Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

She had been caught selling ’phets and weed down by the Murmansk railway station. Her boy had been with her but had run faster and there was snow on the ground and the trooper had slipped, then regained his feet and she had tripped him, and her guy had legged it away. She had not named Timofey. Not a love-match, but a relationship of convenience and comfort, and they would have had to beat her one step short of unconscious for her to give his name. The days were ticked, and now Natacha talked about the dilemma of her hair, and they laughed fit to burst. Should her hair, a scrubber’s blonde, go purple or larch-green at the end of the week when she went free. It would be a big decision, green or purple – but might depend only on which was easier to lift off the shelf in the Magnets store on Poliarnye Zori, and Timofey would be waiting outside and they would be gone – and she would not be back, not to the gaol. They challenged her. She was adamant, would colour her hair and would sell wraps and skunk and smack, and might hitch up her skirt in a police car for cash, but nothing serious.

“Better believe it.… You don’t see me again, none of you, not ever. Nothing serious, nothing that rocks them, so I do not come back.” She flashed her smile. “Counting the hours till I am free and able to enjoy again the wonder and beauty of the streets of Murmansk.”

Murmansk’s winter has six weeks of no sun, just a mix of total darkness and charcoal-grey gloom. Murmansk’s summer has six weeks when the sun never sets and the city is bathed in perpetual light. Far to the north of the Arctic Circle, Murmansk can also experience rain in January and snow in July: a contrary city.

Murmansk has a population, sinking, of almost 300,000, and is big on sexually transmitted disease, ferocious seasonal mosquitoes, drug abuse, and the architecture of Stalin, Kruschev and Brezhnev. The Putin legacy is a couple of modern hotels, low rates of occupancy and high rates.

Murmansk, one day but not tomorrow, could have a glittering financial future as the hub of oil and gas exploration, except that the Fatherland, as represented by the ruling class in Moscow’s Kremlin, cannot filch the necessary infrastructure technology – even with its army of expert hackers – from the West’s engineers. Not for want of trying. While that is on hold, the purpose of the city is to be home to the navy’s Northern Fleet.

Murmansk was founded as a naval base in 1916, in the final throes of the Czar’s rule, because the deep inlet on which the city was built never froze, even in the depths of winter. Government resources are rich when it comes to the fleets of hunter-killer and long-range missile-firing submarines. In strategic terms, Murmansk is a big player in international military games, and nuclear missiles are stacked in bunkers dug out of the perma-frost ground. When the Soviet Union seemed destined for defeat in World War II, and the German war machine pressed closer to the valued nickel and iron ore mines of the region, British, American and Canadian convoys fought their way through bomb and torpedo attacks to bring military supplies to Murmansk and to stabilise a front line to the south during the 900-day siege of Leningrad. The life and atmosphere of the city is supposedly dominated by the experience, and on a bluff above the drab living blocks the Alyosha monument was built in memory of those killed in defence of the port and its resources.

Murmansk’s main street of Lenin Prospekt, designed on the grand scale of public buildings when Josef Stalin ruled, is where the new palace of the FSB is located with 15,000 square metres of offices and holding cells built over eight floors. The vast size of the building is justified, the FSB spokesman has said, because of security dangers in the region. A reported toxic dump for nuclear waste and bristling with modern warfare, it is natural that the security police would send their best and their brightest to Murmansk.

“Murmansk?” Knacker murmured into the phone.

In a building halfway between the pub where he had attended that day’s Round Table lunch and the headquarters of SIS, a member of his staff had taken a call from the British Consulate in Hamburg, the northern port city of Germany. It would have been filtered fast through several of the agency’s arms: the triggers would have been the war in Syria; the village of Deir al-Siyarqi, with its call sign of Delta Alpha Sierra; the massacre; the date; the accusation; the photograph from a Norwegian-based amateur commentary in both Russian and English, sent from a harbour town near the border shared with Russia – a photograph, and a denunciation. Knacker had been in deep and fruitful conversation at lunch with the man who had run a penetration into the political élite of DPRK and with a woman who had compromised a senior official on the treasury side of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds crowd, and basked in justifiable pride at the achievement. Both assets faced, in Knacker’s opinion, an ‘uncertain future’ and both should be kept in their place. The Coldstreamer had discreetly summoned him from the table. A phone had rung with a sharp request to extract him. Knacker had taken the call, had slipped the phone into secure mode, and was relayed the guts of what a Syrian-born waitress had come to the consulate and said. He remembered her, would have been hard not to.

“She is definite in the identification?”

He was told that the girl was adamant.

“Forget the photograph of this Russian officer. Have we been sent an image of her?”

They had. The photo of the girl, as supplied by the consular officer, was on the screen in front of Alice, and Fee had good sight of it.

“Does she carry a scar on her chin? Size of a fifty pence piece?”

She had. It had healed but not well.

Knacker slipped back inside. He whispered apologies to Arthur Jennings and was gently quizzed. Something of interest? He said that it might be. Was it those bastards, the usual ones, he was asked. It was, always them, always the same bastards, always the Lubyanka boys. Arthur Jennings was holding a cheese knife and stabbed it into the table, tearing the plastic covering, watched it quiver.

