Beyond the Dark Water

Uppsala, March 1962. A car has stood in the street outside the Aule family's door for seventeen days, and Liina has counted every one of them without telling anyone.Eighteen years earlier they crossed the Baltic in the dark with borrowed papers. They have been safe since. Now a file that has lain still since 1949 has been reopened, and the safety turns out to have been a filing decision rather than a fact.What follows is not a hunt. It is a security check that suspends a son from his work and is never completed. Two entries in a father's papers that do not agree, and a question nobody had to answer until somebody asked it. A hand laid on a daughter's handlebar by the river, in daylight, by a man who breaks no law. Four intelligence services that all want the same quiet watchmaker, and one of them prepared to wait. Five steamship tickets, a chest X-ray, and a letter to a friend in Tartu that will be read by a stranger before it is read by her.A novel about what a state can do to a family without ever raising its voice, and about what it costs to be the one who stays.Book Two of The Dark Water.