gaze as he brought the flame to his lips. He was no longer a suit-wearing officer in the Russian FSB with a chauffeur-driven car and five-hundred-dollar loafers; you could see in his movements, in the stillness of his eyes, the remnants of the St Petersburg thug that he had once been.
‘A cigarette case,’ Somers said, his throat narrow and dry. The words were barely audible. ‘Don’t see those very often.’
Grek closed the Zippo. Click.
‘No, you do not.’ Then, as calmly as slipping a knife into Somers’s ribs, he said: ‘Have you spoken to anybody else about Edward Crane, Calvin? Anybody apart from Charlotte Berg?’
Somers lost a breath as he realized what Grek had said. The Russians knew about Charlotte. If that was the case, Christ, they probably knew about the academic. For the second time in a matter of minutes he thought that his legs were going to go. He cursed his own stupidity, his cowardice.
‘What?’ he said, trying to buy time. ‘Who’s Charlotte Berg?’
Grek exhaled a lungful of smoke which held in a neat column above the path before it was parted by a gust of wind. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘We are both men of the world, Mr Somers. Do not waste my time.’
‘Have you been bugging my telephone? Have you been hacking into my computer? How do you know about Charlotte?’
This was a confession, of course, and if Grek had possessed any lingering doubts about the nature of Somers’s betrayal, they were now finally dispelled.
‘This is England,’ he replied, gesturing at the countryside. He was smiling. ‘We do not have jurisdiction to bug telephones.’ A fly settled on Grek’s arm, but he ignored it. ‘My colleagues have seen transcripts of your email correspondence with Miss Berg. These were in strict violation of our agreement.’
‘And you’re in strict violation of my human fucking rights getting your “contacts” to bug my computer. How dare you?’
Somers was surprised by the ferocity of his response, even taking a step towards Grek in an attempt to impose himself. But neither his words nor his actions had any visible impact at all.
‘Please calm down,’ he was told, as the Russian took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Tell us who else you have been talking to.’
Us? Who else was here? Somers had never felt more isolated in his life, but Grek was talking as if their conversation was being monitored by a dozen members of the FSB. ‘What do you mean “ us ”? Look, I haven’t been speaking to anybody, OK? Charlotte got the story off her own back. She came to me because somebody had told her I was working at St Mary’s that night. Maybe that person was you.’
‘This is unlikely.’ Grek was looking at his cigarette, turning it in his fingers, speaking calmly. Somers knew that he had tried a feeble tactic and wished that Grek would just come out and call him a liar to his face. He couldn’t bear the faux politeness, the sense of fair play. He heard a dog barking in the distance and hoped that somebody — a walker, a jogger — would come past and interrupt what was happening.
‘Why is it unlikely?’ he asked, moving away from Grek and again heading towards the field. Still the Russian did not follow him and, once again, Somers was obliged to turn and to walk back along the path.
‘You must stop your act,’ Grek told him. ‘It deteriorates you in my eyes. I have come today to warn you that if you speak again to any member of the media or to any individual in any capacity whatsoever about Edward Crane, there will be grave consequences in terms of our arrangement.’ Grek saw that Somers was about to speak but raised his hand to silence him. ‘Enough,’ he said, screwing the cigarette into the path with the toe of his shoe. ‘Next time, the gentlemen who visit you will be considerably less polite than I am. Next time, for example, they may ask you to return the twenty thousand pounds which we paid for your silence. Your silence, Calvin. Do I make myself understood?’
‘You do,’ said Somers. All of his bravado had fallen away in the intense relief of knowing that he was forgiven and would soon be free to return home. ‘Of course you do.’
‘Good.’
‘And can I just say that I didn’t mean to cause any trouble-’
But Alexander Grek had already turned and was walking back towards his Mercedes, leaving Calvin Somers talking to the space where he had been standing, a space which now buzzed with insects in a back-lit haze of seeds and pollen. The nurse felt a bubble of relief rise in his stomach and almost jogged to the edge of the field, sweat on his vest cooling in the evening air so that he was obliged to put on the fleece to keep warm.
