyukov do to Alex if Tom didn’t give him the photographs.

‘He has her then? Definitely?’

‘So he says. He brought me a photograph of his own…’

Slipping from her bed, Tom took his jacket from the back of the chair and dug into a side pocket, finding what he wanted.

‘It’s not pretty,’ he said.

Alex knelt naked on a recent issue of Pravda , her wrists tied behind her back, her head bowed and her hair fallen forward, but not enough to hide her tears.