In January 2020, I was heading to Shetland to join a fishing boat, live onboard, and document their lives far out in the North Atlantic. This is the tale of a chance encounter I made on the way.

The Northlink ferry from Orkney to Shetland is an 8-hour voyage I’d intended to use for writing and sleeping. However, there’s a bar on the boat, and that is where I met the Russian.
I’d seen him at the check-in desk an hour before. He was tall, with cropped grey hair and a weathered-looking olive complexion. From his accent and how he dressed—a knockoff Adidas tracksuit, Hugo Boss man bag, and black pool sliders with white socks—I first had him down as a Latvian lorry driver. I wouldn’t say I like to stereotype, but Eastern European lorry drivers do have a ‘look’.
No matter where I go in the world, and I often wonder if it’s because I look friendly or lonely, someone will always start a conversation with me. In an empty bar, he could have sat anywhere else, but he decided to sit at the same table as me.
“Why are you coming to Shetland?” he asked without warning. And this is how the conversation started. I introduced myself.
“Nikita,” he said as we shook hands. I wasn’t sure whether to tell him I thought Nikita was a girl’s name, but I decided not to, given that we’d only just met. By 2 am, I was glad I hadn’t.

It all started lightheartedly enough, with the exchange of anecdotes and buying rounds at the bar; he told me how he’d ‘accidentally’ spent three days in the hospital after falling asleep at work. Nikita had been working in a power plant near his home town of Irkutsk,
“I sit at a control panel like Homer Simpson!” he laughed.
After swapping from working days to nights, Nikita struggled to adjust and fell asleep in his chair.
“It’s not like Japan, Phil. If you fall asleep at your desk in Russia, it’s big trouble!”
Nikita only dozed off for a few minutes, but when he woke, he knew someone else was in the room – his supervisor. Knowing he was about to lose a well-paid job, and maybe worse, he did what he had to do – Nikita pretended he was having a heart attack.
“They take me out on a stretcher! Three days I’m in the hospital … three fucking days!” he told me in his deep, Russian accent. “But I keep my job!”.
We went out on deck for a smoke. Standing beside each other, we emptied our beer-filled bladders over the side. I made the blunder of standing downwind. By the time we got back inside, the barmaid was making it clear she was about to close, so we bought two more bottles of beer and a large whiskey each.
“What do you do for work now?” I asked. It turns out Nikita isn’t a lorry driver.
“Now, I work on a boat,” he told me. His weathered features and thick, grizzled sausage fingers were an obvious clue; I immediately assumed fisherman. Nikita actually works on a supply vessel, ferrying anything from pot noodles to plasma arc welders to the rigs in the Norwegian oil fields. At this point, I should have finished my whiskey and gone to bed, but I didn’t.
Nikita, it turned out, is Moldovian but has spent most of his adult life living in Irkutsk, at the southernmost end of Lake Baikal. He met a woman and married young; they had three daughters by the time he was 23. Ten years ago, in the late autumn of 2010, Nikita’s eldest daughter, then 17, had been to a Halloween party with friends: Halloween in Russia has, apparently, never been a thing, but the post-communist Soviet youth have adopted it, US-style, as an excuse to get drunk and party. Nikita’s eldest didn’t like drinking, so she left early and walked the half-mile home. Somewhere along the way, the teenager was dragged into a car and punched unconscious.
My bones turned to glass. I didn’t want to hear the rest of this story. I thought about standing up and pretending I was going for another piss, but I’d just been.
“Two policemen came to my home, the first thing they say is that my daughter is still alive…so I’m thinking, why are they saying this? Has she crashed in a car?”
Nikita explained how his daughter had been taken to a house on the outskirts of Irkutsk. He hadn’t said his daughter’s name until then, but he continued after a swig of beer.
“He took Alena, and he rapes her.” Nikita then looked at me and broke into a forced half-smile, “When the police are telling me and my wife, I just sit and look at the television…it is like I am pretending I cannot hear them…but Alena is still alive”. I didn’t know what to say. Nothing.
“She knows this man; he is nineteen when he does this. He followed her from the party. My daughter trusts him, so she gets in a car with him”, he continued.
“So, did they find him? Did the police find him?” I asked.
“Yes, they find him. He sees prison for three years,” said Nikita bluntly.
“You are fucking kidding!? For rape?”
“He says he has been with my daughter before. He lied. He says he hit her, but because she hits him. The police, they know he rape her, but a judge believes him, and he sees only three years…Alena, she never lies.”
I had about ten minutes of Glenmorangie left in my glass and two days of no sleep behind me, but I needed to hear the rest because I knew there was more.
The rapist (Nikita never spoke his name) was released from prison, aged 23, and went back to what he thought would be a forgotten life in Irkutsk. Nikita hadn’t forgotten, far from it… Shortly before Christmas 2012, Nikita arrived at a ground-floor apartment in the centre of Irkutsk; under his arm, he had a bag containing rope, a cheese grater and a bottle of vinegar.
“I hurt this man very badly. Phil, he says he is sorry many, many, many times… When I finish, he is sorry.”
Nikita had taken the top layer of skin and flesh off the man’s chest, stomach, thighs and knees with the grater – painful enough – but then poured vinegar, slowly, over the open wounds. “Even with rope in his mouth, he screams very loud…I worry that some neighbours will hear…but they don’t care; they know what this man is”.
I asked Nikita if he regretted doing it. His reply was resolute: “No, I wish I kill him”.
At 2 am, we crashed our glasses together, made a silent toast, downed the last of our Scotch and went to our beds. I dozed off, relieved that I hadn’t mentioned the girl’s name thing.

I woke to the unnecessarily loud cabin announcement that we’d arrived in Lerwick. On this Northlink crossing, passengers can stay on the ferry for a couple of hours before getting off, but I wanted to go in search of breakfast. As I left the terminal, Nikita got into a taxi ahead of me. He didn’t see me until the car was moving, and he’d nearly passed me; he seemed to fumble to wind the window down, but he was gone. I walked into town, burdened by the weight of camera equipment and safety gear for two weeks in the North Atlantic. That was the last I’d ever see of my Moldovian drinking buddy, AKA The Russian.

*Nikita contacted me about a year after this essay was origanally published, we’ve stayed in touch since then.