Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,48

body, appraising him. He was still as lean and taut as ever, but the lines on his face were a little deeper, and there was the hint of grey at his temples. These signs of age merely served to make him look more attractive, and she cursed the unfairness of the differing ways time affected men and women. She took a couple of steps towards him, and he must have sensed her approach because he turned and greeted her with a broad, boyish smile that made her heart leap. Damn him!

‘Would you like me to translate?’ she asked, sounding cooler than she felt.

‘Sure, go ahead,’ he said, his eyes fixed on hers.

She pretended to look at the image with exaggerated concentration, using the time to pull herself together before she answered, ‘So … what it says is: what am I doing here?’

‘Appreciating your country’s great history …’

‘It’s not so great.’ Alix ran her eyes around the other posters on the walls, with their repetitive images of Lenin – one arm always extended towards his people: soldiers, workers and noble, sturdy communist women. ‘Everything in this room is a lie.’

Carver’s expression lost its amusement. ‘Everything?’

Alix shrugged. ‘I don’t know, you tell me. What am I doing here?’

‘Like I said, business …’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes,’ Carver said, adding to the number of lies. ‘I need to know about a woman who currently goes by the name of Magda Sternberg. We think she used to have another identity.’

‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me, Grantham … MI6.’

‘Ha! You’re working for Grantham now?’

‘Let’s just say we’re helping each other out.’

Alix felt calmer now. Maybe this really would just be business. Maybe that would be better. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘OK, this Magda Sternberg … the name means nothing to me. Why should I know her?’

‘Because it’s possible that you trained together. We think she used to be called Celina Novak.’

That name! It took all her years of experience to conceal the shock of it. Alix felt herself taken back to a time when she was still a gauche, provincial teenager, her eyes only recently cured of their squint, her teeth still in the braces that would create her perfect smile. She thought of Celina Novak, the spoilt, vicious daughter of senior officials in Poland’s ruling United Workers’ Party, sent to Russia to be trained by the KGB. She remembered the absolute contempt and disdain with which Celina had regarded her, and felt a sudden rush of the humiliation that used to be her overpowering emotion. It took an effort to control her voice as she said, ‘Do you have a picture?’

Carver held up his phone. On its screen was an old black and white identity photo of a uniformed cadet, her beautiful face set hard as flint.

Alix nodded.

‘Have you met her?’ she asked.

Carver turned his head away from her and cast his eyes towards the poster again. ‘Professionally,’ he said, still not looking at Alix.

‘Then you’ll know she likes to destroy the lives of everyone she meets.’ She wondered what Carver was trying to hide.

Now he turned back to her. ‘But not yours …’

‘I had powerful protectors. I was luckier than I knew.’

Carver frowned. ‘What happened to the ones who weren’t lucky?’

‘There was a girl called Dasha Markova. She hanged herself …’

Alix could not bear to tell the whole story of how Markova had committed suicide after months of psychological torture inflicted by a gang of classmates recruited and led by Celina Novak. She, Alix, had been part of that gang. She’d felt thrilled that Celina had finally allowed her into the inner circle after all the months in which she had herself been excluded and tormented. And, yes, she’d been relieved that someone else had now been the target. The shame of it had only grown over time.

‘Celina can make you do anything,’ Alix said, her voice barely more than a whisper, so that Carver had to strain to hear her over the noise of the gallery crowd.

Her words seemed to affect him, though, because he grimaced.

‘So what happened to her? Did she get kicked out?’ he asked.

Alix gave a bitter smile. ‘No, she graduated with honours.’

Carver mimed the opening of an envelope: ‘And this year’s winner of the Stalin Prize for psychopathic cruelty is …’

Despite herself, Alix could not help but laugh.

Carver said nothing, just looked at her.

Nervous about what he was seeing, she asked, ‘What is it?’

‘Your smile.’

Just the way he said it told her that his feelings had not changed. But maybe she was fooling herself.