.

 -


Скачать книгу
rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6ef0c4ba-6505-5a48-b2dd-4c92b36576d6"> 4 P.M.

       MATIS

      Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.

      In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep. When they are disgorged from the van, he looks at the house, sees the prospect of being alone with his thoughts, and starts to shake. He grasps Dimitri’s arm.

      ‘I can’t go in. I feel sick,’ he says.

      ‘OK. We’ll get a drink.’

      He can see Dimitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship.

      As they walk down the street, a car pulls up outside their house. Two men, both in dark suits, get out and go to the front door. Some kind of officialdom, Matis guesses. The communist regime had loved officialdom, Lukas’s father told him. Matis admired Lukas’s father enormously. Jűri was a thoughtful, gentle man, in contrast to Matis’s own father. Jűri described languorous men in uniform, standing about pointlessly, feeling important. ‘Puffed up on their petty bureaucracies. Four suited guys to take your ticket at the museum. Welcome to full employment!’

      Matis and Dimitri take their bottle of vodka and drink it in the park. The air is soft, the temperature mild.

      ‘Why don’t you tell the police what you saw?’ Dimitri asks. ‘Let them take care of it?’

      ‘Seriously,’ Matis says. ‘You trust the police?’

      ‘It is different here.’

      ‘Sure it is.’

      Suspicion of authority is only a fraction of the reason why Matis won’t talk.

      ‘You must not say anything to the police,’ Matis tells Dimitri. ‘Promise me.’

      Matis wakes to find himself laid out on the tarmac path, where he has fallen asleep. It is nearly dark. Someone has thrown coins at him. They have landed on the ground in front of his stomach. This kindness makes him cry.

      The ID card, or maybe it was a driver’s licence – Davy can’t tell because it’s in Lithuanian – says the name: Lukas Balsys. A grainy photograph of a man who looks little more than a boy, though he was no less grey-faced when he was alive than after hanging.

      ‘Davy Walker as I live and breathe. This is a nice surprise,’ says Bridget as he walks into her Wisbech office, the ID card proffered for her to see.

      Bridget is a senior officer on Operation Pheasant, whose offices are three rooms in a slope-ceilinged attic close to the town centre. ‘Ah, OK,’ says Bridget, looking at the card. She’s got her hair in a complicated plait affair, two rows on either side of her head, rather like a schoolgirl. She’s wearing a black cardigan over a patterned dress.

      His attraction to Bridget is physical, primarily. Also the attraction of what he cannot have: the new and unknown and illicit. When all that is sanctioned is at home, there is a yearning for the unsanctioned. He realises it isn’t deeper than that, and that his fiancée Juliet offers him something real and complex, albeit cloaked in a somewhat pressurising commitment that he himself had wanted and brought on. It is Juliet, not Bridget, who puts up with his constant cancellations and late arrivals home because of work. The date nights postponed. It is Juliet who fights against the peevish feelings his unreliable shift pattern engenders. Bridget is a destructive impulse. Bridget is forbidden, hard to resist. Bridget is lively, bright-eyed. Her face hyper-mobile – with humour mostly. Also – and this is no small factor – Bridget is Up For It. How often does that come along? Davy can hear Manon’s voice saying, ‘Fucking never, if you’re me.’

      ‘Right,’ Bridget says, after a search on her computer. ‘We don’t have Lukas Balsys on our books. But that’s not unusual. Half these guys are not documented at all. He might be new. If I were you, I’d start at the HMO on Prospect Place. It’s the Lithuanian hub, if you like. But beware of the house spokesman. Someone will be pushed in your face who speaks good English and he’ll feed you a load of hokum about how happy they all are. Yes, yes, very heppy, very nice place.’ She says this last bit in a thick Russian accent. ‘You won’t get a straight answer out of them. Take an interpreter. And try to shake off Edikas. They won’t say a word with him in the room.’

      ‘Righto,’ he says, wondering if he could depart with something more flirty, but the subject matter of their conversation made this seem distasteful. Murder chat versus flanter (flirty banter). Murder chat wins. The attic room smells really nice – of Bridget’s floral perfume.

      ‘By the way, Davy?’ she says as he makes to leave. ‘It’s unusual that the note was in Lithuanian. Most of the guys who come over are Baltic Russians. Just thought it might help.’

      ‘So, not from Lithuania then?’ he asks, confused.

      ‘Yes, from Lithuania, but Baltic Russians from Lithuania. There’s loads of them, especially in Klaipeda, the town where they’re usually from. They relocated there during the Soviet occupation.’

      Davy pulls up outside a red-brick terraced house with plastic windows, front garden piled with rubbish that is escaping its bags. The house next door is immaculate.

      ‘This must be driving them mad,’ Davy says to the interpreter who is following him up the path. Davy gives him a glance, which is part grimace, intended to say ‘it’s going to be unpleasant in here’.

      Initially, no one answers the door. They ring and knock again, Davy shouts ‘Police!’ through the letter box.

      Eventually, a sleepy man in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt opens the door, leaves it open and walks away from them, back up the stairs, without speaking.

      They stand awkwardly in the hallway until a rotund, bald man greets them from the back of the house, holding out his hand.

      ‘Hello, I’m Edikas. How can I help you?’ he says. In Russian.

      Edikas arranges for Davy to talk to various residents. It is an awkward business as there is no seating – what would have been a lounge is set with mattresses, and the kitchen is a galley without a table. The house is dirty – smells of microwaved dinners, the kind made from meat of unknown provenance.

      Davy stands at the doorway to one of the bedrooms with his notepad. His interviewee sits on a mattress, knees up, back to the wall. He doesn’t make eye contact. Everyone denies knowing Lukas or anything about Lukas.

      The interpreter looks uncomfortable as he translates. He can speak both Lithuanian and Russian, as most older Lithuanians can. He casts an anxious glance at Davy, then looks at his notepad and holds out his hands. Davy hands the interpreter his notepad.

      Scared, the interpreter writes. The word is underlined. Then he writes, Can you distract him?

      ‘A word out back, if you don’t mind,’ Davy says to Edikas.

      ‘When you have finished, we talk,’ Edikas replies, in English this time, folding his arms.

      ‘What’s this fella called?’ Davy asks, bending to pet the dog. The dog bares its teeth, snarling.

      ‘Skirta,’ says Edikas. ‘It mean devoted in my language.’

      He is glancing into the bedroom where the interpreter is whispering to the interviewee. ‘What are you saying to my friend?’ Edikas demands loudly.

      The


Скачать книгу