‘He was killed in this cellar by the NKVD,’ Vladimir explains, with a hint of pride. ‘Stood up against the same wall he had built to hide this wine and shot. On the very day they murdered the Tsar and Tsaritsa. This is more than wine, this is the blood of my country.’
‘You must find it difficult to part with.’
He nods, a short bow of his head as though submitting to God. ‘Of course. But necessary in order to restore the palace. Sadly, our bank managers are less trusting than yours.’
Which must put them in the Crippen league, she muses. Money has been mentioned. It is time to begin. ‘I suppose you’ll be expecting a good price for the wines?’
He holds his head to one side, as though considering the matter for the first time. ‘A good price, yes. But not a great price. I need to sell some of the wine quickly. Direct, not through an agent. They’re all mafia! They would charge a huge commission on the wine they sold, then steal the rest as soon as they knew of its whereabouts. No, by selling direct to you we can both gain.’
‘So … how much?’
‘Ah, Elizabeth. You are young. You are beautiful. And you are impatient!’ He chuckles as though scolding a granddaughter, but his smile is anything but grandfatherly. He is a man of refined tastes, in both wine and women. ‘Before we discuss business, let us try one last wine. Not a great vintage but a young Ukrainian wine. A Cagur. A little sweet. Like port. But strong and honest. Like our friendship!’
It is as he has promised, clean, honest, brimming with the taste of blackcurrant. This bottle they drink, not taste, as they sit across the flickering flame of the candle and he quotes the prices he expects. For the Tokay, twenty thousand hryvna a case. Which is fair. For the Madeira, nearly thirty. But it is too dense, she protests, like ink. It is like a woman’s virtue, he replies, you will get double for it in London.
She laughs, returns his stare, which in the candlelight suggests more than simply business. He is exceptionally good-looking for his age, his frame elegant and self-disciplined. Undoubtedly experienced. To her surprise she wonders what he is like in bed. She’s never been to bed with a man over sixty.
‘You are wondering, perhaps, what an old man like me is doing with such longing for a beautiful woman like you, Elizabeth?’ he enquires with startling insight. ‘Have no cares,’ he laughs. ‘Before we are even halfway through this bottle I shall probably not even be able to stand.’
Suddenly she feels elated. For as they discuss the wines she might buy and she struggles with the mental arithmetic of conversion, it’s as though a great weight has been lifted from her. She will take twenty cases. Average cost quoted by Vladimir of £2,600. She will sell half the cases at auction through Sotheby’s for what she estimates will be double the price paid. Which will leave her with another ten cases absolutely free, and available for sale at an even larger mark-up at The Kremlin. With only a little luck she might clear £75,000 on this deal, enough to sort out all her own cash-flow problems. Next time that undersized, illegitimate and copulatory bank manager of hers can pay for his own lunch.
‘Vladimir, I like this place. I like this wine.’ Without wanting to admit it, she likes him too. ‘I think we have a deal.’
‘Magnificent! So tonight we shall have a little party, you and I. But first, a toast. To beauty.’
Vladimir drains the last of his wine and with an agile flourish throws the empty glass against the cellar wall. Elizabeth, giggling and a little intoxicated from the alcohol and excitement, does the same.
Vladimir leans across and kisses her, in celebration, and not like a granddaughter. He feels warm, smells good, masculine. She notices he isn’t having the slightest trouble standing.
Mary Wetherell climbed out of her taxi in front of the Army & Navy Club, wondering what dinner might hold in store for her. You could never tell with Amadeus. Bit of a mad bugger, was the Colonel.
He’d been one of her course instructors at Sandhurst and even at forty he’d been able to flay most of them around the cross-country course. A warrior, not just a soldier. He wasn’t the type who fitted neatly into the little boxes so favoured by the planners and their flow charts. Instead Amadeus adopted an idiosyncratic and almost detached approach to authority which inspired as much enthusiasm from the junior ranks as it raised eyebrows amongst the apple polishers. He would make a point of wearing his camouflage trousers so crumpled, for instance, that they might have been taken from the back of a teenager’s closet. They were battle fatigues, he explained, they weren’t intended to be covered in spray starch but in mud and unpleasant bits of anatomy, preferably someone else’s.
There was also the leg of lamb. It had been served up as an excuse for dinner, a joint so gruesome and gristle-bound that it probably contravened several provisions of the Geneva Convention. Amadeus hadn’t just complained, he had acted. On the spot and in full view of the entire Sandhurst mess hall, he had convened a field court martial at which the carcass had been accused, tried and summarily condemned, whereupon amidst much cheering and ribaldry it had been taken to the firing range, propped against a sandbag and repeatedly shot. ‘And when we’ve run out of carcasses we’ll start on the cooks,’ he had announced. Standards in the mess hall improved rapidly after that.
No, dinner with the Colonel was never likely to be dull.
That wasn’t the only reason she had accepted the invitation. It had arrived on a day of purple clouds over Exmoor that melted with the dawn, when the rains drummed interminably upon her patience and the rivers of slurry hadn’t stopped until they reached the Bristol Channel. It got her to thinking, which was bad. She hadn’t been out of the valley in two months, had trouble remembering when she had last seen anything as exciting as a traffic light. She was spending more time than ever on distractions. On the Internet, on solitary walks. Away from her husband.
They’d had a row when she said she was going to London, a silly, pointless grumbling match, and endless, too. Had he sensed what she sensed, that it was all going wretchedly wrong for them? That this wasn’t simply an invitation to London but an excuse to run away? He didn’t regard himself as her jailer, but she knew it would hurt him if she went. Trouble was, things had got to the point where it would do more harm to stay. She needed to breathe once more, to stretch her wings. To fly away.
‘Glad you’ve come. You can add a bit of class to this bunch,’ Amadeus offered as he made the introductions to the other two dinner guests in the bar. ‘This excuse for illegitimacy is Captain Andrew McKenzie, late of the Royal Engineers. Met him in Bosnia when he was with 33 EOD, dragging out a Scimitar crew that had run themselves into the middle of a minefield. He’s completely mad. The other one comes from a much longer line of bastards – may I present Major the Honourable Freddie Payne? Grenadier Guards, which was formerly commanded by his father. Known as the Great Payne amongst his colleagues in the regiment, for some reason …’
As they exchanged greetings, Mary found her instincts immediately abraded and sensitised. The Army & Navy Club was an unambiguously male bastion, she felt out of place here, and it seemed as though she were watching them all from a distance. She felt uneasy about Freddie Payne from the moment he opened his over-confident mouth. Too much bloody nose, a class thing. Yet there was hunger in his eyes and, she thought, a glint of fear. Like a man who every day has to cross a tightrope just to live, knowing that one day he must surely fall. The air of confidence was a mask as carefully constructed as his expensively capped teeth.
Her feminine instincts played an entirely different game with the other guest, McKenzie, a Highland Scot by upbringing and accent. He was quieter,