10
A limousine collected us about seven o'clock that evening, and we sped down the Komsomolsky Prospect, and I looked two or more three-times out of the window. A black car followed us faithfully, but we were on the main road where that would happen anyway.
We arrived outside a restaurant ten minutes late because more snow falling clogged the public transport and taxis almost to a standstill. There was a short queue outside shivering, but the chauffeur led us past the row and opened the firmly shut door.
The place was packed, and somewhere there was some music. Led to the one empty table, a bottle of vodka materialised within five seconds.
"Of the two decent restaurants in Moscow," a voice said behind us, "I like this the better."
We turned to find Ozdoyev, standing there accompanied by a tall, slim, and beautiful young woman, wearing a deep-blue velvet jumpsuit and high-heels which made her taller than me, and I am over six-foot.
"This is my friend, Elmira," Ozdoyev said, and we explained pleasantries before they joined us.
"What would you like to eat?" Ozdoyev peered into the extensive menu.
The menu was exclusively in Russian, and while the other three chose from it, I used my eyes instead on the customers. There were three men at the following table, and beyond them sitting with their backs to the wall, two more. Very few women, apart from Amber and Ozdoyev's companion for the night.
The faces appeared livelier and varied. For instance, the two men over by the wall were not locals. Instead, they concentrated entirely on the food in front of them.
At the table next to ours, three men were intent solely on their drink. No tablecloth showed between full and empty bottles, full and empty glasses. The men, one large, one medium, one small, were diving into the vast tulip-shaped glasses of champagne.
Ozdoyev looked up from the menu and followed my gaze. "Georgians," he said. "Born with hollow legs." I watched with fascination while the champagne disappeared like beer. The eyes of the smallest were glazed. The big man looked as sober as his grey flannel suit, and there were three empty vodka bottles on the table.
The other three all ordered expertly, and I told Amber to call the same for me. The food when it came was spicy and light-years away from the grey chunks down the road. The huge man at the following table roared at the waiter, who hurried to bring a second bottle of champagne.
"Well, how has your day been so far?" Ozdoyev said, forking some chicken in bean sauce into his mouth.
"Informative," I said.
"Oh?"
I removed my glasses, and squinted at them, and polished some non-existent smears with my shirt.
"I don't think there is any need to have your foot-soldiers follow us everywhere," I said.
"How bad are your eyes?" Ozdoyev said, interrupting. "Let's look through your glasses."
Short of breaking the frames, I couldn't stop him. He took the glasses swiftly out of my hand and put them on.
To me, all the faces became distorted blurs. Colours told me where hair, eyes, and clothes were, but outlines had vanished.
"You have bad eyesight," Ozdoyev said. "You could not have been wearing them while you were on the metro last night and just thought you saw my men."
They all had a go trying my glasses and then handed them back. Everything came nicely sharp again.
"Well, Deputy Prosecutor General Ozdoyev," I said, "your hearing must be almost as bad as my eyesight."
Ozdoyev puffed out his chest like an offended pigeon. "There is nothing wrong with my hearing."
"Oh, I disagree," I said, "I never mentioned we had been on the metro last night."
A stony silence followed, and I looked away at the tiny man at the following table, his head propped up by his glass and seemingly going to sleep. His friends kept up a steady intake and ignored him. Then, finally, the big man shouted at the waiter again and held up three fingers. I waited and watched three more bottles of vodka arrive at the table.
The waiter brought the coffee for us, but I remained mesmerised by the three men. The small man's head, still balanced on his glass, sank lower and lower. Then, finally, the drink came to their table, and the little man slept through it all.
"Georgians," said Ozdoyev.
The huge man settled the bill and then stood up, rising to about seven feet tall. He tucked the three bottles of vodka under one arm and the sleeping friend under the other and made the stateliest of exits.
"Bloody marvellous," I say.
The waiter who had served them spoke to Ozdoyev, watching the departure with respect.
Ozdoyev said, "The waiter told me they had started with a whole bottle of vodka each. Then another two bottles of vodka between them—five in all. Then the two bottles of champagne. But, of course, no one but Georgians could do that."
