The Dictator’s Wife Read online

  Copyright © 2022 Freya Berry

  The right of Freya Berry to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

  HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  First published as an Ebook in 2022 by

  HEADLINE REVIEW

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication – apart from the obvious historical figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978 1 4722 7632 2

  Cover design by Heike Schüssler.

  Author Photograph © Rory Mounsey-Heysham

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for The Dictator’s Wife

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: 2018

  Chapter Two: 1993

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty: 2018

  Acknowledgements

  About Freya Berry

  Freya Berry studied English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and worked for several years as a financial and political journalist at Reuters and then the Daily Mail. Freya splits her time between London and the Welsh coast. The Dictator’s Wife is her debut novel, inspired by the close observation of the wives of some of the world’s most powerful leaders.

  Praise for The Dictator’s Wife

  ‘A gripping, intelligent, utterly-of-the-moment thriller’

  EMMA STONEX

  ‘A remarkable new talent’

  ANTHONY HOROWITZ

  ‘This book is magnificent’

  CHARLOTTE PHILBY

  ‘A captivating story of women's power, love and secrets. As timely and profound as it is unforgettable. The ending left me breathless’

  LARA PRESCOTT

  ‘A gripping and moving debut from a talent to watch’

  HARLAN COBEN

  ‘A fascinating exploration of absolute power, female agency and the complexities of complicity. Atmospheric, claustrophobic and so elegantly written’

  ELLERY LLOYD

  ‘A darkly atmospheric, rich, compulsive and page-turning read’

  KATE HAMER

  ‘One of the most original debuts I have read’

  DAISY GOODWIN

  ‘Excellent. Horrifying and immersive with strong characterisation and atmosphere’

  HARRIET TYCE

  ‘Engrossing, evocative, chillingly claustrophobic. Wonderfully written’

  KAREN HAMILTON

  ‘A thrilling novel’

  OLIVIA VINALL

  About the Book

  ‘I know you would like to hate me. History is written by the victors, and these are always men . . .’

  WOMAN

  I learned early in life how to survive. A skill that became vital in my position.

  WIFE

  I was given no power, yet I was expected to hold my own with the most powerful man in the country.

  MOTHER OF THE NATION

  My people were my children. I stood between him and them.

  I am not the person they say I am.

  I am not my husband.

  I am innocent.

  Do you believe me?

  To my parents

  For always making time

  She is a mother. She is and remains a mother . . .

  For at one time she carried the child under her heart.

  And it does not go out of her heart ever again.

  Leo Frobenius, Der Kopf als Schicksal

  Perception is real, and the truth is not.

  Imelda Marcos, The Kingmaker

  CHAPTER ONE

  2018

  The past rarely comes for us politely. She springs out from a half-seen face in the street, assaults us in a once-familiar hall. A sudden visitor, not so much knocking at the door as smashing a fist through the frosted pane.

  I raised the teacup to my lips, turned the newspaper page, and there she was, her amber eyes turned to black and somewhere the scent of decaying flowers. Only later, after I had swept up the shattered china, did I realise why I had not spotted the obituary at once. Twenty-five years ago the dictator’s wife would have commanded the cover. Now she had been bumped to page three.

  I put the paper in the bin, then took it out again, the dark web of ink at odds with the Devon sun. This time I was not imagining it: the whiff of something rotting. The funeral was in three days.

  ‘I’ll have to go, you know,’ I said to the cat. He glared up at me as if asking why I would do such a thing. I did not reply, though the answer burned nevertheless.

  To make sure she is dead.

  The plane was small and not busy. I sat in a row on my own, along from some eastern European women visiting home, the glaring yellow of the airline’s livery reflecting unfavourably off their tired faces. Long before the dawn clawed at the grubby hotel curtains, I was up and dressed.

  I felt the churchyard before I saw it. A hush surrounded it, silencing the gathering crowd. Some observers crossed themselves; others hesitated, hands frozen before their hearts. I stepped through the gate and braced myself: nothing, only the shrieks of the crows in their shabby black. Was I free, at last, of her influence? Perhaps. But I had long since learned that enslavement may be just as imperceptible as freedom.

  I found a space among the mourners. They watched with their whole bodies, these people, I remembered now. In this particular corner of eastern Europe, the eyes were larger, darker, with the look of animals calculating whether to run. When I had last come to this country, twenty-five years ago, I had disliked that I was born one of them, a watcher. Here, too, I had learned to be glad of it. It had saved me more than once.

