“Stop this,” she said. “It is not fair, you are cruel, you are a bitch, Anna. Leave. I don’t need you, I can get better by myself, I do not want you here, go, go on, fuck off, fuck off.”

  “Elena,” I said.

  “No, no, fuck off. Don’t do this. Don’t talk to me like this as if this could be something real, something that would bring my son to me—”

  “Elena.” I stood up and stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She raised a hand as if to push me out of the way, but left it there, between us, trembling.

  “Elena,” I said again, more gently this time.

  “Can it work?” she said. “Can it really work? These men kill people, Anna.”

  “I know,” I said. “There is a lot that we need to do. But I think it can work.”

  “He didn’t send you? If I do not throw you out, does it mean I get a beating?”

  “I would not do that for him,” I said. “Never.”

  She made a face, and yanked her blouse up to show the marks. “You do this for him. You help this go away, so it can be done again.”

  I tried to say something but I could not think of anything to say. I sat down on the edge of the bed. After a moment or two, Elena sat down next to me.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I do what I do because he makes me. You do what you do because he makes you. I cannot hate you for that.”

  Yes, but he makes you with your son, I thought. I am doing this all for myself. She put a hand on my shoulder.

  “And you should not hate you, for it also.”

  I put my hand on hers. “Thank you,” I said. But just because she told me that did not make it so.

  “This money,” Elena said. “How much will it be?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “It has to be enough that I can get my son, and get us away,” she said. “Or I do not do it.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean what I get, it must be enough,” she said. “My half. That must be big enough to do that. Or I do not do it, we forget it.”

  “There is no your half,” I said. “All of it will be for you.”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “You are not taking any of the money?”

  “No,” I said. “The money will all be yours.”

  “Then what do you get?” The suspicious Elena of a few moments ago was back.

  I looked at her for a long time.

  “Corgan,” I said. “I get him.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “No offence,” Sean said. “But you’re fucking mad.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I am grateful for your support.”

  We were sat in the little front room of Sean’s flat. It was not fair to Sean if I stayed with him for long, so I had moved back to the hostel. I was worried that if we lived too close, too long, that it would bring to the surface things that should stay sunk. I would think Anna, listen to yourself, you think you are some great catch, the way you look now? But then he would look at me, just for a second longer than he should, or he would not look at me at all, and I thought no, I am right not to stay here, it is not fair on him. He told me I could stay as long as I want, but I talked some bullshit about losing my room if I stayed away too long. He started to say something else, but then he stopped and gave me one of those Sean grins that he did to cover an awkward moment.

  I sat on one end of the small couch that once had been orange but now was faded to dirty brown. Sean had been wandering around the room, changing CDs while he talked excitedly about the music, and making a pretence of tidying by moving things from one pile to another. When I started to talk to him about Elena he sat down on a plastic chair that he had stolen from a pub garden.

  “Fucking mad. And I should know, remember, I’m the expert. Christ. You don’t even know who this bloke is, who to talk to about him, nothing. Anna, Anna I know why you’re doing this, but there’s a hundred, a thousand ways that it could go wrong.”

  “Not only your support,” I said, “but your encouragement too.”

  “Encouragement? You expect me to encourage you in this? Jesus. Why don’t you just do it the simple way and shoot Corgan?”

  I smiled at Sean, a big idiot smile, like a baby does just as it fills its nappy. I had gone with my father and Aleksey to shoot duck, just once, and they had let me shoot a couple of times. But it hurt my shoulder, and I got bored and they drank and laughed and I got more bored and my toes grew so cold that I thought they were going to fall off. So I made a face until they noticed, and then a worse one until they gave in and declared that the day was over. Aleksey drank coffee from a flask and then drove us home along the country roads, very slowly so he did not crash, or wake my father who snored in the back seat like a pig rooting under a tree.

  “Whoah, don’t you even think about it, Anna. Anyway, you haven’t got a gun.” He looked up, worried. “Have you? You haven’t gone and got a gun, have you?”

  “No,” I said. “I have no gun. And I do not wish to kill him. Well, I do, but the better side of me says not. But Sean, I must stop him.”

  Sean leant forward, his elbows on his knees, his hand cupping his face. “If only there was some kind of organisation. You know, set up by the government and made to go after people who break the law, and catch them, and put them in prison. It seems like such a simple idea I’m amazed that no-one’s ever thought of it.”

  “Funny. You should go on the stage. I cannot go to the police, Sean. One, I have no evidence. Two, I do not trust the police. I know, I know, your police are not the police of my country. But it was men in police uniforms who took my father and who beat my brother to death. So do not tell me I should trust the police, here, anywhere. And you forget, Sean. I have worked for Corgan. If they find out I have done that, and have false papers, they will send me back. And I cannot go back.”

  “They wouldn’t.” Sean said. “Not with your story.”

