The Boat House (3 page)

Nikolai began to feel scared.

It wasn't as if he needed to be here. He'd chosen to be here, gone out of his way to take the risk, elected to travel on forged documents instead of legitimately under his own name because it meant that Alina would be less conspicuous than if she made the journey alone; but if her nerve folded now, if she gave them away, it would all be for nothing.

Alina lifted her head, and returned the guard's level stare.

Everything fell back into place. Her self possession was as cold and as hard as the light of a star. She was around twenty-eight, perhaps a little more; it was hard to tell because she was small and slim with a dancer's compact grace and a clear north country skin, a feature that still caused her to be mistaken for a teenager almost everywhere that she went. Her hair, not quite shoulder length, had been tied back. It had been longer, once, but in one of those rare moments where she'd unwound a little and told him something about herself he'd learned that they'd cut it short during her time in the hospital. He tried to imagine her like that, gaunt and defeated, but he couldn't.

The worst was over. The boy soldier handed back their passports and then hopped up onto his ladder to check the luggage rack and the vent seals. He then unhooked a flashlight from his belt and shone it into the space under the lower bunk; this ritual completed, he stepped out into the corridor and closed the door on them.

There was no baggage check.

The train rolled on slowly.

Alina lay back in the shadowed corner of the lower berth, and this time Nikolai sat beside her. The scene outside grew more and more empty, the forests cleared back from the trackside in a sure sign that the border was approaching. He saw the ruined remains of old concrete bunkers, many of them roofless and all of them half buried in the snow; the train glided on in near silence past the tracks of earlier ski patrols and the occasional bulldozed vehicle road, the snow thrown up at its sides like dirty concrete.

There was daylight in the darkness as they came under the first of the searchlight gantries. These straddled the track every fifty metres or so, and the effect was of a slow pulsing as the thousand-watt arrays passed over. There were other lines here with other trains, all of them freightcars and none of them moving; it was like a forgotten railyard, the place where all the ghost trains ended their runs, the only sign of life a small fire that had been lit under one of the diesel engines to free its iced up brakes. The fire's attendant was a silhouette that stepped out to watch them go by, an eyeless, faceless shadow of a man.

Alina hitched herself up, and moved closer to the window.

The train was slowing in its river of light. At this moment they were being watched from a two-man tower out across the tracks, a dark shape sketched in darkness that stood taller than the pines. Alina stared out at the tower; even in this harsh gantry light she was a wide-eyed madonna, and Nikolai felt his heart turn over. He couldn't understand her power over him, and had no urge to; if he was a lost soul, then he was grateful to be damned.

They stopped briefly in a wooded clearing so that the border control people could disembark. The train was already rolling again as the officials trudged off in ranking order, the two junior soldiers last in line; they were filing down a snowcut path toward a green-painted building about a hundred metres away, and then the trees closed in again and they were gone.

Alina was now staring into the reflected eyes of her own, ghost-glass image.

"Don't celebrate too soon," she said; perhaps to Nikolai, perhaps more to herself. "I've been this far before."

He wasn't aware of having fallen asleep. But when he woke the train had stopped, and Alina was already up and buttoning herself into her midlength overcoat. He looked out. By now the darkness had given way to that strange northern twilight that took a little of the colour out of everything but which sharpened up edges and outlines and presented them in a range of greys that shone like opal. It wasn't daylight - it wasn't even full dawn - but daylight couldn't be so far away.

"What's happening?" he said, but she didn't give him a direct answer.

"Get the bag," she told him.

The pre-dawn chill began to seep into them from the moment that they took the long step down from the carriage. Nikolai paused to look around, his breath misting in the grey air as he tugged his gloves on a little further and zippered his overjacket a little tighter. At first glance they seemed to be at an anonymous spot in the middle of nowhere, endless woodland crowding right up to the trackside and cutting off any chance of seeing what lay beyond. Further along the track, a crowd was gathering by the engine. Alina was already heading to join it.

