‘He’ll be set free,’ she told him fiercely. ‘Your father is a good man. Don’t ever believe he’s not, and don’t ever disown him again in my hearing.’

His cheeks coloured scarlet but his brown eyes didn’t drop away. ‘He’s not my father.’

‘Pyotr, don’t you dare say such a thing.’

Still the brown eyes stared miserably into hers, but his voice lowered to a whisper. ‘He’s not. Ask Rafik. My father was the miller in Tivil. Six years ago my mother ran off with a soldier to Moscow and my father burned down the mill with himself inside it.’

‘Oh, Pyotr.’

‘I had no one, no family. My father was labelled a kulak even though he was dead, so no villager would help me. The authorities were going to send me to an institution.’ He stopped and dragged a hand across his eyes. ‘But Mikhail Pashin adopted me. He was new to the village and he didn’t even know me, but he took me in.’

Sofia drew Pyotr to her and gently stroked his hair.

‘He’ll be set free,’ she whispered. ‘I promise.’

‘Name?’

‘I am Mikhail Antonovich Pashin.’

‘Occupation?’

‘Inzhenir. Engineer First Class. And direktor fabriki. Factory manager.’

‘Which factory?’

‘The Levitsky factory in Dagorsk. We make clothes and military uniforms. It is a loyal factory with dedicated workers. This month we exceeded our quota of-’

‘Silence.’

The peremptory order made the small interrogation room shrink further. There were no windows, just a bright naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. A metal table stood in the centre, grey and scarred, two chairs behind it, another one alone and bolted to the floor in front of it. Mikhail stood very erect, focused on what he intended to say, and forced himself to swallow his anger. He felt it burn his throat as it sank to his stomach.

‘Sit.’

He sat.

‘Place of birth?’

‘Leningrad.’

‘Father’s name?’

‘Anton Ivanovich Pashin.’

‘Father’s occupation?’

‘Wheelwright. He was a man loyal to the Revolution and he died for it when-’

‘Why did you leave the Tupolev aircraft factory?’

‘I’m damned sure you know why I had to leave. It’ll be written down in that fat file in front of you. So why bother to ask me?’

For the first time the man behind the desk showed a flicker of interest. He was tall and elegant, in a uniform that was well cut and bore a row of medals.

‘Answer my question.’ His eyes were slightly slanting and he had small neat features that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a woman.

‘I left because I was forced to.’

‘And why was that?’

Keep it calm. Wrap the anger in a tight shell of control. Play it their way.

‘Because I made an error. I criticised the system of delivery. I was so eager to build the ANT-4 aeroplane for our Great Leader that I allowed my disappointment at the delay in the arrival of some essential items of equipment to cloud my judgement.’

‘You admit you were wrong.’

‘I admit it freely. I didn’t consider the magnitude of what our Leader had undertaken. I know now that the railways had to be expanded first before they could deal with the loads they had to carry.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I was young and foolish.’

The slanting eyes watched him for a long while, then, with a sudden push of his chair, its legs squealing over the tiled floor, the interrogator rose and started to pace back and forth across the narrow space behind his desk.

‘Don’t lie to me, you filthy wrecker.’

‘I am no wrecker.’

‘Don’t lie to me. You tried to wreck the Tupolev factory and now you are wrecking the Levitsky factory. Working against the forces of progress outlined for us all in the First Piatiletka. It is people like you who cause the shortage of goods.’

‘No, I told you we exceeded our targets.’

‘Who is paying you?’

That came as a shock. ‘Nobody.’

‘You were seen with a German diplomat in Moscow.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘I am the one who decides what is a lie and what is not!’ the examiner shouted across the desk. Spittle gathered in the corner of his mouth.

‘This is a mistake.’

‘Are you saying that the Soviet Intelligence System is wrong?’

‘Only that this is-’

‘You were seen to wreck the Tivil Red Arrow kolkhoz Grain Procurement system.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. There are witnesses.’

‘Who?’

‘Silence, scum. Who is paying you? Foreign powers are frightened of our great success. It is well known that they employ subversives to destroy our industry, subversives like you who commit treason and deserve to be shot.’

Mikhail’s blood was pounding. This was worse than he expected.

‘Confess the truth, you piece of dog shit.’

‘I am innocent of these charges, I swear it. I am a Communist, loyal to Russia.’

The interrogator stopped pacing as abruptly as he’d started. With exaggerated steps he returned to the desk and lowered himself on to the seat once more. His enraged expression melted away. He looked at Mikhail with disappointment in the line of the mouth, disapproval in the narrowing of the eyes.

‘Examiner, you are wrong. I swear to you I had nothing to do with the grain in Tivil.’

The interrogator sighed and shook his head with studied regret. ‘Let’s start again.’

‘I’ve told you everything.’

‘Name?’

‘You know my name.’

‘Name?’ A hand slammed on the desk. ‘Name?’

Davinsky Camp July 1933

‘It’s a railway.’

‘What?’

‘They’re saying we have to build the railway.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

Anna looked round the group of women lined up with her outside the medical hut. They’d already been waiting in the yard for an hour, stripped to their ragged underwear. An emaciated bunch with ribs popping out like elbows and knees wider than their thighs. Most had sores of some kind or other. A railway? How could this army of skeletons construct a railway?

‘Why on earth would they want a railway up here anyway?’ Anna asked. ‘There’s nothing but trees.’

‘Trees and mosquitoes,’ one woman groaned and swatted an insect on her arm.

Each year, as soon as the surface snow melted in the forest, the area became a quagmire of marshy ground, covered by a constant layer of stagnant water where the huge mosquitoes loved to breed in their millions. They were the curse of the summer. Infected bites caused more deaths than anything else at this time of year.

‘Gold,’ Nina said and went back to picking a thorn out of her thumb.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s gold up here.’

‘Christ,’ a freckled girl from Leningrad exclaimed, ‘just tell me where.’

‘I heard they’re opening another mine and transporting more male prisoners up here to work it.’

The men’s labour camp was only four versts away and was twice the size of the women’s. They were the ones who felled the pines in the first place and hauled them down to the river when the women had finished trimming them. Throughout the summer great rafts of trunks floated downstream to the timber yards and one of the most feared jobs was riding on them.

‘Rail work is savage,’ Nina groaned.

‘That’s why they’re putting us through this charade of a medical. ’

‘What do they do?’ the freckled girl asked.

‘They just stand around gawping,’ Tasha sneered, ‘while a man in a white coat tells you to strip naked so he can pinch your buttocks to test your muscle tone. Then he listens to your lungs.’

‘And the swines prod you,’ Nina added, ‘in places they don’t need to prod you.’

Anna frowned at her. ‘Don’t scare her, Nina.’

The older woman shrugged. ‘That’s nothing. Something to be scared of is what I heard the bastard shitheads did to one of the men who broke an ankle out in the forest the other day when a tree crashed on it.’