‘Is the doctor with you?’ said Medievsky.
‘He’s just had a bit of hypo,’ said Purkiss. The blood was seeping past the makeshift bandage around Haglund’s hand and dripping onto the tiled floor, guttering in the grouting. Haglund’s face was tight.
Keys appeared behind Purkiss. ‘What’s the problem?’
Purkiss turned. The doctor appeared ashen and a muscle in his cheek was twitching, but he’d composed himself to a remarkable extent.
‘Bloody hell, Haglund.’ Keys shouldered Purkiss aside and reached for a pack of surgical gloves, peering at the bloody hand.
‘I cut it on a piece of metal from the snowmobile,’ muttered Haglund, staring at Purkiss as though he was responsible.
Purkiss watched as Keys urged Haglund over to the nearest bed and got him to sit on it. Carefully he peeled back the sodden wrapping, unleashing a thick slash of semi-coagulated blood.
Keys looked over his shoulder at Purkiss. ‘Out.’
Purkiss nodded and made his exit. He’d collect his recording equipment later; it was for show, in any case.
He headed down the corridor with the sense that he’d just tossed a match onto a petrol slick.
Ten
‘Do you know, Mr Farmer, of the Road of Bones?’
Oleksandra Budian stood before the huge wall map of the region, Purkiss at her side. She’d suggested they conduct her interview in the laboratory, as it wasn’t currently in use, and because, as she put it, she was more herself there than anywhere else.
‘The Kolyma Highway,’ said Purkiss. ‘Built by Gulag inmates during the Stalin era.’
She reached up and traced an uneven line in the upper right quadrant of the map with her finger. ‘More precisely, it is this section of the highway, between Khandyga and Magadan. As you say, built by the labour of slaves, over twenty years. Their bodies were buried under the road, hence the name.’ After a few seconds’ pause: ‘My grandfather was one of Stalin’s slaves. Imprisoned in the Gulag in 1940. My grandmother never discovered which camp, or the exact date of his death. One day he was dragged from their apartment at three o’clock in the morning. The next thing she heard, two years later, he had died in the camp.’ Again she traced the course of the highway. ‘His bones are part of the road. I know it.’
Purkiss had been on his way back to the living room when he’d encountered Budian in the corridor. She’d gazed up at him through her owl glasses and said, ‘You wish to interview me, now?’ and Purkiss had thought: why not. He needed, after all, to conduct some further interviews to obscure the fact that he’d singled Keys out.
Budian had been an engaging interviewee, perched on the stool at the lab bench and talking lucidly about the work she conducted. She made the minutiae of soil sample analysis sound like the juiciest gossip. Despite himself, despite the torrent of thought and emotion the episode with Keys had triggered within him, Purkiss found himself utterly absorbed in Budian’s lecture, which was what it amounted to.
Gradually he’d segued into questions about her background. She was a former head of department at Moscow University — but I belonged here on the ground, not up there in the towers of ivory, she told him clumsily — and had even presented a brief but popular science programme on Russian state television nine years earlier. At the end, unasked, she’d shown him round the lab, describing the workings of the various pieces of equipment, and the projects she and Medievsky were engaged in, with a quiet, passionate reverence.
Their tour of the laboratory reached the wall map. Purkiss had viewed it briefly when he’d accompanied Avner that morning, but now he studied it at leisure. It was difficult to orientate himself, and he had to ask Budian for guidance.
‘Here is Yarkovsky Station,’ she murmured, pointing. ‘And here, three hundred kilometres south by south-east, Yakutsk. The closest city.’
It was then that she spoke of the Road of Bones.
Purkiss peered at an area to the north-west of Yarkovsky Station. ‘What’s that?’
‘Nekropolis.’
‘Yes.’
Unusually, Budian smiled. ‘Ah. A mythological place. It is a graveyard, as its name indicates. But not for human beings, unlike the Road of Bones.’
‘For what, then?’ said Purkiss. ‘Wildlife?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Mammoths. You know them?’
‘Yes. Extinct ancestors of elephants.’
Budian slipped smoothly back into lecturer mode. ‘In 1979, an oil-drilling operation discovered quite by chance a collection of mammoth fossils at this site. Exquisitely preserved specimens dating back to the early Holocene Epoch, approximately nine thousand years. An enormous amount was learned about these creatures in the following decade, from the findings at Nekropolis.’
‘Is it still a research site?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was closed down in 1988. The Soviet Union had run out of money, and could not afford luxuries such as sustaining a facility to excavate fossils.’
Odd, thought Purkiss. That had been the era of glasnost, when Gorbachev was reaching out to the West. What better way of fostering relations than to embrace scientific cooperation? The US or Europe would have jumped at the opportunity to fund such an endeavour.
‘But why hasn’t it been revived?’ Purkiss asked. ‘Now that Russia’s rich again.’
Budian continued to gaze at the map. ‘I do not know.’
She pointed out further areas of note in the vicinity, geographical features which weren’t immediately obvious. Purkiss was struck once more by how utterly remote Yarkovsky Station was, how far removed from any other centre of human habitation, even small ones.
‘Here are our closest neighbours,’ Budian said, indicating a point due north of the station. ‘Saburov-Kennedy Station. One hundred and thirty-six kilometres of tundra separating us.’
Purkiss sensed their meeting was coming to a natural end. ‘Dr Budian — Oleksandra — you’ve been an excellent interviewee. I greatly appreciate it.’
She shook his hand formally, a nod taking the place of a smile. ‘I hope you leave Yarkovsky Station with what you came for, John.’
Purkiss retired to his room half an hour later, finding nobody else about and deciding not to seek them out actively. He locked the door behind him.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he allowed his mind to sort through the facts, and separate them from impressions and speculation.
Keys was a heroin addict, and at least one other person at the station knew about it. Could that be Wyatt? If so, what would his motivation be in not disclosing Keys’s problem to Medievsky? On the other hand, why would he tell anyone? Whatever Wyatt was doing at the station — and Purkiss was no closer to knowing what it was — he wouldn’t be overly concerned with the safety of its staff. He might judge that it was no concern of his if the resident medic was a junkie.
But if that was the case, why was Keys so desperate to pretend to Purkiss that nobody else knew about his addiction? No. Whoever it was that knew about Keys — perhaps Wyatt, perhaps not — they were using it as leverage over the doctor. Purkiss was certain of it.
He allowed his thoughts to range freely. What could a blackmailer want from Dr Keys? Money was the obvious answer. Drugs was another.
The third was: silence. Keys knew something, maybe, and was under pressure to keep his mouth shut.
Assuming the last was correct, Purkiss would have to find a way to loosen Keys’s tongue.