'We're gonna need a tow.' O'Brian gave the side of the Toyota a gloomy kick. 'Heap of junk.'
He held on to the car for support and edged round to the back, opened it up and pulled out a couple of pairs of boots, one of green rubber, the other of leather, high-sided, army-issue. He threw the rubber boots to Kelso. 'Get these on,' he said. 'Let's go parley with the natives.
Five minutes later, their hoods up, the car locked, and each with a pair of binoculars hung round his neck, they set off down the track.
The settlement had been abandoned for at least a couple of years. The handful of wooden shacks had been ransacked. Rubbish poked through the snow - rusting sheets of corrugated tin roofing, shattered window frames, rotting planks, a torn fishing net, bottles, tin cans, a holed rowing boat, bits of machinery, ripped sacking and, bizarrely, a row of cinema seats. A timber-framed greenhouse fitted with polythene instead of glass had blown over on to its side.
Kelso ducked his head into one of the derelict buildings. It was roofless, freezing. It stank of animal excreta.
As he came out O'Brian caught his eye and shrugged.
Kelso stared towards the edge of the clearing. 'What's that over there?'
Both men raised their binoculars and trained them on what appeared to be a row of wooden crosses, half-hidden by the trees - Russian crosses, with three pairs of arms: short at the top, longer in the centre, and slanted downwards, left to right, at the bottom.
'Oh, that's marvellous,' said Kelso, trying to laugh. 'A cemetery. That's bloody perfect.'
'Let's take a look,' said O'Brian.
He set off eagerly with long, determined strides. Kelso, more reluctant, followed as best he could. Twenty years of cigarettes and Scotch seemed to have convened a protest meeting in his heart and lungs. He was sweating with the effort of moving through the snow. He had a pain in his side.
It was a cemetery right enough, sheltered by the trees, and as they came closer he could see six - or was it eight? - graves, arranged in twos, with a little wooden fence around each pair. The crosses were home-made but well done, with white enamel name-plates and small photographs covered in glass, in the traditional Russian manner. A. I. Sumbatov, read the first one, 22.1.20 - 9.8.81. The picture showed a man, in middle age, in uniform. Next to him was P J. Sumbatova, 61.2.26 - 14.11.92. She, too, was in uniform: a heavy-faced woman with a severe central parting. Next to them were tk~e Yezhovs. And next to the Yezhovs, the Golubs. They were married couples, all about the same age. They were all in uniform. T. Y Golub had been the first to die, in 1961. It was impossible to see his face. It had been scratched out.
'This must be the place,' said O'Brian, quietly. 'No question. This is it. Who are they all, Fluke? Army?'
'No.' Kelso shook his head slowly. 'The uniform is NKVD, I think. And here, look. Look at this.'
It was the final pair of graves, the ones furthest from the clearing, set slightly apart from the others. They had been the last survivors. B. D. Chizhikov - a major, by the look of his insignia - 19.2.19 - 9.3.96 And next to him M G. C'hizhikova, 16.4.24 – 16.3.96 She had outlasted her husband by exactly one week. Her face was also obliterated.
They stood like mourners for a while: silent, their heads bowed.
'And then there were none,' murmured O'Brian.
'Or one.’
'I don't think so. No way. This place has been empty quite a while. Shit,' he said suddenly, and took a kick at the snow, 'would you believe it, after all that? We missed him?'
The trees were thick here. It was impossible to see beyond a few dozen yards.
O'Brian said, 'I'd better get a shot of this while it's light. You wait here. I'll go back to the car.'
'Oh, great,' said Kelso. 'Thank you.'
'Scared, Fluke?'
'What do you think?'
'Whoo,' said O'Brian. He raised his arms and fluttered his fingers above his head.
'If you try playing any jokes, O'Brian, I'm warning you, I'll kill you.
'Ho ho ho,' said O'Brian, moving away towards the track. 'Ho ho ho.' He disappeared beyond the trees. Kelso heard his stupid laugh for a few more seconds and then there was silence -just the rustle of the snow and the sound of his own breathing.
My God, what a set-up this was, just look at these dates: they were a story in themselves. He walked back to the first grave, pulled off his gloves, took out his notebook. Then he went down on one knee and began to copy the details from the crosses. An entire troop of bodyguards had been dispatched into the forest more than forty years earlier to protect one solitary baby boy, and all of them had stuck it out, had stayed at their posts, out of loyalty or habit or fear, until eventually they had dropped down dead, one after another. They were like those Japanese soldiers who stayed hidden in the jungle, unaware that the war was over.
He began to wonder how close Mikhail Safanov might have managed to get in the spring of 1953, and then he consciously abandoned this line of thought. It didn't bear contemplating - not yet; not here.
It was hard to hold the pencil between his cold fingers, and difficult to write as the snowflakes settled across the page. Still, he worked his way along to the final crosses.
'B. D. Chizhikov,' he wrote. 'Tough-looking, brutal/ace. Dark-skinned A Georgian?? Died aged 77...'
He wondered what Comrades Golub and Chizhikova might have looked like, and who had blacked out their faces, and why. There was something infinitely sinister about their featureless silhouettes. He found himself writing, 'Could they have been purged?'
Oh, where the hell was O'Brian?
His back was aching. His knees were wet. He stood an4 another thought occurred to him. He brushed the page clear of snow again and licked the end of his pencil.
'The graves are all well kept,' he wrote, 'plots appear to be weeded. If this p/ace is abandoned, like the buildings, shouldn't they have grown over?'
'O'Brian?' he called. 'R. J.?'
The snow deadened his shout.
He put away the notebook and began walking quickly away from the cemetery, pulling on his gloves. The wind stirred in the abandoned buildings ahead of him, catching the snow and lifting it here and there like the corner of a curtain. He picked his way across the ground, following O'Brian's large footprints until he came to the start of the track. The prints led off clearly in the direction of the Toyota. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and twisted the focus. The stricken car filled his vision, so still and distant it seemed unreal. There was no sign of anyone around it.
Odd.
He turned round very slowly, a complete 360 degrees, scanning through the binoculars. Forest. Tumbled walls and wreckage. Forest. Graves. Forest. Track. Toyota. Forest again.
He lowered the binoculars, frowning, then began walking towards the car, still following O'Brian's trail. It took him a couple of minutes. Nobody else had been this way in the snow, that much was obvious: there were two pairs of tracks heading up to the clearing and one pair heading back. He approached the car and, by lengthening his stride and planting his feet in the prints of the bigger man, he was able to retrace O'Brian's movements exactly: so and so.. . and... so...
Kelso stopped, arms outstretched, wobbling. The American had definitely come this way, round to the back of the Toyota, had taken out the metal camera case - it was missing, he could see - and then it looked as though something had distracted him, because instead of heading back up the track to the settlement his footprints turned sharply and led directly away from the vehicle, at a right angle, straight into the forest.
He called O'Brian's name, softly. And then, in a spasm of panic, he cupped his hands and bellowed it as loud as he could.
Again, that same curious deadening effect, as if the trees were swallowing his words.
Cautiously, he stepped into the undergrowth.
Oh, but he had always hated forests, hadn't he? