to make this meeting worth another one. And he felt the burden crushing his hopes of being able to help her.
“Hello, Masha,” he said.
She was silent, staring up at him, the fear in her eyes the same as when he’d entered.
“It’s Taras,” he said.
She stared back. Then he saw her eyes flicker a little and tears forming. Her desperately thin body shook spasmodically and then quieted.
“Taras,” she said finally.
“We’ll soon get you out of here,” he said breezily, but heard that the encouragement in his voice had a hollow ring to it. He looked down, embarrassed now by his inability to really help her. “How are you feeling?” he said, and didn’t need an answer. None of the soothing phrases you heard in a normal hospital was any good in here.
Carefully, he sat down on the cot very close to her head so that his back was between her upper body and the camera. He judged that his body would obscure her from the lens. But she flinched at his closeness and a noise came from her mouth that sounded like inarticulate terror.
“It’s okay,” he said. He bent down slowly and kissed her forehead, feeling the bandage on her face brush his cheek. Then he sat up slowly again. Her right arm was by her side, he saw, and the left one she’d moved slightly, so that it crossed over her stomach and had made room for him when he had sat on the narrow cot. He gently picked up her right hand in his and moved it away from her side, in front of his body and out of sight of the camera. It was a simple gesture of affection, a straightforward holding of hands. But he didn’t know if this was going to work, even if she complied. At least she’d let him move her hand.
“It’s spring,” he said. “The flowers are all out along the mountains. The trees are their wonderful new green. You remember?”
She seemed to nod slightly.
“At the farm this was our favourite time of year,” he said lightly. “New life, the end of winter, warmth. My mother would start to cook properly again after all that tinned food we used to eat over the winter. I remember the first spring you came to the farm. You’d never seen so many flowers, never seen a southern spring.”
The farm. The barn at the farm where she’d been ambushed by Russian intelligence and tried to kill herself.
“It wasn’t a good time to visit in January, darling Masha,” he said. “What on earth were you doing?”
He’d read the transcripts of their interrogations so far. All she’d said, repeatedly, was that she was visiting an old place from her childhood, where her cousin Taras’s family spent their summers. He thought back to her one statement, which he knew in his heart was the only place any hope for her lay. It was a statement from the Russian officer who’d led the ambush party. “It’s not her,” the Russian officer had shouted that night in January at the barn. “It’s not her.”
In her interrogations at the hospital in the past fifteen days, all she’d been able to say, apart from repeating the nostalgic reasons for her visit, was this phrase of the Russian officer. “They must have been waiting for someone else,” she’d told her interrogators so far. “Or why would he have said it? I just happened to be in the way.” Was it really a chance in a million, her visit? Taras wondered. Was it a case of mistaken identity? Not necessarily the same answer applied to both questions. Her reason for entering the barn was thin, at most. And if the Russians had been waiting for someone else, who was it? In his own mind—though thankfully his chief didn’t seem to have considered the possibility so far—another person could only be the person making a pickup. The barn was a dead-letter box, chosen because…why? Because Masha had a reason, an alibi, to visit it. And that put his cousin right in the frame for making the drop. A surveillance team had found a strip of tape on the inside wooden frame of the only door to the barn. They were treating it as a signal sight.
But then there was the most damning evidence of all: her possession of the gun and her subsequent attempt to use it on herself. They all but knew—his chief included—that Masha was there for a specific purpose, even if she herself didn’t know what that was. That was the only approach Taras could think of developing—that Masha was unknowingly caught up in something, that she was an innocent bystander.
Now as he sat and held her hand he lifted his arm slowly, just enough to gently slip a two-by-three-inch notepad out of his sleeve with a pencil following it. It slumped off the end of his hand on to the grey blanket beside their joined hands. As he did so, he continued talking to her. “I know how much you love the place,” he said. “But January, for God’s sake! And on your own! I’d have come with you, Masha. We could have stayed the night, opened up the house, built a fire, eaten some of those tinned ‘rations’ together.” He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a grunt. “Why the devil didn’t you call me?” He smiled down at her, a big wide smile that he realised was the first genuine facial expression he’d managed to make since he’d entered the cell.
Then suddenly she spoke. Her voice was weak, faraway, as if she were at the farm back then, ten years or more ago. “I remember the spring there, Taras,” she said, and her deep grey-blue eyes in the sunken face never left his.
He loosened his hand from hers a little so that her fingers were free. “Tell me, Masha, what took you there in January?”
She didn’t reply at first. Then slowly she picked up the pencil and spoke at the same time. “I was unhappy, Taras,” she said.
“Unhappy?” He felt her fingers turn the pencil round in her hand so the lead faced the right way.
“Yes. I was unhappy in my marriage. I needed to be on my own. I needed a place of safety.” She laughed a hollow, ironic laugh that rattled in her thin chest.
“But you’ve only been married for a few months, darling Masha,” he said and laughed so that the movement in his shoulders covered the slight withdrawal of his hand. “You haven’t made a mistake, have you?”
“I was very unhappy, Taras. It wasn’t what I thought. He changed as soon as we were married.”
“Your husband. Has he tried to visit you here? Has he contacted you?”
“He’s filed for divorce. As soon as he heard I was in trouble. He’s afraid for his career.”
Everything she’d said until the last sentence he saw had been a lie. She hadn’t been unhappy. She was unhappy now. Her husband had deserted her, threatened perhaps in Moscow with his connection to her. But her unhappiness he saw in her new tears was that he was leaving her, that her marriage had so easily been thrown away as soon as she really needed help.
“You want that? A divorce?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, but he saw in her tears it was the last thing she wanted and that her husband was the last hope she’d had in this cell. At the same time, he felt her fingers brush his as she began to scrawl on the paper. But her eyes still never left his.
“The reason I’m here is to help you,” he said. “So you were unhappy. That’s why you came to Sevastopol?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I was lost. My husband wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. I was in turmoil. I couldn’t go to my parents. They would have taken his side, told me not to be so stupid, that he was a good man, et cetera, et cetera. I felt so lost, Taras,” and he saw her tears were genuine, though they weren’t for the reason she was giving, but for its opposite. “I wanted to connect with something I was sure of, a happiness, a happy memory, something to secure me from back in the past. That was the time I spent with you at the farm.”
“So you went to the farm, yes?”
“Yes, but it was all locked up for the winter and I just went to explore around it. The places where I used to play. You remember, I used to jump off the straw bales in the barn, high up from the piled-up bales down onto the loose straw on the floor.”
“I remember,” he said and felt her slide the notebook and the pencil back inside the cuff of his jacket. He fixed her with his eyes now. “I need you to help me, Masha. It’s not that I don’t believe your story, but just that it’s awkward to believe it. It’s awkward for them,” he said, and indicated his superiors with a throw of his head. “You can see that. It’s awkward because of what happened. We know what you do, we know about your job, and your husband’s, too. We know about your FSB graduation—everything, you see. It’s awkward that you just happened to be there, on that occasion, because of all those intelligence connections in your life. And the gun…”
“It’s just a standard issue,” she replied.
“I know, but you shouldn’t have carried it with you. Not into Ukraine.”
“I’m glad I did. When the shouting started and the lights blinded me, I thought I was being attacked. It was an automatic reaction.”
Taras was silent for a moment, wondering how he could at least appear to be useful to his chief. Then he
