The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) (37 page)

Vlad hears the rustle of papers behind him. He turns his head; he hadn’t noticed, but an older colleague has entered the room and sat down at a desk over by the wall. He is there to record proceedings and is feeding a sheet of paper into his typewriter.

It is time. Vlad looks at the prisoner. ‘Tell me about your crimes,’ he says quietly.

The man starts talking almost before Vlad has finished, his head drooping. ‘I am a Trotskyite. At the beginning of the year, I decided to sabotage several machines that were absolutely essential for production at my tractor factory in Charkov. I threw hammers and chisels into the machinery, and it was only thanks to the intervention of a quick-thinking foreman that a total shutdown was avoided.’

‘What else did you do?’

‘I recruited several other workers to my Trotskyite group, in order to increase the incidence of sabotage within the factory.’

‘And who are these individuals?’

The saboteur starts reeling off names, and the typewriter clatters into action.

They are given a dozen or so names.

When the saboteur has finished, he seems relieved. He looks up at Vlad. ‘I am evil,’ he says. ‘Aren’t I?’

He is still looking at Vlad, who does not reply.

Aron doesn’t know what to say either.

The typewriter has stopped clattering. In the silence that follows, the last sheet of paper is removed, and the typist hands it to Vlad.

It is time for the saboteur’s signature.

Vlad holds out the document and the prisoner signs it with a trembling hand.

As Vlad watches him sign the confession, he feels better. Standing erect in his new uniform in front of an enemy of the state is terrific. Getting him to admit his crimes is a small but important victory in a major war.

After completing his first few shifts, Vlad begins to learn how to type. How to feed the paper into the roller, how to tap out the words. Comrade Trushkin teaches him with patience, one key at a time.

Grigori Trushkin is a couple of years older than Vlad, a Russian worker’s son who, like many other guards, was trained in the Young Pioneers and Komsomol. He was only four years old when the Bolsheviks brought down the Tsar; he remembers nothing other than the Communist government. After leaving school, he was forged into a young OGPU soldier when the wealthy farmers had to be broken at the beginning of the thirties. Trushkin can discuss Marxism and class struggles without any problem, but he also enjoys chess, and loves to play Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
on his gramophone, in spite of the fact that it has been banned for many years.

‘Stravinsky came from my home town,’ he says proudly.

Trushkin takes Vlad out and about in Leningrad, and does what Sven never did with Aron: he allows him to discover the city.

The heels of their boots tap loudly on the wide, cobbled streets of Leningrad, and their blue uniforms make them highly visible. They are never stopped by the police and asked to show their identity papers, not once. They merely nod, like colleagues. And all around them on the pavements, ordinary citizens lower their voices and glance away nervously.

Vlad feels good when he is with Grigori Trushkin. So does Aron. They wander along the quayside by the River Neva and visit a dimly lit teahouse, eventually ending up in a smoky restaurant where vodka glasses are frequently raised – but Trushkin doesn’t drink as much as many of his colleagues. He prefers hot chocolate.

Later, in a grocery shop in the city, Vlad finds anchovies and smoked eel from the Baltic. He buys some pieces of fish and savours every mouthful – and suddenly Aron is thinking of the island across the sea, and his own shore.

He ought to get in touch, write home to his mother. But it’s impossible, of course. Countries outside Russia are full of spies, and anyone who is in contact with foreigners also becomes a spy. Letters are much too dangerous.

After three months’ hard work, Vlad is given a reward by Rugajev: a watch, presumably confiscated from an enemy of the state. He places it on his left wrist so that he will know what time it is when he is interrogating prisoners or writing up reports.

The pressure is increasing from above, with constant demands to elicit more and more names.

Comrade Trushkin conducts interrogations that are at least as harsh as anyone else’s, but one evening, as Vlad is about to run and catch him up a few blocks to the north of Kresty, he sees Trushkin stop by a park bench, then bend down and drop something on the ground before quickly moving on.

Vlad walks up to the bench and picks up an envelope addressed to a woman in Leningrad.

He stares at the name: Olga Bibikova. He recognizes the address; he has written it down himself after an interrogation.

