Stranded (3 page)

Over a succession of numb days, I pursued the story via the internet. Bits and pieces emerged gradually. They'd had an attempted burglary a few months before. That night, Rachel had gone off to bed but Sam had stayed up late, working in his study. Sam, the police reckoned, had heard the sound of breaking glass and gone downstairs to investigate. The intruder had snatched up a knife from the kitchen worktop and plunged it into his stomach then fled. Sam had bled to death on the kitchen floor. It had taken him a while to die, they thought. And Rachel had come down for breakfast to find him stiff and cold. Poor bloody Rachel, I thought.

On the fifth day after the news broke, there was a large manila envelope among my post, franked with the
Material Girl
logo. My story had come winging its way back to me. Inside, there was a handwritten note from Rachel.

Dear Sarah,

Thank you so much for your submission. I found your story intriguing and thought-provoking. A real eye-opener, in fact. But I felt the ending was rather weak and so I regret we're unable to publish it. However, I like your style. I'd be very interested to see more of your work.

Gratefully yours,

Rachel Uttley

That's when I realised what I'd done. Like Oscar Wilde, I'd killed the thing I'd loved. And Rachel had made sure I knew it.

That's when my sleepless nights started.

And that's why I'm so very, very grateful for Roger and the case they call
Wagon Mound
(No.1). And for an understanding of proximity. Thanks to him, I've finally realised I'm not the guilty party here. Neither is Rachel.

The guilty party is the one who started the wagon rolling. Lovely, sexy, reckless Sam Uttley.

Breathtaking Ignorance

E
very caterer's nightmare. The choking customer, collapsed on the floor gasping for breath. I'd already hurtled through from the kitchen as soon as I heard the coughing and spluttering, and I made it to his side just as he slumped to the floor like a Bonfire Night guy, legs splayed, head lolling, eyes popping.

The boardroom crowd were keeping their distance, remembering all the strictures they'd ever heard about giving people air. There was a nervous hush, the only sounds the croaking gasps of the man on the floor. I knew exactly who he was. Brian Bayliss, chief legal executive of Kaymen Merchant Bank. I'd catered functions for him, both at the bank's Canary Wharf headquarters and at his opulent house in Suffolk, and I knew he was as pompous and bossy as they come. But that didn't stop me kneeling down beside him and dragging him into a sitting position so I could perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. That's one of the many fascinating things you learn at catering college. You encircle the victim with your arms, hug them tightly and sharply, forcing the air out of their lungs, which in turn frees whatever is blocking their windpipe. The downside is that somebody usually ends up covered in sick.

Bayliss was bright scarlet by now, his lips turning an ominous blue. I got my arms round him, smelling the sweat that mingled with his expensive cologne. I contracted my arms, forcing his ribs inward. Nothing happened. His gasping sounded ever more frantic, less effective.

‘I'll call an ambulance, Meg,' John Collings said desperately, moving towards the boardroom phone. He'd organised this lunch, and I could see this was the last contract for a directors' thrash that I'd be getting from him.

I tried the manoeuvre again. This time, Bayliss slumped heavily against me. The dreadful retching of his breathing suddenly ceased. The heaving in his chest seemed to have stopped. ‘Oh my God,' I said. ‘He's stopped breathing.'

A couple of the other guests moved forward and gingerly pulled Bayliss's still body away from me. I freed my skirt from under him and crawled round him on my knees, saying, ‘Quick, the kiss of life.' Out of the corner of my eye I could see John slam the phone down. In the corner behind him, Tessa, the waitress who'd served him, was weeping quietly.

John's chief accountant had taken on the unenviable task of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Somehow, I knew he was wasting his time. I leaned back on my heels, muttering, ‘I don't understand it. I just don't understand it.'

The ambulance crew arrived within five minutes and clamped an oxygen mask over his face. They strapped Bayliss to a stretcher and I followed them down the corridor and into the lift. David Bromley, Bayliss's deputy, climbed into the ambulance alongside me, looking like he wanted to ask what the hell I thought I was doing.

