So her little adventure was at its end. Her fantasy about the great quest, the epic search – whatever she’d told herself this was – it was over. Now she was back in the real world, trudging down the icy streets of a Swedish seaport with the wind in her face and no particular place to go except back to England and into a foster home. Her father could be absolutely anywhere, doing absolutely anything, but the most likely thing was that he had headed back East, trying to pick up Rashid’s trail. And then, as she very well knew, anything could have happened.
A man stood on the steps of a little hotel on the outskirts of town. He looked up and down the empty street feeling more hopeful than he had for a long time. His task had turned out to be much, much harder than he expected. Back in England, when he had caught sight of the girl hurrying out of the park gates, it had seemed easy enough. He had followed her and seen her enter the bus station but then, in the evening crowd of travellers, he had lost her. Determination and luck had kept him on her track, and he had almost caught up with her before she left England. Then followed a seemingly hopeless trek across Europe, but there was never any question of giving up. He had a task to complete, a duty to perform, and however unpleasant it was going to be, he was determined to see it through. If he didn’t, then his own life would not be worth living. So he had come at last to this little town. He had asked around, and it had been quite easy – English tourists, travelling in a camper van, a tall strange man, two children. The closer he got, the easier it became to get information. After all, everybody knew everybody. Strangers were a rarity to be talked about at length. For the first time for weeks he could relax a bit. They were in the area, somewhere. He would be able to accomplish his terrible task. But it was shockingly cold, he had had no idea; so he had kitted himself out that morning in some secondhand winter clothing from one of the few shops that were open. It was a sort of army surplus store, where you could buy fur hats and boots and snow-gaiters and the like that were no longer standard issue. There were even some collectors’ items that were popular with the visitors – winter coats and hats and officers’ insignia from the Soviet era that the Russian tourists who now flooded over the border in summer brought with them to sell.
Today, at last, he could do his duty. She couldn’t be far away.
Mr Balderson was already in the café, seated at a table in the corner with a large cup of tea and a bilberry muffin in front of him. Judy made her way over and sat down opposite. Looking at him now, Mr Balderson suddenly looked very old – not just an elderly man, but ancient. The lines on his face seemed deeper, the scar where his right eye had been more puckered, his neck thin and wrinkled. He had taken off his hat, and the bald patch on the top of his head looked dry and dull rather than shiny like it had been before. Even his hair looked tired, hanging around his head in sparse wisps. He certainly wasn’t a pretty sight, and the almost fingerless hand that rested on the table didn’t make him any prettier. But the blue gimlet eye that looked right into her was unchanged.
She told him about the visit to the museum.
“He was here,” she finished, “but now he’s gone. He must have gone east, months ago, to find out why Rashid never came.”
“So,” said Mr Balderson, “you have gained knowledge. You understand why he left you alone for so long without a word. A piece of the puzzle, a glimpse of the truth.”
“But now—” Judy began.
“Now you fear for him. Knowledge is not always comfortable. But on the whole, necessary, in my view. ‘The truth thee shall deliver, it is no dread.’ I’ve always thought that was rather well said.”
As far as Judy could see, all that the truth had delivered so far was a miserable journey back to a foster home and an endless wait for news of her father. She was so not looking forward to that. But that was how it looked.
“It’s just a dead end, Mr Balderson, whatever you say.”
“Dead end,” repeated Mr Balderson. “An odd expression that would certainly interest William. Is even death itself a dead end? Your journey is only now beginning. You have passed through the valley of the quest, but there are more valleys ahead, and still a long road to travel. For both of us.”
He stared at her and took a bite of his muffin.
Judy sighed. Mr Balderson was being very serious, but sometimes his philosophizing was a bit hard to bear, and this was one of those times; she wasn’t in the mood for it. She was feeling tired and hopeless and stupid. She shook her head.
“It’s no good, Mr Balderson, I don’t understand a word of what you are saying.”
“But your father would. Oh yes, he would know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Stefan and William came in. Stefan was holding forth about the relative merits of silver or copper in peaty water, and the problems they would face if the spring thaw came too quickly.
“I found a pike, once, quite a big one, two and a half kilos perhaps, in the top of a bush thirty metres from the riverbank – there was much spring water that year, much snow in the…”
But William had seen Mr Balderson and started talking before he was half way across the room.
“It’s a key! There was one just like in the museum! It’s a thousand years old, the cleaning lady told me. It’s the oldest thing I’ve ever found, and it was under the tree. If there hadn’t been a storm I would never have found it there.”
Mr Balderson smiled, and something lit up his face, smoothing away the years.
“The tree fell, your journey began, and it has ended here. William, you are truly favoured. It is no less than deserved. You have gained knowledge! And so has Judy. Your key was the key!”
“Yes I know my key was a key, I just told you.”
Mr Balderson said something under his breath. Judy caught a few words about the gods favouring the innocent. She got the point. And she was happy for William.
