Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Otkur shrugged, walked away a little, made a call. When he turned back, it was to shake his head. There was no easy way to find out if the dead child in the Bishkek morgue was Umida’s foetus.

I called Usupov, telling him to liaise with the local authorities, to drop Tynaliev’s name into the conversation, terrify the police into action. We were a long way from Bishkek, but not as far as Tynaliev’s reach.

‘If you find the man who did this, call me. I’ll make it worth your while,’ Otkur said. So now the Head of State Security and the boss of the Uighur mafia were both after the same man. I would have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t been the one stuck in the middle, with both sides ready to look for a scapegoat if the killer wasn’t found.

There was no point going to look at the woman’s body. The local custom is to bury someone as soon as possible, and I didn’t need to offend any more people by suggesting an exhumation. The effort of digging a grave in weather like this would have been immense; lighting a bonfire on the hard earth, raking it back to scrape away a few inches, then starting all over again. And the cold would keep the body preserved until the spring thaw; time enough to get someone else to dig her up, if necessary.

I thought of Chinara, just a few miles away, and winced at the thought of a carelessly handled spade smashing through her cheekbones, or severing the one breast that remained.

Otkur went back to his car, got into the back seat. His thugs climbed into the front, their Makarovs still vaguely pointed in our direction. A snake of dirty blue exhaust smoke plumed upwards. The number plates were smeared with mud and unreadable; Otkur took no chances.

‘What do you think?’ Kursan asked as we got into our own car. He started the engine and turned the heater up, but it had minimal effect.

‘The business about harvesting foetuses for traditional medicine? You ever hear of anything like that?’

Kursan opened his door and spat.

‘The slants? Those fuckers will eat anything. I don’t put anything past them.’

‘It’s a clever theory, but I don’t believe it.’

‘No?’

Kursan turned to me, interested.

‘We’ve got one dead child. And no one would have known whether it was a boy or a girl until after the… harvesting. One baby boy isn’t going to build you an international illegal drug empire, is it?’

Kursan muttered something about his dick being big enough to stiffen the resolve of the entire Chinese nation. I ignored his bravado and looked out of my window. The snow was falling faster now; our footprints were hardly visible. Maybe there were more dead children out there, harvested and then discarded, open mouths silently screaming as they filled with snowflakes. It was a terrible thought.

‘Kursan, let’s fuck off out of here before we end up being found in the spring.’

It was too far for us to drive back to Bishkek, but Kursan knew a woman in Karakol who’d happily give him a bed for the night.

‘Listen, and you might pick up a few hints,’ he grinned. The idea of listening to Kursan’s sex life didn’t fill me with relish. But if we didn’t get out of this cold, the only thing that would get stiff was us. Kursan set off down the rutted track.

‘No blindfold?’ I asked.

‘Weather like this, you’d never find this place again. Why I chose it. No distinguishing features.’

Unlike the two dead women that I knew about, I told myself, and closed my eyes against the glare of the headlights reflected off the falling snow.

It was a long drive back to Bishkek the next day, but the snow had stopped, and the light was dazzlingly bright, splashing off the Celestial Mountains over on the far side of Lake Issyk-Kul. I’d spent the night dozing on a shyrdak carpet while Kursan drove some elderly lady to vocal heights of delight in the room across the hall. The daylight might have been clear, about the only thing in this case that was. For a moment, I wondered why I put myself through the shit of trying to improve a world beyond redemption or relief. Then I remembered Yekaterina Mikhailovna, forever without a child of her own, snowflakes settling on her upturned face, her belly opened to an indifferent world. Her father, sitting behind a walnut desk that no longer had any grandeur, nor the power to bring his daughter back, cognac after cognac failing to blur the memory of her frozen face on the morgue slab. And fast following, like an autumn storm battling across the Tien Shan Mountains, I thought of Chinara and her last dreadful days in hospital, soiling the bed linen I carried in to replace the hospital’s threadbare sheets, recalling the soup and lepeshka flat bread I took every day that she was too weak to eat.

Towards the end, as she asked, I brought the embroidered cushion that her grandmother had made as a wedding gift for us, the vivid colours and traditional pattern a dramatic splash against the white sheets and Chinara’s equally pale face. She would run her fingers over the intricate needlework, as if tracing our history together, tentative, the way a child or a blind man touches an unfamiliar face. It seemed to offer a comfort I was unable to provide.

Every day of her final week, I held her hand, hoping she would squeeze mine, show that she knew I was there, that she recognised me.

That she loved me, remembered me, even as she slid from her life into my memory.

It crossed my mind to find the killer, watch his brains turn to fine red mist from a bullet in the back of his head, then turn the gun on myself, put an end to all this. But there’ll be other Yekaterinas, other Chinaras, other unnamed children. And if I’m dead, who is there left to speak for them, to fight for them?

‘You need to find yourself a woman,’ Kursan announced, unexpectedly, after an hour of silent driving. ‘It’s not good to be alone for too long.’

‘And what would you know about that? Half the children in Tokmok are probably yours.’

Kursan grinned at this compliment to his virility, then turned serious.

‘Chinara wouldn’t have wanted you to stay single. A man needs a woman, more than a woman needs a man.’

‘Enough.’

‘I’m only saying.’

‘OK, and now you’ve said.’

My temper wasn’t improved by the landscape we were passing through. On our right, empty fields stretching towards the Kazakh border; on our left, the cold slab of the lake. Dotted every few miles were the graveyards that served long-abandoned villages, the memorial stones and brick arches slowly crumbling under the assault of summer heat and winter cold. Sepia photos of babushki in headscarves and old men in black and white felt kalpaks fading under glass roundels, thin strips of weather-faded cloth flapping in the wind. Most of the graves were surrounded by railings, a small metal crescent moon at each corner. Chinara was buried in just such a place, on the outskirts of her village, on a stony outcrop overlooking the river below and the valley that stretches out before rising into the mountains separating Kyrgyzstan and China.

A peaceful place, if you chose to see it like that.

Kursan dropped me off at Sverdlovsky Station, but it was well after nine, so the Chief wouldn’t be in his office, and I’d nothing much to report anyway. A dead daughter of one of the top nomenklatura trumps a dead peasant girl from Oblast Issyk-Kul any day. The Chief wasn’t a bad cop in his time but, at his level, the only thing that counts is politics. I didn’t want a drink, but I also didn’t want to be alone. The Metro Bar was too far, and I didn’t want to go to the Kulturny, in case I met Vasily and his crew, and gave them a couple of smacks. But tiredness kicked in and I decided it was time for home, then bed. One thing about the winters here: everything stays preserved, not just the corpses. I knew that, in the morning, I’d drag myself out of bed, hope there was enough hot water for a shower and a shave, reluctantly pull on all the layers of clothing I could find, and set out once more. Or I would if I knew where to go.