Chapter 16
Calvin Somers left the Michael Sobel Centre via the staff entrance just after six o’clock and walked in pale evening sunlight towards Batchworth Heath. On autumn nights he preferred to take one of the narrow, overgrown paths through the woods and to cross a network of open fields towards the outskirts of Harefield, where he lived in a one-bedroom flat in the centre of town. It was mid September and there would be only a few more opportunities to walk to work before the clocks went back and the nights closed in and he was obliged to take his car. Beneath a thick Land’s End fleece, he was still wearing his pale green nurse’s uniform because he liked to wash when he returned home, rather than to use the showers in the more impersonal surroundings of the Mount Vernon Hospital.
A thirty-four-year-old cancer patient had died on the ward three hours earlier but Somers wasn’t thinking about him, wasn’t thinking about the patient’s grieving relatives or the student doctor who had cried when she glimpsed the mother collapsing in tears in the car park just after lunch. He was thinking about the box of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to finish that night and the range of microwaveable ready-meals stacked in his fridge. What did he feel like for dinner? A curry? Fish pie? Nowadays — and he would happily admit this to anyone who asked, even to colleagues who felt quite differently about things — the deaths on the ward just seemed to blend into one another. You forgot who was who, who had suffered from what, which family member went with which patient. Maybe he was just sick of the job. Maybe Calvin Somers was finally sick of the sick.
He was about to cross the main road towards the Heath when he heard a noise behind him in the north-west car park and turned to find a man stepping out of a dark blue C–Class Mercedes with blacked-out windows. For a brief moment, Somers considered breaking into a run, because panic had surged inside his chest like an electric charge. But to run was a stupid idea. You didn’t run from a man like Alexander Grek. Grek could find you. Grek knew where you lived. The best thing, Somers decided, would be to do what he always did when it came to moments of uncertainty. He would become confrontational.
‘Are you following me?’
‘Mr Somers?’
‘You know who I am. Why are you here? Why have you come to my place of work? I thought our business was concluded. You assured me that our business was conclu-’
Grek interrupted him. ‘Please stop walking, Mr Somers.’ He had a deep voice, almost baritone in texture, with a certain music in it, a certain appalling charm. He was wearing a dark grey suit and a crisp white shirt with button-down collars and a navy tie.
‘I wonder if I might join you on your walk?’ he said. Grek spoke a precise, formal English, but it was a coat of varnish on an utter ruthlessness. ‘You are walking home, are you not? This is the route that you always take?’
Somers felt the panic again, the charge in his chest, and knew that he had been rumbled. Why else had Grek come for him? They must have found out about the academic and Charlotte Berg. Why had he been so greedy? The FSB had paid him twenty grand for the Crane story, for the tale of Douglas Henderson and St Mary’s Hospital. There had been one condition to that transaction: that he never again speak to anyone about Edward Anthony Crane. But since then he’d been paid twice for the same information; he just hadn’t been able to help himself. And now Alexander Grek had come to find out why.
‘You’ve been following me,’ he said, but his voice betrayed him, stuttering twice on the word ‘following’.
‘No, no,’ Grek replied, smiling like an old friend. ‘We just have two more questions that we would like you to answer.’ He held up his fingers, splayed like a V for Victory. ‘Two.’
Somers unzipped the fleece. He was suddenly very hot.
‘Why don’t we walk as we talk?’ the Russian suggested, and Somers agreed, not least because he did not want to be seen with Grek by other members of staff. They turned towards the main road, crossed it and joined a narrow, overgrown path into the woods. They were obliged to walk in single file and Somers moved quickly, desperate to reach the open ground of a field. Grek was no more than three metres behind him at any point, but barely made a sound as his five-hundred-dollar loafers caressed the damp path.
‘So what was it you wanted?’ Somers asked, carrying the fleece now because the vest beneath his uniform was soaked with sweat.
Grek came to a halt. They were still on the path, bent trees and summer grasses hemming them in on all sides. Somers had to stop and turn around, pale sunlight filtering through the branches.
‘I wanted to ask you about Waldemar.’
At first, Somers didn’t understand what Grek was asking, because the Russian had pronounced the name of the Polish janitor at St Mary’s with a Slavic expertise that stripped ‘Waldemar’ of recognizable consonants. Then he put two and two together and decided to stall.
‘Waldemar? The porter? What about him?’
‘We cannot find him.’ From his relaxed tone of voice, Grek might have been reporting on the status of nothing more significant than a lost watch. ‘We have had difficulty in tracking this man down.’
Somers laughed. ‘I thought you were meant to be Russian Intelligence? Doesn’t say much for your capabilities, does it? Doesn’t say much for your, er, intelligence?’ It was a mistake, of course, to sound glib, to taunt a man like Grek, but Somers couldn’t help himself. He was always like this when the cards were stacked against him: cocky and sarcastic, fighting fire with fire.
‘Perhaps,’ Grek said, and Somers couldn’t work out what he was referring to. Perhaps what? He experienced a renewed desire to get off the path, because he felt that Grek, at any moment, might throw a punch at him. Calvin Somers had a profound fear of physical violence and knew that he would not be able to defend himself if the Russian attacked. He turned and saw the edge of a field no more than fifty metres away. If only they could keep walking.
‘So you do not know where we can find this Waldemar?’ Grek continued. ‘You have had no contact with him in the intervening period?’
‘In the what?’ Somers was laughing again, choosing to mock Grek’s choice of phrase.
‘You heard me, Calvin.’
To hear his Christian name spoken in such a context was nauseating. To control his fear, Somers turned and began to walk towards the field, praying that Grek would follow him. He did not.
‘What about Benedict Meisner?’ the Russian called after him and Somers was again obliged to stop, to turn around and to walk back along the path. It felt as if he was heading into a spider’s web.
‘What about him?’ His voice quickened as he added: ‘Can we move along, please? I’m keen to get home. Can we start walking towards my-’
‘You will remain here while we speak.’ Grek gestured in the direction of the car park. ‘I do not want to move far from my vehicle. Where is Meisner, please?’
Somers spluttered another laugh and wondered why Grek was asking him questions about colleagues he hadn’t seen for more than ten years. How was he supposed to answer? He wasn’t friends with Meisner, he wasn’t friends with Waldemar, never had been. The Crane deception was all that they had in common.
‘Look, I don’t have a fucking clue,’ he said, and regretted swearing, because the temperature dropped in Grek’s eyes.
‘I see.’ They were narrow eyes, a very pale brown, and within them Somers could see the extent of his own betrayal. ‘This is interesting. Nor have we had any success in locating Mr Crane himself.’
Somers felt as though he was being swung from point to point, as if the Russian had no real interest in the answers to the questions he was asking, only in generating a sense of unease. Was that a standard spy tactic? Why did Grek even suspect that Crane was still alive?
‘Why do you keep telling me how bad you are at your job?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t walk around telling people when I’ve made a mistake on the ward. All you’ve seemed interested in talking about for the last ten minutes is what a fuck-up you’re making of your investigation.’
Grek did something now that was commonplace, and yet utterly unsettling. He spat on the ground. The Russian then reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a cigarette, not from a packet, but from a pristine silver case. He placed the cigarette in his mouth, rolled a Zippo lighter across his thigh and held Somers’s