‘It was my food he was eating,' I said defensively. ‘I want to make sure he's all right.'

‘Looks a bit late for that,' he said. He didn't sound filled with regret.

At the hospital, David and I found a quiet corner near the WRVS coffee stall. I stared glumly at the floor and said softly, ‘He didn't look like he was going to pull through.'

‘No,' David agreed with a note almost of relish in his voice.

‘You don't sound too upset,' I hazarded.

‘That obvious, is it?' he asked pleasantly. ‘No, I'm not upset. The bank will be a better place without him. The guy's a complete shit. He's a tyrant at the office and at home too, from what I can gather. He says jump and the only question you're allowed to ask is, how high? He goes through secretaries like other people go through rolls of Sellotape.'

‘Oh God,' I groaned. ‘So if he recovers, he'll probably sue me for negligence.'

‘I doubt if he'd have a case. His own greed was too much of a contributory factor. I saw him stuffing down those chicken and garlic canapés like there was no tomorrow,' David consoled me.

Before we could say more, a weary-looking woman in a white coat approached us. ‘Are you the two people who came in the ambulance with –', she checked her clipboard. ‘Brian Bayliss?' We nodded. ‘Are you related to Mr Bayliss?'

We shook our heads. ‘I'm a colleague,' David said.

‘And I catered the lunch where Mr Bayliss had his choking fit,' I revealed.

The doctor nodded. ‘Can you tell me what Mr Bayliss had to eat?'

‘Just some canapés. That's all we'd served by then,' I said defensively.

‘And what exactly was in the canapés?'

‘There were two sorts,' I explained. ‘Smoked chicken or salmon and lobster.'

‘Brian was eating the chicken ones,' David added helpfully.

The doctor looked slightly puzzled. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure. He never touched fish,' David added. ‘He wouldn't even have it on the menu if we were hosting a function.'

‘Look,' I said. ‘What exactly is the problem here?'

The doctor sighed. ‘Mr Bayliss has died, apparently as a result of anaphylactic shock.' We must both have looked bewildered, for she went on to explain. ‘A profound allergic reaction. Essentially, the pathways in his respiratory tract just closed up. He couldn't physically get enough air into his lungs, so he asphyxiated. I've never heard of it being brought on by chicken, though. The most common cause is an allergic reaction to a bee sting,' she added thoughtfully.

‘I know he was allergic to shellfish,' David offered. ‘That's why he had this thing about never serving fish.'

‘Oh my God,' I wailed. ‘The lobster!' They both stared at me. ‘I ground up the lobster shells into powder and mixed them with mayonnaise for the fish canapés. The mayo for the chicken ones had grilled red peppers and roast garlic mixed into it. They looked very similar. Surely there couldn't have been a mix-up in the kitchen?' I covered my face with my hands as I realised what had happened.

Of course, they both fussed over me and insisted it wasn't my fault. I pulled myself together after a few minutes, then the doctor asked David about Bayliss's next of kin. ‘His wife's called Alexandra,' he told her, and recited their home number.

How did I know it was their home number? Not from catering executive lunches, I'm afraid. Perhaps I should have mentioned that Alexandra and I have been lovers for just over a year now. And that Brian was adamant that if she left him, he'd make sure she left without a penny from him. And, more importantly, that she'd never see her children again.

I just hope the mix-up with the mayo won't hurt my reputation for gourmet boardroom food too much.

White Nights, Black Magic

W
hen night falls in St Petersburg, the dead become more palpable. In this city built on blood and bone, they're always present. But when darkness gathers, they're harder to escape. The frozen, drowned serfs who paid the price for Peter the Great's determination to fulfil Nostradamus's prediction that Venice would rise from the dead waters of the north; the assassinated tsars whose murders changed surprisingly little; the starved victims of the Wehrmacht's nine-hundred-day siege; the buried corpses of lords of the imagination such as Dostoevsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov – they're all there in the shifting shadows, their foetid breath tainting the chilly air that comes off the Neva and shivers through the streets.

