Faked Passports (39 page)

Angela made an effort to stop her teeth chattering and added: “Ye-ye-es. They'd sh-shoot us if they caught us, so we must go on. I'm going to drive again.”

Right oh!” Freddie handed her the reins. “There must be a village somewhere along this road and maybe the peasants will give us shelter whether they're Finns or Russians.

They drove on for what seemed an interminable time through the dark, menacing forest, which now looked even more sinister in the bright moonlight, halting occasionally to rest the horses and change the drivers. Erika remained with Gregory's head pillowed on her shoulder although she was cramped and terribly cold. Angela tried to persuade her to change places and take a turn with the reins but she refused
for, brave as she was in other ways, she was frightened of anything to do with horses.

Freddie could not understand how any main road, such as this obviously was, could continue for so many miles without a single village upon it, until Erika said: “I don't think people like ourselves who live in the more highly-populated parts of Europe ever quite realise how sparsely countries bordering on the Arctic are peopled. Sometimes, I believe, there's as much as a hundred miles between settlements, and then they are inhabited only by miners or trappers.”

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Angela, who was standing up in the sleigh driving again, gave a cry of exultation and pointed with her whip. A solitary light showed clearly through a break in the trees on the left-hand side of the road.

Halting the sleigh, she and Freddie got out and ran towards a track which wound between the trees. It was only just perceptible in the glow from the snow but they soon realised that the light was much further away than they had at first imagined; so they walked back to the sleigh and climbing in again drove along the track towards it.

The track was about a quarter of a mile in length and as they advanced they saw that the light came from the window of quite a large, one-storeyed building. Pulling up in front of it Freddie gave a shout, but no answer came from the lighted room or from the doorway in the log wall which stood ajar. Tying the reins to a near-by post Freddie stamped his feet to try to get some warmth into them, kicked aside a little drift of recently fallen snow outside the door and pushed it open. Catching his breath he paused there for a moment staring at the ghastly sight that confronted him.

A single oil-lamp burned upon a stout, wood table in the centre of the room; its light shone upon four human figures and all of them were unquestionably dead.

Under the window, two panes of which Freddie now saw had been shattered, an elderly bearded man lay clutching a rifle. Near-by a younger man sprawled on his back staring with blinded eyes at the raftered roof. On the far side of the room, beyond the table, a middle-aged woman was huddled with her arms round a boy of thirteen as though in a last effort to protect him.

Blood stained the white scrubbed floor but the large room was not in serious disorder and it was well equipped for a
squatter's home. A row of burnished pots and pans hung beside the stove; the table-cloth, curtains and chair-coverings were of decent material. In one corner there were some home-made shelves, containing at least a couple of hundred books, and a wireless stood on a small side-table. Freddie realised at once that such luxuries would never be found in a Russian peasant's shack, so the dead people must be Finns. Perhaps the man and his eldest son had fired upon a body of Soviet troops that they had seen moving along the road earlier in the day. In any case the cottage had been attacked some time after sundown when the lamp had already been lit. It looked as though the two men had been shot while defending it, and the woman and boy brutally murdered afterwards.

The flat-topped stove, a feature of all Arctic dwellings, consisting of cooking range and brick baking oven—in this case a huge affair nearly ten feet square—was still going. But owing to the fact that the door of the house had been left partly open for several hours, the room was little warmer than the climate outside; and as Freddie examined the bodies he found that they were already frozen stiff. Going out to the two girls he told them what he had found and asked them to remain where they were while he disposed of the corpses. He then returned to the cottage and one by one carried the poor dead Finns from their home to deposit them round the corner of the building, since he was far too done up to think of burying them before he had slept.

While Freddie was busy with the bodies Angela took the torch and scouted round the house until she found a large stable in its rear. There were no horses there but one end of it was piled high with roughly-made trusses of sweet-smelling hay, and as the place backed on to the stove in the living-room its temperature was not unbearably cold. Stumbling with weariness she went back to the sleigh, unharnessed the horses, rugged them up and turned them loose in the stable to munch mouthfuls of hay from the trusses.

Erika had meanwhile roused Gregory and found to her joy that he was now able to walk without assistance; but he complained that he had a most frightful headache and that it hurt him to talk. She led him into the house and made him sit down in an arm-chair where she brushed the frost from his eye-brows and chafed his half-frozen hands and feet.

By the time they had finished protecting the room from the cold and had warmed themselves at the stove they could hardly
stand from fatigue. Since morning they had sustained eighteen hours of almost constant anxiety and exertion and they felt much too tired even to look round the cottage in search of food. Having stoked up the stove they climbed wearily on top of the oven and drew their furs over them; Freddie put out the light and within ten minutes all four of them were sound asleep.

When Freddie awoke it was still pitch-dark and on looking at the luminous dial of his watch he saw that it was a quarter to three. Knowing that it must have been just about that hour when they turned in he jumped to the conclusion that they must have slept the clock round twice, but it seemed rather extraordinary that all of them should have done so, even allowing for the terrific strain of the previous day. Then the explanation flashed upon him. Up here in the Arctic, now that it was close on mid-winter, the sun did not rise until ten o'clock and it would set again soon after two. They had slept once round the clock but the short four-hour day was already over; although they were encompassed again in pitch-black night it was actually only a quarter to three in the afternoon.

His stirring had roused the others and while he lit the lamp they climbed down off the big, flat top of the oven. Erika's first concern was for Gregory but when she asked him how his head was he looked at her in a puzzled way.

“My head? Yes; it's aching like blazes. I—I wonder why?”

“You were hit on the back of it last night by a spent bullet and passed out. You gave us the most awful shock. We thought you were dead.”

He smiled at her. “That's strange. I don't remember the least thing about it and—er—” he looked round the big living-room, “where the devil are we?”