He hurried to catch up.

He was walking on snow-covered gravel that had been stained brown with the throwoff of the passing trains. There were faces at most of the windows above him, and people were hanging out of the open doorways at the carriage ends as they craned to see what was going on. Everybody seemed dazed, rumpled, slightly shocked to find themselves active and awake at such an hour.

He and Alina joined the crowd, stepping over the collapsed wire of the woodland's boundary fence so that they could circle around and get a better view. Two Finnish policemen in fur caps and cold weather gear were doing their best not to argue with five of the railway's people, all of whom were looking around anxiously when not taking a turn at protesting. Glancing around, Nikolai could now see that they weren't in the middle of nowhere after all but on the outskirts of a small township of wooden buildings, a few brick sheds, and a grey metal radio tower; the
Poliisi
van had been moved in to block the train on the township's solitary level crossing.

Keeping his voice low, Nikolai said, uncertainly, "They're not searching."

But Alina was looking past hope, to harder possibilities. "No," she said. "But they're waiting for someone who will."

It was hard to know what to do. Some passengers were drifting back to their compartments as the cold worked its way into them, and others were taking their places. Two or three men were tramping off into the woods to relieve themselves out of sight of the train, but everyone could see them go.

The sounds of cars, being driven hard.

They came around the bend, three of them with their lights full on, and at the sight of the van they had to stop suddenly with a squeal of snow tyres and a cloud of road grit. They didn't look like police cars, just ordinary saloons. There were four men in each. They started to get out.

Nikolai could hardly believe what he was seeing. They were Russians, not military or border patrol but just the ordinary militia, on the wrong side of the frontier in cars with Soviet registrations. Some were still in police uniform, and had thrown on anonymous-looking topcoats as if in an attempt at disguise; they looked around nervously as they stepped out by the rail tracks, aware that they were off home territory and in what was potentially a diplomatic minefield.

Their leader was an older man in plain clothes, overdressed even for this kind of weather; a raincoat over a heavy topcoat, which in turn was over a jacket and at least two baggy sweaters. Everything was unbuttoned, his scarf hung loose, and still he appeared to be steaming. His old fashioned spectacles had one milky, sandblasted lens as if he'd lost an eye or, at least, the use of it. He approached the Finns and started to talk. The Finns didn't look happy. Cross-border cooperation, it seemed, was being pushed to the limits and beyond, here.

Nikolai said, "None of them knows us."

"Yes, they do," Alina said. "Pavel's with them."

She was looking at the last of the three cars. Nikolai followed her gaze and saw a young Russian policeman of the lowest rank, the last to climb out; he was scanning the windows of the train and in his eyes was a certain desperation, as if his presence here was the result of a drive beyond that of uniform and duty.

If he should happen to lower his gaze to the trackside crowd, he'd see them in moments. The Finns and their cross-border counterparts were almost arguing now and those from the cars were gathering around, but the young policeman was ignoring them - eyes still scanning the train, his lips moving slightly as if keeping a tally or reciting a prayer.

And with a quick glance around to judge the moment, Alina took a few steps backward and then turned and headed for the trees.

Realising almost too late that she'd begun to move, Nikolai followed her. A few heads turned, but the crowd mostly screened them from the police and nobody called out.

He caught up with her. The immediate cover was sparse, mostly leafless silver birch; Nikolai was expecting a shout at any moment, and he ran hunched as if he anticipated it coming as an actual physical blow between the shoulders. When he stumbled and slowed, he felt Alina's steadying hand on his arm. She was surprisingly strong, and she hustled him forward a little faster than he felt able to run.

They climbed. The tracks seemed a long way behind them now. One moment when Nikolai lost his footing, he almost brought Alina down with him. When finally they came to a stop they were both breathing hard, the cold air feeling like broken glass in Nikolai's lungs, but he forced himself to keep it under control so that he could look back down the trail and listen. The early-morning air was still, a silence broken only by the occasional rustling of tree branches shedding their snow.