My dead too. I never feel closer to Elinor than when I walk along the embankment of Vasilyevsky Ostrov on a winter's night. The familiar grandeur of the Hermitage and St Isaac's cathedral on the opposite bank touch me not at all. What resonates inside me is the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the spark of her eyes.

It shouldn't be this way. It shouldn't be the darkness that conjures her up for me, because we didn't make those memories in the dead core of winter. The love that exploded between us was a child of the light, a dream state that played itself out against the backdrop of the White Nights, those heady summer weeks when the sun never sets over St Petersburg.

Like all lovers, we thought the sun would never set on us either. But it did. And although Elinor isn't one of the St Petersburg dead, she comes back to haunt me when the city's ghosts drift through the streets in wraiths of river mist. I know too that this is no neutral visitation. Her presence demands something of me, and it's taken me a long time to figure out what that is. But I know now. Elinor understood that Russia can be a cruel and terrible place, and also that I am profoundly Russian. So tonight, I will make reparation.

Three summers ago, Elinor unpacked her bags in the Moscow Hotel down at the far end of Nevsky Prospekt. She'd never been to Russia before, and when we met that first evening, she radiated a buzz of excitement that enchanted me. We Russians are bound to our native land by a terrible, doomed sentimental attachment, and we are predisposed to like anyone who shows the slightest sign of sharing that love.

But there was more than that linking us from the very beginning. Anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship has had their mental map altered forever. It's hard to explain precisely how that manifests itself, but once you've been there, you recognise it in another. An almost imperceptible flicker in the eyes; some tiny shift in the body language; an odd moment of deference in the dialogue. Whatever the signals, they're subconsciously registered by those of us who are members of the same club. In that very first encounter, I read that kinship between myself and Elinor.

By the time I met Elinor, I was well clear of the marriage that had thrown me off balance, turned me from a confident, assured professional woman into a bundle of insecurities. I was back on even keel, in control of my own destiny and certain I would never walk into that nightmare again. I wasn't so sure about Elinor.

She seemed poised and assertive. She was a well-qualified doctor who had gained a reputation for her work on addiction with intravenous drug users in her native Manchester. She was the obvious choice for a month-long exchange visit to share her experiences with local medical professionals and voluntary-sector workers struggling to come to terms with the heroin epidemic sweeping St Petersburg. She exuded a quiet competence and an easy manner. But still, I recognised the secret shame, the hidden scars.

I had been chosen to act as her interpreter because I'd spent two years of my post-graduate medical training in San Francisco. I was nervous about the assignment because I had no formal training in interpreting, but my boss made it clear there was no room for argument. The budget wouldn't run to a qualified interpreter, and besides, I knew all the technical terminology. I explained this to Elinor over a glass of wine in the halfempty bar after the official dinner with the meeting-and-greeting party.

Some specialists might have regarded my confession as a slight on their importance. But Elinor just grinned and said, ‘Natasha, you're a doctor, you can probably make me sound much more sensible than I can manage myself. Now, if you're not rushing off, maybe you can show me round a little, help me get my bearings?'

We walked out of the hotel, round the corner to the Metro station. Her eyes were wide, absorbed by everything. The amputee war veterans round the kiosks; the endless escalator; the young woman slumped against the door of the train carriage, vodka bottle dangling from her fingers, wrecked mascara in snail trails down her cheeks; Elinor drank it all in, tossing occasional questions at me.

We emerged back into daylight at the opposite end of Nevsky Prospekt, and I steered her round the big tourist sights. The cathedral, the Admiralty, the Hermitage, then back along the embankment to the Fontanka Canal. Because she was still operating on UK time, she didn't really register the White Nights phenomenon at first. It was only when I pointed out that it was already eleven o'clock and she probably needed to think about getting some sleep that she realised her normal cues for waking and sleeping were going to be absent for the next four weeks.

