The Boat House (6 page)

He reached out with the flashlight, and pushed the man on the shoulder.

"Seen anything you like?" he said.

The man spun around, startled, but Pete was well back and out of reach. He held the flashlight ready, a weapon for if he needed it.

"So," he went on. "What's the idea? This isn't some free show."

They faced each other.

The man was struggling for words. Shock made the struggle almost physical, like that of a beached fish for air. There was something strange about him, something off-key.

And then he spoke.

His accent was like Alina's. Only more so.

"I need to see her," he said. "She has to talk to me."

Suddenly Pete didn't need to ask who. How long had they been following, the three of them in the car? He felt blind, he felt stupid. He felt like a man who'd picked up an exhausted

hare and then turned to see the dogs bearing down on him. He swallowed, hard, and wondered what the hell he was going to do now.

"Listen," the man said, with a glance toward the road; he was holding up his hands as if to fend Pete away, or to show that he wasn't going to attack. "Those two men in the car, they're British policemen. Once I've identified her, they'll come for her. I don't want that to happen until I've at least had the chance to talk to her. Will you tell her that? Tell her you saw Pavel and he wants to talk. Please."

The man was circling, heading back for the car and keeping safely out of range. Pete glanced up at the window again, long enough to see that Janis was there and staying well back in the room. She was a shade, a silhouette; at this distance, she could have been anybody.

"Please," the man said again, still backing off, and with a note that was like desperation in his voice.

A moment later, he was gone.

Pete watched the space where he'd been; a light breeze shook the bushes, and a car horn sounded somewhere faroff. Then he turned, and briefly switched on the flashlight to signal to the block that everything was okay.

One thing was clear to him. The prowler - Pavel, or whatever his name was - had been looking at Janis's outline and thinking that he was seeing Alina. As long as this mistake went uncorrected, they had time.

Back indoors, Pete spent a couple of minutes in exploration before he knocked on the door of the third floor flat.

Alina opened it.

"You found your burglar?" she said as Pete came in and made sure that the door was closed behind him; he then set the flashlight on the teak effect sideboard, and turned to face her.

"Does the name Pavel mean anything to you?" he said.

Her reaction was instantaneous. Astonishment. Fear.

She said, "I don't understand."

"He's the one, the man outside. He knows you're here."

"But how?"

"I don't know. Could anyone have told them where your flight would be taking you?"

"Nikolai," she said bleakly.

"Well, it looks as if somebody near the airport must have seen me picking you up. They'll have put out a call on the make of the car. They'll think we're around here somewhere, but they won't know exactly where. You know what that means?"

"No," she said uncomprehendingly, and she sat heavily on the sofa. She put a hand to her forehead. "No," she repeated; but Pete was already on the move, grabbing her few possessions together.

"We're still one ahead," he said. "They're watching the wrong window on the wrong side of the building. We can sneak out and be away before they know it.

"Away to where?"

He stopped by the window, and checked on the view.

Nothing moved.

He said, "I'm taking you home with me."

He looked at her then, and found that her gaze was already on him; but what he saw in it was nothing like what he might have expected. It wasn't relief, it wasn't even apprehension; it was something cool and remote and yet strangely compelling, as if there could only ever have been one outcome to the night and both of them had somehow known it all along.

Rusalka.

Heartbreaker.

Wasn't that how they said it?

PART THREE

Out of Darkness

SIX

Daybreak tended to steal up gently on the valley, re-inventing a fresh landscape out of the leftover mists of the night; lake breezes would then strip away the shrouds one by one to uncover the forests and the shores and the mountains behind. Three Oaks Bay was a small resort town on the lake's eastern side, busy in the season and almost dead outside of it. The Bay had a square, two pubs, a promenade walk overlooked by three medium sized Victorian hotels, and a restaurant with a terrace that stood out over the water. It rated one resident policeman and a mention in the Shell Guide. People came in the summer to walk and to sail and, if development plans succeeded and the roads could be kept clear, they'd soon be coming in the winter to ski.

Pete had seen a fair number of valley mornings, although not so many had been as early as this. He shivered a little, and turned up the collar of his suit jacket.

It didn't make much of a difference. He was standing on the exposed rocks at the highest point of the headland; the ground fell away steeply from here, mostly bare rock and scrub, with just a narrow shelf of land that was almost a beach down at the water's edge. He could see the upturned hulls of a few boats drawn up onto the shore, mostly of fibreglass but some of varnished timber, all of them de-rigged and tied down against the weather. Out across the water, the end of the lake had not yet emerged from the mist, and the mountains above it were no more than a delicate shadow of grey against a deep grey sky.

Alina was still in the car. Still, as far as Pete could tell, asleep. He'd covered her over with a coat and taken her few possessions inside, and she'd slept on; she'd been the same way for the last couple of hours of the journey, ever since they'd made their final stop at a twenty-four hour garage so that he could fill the Zodiac's tank and buy some tape for a running repair to the headlamp that he'd broken when, lights doused to escape notice, he'd clipped the corner of the garage block on their way out of the parking area. The repair didn't look much, but it would keep the rain out.

A sound came from behind him. He didn't turn.

Alina scrambled up alongside, and found herself a rock just a couple of feet lower than his own. She'd brought his coat from the car, and she wore it around her shoulders against the cold.

They stood in silence for a minute or more.

And then she said, "This is where you live?"

He looked at her then. "You like it?"

"It's…" She searched for the words. "I
do
like it. I like it a lot."

"Actually, the house is a dump, but the boss lets me have it cheap. It belongs to his sister's family."

"I think it's fine," Alina said, and Pete watched her for a moment longer, almost as if he was checking her score on a test.