Maxim Bibikov’s wife. But Bibikov is dead; he got a bullet in the back of his neck three days ago.

Vlad doesn’t understand, so he hurries along and catches up with Trushkin. ‘Comrade.’ He holds up the letter. ‘What’s this?’

Trushkin looks, and smiles like a shy schoolboy. This is unusual.

‘It’s just a letter.’ He grabs the envelope and slips it in his pocket. ‘I leave it in a dry spot on the street in the hope that someone will find it and post it.’

‘But why?’ Vlad asks. ‘What kind of letter is it?’

Trushkin laughs, quietly and nervously. ‘It’s just a message.’

‘About what?’

‘I wrote and told Bibikov’s wife that he died of tuberculosis,’ Trushkin says. ‘So that she won’t have to keep wondering what’s happened to him.’

Vlad looks around; there is no sign of anyone else in a blue uniform. Vlad wants to move on, but Aron makes him stay, ask more questions. It transpires that Trushkin has written a series of anonymous letters to the relatives of those who have been executed, informing them that their husband or father has passed away following a heart attack or a lung infection. Short letters, admittedly, but still …

‘It saves them wondering what’s happened,’ Trushkin says again, with a shrug. ‘It’s just to give them peace of mind.’

Aron nods silently, but Vlad is furious.
Letters are dangerous.
They leave a trail. And he knows that this is wrong, writing letters and sympathizing with the enemy.

‘Stop writing them,’ he says to Trushkin. ‘Immediately.’

Sympathy is the wrong attitude – it means the battle is lost.

Vlad refuses to participate in this particular battle, in spite of the fact that anxious wives and parents regularly turn up at the prison. They stand there with warm clothes and food parcels for the prisoners, pleading for help. As a guard, Vlad is used to it. He listens to them, his face expressionless, and gives the response he has been taught to give: ‘
Razberemsja.
We will take a closer look at this case.’

Silently, he wonders, how can these people still be at liberty? They are related to criminals; they should all be arrested. This does happen frequently, but there are still many left out there.

Why haven’t we seized all our enemies yet?

Vlad must not lose his grip, not here at Kresty in his uniform. If a woman with frightened eyes stops him in the street, perhaps with a child in her arms, he simply stares her down and goes on his way.

And if she won’t give up, if she calls after him and catches him up, he stops, plants his legs in their shiny boots wide apart, and replies, ‘I’m sorry. Your husband has been moved elsewhere.’

Which is always true.

As the sun blazed down on the landscape outside the windows, Gerlof drifted around the corridors of the residential home. It was cool and airy inside, and it was easy to get about. There were no raised thresholds, no stones, no clumps of grass – but it was lonely. Very little happened.

He had few visitors. John was busy with the shop and the campsite, and Tilda was away on holiday. His daughters popped in, but they were always on the way to somewhere else.

There was a poster by the main door advertising a course that was due to begin in August: ‘Make Friends with the Net’. Gerlof assumed it didn’t have anything to do with learning to fish.

He missed the talks they had during the rest of the year. Veronica Kloss had come in to talk about her family history, and it had been really interesting. Now, of course, he knew quite a lot more about the Kloss family than she had mentioned that day.

There was a small library in the home, so he went down there and found a book by an Anglo-American historian, Robert Conquest, about the Soviet Union in the thirties. He borrowed it and took it up to his room. He wanted to know what kind of life Aron and Sven Fredh had encountered when they reached the new country, and the title of the book made him fear the worst. It was called
The Great Terror.

One quiet Friday towards the end of July, Gerlof took the lift down to the ground floor. It was just as cool and quiet down there. Using his walking stick for support, he made his way slowly along the corridor. Greta Fredh’s room had been almost at the end, if he remembered rightly. It was now occupied by someone called Blenda Pettersson, according to the name on the door.

He remembered what Aron had said on the phone: ‘They took everything I had here.’ He had meant the croft by the shore. Nothing else. Hadn’t he?

Gerlof looked at the nameplate, but didn’t knock.

‘Hello there – are you lost?’

A dark-haired, tanned young woman was smiling at him; she was wearing a red uniform and was obviously a temporary member of staff.