‘How do you cope with the constant light?' she said, waving an arm at a sky only a couple of shades lighter than her eyes.

I shrugged. ‘I pull the pillow over my head. But your hotel will have heavy curtains, I think.' I flagged down a passing Lada and asked the driver to take us back to the hotel.

‘It's all so alien,' she said softly.

‘It'll get worse before it gets better,' I told her. I dropped her at the hotel and kept the car on. As the driver weaved through the potholed streets back to my apartment on Vasilyevsky Ostrov, I couldn't escape the image of her wide-eyed wondering face.

But then, I wasn't exactly trying.

Over the next week, I spent most of my waking hours with Elinor. Mostly it was work, constantly stretching my brain to keep pace with the exchange of information that flowed back and forth between Elinor and my colleagues. But in the evenings, we fell into the habit of eating together, then strolling round the city so she could soak up the atmosphere. I didn't mind. There were plenty of other things I could have been doing, but my friends would still be there after she left town. What I wasn't allowing myself to acknowledge was that I was falling in love with her.

On the sixth night, she finally started opening up. ‘You know I mentioned my partner?' she said, filling our wine glasses to avoid my eyes.

‘He's a lawyer, right?' I said.

Her mouth twisted up at one corner. ‘He's a she.' She flicked a quick glance at me. ‘Does that surprise you?'

I couldn't keep the smile from my face. For days, I'd been telling myself off for wishful thinking, but I'd been right. ‘It takes one to know one,' I said.

‘You're gay?' Elinor sounded startled.

‘Labels are for medicines,' I said. ‘But lately, I seem to have given up on men.'

‘You have a girlfriend?' Now, her eyes were on mine. I didn't know what to read into their level stare, which unsettled me a little.

‘Nothing serious,' I said. ‘A friend I sleep with from time to time, when she's in town. Just fun, for both of us. Not like you.'

She looked away again. ‘No. Not like me.'

Something about the angle of her head, the downcast eyes and the hand that gripped the wine glass told me my first instinct had been right. Whatever she might say next, I knew that this apparently confident woman was in thrall to someone who stripped her of her self-esteem. ‘Tell me about her,' I said.

‘Her name's Claire. She's a lawyer, specialising in intellectual property. She's very good. We've been together ten years. She's very smart, very strong, very beautiful. She keeps my feet on the ground.'

I wanted to tell her that love should be about flying, not about the force of gravity. But I didn't. ‘Do you miss her?'

Again, she met my eyes. ‘I thought I would. But I've been so busy.' She smiled. ‘And you're such good company, you've kept me from being lonely.'

‘It's been my pleasure. Where would you like to go this evening?'

Her gaze was level, unblinking. ‘I'd like to see where you live.'

I tried to stay cool. ‘It's not very impressive.'

‘You don't have to impress me. I'd just like to see a real Russian home. I'm fed up with hotels and restaurants.'

So we took the Metro to Vasileostrovskaya and walked down Sredny Prospekt to the Tenth Line, where I live in a two-roomed apartment on the second floor. Buying it took every penny I managed to save in the US, and it's pretty drab by Western standards, but to a Russian it feels like total luxury to have so much space to oneself. I showed Elinor into the living room with some nervousness. I'd never brought a Westerner home before.

She looked round the white walls with their Chagall posters and the secondhand furniture covered with patchwork throws, then turned to me and smiled. ‘I like it,' she said.

I turned away, feeling embarrassed. ‘Interior design hasn't really hit Russia,' I said. ‘Would you like a drink? I've got tea or coffee or vodka.'

‘Vodka, please.'

There is a moment that comes with drinking vodka Russian style when inhibitions slip away. That's the time to stop drinking, before you get too drunk to do anything with the window of opportunity. I knew Elinor had hit the moment when she leaned into me and said, ‘I really love this country.'

I pushed her dark hair away from her forehead and said, ‘Russia can be a very cruel place. We Russians are dangerous.'

