Blood Stones (13 page)

Ruth had been pleasant, slightly deferential. She had behaved like the efficient secretary-cum-personal assistant going over the preliminaries with her new boss. He noticed her clothes. They were appropriate, too. Elegant but very understated, not too much make-up, just the cat's-eyes emphasized so that when he looked at her, they caught his attention.

‘I'm so looking forward to going,' she said. ‘And to working with you, Mr Hastings.'

He didn't want to say it, but it was office policy to use Christian names. ‘Thanks, Ruth. I'm sure we'll be productive. If there's anything you need, just let me know.'

She had smiled at him, very impersonally. ‘I will, thank you. Mr Kruger asked me to send his best wishes for success.'

‘That's nice of him. I'm sure he'll miss you.' Best wishes from Kruger? Like hell, James said to himself. All he wishes me is a broken neck …

He said it again, ‘Darling? How was the birthday party?'

Elizabeth looked up. ‘Oh, sorry, darling. I was making mental lists … I'm sure I've forgotten something vital. It was fun, great fun. Pop enjoyed it, and he loved his present. I said it was from you, too.'

‘Good,' James said, relieved. She looked rather tired round the eyes. Not surprising after a long drive, then coming back to the last vestiges of the packing. He came and slipped his arm round her. ‘Sweetheart,' he said, ‘why don't we eat out tonight? Get away from all this … We moved house so often when I was a kid, and I always hated it. How about that new trattoria in Gloucester Road?'

Elizabeth leaned against him. He didn't talk much about his childhood, but she knew it had been insecure. His father made money and went where the business was. There hadn't been the foundation of a settled home like hers. No wonder he wanted to get out for the evening. She would have preferred an omelette and an early night.

‘Of course we'll go, darling,' she said. ‘I love pasta.'

Valerie Kruger wouldn't go away. She had hovered in Elizabeth's mind all the way in the car down to Somerset. She drifted through Elizabeth's dreams, sad faced, full of warning. And the same theme ran through it all. No children. Dick was so disappointed. So he turned more and more to the business …
Make your husband get rid of her. Don't let her do to you what she did to me …
No children. Nothing to bind a family-minded man to a barren marriage. And a woman who could share the other side of his life had prised him away. The same woman who was going to Paris and would be working with James every day. They were sitting at the restaurant table, drinking Chianti, and suddenly she couldn't help herself.

‘Jamie …'

He looked up at her. He'd been studying the menu for their main course. ‘Made up your mind yet?'

She said, ‘No. Jamie, I want to ask you something. Put that down, will you …'

He did. ‘What is it?'

‘If we never have children, will you still love me?'

He actually burst out laughing. ‘God you are a nutter! What do you mean, will I still love you? Now listen to me. Just listen. I didn't marry you for children. I'd like them, but not as much as you would. I'm being honest. If we never have any, so what? We'll adopt if you want to. And anyway, there's no reason to talk like that. You'll get pregnant – there's no hurry, and if you'd only stop worrying about it, everyone's told you … Sweetheart, I'm not going to sit here and spoil a nice dinner by talking a lot of balls about whether I'm going to stop loving you. Because I'm not. Never. Now make up your mind what you're going to eat. OK?'

She smiled back at him. ‘OK.'

That night he made love to her. She knew it was more to reassure her than because he felt like it; he was a very active lover, but she could tell the difference. She didn't feel like it, either. It was less a passionate coupling than a comforting embrace. It should have reassured her, but it didn't.

‘I've booked in at the Lancaster,' Dick Kruger said.

They were in bed watching TV. Or rather Ruth was watching the programme and Dick was fretting about losing her the next morning. She was flying in a day ahead of the Hastings to set up his office and her own. The office had rented a small apartment for her near the Invalides on the Left Bank. Two rooms and a single bed. Kruger insisted that she change that. In the interval he would stay weekends at a hotel.

‘That's great,' she said. She wished he wouldn't harp on their separation. He needed constant assurance that her reason for taking the offer was to help him and Arthur Harris and sabotage James Hastings. She had said it over and over and it was getting on her nerves. She wanted to watch
Newsnight
.

‘I'll come over on Friday evening. Can you meet me?'

‘I may be working late. I don't know.' She made a decision. She turned to him. She slipped her hand up and tweaked his ear. His ears were very sensitive. ‘Darling,' she murmured, giving up
Newsnight
, ‘why don't you wait till the weekend after to come over? I'll have fixed the flat by then. I don't know how it's going to work out … I might be busy on Friday until late, even have to work Saturday … it depends on Hastings. What will you do, sitting all alone in some hotel? Wait till the weekend after.'