"Yes," he said finally. "It's fine." And he turned again to the view. The mist over the northern end of the lake had now begun to clear, uncovering a part of the Liston Estate. A piece of land that had held no particular interest for him at all until the arrival of its new estate manager.

"This isn't going to work," Alina said despondently. The silver dawn was turning into plain old daylight now, its magic fading and taking her momentary confidence with it.

"Why shouldn't it?"

"Because I'll mess up your life. I poison everyone I touch. Look what I already did to your car."

"Forget the car."

"I can't even pay you rent."

"I don't want anything from you. You think that's using me, forget it. You're a guest." Pete stepped down. "Come on," he said, offering his hand. "We'll put your stuff in your room."

Alina accepted, and he helped her along. "I get a room?" she said.

"You even get a bed, until you decide exactly what it is you want to do from here. There's more space than I can use. I'll clear it with Ted, but nobody's going to mind."

They descended to the gingerbread house; Rosedale, the cabin in the high woodland, paint flaking, boards weathered silver, the place that Pete called home.

She didn't look like someone who could poison what she touched, whatever she might think. Nobody could blame her for taking life as seriously as she'd had to, but the way to some kind of peace and personal balance would surely lie in the opportunity to stop running and relax a little. She could lose herself in a place like this; if not in the valley itself, then in some other part of the region. Tourists passed through here in their thousands, and the face of a stranger would be nothing to remark upon in the approaching season. Even her accent wouldn't give her away; all kinds of nationalities came to take up casual work in the restaurants and hotels. Endless human variety, but on a manageable scale. It would probably be just what she needed in order to find herself again.

And she certainly needed to unwind, at least a little. He couldn't help thinking of something that she'd said in all seriousness when they'd left the apartment building behind and a lack of any interest from a passing night patrol on the motorway had told him that no, the police didn't seem to be keeping an active watch for his car; she'd looked at him and she'd said,
Promise me, Peter. Don't ever try to get too close to me. Don't even think of it. And I promise that I'll try never to hurt you. Is that a deal?
And Pete, who hadn't been entirely unaware of some of the paths that such a newly founded relationship might follow, suddenly found himself shifting into back-off mode. Helping her was one thing. But even to consider getting involved with someone who could talk in such a way… well, that would be to enter dangerous waters indeed.

The room that he'd given her was smaller than his own, but she got a bigger wardrobe. Not that she had much to put in it… the only other pieces of furniture were the bed and an old dressing table with a cracked mirror. Her window looked out of the back of the house, onto what had once been a small garden.

She sat on the bed, next to her bags. Pete stood in the doorway and watched as she bounced a little and made the mattress creak. When she looked up at him and smiled, he could see that the dangerous edge of last night's exhaustion had been blunted.

He said, "I only wish I could help you more. But I wouldn't know how."

"You
are
helping me."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean," she said. "Please don't worry."

"There's tinned stuff in the kitchen if you wake up and I'm not around. If I'm not here, I'll probably be down at the boatyard. When I get the chance, I'll show you the sights."

"I'll manage," she assured him.

And so he made a gesture as if to say, It's all yours. And then he withdrew, closing the door after him, and went to his own room to stretch out for a while.

Alina stayed where she was, her eyes closed, almost as if she was listening to the silence. Pete must have dropped onto his bed without undressing, he made so little sound. Then she turned to the much-travelled carrier bag on the bed beside her.

From it she took a book, which she carried over to the dressing table. It was a cheap scrapbook, coarse paper between cardboard covers, so well used that some of the pages were starting to fall out. She laid it flat and opened it up.

The book was filled with photographs. A few of them would have been a serious giveaway in any frontier search, but these she'd covered over with postcard views bought from the Europiskaya Hotel.

She began to take out the postcards, revealing the snapshots underneath. When she reached a particular one, she stopped.

It was a group view, slightly blurred, a dozen friends on a day in the country. They were in rows like a football team, the people in the front row all kneeling on the ground.

Old times, sad times, a million miles away. For a while Alina sat looking at her younger, unmarked self. She was in the back row, lifted higher than anybody by the boys on either side of her.

That was how she'd been, back then. Open, smiling, everything before her.

Lifted on the arm of a boy named Pavel.

SEVEN

Pavel's was a city dawn, seen from the rear seat of the unmarked car as they circled back in on the motorway network toward their base near the airport. The night had not been a success. He knew that he'd been close, but then somehow it had all slipped away from him; when Alina hadn't come out and the three of them had finally gone into the building, it was to find incomprehension from the woman who lived alone and an empty flat where she said she'd gone for help. Pavel had no names, no numbers. He could go no further.

And his two escorts had shrugged and sympathised, and called it bad luck.

A couple of years ago, he'd never even have been able to get this far. The notion of such international cooperation would have been unthinkable even at senior Investigator level; but here the arrangements had been made and he'd been on a plane within a matter of hours. He had no official status and no powers of arrest, but once he'd identified Alina then the two officers along with him would have been able to detain her on immigration charges. Since she'd entered the country on stolen papers, she could then be deported back to Russia and the knotty question of extradition would never have arisen. An appeal for political asylum would have been likely to get her nowhere; Alina wasn't political, and never really had been. By most people's definition, she was a common criminal and nothing more.

For most people, but not in the eyes of Pavel. To Pavel, and probably to many of the others who'd fallen under her influence, she was the most uncommon criminal ever.

The Finns had found the boy within half an hour. He'd been hiding in a woodland graveyard, only half-heartedly concealed behind one of the leaning roofed crosses. He'd known almost nothing. Nothing of her true nature, not even - and here Pavel had been holding his breath at the back of the Border Control's interrogation room - where she'd been living for the past two years. The boy's eyes had met his own, and for a moment Pavel had been afraid; but the boy hadn't said anything, and after a moment he'd looked away.