Teeth chattering from cold and shock, Viktoriya climbed painfully to her feet. The sound of a lone, distant car horn drifted across the park. The snow had stopped as suddenly as it had begun; once again the moon cast its ghostly pall over the winter stillness. Skirting the frozen lake, now ornamented with the new fall, she traced the path to its beginning and exited onto a near deserted prospect. There was no sign of her assailant. Further up, workmen in orange overalls swung pickaxes at unforgiving tarmac next to a softly purring roadside generator. Hugging her torn coat, Viktoriya passed them on the opposite side.
Fifteen pain-filled minutes later, Viktoriya found herself in front of her apartment block. Four identical six-storey buildings of indeterminate brown enclosed a large floodlit square. A bronze statue of Lenin, clutching Das Kapital in his upheld hand, railed against oppression, oblivious to local drug dealers and alcoholics who routinely relieved themselves against his polished granite podium.
Viktoriya’s ankle boots, wet and cold, sank deep into the drifting snow as she traversed the final twenty metres to the main door. Inside, two bare wires woven together replaced the switch that had been stolen the month before. Exhausted, Viktoriya battled the three flights of stairs to her bedsit share. When she finally managed to turn the key and push open the door, Viktoriya was blinded by the sudden switching on of the internal light.
‘Agnessa, turn that off!’ Viktoriya croaked, covering her eyes. Her head throbbed and she felt as though she would throw up at any second. She took a step forward and nearly fell. Agnessa caught her and guided Viktoriya past a small wooden dining table before gently easing her onto the sofa. Streetlights cast a jaundiced hue over the small and sparsely furnished room.
‘You look terrible! Don’t move, I’ll be back in a moment,’ said her flatmate.
Viktoriya didn’t feel she could have moved even if she had wanted to do so. She began to shiver uncontrollably. Agnessa reappeared, helped her undress and towelled her dry before wrapping her in a woollen blanket.
‘What happened?’ her friend asked, her voice full of concern.
Viktoriya could not bring herself to say anything. She shook her head and held up her hand.
‘I’ll make you some sweet tea.’
‘I need a bath,’ Viktoriya managed to whisper finally.
Viktoriya watched Agnessa as she put on the kettle and placed two large saucepans of water on the hob to boil. How many years had she known Agnessa? Since she was six or seven? Primary school then Ten Year School at eight. Their parents had lived on the same landing. Both their fathers had worked at the docks and often gone out drinking together, sometimes on a weekend binge. At fourteen it had been Agnessa she had turned to that night when her father had caught her in the face with a poker in one of his drunken rages, only narrowly missing her eye.
Reflexively, Viktoriya’s finger traced the faded scar. Her headache was splitting now. She needed a painkiller, more than one.
‘Before you go into shock,’ said Agnessa, handing Viktoriya two Efferalgan and a mug of hot sugary tea.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to say, as feeling began to return to her half-frozen hands. ‘I’m remembering this is not the first time you have played nurse.’
‘It’s what friends are for.’
Ten minutes later, Viktoriya lowered herself into a shallow tin bathtub of steaming hot water.
‘You should see a doctor,’ Agnessa said, staring at the terrible abdominal bruising that was beginning to show.
‘I’ll survive,’ said Viktoriya, relieved to be washing the night away.
‘Are you going to report this?’
Viktoriya shook her head.
‘Bed,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I want.’
Ten minutes later, bruised and exhausted but feeling a lot calmer, Viktoriya climbed into bed and fell instantly asleep.
Chapter 2
‘What time is it?’
Viktoriya could hear him struggling to look at his bedside clock. Something crashed to the floor. She guessed it was the radio he always had precariously balanced there.
‘It’s 5.10 a.m.,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact voice, as though calling him at that hour was not an unusual occurrence.
‘Just a minute.’
Viktoriya heard Konstantin sit up. There was a muffled protest from one of his flatmates.
‘Can you meet me by the Baltic Hotel, 7 a.m.? I’ll explain later. I can’t talk about it now, not here in the corridor.’
‘Okay, 7 a.m.,’ Konstantin repeated and hung up.
When Viktoriya had woken an hour before, she had lain there, not disturbing Agnessa, going over what she should do. She felt certain that this was not the first time her assailant had attacked a woman. He was just too confident, too sure of himself, sure that she wouldn’t go to the police. For the same reason she hadn’t gone to the police, she suspected neither had his other victims. Either way, whatever the truth about his past, Roman’s drinking companion was not going to get away with what he had done or be allowed to assault her again.
That was when she had got up and called Konstantin. She could have called the bar doorman – he was ex-army – or one of her other male friends, but it was Konstantin she had instinctively turned to. He would know what to do.
Carefully, Viktoriya retraced her steps to the share. She wrapped some bread and cheese in a kitchen towel and, after layering up, headed out to the bus stop and the still dark square.
Light pooled eerily from overhead floods, the crunch of her footsteps magnified. On the far side a door banged shut with a wumph. A woman, heavily padded, wearing a bright red headscarf, materialised and quickly vanished down a side path. Viktoriya tightened her grip on the kitchen knife she had slipped into her trouser belt and peered anxiously about her.
The bus pulled in to her stop. A woman driver waved her in and quickly closed the door… warmth at last. Viktoriya cleared the condensation from the window, pulled off her gloves and brusquely rubbed her hands together.
As they skirted the Fontanka, smoke drifted from the chimneys of canal boats fixed to their winter moorings, hulls captive to slowly thickening sheets of ice; water dwellers, no doubt stoking early morning fires, preparing sweet tea and coffee, fending off the early morning cold. Life going on as it had before.
Here and there, workers began to appear along the wide pavement wearing thick padded jackets, ushankas and balaclavas. Once or twice, Viktoriya thought she glimpsed her assailant. Unnerved, she cast her eyes around the bus: a young woman with a suitcase bound shut with twine read a book; behind her, two men, a row apart, napped, heads lolling against the foggy window. She pulled her scarf up around her face and the flap of her fur hat across her mouth. Two stops and she disembarked. If anything, it felt colder than when she’d waited at the bus stop.
Next to an old church, now used as a warehouse, she found the hotel. It was small and, like most of Leningrad, well overdue a coat of paint. Faded streaks of pink, redolent of an era she could only imagine, emerged from under its grey rendered exterior. A sign above the door spelled in capitals: BALTIC HOTEL.
Sheltering under the buttress of the church, Viktoriya pulled the hood of her coat up over her hat and in between bites of bread and cheese sipped on the steaming hot tea she had bought from a street vendor.
A familiar whistle made her turn to catch sight of Konstantin striding purposefully in her direction.
‘A sip of whatever you’re drinking,’ he said, standing in front of her holding out his hand. He pushed back his hood and swept a mop of jet-black hair off his face. She began to tremble as if the shock of what had happened was only now setting in.