The Boat House (12 page)

Alina said she'd been raised in the country. Maybe that was it, you grew up with a knack that you otherwise couldn't acquire, like the owls and the bats and the creatures of the lake. She had it, he didn't. Could it be that what he was feeling was a kind of envy, in the sense that he'd brought her here, to a place that he felt he'd made his own, and in a matter of weeks she'd already grown closer to it than he could ever hope to be?

No, he tried to tell himself, that wasn't it; nothing so mean, nothing so unreasonable. Even though he was looking forward to the day when she moved on, he was already beginning to sense that her leaving would be something of a wrench. As they'd agreed, there was nothing between them… but he knew that he'd miss her.

Without even realising that he'd moved, he found himself standing by the door to her room.

He put his hand on the handle.

Hesitated a while longer.

Took a sip of the aspirin.

And then, with a guilty look over his shoulder, he opened her door and stepped inside.

She kept the room neat, her bed made and her work clothes carefully preserved on a hanger on the front of the wardrobe. Her party dress was alongside, bagged in polythene to protect it from dust. Over on the dressing table, one of her notebooks lay alongside the photograph album. He went across to it, still thinking that it wasn't too late to back out and close the door behind him and pretend that he'd never even been in here.

But instead, he opened the book of photographs.

The pictures were strange. Not all of them, but some. A number were of the same place, some old village with nobody in it, the first a shot down a dusty road and the rest of individual buildings or, in some cases, of open fields enclosed by split rail fencing. The houses were all of dilapidated wood, with the tallest building a spired church right in the middle of everything. Fir trees grew in amongst the roofs, and weeds and flowers grew everywhere else. The village stood next to a lake.

A fast flick through some of the other pages showed images of a more easily recognisable kind - strange faces, old friends, scenes from a life. He closed the album carefully, making sure that none of the loosened pages could fall out and give him away.

Then, quietly, he left the room.

SEVENTEEN

It was midway through a Friday afternoon, and Adele Venetz had taken the restaurant's van to the cash and carry for all the last minute supplies they'd be needing for Saturday's party catering job, leaving her sister and Alina to manage the business alone. It was quite a drive and quite a list for when she got there, so she was unlikely to be back before the early evening; but this was no great problem, because they'd soon be closing the doors so that they could make a start on the next day's preparations. It had been a quiet afternoon so far, and it showed no signs of picking up. A few day trippers and walkers had stopped by, but almost no locals at all.

When the outside deck stood empty and all the tables had been cleared and reset and there still wasn't a prospect of any trade in sight, Angelica said to Alina, "Come on, let's take a break," and they headed into the kitchen.

Alina mostly took her breaks alone; she'd sit in a corner with a magazine, usually one of Adele's old wildlife partworks, and be about as obtrusive as a church mouse until her time was over. At which point she'd stand, lay the magazine aside, and get straight back to business. When they did converse, she said little and mostly listened; it had only recently struck Angelica that she knew almost nothing more about Alina now than she had at the end of that first day.

And, as for the reason
why
it had stuck her…

"I had to make a guess this morning," she told Alina, glancing back over her shoulder from the Cona machine as she waited for the water to run down through the filter. "I hope I guessed right."

"What do you mean?" Alina said, warily. She'd moved over by the window and had been reaching for a chair, but now she stopped. She wasn't sure where Angelica was leading, and so Angelica went straight to it.

"Whenever we employ somebody, there are formalities we have to go through. Tax. National Insurance. It can get complicated."

"I'm sure it can."

"Especially," Angelica said, "when you're trying to make out a form for somebody whom you know won't appear anywhere in the records."

She glanced over her shoulder again.

Slowly, Alina closed her eyes. Her face was as blank as a porcelain mask. She lowered her head, as if to look at the floor.

Angelica went on, "I'm right, aren't I?"

Alina nodded.

"Want to tell me about it?"

"Sing for my supper," Alina said with a kind of bitter weariness that ran completely against Angelica's perception of her character. It stung her to a sharp reply.

"Nothing of the kind," she said, the coffee forgotten as she turned to face her. "It's just possible that I may be able to help you."

Still guarded, as if the real centre of her personality stood behind glass and in silence, Alina said, "What do you want to know?"

"You might start by trusting me. I think I've earned it. Begin at the beginning."

Alina looked at her for a while. It was as if she was deciding. And then she shrugged. What had she got to lose, she seemed to be saying, now that it had come to this?

She folded her arms, and leaned back to rest against the work surface behind her. "I was never a waitress before I came here," she said. Her gaze was level, a challenge to disbelief. "I've told you that already."

"I know, you've learned fast. What were you before?"

"I was a schoolteacher. This was at the language school in Leningrad, with all the lessons in English. It was a good job, a very good job, but I lost it."

"How?"

"I never knew. It was one of those mad things where you don't know if you've done something wrong and no one will ever tell you. What happened was, one of my students wrote something in an examination essay and it got me fired. I never found out what. I never got a chance to defend myself and I wouldn't have known the right thing to say if I had. I couldn't get another job. After a while I started to get official letters threatening to send me to prison if I didn't find work. I lost my flat, and I had to move in with friends. I was living off my car savings for a while, but then they ran out. For a while I was sleeping on a floor… I'd never had to live like that before. I finally got one job offer, but when I turned up to work I found that it had been a mistake. I'm pretty sure that someone had called them."

This was worse than anything Angelica had expected. She said, "Is that why you decided to get out?"

"That, and other reasons." Alina looked down. "I'd had some old trouble. They were threatening to bring that up, too. I couldn't face it. So I decided to leave. But the first try was a shambles, and I was caught."

"They took you back?"

