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

Mikhail mumbled.

‘Are you eating?’

There was a chewing noise that made her grimace. ‘Breakfast, and I’m having fried eggs before you ask. We need to do some shopping. Have you got a signal on your mobile?’

She held it close to the windscreen then brought it back to her ear. ‘Four bars.’

‘Good. Can you put me on speakerphone and log onto VKontakte?’

‘Misha, I’m busy.’

‘Humour me.’

As soon as she clicked the speaker icon, the sound of chewing filled the car, making her feel queasy. She tapped the blue VK symbol on her mobile and the social network software filled the screen, listing recent updates from her friends and pages they had liked.

‘Now what?’

The chewing stopped and there was a slurping noise.

‘For God’s sake put me on speaker phone too so I don’t have to listen to that noise.’

There was a soft knock which she guessed was his phone being placed on their dining table. In the background she could hear cupboard doors opening and a murmur of conversation – Anton was up too and she wished she could be there, enjoying a leisurely breakfast with them.

She heard a slight echo when Mikhail spoke again. ‘Now look for the missing Sven.’

‘She’s Swedish, won’t she be on Facebook?’

There was another slurp, quieter now. ‘She’s on both. Have you done it yet?’

‘Don’t be impatient.’ She tapped in “Zena Dahl” then clicked on the search button. Only one profile image returned – a circular profile image of a skier wearing thick goggles and a woollen hat; a stripe of pink zinc oxide cream ran along the length of her nose. Like that, she was indistinguishable from half the girls in St. Petersburg. Maybe it was deliberate – a rich kid craving some anonymity.

‘The skier?’

‘That’s her. She has more pictures on her page.’

Natalya tapped on the image and selected the girl’s photos. She flicked through them until she found a clear one of Zena holding up a glass to the camera. ‘The wine glass?’

‘Yes, that’s the best I think. There’s been no activity on VKontakte since Wednesday. I’ve already checked her Facebook account – it hasn’t been updated since March and she only has forty-six friends.’

‘A loner?’

‘Maybe.’

Another plate clattered on the table, then she heard Mikhail say something indistinguishable. ‘What was that?’

‘Anton. I told him to eat his breakfast on the sofa while we finish talking.’

‘Hi, Natasha,’ a distant voice called.

She raised her voice in return, ‘Hi Anton.’

‘Haven’t we finished talking yet?’ She asked Mikhail.

‘I’ll speak to Rogov and call you back with her address.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Look at your phone again, her security is weak.’

She got the hint and opened Zena Dahl’s friends list. There were only four on the VKontakte profile and she studied the circular picture of the first one; it was of a pretty, narrow-faced girl with bright blue hair wearing a cowboy hat.

‘You see her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Meet Yulia,’ he said, stuffing egg into his mouth, ‘Yulia Federova.’

Natalya squinted in the bright sunshine as she drove along the wide highway with its scrub grass borders and grey and brown twenty-storey monoliths in the background. This was Primorsky District, the home of the people who’d never been invited to sit at the city’s rigged Roulette table where ruthlessness passed for luck. She turned her Volvo into Komendantsky Prospekt and parked under the shadow of a rusting tower crane whose jib, like an accusing finger, pointed at the centre’s Golden Triangle where properties changed hands for five thousand dollars a square metre and upwards.

Mikhail had offered to accompany her but she had insisted he stay at home in case two detectives intimidated Yulia Federova into silence – the woman’s brief appearance at Vasilyevsky police station suggested she was nervous. There was also the issue of Anton’s university place and she needed Mikhail to check his online account. The consequences of failure were almost too painful to think about: Anton spending years avoiding the soldiers who roamed the city challenging any boy of conscription age. She had heard stories of sons being dragged from Metro trains or plucked from their beds in the middle of the night by uniformed thugs. When she got home, she would check to make sure he’d paid the bribe.

She unlocked the glove compartment and took out her Makarov in its leather holster. First, she checked the clip and safety before fixing it to her belt along with a pair of handcuffs. The barrel of the gun was pressed against her hip bone, ready to tap out a bruise when she started walking; still, it was better than the shoulder harness she had worn earlier in her career which left painful friction marks on her right breast.

She was putting her leather jacket in the boot when a girl approached the building, pocketing a pair of sunglasses before switching a white holdall to her left hand to tap out a code on the door’s security pad.

‘Wait!’

The young woman heaved open the metal door and Natalya sprinted for the building, pulling out her police identification card as she ran.

The door closed on her fingers, its metal edges connecting with bone.

Her eyes watered as she strained to pull the door open with her other hand, dropping the identification card to the floor. ‘Damn it!’ she shouted at the retreating girl. ‘Why didn’t you hold it?’

She stooped to retrieve her card and saw the girl starting for the stairs.

Mikhail had got the address from Rogov. Yulia Federova was a common enough name but Rogov had got the girl’s birthday from her VKontakte profile and reduced the number of matches from nine to one. She looked around the building’s foyer, sighing at the “Out of order” sign on the graffiti-tagged lift door: the address was on the twelfth floor.

The girl turned on the landing, the sunshine through a steel-reinforced window framing her fine brown hair like the headshot of a model in a photographer’s studio. She was heart-stoppingly beautiful. The only difference was the hair. In her VKontakte profile picture Yulia Federova had been wearing a wig.

‘Stay there.’

The girl looked down with a frown then her eyes lowered a fraction to take in the gun and handcuffs.

‘Yes?’

She held out the card again, seeing a white line across her fingers where the metal door had closed on them. ‘Senior Detective Ivanova, Criminal Investigations Directorate. I need to talk to you.’

Yulia Federova took another step and her neat eyebrows rose in an attitude of indifference. ‘I’m in a hurry. Can you come back after lunch?’

Sure, Natalya thought, and then I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find you. ‘It’s entirely your choice. You can talk now or be charged with obstruction and spend the weekend in a police holding cell.’

‘We’re already talking, aren’t we?’ Federova raised her chin in a cocky display that suggested a history with the police. She’d ask Rogov to check Yulia for a criminal record if he hadn’t done already. It could explain the girl’s reluctance to give her full name and address at the police station.

‘Why don’t you make some tea?’ she checked her watch, it was a little after ten thirty.

‘Alright, alright, but the place is a mess and I’ve only got coffee.’

By the twelfth floor, she was testing the limits of her antiperspirant. They exited onto a long corridor with identical doors; Yulia Federova stopped outside one of them and took out a set of keys from the side-pocket of her bag. Natalya followed her inside.

The bedsit had a tiny partitioned bathroom and a double divan arranged diagonally to take up much of the room’s thirty square metres as if the girl was making an ironic statement about the lack of space by reducing it even further. To the left was a built-in wardrobe, incongruously large for the apartment, and to the right, a kitchen with a gas stove and small appliances designed for the single person. Straight ahead, there were windows running along the external wall where a glass door opened to a balcony. Outside, the view was of more tower blocks.