That morning, he spoke to her in a hard, threatening tone. He made it clear she would be wise not to ask questions. Out of fear and deference to authority, she wrote the notes with a shaking hand.
Then Kuznetsov asked her directly about a personal relationship with Principal Gromov. Maximova fell silent for several seconds and looked down. Her attorney gave a small nod, signaling that she could answer.
With obvious embarrassment, she admitted they had been having an affair. It had begun in the fall of 1991. They kept it hidden because Gromov was married.
Svetlova had believed he would eventually leave his wife for her. Gromov kept promising he would, then finding reasons to delay. Right after the class disappeared, he came to her pale and agitated and said they needed to leave town.
He promised they would start a new life together somewhere else. Trusting him completely, she resigned from the school and moved to an apartment he arranged for her in the regional city. There she waited for him.
But Gromov never came. He called only occasionally from pay phones, speaking briefly and nervously. He said the police investigation made it too risky for him to leave.
He asked her to wait until the attention died down. She waited six months. Then he stopped calling altogether.
In December of that year, lonely and disillusioned, she met the man who would become her husband. He was a quiet, dependable engineer in town on business. Before long, she married him and moved away for good, deciding to put the past behind her.
After listening to that part of the story, Kuznetsov asked the central question: what had actually happened to the students on the night of May 23?
Maximova said she still did not know the exact details. Gromov had always been terrified of the subject and never told her much. But a few days after the disappearance, he came to her apartment in the middle of the night in a state of collapse.
He was crying uncontrollably and barely making sense. He kept saying everything had gone wrong. According to his rambling account, the students had seen something at the school they were never supposed to see.
He blamed Savelyev, saying the facilities manager’s rough handling of the situation had ruined everything. When she tried to ask what exactly had happened, Gromov shut down and refused to say more.
He told her only one thing: by then, it was too late to fix anything. He asked her never to bring up that night again. Kuznetsov listened carefully, then showed her a photograph of the bottle found in the basement.
It was the empty imported liquor bottle. Maximova recognized it immediately. She confirmed that bottles like that had often been kept in Gromov’s office.
He used to brag that they were gifts from wealthy business contacts. That gave Kuznetsov another lead. He requested every surviving school financial record from 1991 and 1992. After a lengthy search, the town archive and accounting office produced several old invoices.
Among routine purchases of school supplies and textbooks were several suspicious entries. They listed vague “facility-use goods” totaling about $8,000 in 1992 dollars, an enormous amount for a public school at the time.
There was no detailed description of what had actually been purchased. The supplier on the paperwork was a company called Mercury. Police quickly learned that Mercury had been one of the town’s earliest shell companies.
It had been involved in importing scarce foreign goods through questionable channels. In 1995, the company conveniently went bankrupt, and its records were lost or destroyed. But the school’s former chief accountant, Tamara Krylova, was still alive…
