Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘Through you go.’

Tom helped Alex up and over the sill, hearing her grunt as she landed outside. Scrambling after her, he looked back. The general was rounding a corner in the row of huts behind. He held his automatic drawn and was stepping sideways, with the weapon raised and ready to fire.

‘What did you see?’ Alex asked.

‘One of them.’

‘You should leave me.’

‘Alex…’ Tom wasn’t sure what to say other than Don’t be ridiculous.

So he put his arm round her again and ran for the last of the rows, finding a door unlocked and barging it open. ‘Quickly,’ he said.

A pile of rags produced torn trousers, a kapok jacket with one toggle missing and a cap with half its peak ripped away. The jacket was stiff with ice and quite possibly dirt. The cap had been chewed by rats, judging from the droppings.

‘Alex. Come on.’

Turning her back, she slipped off Tom’s jacket, let him help her into his shirt and then the padded jacket they’d found. Buttoning the front, she turned to let Tom tie the missing toggle’s tape to the loop it threaded through. And Tom had a flashback to helping Becca dress. She’d been young. Young enough to accept help.

‘Are you okay?’ Alex asked.

‘I’m fine.’ Tom grabbed his jacket and turned his back while she scrambled into the trousers.

‘What’s that?’ Alex said. He thought she’d heard something but she was staring through the filthy window towards a long building between them and the river. It was older than the orphanage, but not by much, one of those strange pre-war buildings that must once have looked very modern.

‘We’ll go round it,’ he said.

Crouching low and keeping huts between themselves and where Tom hoped Kyukov and the general were, they ran for the trees along the river, Tom dragging Alex after him. ‘Almost there,’ Tom promised.

They cut between the pine trees, grateful for their sudden cover, and came out on the edge of the Volga, stopping in shock. There was no ice. Dark water stretched from their feet right across to the far bank. There was no way over.

‘Why isn’t there ice?’ Alex demanded.

‘I don’t know.’

There had been ice on the river’s other side.

There was still snow at their feet, snow falling around them and snow smothering the bank they couldn’t reach.

Dropping to a crouch, Tom tested the water.

It was close enough to freezing to make his fingers ache and numb his hand. The only clue to the absence of ice was that fat pipes, coming from the building they’d gone round, disappeared into the water and a low mist hung over them.

‘Think you can swim across that?’

Alex shook her head miserably.

‘I’ll help you,’ Tom said.

‘It’s too far,’ Alex said. ‘I’ll drown.’

She must know she was trapping them on the island. But this was Alex. Swimming was one of the things she did well, probably better than him. If she said she was too cold, too weak, too shaken, or a mix of all three, to swim across, he had to believe her. No matter how fiercely he wanted to drag her into the water and make her try.

The Stalingrad Oblast Abattoir.

The words were carved into limestone above the building’s double doorway. The door itself was locked and Alex huddled in the recess while Tom rattled the handle, peering through a thick glass panel until he realized there was movement inside.

‘Get back,’ he said.

Grabbing Alex, he stepped away from the door.

An old woman came to the other side of the glass, peered through it and shook her head, vanishing the way she’d come. As an afterthought, she turned on the foyer lights at a switch by a door she shut behind her.

‘It’s still in use?’ Alex asked.

Tom shrugged, nodded towards a path that had obviously been cleared recently, because it wore only a thin skim of snow, and together they headed round the side of the abattoir towards a loading bay at the rear. Empty vodka bottles colonized one corner. Empty cans of local beer sat beside them.

A concrete ramp led to half a dozen sliding doors.

A landing stage was so dilapidated that one end had sunk beneath the water. A sign warned that no more than one cattle barge was to be unloaded at a time. The sign was as rusted as the landing stage was ruined. ‘Keep watch,’ Tom said.

Alex shuffled to the corner and peered round it.

‘See anyone?’

She shook her head.

Tom tried each sliding door in turn.

All of them were locked from inside, and he was about to give up when he saw a narrow door set into the side of the recess that held the doors he’d been trying. He’d already worked out that cows went through the separate doors, probably straight into individual killing pens on the far side. The narrow door was padlocked. Tom didn’t have a pick or any wire to make one but that was fine.

‘They’re here,’ Alex said suddenly.

‘Coming towards us?’ he asked.

‘No. They glanced this way. They’ve gone to the front.’

How long would it take them to find and follow their footprints? A minute? Less? Grabbing an empty beer can, Tom flicked open his lock knife and hacked out a triangle of metal, bending it over the back of the blade.

‘What are you doing?’ Alex asked.

‘Making a shim.’

He pushed the shim’s point into the outside of the padlock’s staple, and tore his frozen fingers turning it, but felt the staple pop free.

‘Hurry,’ he said.

Tom shut the door behind them, jammed it from inside and hoped that neither the general nor Kyukov knew there’d been a padlock or realized one was missing. When he looked round, Alex was staring in horror at the killing pens, which had floors that sloped and gutters for shit.

‘You’ve never seen one?’

Of course she hadn’t. Tom almost apologized, but she took it as a straight question and was shaking her head. Tom had. He’d worked for a month in Donegal, killing twenty cows a day. There were bigger abattoirs but his had been family-run, and their speciality was not looking too closely at the state of the meat.

Where you had an abattoir, you had…

Tom looked around him. The gates were old but well oiled, the blood drains were clear and the slopes swept. He had the feeling the building hadn’t been used for killing cattle in years; it felt too sanitary. But somebody was looking after it, and it was so neat that cows could be shipped in tomorrow, slaughtermen found and work begin immediately.

There would be a locked cupboard.

Beyond the slaughter floor, with its drains, was the inedible-offal room with its row of stainless-steel paunch tables. The layout was so familiar that Tom recognized it instantly. A door led off to a store with a metal cupboard at the far end, leather aprons hanging from hooks both sides and rubber boots in pairs along the floor.

‘Try those,’ Tom said, pointing to the smallest.

He was wrong about the cupboard being locked, though.

A dozen penetrating captive-bolt guns were racked in a row, with the blank cartridges needed to load them on a shelf above. Tom pushed the blanks aside.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘A pithing rod.’

‘What’s a pithing rod?’ Alex asked.

Tom decided not to explain. ‘Take one of the stun guns,’ he said.

Alex shook her head.

‘I can teach you how to use it.’

She took the thing reluctantly, looking horrified at its weight.

‘Too much?’ He meant the weight but when she nodded and said yes the tremor in her voice told him she was talking about something else.

He took the gun back.

‘Stay close then.’

She shot him a glance Tom recognized.