Meanwhile Stefan was tucking into a huge cream- and marzipan-filled bun that he had fetched for himself, one of two that almost didn’t fit on to the plate. Judy wondered briefly how many of them he could eat if he really made the effort. She would have to test him some time. Except that there wouldn’t be a “some time”.
Stefan looked up at the clock on the wall above their heads.
“I must go to the bus station soon, or I miss the last bus.”
Now, suddenly, it was there. Stefan would go back to his farm, Judy and William would – well, Judy didn’t really know what they would do, but it was over. It wasn’t a very nice feeling. She felt cold, and even lonelier than she had felt in the houseboat on Christmas Eve.
“Are we going home now, Judy?” asked William.
Judy nodded.
“Looks like it, William. We can’t stay here for ever, and Mr Balderson…” She looked at him, but he simply smiled, and took another bite of his muffin.
“Why can’t you come with us, Stefan?” said William. “You can make Judy laugh. And I’d like it a lot.”
“So would I, Stefan,” said Judy, taking herself by surprise.
Stefan mumbled something.
“What?” said William.
Stefan wiped cream of his mouth and spoke slightly more clearly.
“I will not like not coming with you. I am not happy to say goodbye.”
Mr Balderson stood up.
“I shall return to the camper – I parked it in the square. You will wish to accompany Stefan to the bus station and say your farewells.” He picked up his hat and left the café. They watched him stride past the window, his long coat flapping, his head, with its drapery of white hair, perching on a thin neck. For a moment he looked like some huge exotic bird.
Once he had gone, nobody had very much to say. Stefan cleaned the last of the cream off his plate. Judy drank up her tea. They stood up and left. The wind had dropped while they were in the café and it had started to snow, one of those sudden heavy falls of late winter, with flakes the size of chicken feathers, that quickly covers everything in a fresh white coat and is as quickly gone ag
ain when the weather makes its next turn. They walked together in silence – even William seemed to have run out of steam – to the corner of the street.
Judy and Stefan looked at each other.
Stefan looked down at the warm boots that Farmor had exchanged for Judy’s scuffed trainers a long time ago.
“When can we come back?” William wanted to know. More than anything he wanted very much to go back to the museum and hear more about ancient keys.
“William,” said Judy “We may never come back.” She couldn’t think of a nicer way to put it.
William looked absolutely miserable.
“I can find the name and address of someone who works there,” said Stefan. “There is probably a lot on the internet. You can talk to him on the telephone when you get home.”
“But when will I get home?”
Neither of them had an answer to that.
Stefan turned to Judy. “And you will write me a letter please? To help me with my English, you know,” he added lamely.
“Yes. Will you reply?”
“You know that I will.”
Funnily, Judy did know.
Stefan turned away from them. They watched him walk off down the street.
19
Judy and William headed for the square along streets that were now completely empty. The last booted and scarved pedestrians had long ago hurried home to their warm kitchens and evening meals. They arrived at the main square, now lying silent and muffled in snow. The municipal flower beds and benches were just white lumps, and the kiosk that in summer housed the tourist information office was boarded up. In the middle of the lamp-lit square was a tall flagpole. Along one side was space for parking, but the camper wasn’t in it.
“Is this the right place?” wondered William aloud.
Judy looked around. “I’m sure of it.”
They walked all round the square, checking down side streets just in case, but there was no camper.
“Maybe he’s gone to get petrol or something.”
There was nowhere to sit. The snowfall stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the wind got up again, making the flagpole’s long lanyard snap and slap rhythmically.
“Look, a flag!” said William, not pointing at the flagpole but at a pile of old snow several metres high and now white and fresh like a miniature Himalaya. Planted on the top of it was a small tattered flag. It looked like a miniature version of the prayer flags that adorn the high passes of Tibet. William walked over to the hill of snow and started to climb up it. Judy followed.
“Look, it’s the feather.”
Tied to the top of the little pole was, unmistakeably, the capercaillie feather they had last seen in Mr Balderson’s hat. The flag, when they got closer, turned out to have been made from an old handkerchief. There was writing on it, blurred where the ink had run. Judy took down the flag and made out the words,
“You enter the second valley. Our ways part.”
“There’s your bag,” said William, “and my collection, too.” They lay on the other side of the snow-mound, and had been hidden from view.
Mr Balderson had gone.
Stefan was sitting right at the back of the bus, as usual. It was practically empty, and luckily there was no one he knew, because he didn’t want to talk to anybody. The driver started the engine, and the bus began to pull away. He heard a shout and looked out to see a head with dark hair flying; too late, the bus was gaining on it. Stefan jumped up and ran forward.
Outside Judy saw the bus, incredibly, slow down again and stop. The door slid open to reveal Stefan, with an enormous grin on his face.
“You run pretty fast. Is William coming?”
“He’s a bit behind. Can we wait?”
Stefan said a few words to the driver, who shrugged and nodded. The last bus, a winter night; of course he could wait.
William struggled up after a while. He was no slouch, lean as whippet and surprisingly tough considering his diet of bread and butter and his objection to vegetables, but his collection weighed a lot.