‘You don't feel very dangerous to me,' she whispered, her breath hot against my neck.

‘I'm Russian. I'm trouble. The two go together like hand in glove.'

‘Mmm. I like the sound of that. Your hand, my glove.'

‘That would be very dangerous.'

She chuckled softly. ‘I feel the need for a little danger, Natasha.'

And so we made trouble.

Of course, she went back to England. She didn't want to, but she had no choice. Her visa was about to expire, she had work commitments at home. And there was Claire. She had said very little about her lover, but I understood how deeply ingrained was her subservience. The clues were there, both sexually and emotionally. Claire wasn't physically violent, but emotional abuse can cause damage that is far more profound. Elinor had learned the lesson of submission so thoroughly it was entrenched in her soul. No matter how deep the love that had sprung up between us, in her heart she couldn't escape the conviction that she belonged to Claire.

It didn't stop us loving each other. We e-mailed daily, sometimes several times a day. We managed to speak on the phone every two or three weeks, sometimes for an hour at a time. A couple of months after she'd gone back, she called in distress. Claire had accepted a new job in London, and was insisting Elinor abandon her work in Manchester and move to the capital with her. I gently suggested this might be the opportunity for Elinor to free herself, not necessarily for me but for her own sake. But I knew even as I spoke it was pointless. Until Claire decided it was over, Elinor had no other option but to stay. I understood that; I had only managed to free myself when my husband had grown tired of me. I wanted to save her, but I didn't know how.

Three months later, they'd moved. Elinor had found a job at one of the London teaching hospitals. She didn't have the same degree of autonomy she'd enjoyed in Manchester, and she found it much less challenging. But at least she was able to use some of her expertise, and she liked the team she was working with.

I was actually reading one of her e-mails when my boss called me into his office. ‘You know I'm supposed to go to London next week? The conference on HIV and intravenous drug use?'

I nodded. Lucky bastard, I'd thought when the invitation came through. ‘I remember.'

‘My wife has been diagnosed with breast cancer,' he said abruptly. ‘They're operating on Monday. So you'll have to go instead.'

It was an uncomfortable way to achieve my heart's desire, but there was nothing I could do about my boss's misfortune. A few days later, I was walking through customs and immigration and into Elinor's arms. We went straight to my hotel and dived back into the dangerous waters. Hand in glove. Moths to a flame.

Four days of the conference. Three evenings supposedly socialising with colleagues, but in reality, time we could steal to be together. Except that on the last night, the plans went spectacularly awry. Instead of a discreet knock at my bedroom door, the phone rang. Elinor's voice was unnaturally bright. ‘Hi, Natasha,' she said. ‘I'm down in reception. I hope you don't mind, but I've brought Claire with me. She wanted to meet you.'

Panic choked me like a gloved hand. ‘I'll be right down,' I managed to say. I dressed hurriedly, fingers fumbling zip and buttons, mouth muttering Russian curses. What was Claire up to? Was this simply about control, or was there more to it? Had she sussed what was going on between Elinor and me? With dry mouth and damp palms, I rode the lift to the ground floor, trying to hold it together. Not for myself, but for Elinor's sake.

They looked good together. Elinor's sable hair, denim blue eyes and olive skin on one side of the table, a contrast to Claire's blonde hair and surprising brown eyes. Where Elinor's features were small and neat, Claire's were strong and well-defined. She looked like someone you'd rather have on your side than against you. While Elinor looked nervous, her fingers picking at a cocktail coaster, Claire leaned back in her seat, a woman in command of her surroundings.

As I approached, feeling hopelessly provincial next to their urban chic, Claire was first to her feet. ‘You must be Natasha,' she said, her smile lighting her eyes. ‘I'm so pleased to meet you.' I extended a hand, but her hand was on my shoulder as she leaned in to kiss me on both cheeks. ‘I've been telling Elinor off for keeping you to herself. I do hope you don't mind me butting in, but I so wanted to meet you.'