  It was surprisingly warm in the sunshine, and as we waited, I began to sweat. In Devon it was winter, but in Yanussia spring had sprung like a trap, though snow lurked still in the shadows of the gravestones. I removed my coat, then my jumper, quickly, uneasy about obscuring my vision. As I did so, the crowd gave a sigh. I wrenched the wool over my head and saw the church doors open.

  She who carries the scar remembers; she who gives the scar forgets. An old Yanussian saying, and as I watched that plain wooden box, utterly free of adornment, I remembered. No wonder the government had arranged the First Lady’s funeral in such haste. They would all be trying to forget, to purge themselves of the woman whose influence still ran liquid in their veins, who had burrowed into their very marrow. In the trees the crows screamed, but the ensnared faces around me did not look up. I heard someone mutter a single word, and now at last I felt it, that odd mixture of enchantment and dread.

  Vrăjitoare. Witch.

  Only when the coffin crossed the churchyard boundary, bound for the cemetery, did the mourners exhale, hardly knowing why. I crushed a small heap of snow with my foot. It was over. Marija Popa was gone, her secrets departed with her. Death is a great leveller: it makes everyone uninteresting. The men are always kind and funny, the women beautiful. What happens to the dull, the ugly and the cruel? Perhaps they live forever.

  I turned to leave, but as I did so, among the smartly dressed mourning party . . .

  ‘Pavel?’

/>   It was him. Older, stooped, but distinctly him. He turned – not, it seemed, because he wanted to, but because he was compelled. To my amusement, the dyed black hair still clung on grimly, though the underlying colour must long ago have bleached to white.

  ‘Laura Lăzărescu,’ he said. ‘Those dark eyes. My God. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Same as you.’ I indicated the mourning party. ‘Only from the outside.’

  Cristian Pavel, consummate insider. Of course my old boss had wangled himself an invitation. He blended in perfectly, with his immaculately cut coat and shining shoes, while my hair was mussed and my arms full of clothing. Even as I stood there, my jumper detached itself and fell to the floor. I scrabbled for it, my fingers accidentally making contact with his foot, and rose to find him staring at the point where my skin had met the polished leather. I strangled a smile: he hadn’t changed.

  But I had. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got a drinks thing . . .’

  ‘Pavel.’ My voice was calm, but its undercurrent forced him to meet my eye. I admired the imperceptibility of his hesitation.

  ‘All right. One moment.’

  Pavel never was able to resist a challenge. He insinuated himself back into the throng, a crow returning to its murder. Several business cards changed hands. The man retired from the law twenty-five years ago, for heaven’s sake. What did his card even say? But there is a certain breed of person who sees a funeral as a networking opportunity, and I felt suddenly grubby, loitering among the gravestones. Her husband wasn’t buried here; rather in a far grander cemetery beside statesmen, kings and other notables who had taken the wound of the world and rubbed salt in. Those iron eyes now terrorised only worms; safely interred was that heavy jaw, set against a universe he must have believed had wronged him, or how else could he have done the things he did? I wondered why his widow had not been granted the next-door plot. I would have been the last to suggest Marija Popa deserved more, yet I could not help but feel that this mean little church was cheating her – that if only she had died young and beautiful, they would have laid on the cathedral and throngs of weeping faithful. Like Evita, although Marija would have mocked the comparison. As it was, she had made the mistake of growing old, even unattractive. That surprised me. It was unlike the First Lady not to play a role to the bitter end.

  Why had I asked Pavel for coffee? What on earth would we say, could we say, to one another? I sensed the bodies encrusting the earth beneath our feet, their blue-white eyes upturned towards me. Pavel was unaware of my secret, but the dead knew, they all knew, what I had done for the dictator’s wife . . .

  ‘Laura? Let’s go.’ Pavel had returned, tucking his cards away. He didn’t offer me one.

  We walked onto the Bulevard Unirii, rimed with litter and old snow; the pressure in my head gradually lessened, like the retreating toll of a bell. The city of Poartă had been known, once, as Little Paris, but that was before its alleys were torn open to boulevards, its townhouses mushroomed into monstrous apartment blocks. Yanussia was a tiny country, squashed between Romania, Hungary and Serbia, yet Constantin Popa had decided to build a capital fit only for giants. Before his rule, the country had had modest aspirations, chiefly farming, drinking and spying on neighbouring Romania, which treated it as an irksome younger brother. In the 1848 revolutions, both nations fought for independence from Imperial Russia: Yanussia won where the other regions failed, a fact that apparently surprised them just as much as everyone else.

