Tall, Dark & Distant (22 page)

The whole club tasted stale. It wasn’t just the champagne leaving a bitter taste in his mouth; it was the people. He used to love to party with them, but things had changed.
He
had changed.

Nik got to his feet. There was nothing here for him anymore.

He wanted more than anything to get on a plane that would take him back to Georgia. That wasn’t an option, but he realised there was maybe something he could do to start changing his life. First, though, there was someone he needed to see.

‘Enough with the perfume,’ Nik said in Russian, opening a window in the tenth-storey apartment. It was snowing outside, but he needed fresh air.

‘What are you doing opening the window?’ his mother snapped. ‘You’ll let them in.’ She gave the bottle of Chanel No. 5 a defiant last squirt and then waved the scent around the room, before returning the perfume to the mantelpiece. Nik didn’t even need to watch to know what she was doing.

‘Who?’ he asked, making no attempt to close the window and trying to make out the Alps through the fog.

‘You know who!’ she shouted, elbowing Nik out of the way and slamming the window shut.

Nik put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. ‘You’re safe in here, Mama. No-one’s going to get you here.’

‘Did you lock the front door?’ she asked, craning her neck towards it. ‘You didn’t put the chain on. How many times do I need to ask you? Is it so hard to put the chain on?’

‘Mama, sit down,’ he said, guiding her to a chair by the fireplace and taking a seat beside her.

She slumped into the chair like an old lady and then began singing quietly to herself. He never really knew what he was going to find when he came to visit. It completely depended on whether she’d bothered to take her medication or not. Today she was no worse than he’d seen her lately, but certainly no better.

‘Are you going to play with Kat?’ she asked, obviously mixed up about what year it was. Kat and Nik hadn’t played together for at least eleven years. After the kidnapping, Nik hadn’t felt like playing for a long time. By the time he did, his sister had long since grown out of it.

‘Kat’s not here,’ he said. ‘But I did see her in Australia a couple of weeks ago. She’s … just the same.’

‘Australia,’ his mother said. ‘Is that where you’ve been? A new girlfriend or a new ex-girlfriend?’

‘What does that mean?’ he asked.

‘You normally visit when you’ve just split up with a girlfriend,’ his mother said. ‘But sometimes when you have a new girlfriend.’

‘Really?’ Nik said, surprised by how observant she could be. ‘Sometimes I visit after a fight with Papa.’

His mother laughed, returning a little youth to her face. It was so rare to see her laugh that Nik smiled, despite himself.

His mother reached over and put her hand on Nik’s knee. ‘I just want to see you happy, you know, Nikolai.’

She looked out the window. The snow had stopped and he could see the Alps peeking through the clouds.

‘So beautiful out there today,’ she said calmly. Then she turned to Nik and took his hand. ‘You deserve to be happy,
dorogay moy
.

Stop blaming yourself for what happened.’

Nik stared at his mother. She was suddenly so lucid.

‘Stop destroying things,’ she said. ‘You need to start rebuilding – piece by piece. You can do it. Start now. Don’t wait.’

Nik squeezed his mother’s hand to reassure her that he understood what she meant. He knew he destroyed things. All the time. But he had never had a reason to do it differently, until now.

‘Okay, Mama.’

She looked sceptical. ‘Promise me,’ she said, holding his hand tightly.

Nik nodded. ‘I will, Mama. I promise.’

The days after the kidnapping disappeared into a blur of police investigations and interviews for Georgia. With two kidnappers at large, the police wanted to know everything about her relationship with Nik and the events leading up to the crash – the extortion note, and who had been in the Mercedes. They also wanted to wring out every detail of her encounter with the man in the national park and the drama on the jet ski. Suddenly these weren’t just figments of her paranoid psyche, they were relevant. She thought back to the day in the rain when she’d seen the stranger on the track. She willed her brain to deliver a complete picture of him – anything to help the police find Alice’s kidnappers.

‘The man on the track was big, with dark eyes and dark hair,’ Georgia began.

‘Is there anything else you can tell us about him – anything unusual?’ asked the officer – a bald guy with a no-nonsense attitude. Squid was nowhere to be seen. At least Georgia could be thankful for that. ‘Did he have any tattoos, piercings, anything like that?’ the bald guy asked.

She racked her brain. She could clearly remember the man’s black eyes, but was there something else – something that she had taken in subconsciously? She had spent some time researching the Russian mafia – the type of men who might have kidnapped Alice. They were all marked with tattoos of some kind – many of them with stars, just as Nik had said. Did the stalker on the path have one? He might have. And the more she thought about it, the more vivid the picture in her mind became.

‘He had acne scars on his face and he had a tattoo,’ she said confidently.

‘A tattoo?’ the officer asked. ‘What kind of tattoo?’

Georgia thought some more. ‘I think it was a … star tattoo.’

