“You have to change in Kazan,” he explained. “Just show the Kazan tickets for now so no one realizes you are planning to go further.”

“It’s like we’re secret agents,” Nicole whispered to Val.

She put her finger to her lips. They had to keep quiet anywhere they might be overheard.

At the barrier, a guard eyed them with suspicion. Bill spoke to him in Russian as he checked their tickets, answering the questions that were barked at him without hesitation. Val held her breath until they were waved through. They found seats in a compartment on their own and watched out the window as the train pulled out.

The first part of the journey felt interminable: eight hundred miles of fields, mountains, factories, and drab towns. Val had brought coloring books and board games to entertain Nicole, but soon she was irritable with the sheer tedium.

“I don’t like Russia,” she said. “It’s a country for old people.”

“I’m sorry,” Bill told her. “I promise you’ll like Leningrad. It’s full of pretty palaces where princesses used to live.”

“Princesses are for kids,” Nicole said scornfully, clearly believing that at the age of almost eight she was too grown up for such things.

Eleven and a half hours later, they pulled into Kazan in the late evening. Nicole was sound asleep and had to be wakened as they wandered the station looking for their onward train. There were several sitting at platforms but none had their lights turned on. Bill went to question a guard and came back shaking his head.

“I can’t believe it. There are no trains to Ekaterinburg till tomorrow afternoon, but there’s a bus outside that leaves in an hour. I suppose we will have to take that.”

Val felt a lurch of anxiety. “Is it safe? Should we not give up and go back to Moscow?” She had visions of them all being arrested by the KGB, then interrogated in separate cells.

“Bus is probably safer than train,” Bill said. “There is just one driver, and no guards asking for ID. We’ve come this far, it would be a shame to turn back.”

The seats on the bus were cramped and uncushioned, and once the sun rose in the morning, the atmosphere was stifling and airless. On and on they trundled, stopping in small towns along the route. Val and Nicole could not risk speaking even in a whisper so they wrote notes to each other: “I’m thirsty”; “What time is it?”; “How much longer can it be?” Val had a tight knot of anxiety. This was her idea and it had been a crazy one; she hadn’t realized quite how long it would take, and how uncomfortable the journey would be, or she would never have suggested it.