Garry Abson - Motherland - A Gripping Crime Thriller Set in the Dark Heart of Putin's Russia

‘Yes?’

The door was opened a crack by an old lady with a hooked nose, clear plastic glasses, and a red and white patterned headscarf.

‘I’m calling for Zena.’

The woman fiddled with a hearing aid, twisting it around her ear. Natalya presumed she must have been watching her from a window because she wouldn’t have heard the bell. She waited as patiently as she could manage for the brown earpiece to be fixed in place.

Natalya resisted taking her ID card out. Especially with the citizens who’d lived through the Soviet era, a call from the police was something to fear and their mouths shut faster than rabbit traps. Another reason for subterfuge was obvious: if Zena had been kidnapped, and for a rich kid it wasn’t an unreasonable supposition, the release of information had to be carefully controlled.

‘I’m calling for Zena Dahl. Is this her place?’

‘Yes, but I don’t know where she is.’

‘I know,’ Natalya thought on her feet, ‘she’s gone away for a few days. You know what these young girls are like.’

‘Then what do you want?’ The woman’s face hardened and she used her position at the top of the stairs to stare Natalya down.

‘I’m a friend of the family. Zena called to say she thinks she left her gas oven on.’

‘A man came yesterday too. Is she in trouble?’ She eyed Natalya suspiciously.

‘Trouble?’ Natalya wrinkled her forehead as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her. ‘What did he look like?’

Up close, the old lady’s eyebrows were a burgundy colour, delicately dyed to match the hair hidden under her headscarf. Natalya watched the brows knit together in thought. ‘A bureaucrat: grey hair, suit.’

‘When was that?’

‘Early morning. Seven-thirty? I saw him in the street when I went out at eight. He tried to hide his face in a newspaper but it was him.’

She’d ask her for a better description of the man later, first she needed to have a look inside.

‘He called me “ babushka ”.’

‘I don’t know him,’ Natalya took the first step, ‘but men can be very rude sometimes. Did he say who he was?’

‘No.’

‘See? We’re better off without them. Anyway,’ Natalya pushed hair from her eyes and took another step, ‘I need to turn her oven off but I just wanted you to know so you don’t think I’m a burglar.’

‘Do you have a key?’ the woman asked, standing back to let Natalya enter.

Like most of the older buildings, the hallway was neglected to the point of abuse and there was a strong, unpleasant smell of ancient tobacco.

‘No,’ said Natalya stepping inside. There were two doors on the ground level; the one on the right was closing slowly, presumably the old woman’s.

‘Is that Zena’s?’ She pointed left at a door that was solid enough to make an OMON riot squad pause for thought.

The woman grunted.

‘Then I might need to break a window. I’ll send someone to fix it right away, I promise.’ She took a step back and offered the woman a reassuring smile.

‘I moved here in 1978 with Andrei, my husband. He was a Brezhnev man.’

Natalya groaned inwardly and turned to face her. ‘So you’ve been here a long time then?’

‘There used to be another family in Zena’s apartment. Irina’s man, Vitaly, was an apparatchik too. It doesn’t matter how much you feed the wolves, they still look at the woods.’

‘So they saw other women?’

‘Like an affair?’ The woman weighed the words, then spat them out in contempt. ‘They didn’t need to do that. Andrei and Vitaly worked the committees. They said to the young girls with children, you need a place for your new family. You don’t want to share the same shithouse with fifty people in a komunalka ? Excuse my language. Those girls, their men knew what was going on, but what could they do? Andrei and Vitaly made those girls fuck and suck for an apartment, then fuck and suck for a job.’

The woman’s top lip curled and Natalya winced.

‘They were gone for days and I stayed with Irina in her apartment, or sometimes she came to mine. We cooked together, our children played.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Natalya, edging away.

‘She died three years ago last October. Her daughter came to sell the apartment, she told me Irina had a clot on her brain. Come inside.’

‘But I—’

‘Come inside.’ A thick hand touched Natalya’s shoulder and she would have had to physically pull away to refuse.

Natalya watched, frustrated, while the woman fumbled with a key to open her door. She followed her into a room with worn parquet flooring covered by a threadbare Persian rug. The only furnishings were a dark-stained wooden wall-unit with cardboard boxes on top and a floral armchair facing a television that was still playing.

‘You like Botox?’ the woman asked.

‘What?’

‘Botox. You know, Putin?’ The old woman pointed at the television and cackled.

‘No, I’m not a fan.’

Natalya looked at the programme. A woman with bright pink lipstick who bore a closer resemblance to a porn star than a TV presenter was explaining why she wanted the president to be her boyfriend. The image on screen cut to show Vladimir Putin inside a mini-submarine off the coast of Crimea.

‘I am,’ the woman said, nodding resolutely. ‘He runs around with his chest out, telling everyone what a tough guy he is. Only a man with a tiny khui does that, but he wants to make Russia great again and there are some things you can’t argue with.’

Her thick fingers gripped the remote control and she pressed the mute button. ‘Here, give me a hand.’

There were open boxes of matryoshka dolls by the wall unit and Natalya guessed she sold them to tourists to supplement her pension.

‘You want to buy one?’ The old lady picked up a doll. ‘Do you see? Our leaders. All bald then hairy, bald then hairy, all the way back to Peter the Great. There are only seven in that set. It doesn’t sell because it stops at Andropov and no one remembers him. I’ve also got Harry Potter and Disney princesses – they do much better.’

Natalya took a matryoshka doll from the woman and saw Putin’s bald head on the outer layer. She opened the doll to find Medvedev inside with his neat brown hair, then a younger Putin, then Yeltsin’s white quiff, then Gorbachev with the oxblood birthmark on his bare scalp. She reassembled the doll set and put it back in the box.

‘Here, an old ape has an old eye. Look in this drawer for me.’

Natalya opened it to find it crammed full of rubbish.

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Her keys,’ the pensioner said in an exasperated tone as if speaking to an idiot, ‘Irina gave me her keys.’

Natalya grinned at the old woman.

Natalya waited for the old woman’s door to close then she heard the distorted voice of the TV presenter as the volume returned to normal. She took a pair of latex gloves from her handbag and snapped them on before turning the key in Zena Dahl’s metal door, careful to avoid the areas of the lock and handle.

Inside it was gloomy; long green curtains were drawn, allowing just enough light to see by. There was a pile of mail on the parquet floor that had been pushed through the door’s letterbox, presumably by the babushka . Natalya squatted to examine it, picking up the ones with postmarks then returning them to the same position; an envelope that looked like it contained a store card was stamped with the 22nd of June – two days ago. She closed the door behind her, seeing a denim jacket fixed to the hook on the back. Through the gloom she followed the small hallway into a sparsely furnished living room much like the old woman’s, with an ancient cabinet, a sofa bed, and a television on a stand.