He was gone and left a slack grin at the mouth of the Round Table’s founder… He was Knacker because of his reputation to recruit damaged personnel, get one last mission from the wretch. Like a man who went round farms or gypsy camps and took away lame horses and would get them one last time between the shafts of a carriage, tighten the harness, crack the whip. Cat food if it failed, or, if it went well perhaps another season grazing in a paddock. And who would his new bedfellows be? The usual point of concern when a mission was at the embryonic stage: who would help it along and who would stand in its way, who was an ally and who was the enemy? Strangers would lurch out of any imagined mist. Might help, might hinder. Always the way with his work. He turned the word over in his mind as he stamped off down the pavement: Murmansk. He had just the man for it.

He held the phone. What he had looked forward to, like a talisman, through the despair of the late afternoon and early evening as the storm curdled over the horizon to the west, was the arrival the next morning of Aggie. She would have come on the plane from the small sister island of Papa Westray, or hitched a ride on an open boat, both rough and turbulent but both usually running whatever the weather.

“Sorry and all that, Gaz, but you know how it is… Just a foul summer dose of ’flu. Best to see it out and get it behind me. Give it a few days, and I’ll have shaken clear of it. Look after yourself, my big boy. Bye-bye.”

The phone purred in his ear. She did not say, not ever, that she loved him. Did not say that it hurt her to cry off from travelling to see him… She made pottery for sale in the hotel on Gaz’s island, and was a dab hand at simple watercolour paintings and designed her own cards with illustrations of her island views. She would have been four or five years older than Gaz and he had met her when a gale had damaged her roof and it had needed a partial rebuild, and the weather had been foul and it had needed strength, ingenuity and luck to keep the tarpaulin in place while he had done the work, and she had paid him in cash and he had been captivated. She had been on her island three years longer than he had been on Westray so was a veteran and took the bad times with the good; unflappable, unfazed whatever the elements chucked at her, and seemed not to share any of the black dog days he entertained. It had been weeks before they had kissed and months before they had gone to his bed – probably too much drink taken that evening in the Pierowall hotel bar, but not regretted. Most weeks she came on the twenty-five minute ferry link or the two-minute fixed-wing flight, and greeted him as he met her as if it were the one thing – a kiss and a hug – that she had most missed since last seeing him, but she would call and stand him down and sound relaxed about it, no huge deal. Gaz had told her that she was the most important woman he had known in his adult life, had tried to tell her about previous relationships – all in the disaster folder – and been shushed. She knew he had been a serving soldier, not what he had done and not where he had been, and she did not know any of the detail of the psychiatrist’s assessment… and of her he knew next to nothing. Easier. What he did know was a verdict on him that she had given a friend in the bar who had told him on one of the rare times he was there by himself, and this woman had passed on Aggie’s description of him. ‘Nice enough, and bloody useful round the place, but I don’t really know him because he wouldn’t let that happen. A guy you hardly remember, see him and think he’s all right but the memory is sort of vague. Something happened but I don’t know what, and he’ll not tell me, and I don’t ask.’ What he had learned about black dog days from the few therapy sessions he had gone to before the uprooting and the journey north, was that no one outside the experience gave a toss what he and other sufferers went through and in military terms it was still ‘Get a grip’, and the days of a diagnosis of ‘lack of moral fibre’ still lurked. He needed her, and with a storm coming he had counted on her presence to help him through. Sometimes, when the weather was bad and his bungalow seemed to shake with the wind’s buffeting he would sit on the floor in the hall and let the draughts whistle round him and put a blanket over his head and just shake and tremble. Sometimes – if the tremors were slaughtering him and his legs were weakened and his head in torment, he would go out – likely having the back door open – and trudge up the hill and past the Noltland ruin and maybe start to run, pounding ahead in the darkness as they had done in the fitness sessions before being accepted into the unit, and he would run until the lighthouse beam caught him and then keep going until he was at the edge of Noup Head. He would hear the waves crashing on the rocks some 400 feet below and sway on his heels and let the wind shake his balance. When the lighthouse beam came round again it would fasten momentarily on the narrow ledges to the left of where he stood and show him the white bodies of the gannets. They were never blown off their roosting points and it might be the only place where he could fight his way through the black dog sessions. With the gannets, up on Noup Head, were guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmars, and farther to the right where the ground dropped towards a bay there were old rabbit holes refurbished as homes for puffins. Once – only once – he had seemed to stumble and a gust of wind might have come at him at a different angle, and he had lurched towards the edge and had regained his balance. Had Gaz saved himself by regaining his foothold? Had the wind shifted and veered off him? Had he struggled to prevent himself being pitched over the cliff? Was he resigned to ending the agonies? Not sure… And it had passed and he had turned and gone back towards the ruined castle with the wind hammering at his back. It was about controlling levels of stress and minimising them. Hard to do, but it was why he had fled to the island.