The Half Truth(54)

Tina knew that now. She hadn’t at the time, but Sasha had. ‘And you still never told me.’

‘I was protecting you.’

‘You were keeping me in the dark and treating me with zero respect.’

Sasha leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his hands together as if in prayer. ‘I did not see it like that. I still do not.’

Tina knew this was difficult for him, but not as difficult as it was for her. He was wrestling with his conscience, trying to justify his actions to her. Something he knew he could never really do.

‘Pavel had more than his fair share. He took some diamonds from one of the jobs and he sold them on, getting a large sum of money. The remaining members of the Porboski gang did not take too kindly to this information once they found out. They wanted what they considered to be their cut. We were both coming under threat from them, Pavel and me.’ He was struggling for words now. The effort of speaking in English taking its toll – he had spent five long years away, speaking in his mother tongue. ‘I needed to hide. The word was out that I was on their hit list too. I knew as long as I was alive they would keep coming for me. They had gone after Mario and you know what happened to him.’

Tina certainly did know what happened to one of Pavel’s friends. He was found tied to a chair in a garage in Dalston, beaten and tortured to death. She couldn’t believe that she never made the connection then. She truly believed that she and Sasha had no more of a connection with what was going on other than that Sasha hailed from the same country. How could she have been so naive?

‘There’s something else,’ he said.

‘Oh, God, what?’ She wasn’t sure she could take any more.

‘I had been forced to speak to the police.’

Tina frowned. ‘Speak to the police? I don’t understand.’

‘An informer. The police were blackmailing me.’ He sat back against the bench. ‘They had evidence on me for the money-laundering. They said I could be kept out of prison if I gave them information.’

‘You grassed on the Porboski gang? Your own brother?’ Tina let this new information sink in. John had never told her that bit. He must have known, surely?

Yet another lie.

‘I had no choice. I was stuck in the middle.’ Sasha let out a long sigh. ‘The only way I could stop both the police and the Russians coming for me was if they thought I was dead. The Porboskis wanted their share of the money and they wanted revenge. They wanted my blood.’

‘If you had told me, we could have disappeared together,’ said Tina. There was a bleakness in her voice as she began to understand what her husband had been involved in. How she thought she had known him but really she hadn’t. It hurt. Badly.

‘I could not take you with me.’ Sasha held Tina’s hand as he had done so earlier. The roughness of his skin still felt alien to her. He felt alien. He wasn’t the Sasha she had been married to. The Sasha she married had never really existed. He was a front, a disguise for the real one. She kept her hands within his. She wanted him to tell her more. She needed to know exactly what happened. ‘If I had taken you with me, you would have given the game away. An English woman in Russia, who could not speak a word of the language, it would have been easy to find me and you would have been in grave danger too. You and our unborn son. I could not put you in that position. I couldn’t let there be any chance that they would come for you. The only way I could escape and keep you safe was if I died. I could not tell you. If you knew the truth you would not have let me go, I know you too well. You would have tried to do something crazy to put it right.

Tina nodded. Yes, she probably would have. She would have done anything to keep the love of her then-life.

‘So you faked your death. You and your brother and your family were all in on it,’ she said, as realisation about the extent of the lie hit her. ‘They all knew. No wonder Pavel didn’t want me to come over for the funeral. There wasn’t one.’

Sasha bowed his head. Shame settled over him like a shroud. At least he had the decency to be ashamed of what he had done. She remembered the pain of the grief. It was still raw, but it was all needless. How tragic.

‘You deceived me. You betrayed me. You have come back and rewritten my history. I can’t just say, “Oh, that’s okay Sasha, don’t worry about it. It’s all okay now”.’

The sound of a car horn, tooting several times, made Sasha look round. He stood up, anxiety etched across his face. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Go? But … why?’ She couldn’t let him go without some sort of resolution.