Jack Grimwood - Moskva

Beyond the landing stage, far enough away to look like the opposite bank, was the tip of what Tom realized was an island. The real edge of the river was lost in falling snow. The Volga was wider than most lakes he’d seen.

Tom could just make out a matching landing stage on the island, with a slight fuzz to its edges that might be razor wire.

‘A prison camp?’

‘A school,’ the colonel said. ‘My school.’

‘How many boys?’

‘Hundreds. Thousands.’

Ramming the Jeep into gear, Kyukov headed for the ice and grinned as Tom suddenly sat upright.

‘Ah, yes,’ Kyukov said. ‘Poor Vladimir Vedenin.’

The Jeep bounced heavily on ruts in the ice and then raced across the river at breakneck speed. Kyukov was grinning. But then Tom was coming to realize that Kyukov was usually grinning, except when he was staring.

The staring somehow felt less dangerous.

The Jeep raced up an icy bank and through a stand of firs that opened on to a field, with a huge, two-storey building just visible through the falling snow. The building had all the elegance of a nuclear bunker.

Beyond it were rows of huts, dozens of them.

The door to the orphanage was missing and a white wolf stood in the gap, the fierceness of its gaze making clear that it regarded the approaching Jeep as the interloper. As Tom watched, it turned and vanished into the darkness inside.

Kyukov shrugged, as if he expected nothing less.

‘They used to pay ten roubles for every one killed,’ he said. ‘No longer. There’s no cattle now for them to kill and no one wears their fur these days.’

Thin light bled through broken windows into a foyer where a mosaic of blond boys, stripped to the waist and clutching axes, filled the wall behind a rotting reception desk better suited to a hospital.

Because of the missing front door, frost made the vinyl tiles of the reception area slippery underfoot. Those at the edges curled to meet the walls.

Tom shivered.

His school had had hose-down floors too.

Who knew when the building had last been used? Five years, ten years? It could have been more recently. It was impossible to tell how long it had been empty, how many generations had passed through here for indoctrination or lessons, whether they had hated this building more than the crude dormitory huts outside. There was a sourness to the foyer, a stink as if something monstrous had been left to rot rather than shriven, blessed and decently buried. It coated the inside of his nostrils the way the frost coated the tiles.

It pulled with smoky fingers at his mind.

Without warning, Tom vomited.

‘Can’t you smell it?’

‘No smell,’ Kyukov said. ‘It’s too cold for things to smell. That only happens when the ice begins to thaw. Believe me, I know…’

‘Where’s Dennisov?’

‘You call him “general”.’

‘Where’s the general?’

‘He’ll be along later. I’m to show you the girl and check you have the photographs. Although, as you’ve agreed, you’d have to be stupid to come here without them. The general will do the swap later.’

I have to be stupid to be here at all, Tom thought.

‘How much further?’

‘Save your breath for walking.’

The corridor Kyukov strode down was patched with damp and dirt and decades of misery that had leached into its walls. At the far end, a single door on to a yard was so blocked by falling snow that they had to kick it away to get through. A single set of half-filled-in footprints led to a gymnasium beyond.

The Tartar yanked back a new-looking bolt.

‘You don’t touch anything. All right?’

Tom looked at him.

‘The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.’

Kyukov stepped back and gestured Tom through. Tom went, his shoulders tensed, half expecting to be clubbed from behind. Instead he heard a bang as the heavy door slammed behind him and its bolt thudded into place.

‘I’m going to get the general now,’ Kyukov called. ‘I’ll be an hour or so. Say hello to the girl for me.’ He went off laughing, leaving Tom on the wrong side of a reinforced glass door.

The left wall of the changing room had toilet cubicles with no doors. Open showers and a long urinal shared the right. A rack for clothes running down the middle of the room had benches either side.

What little light entered came through snow on a skylight above.

The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.

It was only when Tom stepped into the gymnasium that he understood what Kyukov had been talking about. And when he did, he felt the room lurch and a hot anger rise inside him. He bit down on it, and felt cold fury take its place.

Alex hung by her ankles in the middle of the room.

She was naked, her head shaved and her flesh marble, her hands dangling a foot above the floor. Her hipbones were sharp, her ribs rabbit-like.

Dog tags hung from her neck.

Alex didn’t react when Tom crouched beside her.

Her throat was cold beneath his fingers. She had a pulse, just about. Although her breathing was so shallow that her ribs barely moved. He checked the dog tags without thinking. Her stepfather’s: Edward J. S. Masterton . An army number followed.

Dear God, could it get any messier? He filed that with all the other questions for which he’d only ever found half answers, and dug into his pocket for the lock knife he always carried.

‘I’ll get you down,’ he promised.

She was way beyond hearing, at the very edges of this world.

Sawing savagely at the rope, Tom wrapped his other arm tight around her hips. Even braced, he staggered as the rope fibres parted, only just catching her before she hit the floor. Laid out, with her body shaved and stark naked, eyes closed and barely breathing, she looked terrifyingly like the girl found frozen at Patriarch’s Ponds.

The one he’d watched being cut open.

He couldn’t bear for there to be another laid out on a slab.

Blood pressure. Heart beat. Lung function… Tom tried to remember the dangers of being hung upside down.

Blood had trouble leaving the brain. He knew that much. He was pretty certain being cold was a good thing. Unless she was too cold.

‘Alex. Wake up.’

He slapped her cheek.

Nothing, not even when he did it harder.

Scooping her up, he headed for the changing room and found himself facing the bolted door. The door was sound, the glass reinforced with steel mesh; nothing he could see looked sharp enough or heavy enough to break it.

How long had he been here? Ten minutes, fifteen?

‘Alex. Please.’

He watched one eyelid flutter.

‘That’s it. Come on, wake up.’

Her colour was slightly better, her ribs visibly rising and falling.

He felt for the pulse in her wrist and instinctively closed his fingers around hers, making a promise that he’d do whatever was needed, whatever he could. The promise so instinctive he barely realized that he’d made it.

‘Alex. Please. It’s me.’

She opened one eye, the first time she’d done so.

‘I need you to wake up.’

Her eye closed, her eyelids fluttered and then she opened both eyes at once. Her pupils were huge in the gloom of the changing room. Like a fool, Tom tried to stand her upright and grabbed her as she crumpled.

He needed Alex safe.

He needed her out of there.

Awake was what he needed most of all, but both her eyes were now firmly shut and her head lolled from side to side as he tapped first one cheek and then the other. Alex’s breathing was definitely steadier, her ribs rising and falling almost normally, her heartbeat steadying.

She still looked starved, though. A ghost of the girl she’d been. It would take time to cure that.