My mouth flapped uselessly and I was struck with a sudden, terrible feeling of what it must be like to be Smith.
“Look, this doesn't ring true,” an older woman, arm in arm with a frightened, mousey looking younger girl, stepped up. “I don't mean to interfere–”
“Then fucking don't,” hissed Mark. His tone was short and sharp, and as I glanced up and caught the flash of anger in his eyes, I understood when the women backed up a step.
Smith, seeing his only allies retreating, moaned and squirmed on the pavement.
“What's all this?”
The tone was mild but authoritative, and instantly recognisable. I closed my eyes, but not before I'd seen the patent shoes stop in front of me. They were polished to within an inch of their life, and I knew exactly who they belonged to.
Something squeaked. I thought it was Smith. Then I realised it was me. I risked a glance at Mark, who had suddenly gone very pale.
The Colonel had arrived.
And now the shit really was going to hit the fan.
43
ELIAN & THE DOCTOR
GEVERS DEYNOOTWEG, SCHEVENINGEN
9.7.15 Midnight
As soon as the door closes on the apartment next to Lev’s, Elian darts out from her hiding place and runs down the stairs, not caring that the clattering sound of her footsteps is very loud in the dark night. Once on the street she skips over the tram tracks, legs pumping as she runs towards the Holland Casino. She swerves to the right, past the Palace Hotel and the fountain and only when she races through the pedestrian area and finds herself just to the left of the sea does she stop running.
She leans over, hands on her knees, the crashing sound of the sea on the shore slowly bringing her back to the present. Because that’s where she is, right now, here today. She’s not back in Chenrobyl in the middle of the Red Forest, she’s not chained in an underground tunnel or locked up in a caravan. But she has witnessed … what? Russian Lev moving a body? Because that’s certainly what it looked like, and who was that man with him?
In all the procrastinating that she’s done since she came here, all the trumped up ideas she had about punishing Lev, deep down, she doesn’t think she ever expected to catch him in the middle of … What did she catch him in the middle of, murder? Disposing a body? But why were they putting it in the next door apartment?
She’ll have to go to the police, there’s no doubt about it. But what if she’s wrong? What if her fucked up brain is deceiving her again, like it has so many times since she came here? Did she see Lev with a body? Or was it a flashback, a half-dream from her own traumatised mind?
Elian moves back down the cut through and onto Gevers Deynootweg. She sits down in an empty shelter, noting the absence of the trams, trying hard not to look in the direction of Lev’s apartment down the street.
She thinks on, trying to formulate a plan. If she goes to the police she’ll have to give her details. People back home will have reported her as missing by now, Alex, or his aunt Selina. Maybe Alex has told her own aunt, Sissy. Right now she could be back in London, searching fruitlessly for her. But would that be so bad? If someone were to find Elian right now, then all this could be out of her hands and–
No, she came here to confront Lev herself and if she doesn’t, if that one piece of control is taken away from her, then she knows that she’ll never be able to recover from what happened to her in Chernobyl. She needs that control. She needs a sliver of power if she is going to get better.
She pushes herself upright, willing the fight and the anger to come back to her, and just as she begins to walk back to Lev’s apartment, a car pulls up a little ahead of her and she hears her name called.
Elian jumps, quite literally, at the sound of her own name against a man’s lips. Who knows she’s here? Nobody except Brigitta, that’s who. And then her heart leaps as she catches sight of the figure of a man sitting in the driver seat. She runs the few yards to the car, tears threatening at the thought that he cared enough to find her and as she leans down and looks through the window her heart sinks like a stone.
“Oh, Doctor Bastiaan,” she says. “It’s you.”
Doctor Bastiaan had braked hard when he spotted her, sitting waiflike in the tram shelter. What was she doing out so late? And on her own – doesn’t she know what has been happening lately? He feels an unexplainable surge of anger towards the young girl, but he has rearranged his expression into a caring, but concerned, fatherly smile.
“What are you doing out here so late?”
She shrugs, looks both ways down the street and then he gets it. There’s only one reason why she would be out here at midnight. She’s a working girl. All of the lines that she fed to him back in his surgery were lies. He looks at her outfit; a tight T shirt and a tiny pair of shorts. She’s wearing old sneakers on her feet, he noticed as she jogged up to the car and to him she looks more like a child than a whore, but, he thinks, maybe that’s her game. Some men like the idea that they’re with a child. His blood
