Free The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith Page A

normally left at the gate: this had been left on his doorstep. The parcel was about thirty centimeters long, twenty centimeters wide, and ten centimeters deep. There was no name, no address, just an ink drawing of a crucifix. Ripping the brown paper, he saw a box, the top of which was stamped:
    NOT FOR PRESS

SAME DAY
    T HE METRO CARRIAGE WASN’T CROWDED yet Elena took hold of Raisa’s hand, gripping it tightly, as if fearful they were about to be separated. Both girls were unusually quiet. Leo’s behavior this morning had unsettled them. Raisa couldn’t understand what had come over him. Normally so careful around the girls, he’d seemed to accept that they were about to sit down for breakfast and witness him preoccupied by that word:
torture.
When she’d asked him to take the sheet of paper away, his cue to pull himself together, he’d obeyed only to return to the kitchen in exactly the same disheveled state, staring at the girls and not saying a word. Bloodshot eyes, a haunted, ragged look: she hadn’t seen that expression for years, not since his returns from all-night assignments as a secret police officer, exhausted and yet unable to go to bed. He’d slump in the corner, in the dark, brooding, silent, as though the events of the previous night were playing over and over in his mind like a looped reel of film. During that period he’d never spoken about his work yet she’d known what he’d been doing, arresting indiscriminately, and she’d secretly hated him for it.
    Those times were past. He’d changed—she was sure of it. He’d risked his life to break from a profession of midnight arrests and forced confessions. The State Security apparatus still existed, renamed the KGB, remaining a presence in everyone’s life, but Leo played no part in its operations, having declined the offer of a high-ranking position. Instead, taking a much greater risk, he’d opened his own investigative department. Every night he shared stories of his working day, partly because he sought her advice, partly to show how different his department was from the KGB, but mostly to prove there were no more secrets between them. Yet her approval wasn’t enough. Observing him around the girls, it struck Raisa that he behaved as if he were cursed, a character in a children’s fairy tale, and only the words—
I love you—
spoken by both girls, could break the dark magic of his past.
    Despite his frustrations, he’d never shown any jealousy of Raisa’s easy relationship with Elena and Zoya even when Zoya deliberately tormented him by being openly affectionate to her and cold to him. Over the past three years he’d withstood rejection and rudeness, never losing his temper, soaking up hostility as if he considered it nothing less than he deserved. In the face of this, he’d made the girls his only hope of redemption. Zoya knew it and reacted against it. The more he sought her affection, the more she hated him. Raisa couldn’t point out the contradiction, or tell him to relax. Once fanatical about Communism, he was now fanatical about his family. His vision of utopia had been made smaller, less abstract, and though it now encompassed only four people, rather than the entire world, it remained just as elusive.
    The train pulled into TsPkiO station, abbreviated from its full name, Tsentralnyl Park Kulturyi Otdykha Imeni Gorkovo. The first time the girls had heard it formally read out over the PA system they’d started to laugh. Caught unaware by this chance absurdity, Zoya had revealed a beautiful smile that, up until then, she’d kept locked out of sight. In that moment Raisa caught a glimpse of the child that had been lost—playful and irreverent. Within seconds Zoya’s smile had been wiped away. Raisa had felt an intense pain. She was no less emotionally involved. She and Leo had been unable to have children of their own: adoption was her only hope of motherhood. However, she was by far the better at concealing her thoughts,