Watch Her Fall by Erin Kelly

Author:Erin Kelly [Kelly, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

At the bleep of the Force Patrol key fob, the iron gates slid open and the baked black tar of Gabriel’s Hill rose between banks of yellowing trees. Katya sat beside Roman in the passenger seat, out of sight of the cameras, ready for her house-to-house sales calls in her work uniform, a black nylon tunic worn over cropped trousers. A little wheeled case packed with the tiny bottles of her trade clinked in the back seat. She tapped constantly at her phone, which he suspected probably held photographs of his Maxim Shevchenko ID as well as the contents of his yellow wallet: same face, different names. She had all the dirt she would ever need on him. Her phone was a loaded gun. He’d worked out the code from glancing in the rear-view mirror; 959595. Roman would go through the phone if he could, see just what she had on him, but she never put the bloody thing down.

At the top of the hill she said, ‘Drop me here.’

Her case rolled over the smooth paving stones. Roman drove ahead, keeping her in his rear-view mirror rather than driving along behind her where the camera might pick her up. His plan, inasmuch as he had one, was to humour her for a couple of days. Katya was bright but unschooled. Her grasp of the Western alphabet was shaky. Her little scam would never get off the ground.

She stood now before the vast gates of one of the mock-Tudor houses, finger on the buzzer. To his surprise the gates parted to let her in. He made three slow circuits of the estate, turning things over in his mind. If he hadn’t bought Maxim Shevchenko’s identity, Katya never would have found him. The British said that ignorance was bliss but Katya had hardly been in bliss before she’d found him, more a state of great agitation, stalking and waiting and asking, fixating on the life she had lost to ease the pain of the love she had lost.

He understood it, in a way. Anyone who had lived on the contact line in Ukraine knew that grief made you mad, made you cling desperately to the wreckage of your before. There was a widow everyone called Baba Sofia on the ground floor of their old block in Donetsk who’d lost her only son in a shelling but still set the table for him every night. If you saw Baba Sofia in the supermarket she’d show you the basket full of beetroot and sorrel she’d got in to make her son borsch just the way he liked it: he was working hard, he needed a good hot meal to come home to. Roman had always wondered what happened to Baba Sofia when she went home. Did she have a conversation with an empty place setting? Scrape the uneaten food into the bin? Veronika had tried to help her, showing her the newspaper reports of her son’s death, but she seemed to think the

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