At last the forests ended and just when dusk was falling a great, white expanse lay before them which Erika knew must be the Gulf of Finland. Far away in the distance there was a streak of colour. It was March the 7th and further south the thaw had already set in; the ice in the Baltic was breaking up and giving place to blue green water.
Before they reached the coast line the plane circled and came down on a big military airfield where many Soviet planes were in evidence. At first Erika thought that they had descended only to refuel, butt she was told to get out, and was led between the hangars to a car; so she guessed that they were to break their journey here for the night…
The car took them a few miles through the area where the battles of January had raged, until it entered a deep wood in which there were many hutments; to pull up before a block that had bars across each of its long line of windows and a Russian sentry on guard outside it. The Gestapo men got out and shepherded Erika across some duck boards to the entrance, an N.C.O. was summoned and she was taken inside to one of the row of rooms. It had a stove to warm it but only a palliasse and, blankets on the floor. Leaving her there they locked her in.
Twenty minutes later a Russian soldier brought her a meal of stew, rye bread and coffee substitute. It was still quite early only a little after seven o'clock but she felt so tired and dispirited that, after eating what she could; she tried to settle down for the night.
She had not been lying still for long before she discovered, to her horror, that the straw of the mattress was alive with bedbugs and that the blankets held a colony of lice. Abandoning the palliasse in disgust she curled up on the floor, near the stove, but its hardness, together with the irritation of the vermin which had now got under her clothes and were biting her in a score of places, made sleep impossible; all through the long hours of the night she tossed and squirmed in abject misery.
In the morning she attempted to delouse herself but the vermin were so numerous that her slaughter of them seemed hardly to decrease their numbers and. after a time, the job made her physically sick. She expected the Nazis to come for her to continue their journey but, to her surprise, they did not appear, and except for the soldier, who brought her more food, she was left alone until the afternoon.
She had just switched on the electric light when the door was unlocked and Grauber came in. It was a moment before she recognized him. One bandage swathed his head, covering his empty eye socket, another covered his chin and the whole of the lower portion of his face, but his remaining eye glinted at her with evil satisfaction.
"Guten Tag, Frau Gräfin," he said in his thin, piping voice. "So we have run you to earth at last."
Erika did not reply, so he went on with evident enjoyment: "Jawohl; we've got you now, and I had you brought here because long ago I promised myself the pleasure of breaking that aristocratic pride of yours. It will be fun to see you scream and whimper before all that I intend to leave of you is dragged out to the execution yard. And don't imagine that your English boy friend, Mr. Gregory Sallust, will be able to come to your assistance. We've got him too."
At that Erika was stunned into retort. "You swine you filthy swine " she whispered between closed teeth.
"That makes you sit up, doesn't it?" he laughed in his high falsetto. "He was here two nights ago, posing as von Lutz again, and he had succeeded in wangling an order for your release with which he left for Kandalaksha; but I got on to his game in time and the men whom I sent to fetch you in the plane also took an order to the Governor there to arrest him directly he turns up."
Erika's heart was thudding. Dear Gregory dear Gregory. So he had risked everything to try to save her, after all; but he was caught this time and worse those all important papers would never get to England now.
"I shall proceed about your extermination slowly, 'Frau Gräfin," Grauber went on with studied malice. "We have none of the usual aids to questioning prisoners or even an-er examination room, but I don't need accessories to make little traitors like you go on their knees and beg for death."
Suddenly he struck her a violent blow in the face with his clenched fist. Reeling backwards she fell upon the filthy palliasse, with her mouth cut and bleeding. Having watched her for a moment as she lay there moaning he kicked her twice and, turning away, left the room.
The Russian soldier who brought her evening meal looked at her with round, pitying eyes when he saw the blood on her face and brought her a little lukewarm water with which to bathe her mouth; but that night it seemed to her that she had, descended into the depths of hell.
In attempting to save her Gregory had been caught himself. At the very moment of his triumph, after heaven knew what superhuman scheming and endeavour during the last twelve days, he had walked straight into a trap; and been re arrested the instant he produced the order which was to free her. They would make very certain, too, that he did not escape again. It was the end for him, and the end for her. In a torment of misery she sobbed herself into an exhausted doze which was constantly broken by the biting of the vermin and nightmare thoughts of Grauber.
He came again the following afternoon, bringing with him a thin, flexible riding switch, and he spent an hour in her cell. Perhaps he did not wish the Russians to hear her screaming, or it may have been that he delighted to start her torment very gently, since he did not apply the switch savagely but struck her on the hands, the hips, the upper arms and the calves of the legs, little stinging blows every few minutes, while he taunted her and told her some of the things that he had in mind to do to Gregory.
On Sunday and Monday he came again and plied his switch each time with increasing vigour until the tender flesh of her whole body was criss crossed with thin, aching red weak. On the Sunday she fought him, driving her nails deep into his cheek above the bandage and burying her teeth in his hand; but he hit her a blow in the stomach that drove the breath from her body and doubled her up in a writhing heap on the floor. On Monday, with the intention of rousing the guard, she deliberately began to scream the moment her tormentor entered the room; but the soldier who came in response to her screams was not the wide eyed young peasant who had brought her the water three nights before. He was a sullen looking lout who, on a sharp word from Grauber, shrugged his shoulders and slammed the door. After that she could only moan and submit to each further vicious little flick which was never hard enough to harm her seriously but which in succession were fraying her nerves to tatters.
The remainder of each twenty three hours, when Grauber was not with her and she was not drowsing in torpid nightmare ridden sleep, she spent in an agony of dread anticipating his next visit. She no longer even noticed the lice and bed bugs that were now swarming on her or cared about her filthy, unwashed condition; and thought only of the fresh torments that were in store for her. But on the Tuesday afternoon when she shuddered with apprehension at hearing the key turn in the lock of her cell a new figure entered; a tall, thin faced man in the uniform of a German General.
Scrambling to her feet she ran towards him stretching out her bruised hands and stammering a plea for his protection, but he gently pushed her back and closed the door carefully behind him.