At last they were perched in a row on the back seat, Judy and William still breathless and gasping.
“It is good that you have changed your mind. Farmor will be glad,” he said.
“Are you sure?” asked Judy.
“Yes.” Stefan paused for moment. “I also.”
“But we didn’t change our minds,” said William. “Mr Balderson went away and left us here. We had to come.”
Judy sighed inwardly as she saw Stefan absorb this information. William went on, “But I’m very glad, because I can talk to the man at the museum now and I can tell Farmor about the key and here there’s no school.”
Stefan turned to William and punched him gently on the shoulder.
“And I still have my workmate.”
Judy had been looking for the right words. She said, “Stefan, I … I didn’t really…” She tried again. “There wasn’t anything else to do, except go.”
“You mean you wished to stay?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you not tell me in the café?”
“How could I? It would have been … after all you’ve done … presumptuous.”
“What is that?” Stefan was smiling.
“Um … forward.”
“Forward? So instead you were backward.”
“You could say that, I suppose.”
“I do say that.”
After a while, Stefan said,
“Mr Balderson sees with his soul. He is not backward. He makes you do what you want to do.”
It was already late evening when the bus left them outside the village store. It was so late there was no one about. They stood and watched the tail lights get smaller and smaller until Stefan turned to Judy and William, saying, “Come with me, please.”
They followed him up a side street and quickly came to the edge of the village proper, where the houses gave way to fields, then turned up a track that led off between granite gateposts and towards a two-storeyed timbered house with a huge old barn attached to the gable-end. In winters past, the inhabitants could walk through and tend to their animals without going out of doors at all. There were several big outhouses – it was almost a little village in itself, and had clearly been the home of farming nobility at one time.
“Stefan, where are we going?”
“I would sleep here tonight, and go home with the postman tomorrow. You will stay here too.”
“But—”
“Please do not be backward, Judy. There is plenty of room. It is a big house.”
They ascended wooden steps to a wide roofed porch. Above the carved and panelled door was a huge pair of elk antlers. Stefan called out briefly, and – in a way that was now familiar to Judy and William – walked straight in. They followed, and found themselves in a hallway that seemed not to have changed much in the last hundred years, with broad wooden floorboards, half-panelling on the walls, and a tallboy that was the worse for wear. A staircase swept up in an elegant curve to the upper floor, and a door leading off the hall opened, with a boy of about Stefan’s age, stocky, with dark hair and long arms, emerging from it. Judy swallowed. It was Karl.
Stefan launched into a speech that for him was pretty long. He spoke – deliberately Judy guessed – in broad dialect. It was practically another language from the simple words she had learnt; she understood nothing. When he was finished, Karl nodded. He turned and led the way up the staircase.
There was an upper hall, with doors leading off it in two directions, and Karl opened one of them and turned on the light. There was nothing much to see. The roof slanted, they were almost under the eaves, and on the floor was a pile of fleeces. There was even, Judy found out later, a bearskin and an extremely old wolfskin rug, which had been thrown over the knees of Karl’s great-grandmother when she rode in her trap to church. The room was unheated.
Stefan and Karl stood talking in low voices while William and Judy were making themselves comfortable.
Stefan went over to Judy.
“Karl says he is sorry it is not the proper guest room. He can’t—”
“It’s all right. I know what he thinks about me.”
Stefan replied in a low voice that was so hard and fierce that Judy was shocked.
“You do not know. You know nothing. You are my friend, he knows who you are, you are here, you are a guest. He has seen you fight, he has seen you laugh. If you fall down he will pick you up. But his grandfather is an old hard man, with a hard hand, sitting downstairs in the kitchen. Some time you must think how it is to be Karl.”
It was true. She had made her mind up on that bridge and done exactly what she blamed others for. Made him one of “them” without knowing anything about him. She walked over to Karl who was standing in the doorway and chewing his lip. She held out her hand and said, in her best Swedish,
“Thank you, we will be very comfortable here.”
Stefan was beside her again.
“There is something more Karl said. It is important, I think. Karl says someone was looking for you in the village earlier this evening. Anna told him, she works sometimes in the café.”
“Looking for me?” Judy’s first thought was that Mr Balderson had returned for some reason. But everybody knew him. He wasn’t “somebody”. And he knew where she would be.
“He knew your name. He asked about you.”
“But it’s impossible.” Suddenly a wave of mad hope swept over Judy. Had he found her? Had her father somehow, by some miracle, found her?
She turned breathlessly to Karl,
“Please tell me, where is he now, what did he look like?”
Stefan translated, listened to Karl’s reply.
“He was foreign, speaking English, he had a little car.”
Then a wild thought struck her.
“Was it blue? What was the number plate? Was it 377?”
Karl looked apologetic when Stefan translated this. He explained that Anna had not told him so very much. He could ask her tomorrow. But the man had been quite short, and he had a limp.
The Unexpected Find Page 16