The Moscow Sleepers

18

It was Saturday afternoon and Dieter was at home by himself. Even though he knew that Irma would be gone for at least another hour he was keeping an anxious ear out for the sound of her key in the front door. She was leading a day retreat for the teachers of the Freitang at the school itself – no off-site away days for Irma, he reflected with a thin smile. Her familiar parsimony would ensure a meagre lunch of sandwiches prepared by the kitchen staff, pressed, reluctantly, into weekend service.

He felt extremely uneasy snooping around his wife’s study, though he knew it was the only way he would discover whether his growing suspicions were justified. His colleague and now confidante Matilda in Brussels had been very reassuring when he’d explained his worries; he had felt immense relief that she hadn’t dismissed his concern or thought him a fantasist. On the contrary, she had listened with interest, and the next day had raised the subject again herself.

‘You know, Dieter,’ she’d said during their coffee break in the canteen, ‘I’m sure Irma isn’t doing anything wrong. But there can’t be any harm in finding out for sure; it would put your mind at rest. And who knows? Perhaps she’s got involved in something without realising it. Perhaps she’s being taken advantage of.’

Knowing Irma as he did, the chances of her being victimised were remote, but he took Matilda’s point that knowing what was going on would reduce his anxiety. The difficulty was there was only one way he could think of to find out more about Irma and the Freitang school – search the filing cabinet in her study upstairs at home.

The cabinet was always locked but that was not actually a problem. The year before both Irma and their housekeeper had come down with flu, and the cleaning had fallen to him. One weekend he had set about vacuuming and dusting. He had found it not only a boring chore but also rather more complicated than he had thought. In his efforts to hoover the cluttered floor of Irma’s study to her high standards, he had managed to wedge the vacuum’s nozzle between the back of the filing cabinet and the wall. Hard as he pulled, it wouldn’t budge. At last he had turned off the vacuum, then edged the filing cabinet away from the wall by a couple of inches, freeing the nozzle. It was then he saw the small key taped to its steel back. Trying the key in the lock of the cabinet, he found it turned easily, and it was with a mixture of apprehension and private delight at discovering the hidden key that he re-taped it to the filing cabinet, before shoving the cabinet back in place.

So the problem wasn’t access to the cabinet, though previously he would never have dreamed of using the key to look at the contents. He couldn’t imagine what Irma would say or do to him if she ever found out he had looked inside.

Now as he turned the key and gingerly pulled open the top drawer, he found his hands were shaking. He stared nervously at the neat line of file pockets hanging on the rails, each individually tagged with tabs inscribed in the dark Gothic hand Irma favoured.

Each pocket contained several files in buff-coloured folders. They all concerned the Freitang school. One folder contained a set of minutes of governors’ meetings; another seemed to be accounts going back several years. There was a pocket of files containing annual performance reports on teachers and other staff members. Further back in the top drawer were files containing papers about various pupils. They looked like reports of interviews with the children detailing how they had come to be in Germany, their journey from their homeland and what their family circumstances were. They were all orphans, their parents having died before they set off or disappeared somewhere on the journey. To each report was attached the results of an intelligence test and what looked like some sort of technical aptitude test. The only remarkable thing was that the marks were all very high. As Dieter knew that the school specialised in computer studies, he assumed that the tests were part of some sort of selection process. It all looked much as you might expect.

He opened the drawer below it, and to his surprise found it virtually empty. The first few files inside contained articles from education magazines on teaching German to foreigners and others concerning trauma among orphaned children. There were some papers about post-traumatic stress among refugees and others along similar lines. It wasn’t until he came to the last few files that his interest was aroused. In a folder he found a brochure from the University of Vermont and attached to it some correspondence dated the previous April about a group of children from the Freitang school who were to visit for the summer school in computing studies. On a separate paper was a list of names alongside dates of birth and nationalities. They all seemed to be fifteen or sixteen years old, though he noticed one who was older – nineteen.

The file behind this one contained a brochure from a school in England, the Bartholomew Manor College, near Southwold, Suffolk. There was a picture on the front of a grand house in what appeared to be extensive grounds. He took it out and flicked through it. The school was for children from thirteen to eighteen. It called itself an ‘international’ school, and claimed to specialise in preparing children for entry to the top universities of the world with a special focus on modern technology. Though he didn’t have much experience of international schools, the fees seemed very high to Dieter and he wondered why Irma should be interested in their prospectus.

He was puzzling over this, turning the pages of the glossy brochure looking for an explanation, when he heard the front door close loudly. Christ! He had lost all track of time. He stuffed the brochure back into the file and the file back into the metal cabinet, then closed the drawer as quickly and quietly as he could, turned the key still sticking out of the lock and pocketed it, shoving the cabinet back against the wall.

He had just got things back in place when he heard Irma coming up the stairs; he looked around wildly, trying to control his panic. He grabbed a book from the bookshelves and sat down heavily in the room’s only armchair, doing his best to breathe normally.

‘Dieter,’ Irma called out as she came down the corridor and stopped at the bedroom door. Not finding him there, the footsteps restarted, until they reached the doorway of the study, where Irma saw him apparently sitting quietly, engrossed in a chapter of Buddenbrooks, a book he had read at school and not enjoyed.

‘What are you doing?’ Irma demanded as he looked up from his book, trying to stay calm.

‘What does it look like?’ he said with a broad smile, holding the book up.

‘You never read in here,’ she said accusingly.

‘Sometimes I do,’ he said weakly. ‘When you’re out.’

She stared at him for a second, seeming to weigh things up. Then she snorted. ‘Honestly, Dieter, if you want to sit in my study you only have to ask.’ But he could see there was suspicion in her eyes – as if, like him, she had seized on something plausible to say, something at odds with what she was really thinking.