“Our thanks for your kindness to the weary traveller. May you be repaid.”
Then he jumped into the cab and started the engine.
“All aboard, youthful ones,” he roared. “We are on the road again!”
This time it was Stefan who sat on the engine cowling between the front seats, listening carefully for telltale noises that would warn him if he had not tuned the engine to perfection. Mr Balderson drove very slowly; the road surface was as treacherous as it could be, with the thermometer hovering above freezing, so they sometimes lost their grip going uphill no matter how careful he was being. Only William was oblivious to the danger, lying on one of the couches in the living space and examining an old shoe with a birch-bark sole that he had found under a floorboard in the barn just before they left.
It wasn’t a very big town. It lay on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, and had once been a thriving seaport, in the days when timber and tar and herring and flax had made wealthy burgers of its citizens. They drove along the harbour road, lined on the landward side with tall old wooden buildings that had once been warehouses and ships’ chandlers and smokehouses, but were now mostly empty. They were well cared for, but just summer tourist attractions now, with the odd café and souvenir shop. On the seaward side the stone quay ran the full length of the road – deserted while all the yachts and launches were laid up for the winter and the occasional merchant vessel from Finland or the Baltic States couldn’t get into the bay. The town wasn’t nearly big enough to attract the services of the government ice-breakers that plied the waters north of the Gulf of Finland. The sea was a flat frozen plain, stretching all the way to the horizon and dotted here and there with small densely forested islands.
The road bent inland again, and they came to a collection of low metal-roofed sheds that housed a builder’s yard, a wholesale agricultural supplier, a tractor repair shop and their destination, a tire service centre.
Stefan went inside, and was followed out moments later by a young man in overalls. Together they bent down to study the camper’s tires, and plenty of gruff laughter told the occupants of the cab that amusing remarks were being made about English people’s cavalier attitude to driving in the snow.
Stefan opened the cab door.
“He has good tires for you, but he needs an hour or two. We can walk to a very good café with very good cakes.”
So they decided that they would walk up to the council offices, to see if they could get some lead on Rashid, and then, said Stefan, there was something he wished to show them.
The visit to the council offices was a total failure. They walked into a shiny new building close to the town square and were greeted politely at the reception desk. William and Mr Balderson retired to some comfortable seats that were provided for visitors. They were both interested in the tourist brochures advertising various historical places of interest. Stefan got to work, and did a lot of talking, starting with the receptionist. In the end, by simply refusing to leave, he managed to get himself and Judy shown into an office where a shirt-sleeved young man was sitting at a computer. But he hardly even looked up from whatever he was doing, and Stefan had to turn to Judy and say. “It is no good. They have some information here, but it is forbidden for him to say anything. He can only say when the asylum seeker has been given a…” His English failed. “A number, you know?”
“Social security number, or something like that?” said Judy
“Yes, something like that, and there is no one called Rashid…”
“Forget it, Stefan. Let’s go,” said Judy.
“Well, well,” said Mr Balderson when they told him that they had drawn a blank, “the plot thickens.” He got up from his chair. “ I shall now remove myself from your company for a while. We meet at Stefan’s café.” He strode off.
Once outside, Judy had no desire to go anywhere in particular. There didn’t seem to be any point.
Stefan turned to William.
“Now I will show you my shop. It is the best shop in this whole place.”
“I didn’t know you had a shop.”
“Well, it isn’t my shop, I just call it my shop.”
“Why, if it’s not your shop?”
“Because if it was my shop, that is what it would be like.”
Judy was already well ahead, walking fast. Stefan caught up with her. They walked in silence for a while, then Judy spoke.
“There isn’t much left to hope for now. Even if Rashid sent that letter from here, he’s obviously moved on. He could be anywhere in Sweden. Anywhere on the planet, for that matter. “
Stefan said nothing. There really wasn’t anything to say.
It turned out that the shop of Stefan’s dreams was a sort of combined ironmonger’s, tackle shop, and outdoor supplier. All the ways that anybody had ever thought of to join something to something else – nails from tiny to massive, screws, bolts, rivets, welding gear, glue for wood, glue for metal – were there to be browsed, along with all the tools that you might ever need to do it right. And of course fishing gear, including all the delicate fiddly stuff you need for tying flies; knives, axes, camping equipment, guns. To Stefan it was a treasure trove.
He stood for a moment and studied the window display – it was getting to be the time for ice-fishing, now that the snow cover was shrinking every day. He gazed longingly at a motor-driven ice bore, collapsible, relatively lightweight but with a very efficient five-inch spiral bit that would easily deal with half a metre of core ice. It was Japanese, and normally he was faithful to the quality Swedish manufacturers, but it had to be admitted that when it came to getting the balance right between weight and function, the Japanese were at the top of the heap. Judy was already inside going through a box of lures, half-price because they were out of season, and comparing them unfavourably to the one that Stefan had given her. Stefan turned to explain to William the important differences between angling under ice or on open water. But William wasn’t there.
