The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [46]
Stevie lit one of her black cigarettes and considered her next words. ‘It would have been simple to pass the girls invitations to the model night at Zima. What teenage girl could resist, especially Petra. From there, it was a pretty safe bet that Anya would come to the club— without her parents—and they were smart enough to figure out that Petra was the weak link—’
‘—to say the least!’
‘Right. But the point of Petra is, had these guys been after money, why not take her? She is impressionable and gullible and her father has a lot more money. No. They wanted Anya because of who she was. They want to get to your father.’
‘To take revenge?’
Stevie took another sip of the magical tsarina. ‘If they had just wanted to punish your father,’ Stevie looked into Vadim’s glacier eyes, ‘they would probably have shot Anya dead outside the house. They didn’t do that. They chose a much riskier plan.’
‘How is not killing someone riskier?’
‘Kidnapping someone involves all sorts of extras: you need to have a safe hideout where you can keep the victim hidden and stop them escaping, which means armed guards, food supplies and so on. You have to establish ways to communicate with each other, and with the family of the victim. It is a lot more dangerous than assassinating someone because there are lots more ways of getting caught.’
Vadim snorted. ‘This is Russia. No one gets caught if they can pay their way out. You remember when Klebnikov was shot?’
‘The Russian editor of Forbes, yes.’
‘The only two people the police arrested got let off in May. It’s not a great deterrent to murder, is it?’
‘Look, Vadim, the more things drag on, the more people begin to ask uncomfortable questions and the more room there is for things to go wrong. That means that the people who took Anya have every reason to make contact. I think as long as your father is useful to the kidnappers, Anya is safe.’
‘Safe?’
‘It’s relative. They won’t kill her.’
Vadim grew silent, taking this in. Stevie finished her drink and they stood to go. Outside, the snow was falling so heavily that the Kremlin walls had all but been obscured by cascading flakes. Stevie wondered what the birds did when the weather was like this. Probably migrated.
They trudged through the snow without talking. Suddenly, Vadim turned to her. ‘Is it true what you said to Petra, about the joker?’
‘I got it from a Batman film. I was hoping Petra hadn’t seen it. It was all I could think—’ A huge sneeze blew away the end of her sentence.
6
It was true, thought Anya, that you heard more with your eyes closed. Anya’s hearing had always been good but now, after so long with a blindfold— how long had it been?—it felt as if her hearing had become almost superhuman.
She now knew, for example, that she was being held in a tiny bathroom in a large block of flats. The hollow sound of the paperboard walls, the muffled noise of living—radios, voices, clashing cooking pots, water pipes, children running—wafted all around her. It was a symphony of sounds that could only have been composed by layers of people living on top of each other.
She also knew that she was being held by two people, a man and a woman. His name was Gregori and hers was Tamara. They argued a lot, mostly about money.
Right now, although she couldn’t see out of the window, she knew it was snowing heavily. Tamara was complaining it would ruin her hair. Anya guessed by the strong perfume Tamara wore that she had long and elaborate hair. She knew she wore lots of rings by the sound her fingers made when she picked up a mug or a glass.
Sometimes Tamara would get bored and slide the bathroom door open and talk to her, mostly about celebrity gossip. Anya knew conversation with her captors was a good thing so she tried to forget how strange it was to be discussing Nicole Kidman’s latest hair style, or Sandy Belle’s newest handbag, with the woman who was holding her prisoner, blindfolded, her hands tied firmly to a drainpipe.
Tamara was jealous of everyone. She read endless gossip magazines and worshipped