Free A Killing Winter by Tom Callaghan Page A

sorts of strange medicines. Everybody knows about the belief that rhino horn cures impotence, and tiger bones help with arthritis. But that’s just the start of a long list of ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine: syrup of bile extracted three times a day from captive Asian bears, dried seahorses crushed into a powder, bitter herbs used to make tea, and who knows what else.
    I sensed Kursan was hinting at something. But although I was family, I was also
ment
, and it went against the grain to tell a cop anything. I said nothing; I’ve always known the value of patience. When he was ready to tell me, he’d talk. There was a reason why he was dragging me out towards the mountains. And so far, he was the only lead I’d got. I stared out at Lake Issyk-Kul over to my right; even this high up in the mountains, it never freezes, which is how it gets its name, ‘Warm Lake’.
    In the summer, the place is packed with holidaymakers enjoying the clear water and clean air. Expensive sanatoria are filled with Russians coming to take a health cure; the bureaucrats stay in government-owned
dachas
. By the roadside, the locals sell buckets of glistening cherries and apples pickedfresh from their gardens. Headscarved women stroll up and down the beaches selling smoked fish. You might even glimpse a two-humped Bactrian camel, trudging gloomily along the shore, a couple of screaming children on its back.
    Winter, though, that’s a different story. In the sour grey light, with the wind blasting down from the Celestial Mountains, the old stories about sacred rocks and rivers, ancient armies riding through the night, the sack of villages and the slaughter of the locals, seem only too real. The only sensible course of action is to hole up somewhere warm with a bottle of vodka and wait for the spring to stumble back in four months’ time. The Kyrgyz winter reminds us that the past is never dead, simply waiting to ambush us around the next corner.
    ‘The thing is,’ Kursan continued, ‘I know this Uighur, from Urumchi. Not a bad type, not a shithead like most of them are. We’ve managed to do a bit of business in the past. He called me up a couple of days ago, and asked if I’d heard anything about girls being shipped over the border into Bishkek. You know there’s lots of demand in Dubai, not so much in Moscow, but why would you drag someone all the way over the Tien Shan in this weather? Plenty of young bitches in Panfilov Park, if that’s what you’re after.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Well, he was a bit concerned about this woman because he said she was pregnant, long way gone, and with her time almost due, when she disappeared.’
    I began to get a very bad feeling about this.
    ‘And when you heard about the murder?’
    ‘And the baby in the belly, right, I wondered if there was a connection.’
    ‘We’re on our way to meet him?’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘A phone call might have been easier.’
    Kursan laughed at my naivety.
    ‘Get a smuggler to talk to the filth on a mobile? With State Security and the Chinese Border Police tracking every call? Sure. Nothing he’d like more than fifteen years in Bishkek Penitentiary Number One catching TB from all the lifers. Or a bullet in the back of the head, depending which side of the border they catch him.’
    ‘So where are we meeting him?’
    ‘I know where. So you don’t need to.’
    And with that, he turned his attention to driving through the blizzard, peering to see the road ahead, while I stared into the murk and gloom for any idea where the case was going.

Chapter 11
    Forthe last hour, I’d been blindfolded, at Kursan’s insistence, bouncing from side to side as the car drove over what was clearly no more than a dirt track. I was bruised, sore and pissed off. My gun was locked in the trunk, ‘to be on the safe side’.
    Finally, I sensed the car slowing to a halt. Some shouting outside, then Kursan removed my blindfold. I blinked, and looked through the windscreen. Fuck knew