“Judy, where did William go?”
“What?” She had been miles away.
“William, did you see where he went?”
“No.”
He was nowhere to be seen.
William was in the municipal museum. They had passed it on the way to Stefan’s shop, and William had got distracted by it. It was housed in a noble stone-built edifice dating from the nineteenth century, and there was a poster outside showing artefacts that had been found in the local area. A burial site from the Scandinavian Iron Age had been excavated recently, and there were photographs. William stopped and studied the poster while Stefan and Judy rounded the corner and disappeared ahead of him. In no time at all he was on his way up the steps.
The first room held axe-heads and swords, and a shield-boss from the early Viking period. There was also a small model of a long-house, with the roof lifted off so that you could see the great hearth that had run almost the length of the hall, and the benches and trestle-tables where the warriors had sat draining their mead-horns and listening to the harpists sing of the deeds of their forefathers. There were other exhibits, from the iron age or even earlier. There was one complete skeleton of an early iron-age warrior, lying as they had found him, in a reconstruction of his grave, with his sword at his side. William wandered through the rooms, totally absorbed, and was drawn to a small well-lit glass display-case. There he saw something that rooted him to the spot. On display were a silver brooch, a little pile of silver coins, a pendant of some kind that might have been a cross but wasn’t quite because the arms of the cross went right across the top like a capital T. And something else. A small elongated thing, forked and bent upwards at one end, with the other end like a sort of flattened spoon.
William reached inside his shirt and drew up his find. It was bigger, and it wasn’t made of silver, but it was the same shape. Not exactly the same shape, but very nearly. William peered at the neat little label that lay next to the exhibit. It was in Swedish.
He looked around. The museum
was almost deserted, but he remembered seeing someone a couple of rooms back, and retraced his steps. He found a woman dressed in a housecoat and headscarf pushing a cleaner’s trolley laden with mops and buckets and floor-clothes and bottles of cleaning fluid in the direction of the toilets. She stopped when William came towards her. He saw that she wasn’t very old – about the same age as his mother, he thought. She too had been a cleaner for a while, but she hadn’t liked it very much. This lady wasn’t like his mother in any other way, though. She had dark hair and eyes, more like Judy, and she looked tired.
“Can you read a label for me please?” asked William.
He wondered if she could understand him. She could.
“What label do you mean?”
“Over here.” The woman followed him back to the room with the display case.
“Look,” said William, holding up his find, “they’re the same, and I don’t know what it is, and now there’s one here, though it’s not quite the same is it?”
Now the woman smiled at him.
“Well, I can read the label for you, at least.” She was quiet for a moment, mouthing the words as though the language was unfamiliar to her.
“It is a key.”
“A key? But it can’t be. Keys don’t look like this. Have you read it right?” William was thinking of the key to the flat that he usually had round his neck at home.
“It says that the first keys looked like this. It is … let me see … about a thousand years old.”
“A thousand?”
“Yes, I think so. Mediaeval, that would be about a thousand years ago.”
William stared at his find, turning it over and over in his hands.
“You have made a good find, I think,” the cleaning lady went on. “Did you find it here?”
“No, in England, under a big tree.”
“And you have come here from England? Are you on holiday?”
“No, I came here with Judy, but it was by mistake – she’s looking for someone who sent a letter, though she doesn’t know much. From her father’s friend, he sent it from here. But she’s not really looking for him, she’s looking for her father – he went away and didn’t come back. Now she’s sad because Rashid wasn’t at the asylum centre.”
As William spoke, the woman’s face had gone very still, and when he said the name Rashid, she drew a sharp breath.
“The person you came with, what is her name?”
“Judy, I told you.”
“I mean her … surname.”
“Er … Azad.”
Suddenly the woman bent down and took hold of his shoulders. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t mind nearly as much as he used to.
“Where is she now? Please. I must talk to her.”
“She’s … oh.” Now William remembered that he had lost Judy and Stefan, or they had lost him.
“They were going to a shop.”
Stefan and Judy retraced their steps. Somehow William had managed to disappear. Judy wasn’t too worried – especially when Stefan decided that he knew where William was.
They walked back to the museum. As soon as they went in it was utterly obvious that this was where they would find William. “This is a Parkinson paradise,” said Judy, gazing around at the exhibits. When they came to the third room, sure enough, there he was, apparently in conversation with the cleaning lady.
“Judy, Stefan, it’s a key, I’ve got a key! It’s a thousand years old! Look. Look in there. That one’s just the same, and she says it’s a key.” He gestured to the woman who was standing looking at Judy as though she was afraid of her.
“Are you Judy Azad?” the lady said.
Judy sighed inwardly. Presumably William had blurted out her whole sorry tale already, to this complete stranger.
“Yes, I’m Judy.”
