Tim Glister: Red Corona

One of the sirens that marked the passing of another half-hour blasted from a tower next to the power plant as Valera and Ledjo stepped through the door into their modest little home. As the door shut behind them they both let out a high-pitched scream, shook their bodies, and gave each other a big hug.

‘Hello, Pikku,’ Valera said, using her pet name for her son.

‘Hello, Mama,’ Ledjo replied, squeezing her waist tight.

Valera helped Ledjo take off his worn school shoes, which were at least a size too small, then followed him into their spartan living room, waiting for him to climb onto their sofa – the one seat in the room – before jumping on top of him. They both giggled together. Valera pretended she couldn’t feel her son’s ribs pressing into her as she tickled him.

‘Mama,’ Ledjo said, when Valera had stopped gently attacking his sides. ‘Teacher told us today that we have conquered space and all the stars are ours. Is that true?’

Valera grinned, leaned in close to Ledjo, and whispered ‘no’ in his ear. She could never have said anything as inflammatory as that single word outside, but in the privacy of her own home she was free to rebel a little.

Ledjo’s face turned into a thoughtful frown.

‘That must be why we have to hide under our desks every day,’ he said. ‘Because of the Mercan bombs.’

She wanted to tell him it wasn’t the American bombs he should be worried about, but some trigger-happy major accidentally launching one of theirs. But there’d be hell to pay if he accidentally repeated something so un-Soviet in the playground or classroom.

It was now past the naukograd ’s unofficial curfew. They had nowhere to go, but for the rest of the day they were safe from prying eyes and ears. Valera would make them a stew on their single-flame stove with whatever food they had in the kitchen, and they would play games they made up or tell each other stories, pretending to paint them on the living room’s bare white walls until it was time for Ledjo to go to bed.

For Valera and Ledjo’s first six months in Povenets B life had been very different. Zukolev had gone out of his way to make things pleasant for them. They were his favourites. They were invited to events at his home – the only two-storey house in the naukograd – with senior scientists. Ledjo was allowed to play in the major’s immaculately kept garden. They were even occasionally given extra meat from the monthly supply delivery. Karelia itself even wanted them to feel welcome, stretching out the warm autumn.

But one morning at the school gates, just as the winter chill was starting to bite, Valera noticed the same look on the faces of several of the other mothers – a mix of pity and disgust. Valera was the only woman in Povenets B who wasn’t just a wife or mother, and she had no friends among the other women to ask what the look meant. But one of them was kind enough to whisper ‘whore’ as she walked past Valera two mornings later.

Valera had brought a lie with her when she’d come to Povenets B, and she’d trapped herself in it. Ledjo had been the result of a brief affair with a young Red Army officer. The relationship had been intense, but when Valera told her lover she was pregnant and wanted to get married, he told her to get rid of the baby and then left himself. Valera didn’t want an abortion, but she also didn’t want a child who would have to grow up with the stigma of being a bastard. So, she invented another end to the story of the Red Army officer, which involved him dying tragically in service of Soviet glory.

She’d forgotten that the role of the mourning, withdrawn widow was one she was supposed to play for the rest of her life, until the stranger at the school gates had reminded her. They’d also made her realise that she wasn’t Zukolev’s favourite at all. She was his prey. She was the only single woman and only single parent in Povenets B, and she’d let herself be manoeuvred into a position that made both her and Ledjo extremely vulnerable.

Finally seeing the real agenda beneath Zukolev’s kindness, Valera refused his next invitation to dinner, and sent away the man who appeared at her door with two plucked chickens the following night.

Zukolev’s behaviour changed instantly. He became as cold as the winter wind that rattled through Valera’s bungalow and chattered Ledjo’s milk teeth. For the next eighteen months he delighted in making her life difficult, reminding her at every opportunity that he had the power to make it – and Ledjo’s – even worse whenever he wanted. He would sporadically summon her to his office to tell her that her research was too slow, too expensive, or just outright useless. It didn’t matter that he had no comprehension of the particular area of radio wave physics to which Valera had dedicated every last bit of her energy and life that wasn’t already given to Ledjo.

Over the last year their run-ins had become more frequent, and they now averaged one a week. Moscow had started to put pressure on Zukolev, so he was heaping it on her. Even locked away in the depths of Karelia, news from the outside world filtered through. Valera knew that America’s desire to win the space race was as strong as Russia’s. And she guessed scientists somewhere in the West were working on the same problems she’d been tasked with solving to help their side achieve a final, insurmountable victory.

‘What shall we have for supper, Pikku?’ Valera asked Ledjo as she untangled herself from his arms.

‘Caviar!’ Ledjo cried. ‘Goose!’

‘Of course, Pikku. Anything for you.’

Valera left Ledjo to lose himself his imagination, and scoured the dark kitchen cupboards for any potatoes or grains that might have magically appeared in them.

Years surviving on a subsistence diet had taken its toll on Valera. She was thin, and her skin was pale. The almond eyes that her mother had told her were so beautiful when she was young now looked like they belonged to someone far older. And her hair, which had never been thick but one upon a time had shone with life, hung dull and limp around her shoulders.

Other women in Povenets B tried to disguise their deterioration, tying their brittle hair into elaborate plaits or squirrelling away their meagre supplies of butter and oil to give their faces an unnatural sheen. Valera did neither. She had no interest in pretending life in the naukograd was any better than it was.

She also didn’t want anyone paying attention to her – especially Zukolev. But, as she took a blunt knife to half an old beetroot she’d been saving to make a thin borscht, she realised it was ten days since she’d last had to face the commandant of this prison she was locked away in, and she was overdue a visit.

After Manning had left Bianchi and Moretti’s flat with Peterson at his heel, several MI5 officers arrived to pack up the scene and arrange transport of the bodies to a secure morgue.

Knox made his own way back into town. There were no black cabs on Deptford High Street, so he caught a train into London Bridge, then walked over the river to Bank and took the Central Line to Oxford Circus.

The Central Line in July was one of the least pleasant places to be in the whole of London. It was hot, pungent with the smell of stale bodies and cigarette smoke, and, somehow, always crowded. But it was also the fastest way across the city.

Less than an hour after leaving Deptford, he was walking the short distance from Oxford Circus to Berwick Street and Kemp House, the eighteen-storey high-rise block that towered over the centre of Soho.

The building had only been complete for a few months and Knox had been its first resident. When he’d seen the announcement by Westminster Council about the block in the Evening Standard over a year ago he knew he had to live there, and he’d used some contacts to pull a few strings and cut a deal with the council to buy a flat on the top floor off the architect’s plans.