  ‘Look,’ Pavel said suddenly. Above, between us and the sky, spiked the chimneys of the old iron mill. I remembered smoke pouring out at all hours of the day, but now it was empty, its blast furnace stilled, its chimneys greening and silent. An old communist joke, what the Soviets called anekdoti, drifted in. Who had told it? Sorin, probably, in a lighter moment.

  A factory inspector is conducting his assessment. He asks one worker, ‘What do you do here?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the worker replies.

  The inspector turns to another. ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The inspector frowns. In his report he writes, ‘The second worker should be fired for unnecessary duplication.’

  No, I probably hadn’t laughed even then. Still, it looked like the grand tradition of people pretending to work in return for the authorities pretending to pay them had finally ground to an end. On a wall someone had sprayed furious graffiti. Turn Up, it said. A modest ambition. Dreams had shrunk since 1989.

  I allowed Pavel to herd me down a side street. He must have been at least eighty, yet his gait was still of someone with places to be. We ducked into a small café, one of those faux-Italian affairs with wipe-down tables, stainless-steel chairs and posters of the usual film stars on the walls. I grated my way into a seat, Sophia Loren pouting down. Her haughty expression reminded me of Marija, and I averted my gaze. It was an unlikely choice for Pavel. I would have expected the bar of some Westernised hotel. I wondered whether his tastes had changed, but then I realised: he did not want to be seen with me.

  ‘You saw last year’s Supreme Court ruling,’ he said without preamble. ‘About the government keeping her jewels.’

  ‘Yes. Couldn’t prove she’d acquired them legally.’ I sighed. ‘What was she, eighty-three? What good were diamonds by then?’

  ‘You expected her to give them up?’

  I gazed at the cup before me, the steam making the tabletop waver strangely. ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have. If you were her.’

  It was such a curious thing to say that I could not think how to respond.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten what you were like, you know. Truculent. Always fighting, until the end.’ A half-smile. ‘As your boss, it could be very annoying.’

  A minute passed in silence before he said, evenly, ‘First time back?’

  ‘Yes. You?’

  He took a careful sip and nodded.

  ‘I would have thought she’d have asked you to visit.’ I winced at my own bitterness, but to my surprise he responded by dropping the mask for the first time.

  ‘Why would she? It was all over.’ He looked, suddenly, old, the shadows catching up with him like they do on elderly faces, lines webbing across the sockets. So he too had been discarded. Poor Pavel.

  Why had he really come? Had that been social climbing at the graveside, or a man burying himself alive in ritual? Had we both in fact returned for the same reason: to verify that those amber eyes had not caused Death to forget his duty? I didn’t think Pavel the type to believe in ghosts, yet the Black Widow brushed the earth away from our most secret parts, the parts we hid even and above all from ourselves. Her genius was to make the disinterment feel natural. Even . . . desirable.

  The dead were very close now, their long fingers brushing my skin. I knew who they were and what they wanted, what they had always wanted.

  Tell him. Tell everyone.

  Could I share it, the thing I had carried in my breast for twenty-five years? Few of us have looked the Devil in the eye and turned her away, and Pavel, above all, would understand the nature of the power I had found myself up against. If law taught me anything, it was that people rarely act from natural evil or malice. There are a million little steps to the cliff edge, and even in the leaping moment, the slightest twinge in the muscle or eddy in the wind may change the outcome utterly.

  Of course, gravity has only one plan for us. But there are many ways to fall.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1993

  We arrived to an invisible city. The taxi forced its way through autumn fog thick as smoke, the window dirty as if reluctant to let the light in. I knew Poartă was there, felt the capital lurking at the edges of my vision – a spire here, the bone of a bridge there – but every time I turned my head, the thing was gone.

  Home. I tested the word on my tongue, probing it for familiarity, for anything that might have lingered in the two decades since I had seen it last, receding from the back of a vegetable truck. Instead I was aware of a deadness pressing down, of things that were broken and had remained so. We passed a man entering a massive apartment block; he stepped inside hastily, yanking the door to, though no one was in pursuit. Forty years they’d had under Marxism, or Bogdan and Popa’s translations of it anyway, which were about as true to the original as a badly dubbed bootleg of a Chuck Norris movie. But now the palaces with real gold mosaics were gone, the orchids flown specially from Thailand withered, and all that remained were the stunted figures of the ordinary people, moving warily as if there were nothing good around the corner.