But then, after a few moments, they were rewarded by the sound that they most wanted to hear.

The train was leaving. Without them.

Nikolai said, "Why do I get the feeling there's something you haven't been telling me?"

"There's a lot I haven't been telling you," Alina said. "Mostly for your own protection."

"So, who's Pavel?"

She looked at him, her breath feathering in the cold air. Her face was a hard, perfect mask; the face of a stranger, her grey eyes like chips of slate in the light of dawn.

"He's the one I've been living with," she said.

For Nikolai, it was as if the ground had dropped away beneath him. But then before either of them could say anything more, they were stopped by the sound of a distant whistle as it cut through the air.

Just the cry of a bird
, Nikolai wanted to say, but he couldn't bring himself to believe it. Alina took the lead and said, "They guessed. They left someone."

Another whistle answered, from some way further down the ridge. This one was more distant, less expert.

It was definitely no bird.

Alina faced him again.

"Listen, Nikolai," she said. "I'd have abandoned you anyway, once we got to England. You could never be happy with me, and I'd hurt you in the end. I've used you, and I'm sorry. But I can't let them take me back. I'll die before that happens."

"We can still make it," he insisted.

"Perhaps
you
can," she said. "Be happy, Nikolai."

And she have him a hard shove, much harder than he would have expected, sending him on his way and nearly pushing him off his balance on the slippery path.

By the time that he'd recovered enough to protest again, she'd gone.

PART TWO

The Kindness of Strangers

TWO

By nightfall, Pete had made it as far as a window seat in a motorway services cafeteria overlooking three lanes of northbound traffic. He could feel that he needed a shave, and his dark suit now looked and felt as if a family of dogs had been using it for a bed. Wayne had told him the previous night that he'd had the appearance of someone who'd just emerged from prison, but Pete now reckoned that he looked more like somebody who was heading for one. The worst of the day was behind him; before him on the formica tabletop were a cup, the remains of a sandwich, and the key that Mike had given to him.

He'd an address to go with it, for some place that he knew nothing about. Mike was in the property business - buying, leasing, renting, renovating - and for Pete it was simply a case of getting whatever happened to be going through the books at the time. Pete didn't know exactly what his brother's business entailed, but it enabled him to run three cars and to spend two months of the year in an apartment in the Canary Islands. Needless to say, that was one key that Pete was unlikely to be offered. Their mother had always said that Mike was the worker, Pete the dreamer; but Mike's true knack was in finding the free ride on the back of someone else's labour, while Pete's dreams had more or less burned themselves out in an adolescence of fast secondhand cars and Marvel Comics. The cars had given him a few saleable skills, the comic books he'd sold off to a market trader a long time ago. The old girl had been proud of Mike, but she'd worried for Pete; he'd been irritated by it then, but he realised now that it was something else and he missed the feeling already. Even though they'd been miles apart, just knowing about it had somehow been enough. He wondered if there would ever be anyone who'd worry for him again.

Family funerals. The only bright thing about them was that, unlike at weddings, the family didn't tend to end up fighting.

Pete glanced around. The cafeteria was quiet at this time of the evening, the empty tables around him uncleared and one whole section across the way roped off and unlit. There were a few people down the far end, but not many. Airport traffic, at a guess; the airport was only ten miles on and they had the look of late arrivals heading for homes with empty refrigerators. Some had ski tans, others were in loud shirts from some tropical beach. Beyond them, a young woman in a mid-length coat stood reading the menu.

He lowered his eyes, and looked at the key.

It wasn't as if he had a guarantee of a four star hotel, or anything. For all that he knew, Mike was probably expecting him to camp out amongst dust sheets and bags of plaster.
It's costing you nothing
, the logic would go,
you ought to be grateful
. Pete's brother could make a personal favour seem like a tip to the bellboy. He was tempted simply to press on, see if he could make it back to the valley by morning; the Zodiac was still giving him problems, and this way he wouldn't have to cope with a cold engine after a night in the open.