While watching the goings on close to us, I hadn't noticed that the two women had gone to the ladies room to freshen up. On their return, Amber looked livid, and Elmira chastised. She leant forward in my direction and said, "Time to leave."
I looked at her and saw flaming anger in her eyes.
I stood up as Elmira sat down, and she, in turn, leant towards Ozdoyev, whose amiable expression froze.
"What's wrong?" Ozdoyev asks.
"While we were in the ladies room, Elmira told me that the FSB had a strong interest in Robbie and said the security agency had important files on him. When I asked her, what was on the files, she said I would have to hand over the hard drive first. I refused, and she tried to take my bag off me, so I slapped her around the face."
Elmira regarded Amber with slightly narrowed eyes, and Ozdoyev called for the bill.
The sallow men by the wall went in the wake of the Georgians, and the place was emptying fast.
We collected our coats and left Ozdoyev and his muse standing there looking dumbfounded.
There was no limousine outside waiting for us, so we caught a taxi and luckily picking a driver who spoke a smattering of English.
We motored a good way northwards through the vast, primarily well-lit empty streets. When the roads became narrower, I said, "Ask the driver to stop for a moment."
"What now?" Amber said.
"See if we have got a tail."
However, no car stopped behind us, and when we went on, we found no stationary vehicle waiting outside the Majestic. I asked Amber to get the driver to circle a reasonably large block. The driver, thoroughly pissed off by these junketing’s, began muttering under his breath.
He dropped us right outside the hotel, and a large tip on top of the fare silenced most of the driver's moaning but wouldn't, I guess, keep him quiet. He drove off back to the bright lights of the city as if glad to see the back of us.
But no black cars, or any others, paused or stopped. So as far as we could tell, we were on our own.
11The flight home was met at Gatwick at three in the afternoon by Blanche, who, after dropping Amber off to re-join her children, whisked me off to another crime scene."What's happened?" I asked as we headed towards Ascot."Igor Akinfeev died this morning," she replies, her eyes fixed on the road ahead."Don't tell me, suicide," I say, without feeling."Police have been quick to announce that there is nothing suspicious about the death," she says."Who found him?""Avron Cohen, his bodyguard, returned from running errands early this morning. When he knocked on the bathroom door, there was no reply. The missed calls on the oligarch's mobile, which he rarely left unattended, was another reason for concern. So finally, Cohen, an ex-Mossad agent who had guarded Akinfeev for six years, kicked down the door. Inside, Akinfeev was lying on the bathroom floor on his back. A length of a scarf tied tightly around his throat. Overhead, another
12Elena Koshka did not believe that her ex-husband Igor Akinfeev committed suicide. However, when Akinfeev and his wife Elena divorced five years ago, he was ordered to pay her up to £200 million, making it the costliest marriage split in British legal history.She lives in Kensington, west London, in a penthouse overlooking Hyde Park on the first floor of a Georgian row that has probably featured in every BBC period drama since television began. I half expect to see horse-drawn carriages outside, and women are parading in hats.Elena isn't wearing a hat. Instead, her short blonde hair is off in her face with a headband and clad in black spandex shorts, a white sports bra, and a light blue T-shirt with a looping neckline.A gym membership card dangles from a bulky set of keys that must help burn calories simply by being lugged around."Excuse me, Miss Koshka. Do you have a moment?""Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying.""It
13My answering machine is flashing. There are two messages.The first is from Blanche Bradbury:Hi Quintus, it's Blanche. I'm at the mortuary. Can you meet me there? Clunk!Detective Inspector Brooks.Mr Noone, I need to speak to you. Would you mind giving me a call?Just after eight, I dress in casual clothes and make my way to the mortuary. Someone followed me.I didn't know by who, but I just sensed it. Unrecognisable faces in everyday places.Blanche Bradbury wore a dark-blue jumpsuit beneath a surgical gown and a bright yellow face mask covering her mouth and nose. Without any apparent awareness of how lovely she looked, she moved nimbly around the table, taking measurements, her white tennis shoes protected by green plastic covers.She crosses to the whiteboard to scribble up the initial statistics, talking all the time above the squeak of her felt pen. "Alexi Zelenyy weighs one-hundred-f