"Worse. I was examined by three doctors and declared insane. They did that kind of thing, back then. They put me in the prison hospital. I was there for nearly six months and by the end of the first week, I wanted to die. Sometimes I thought I was going to; sometimes I was even more scared at the thought that I wouldn't. They interfered with me there. I don't even like to think about it."

Angelica now knew why Alina had disappeared from the terrace so promptly on the day that Walter Hardy had hooked out the dead dog. It wasn't the sight of the dog itself that had driven her indoors, but the certainty that the police would soon be arriving. Seeing that Alina was upset by the memory, she said, "You don't have to go on," but now Alina was determined to be heard.

"Now you know I've no right to be here," she said, "I want you to know what's waiting for me if ever I get taken back. I only got out of the hospital because of an old unclosed file, and a doctor from the outside who took an interest in my case. They didn't officially let me out - I escaped. Otherwise, I'd still be there. And that's the reason why they want to get me back."

"And how did you reach England?"

"By using somebody," she said, and her voice sounded hollow with guilt.

Angelica, the coffee now standing cold and forgotten in the jug beside her, said, "Go to the authorities, Alina. They wouldn't send you home, not with a story like that."

"You can guarantee it?" If Alina was looking cynical, Angelica could only suppose that it was because she'd earned the right to be. "I don't think that you can. According to the record, I'm a criminal and wherever I am, I'm there illegally. If the authorities get hold of me, it won't matter what I say - I'll be returned, and then I'll be lost."

"But you can't just hide forever."

"I have plans. Please don't worry about me. I don't intend to leave this valley."

There was a determination in her eyes now that was almost frightening; how little Angelica had understood, she now realised, reading only the surface and never suspecting that any of this lay beneath.

Alina added by way of explanation, "Everyone needs to belong somewhere. And this is the place that I've chosen."

"Well," Angelica said, "I want you to remember that you've got friends here. If you should need any help…"

"When the day comes, I'll ask," Alina said. And then she glanced out of the main kitchen window, the one that had a partial view of the terrace; Angelica looked as well, and saw that they had a few customers arriving and looking around uncertainly at the unstaffed deck.

Alina said, "Do I still have a job?"

"Of course you do."

Angelica had already decided that her money could be taken out of the petty cash and then lost in the books somewhere… and if ever they should be caught doing it, she didn't feel that it was a crime she'd be ashamed of.

Alina smiled, with some confidence but also a lot of apprehension still, and she moved around the table toward the door. She took her notepad from the pocket of her apron as she went, and at the doorway she stopped for a moment as if to gather herself.

She took a breath and, in the space of a couple of seconds, seemed to re invent the waitress from the refugee. It was a faintly unsettling transformation for Angelica to witness, an unasked for revelation of a totally private process. One shell was discarded and a new one immediately hardened into its place, but for the brief instant in between there was a glimpse… of what?

Angelica couldn't have said. She reckoned that she could only take on board a limited number of surprises in any given period, and her quota for the year had just been reached. She already had plenty to think about.

Alina, meanwhile, went on out into the daylight.

EIGHTEEN

Midway through Friday afternoon, the early shift newsreader watched the red transmission light die on her last bulletin of the day and sat back from the microphone with a sigh of relief. That was it until handover on Monday, which she hoped would be enough time to shake off the cold that had been dogging her for the last couple of days.

Her name was Isobel Terry, and she was twenty two years old. She'd been in commercial radio for eleven months following nearly three years on a regional newspaper; she reckoned to stick around this particular station for another two years at the most. After that she reckoned that if she hadn't moved on to somewhere bigger, she'd probably be stuck here forever reading out the latest sheep prices at six o'clock every morning. Isobel was ambitious, and had her sights set on the national news media; unfortunately, so did every other young news hustler in every backwater station in the country, and few of them were having to contend with sinuses that felt as if they'd been stuffed with pillows. God only knew what she sounded like on the air. Inside her cans, she sounded like Elmer Fudd.

"There's someone to see you," the technical operator called through over the talkback system as she pushed her chair back to stand, gathering together her yellow bulletin flimsies with their handwritten amendments. The TO was only about three strides and two sheets of glass away from her, but the talkback gave his voice the quality of a long distance call.

"Who?" she said, and she saw him shrug. Beyond him she could see the afternoon DJ in his studio, a couple more strides and another set of double glazing farther on, hunched over his microphone like a harassed co-pilot.

The TO said, "He talked to you on the phone and you told him to come in. That's what he says. anyway. Amanda put him in the newsroom."

Isobel stepped out into the corridor, quiet except for the ever present low murmur of the station's output as it played over unobtrusive speakers. Dave, the afternoon DJ, was talking over the intro of a record that he was saying had been a big hit in Europe. Dave talked right on and over the start of the lyric, and then made it worse by trying to pretend that his mistake was intentional.

Isobel winced. Here on Sheep-shagger Radio, Dave was about as polished as they got.

She passed the sales office and made the turn toward the newsroom. There was no one in the office, the entire sales team having discovered important appointments that gave them excuses to sneak off home and start the weekend early. There was only one person in the newsroom, and he quickly got to his feet as she entered.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I know we already spoke, but what was your name?"

"Please, call me Pavel," he said.

Pavel.

She remembered the call, now; remembered it as soon as she heard his accent. Something about an emergency appeal to a missing person. The fact of it was, Amanda should never have brought him in here at all; she should have kept him in Reception, as per company policy. The man had all the markings of a weirdo. His clothes, dated and drab, appeared to have been slept in. He'd had a bad shave and his hair looked as if it was growing back after having been cut too short. And here were dark rings under his eyes, which burned as if with a fever.

But he'd sounded sincere enough. And he seemed sincere enough now, his piece of paper held ready in his hands, and so with the safety of the newsdesk between them she reached across and took it.