Jack Grimwood - Moskva

In the same hour that a sergeant in the Moscow police threw a tarpaulin over the naked body of a boy below the Kremlin Wall, a missile pulled by a diesel train a thousand miles away jumped its rails approaching a bend and killed everyone on board. Faced with such a disaster, the local soviet took the only decision it could.

Military bulldozers began gouging a 200-yard trench in the dirt.

In the weeks that followed, any evidence that the track had not been properly fixed was buried, along with twisted rails, the wreckage and the bodies it had contained. Fresh track was laid along the edge of a lake and fixed properly this time. The accident simply ceased to exist.

In Moscow, the truth was harder to hide.

It was six in the morning, not yet dawn, and the old man using the short cut behind Lenin’s Tomb was old enough to remember when Resurrection Gate still guarded the entrance to Red Square; back in the days before Stalin had it demolished to make it easier for tanks to parade.

The old man was unkempt, shaggy-haired. He’d been born to peasants and fought beside Trotsky in his teens. He would be happy to resign his seat on the politburo if only the USSR had someone to replace him.

That fool Andropov, dead after fifteen months. Chernenko didn’t even last that long. Now Gorbachev, practically a child…

How could he possibly step down?

The man only realized something was wrong when a torch momentarily blinded him. It was lowered quickly, lighting trampled snow. The sergeant was apologetic, abjectly so. ‘Comrade Minister. Sorry, Comrade Minister… I didn’t realize it was you.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘A car crashed into a bollard.’

‘What kind?’

‘Sir?’

‘A Zil, a Volga, a Pobeda?’

‘A Volga, sir. A new one.’

The old man frowned. The waiting list for a Volga was so long it could be resold instantly for double the original price. Even in a country where vodka was often the only way to keep out the cold, crashing a new one would be more than unfortunate.

He watched the sergeant shift nervously from foot to foot.

How long would it take him to realize the obvious? There would be tyre tracks in the snow if he was telling the truth. He didn’t blame the man. He’d obviously been ordered to lie.

‘Tell them I insisted on seeing for myself.’

‘Yes, Comrade Minister. Thank you, Comrade Minister.’

They should have been around when Stalin was alive. Then they’d know what real fear was. Ahead, lit by uplights on the Kremlin Wall, a major of the militsiya , Moscow’s police, stood bareheaded before a politburo member the old man had never liked. The man’s preening idiot of a son was on the far side.

‘Vedenin,’ the old man said.

‘Comrade Minister? You’ll catch cold.’

That was Ilyich Vedenin for you, the old man thought sourly. Always willing to state the obvious. At their feet, falling snow turned a tarpaulin white.

‘Well, aren’t you going to show me?’

Vedenin’s son yanked back the cover to reveal a boy of twelve or thirteen, apparently asleep. He was naked, his head and any body hair shaved clean. His mouth was very slightly open and his genitals looked tiny. The jelly of his eyes was milky white and he stared so blindly that for a second the old man looked away.

The little finger of the boy’s right hand was missing. The cut was clean, no blood on the snow beneath. Kneeling, the old man touched the boy’s chest and then his face, almost gently. The flesh was hard as ice.

‘Strange,’ he muttered.

‘What is, sir?’

‘He can’t have been here long enough to freeze.’

The old man was readying himself to stand when he paused and covered his action by tapping for a second time the white marble of the frozen boy’s chest, pretending to listen to its dull thud. Then he checked that he’d seen what he thought he’d seen.

Almost entirely hidden in the boy’s mutilated hand was a tiny wax angel.

That was unnerving enough. What was more unnerving still was that the angel had the boy’s face. Glancing up, to make sure he wasn’t being watched, the old man palmed the angel and pocketed it.

There was a message in the whiteness of the wax.

As there was in the frozen state of the body placed so carefully in front of the Supreme Soviet’s centre of power. The old man had to admit he was slightly shocked that the dead boy and the figurine should come together. Not least because the latter could only have come from someone he knew to be dead.

The British embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment was across the river from the Kremlin. As the ambassador was fond of reminding people, the sight of the flag on its roof once so upset Stalin that he demanded the building back. When the British refused, Stalin had curtains put up to hide the view. Anglo-Soviet relations were better these days.

But not by much.

The last man to arrive at that night’s party was a major in British Army intelligence, recently seconded to Moscow at short notice and with the kind of ill-defined job that annoyed Sir Edward intently. The ambassador liked people who knew their place. He also liked to know what that place was. It might have reassured him to know the major wasn’t a whole lot happier.

The place, the people, the party… none of them fitted Tom Fox’s idea of a perfect New Year’s Eve.

He’d arrived five days earlier to discover that barely anyone at the embassy knew he was coming and those who did seemed bemused by the fact. Only Sir Edward had been unsurprised, and he’d been disapproving without bothering to say why.

Tom managed fifteen minutes before heading for the nearest balcony and an emergency cigarette. Standing in a chill wind, with snow splattering on to his dinner jacket, he looked resignedly at the icy flatness of the Moskva River and wondered how soon he could head back to his flat.

He’d been in the Soviet Union less than a week.

It was already too long.

If Caro were here, she’d say go and make friends. She’d know what to say and who to say it to. His wife’s talent for socializing had rubbed off for a while; until things soured between them and he’d stopped bothering. When the balcony door creaked, he refused to look as a figure came to stand beside him, leaning against the cold balustrade.

‘Got a cigarette?’

He passed his packet across without comment.

‘I’ll need a lighter.’

Tom put his Bic on the balustrade where it wobbled in the wind until the girl closed her fingers around it. As it flared, and she put up a hand to shield the flame, he noticed a jade ring on her engagement finger and a graze on her wrist.

‘These are foul.’

He nodded.

With the tiny stub of tobacco only half gone, she flicked her papirosa over the edge and they watched the wind whisk it away, darkness taking it long before it hit the snow below. ‘It’s bloody cold out here,’ she said.

Tom nodded.

‘You don’t say much, do you?’

Shaking his head, he kept his gaze on the red brick of the Kremlin Wall, which was lit from below. He’d been told how many kilos the red star on top of Spasskaya Tower weighed, how much power it took to make it glow. Like most of what he’d been told in the past week, he’d forgotten. He had a sense though, as the balcony door shut, that he’d remember the girl. If only because she’d been wearing black jeans and a dinner jacket of her own.

Then he blinked, and the moment was gone, and he forced himself back inside, heading for the floppy-haired young military attaché whose job it was to help him settle in. Gold cufflinks, signet ring, a dinner jacket he looked as if he’d been born to… Tom sighed; he should give the boy a chance.