Gerlof shook his head and introduced himself. ‘I live upstairs,’ he said. ‘I’m just having a little wander round, calling in on my neighbours.’

‘Oh, I see. Our residents down here tend to spend most of their time in their rooms; the heat makes them very tired. Do you know Blenda?’

Gerlof shook his head again, but the girl had already opened the door. ‘We can go in, I need to check on her anyway … Hi, Blenda!’

Gerlof felt like an intruder, but followed her anyway.

He walked into a small apartment that was almost an exact replica of his own: a hallway with a worn plastic mat, a spacious bathroom with an adapted shower on the left, and a bedroom beyond the hallway. A woman with thin white hair was slumped in an armchair.

Gerlof couldn’t work out whether she was awake or not. The girl chatted away to Blenda, but got no response. She tidied the bed, filled a glass with water and set out several tablets. Then the visit was over.

But Gerlof lingered outside the door. ‘The lady who used to live in this room before Blenda … Greta, wasn’t it?’

‘Greta Fredh, that’s right. She died last summer, when I was filling in over the holidays. It was in the middle of August.’

‘Did she have a fall?’ Gerlof asked, vaguely remembering something Sonja Bengtsson, the gravedigger’s daughter, had told him.

‘That’s right.’ The girl lowered her voice, as if Death might be listening. ‘Greta fell and hit her head in the bathroom. The lock might as well have been glued shut; we had to send for a locksmith to let us in … but by then it was too late.’

Gerlof looked at the door. ‘Did Greta have any visitors? Any relatives who sometimes came to see her?’

The girl thought for a moment. ‘Veronica Kloss used to come and read books and magazines to her … You know, the woman who runs the Ölandic?’

Gerlof nodded. He knew very well. ‘But they weren’t related, were they?’

‘Greta sometimes claimed they were, but she was very confused towards the end.’

‘Any other visitors?’

‘Not as far as I know. Not while she was alive. Her brother was here a couple of times earlier this summer, but I think he was just collecting some of her things.’

Gerlof gave a start. ‘Did this brother tell you his name?’

‘Yes … Arnold.’

‘Aron,’ Gerlof said.

‘Oh yes, Aron. But he didn’t say much; he was very quiet.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Old, but in good shape. Tall and broad-shouldered … He seemed to have lots of energy, even though he must have been getting on for eighty.’ She looked at Gerlof, and quickly added, ‘Mind you, that’s no age.’

‘Age is all in the mind,’ Gerlof responded.

He thanked the girl and set off along the corridor. He saw the name ‘Wall’ on the room next door. Ulf Wall. Who was that? The father of Einar Wall, who had been murdered? Perhaps, because the picture of Einar Wall that the police had shown him seemed to have been taken just here.

Ulf Wall’s door was firmly closed. Gerlof didn’t knock; he kept on going. He was desperate for a cup of coffee, and he could only get one back in his own section.

Uncle Kent was wearing a black T-shirt and khaki camouflage shorts; he was almost behaving like a soldier, marching up and down in front of the family and staff at Villa Kloss – and for the first time in days he looked quite pleased with himself, Jonas thought.

‘The alarm is triggered by a motion sensor,’ he said. ‘It’s switched off using a remote control. You have one minute to deactivate it once you step on to our land. It’s also millennium-proof, so it will work after New Year.’

Jonas listened to Kent’s presentation, surrounded by Mats and their cousins, Aunt Veronica, his father, Paulina and a gardener who had only just started working for the family. His name was Marc, and he came from somewhere abroad; he was muscular and very tanned.

They were gathered in the garden at the front of the house, which currently looked like a moonscape. The grass, the shrubs and the viper’s bugloss were gone; everything had been ripped up and replaced with fine gravel. Over the past few days, Jonas had realized what the temporary markers that had appeared the previous week were for.

They had now been replaced by a dozen small posts, buried in the ground with only a couple of centimetres showing. They were made of black plastic, but Jonas thought they looked like the wooden poles in a gill net.

‘Sensors’, that’s what Kent called them. He reminded everyone several times that they were extremely sensitive, then pointed to a panel next to the garage.

‘This is the control panel for the external alarm. You use one code to activate it and a different one to switch it off.’