The field was a great expanse of dusty, harvestable corn which opened up his mood and gave him the time and the confidence to think more clearly. He was free. He had been caught, but the Russians had given him a second chance. He walked along the perimeter of the field, emboldened by this thought and was very soon imagining the glass of Wolf Blass Chardonnay he was going to pour himself, perhaps even the packet of cigarettes — ten, not twenty — that he would buy at the garage near his flat. He craved a cigarette. Something to batten down the last of his nerves.
Ten minutes earlier, the two FSB officers who had driven to the Mount Vernon Hospital with Alexander Grek had waited until their boss was out of sight before locking the Mercedes and crossing the main road. The first man, whose name was Karl Stieleke, had walked three hundred metres west before entering the woods and circling back towards the path where Grek and Somers had been talking. The second man, whose name was Nicolai Doronin, had walked in an easterly direction from the car park until he had found himself at the end of a dusty farm track which circled the Heath. Stieleke had waited beneath a chestnut tree, listening to Grek’s interrogation. He now tracked Calvin Somers in the last of the evening light as the nurse walked along the edge of the cornfield, heading towards his home in Harefield.
Somers became aware that he was being followed when he reached the perimeter of a large wood, about half a mile from the hospital. It was necessary to go through the wood in order to reach his house; there was no short-cut, no other way around. He turned and saw a man in his late twenties wearing a pair of jeans and a polo shirt. The man was not accompanied by a dog, nor did he look like the type to be taking a walk in the countryside on a late summer evening. He was almost certain that the man was Russian.
So Calvin Somers panicked. He knew that there was a gate into the woods, and a path, but it was at least a hundred metres away, so he tried to climb over the fence which ran around the wood and caught his fleece on a stretch of barbed wire in the process. As it tore, he swore under his breath, looking back to check if he was still being followed. The Russian had disappeared. Somers was standing in dense undergrowth, with no way of hiding nor of reaching any of the paths in the wood without cutting and scratching himself on a wall of thorns and bushes. He was, in effect, trapped. So, with an odd sense of embarrassment, he decided to climb back over the fence and to return to the field. It would be safer out in the open, he told himself. Somebody might walk past and see him.
That person was Nicolai Doronin. Guided by Stieleke on a mobile phone, Doronin had jogged around the northern edge of the cornfield and completed a pincer movement by circling back towards the woods into which Somers had just disappeared. Somers saw him as he clambered back over the fence, gingerly holding his fleece, and almost waved in relief. This man looked more local: he was shaven-headed and wearing a shell-suit and a pair of expensive-looking trainers. Somewhere, in the depths of the field, he probably had a Bull Mastiff or a Doberman busily chasing rabbits.
Then Somers looked to his right. The Russian was suddenly beside him, and springing at him like a cat. Somers was on the ground before he realized that the second man, the shell-suit, was also there, close in against the fence, and he felt an awful, irretrievable shame as he let them go about their business. In a sense, he had been expecting this and still believed, in some vague, hopeful way, that it would just be a beating, just a lesson from the FSB, a few kicks to the stomach, a blow to the head, maybe a black eye at work for a couple of weeks.
After a minute or so, however, Calvin Somers knew that it wasn’t going to end. He felt a warmth in his body which was more than sweat and realized that something wasn’t right in his stomach. One of the men had used a blade on him. He started to beg them to stop and hated himself for pleading, but it was all that he could do. It was all that he had ever done. Were they going through his pockets? Was one of them going through his bag? It seemed as though only one of the men was left now and that he was the one who had done all the damage. Was that right? Somers couldn’t focus. The blood in his gut was turning cold and he wondered about the woods. If he could just get into the woods again, maybe back on to the path. If he could get away, all this would stop happening.
But it would never stop. Somers knew that he wasn’t ever going to stand up again. Had they meant to go this far? Had they meant to kill him?
He shouldn’t have talked to Charlotte Berg. He knew that now, just as he knew that he was never going to
