A Killing Winter by Tom Callaghan Page B

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.

Chapter 13
    Itwas 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, asif 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