“In some woodman's or trapper's home that we were lucky enough to find—about forty or fifty miles south-east by south of Petsamo,” said Freddie.

“Petsamo?” Gregory murmured vaguely. “Petsamo? Where's that?”

“Wake up, man!” Freddie laughed. “It's the Finnish port in the Arctic Circle.”

A look dawned in Gregory's eyes that none of them had ever seen there before; a frightened, hunted look. “But, but—” he stammered, “the Arctic! What am I doing up in the Arctic?”

They all stood there in silence for a moment regarding him anxiously until, in a very small voice, Erika said suddenly: “You do
know
me, darling, don't you?”

“Of course I do,” he laughed uneasily. “As though I could forget your lovely face in a million years! But wait a minute—that's very odd—I can't remember your name.”

“I'm Erika,” she said softly.

“Erika,” he repeated. “That's a pretty name, isn't it—and marvellously suitable.” He looked at the others. “Of course I know both of you, too, but somehow—it's quite extraordinary—I can't place either of you for the moment.”

“I'm Freddie, and this is Angela,” Charlton announced. “It looks as though that crack on the back of your head last night has caused you to lose your memory, old chap,” he added with a worried frown.

Gregory passed a hand across his forehead and nodded slowly. Then he laughed—rather uncertainly. “Yes, I suppose that's it. What a damnable thing to happen! My mind seems to have gone completely blank. I—I haven't the faintest idea who I am or what we're all doing here.”

It was a strange and rather alarming situation but the practical Angela pulled them out of the sudden gloom that had descended upon them, by saying: “I expect when we tell you all we know about your past things'll soon come back. In the meantime I'm jolly hungry. What about seeing if we can find some breakfast?”

“That's the idea,” Freddie supported her, and the two of them began to poke into the cupboards to see what supplies they could find while Erika examined Gregory's wound. The bullet had cut a furrow about two inches long through the hair at the back of his cranium, exposing a jagged red weal where the torn scalp had bled. He felt no pain from the wound itself; the whole area had gone dull so that he could not feel anything even when Erika pressed quite hard with her fingers, so she washed it carefully and left it unbandaged so that the air could get at the abrasion and heal it more quickly.

In a cupboard near the stove Angela had found a small stock of coffee, sugar, tinned milk, some slices of dried meat on a plate and two flat loaves like small, thick motor tyres. Erika said that as it was too cold to grow wheat in Finland white bread was procurable only in the towns, where it was made from stocks of imported corn, and that this was rye-bread upon which the bulk of the population lived. She had often seen the peasant women carrying a dozen or more such loaves by a string threaded through the holes in the centre, and had heard it said that they went as hard as brick when they were stale but kept
almost indefinitely, and that the people made great stocks of them in the autumn to last through the winter.

Angela made some coffee and breaking up a part of one of the brick-like loaves they soaked the pieces in it to soften them; which, with the cold meat, made a not particularly palatable but satisfying meal. Over it they gave Gregory particulars as to who he was and a rough outline of his doings—as far as they knew them—since Erika had first met him on the road between Coblenz and Cologne three months before.

He was naturally extraordinarily interested in this recital but at certain parts of it they had great difficulty in persuading him that they were telling the truth. At first he refused to believe that he was a secret agent and said that such an incredible series of adventures could never have happened to anyone in real life; but he had to admit that they could hardly have invented such a story on the spur of the moment. He seemed to take everything in but he said very little and they were greatly distressed to see that his loss of memory had robbed him of his mental agility to such an extent that he was almost a different personality.

But the supply of food they had found in the cupboards was very limited so Freddie was still greatly concerned about their situation. If there was not a larger stock somewhere about they would have to move on again; a thought that presented a score of difficult problems. In discussing their prospects it was Freddie who now took the lead while Gregory meekly agreed to everything that was said. Angela declared that she must go and look after the horses and Freddie said that he would make a full inspection of the premises; upon which, in silent acquiescence Gregory followed them out of the house like an eager but meek-looking spaniel.

When they drove up to the building the night before they had been vaguely puzzled by the fact that although from the outside it appeared to be quite a sizable place it seemed to
consist of only the stable and one large living-room; but they had been too exhausted to bother about that at the time.

On going round the house they found that there were three other rooms in it, although none of these led into the room where they had slept.

The first room they entered was a fur store. It was very nearly empty, as the trapping season had only just begun, but its use was obvious from three bundles of pelts lying on the floor and a dozen skins which were hanging up to dry from rafters in the roof.

To their delight they found that the second room was a food store and, evidently, the trapper had laid in his supplies for the winter. No refrigerating apparatus was needed in that climate and there was a great pile of skinned and gutted carcases with the antlered heads still attached, showing that they were reindeer. Two or three dozen joints which hung from the beams they took to be haunches of either bear or venison; and filling almost half the floor-space was a stack of cases. They set to work opening these with a jemmy which lay handy on a shelf and found them to contain tinned stores—milk, coffee, the cheaper varieties of jams and fruits, pork-and-beans, soups, sausages, sweet corn and other vegetables; there was also a pile of about a hundred of the cart-wheel rye-bread loaves and twenty crocks of pickled eggs. Altogether it was a most satisfactory supply which, although containing few luxuries, would have been ample to see the trapper and his family comfortably through the winter and, if necessary, would serve a similar purpose for the party that had taken over his home.

The third room was a general store. It contained half a dozen sets of skis and ski-sticks of varying sizes, several pairs of big snow-shoes, three small sledges of a size to be pulled by dogs or men and all the family's spare clothing, which included several sets of furs and two trunks full of other garments; the whole of the far end of the room was stacked with a huge pile of logs and a number of drums of paraffin.