‘You
think
, or was it definitely a star tattoo?’ the officer asked. ‘This is important.’

Georgia nodded. ‘It was a star tattoo … like the ones of the Russian mafia.’ She could see the tattoo in her mind quite clearly now.

‘And was this one of the men you saw in the tinnie?’ the officer asked.

She nodded slowly. ‘The men in the tinnie were wearing masks. But I remember tattoos. They both had tattoos on their shoulders.’ Georgia thought some more. ‘I’m pretty certain they were the same guys that kidnapped Alice.’

‘Pretty certain?’ the officer asked.

‘Certain,’ Georgia replied. ‘I only saw their outline in the car. It was dark. But I’m sure it was them.’

And so Georgia went on, with more and more conviction, describing the men who had kidnapped Alice and tried to extort half a million dollars out of Nik. There was no-one to contradict her description – Alice had suffered amnesia after the accident. She woke up in the hospital with no recollection of the previous night. The last thing she could recall was leaving the apartment on New Year’s Eve. After that – everything was a blank. Nik couldn’t add to the story, either. He had disappeared completely.

‘It’s unlikely these men are still in the region,’ the officer said. ‘But just in case, we’ll put a patrol in your area.’

‘Thanks, I feel better about that,’ Georgia said. But she didn’t really. She felt numb. She knew she’d done the right thing, sending Nik away – but she missed him too. All she could think about was his arms around her, his hand stroking her face, telling her everything was going to be all right, even though she knew it wasn’t. She had never felt so alone.

Since the kidnapping, Alice had withdrawn to the couch, watching television for hours and crying. Even though she couldn’t remember her ordeal, she seemed depressed by it – maybe her subconscious had taken everything in and trapped it.

When Georgia tried to update her on developments, or the lack of them, Alice fixed her with a blank stare.

She saw Ella and Mei a couple of times in Hastings Street, but when she smiled at them, they just looked right through her. And how could she blame them, after the way she had let everyone down? Any one of them could have been kidnapped just because they were friends with Nik. She imagined how life would have been if she’d never met him. Alice would be her old self. Ella and Mei would meet her on the beach and try to give her boy advice.

As the kidnap crisis dragged on and the police failed to come up with any concrete leads, Georgia became more determined to find some answers herself. She gave up running and took up internet research. She spent hours on Wikipedia, wading through blogs, posting to forums and google-translating pages and pages of Cyrillic, trying to understand how the
Russkaya Mafiya
worked.

She had no doubt that they were behind Alice’s kidnapping. She’d read reports of the mafia’s involvement in organised crime in Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast. There was no mention of the Sunshine Coast, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to infer they were in Noosa – or had been.

She shivered at the thought of what might have happened to Alice if the car hadn’t crashed.

Late one night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Georgia stumbled upon an old Russian news story about the mafia. She was tired and she had just been skimming over the report, but she woke up quickly when her eyes hit the name:
Morozov
. Georgia’s heart stopped. What had she found?

She looked away from the screen, dropping her face into her hands. Georgia could hardly bring herself to look at the story. Were the Morozovs part of the Russian mafia? It would explain why Nik was so secretive. It would explain why he had been so reluctant to get the police involved when Alice was kidnapped. Georgia wasn’t sure she was ready for that kind of revelation.

Slowly, she let her eyes return to the computer screen. She forced herself to look at the story and, without skimming or skipping, she read. It was a chilling account of the worldwide reach of the Russian mafia and their involvement in human trafficking, drug deals and money laundering. Right at the end of the story was a reference to a kidnapping in Georgia. The Russian mafia had been blamed, although it was still unclear who was behind the crime. But the victims were the Morozov family.

Georgia’s heart sank. She closed her eyes. She was relieved that the Morozovs weren’t involved with the mafia, but her heart ached for Nik.

She took a breath and read on. The family had been holidaying in Georgia when Nik and his mother had been kidnapped. They’d been held for three days until an undisclosed ransom was paid. Local police had been implicated in the kidnapping. This all happened eleven years earlier – when Nik was nine.

Georgia felt her body turn to ice, even though it was thirty degrees. She switched off her computer and flopped onto a sofa, trying to take everything in. Suddenly Georgia had an explanation for the way Nik had responded to her name when they first met.

She also knew why Nik reacted the way he did to the extortion note and Alice’s kidnapping. He didn’t want the police involved because he didn’t trust them. Georgia understood why Nik was such an emotional basket case – he’d been kidnapped as a kid. How could he trust anyone after that?

Georgia wished she could reach out to Nik and hold him. To tell him she was sorry, that she understood what he’d been through and that she wanted to help him. But it was too late. She had sent him away again, and there was no going back on what she’d said to him.

She closed her eyes and cried herself to sleep.

‘There’s been a bit of a breakthrough,’ the bald police officer told Georgia the next morning when she was called back to the police station. ‘We think we found the Halloween masks that you were talking about.’