14Blanche is driving her Mercedes.The suspension is soft; it's like a waterbed on wheels."What do we know about Kayla Zelenyy?" Blanche asks."Kayla Zelenyy is a Georgian businesswoman and philanthropist and now the widow of Alexi Zelenyy. Last year the Sunday Times estimated her wealth at £650m, making her the 196th wealthiest person in the UK. She is the founder and President of the Zelenyy Foundation that supports education initiatives in Georgia. She has two daughters, Marina and Sasha. The death of her husband will spark one of the biggest estate battles ever. Kayla has extensive business and property interests in Georgia and across the rest of the world."She raises her forefinger from the steering wheel. "This is the place."We pull up outside a twelve-foot-high gate attached to a couple of pillars. A perimeter wall stretched around the estate on either side, topped with broken bottles that sprout from the concrete.Th
15We emerge out of the drive and swing right, taking the back road. The Mercedes floats over the dips."Did you see Daler Kuzyaev's face? I thought he was going to have a heart attack.""He's frightened.""No shit, Sherlock? World War III?"Blanche begins listing the security measures, the cameras, motion sensors and alarms. Barklay could have come straight out of the SAS."Blanche, let me explain," I said after she had been talking non-stop for about ten minutes."I wish you would," she said sharply."Daler Kuzyaev is a financier who made his fortune in Moscow. He has been receiving death threats since lifting the lid on a $230 million tax fraud by corrupt Russian government officials last year."Heading back towards North London, I can't get a single question in my head:Who is next?"I need to go back and see Amber Chase," I say, "and I need to have another look around Robbie Chase's apartment again. I'
16Blanche drives me home and offers to cook me something."That's probably not a great idea," I reply, but she's already opened the fridge. I'm embarrassed by the contents. Six bottles of Peroni, grated mature cheddar, parmesan, orange juice, sundried tomatoes and half a dozen eggs."She opens another cupboard and finds a lone onion and some sad-looking potatoes that are starting to sprout."This is going to be a challenge," she laughs."I could get a takeaway," I suggest.Blanche gathers up the meagre supplies and pauses to pull back her hair and loop a band around a ponytail.I open two beers and watch her cooking, and we make small talk about our likes and dislikes, involving politics, food, theatre, cinema, sport, and past relationships. The conversation becomes a little strained."I'm not very good at this," I say. "I've been on my own for a long while.""Me too," she replies, raising her bottle of beer and clinkin
17Katrin Cajthamlova's Paris studio is on swish Avenue Victor Hugo, a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe, in a building that houses the Icelandic embassy; a thickly-built man in a tightly-fitted suit opened the door with a false smile. He assumed Blanche and I looked at the haute-couture clothing and the impossibly high-heeled stilettos Cajthamlova designs and sold under her KC brand."They are press," Cajthamlova said when she spotted Blanche's notebook. She looked at the thickly-built man pleadingly and spoke with a note of panic in her voice. "They are here to talk about Daler Kuzyaev."The man walked briskly to the door and opened it. "She will say no more to you," he said curtly in French. "She's had problems with the press. It's bad for her business."I held up a hand in protest. "We are not the press, and we are investigating the death of Daler Kuzyaev, Robbie Chase, Igor Akinfeev and Alexis Zelenyy."Cajthamlova is well over 6 feet tall,
18If, for a contented mind, time is peace, then for a fevered one, it is the opposite. The nearly three hours or so it took us to return to London were close to torture. The more I thought about Paris, the more I wondered what was wrong.We cross-referenced everything Katrin Cajthamlova had told us and what she said to the press and social media. She never told the same story twice. The inconsistencies were acute, but they were there.But why?Was she scared?Or was she playing us?Once we had arrived at St. Pancras, Blanche, we intended to catch the Northern Line train from Kings Cross to Woodside Park and continue with our work over a Chinese Takeaway, but only as we walked from one mainline station to the other did I realise that we had a tail.I thought I had sensed it on the Eurostar, but it took me some time to be sure.We stopped at a paper shop, bought a paper without actually looking at it, tucked it under my arm, and