“And you are looking for your father.”
William had clearly been busy. “Yes.”
“I have talked to him.”
18
Judy was stunned. At last, after all this time, someone had seen her father.
“Where is he?” she blurted out. “What’s happened to him?” Judy bit her tongue, trying to control her furious impatience.
“He was looking for a man called Rashid, the sender of a letter. Please come and sit down, I must explain.”
They followed her into a little room, not much more than a cubbyhole, where the cleaning staff could change their clothes and have their coffee break. They sat down at a small table.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you,” said Stefan. Judy just shook her head. Her mind was racing and Mr Balderson’s kaleidoscope conversations were suddenly very real to her. All those little fragments. Were they about to sort themselves into a pattern?
The woman sat down opposite them and put both hands palms-down on the little table. They were work-roughened now. Judy saw a chipped nail, and raw scuffed knuckles. But they were small delicate hands and the nails were varnished red. They spoke of a very different life before this one.
“It was I. I sent the letter.”
Into the shocked silence William delivered himself of a thought.
“But you can’t be Rashid. Rashid is a boy’s name. Have you got a boy’s name? There are some names like Hilary and Lesley…”
“William.” It was Stefan who spoke. “I think we should just listen.”
“I will tell you.”
“English please,” said Judy, for the woman had spoken in Farsi. “These are my friends. I want them to hear too.”
“My name is Soheila, and I sent it from here. I put it in a letter box only a few days after I got here.”
In Judy a hundred questions jostled for attention.
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t Rashid post it himself?”
“He gave it to me, Rashid. He asked me to post it when I was safe, when I knew that it would be sure to arrive safely. He had some difficulties. He had to be very careful, he said. Only the mountain paths, and the secret ways. For me it was easier – just the long walk, and the waiting, and the walking again. I was just one of many. The letter would be safer with me, and Rashid was sure that when I got here, they would let me stay. “
“How could he know that?”
The woman had been gazing intently into Judy’s eyes. “He said when they saw my back they would let me stay. And it was true.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was at the university, studying law. I was interested in politics. Then I walked with a male student friend; he was not related to me, my hair was showing. It was enough.”
She looked up again. Dark eyes met dark eyes. Stefan could almost believe they were related.
“Oh, I see,” said Judy. But Stefan didn’t.
“It was enough? Enough for what please?”
“For two hundred lashes.”
Stefan stood up and frowned. He went red in the face. He said crossly,
“You should not make up stupid stories.”
Judy said, “It is true, Stefan, I promise you.”
Stefan turned his face to the wall. Something was bubbling up inside him and he didn’t want them to see it. He hadn’t felt like that before, and he was worried about what would happen if he let it out. If he started breaking furniture or smashing his fist into the window then they would be frightened, and that would make him just another one on the long, long list of people who use fear. If Karl had been there and said something stupid then he would have had something to do, but luckily for Karl he wasn’t. Stefan felt his eyes sting.
“So you see your father came here looking for him, just like you,” the woman continued. “He was sure that he would be here, because this is where the letter came from. But I couldn’t tell him much, except that Rashid never did come here. I met your father at the asylum centre, before I got my residence permit.”
“So where did my father go? Where is Rashid?”
“I am sorry, but I cannot answer your questions
.”
“So.” Judy spoke softly, almost to herself. “Rashid and my father could be anywhere.”
Judy put her head in her hands, and the woman reached out across the table to take them in her own. Judy let her.
“I am sorry, my dear.” The woman said in Farsi. “But even a small piece of the truth is better than the darkness of complete ignorance.”
Judy wasn’t so sure. Her last chance of finding her father was shot to pieces. But remembering her manners she finally managed to say, “Thank you for your help,” before they left the museum and walked back out into the daylight.
“I am going to talk to the head of the museum,” said William. “I wonder if you can look him up in the phone book. He will know all about my key and what it opens. There are lots of different kinds of keys, aren’t there? There are door keys, and keys to treasure chests, and keys to cars – though it can’t be a car key of course, because there were no cars a thousand years ago. Pianos have keys too, but they don’t count…”
“William,” said Stefan, “you haven’t seen my favourite shop yet. You must see it before you leave.”
“It doesn’t matter so much.”
“But it matters to me. You are my workmate. I want to show my workmate.”
“All right.”
“Judy, go to the café,” said Stefan, pointing down the street. “Mr Balderson will be there by now. We will come after soon.”
Judy looked gratefully at Stefan. She didn’t want to spoil William’s great moment, and she really did need a few minutes to herself. She walked down the steps and turned back along the street towards the town square, pulling up the hood of her parka and sticking her hands in her pockets as she walked. A biting easterly wind was getting up, the wind that sometimes strikes the Swedish coast in winter after travelling across the frozen Baltic with neither a hill to break its force nor a drop of open water to relieve its chill.
The Unexpected Find Page 15