“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come in if you want, I’ll make coffee, and I’ll walk you home.”
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Friend of Valentina.”
“Which friend?”
“This guy, he was at the party. Greg, he calls himself. I’m going in my house, he calls to me, and I say, go away, go away.”
“What else?”
I wasn’t sure if this woman, Gagarin, had picked up on what I’d been telling Fiona. Being with her felt like having napalm sprayed on you.
“Greg threatened me once. Said I shouldn’t listen to what Val tells me. I don’t understand. I could sleep in your bed, but we don’t do anything.”
“How do you know Greg?”
“I told you. I am friend of Valentina, of Tolya, best friend, BFF, you say.”
“I’ll walk you home,” I said. “Now.”
“I’ll go, I don’t beg,” she said suddenly, turned her back to me and marched to the door.
“Let me walk you,” I called.
She didn’t answer. Just went out into the rain, back hunched over, heading for her place. She told me it was just around the corner, and I went upstairs and and sat down in front of the TV, waiting for late calls from New York. I must have dozed, and I was still in the big leather chair, watching reruns of the Canadian women’s curling team, when sirens woke me. I looked at my watch.
It was five in the morning, and by the time I got to the window, only the faint screams of the sirens were left behind, like a bad, bad hangover.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Is she dead?” I said to the medic at the hospital where they had taken Elena Gagarin.
“No,” he said. “Bad, though.”
“You got hold of me how?”
“In her pocket. Your name and number were in her pocket when the police found her. You’re a relation?”
I nodded. You got more out of hospitals if they thought you were blood.
“Come,” he said, and I followed him down the corridor to a room where Gagarin was attached to a tangle of IVs.
Most of her face was bandaged; one arm that lay outside the thin sheet was black and yellow. She had been beat up pretty good. A cop hovered close by.
“What happened?” I said.
“I found her,” said the cop.
“How come?”
“I was passing. I’d been round to a pub with some friends, and then to somebody’s flat for coffee and I was on my way back to the tube at Notting Hill Gate, and I cut around through an alleyway behind the shops, you wouldn’t know it, over by where the Marks food place is, and I found her. She could barely speak. They beat her up, one used a knife, left her on a building site. Nobody noticed.” He snorted. “Not even in an area where the bloody houses go for ten million quid. You’re related to her. I am sorry,” he said, and I thanked him and went back into the room.
The doctor told me Gagarin had been in a coma since they admitted her, and we stood by the bed, and watched her for a while, keeping watch, I thought, somebody to bear witness for this pathetic woman. A few hours before she had stood in my doorway, drenched by the rain, asking for help.
We watched her, the cop, the doctor, technician and me, watched the lines on the machines go flat. She was dead.
Thinking I was her relative, they gave me her bag to see if I could make an ID. There was a little book, and the address of a building around the corner from Tolya’s where she had told me she lived.
The bag was made of fancy white and gray snakeskin with a silver buckle which when I looked closely I saw was a fake, a knock-off, a cheap version of the real thing, jammed with make-up, underwear, sweater, a few photographs, a wallet with a couple of pounds in it.
I put the photographs in my pocket and gave the bag back to the policeman, handed over my cell number, and left Gagarin to the cops and medics, and other people who tended the dead and dying.
Dead, with no ID, and only a fake bag, Gagarin seemed to have ceased to exist.
Around eight in the morning, I left the hospital, found a Starbucks-they had spread like a stain all over London- got some coffee, and went over to Gagarin’s place.
A slim pretty woman, half asleep from the look of it, opened the door. She wore jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and yellow flip-flops.
“Yes?”
I apologized for banging on the front door. I said I was looking for Elena Gagarin’s flat, pretending I expected to find her in the house.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “The police have already been. They said she was attacked not far from here. They’ve seen what there is, and it isn’t much. They told me Elena was taken to hospital very early this morning.”
I said I was her cousin and I’d come to get some things for her, to take to the hospital.
“I’ll help if I can,” said the woman. “But she hasn’t lived here for some months. Is she all right?”
I explained what had happened. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “Is this the right address?”
“Yes, number twelve, that’s right, but it belongs to us, my husband and me.”
“You don’t know her?”
“Look, come in,” she said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee? Tea? I’m Janet Milo, by the way.”
I went into the hallway. Inside what had once been a private house and was now divided into apartments was a beautiful winding staircase. I followed the woman in yellow flip-flops to the top floor where there were two doors. One was ajar.
“This is ours,” she said, gesturing at the apartment with the open door where I could hear a radio playing news. She unlocked the other door. “Up top here, there’s a minute little room, I suppose it was once for a servant,” she said. “Elena did rent it from us for a time, oh, six months back, she said she adored the area and she was looking for a place of her own, but she could never quite pay the rent and eventually we asked her to go. We’ve redecorated and there’s a new girl coming to live here.”
“You haven’t seen her, yesterday, recently?”
“No, but she did stop by, asked if we had changed the locks,” she said. “The police asked to see the room where she had lived.” She was pretty cool about it, but maybe it was her style. “I assume that’s why you’re here?”
“Yes, and she’s dead,” I said.
I realized now that I had never seen Gagarin go into the house. She had lied about the apartment.
“I’d like to take a look.”
“I don’t see why not. Coffee?”
“Do you know where she worked? You must have asked.”
“I got the impression Elena was always looking for a job. She said she had prospects at one of the big banks, but I think she survived doing translations. Working at a bookshop. Possibly a club that catered to Russians, a bit of, forgive me, sponging off her friends. Quite a few of them have settled around here, sadly. She left early and came home late, and she was quiet. You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“It was so nice when we had Americans. I adore Americans. Not too many now,” she said. “The dollar, I suppose. For that matter, there aren’t too many English people, either, not round here, anyway,” she added, a wry