  “You keep saying that,” I said, annoyed. “What are you, some kind of expert? Read a book about immigration law during slow nights on the till?”

  “OK, OK, I’m just saying,” Sean said.

  “Well do not.”

  “OK. Jesus.” He scratched his head. “Tell the police anonymously, maybe?”

  “Not enough,” I said. “You think they will listen? And besides, if I go to the police, how does Elena get any money? She has to have money to look after her son.”

  “With Corgan out of the way, she could settle here properly. Get a job. Bring her son over.” Sean stopped, shook his head, and looked at me. “I’m talking bollocks, aren’t I?”

  I shrugged and said nothing.

  “A working girl, here without permission, family back home? They’d send her back before Corgan’s had his first night inside, scared shitless that the Daily Mail will get hold of it.”

  “More than that,” I said. “If she has no money, she cannot disappear. And if she cannot disappear, Corgan will find her.”

  “But he’ll be locked up and—yeah, OK. Bollocks again. Someone like him...”

  “Yes. Either the people he works for, or the people who work for him. He will have a long reach. Even from a prison cell.”

  Sean put his fingers together, and rested his face against them like he was praying. “OK. So, the police aren’t an option. You need to get proof that Budden is fixing Corgan up with contacts to go it alone. This Lomax or whatever he’s called, he isn’t just going to take your word for it, is he? Recording would be best, if Elena can get Budden talking. Video would be perfect, but you’d need line of sight, and then how do you hide it? Might have to settle for sound.”

  “Sean,” I said, amused. “It sounds as if you are starting to help me plan this? I thought that it was madness.”

  “Well, it is,” he said. “So who better than a madman to advise you on the finer points of it?” He grinned at me in a scary way and rolled his eyes.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “No joke.”

  “I know,” Sean said. “But I want to. No joke. It feels good, Anna, this. Taking something on. Not running away.”

  “Good,” I said. “I am so pleased.” And I was.

  “Because I don’t want to run away from you,” he said, the grin gone, and I did not know what to say to that so I smiled at him and then pretended that I had a thread on my jeans that I had to pick off. I heard Sean take a breath as if he was about to say something else, but then he let it go in a sigh, and said, “Right. If we’re going to plan this properly, I better make some tea. Here, listen to this while I’m doing it. Found it the other day in the market. She made an album, back in the sixties, then lived on an island or something until a couple of years ago and she got rediscovered. It’s beautiful.”

  He went and bustled in his little kitchen, and I sat on the couch and listened to the woman’s voice, as delicate as thin glass, while I thought about what I would do if Sean made a pass at me. I liked him, very much. But I thought maybe that was all. Sean was sweet, and he understood me in a way that no-one else did. But he did not do what Daniel did, which was make me feel like I could lose control, like I could not predict what I would do because my brain was no longer in charge. By the time Sean had come back in with the tea, I had still not decided how to handle it. I just hoped that I had read him wrong. Or that I had read him right, but he would not do anything, for fear of spoiling our friendship.

  “You look lost in thought,” he said, as he put the mugs down on the table. “Got no biscuits, sorry. Beautiful song, this.”

  “It is a very complicated world sometimes,” I said, without really meaning to.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Which is why I’ve forgotten to get any biscuits. Still, never mind, eh.” But he said it too brightly, too lightly, and I knew then that he knew what I was talking about.

  We drank our tea and we made our plans. Sean managed to find paper and a pen amongst the clutter, and we made a list of all that we had to think about. Sean talked it through, looking at every angle, trying to think of all of the problems, and all of the answers.

  “The less he’s thinking, the better,” he said. “So if she tries to get him talking right in the middle of it—”

  I held up a hand, to stop his excitement which was carrying him on like a train out of control of its driver.

  “What?”

  “You hear what you are saying, Sean. ‘In the middle of it’. You do realise what else this means? For Elena.”

  “Christ. No. I hadn’t thought.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Jesus.” Sean sat back in resignation. “Maybe we should just shoot the bastard after all.”

  “Do not think that I haven’t thought about it. Much. Often. But Elena will do what she does, I think, one last time. This gives her the escape she wants. A new life. If not, she has to do it over and over, many times.”

  “And you? What does this give you, Anna?”

  “It frees me from Corgan. It pays back the debt I owe for doing all of these things for him. I do it for them, I become one of them. No matter that I am just the doctor, mending people. I do his work. And by doing his work, I work for him, no different from the others like him.” And I have known others like him, I thought, and from nowhere my eyes filled with tears. I pretended I was tired, rubbed at my eyes.

  “I’m just having trouble seeing what comes next,” Sean said, tipping his chair onto its two back legs, and putting his feet up on a pile of music magazines. “For you. Elena gets her new life, she flies off to Canada, reunited with her son. Cool. But you? You said yourself, Corgan has a long reach. So he gets investigated, maybe sent down, maybe not. For all we know he could be paying someone off. Either way, is he going to think Elena’s done all this on her own? Not likely. So if he starts to think who might have helped her, whose name is going to come up, huh?”

