Free A Little White Death by John Lawton

certain. The Moscow home of the Troitskys, abandoned by his father in 1905,
passed to an uncle in the interim and confiscated by the state in 1922.
    He knew as soon as he left the bookshop that she was following him. It confirmed what he had first thought, that he, not Charlie, was the object of suspicion. He would have liked a clear look at
her, but the streets offered too few plate-glass windows in which to catch her reflection. He decided it did not matter. She was unlikely to lose him, and sooner or later, he’d have a chance
to turn without simply stopping her on the street. He caught a tram out to the southwest. The spook ran and leapt onto the platform at the last minute. If she broke a leg doing it, this woman would
not dare lose him.

 
§ 11
    Even the paint was the same colour his father had described to him – a middling, dull shade of green. The house rose straight upfrom the pavement on Lyev Tolstoy Street,
the ground-floor windows too high to see into, the outer doors closed tight against the season. A narrow, gabled house, climbing to five storeys in off-off-white, almost pale brown brick, with
copper pipes and gutters dulled by a century and a half of air and rain to a verdigris green brighter than the paintwork. The bars of the gates were folded back, a pattern of blooming lilies,
venuses rising from conch-like shells, woven into the ironwork. A splash of yellowy-white amid the greens.
    A polished brass plate was fixed to the wall underneath the house number. ‘Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley’. The house had once
belonged to the owner of the perfume distillery next door. His father had told him of the wafting scents that had curled upto his open window all summer long. The ministry had taken both buildings.
Not a wisp of summer’s scent remained.
    There seemed no point in ringing. The doors looked to him as though they opened for no one. Besides, what reason, what excuse could he give for wanting to see inside? The Ministry of
Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley could scarcely be accustomed to the sons of the disinherited asking for a quick look round. He crossed the street to look
upat the topfloors, where the rooms disappeared into the pitch of the roof and reappeared as dormer windows, copper topped and adorned with ironwork so distant they could be fleur-de-lis or budding
roses. He could not tell and he could not recall that the old man had ever mentioned them to him. His father’s memory was for incident much more than static detail. He described the rooms
– the dining room in green, again green, as though it were the colour motif of the building; the main bedroom with its faded wallpaper of vast Monetesque flowers in paintbox colours; the
library in red maroon – simply because the boy Troy had nagged him for such detail. Of his own choosing he had told of his own boyhood in the next to attic room that was his nursery, where a
German governess had taught him to read and her French successor had let him watch her strip and bathe.
    Troy looked slowly down the height of the building, each floor’s windows closed and shuttered as though the Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat &
Barley had no need of natural light, and it struck him that the house was blind, that the ministry had put out its eyes, that the house was great and grey and grief-stricken, blind as blind
Gloucester. It saddened him. He could recall every room, though he had seen none. The governess’s bedroom; beneath that his aunt’s; beneath that his grandparents’; beneath that
the dining room; next to that the library; beneath that the drawing room; beneath that the scullery. He could have no feeling one way or the other about the use to which the Soviet government put
the building. No feeling even about the simple fact of possession. They were welcome to it. But the blindness of the house seemed simple