Питер Ловси - The Finisher

“Olga, you should report this to the police. He mugged you. He’ll do it to someone else.”

She shook her head and glared. “No police.”

“Why not? They could get your gold necklace back.”

“Not important.”

“I expect it was valuable.” Worth a small fortune, judging by the house and its contents. “The mugger shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Unless he’s caught and locked up, you won’t feel safe at home or in the streets. What was he like — young?”

Olga treated the question as if she was playing chess. She made a countermove. “You want cake, biscuits? I have.”

Maeve could be firm, too. “Would you recognise him again?”

She was too smart to fall for that. “So you are runner?”

“Me? Only a beginner. I signed up for the half marathon a few weeks ago and now I’m trying to get myself fit. Do you live here alone?” It was worth underlining the danger of a repeat attack.

But for some reason Olga was laughing at the question, laughter fit to ring the great bell of Moscow. “You think?”

“I’m asking. Do you?”

“Sometimes I think so, too. My husband, Konstantin, he is in Qatar five weeks. Before that, Kuwait one week. Much travel.”

“And you don’t go with him?”

She laughed again. “Too hot for fat woman.”

“Wouldn’t your husband want you to report the mugging?”

“To police?” She pulled a face and made a pushing gesture with her right hand that said husband Konstantin would want the forces of law and order kept at arm’s length. It begged the question how he made his money.

Maeve tried another tack. “How did you hurt your leg? Was that in the attack?”

“My fault. I fall down steps.”

“Whilst trying to escape from the mugger?”

“I think he is running after me, but he is not. Next I hear car drive off.”

“Don’t you think you should get yourself checked at the hospital? You could have broken a bone.”

“Hospital, no way. Questions, questions, questions.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re a victim.”

“Please, no more.” Olga reached forward. “Give me hand.” She grasped Maeve’s fingers and squeezed them gently. “You are such help to me. If you want, we can be friends. Meet again, yes?”

The slap of trainers on tarmac was a return to normality for Maeve. She was on her way back to Larkhall, finishing her interrupted run. The episode with Olga had been so bizarre that it was already starting to seem like fiction. Yet her aching shoulders and hip testified that it must have happened, that she’d brought different sets of muscles into play. She wasn’t running freely. Now that she thought about it, everything was aching from her toes upwards. Not for the first time she wished she could look forward to a bath at home instead of the feeble shower that dribbled lukewarm water over her. There was a strong appeal about the idea of soaking in hot water and easing the tension from her body. But her mood wasn’t totally down. Olga had been entertaining company, full of contradictions, obstinate, outspoken, vulnerable and lonely, and all of this graced by self-mockery and that lovely infectious laugh.

They’d agreed to meet again. First, Olga had offered the use of her “boring” basement gym. Maeve had turned that down straight away. Nothing could take the place of real running on solid roads.

They’d settled on a lunchtime walk in Henrietta Park as soon as Olga was fully mobile again. Walking was Olga’s way of slimming. It would be slow going for Maeve, but it would do her no harm.

That evening she smothered her sore shoulders with an ointment called Cold Comfort that was supposed to take away muscle pain. Her running guru, Trevor, wouldn’t have thought much of it. He’d prescribe stretching or something equally painful.

While the stuff began to work, she reflected on this latest unexpected twist in her life. In truth, the incident hadn’t been entirely outside her control.

She could have ignored Olga’s cries for help, but if she’d run on, nothing would have eased her conscience. Certainly not Cold Comfort.

I did the right thing, she told herself.

Didn’t I?

At eight on Sunday morning when the door was unlocked as usual and everyone trooped upstairs and along the street to where the silver van stood at the end, engine humming, Spiro stepped out of line and ran.

Jesus, did he run!

Powered by terror, he dashed up a street he didn’t know in a city two thousand miles from home.

He had been warned he would be crazy to try, but if he didn’t escape now he’d end up like the others, a zombie. You don’t know how well off you are, Spiro, they had said, with a job to go to and a bed to sleep on. Yes, he’d said, a stinking, low-paid, seven-day-a-week job and a mattress on the floor in a poky, windowless room shared with five others. Better than what you left behind, they’d said, which was true. But at least he’d had his freedom then and spoke the language and knew where he was.

Both of his parents had been killed in the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when he was eleven. In shock, he’d been sent with hundreds of others to an orphanage in Tirana. When he was fourteen the law required him to leave and fend for himself. The youth unemployment rate in Albania was about the highest in Europe and there were only part-time labouring jobs to be had, which is a major reason why two-thirds of the population have left the country. For the next fifteen years, Spiro had lived hand-to-mouth, job-to-job, in growing despair. He had been homeless and skint and supposedly in the prime of life when he’d got the offer of free passage to a new life in Britain with steady employment and lodging provided.

Spiro wasn’t daft. He knew this was a racket and meant travelling in a container with ex-prisoners and alcoholics and being classed as an illegal immigrant when he got there. He knew the living conditions would be basic and the work menial and underpaid and he could be deported at any time. Like the others on the trip he had hopes of surviving undercover for long enough to find a way of staying on.

His new existence in England was modern slavery, so deal with it, he had told himself. He expected hardship at the beginning. What he hadn’t foreseen was the psychological effect. The real need to escape was the gnawing realisation that he, too, was becoming a zombie.

After seven or eight weeks of drudgery — he was losing count — he had felt himself falling into the trap of mindless obedience. He was becoming conditioned just as they were, but he had always prided himself on being a thinking man. A few more days of the same numbing routine would do his brain in.

So he made his dash for freedom and sanity.

The gangmaster, the one the workers called the Finisher, didn’t immediately react. His back was turned while he counted twenty-three shambling, half-awake men into the van that transported them to the private recycling plant on the edge of the city. Getting them to squat and squeeze together in the limited space was always a slow process. He would only react when he realised the count stopped at twenty-two.

An all-out, do-or-die sprint.

Spiro was now twenty-nine, stocky, stronger than most of the others. He had once been a passably good runner, but he was out of condition and couldn’t last long at this speed. Even though his legs and back had been toughened by the long hours of standing, picking trash from the belt, the muscles needed for running hadn’t had any use in years. Desperation was driving him. A bullet in the back was a possibility. He didn’t know for certain whether the Finisher was armed. That pig had never produced a gun, never needed to with the wimps he managed, but an enforcer without a weapon is hard to credit.