She snapped the TV off, and set about him, her hands wandering, touching him.

He protested. ‘Why? Why don't you want me to come? What the fuck am I supposed to do all weekend without you?'

‘Play golf,' she murmured, nuzzling his neck. ‘And think about what I'll do when you come the next weekend. Call Tony and fix a game for Saturday. Go down to the club for the weekend. I don't want you staying in London getting up to mischief.'

He groaned, clawing at her as she moved on top of him. He'd argue about it afterwards, but now … Oh Jesus … now …

He fell asleep, and she eased out of bed. She showered, dried herself and slipped on a nightdress. They always went to bed naked. She liked the feel of silk after she'd made love. He was a good lover; she'd taught him how to please her and, my God, she knew how to please him … She'd shut his mouth that night, and she could relax and think of the future. She wasn't sure what it held. It was all in the balance. The coming fight to a finish between Heyderman and Arthur Harris, Andrews' attempt to scuttle the Russian deal with Karakov, and James Hastings taking the battle to the enemy's heart in Paris. It was so exciting. The thrills of sex were mind blowing, but they didn't last. Pleasure was transient. Power was there the next morning. She liked that phrase. It pleased her. She didn't love Dick Kruger. Ruth had always been truthful with herself. She might lie to the world, but never to Ruth Fraser, who had been born Ruth Felderman and brought up in a dingy East End two-roomed flat where she and her brother slept on a put-u-up in the sitting-room, and her parents occupied the only bedroom.

She had learned very early in life that you had to work to get what you wanted. Her mother worked; she took in sewing and she kept her family clean and fed. She was a good mother but a hard one. If Ruth came home late from school she was hit. If she didn't finish her homework on time she was hit. If she talked back to her mother, her father hit her instead. They worshipped the boy. He could do no wrong. She couldn't do right. Her father was a tailor; it wasn't his business. He never got into working for himself. That's why they were poor. Her mother was always reproaching him because he was salaried and other people took the profit home. One night, when Ruth was asleep, she felt her brother's hand on her. He was younger than she was, but much stronger. He held her down, the pillow rammed over her face till she nearly suffocated. He raped her. Then he said simply he would deny it and tell her parents she'd been with another boy and was blaming him. They'd believe him and beat the shit out of her. He'd liked it and he'd do it whenever he wanted. He turned over and went to sleep. When he came at her the next night, and all the nights afterwards, he didn't have to stop her mouth. She let him do it. And when she was sixteen, six months after it first happened, she missed two periods and knew she was pregnant. She didn't tell him. She didn't tell anyone. She packed her few clothes in a cheap holdall, robbed her mother's purse of the week's housekeeping money, and walked out. She went to a Salvation Army hostel, gave her name as Fraser because she didn't know if they would take in a Jewish girl, and got herself a job waitressing. She slept with the café owner, who was a Greek Cypriot, and saved enough money to have an abortion. It had been done by an old Cypriot woman who serviced the neighbourhood. It was quick and uncomplicated. Luckily the old woman was clean. She boiled her instruments and used clean sheets. Ruth walked away and spent three days in her room. Then she went back to the café. It could have been a downward slide, but Ruth was not going down. She was going up. By any means on offer. She avoided the criminal element. There were petty crooks and pimps on the lookout for a pretty girl, and Ruth was very pretty. She left the café and got herself a job in a supermarket. She waitressed at a wine bar in the evenings and she saved. She slept with the manager of the supermarket, and he made her a supervisor. She went to secretarial classes at night school. At nineteen she got her first office job. It had taken off from there. She lay beside Dick Kruger. He was snoring. She rubbed the silk nightdress, stroking herself like a cat.

Dick had been generous to her. Most men had rewarded her for the way she made them feel; only one had tried to knock her about and bully her, and Ruth had left the job and moved to Central London where she worked at an agency for a while, making a lot of money, buying clothes and shaping herself for a suitable interview with a brokerage firm where a secretary was needed on a permanent basis. She got the job, and she found her true
métier
. She had a talent for business. It fascinated her. The industry and intelligence stemming from her Jewish heritage blossomed in the environment of trading. She was home and she knew it. But she was a woman, and women didn't infiltrate the man's financial world, except through the back entrance.

