The Medieval Murderers - The False Virgin

Boris Malenkov gazed from his top-floor window at the high summer clouds. He glanced again at his Rolex, then stared out of the window once more. Young Deverill was late by all of eleven minutes. When he arrived, Boris would give Mikhail… he would give him… He struggled to remember the right English expression. A piece of his head, was it? Or maybe it was a piece of mind? Anesha could have told him which one was right. He always relied on her to correct him when he made mistakes in his English. But Anesha was no longer here to put him right.

Boris Malenkov’s thoughts turned from his wife and back to his visitor. His irritation at Mikhail was tempered by a reminder of what the young man was bringing. If he really was carrying it – the text message had been no more than the single word ‘BUTTERFLY’ – then there would be no reproaches for his lateness, none at all.

There was a tap at the door. Boris trundled round expectantly but it was only Eric Butler.

‘Excuse me, Mr Malenkov, but is your guest staying for lunch?’

‘How did you know I had guest?’

‘Sonia mentioned someone was coming to see you and I thought that you might be requiring me to cook for two.’

‘No guest for lunch,’ said Boris, and then corrected himself. ‘I mean, no lunch for guest.’

‘Very well, Mr Malenkov.’

As Eric Butler made to close the door Boris raised his hand. ‘I do not want lunch myself. And please find something to do yourself downstairs. In fact, take afternoon off.’

‘Thank you, Mr Malenkov.’

After the door closed, Boris waited for the clank of the lift taking Butler to the ground floor. While he waited, he looked at the icons arrayed on the walls of this top-floor room, part of his private quarters. He looked at the icons without really seeing them. The autumnal glow of their background was as natural to him as the sun, while the elongated, clear-cut features of the saints were familiar, like the faces of his long-dead parents. The exterior wall with its windows giving a view across the treetops of Eaton Square was the only one not covered with icons.

He heard the soft thump of the lift as it reached the ground floor. Boris had not even been aware that Eric Butler was up here on this level, in his little kitchen at the back. Generally Boris liked his unobtrusiveness. He liked the people who worked for him to be quiet and discreet. Sonia should not have mentioned to Eric Butler that a visitor, a guest, was coming to call. He would have a word with her, he would give her a… suddenly he remembered the expression he’d been searching for. It was ‘a piece of his mind’.

If Boris Malenkov had eavesdropped on the scene now taking place on the ground floor, he would most likely have given both Sonia Davies and Eric Butler a piece of his mind. Eric strolled over behind the desk where Sonia sat working her way through a book of sudoku puzzles. He waited to catch her attention and when she did not look round, he reached down, pushed his hand inside her blouse and gave her right breast a friendly tweak.

‘Eric, no,’ said Sonia, dropping the book and wriggling away from him, but not doing so especially quickly. ‘What if he’s watching? You know he doesn’t like that kind of thing. Thinks I’m still a virgin, probably.’

She nodded towards the CCTV camera tucked below the elaborate cornice over the door and angled directly at her desk. Another camera covered the entrance porch and a third surveyed the small walled garden at the rear of the house. All of them fed into a composite picture on a monitor on Sonia’s desk as well as to another screen on Boris Malenkov’s floor.

‘It’s never switched on these days upstairs,’ said Eric, taking his hand out of her blouse but not moving from his position behind Sonia. ‘Or if it is on, Boris never looks at it. Why should he? When was the last time he had a visitor?’

‘He’s expecting one now,’ said Sonia. ‘The gentleman is a few minutes late. Mr Malenkov will not like that.’

‘That’s the mysterious gentleman visitor, the one you won’t tell me about.’

‘Because I don’t know much about him, except he’s young and good-looking. Get away, Eric. I don’t like you behind me.’

‘You don’t?’

Eric Butler moved around and stood in front of Sonia. He was a small man, with deep brown eyes. Sonia was a round blonde. She and Eric had started sleeping together about three months ago. Coincidentally or otherwise, that was about the time it became obvious that the Anesha Foundation was on the skids. The purpose of the Foundation, named for Boris Malenkov’s late wife Anesha (which means chaste in Russian), was to restore purity to the motherland. It was an almost missionary enterprise, one set up when Boris decided on London as his home after making his money – and making enemies – in the newly liberalised Russia. Now in his early seventies, Malenkov had once been no more than a Soviet Party bureaucrat working in the gas industry. Luck and a little arm-twisting enabled him to earn a fortune after the old system fell apart.

But Boris Malenkov was no oligarch in exile. Once in England, his latent spirituality emerged, spurred by the death of Anesha. He set up the organisation in her name, using the Eaton Square house as office and residence. Yet the fortune he brought from Russia eventually dwindled until only a small deposit remained. Where once a dozen or more dedicated young men and women – some English, but most of them expatriates – had prepared pamphlets and flyers, organised appeals and meetings, and liaised with similar organisations, all for the sake of holy Russia, now there was no one left at the house. No one apart from Eric Butler and Sonia Davies. Not that these two engaged in any missionary-style work, they simply held the fort. Eric Butler did a spot of cooking, as well some tidying up and sorting out of papers. Sonia Davies was the receptionist, although there was rarely anyone to be received these days. In between the ground floor and the top one where Boris himself worked and ate and slept, there were rooms full of slightly out-of-date office equipment, printers and filing cabinets, whole floors where the lift never stopped.

‘Where’re you off to then?’ said Sonia.

‘Going for a walk,’ said Eric. ‘He doesn’t want me up there, he doesn’t want me to do lunch for him and his mysterious visitor. Just as well, since there’s nothing in the kitchen. The cupboard is bare. I’d have to break into the petty cash if he wanted food.’

‘You’d be lucky,’ said Sonia.

‘Why doesn’t he sell some of those religious pictures?’ said Eric, reluctant to leave Sonia’s company. ‘He’d get more than petty cash.’

‘Mr Malenkov will not sacrifice the icons,’ said Sonia. ‘Not unless he’s up against it, and probably not even then.’

‘It’s real, is it, this religious thing?’

Eric Butler had been working for Malenkov only since the beginning of the year. Sonia had been with the Anesha Foundation almost since its inception. She knew that the Russian, of whom she was fond, had been motivated to found it partly by his distaste, even outrage, at the way in which his homeland was sinking into a mire of materialism and corruption. Also, there had been the unexpected death of his wife, who happened to be half-English. Malenkov had sunk all of his fortune into the Foundation. Now the money was running out. Of course, he could sell some of those strange golden pictures on the top floor but somehow Sonia didn’t think that he would. It wasn’t worth explaining why to Eric.

Instead she said to her lover: ‘Stop staring at my chest.’

‘Who’s to see?’ said Eric Butler.

‘I am. Besides, you never know if he’s… ‘She nodded again in the direction of the CCTV camera. ‘Later, you can look as long as you like.’