When she was finished Svetlana smiled. ‘You perform well, my dear, but then you are an academic, an actor in a way. I feel I know all the people you have mentioned. This General Ferguson and his people, you and your brother, the Member of Parliament. Such a tragic figure. And my nephew – how he feels, what he wants. It’s been sixteen years since he last sat with me, here where you are sitting now. For years, nothing, and then later on, the books, a photo on a cover, appearances on television. The falsity of the internet. To watch him was like watching someone playing him in a movie. In fact, that’s what he looked like to me with that absurdly long hair and that tangled beard.’
‘Tell me about him, please. You raised him, after all.’
‘My brother was KGB all his life, so for his family, things were okay in the Soviet Union. His wife was not a healthy woman. I came to Moscow hoping to act, but he agreed to let me come only if I lived with them and supported her. She shouldn’t have had another child after Alexander, but my brother insisted. Two years later, Tania was born and her mother died. We were all trapped. I was allowed to act with Moscow companies. He used his influence, but always I had to be a mother to the children, not that I objected. I loved Alex dearly.’
Monica said, ‘And Tania?’
‘Never cared for me, but she could do no wrong in her father’s eyes. The years passed, he became a colonel in the KGB, very important. We had a couple living in at the house, so I had more freedom. When the Chekhov Theatre was invited to London to perform, I was one of their lead players, so he agreed I could go. It was a prestige thing. The rest is history. I married Kelly and refused to return.’
‘And the children?’
‘Tania wasn’t bothered. She was fifteen, a wild child, and as always he doted on her. Alexander was a brilliant student, already at Moscow University at seventeen. I took a chance and wrote asking that he be permitted to visit. His father, knowing how close I was to Alexander, allowed him to come on holiday, but ordered him to persuade me to return.’
‘Are you certain of that?’ Roper asked.
‘Yes, Alexander told me, and Kelly. He liked Kelly. They practised judo together. Kelly was a black belt.’
‘All this fits not only with what I’ve found, but with what he told Monica,’ Roper said. ‘About being so happy here with you and Kelly, but then came the serious unrest, the battles with the police and student groups over Afghanistan, hundreds dead in street fighting in Moscow.’
‘And amongst them Tania,’ Monica said.
‘Her father contacted us saying she was wounded. That’s what made Alexander return instantly.’
Monica said, ‘He told me that he arrived too late for the farewell. He said she had a headstone at Minsky Park Military Cemetery because his father used his influence to somehow make her death respectable.’
‘That sounds like my brother. He lied about her only being wounded just to draw Alexander back.’
‘And when he joined the paratroopers, what did you think of that?’
‘I was horrified, but by then we’d lost touch. All mail was censored, so I didn’t know about it for a long time.’
‘He told me he thought he’d done it to punish his father, who couldn’t do anything about it because it would have made him look bad, a man of his standing.’
‘I can believe that, but I don’t really know. Everything after that, all his army time, Afghanistan and Chechnya, I know only from his books. I had no contact during all those years, and the years after that he covers in Moscow Nights, the years of his anti-establishment activities. I envy you for having been in his company and I’m grateful for what you have told me.’
Roper said, ‘What do you think about his insistence on total secrecy?’
‘That it might present difficulties for him. But that is a bridge to be crossed at a later date.’ She smiled and said to Katya, who had been working away quietly, ‘Have you anything to say?’
Katya put down her painting things and wiped her hands. ‘Let me just mention this. Svetlana and I first became friends when I was thirty – I’ve never met Alex, but I’m a play designer; a total concept specialist. Not just sets, but people, clothes, appearance, and one thing I can tell you: any problem, however difficult, has a solution.’
‘As she’s proved at the National Theatre on many occasions,’ Svetlana put in.
Katya found a pack of cigarettes in her smock and lit one. ‘Think of this whole affair as a theatrical performance. Alex flies from Paris, you and your people get him to England in one piece, Major, and then what do you do with him?’
‘Help him vanish,’ Roper said. ‘That’s what he wants.’
‘And what would you do with someone you really needed to keep safe?’
‘We have safe houses for situations like that. But for Kurbsky, it would just be a temporary solution.’
‘Here would be an impossibility,’ Svetlana said. ‘I’m sure they’d look for him here. He couldn’t possibly show his face.’
Katya went to the sideboard, poured a vodka and passed it to Svetlana. ‘True – if it was his face.’
Svetlana looked at her. ‘Thank you, my dear. I presume you mean plastic surgery?’
‘Not as such, although it’s a long-term possibility. Making him a new person, totally different in every way, that’s how I would approach it. What is a postman or a policeman? A uniform is what we see and accept, not so much the individual. Take Alex. His persona is like a Hollywood costume actor’s – the hair, the beard, so extravagant. Svetlana has told me of his love as a boy for The Three Musketeers and Captain Blood, the swagger, the boldness inherent in such costume dramas. That is what he projects and what people see in him.’
‘So how would you change him? By cutting his hair?’ Monica said.
‘If you did that and removed the beard, I think you would be amazed.’
They all thought about it and Svetlana said, ‘He couldn’t live in the house, of course. But Kelly used to use the apartment over the garage as a study. They practised judo up there.’
‘Do you still use it?’ Roper asked.
It was Katya who answered. ‘Until three months ago, we had a young Pole named Marek living there, taking care of the garden. He had a sociology degree, but in Warsaw that only brought him two pounds an hour as a teacher. We let him live in the apartment, and as long as he saw to the garden, we never queried what else he did. He was with us for almost a year before he decided to go home again.’
‘There’s another possibility, too,’ Svetlana said. ‘I have a cottage way down by the Thames estuary beyond Dartford looking out towards Sheerness and the Isle of Sheppey. Holly End the place is called, marshland, wildfowl, birds, shingle beaches. You can breathe there.’
‘It sounds nice. Could Alex hide himself there?’ Monica asked Katya.
‘It’s lonely and desolate enough. The problem is if it’s too
