expression on her handsome English face. “Do go in. Let me know if you need anything.” I thanked Mrs Milo and she said please call me Janet.
The little studio at the top of the house was the kind a student might use. It was freshly painted. Striped curtains hung at the windows, which were open and through one I could see Tolya’s house on the other side of the green square.
A bed, desk, old-fashioned dresser, some lamps, a chair and a little TV completed the furnishings. The bathroom was pristine, and there was no sign anyone had been here.
Where did she live? Where did she keep her clothes?
I went and asked Mrs Milo for the coffee, and followed her into her apartment.
“Elena wasn’t here last night at all?” I said casually.
“No, and we changed the locks when we redecorated. We’ve got a new tenant coming in this week, as I said.”
“So you haven’t seen her.”
“I told the police that she was round several times asking if she could have the room back, that she had some money. But I told her it was already let.”
“Please try to think, did Elena mention anything, did she maybe leave something?”
Janet Milo paused, and something seemed to click, and then she said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You’re right of course.”
“Go on.”
“It was a while back, and she asked if she could store an old suitcase in our storage room in the basement. I completely forgot.”
“You showed it to the cops?”
“I only just remembered. I’ll phone them straight away.”
“Could you show it to me first?” I smiled reassuringly.
In the underground storage room, I crouched down and opened the huge battered green suitcase that had belonged to Elena Gagarin.
Clothes, shoes, underwear were stuffed into the suitcase. There were also envelopes filled with clippings, letters, snapshots. I shuffled through them, including one of Elena herself posed alongside a car that had belonged to Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut. Another of a middle-aged couple, weary-looking people, working-class Russians I figured for her parents. Pictures of Valentina. A picture of Greg.
I began to sweat. I’d been an idiot not to see it before: Elena and “Greg” were related. You looked at them together in the pictures and you could see it. Brother and sister? Cousins? I had been insane not to see it.
Rooting around in the suitcase, I found applications for British citizenship, credit card slips, a small notebook with telephone numbers. I tried ringing a few, including the bank where Gagarin claimed to have worked. Nobody had heard of her. There was an ID card. Her name really was Yelena Gagarin, but it was a common enough name.
This had made it easy for her to imply the connection with the famous cosmonaut, the Soviet hero, Yuri, whose daughter was known as Lena, the diminutive form of Yelena, or Elena of course. This Gagarin had a different middle name, different patronymic, which she had changed to make her game work.
It was a smart move. Elena knew the current generation of young Russians at home and abroad idolized Yuri Gagarin, that he had become a hero to them as he had to their parents and grandparents: the first big modern hero in Russia, even if he did die flying a plane drunk.
It didn’t matter. He got to space first, he beat the Americans, he was young and handsome and a true Russian hero. Elena had borrowed a little piece of him, just the reputation, which was easy since she already had the name. It made her very popular. It made it easy for her to make her way, first in Moscow, then in London. In a small notebook, she had scribbled notes about her childhood obsession with Yuri Gagarin, and how she had visited the town of Gagarin where she posed with his car. In Moscow she went to his statue every year. This stainless steel cosmonaut was said to fly annually and grant you your wish.
From the suitcase diary and notebook and scraps, the postcards and letters in the box-what I could put together-she had arrived in London a couple of years earlier from Moscow, though she had grown up in St Petersburg. She already spoke good English and had worked as a cleaner for a while in a hotel near Heathrow Airport.
She got to know a few people, guests at the hotel, and then she made her move. She set herself up as a banker. She made friends with Val. Even after she left the apartment in this building on Tolya’s square, she went on pretending she lived here.
A couple of letters from her mother revealed that Gagarin came from a working-class family still living in one of the crappy housing projects on the fringe of St Petersburg, near the cemeteries, where the mud made your feet sink on a damp day.
Elena wasn’t related to Yuri Gagarin, she didn’t work in a fancy bank or hedge fund, she didn’t live on Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill, she couldn’t even afford the attic room.
Who the hell was she? A girl on the make in London? A girl who had come over looking for a life, or a husband? She had managed to fake it with Tolya, Val, even me. Her lying about almost everything was her way of surviving.
I pocketed an address book I found in the suitcase. Now I was sure Greg had been involved in Elena’s death. And Valentina’s. The three were connected.
Heart pounding, sweating, in a small wooden box in the suitcase pocket, I found a portrait of Val in a green sweater I recognized.
But Val was dead. And even Yuri Gagarin couldn’t grant me my wish.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The return address on the envelope I had found in Gagarin’s suitcase was the same as the address I’d found in Val’s bathroom. Wimbledon.
It was Saturday. I was hungover from the party the night before. Worse, I felt messed up by Elena Gagarin’s death. I didn’t get any sleep, but the adrenalin shot through my body, it made me jumpy, on edge, the tension made me wired. I could smell him. I could smell this Greg.
If I could stay cool, if I kept the gun in my pocket, if I didn’t lose it the way I had when I saw him at the party on the dance floor, I’d get him.
It was raining when I got to Wimbledon. Tennis, I thought. They play tennis in Wimbledon. When did they play? I thought. June? July? I took the subway.
There was a loud, harsh wail of sirens that hit me as soon as I came up the subway stairs. Outside most of the street was blocked off. Rain came down hard. Next to the subway entrance, a small crowd had gathered against a three-storey building. On the ground floor was a fruit and vegetable store.
“Move them away,” said a uniform standing a few feet away. “Fucking sightseers,” he said to his partner.
I went over and asked what was going on, he looked at the gold watch on my wrist, a mixture of envy and contempt on his face. He didn’t answer, as if to say, what’s your bloody need to know, mate? He gestured to me to get back against the building.
It was as if I was on the other side, a civilian. Gun in my pocket, I kept my mouth shut and moved closer into the shadow of the fruit store.
Among the onlookers was the low rustle of fearful talk. Talk of bombs, guns, murder, knives. Talk of rising crime. Of terrorism. Islamists, they mumbled. Make bombs out of hair dye. They don’t fucking want to live by our rules then they should fuck off home. An old man said this. A woman nodded in agreement.