  “I know,” I said, and I did, because I had thought about it very much. “Mine, maybe.”

  “Maybe? Definitely. So then he’s going to come after you. And what are we going to do then, Anna?”

  I felt a gratefulness for that word that made my eyes sting with a tear. Both because of what he had said, and because of what I was about to say to him next.

  “I am going to run, Sean. I am going to go somewhere he can’t find me. I am sorry. But I will have to leave.”

  Sean looked up at me, went to say something, stopped. He looked down at the floor for a moment or two, and then back at me. He smiled, but it was not a very good attempt.

  “I see,” he said. “I suppose that’s obvious, yeah. Can’t stay here. Not safe. I just didn’t think—I dunno, I just didn’t think. Not so keen on this song,” he said, and he got up and fiddled with his cheap CD player that sat on the floor under the window. “Don’t know why. Anything else you fancy on?”

  “I cannot stay, Sean,” I said. “He will find me. I need to go to another city, I can disappear. I have no identity anyway, Sean, I am no-one. There is Anna, who was nearly a doctor. There is Anna who is here from another country working in a burger bar and might get deported because I am not welcome here. There is Anna, who has the papers that Corgan had made. But they are just papers, they burn. I can be another Anna, just as easily. I lose nothing, leave nothing.” I saw his face, and hated myself for my clumsy words. “Except for my friends. Except for you. I am sorry, Sean, really I am. I will miss you very much.”

  “You might not,” he said.

  “I will,” I said, offended that he could think that way, but not wanting to show it because I had already hurt him enough.

  “Mmm,” he said. And then he went and made himself busy making more tea that neither of us drank.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I took Sean to see Elena. If he was going to help, it was important that they knew each other, and important that Elena could trust him. At the first meeting, that seemed a long way off. Elena stared at him like one cat stares at another when they are about to fight, and then she hid herself behind a smokescreen while I sat and tried to keep the conversation going, and Sean made awkward attempts to show that he was not a man just like all the others who used Elena. We sat in Elena’s room, Sean and I on the couch, Elena perched on the edge of her bed, ashtray on her knee.

  “I don’t know about this,” Elena said. “Too many people, someone talks.”

  “There are only the three of us,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Three’s enough. What if he talks?”

  “He won’t talk.”

  “Um, I am here, you know,” Sean said.

  Elena ignored him. “It is my life at risk,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And if you do nothing, go on as before?”

  Elena blew out a stream of smoke towards me, and looked away.

  “If you really don’t want me to be involved,” Sean said to her in a gentle voice, “I won’t be. But I do want to help.”

  “Why?” The suspicion was plain in her voice. “What do you get? You help me, then I fuck you maybe, is that it?”

  Sean looked as if he had been slapped in the face.

  “Elena,” I said, angry. “That is not fair. He is not like them.”

  “That is what their wives think too,” Elena said.

  “Look,” Sean said, raising his voice. “Will both of you stop talking as if I’m not here? You included, Anna, I can speak for myself. Listen, Elena, I know what you must think of all men, but it’s not like that. You want me to be blunt, I’m not even here for you. I mean, I’m really sorry for everything that’s going on, it’s disgusting, it’s terrible, and I’ll do what I can to help, but you want a straight answer, I’m not here because I want anything from you, I’m here because of Anna.”

  “Ah,” Elena said, and her eyes lit up. “Now I understand.” She winked at me, crossed her legs, and mashed her cigarette into the ashtray with one hand, shaking her packet of cigarettes with the other so she could get at a fresh one. “I am sorry, Sean. Now I understand.” She looked amused.

  “No,” Sean said in despair. “No you’ve—look—Anna’s my friend.”

  “Uh-huh,” Elena said, swinging one foot backward and forward, her shoe dangling from her toes. Sean looked down at her legs, looked away, then back again, as if he had no choice in the matter. Men.

  “She is. I’m helping out a friend. People do that, you know.”

  “Sure they do.” She lit her new cigarette.

  “For Christ’s sake, tell her, Anna,” he appealed.

  I nodded. “Like he said. Sean is a very good friend to me.” Elena gave me a look. I gave her one back. She nodded, smiled.

  “OK,” she said. “Very good friends, that is all. Fine. I understand.”

  And with that, the ice in the room was broken. But all the rest of the time that we were there, Elena kept giving me the occasional look as if we were conspirators in some plot. I did not know if Sean noticed, and I did not do much to make her think anything else, because if it made her more trusting of Sean, then it was worth it. A couple of times though, while we were talking, I knew that if I looked across I would have seen Sean, looking at me, as if he was thinking about something. But I did not look across, because I did not want to find out that I was right, or to see him suddenly looking away, a flush in his cheeks.