The décor was a temple to modern Russia’s celebratory absence of taste: a riot of purple, with an expensive television and a cream sofa from which to watch it. Kate pulled back the net curtain and gazed out at the River Neva, almost lost in the blizzard. She glanced up and down the embankment.

She took a small bottle of whisky from the minibar and swallowed two zopiclone with its contents.

All she was aware of, as she turned out the light, was the rapid beating of her heart.

19

19

KATE DIDN’T BOTHER with breakfast. She put on her coat and the beanie she had stuffed into its pocket and walked out into the Arctic winter chill. She’d been up since dawn had broken and had remained at the window ever since, watching the sun creep steadily across the Neva and the grandiose buildings of Vasilyevsky Island opposite.

Kate walked across Palace Bridge, stopping to lean over the side at its centre. The spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral glistened in the bright sun, the river flowing steadily beneath her, not yet frozen despite the biting cold. Palace Square was almost deserted, the tourists not yet having emerged from their expensive hotels. She lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke with the fumes of the morning traffic. It made her feel resolutely wretched, but she worked her way through half of it before finally flicking the remains into the river below.

She started walking and immediately stopped. What was she doing here? The carefully constructed operational arguments folded in the face of the loneliness that gnawed away at her. She knew damned well why she was really here and it made her feel foolish, nervous and naïve by turns. She was back to being a fourteen-year-old girl preparing for her first date with Pete Carter, the trainee anarchist.

She glanced at her watch. She walked on past the Rostral Columns – once primitive lighthouses for river traffic on the Neva – the great massif of the former Stock Exchange, the honey-coloured buildings of the university and the severe grey beauty of the Academy of Sciences. At this end, close to the Strelka, the island still bore the hallmarks of the grand administrative centre the city’s founder, Peter the Great, had once intended. But the further you walked from the Neva, the greater sense you got of the mercantile past that had been its true destiny. Sergei had liked to summon an image of its Tsarist heyday, when the summer air was filled with the whistling of winches, the cries of seagulls and the shouts of the ships’ crews as an avalanche of varied cargoes was unloaded from all over the Russian Empire and well beyond. The days of a great Russia, he’d said, how different things might have been but for the Revolution.

It was why she’d always called him a dreamer.