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

‘I wonder it myself.’ Natalya took out her phone. ‘I’d like to show you someone. You said a man came to Zena’s door two days ago.’

‘The bureaucrat, yes. He was waiting for me to leave.’

Natalya flicked through the saved pictures and selected the one Mikhail had taken of Anatoly Lagunov on Dahl’s Gulfstream. She kept her voice level, ‘Is that him?’

The old woman pulled off her glasses then peered at it. ‘Can you make it bigger?’

Natalya tapped the image twice and it enlarged. ‘Is that better?’

‘These phones are a miracle.’

‘Yes they are. Is that the man you saw?’

‘Wait. Patience and work will grind down everything.’ Lyudmila Kuznetsova squinted. ‘I knocked on the window and he looked up.’ She put a thick hand over the phone to push it away. ‘My eyesight isn’t so good now but I’m sure it was him.’

She was walking halfway along Sredny Prospekt when her phone started ringing. She fumbled for it in her handbag then pressed her palm against her exposed ear to block out the surrounding traffic. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s Primakov, Captain.’

‘I can see that.’ His VKontakte image showed him running; the photograph taken mid-stride as if he was floating on air. She tried to shake the tiredness out of her voice. ‘Sorry Leo, how can I help?’

‘Major Ivanov asked me to call.’

‘He did?’ A driver beeped his horn at the car in front for being a millisecond too slow at pulling away from the traffic lights.

‘I left a preliminary report on my findings on your desk. Mikhail saw me, he was in his office.’

She thought hard to remember what Primakov must be calling for. There had been a conversation in the plane. Where was her notepad?

‘Leo, can I call you back? It’s hard to hear you—’

‘He asked about bank details.’ Primakov got in fast before she ended the call.

Not Mikhail’s surely. Something to do with Zena. An image flashed in her mind of sitting in the staff room behind the bar in Cheka bar and one of the doormen telling her something. She had written it down.

‘Zena’s bank details,’ Primakov said. He was always polite but there was a hint of exasperation in his voice.

She stepped inside a café and felt a chill of air conditioning. A waitress approached and she waved her away. ‘What about them?’

‘Mikhail asked me to let you know. There was nothing in her apartment. No statements, cards or bills. She was tidy, so maybe everything was online.’

‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You hate mess. If a burglar broke into your place would they find your bank details?’

‘Maybe.’

On Monday, she’d ask Rogov to call the main banks and see if any held Zena’s checking account. He was off duty now and only she had been authorised to continue working. Mikhail shouldn’t have been in either but he often used the weekend to catch up on his paperwork when the office was quiet.

‘Leo?’ She took a table by the window and mouthed “Cappuccino” at the waitress. ‘I need some advice.’

‘Captain?’

She had little reason to doubt that Primakov was on her side, he had never done anything to make her think otherwise, but he was a very private individual and she wondered how much to tell him. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

She heard heavy breathing on the other end of the line. ‘Leo, what are you doing?’

‘Going up the stairs.’ She heard a door close. ‘Now I’m home.’

She shook her head. It felt too ridiculous to voice her thoughts. Inexplicably, there were tears forming and she blotted them with her fingertips, annoyed at her emotional incontinence. ‘If I ask this, promise it will go no further?’

‘Unless you’ve killed someone.’

‘You watch too much TV.’

‘True.’

She looked around to make sure no one was in listening range then dropped her voice to make sure. ‘I have a friend, she’s worried her husband has got another woman set up in an apartment. She’s found a secret bank account but can’t get past the security questions.’

‘Then what do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing illegal, just some advice. She promised me she won’t take any money from the account; she only wants to poke around and see what else he’s been doing. How can she hack into it?’

Primakov’s reply was instant, ‘It can’t be done.’ There was a pause and she heard the sound of a meow then the clatter of what could have been a saucer – she didn’t know he had a cat. ‘Or at least,’ Primakov added, ‘it can’t be done the way you think. Usually the bank locks a user out after three attempts then send a warning email or text message to the account holder.’

‘So, what do I do?’

‘You get Mikhail to give it to you.’

Primakov, as usual, was too smart, but it annoyed her that he hadn’t spared her feelings by going along with the subterfuge. ‘Well, if it’s impossible—’

‘I didn’t say that, Captain. Your… friend needs to think like a cybercriminal. Give me half an hour and I’ll send you an email. Make sure you disable the spyware option on your… I mean her antivirus software if she has one on the computer. Tell her to run the program in the email and follow the instructions. Make sure she deletes everything afterwards and empties the trash folder.’

‘It’s not for me, Leo.’

‘Of course.’ She could almost hear the bastard smile.

‘What are you sending?’

‘A keylogger. It will sit invisibly on your… friend’s machine and copy everything her husband types.’

‘Thanks, Leo.’

The afternoon had gone in a blur. Instead of taking the Metro she decided to clear her head with a walk and somehow ended up at the Peter and Paul Fortress. The temperature was barely warm enough for shorts yet middle-aged men and women, their bodies a luminous white or else the colour of oiled cedar, lay like basking seals on the banks of the Neva. She followed the road entrance and passed two young women with a gold ‘K’ on their shoulders. They wore white blouses, both had blonde hair half-way down their backs and tottered on platform heels at least ten centimetres high. She had been one of those girls once: a police cadet who appeared to exist solely as bait for the instructors or, according to the boys in her class, to fulfil an equal opportunities quota.

In hindsight, joining the police had been an effect with more than one cause: an act of supreme rebellion against her mother who had impressed on her the need to find an office job, get married, and have a baby at the earliest opportunity. Enrolling as a police cadet after university had seemed the most efficient way to deal with the issue of finding a job, while postponing marriage and motherhood for as long as she could. Blaming the dead was never satisfying though, they never argue back.

She walked around the fortress, stopping at the old jail where many of the country’s historical figures had been incarcerated, including Alexei, Peter the Great’s own son whom he’d had tortured to death. After a while, she crossed Troitsky Bridge thinking of Anatoly Lagunov. In the airport, he’d displayed stunning ignorance when she asked him about the orphanage. He’d also been unable to recall Zena’s birth name, when the adoption had taken place, or even what the orphanage had looked like. It did make sense if he was covering for Dahl. At a time when Russia was falling apart, adoptions were often informal or beset by bribery. If Zena’s had been one of them, Dahl was laid open to blackmail or criminal charges.

At the midpoint of the bridge, she paused and stared over the Neva. Another thing Lagunov would struggle to explain was his presence outside Zena’s apartment on the Friday morning, a full twenty-four hours before Yulia Federova reported her friend missing – assuming it was him that Lyudmila Kuznetsova had seen. It didn’t mean Anatoly Lagunov was complicit in the abduction of his boss’s daughter – not necessarily. An even more likely possibility was the kidnapper had already made contact with Dahl, and Lagunov had merely been summoned to check Zena’s apartment to see if she really had been abducted. She had seen it before: parents colluded with kidnappers and withheld information from the police, sometimes telling outright lies in a dubious attempt to protect the missing child. It made the job twice as difficult. On Monday, she’d insist Anatoly Lagunov and Yulia Federova come to headquarters for a formal interview. Until she was convinced that Lagunov wasn’t involved, she would instruct Thorsten Dahl to keep him out of any ransom negotiations. She knew she needed to make that phone call urgently, but it required treading carefully and her head was too full of last night’s vodka to find the right words.