I drew in a breath, already sensing that it hadn’t gone the way he had hoped. “What happened?”
“He didn’t succeed.”
“Did he-?”
“He never came back. Valentin’s father took care of the burial.”
“You’ve never been to his grave?”
“No. It wasn’t politically viable for me to make the journey.”
“Oh, Maxim.” My heart bled for him, and as strong as he was being, as good as he was at making out that none of this touched him, I knew it did. He wouldn’t have hung onto this apartment so fiercely if he didn’t feel anything at all.
Elizabeth
Much later, after he’d stripped me naked and worshipped my body with his mouth. After he’d climbed on top of me and pushed inside me, hips pistoning me into the mattress until all I could do was shout out his name and clamp around him hard, drinking in the waves of cum he released deep inside me. Hours after that, when we were clean and showered and halfway presentable to the world, we went out.
He took me by the hand as we strolled along Hatton Garden looking in the windows of all the jewellery shops at row upon row of glinting diamond rings.
But Maxim didn’t lead me into one of the shop fronts. Instead he took me along to a doorway rimmed with black stone. Two shiny, impenetrable black doors stopped us from seeing whatever was inside, and above were only the street numbers, in large, gold numerals. 88-90. There was no entryphone, but a security guard was standing outside with the see-through wire of a headset in his ear, and the alert, vigilant pose of a man who used to be in the armed services.
“I’m here to see Yuri. Maxim Toropov. He’s expecting me.”
The security guard nodded and checked in with whoever was on the other end of his walkie talkie in a burble of static.
My eyes wandered to the twin signs framing the door, the only advertisement for whatever existed inside. Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd.
Maxim leaned close enough to whisper in my ear. “They fly diamonds in by helicopter sometimes. People hold whatever they want in here.”
The security guard’s eyes flicked down to me, and Maxim moved in closer, and his hand settled posessively around my waist.
Another burble of static came through and the security guard opened the door for us to the buzz and heavy click of the weighty lock being released.
Inside, the stairs swept down from a marble entrance hall, instead of going up, as I’d expected, given the talk of helicopters and something triggered in my memory. “Isn’t this where that robbery happened?”
Maxim nodded. “£200 million, estimated, never found.”
I looked at him, eyes narrowed. He seemed far too pleased about that.
“Did you guys have anything to do with it?”
“Now why would you say that? They caught the men responsible.”
“But they never found what they took.”
Maxim’s eyes glinted, and he shrugged. “Maybe they never looked in the right place.”
“Maxim!” The portly, balding man at the bottom of the steps greeted Max with a clasped handshake. “I trust our mutual friend Timoshenko is well.”
There was an East End twang to his accent and a little more flash to his suit than I’d expected from the classical frontage of the building. His eyes grazed over the pair of us slowly, in a very assessing way and I had no doubt this man did more with his time than manage a suite of deposit boxes.
“I believe so, Yuri. Please, meet Elizabeth. She is doing me the great honour of becoming my wife. I couldn’t, in good faith, bring her anywhere but here to choose her ring.”
“Of course you bloody couldn’t. Well. Come on, come through. Let’s see what we can get for you.”
The man had a large bunch of keys and he flipped through them with the efficiency of a librarian flicking through a row of books as he led us into the narrow entryway to a larger room. From floor to ceiling were locked doors the width of box files, all stacked horizontally one on top of the other, next to other square locker doors that were double the height, and few that were taller than that.
He opened a few, seemingly at random and inside were dark black lockboxes with handles, waiting to be pulled out.
Yuri nodded. “Go on then.”
Max took hold of the first box and pulled it out, keeping it flat as he moved it over to a table in the centre where the L-shaped room widened.
“Deductions from your share, or the company share, today Mr Toropov?”
“My share, of course.”
“Very good. I’ll mark it down, once we’ve established the value. Is it loose diamonds you’re after, or something ready to wear?”
Maxim shrugged. “Lets see what you’ve got.”
“Excellent idea.” Yuri nodded, and unlocked another couple of doors, pulling down the boxes and setting them out next to the first. “I think these ones should do you nicely.”