Dick Kruger, lying on his back with his mouth ajar, was the last of a succession of lovers who had helped to advance Ruth's career. She had been offered marriage by one or two and refused. She was not interested in domestic life. She didn't want children. Never, after that one experience. She didn't want to belong to anyone or own anyone herself … Marriage was not for her. Unless it was to the boss. And even then, she wasn't sure she'd settle for it.

Dick wanted to marry her. She'd said yes, for the same reason she'd heated him up that night when all she wanted was to watch her programme on TV and go to sleep. To keep him quiet. She had managed to put marriage on the back burner. Paris came first. The prospect excited her. She relished the challenge. Her own role was not yet clear. She might do exactly what she'd promised Kruger: wreck Hastings' project if she got the chance. Or she might not. It would depend on which side looked like winning. If Andrews succeeded in Russia, then Hastings' role wouldn't be so vital. Arthur Harris might come out vindicated, and Kruger with him. She might need to strike at Hastings if that happened, just to clear him out of Kruger's way. There was everything to play for, and she felt lucky. Her instinct had never failed. There had never been a woman on the Board of Diamond Enterprises. She fell asleep on that beguiling thought.

Arthur Harris took Andrews' telephone call. They had spoken two days before, and Ray had nothing to report but the sterile interview at the Nuclear Energy Ministry. D. V. Borisov sounded like the kind of Soviet bureaucrat that had successfully stifled the Russian economy in the days before Gorbachov. Arthur sighed.

‘Well,' he had said, ‘there's nothing you can do but wait and then prod them through the Embassy if you haven't had a response by the end of the week. They're as bad as the bloody Africans. Keep me in close touch, won't you … I have faxes from Julius twice a day demanding progress reports.' He had taken his mind off his troubles by rereading the brochure on his new racing yacht.

Andrews was put through immediately when he made the unexpected call.

‘I've been sent for,' he explained. ‘Given a day's notice this time, and a longer interview. I don't want to read too much into this, but I think he's interested. I talked to Sir Peter and he thinks so too. He says this guy doesn't waste time talking unless he means business. Now … if he comes up with some concrete proposal, how wide is my brief, moneywise?'

Arthur didn't hesitate. ‘No limit,' he said smoothly. ‘Whatever he wants, promise it. Whatever it takes, get them to cut off Karakov's supplies. And don't worry. I'll back you.'

‘Thanks,' Andrews said. ‘Can I call you at home?'

‘Call me anywhere, any time,' Arthur said. ‘Don't hesitate. Good luck.'

Andrews had rung off.
Whatever he wants, promise it
. He had never gone into any negotiation with such an open-ended brief. It gave him a surge of enthusiasm which had been missing before. He had loved his job, squaring it with his domestic pressures as fairly as he could, but he had begun to lose impetus in the last two years. Begun to drift along, his ambitions on hold, losing sight of the mountain peak. Suddenly they had come into view again. He was ready to do battle with D. V. Borisov.

Dimitri Valerian Borisov was thirty-seven years old. He was very young by Russian standards to hold such a senior position. He owed his advancement to his top scientific qualifications and to his equally distinguished engineering and geological achievements.

He had two brothers and a sister. The Borisovs had been a very close family. As the children of the most powerful man in the old Soviet Union after the Secretary General himself, they were privileged. All doors opened for them academically, or in whatever branch of State Service they chose. His sister was a paediatrician, his elder brother went into the Army. He had been killed in Afghanistan. Dimitri Valerian knew that he had been tortured to death by mujahideen fighters, a fate so horrible that it had brought about his father's incapacitating stroke. His mother never knew the truth. His younger brother was the exception. He chose no career, settled to nothing, and joined a rock band, playing in Moscow discos. Dimitri Valerian was his father's son. Dedicated, unscrupulous about methods, concerned only with two things: his own promotion up his career scale, and the best interests of his country. Russia had suffered, and still suffered, the birth pains of her new freedom. A freedom which men like his father had supressed with bloody efficiency for seventy years. He loved his father, and he believed that what he had done was necessary at the time, but that time had passed and Russia's greatness lay in a future adapted to Western economic values. Industrial power was the key, now that war had become a form of mutual genocide. Russia must grow economically, her reserves were so vast, her labour potential so immense, if only her structure could be reformed and system made to work … He dreamed of Russia's greatness as an older generation dreamed of world domination by a universal creed.