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

‘And Anton too,’ her sister said unconvincingly.

That was fantasy. Anton was legally an adult and he didn’t have the transferable skills to get himself a one-way ticket. On top of that, he wasn’t her son. Mikhail leaving without Anton was a joke, and she wouldn’t go without them.

‘Maybe,’ she said, to kill the conversation.

She looked at the screen again and tapped the mouse button to take her to the April transactions. Mikhail’s salary was there, as were the debits for most of their household bills. She tapped the mouse button again for March. Nothing there. She tapped it again, and again. On the January statement she saw it: an amount of three hundred and fifteen thousand roubles leaving the account, no doubt to pay off the Head of Admissions. She looked closer, unable to believe what she was seeing. Her heart started pumping and her mouth felt dry: a few days before, a sum of three hundred thousand had been deposited into his account.

‘Well, think about it anyway,’ Claudia said.

She was confident Mikhail had no other bank accounts, or at least none that he’d mentioned. In addition, he didn’t gamble and had never mentioned receiving a payout. There was no reason for anyone to give him such a large sum of money.

She clicked on the highlighted transaction to see where it had come from. There was no name, only a long string of digits that she realised was an international payment number: an IBAN. The payment had come from abroad.

‘I will.’

She opened a new tab, and the default Yandex browser appeared. She typed in “IBAN calculator” then copied and pasted the digits from Mikhail’s online account.

‘Do you know the story of frogs in boiling water?’ Claudia asked. ‘People always leave things until it’s too late.’

After taking a deep breath, she hit send. A name came up with a fresh link for The Limassol Trading Bank .

‘Shit,’ she whispered under her breath.

The bank’s website opened in a new tab when she clicked on the link. There was a small, square icon at the top of the page; a tricolour of white, blue and red. She tapped the flag and the page translated into Russian.

‘Are you there, Natalya?’

She copied the sort code and account number from the IBAN calculator and pasted them into the fields on the bank’s web page and clicked the ‘Go’ button.

‘Yeah, I’m here.’

A welcome page appeared and she tapped the flag again. This time there was an empty field asking for a six-digit passcode and an account name. She typed in “Mikhail Ivanov” and used his birthdate for the code, then clicked ‘Go’. An error message appeared explaining there was an error in the details entered and she had two tries left.

‘You don’t sound there.’

‘I was just thinking about the frogs,’ Natalya said, staring at the screen.

Her mind was reeling. Was this Mikhail’s account or did it belong to someone who owed him money? If it belonged to him then it was clearly illegal – public officials were banned from having overseas bank accounts. Worse than that, it was an offshore one of the type the mafia used to launder their dirty money. If it belonged to Mikhail then he was corrupt. There was no doubt about it.

‘What about the frogs?’ she heard Claudia say.

‘It’s not true,’ Natalya said after a moment. ‘The frogs don’t leave it too late. Some twisted scientist tried it with live ones. They all jumped out when it got too hot.’

She heard the alarm on Mikhail’s phone but it sounded distant; an echo in another room. She yawned, keen to dispel the nightmare floating inside her head: Anton in danger and she unable to do anything about it.

The alarm stopped. She was tired and sensed a cool trail of saliva running from the corner of her mouth to her jaw line. Without opening her eyes, she wiped it with the back of her hand but it came away dry. What time had she returned? Around four she guessed. It was coming back to her in flashes. She had left the apartment; too shocked at seeing the offshore bank account to climb into bed with Mikhail and pretend nothing had happened. There was another memory – she had gone to the Cheka bar and Semion the barman had flirted with her, offering free vodka. She had driven home drunk. Her fingers made contact with an upholstered wall as she reached for Mikhail, wondering what to say to him. She opened her eyes, puzzled, and stared at the edge of the sofa bed. She frowned, then remembered assembling it and lying down fully clothed because the bedding was at the top of the wardrobe in Anton’s room and she hadn’t wanted to disturb him.

At least it was Sunday and she could afford to deal with it all later. She closed her eyes and drifted off. There was a noise in her face, a metallic whine of a fly. She opened her eyes and saw Mikhail standing over her, an electric toothbrush in his mouth.

‘Oh God, what time is it?

‘Nearly ten,’ he mumbled.

She felt stiff and in need of a hot shower.

He was wearing the grey shirt his ex-wife Dinara had bought for him in the dying days of their relationship; it was a bad omen. ‘What the hell happened to you?

‘I couldn’t sleep so I went to the bar… the one Yulia said she had gone to with Zena.’

‘And?’

‘And I wasted my time. No witnesses and the security tapes have been reused.’

‘You told me that last time.’

‘This time I checked with the manager.’ She yawned to cover the lie.

He switched off the toothbrush and gave her a look that was more sad than angry. ‘Then why didn’t you come to bed?’

‘It was late and I didn’t want to wake you.’ Another lie, Mikhail could sleep through the tank section of a May Day parade.

‘Do we have a problem?’ he asked.

The question wasn’t a surprise considering she was exuding vodka from every pore and Mikhail was no fool.

Anton stepped into the living room wearing a pair of yellow boxer shorts. ‘Natasha, have we got any juice?’

‘No,’ she said, addressing no one in particular and watching Mikhail frown as he wondered whom she had replied to.

Outside it was overcast and Natalya took the Metro to Vasileostrovskaya station then walked for a kilometre along Sredny Prospekt before turning onto Veselnaya Ulitsa. It was quiet outside Zena’s apartment; there was no twitch of the curtains from the neighbour, Lyudmila Kuznetsova, and she let herself in. She slipped on a pair of latex gloves and looked around. The food in the fridge, what there had been of it, was starting to smell and she was glad Primakov had taken the rubbish away. The heavy green curtains that had come with the apartment were still drawn but now the room felt like a mausoleum – a tomb without a body. It was hard to imagine the girl coming back to breathe life into the place. She stepped into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe, surprised to find the designer clothes still there. If Zena didn’t return, one day they too would disappear, leaving another mystery to solve.

She heard the door in the adjacent apartment open and called out, ‘Mrs Kuznetsova?’

‘Yes?’

There was a shuffle and in the hallway she saw the old woman wearing a black headscarf and clear plastic glasses. ‘Still no news?’

Natalya shook her head. ‘May I ask you a question?’ She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice – it was the first lead she had on the case. Following regulations, she ought to bring Lyudmila Kuznetsova to headquarters and present her with a range of images but she sensed the old woman spoke more freely at home.

‘May I?’ The soft wrinkles on Kuznetsova’s face cracked into a smile as she impersonated Natalya. ‘You are so polite. Are you sure you’re a ment ?’