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

He caught her staring at him. ‘That will be all, Captain.’

Ever since she had been a child, Natalya thought the upholstered chair with the wooden back resembled a small throne. Apart from her brown eyes and some jewellery that was too dated to wear, it was the only physical reminder of her mother’s existence. After her parents’ divorce, the poor woman had worked herself to an early heart attack and died in it. Mikhail was there now and on the table in front of him were half a dozen shopping bags and a plate with slices of sausage and bread that he was eating with gusto.

She picked up his dripping raincoat and fixed it to the hook at the back of the apartment door then unpacked the bags by mutual agreement, knowing he couldn’t be trusted to put everything away in the right places

He asked, ‘How about some tea, Angel?’

It was an affectation that used to annoy her but the habit was too ingrained. At least she’d managed to stop him calling her “babe”, “little fox”, and all his other annoying epithets. She frowned briefly then smoothed it away. ‘We only have postman’s. We forgot to buy loose leaf.’

‘ We forgot?’

‘OK, you forgot. But apart from that, you did well.’

There were other things he’d gotten wrong according to Roscontrol , a citizens’ consumer group she followed. The smoked Odessa sausage he was tucking into was made from animal skin and soya; at the onset of winter, the windscreen cleaning fluid he’d bought would freeze in his Mercedes; and most alarmingly, the bottle of Slavyanovskaya mineral water exceeded alpha radiation limits.

He waved the knife at her. ‘You want some?’

‘Not hungry. I’ll eat later.’ She patted her stomach and hoped it wouldn’t give her away by growling.

While Mikhail had been shopping she had called Yulia Federova and told her to attend police headquarters on Monday morning for a formal interview. The rest of the afternoon and early evening had been wasted scouring the internet, trying to find a way to contact Zena’s father.

‘Where’s Anton?’ he mumbled while chewing.

‘Don’t know. Maybe at Dinara’s? According to the terms of your divorce, he is supposed to live there.’

‘Hmm,’ he mused, ‘more like Tanya’s. I hope he’s behaving himself.’

She finished unpacking the shopping then switched on the kettle before retreating to the study. Sitting at their computer desk, she typed ‘Zena Dahl’ on the Yandex search engine but it returned little except for links to the missing girl’s Facebook and VKontakte pages. She switched to Google, but struggled to find her amidst the other Zena Dahls who had a higher net presence. Next, she tried the father, Thorsten, and followed a link to the landing page she had seen earlier for GDH Dahl Engineering . There was nothing of note there and she returned to the search list finding an InformationWeek commentary on the liquidity issues the company was facing due to the oil price collapse and increased competition from China. She grew bored of the article’s dry, financial language and returned to the main search again, this time coming across an image of the company’s main stockholder on the Forbes website. Thorsten Dahl was a blond, big chested Viking wearing a frayed fisherman’s jumper. The only concession to his elevated position in Swedish society appeared to be his neat, side-parted hair.

‘Fuck,’ she said aloud. Dahl was sandwiched between a pair of Tetra Pak billionaires under the heading of ‘The World’s Highest Net Worth Swedes.’

‘Thorsten Dahl is rich,’ she shouted through.

‘Yeah, I told you he is.’

‘No, I mean he’s rich like an oligarch.’

‘The kettle’s boiled,’ she heard Mikhail shout, already bored with the conversation; presumably he knew already.

‘Thanks,’ she shouted back, ‘I’ll have tea.’

She returned to the search results and clicked on a website run by a group of Swedish anarchists. They had posted a picture of Dahl hauling skis outside a villa near Åre and another of him posing with environmentalists in front of an eco-cabin made from recycled glass. She scrolled past photographs of his island retreat on the Sankt Anna archipelago, his six-room pied-à-terre in central Stockholm, and finally, his ancestral pile in Gothenburg. If the online translation was correct, the anarchists were calling him an ugly capitalist boar, but when she looked at Dahl’s picture again, she could have sworn he’d become quite handsome.

She heard Mikhail talking and wondered if Anton had returned, his finely honed sixth sense telling him the fridge had been restocked.

The door to the study opened. ‘Is that my tea?’

‘No,’ Mikhail sighed, ‘I’ve just had a call from a lawyer.’

‘Criminal… or divorce?’ she smiled brightly.

‘Commercial, I think. Someone passed on the messages I left for Dahl. He works for him and is based here in Piter . The name’s Anatoly Lagunov.’

‘Did you ask him about Zena?’

‘He did all the talking. Dahl was on his way to Düsseldorf when he got my message.’

‘So what’s the plan?’

It was nearly eight and she hadn’t started cooking. With Anton away they might find a restaurant, maybe a romantic one if Mikhail could stomach it.

‘His lawyer – Lagunov – is coming here.’

‘Here?’

She frowned. To say it was irregular was putting it mildly, but there again the whole investigation had an unofficial tone to it. Until Zena Dahl’s disappearance was confirmed as a kidnapping or murder, there could be no teams working shifts in dedicated rooms; instead, she had her husband – when he didn’t have better things to do – and an unreliable sergeant.

Mikhail sliced the sausage with the knife. ‘I told him we’d see him at the station tomorrow but he’s briefing Thorsten Dahl tonight and wanted to talk to us first.’

‘And you agreed to this?’

‘Not quite.’ Mikhail gave her a wolfish smile. ‘I told the lawyer to come here then we’ll all see Dahl together.’

‘So when is this happening?’

‘As we speak. Dahl’s plane is diverting to Pulkovo. He doesn’t have a visa so this way he can talk to us without officially setting foot on Russian soil.’

‘Misha, what are you talking about?’

‘We’re meeting Dahl on his Gulfstream, Angel.’

After fifteen minutes of speed-cooking that produced a green salad and her second pizza in two days, she heard the apartment’s buzzer and stuffed a slice of pepperoni in her mouth as Mikhail left to meet Anatoly Lagunov at the main entrance.

She was still chewing a few minutes later when she heard the doorbell. A stream of liquid trickled from the tip of Lagunov’s umbrella as he propped it against the exterior wall in the hallway. He was wearing a charcoal suit that fitted his stocky frame and had presumably been tailored. As he looked up, sharp eyes covered by rain-spattered, metal-rimmed glasses met hers. He removed his spectacles and wiped them on a lint cloth from his trouser pocket, then smoothed his damp, grey hair with a hand.

The impression she had of him was one of negation. Anatoly Lagunov was the type of man the intelligence services liked to recruit: he looked fit as well as intelligent, but more importantly, his face was utterly unmemorable. He was a person who could never light up a room so much as glide in and out of it unnoticed, extracting all the gossip. Zena’s elderly neighbour had offered a similar, bland description of the man who had visited her apartment block the day before.

She swallowed her mouthful. ‘What have I missed?’

‘Introductions,’ Mikhail offered. ‘This is my wife, Natalya, and Mister Lagunov is Thorsten Dahl’s… what do you call yourself, Anatoly?’