Bennett handed Knox a couple of krona notes. ‘Settle up, and stay put. I’ll wait outside in case they’re just stopping by.’
‘And if they’re not?’
‘Then we’ll need to work out a way to get rid of Blondie.’
There was no need to worry about Valera’s companion. Five minutes after Bennett stepped outside the man left the hotel. And two minutes after that, so did Valera.
Knox waited a moment to let her clear the entrance, then left as well. He didn’t pause at the door, or look down the street to see which way she’d gone, but crossed straight over the road to where Bennett was waiting for him. Without a word she nodded to the right and they both set off north, trailing twenty yards behind Valera.
CHAPTER 39
It turned out Djurgården wasn’t just an island of trees. As Valera crossed the low, ornate bridge to it and passed through a high, wrought-iron gate, she saw wooded paths busy with people branching off all over the island. Old men sat on benches talking, couples strolled arm in arm, and parents struggled to control children who wanted to run everywhere but on the path.
Valera had gone looking for solitude and she hadn’t found it. But she wasn’t ready to go back to the hotel yet. Despite having cleaned herself up in Helsinki and at the Reisen, she could still feel grains of dust under her fingernails and smell the carnage of Povenets B in her hair. They were a constant, taunting reminder of what she’d lost. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get rid of them, but she knew that if she went back to the Reisen she’d just fixate on them.
She wanted to taste at least some of the freedom she’d gone through so much for, so she picked a path and started down it, falling into step with the other people who had chosen it for their late-afternoon stroll and letting them guide her deeper into the island.
The woods became very dense, very quickly. The background hum of the city faded. Valera was reminded a little of Leningrad. It was also a city of islands, and some of them had been left wild. But few of their trees had survived the siege. Their wood was needed for shoring up defences or burning for heat, and their bark, in the most desperate moments, for food. A couple of the islands had been replanted with fresh stock, but they were saplings compared to the huge, old trees of Djurgården.
If it hadn’t been for the other people on the path her mind might also have taken her back to the forest surrounding Povenets B. But before it could the path opened up to reveal a wide, neat lawn. On the far side stood a low, curved building, painted yellow and white. It was flanked with Swedish flags, and the word Skansen was written above it in more iron.
Valera joined a queue of people making their way through an archway in the side of the building and discovered, as she handed over one of the notes Alve had given her, that Skansen was some kind of amusement park and open-air museum.
She walked past small farmhouses with country gardens that butted up against clapboard cottages with thatched roofs, and bright, red-painted halls. People in old-fashioned clothes passed her by on horse-drawn carts, or cleaned the steps of townhouses, or mingled with visitors, chatting with parents and explaining things to children.
Coming from somewhere that devoted so much time and energy to erasing its past, Valera was shocked to see such a celebration of history.
She moved from human exhibits to natural ones, passing several large animal enclosures. In one, three wolves lay together on a wide, flat rock, sleeping. In another a brown bear sat in the branches of a tree, staring back at her as she stared up at it. These were the animals she should have encountered in her hike out of Russia, but here they were instead. The bear looked comfortable, content soaking up the last of the day’s sun, but it was still in a cage. She wondered if it recognised a kindred spirit in her, and if it would have stayed happily sitting in its tree looking down at her if there wasn’t a high wall separating them.
She kept walking and came to a deserted Viking village. As she passed its large meeting hall and longhouses, it occurred to her how much Ledjo would have loved this place. He’d have been as excited as all the other children straining at their parents’ arms, running in and out of buildings, hopping through history and rushing to share everything he discovered with her. She wondered how different their lives would have been on this side of the Iron Curtain. They could have spent their weeks working and studying, and their weekends visiting the animals at Skansen or sailing around the Stockholm archipelago – everything she’d promised and never given him.
She stopped at a bench in front of one of the longhouses. She could feel her emotions starting to get the better of her and wanted to sit down before she fell down. But her sadness instantly turned to fear as she watched a man in a dark suit appear from behind the longhouse and sit next to her.
CHAPTER 40
‘Hello, Irina.’
Her blood froze at the sound of her name, pronounced in perfect Russian with the drawn-out emphasis on the middle syllable. In an instant she knew they’d found her, and they’d come to take her back.
‘Who are you?’ she stuttered, staring straight ahead.
‘My name is General Grigor Medev. I am the head of the KGB scientific directorate. And I have come to apologise to you.’
‘Apologise?’ she asked, turning to face him.
‘For everything you’ve been through,’ he replied. ‘For the last three years.’ He turned, finally making eye contact. ‘I want you to know that Povenets B has been decommissioned, and Zukolev has been dealt with.’
Valera had waited a long time for Zukolev to face some kind of reckoning, and she hoped he had, but she had no reason to believe Medev.
‘He was a vain, arrogant man,’ Medev said, trying to calm the doubts he’d anticipated. ‘He did not deserve the responsibilities given to him.’
‘Who the hell is that?’ Bennett whispered to Knox.
They were standing in a narrow gap between a large, thatched hall and a smaller building, which, from the smell, Knox reckoned was some kind of barn. They’d followed Valera all the way from the Reisen, splitting up as she’d wandered around Skansen to make sure she didn’t somehow give them the slip and reuniting out of view of Valera and the man who had appeared from nowhere.
‘I have no idea,’ Knox whispered back. ‘But they’re speaking Russian.’
‘We have to get her out of there. We can’t lose her.’ Bennett tried to edge past Knox, pushing him into the thatch and making it rustle until he gently put his hand on her shoulder to stop her.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Look at her. She’s not going anywhere.’
Medev took in the view from the bench. The quaint, perfectly preserved longhouses, the well-maintained paths, the dappled sunlight. He watched two swallows dance in the sky above them, feasting on invisible insects.
‘I understand why you left,’ he said. ‘I think I would have too under the circumstances. But I have to ask you to come home.’
Valera let out a short, hard laugh. ‘I don’t have a home. Anything I ever had was taken from me.’
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘We’ve failed you terribly, and there’s nothing we can do to make up for the debt we owe you. I can give you an apartment, a dacha, a laboratory. But I cannot give you your life back. Your parents, or Ledjo.’
Valera knew how short-lived promises were in her homeland. Medev might offer her something today, but would she get it tomorrow? Every ruined village she’d walked through as she fled Povenets B had once been teeming with life, hope, and happiness, and they’d all been destroyed.