‘Yob tvoyu mat!’ Liev Popkov swore suddenly and pushed his huge fist towards the window. ‘Look at that. It’s the stinking hell-hole.’

Alexei saw Lydia elbow him hard in the ribs to silence him, but it was too late. Every head in the carriage turned to stare at what he’d indicated and a young woman with a baby asleep in her arms started to weep silently. It was the camp. Trovitsk labour camp. It couldn’t be anything else, though from this distance it looked harmless enough, more like four dog kennels rising above the flat winter horizon. Those must be the tips of the watchtowers, but the rest of the camp was lost in a faint blur, secretive and secluded, too far away to make out anything of the communal huts or barbed wire fences.

‘God help the bastards,’ Alexei muttered.

The big woman opposite grimaced. ‘He hasn’t done much of a job of it so far.’

Lydia looked round at them both and frowned. Her tawny eyes were huge. A straggle of hair had crept out from under her hat and lay like a lick of flame on the collar of her coat. ‘The Soviet State is looking after those people,’ she said in a curt voice. ‘It does what is best. For all of us.’

Oh Lydia. But Alexei made a show of nodding agreement. ‘Da, we must never forget what we owe the State.’

‘As if we could,’ the big woman chuckled, and the chuckle grew until it was a loose rollicking laugh that shook her abundant bosom and sounded too loud in the tight confines of the carriage. Alexei eyed her with increasing caution.

At the other end of the carriage a man with a pipe and a bushy Stalin moustache banged his hand flat on his knee. ‘Those prisoners are here for good reason. Don’t let’s forget that, comrade. ’

Alexei let his eyes stray again to the window and a small shock ran through him. The landscape was monotonously flat, a naked terrain that betrayed the scars and stumps where a forest had once stood, but way off to one side, along the edge of a stand of pine trees which had somehow escaped the axe, eight men were bent double, hauling a wagon. It was stacked high with bare tree trunks and the men were yoked to it by chains. Beyond them, so small and colourless they were scarcely visible against the icy wasteland, other figures scuttled like ants across the Work Zone.

‘Yes,’ Alexei murmured, not taking his eyes off them. ‘That’s why they’re here. It’s the raw materials we need.’

‘For industry?’ the woman asked.

He nodded. ‘For Stalin’s great Five Year Plan.’

‘So what is it the prisoners do all the way up here?’

Still he watched them. Saw a man fall. ‘Mining. This region is rich in ore and coal.’

An uncomfortable silence descended, while the passengers pictured the prisoners, black-faced somewhere deep under the train’s wheels, swinging picks at a brutal coal seam, lungs filling up with heavy choking dust.

‘And timber,’ Alexei added softly.

Dear God, let Jens Friis be good with a saw.

‘This place is too tidy for us,’ Liev Popkov growled under his breath. ‘Too clean.’

For once the ox brain was right. The town of Felanka was not what Alexei had been expecting and not what he wanted. They were walking down the main street, Gorky Ulitsa, with Lydia tucked safely between them, taking a careful look at their surroundings. Where were the usual rows of ugly concrete apartment blocks? Most of the towns up here in the north were sprawling, indifferent places that had sprung into being to accommodate the recent enforced migration of Russia’s dissidents into these sparsely populated areas. No one would notice an extra few travellers in one of those. But this was different. This town felt loved.

Elegant buildings lined wide, graceful boulevards and everywhere there was an abundance of scrolled ironwork. Balconies and streetlamps, door and window settings, all curled and twined in an outbreak of wrought iron. Felanka was built on iron ore. It lived and breathed it. Some way off to the west of the town lay the massive brick-built foundry. It loomed like a giant black turtle on the horizon, belching foul-smelling smoke that turned the air into something you could touch. But today the east wind was keeping the smoke at bay and the town was parading its charms under a brittle blue sky.

‘Popkov.’ Alexei nodded towards a shop front they were passing. ‘In here.’

He wanted to get Lydia off the street. She’d been silent since leaving the train, and all through their registration at the hostel where they were shown into rooms that smelled of laundered sheets, she’d looked pale and listless. He wondered if she was sick. Or sick at heart.

He pushed open the door off the street. It was a printer’s shop, with heavy iron presses on the left and a huddle of men in deep discussion around them. The air held the tang of metal and ink. On the right side of the gloomy interior a high counter ran across the window, and this was what Alexei had spotted from outside. Here customers could buy a hot drink and stand while they waited for their print order. An old babushka with sparse grey hair scraped back into a bun sat sharp-eyed at the back of the shop, one hand resting possessively on the claw foot of the samovar beside her.

‘Dobriy den,’ Alexei greeted her politely. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘Dobriy den,’ she nodded, and gave him a toothless twist of her mouth that he assumed was a smile. He bought tea for himself and Popkov, hot chocolate for Lydia. They carried the glasses over to the wooden counter by the window and stood looking out at the street.

‘It’s too tidy,’ Popkov muttered again. ‘For us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lydia asked. She was again positioned between them – that’s how it always was – but didn’t look at him, just wrapped her gloves around the hot glass in its metal podstakanik and stared at the flurry of trucks trailing past. There was no one else in their section of the shop and the noise from the printing press meant there was no danger of being overheard.

Popkov rummaged his fingers in his thick black beard. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and his teeth were so stained they merged with the black bristles. ‘They don’t need us.’

‘You mean our money?’ she asked.

‘Da.’

She sank back into her silence, sipped her chocolate and blew steam at the window. Alexei could sense the shreds of hope slipping from her grasp. He placed his podstakanik down on the scratched surface with annoyance.

‘People always take money,’ he said firmly. ‘People always take money. Don’t you know that yet?’

Lydia shrugged.

‘Listen, Lydia.’ Alexei leaned an elbow on the counter and concentrated on her face. It looked tired, dark shadows circling her eyes. ‘We’ve come this far. To Trovitsk camp. We’ve even laid eyes on some of the wretched prisoners, poor bastards.’ He saw her flinch, a tiny movement of the muscle beside her eye. That was all. She said nothing. He lowered his voice. ‘We always knew the next part would be difficult.’

‘Difficult?’ Popkov snorted. ‘Fucking dangerous, you mean.’

‘Not impossible though.’ Alexei was irritated and gave a sharp rap with his knuckles on the wood, as if he could knock some sense into their heads. ‘Jens Friis could still be there.’

He saw her tremble. Sometimes he forgot how vulnerable she was, how unguarded. He had to remind himself that he’d had years at a military training establishment in Japan where he’d learned levels of self-control, but she’d had… nothing. He took a mouthful of his chai. It was hot and burned a path down inside him, but couldn’t warm what lay deep in there, cold and untouched. He pushed himself upright, stretched his shoulders and faced the one-eyed Cossack.

‘Popkov, I thought you were a man who liked danger. Drank it in with your mother’s milk, I heard.’