A Killing Winter

Chapter 12

Otkur told me the story, leaving out no details, his voice calm, measured, but with anger apparent in his eyes.

Her name was Umida Boronova. Nineteen years old, married just ten months, to Omurbek Boronov. He’d been at school with her, and had asked her out repeatedly, always being refused, unable to stop hoping. So one evening, he and his best friend drank a litre of home-made for courage, drove his battered Moskvitch to the edge of the village, waited for two hours until Umida appeared.

They grabbed her, screaming and kicking, and drove to Omurbek’s house, where his mother and three sisters were waiting. The women helped Omurbek wrestle the girl out of the car, and dragged her into the single-storey house with the whitewashed walls and pale blue window frames. All evening, they told her what a good catch Omurbek was, how he’d inherit the farm when his father died, about his kindness to his sisters, his respect for his mother and aunts. All the time, Omurbek waited outside in the car, finishing off a second bottle and wondering if the scratches on his face would leave a permanent scar.

Umida fought, wept, begged the women to let her go home. Again and again, they told her how lucky she was, tried to put the white scarf over her hair to show her acceptance of Omurbek as her husband. They pointed out the fine china, the white linen, the elaborate brass samovar. And finally, worn down, terrified, wanting nothing more than her ordeal to end, Umida agreed.

And now, a year later, she’d faced something much worse. Missing for two days. The whole village turning out to look for her, knowing that an eight-months-pregnant woman out in a Kyrgyz winter stood no chance of surviving the night. Then the finding of her body, face down in a snowdrift, already half shrouded, arms and legs frozen into position. Lifting up the body, hearing her fingers snap like twigs, blood half frozen into a thick black puddle beneath her, squelching like a boot being pulled out from thick mud. And then seeing the belly sliced open, the gaping wound and absence, the placenta torn, amniotic fluid spilling out in a grotesque imitation of birth.

Even before the police were called, the word reached Otkur. An important man, a chelovek who could organise the hunt, track down the killer, bring him back to the village to face a justice more determined and brutal than anything a cynical uniform would hand out.

‘Can you find out if she’d seen a doctor? Maybe her blood group is on file?’ I suggested, knowing that it was unlikely. Umida was a poor girl from a poor village, with no money for doctors; her mother and the old women would have cared for her during her pregnancy. If you die in childbirth in this part of the world, that’s just how it is.

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.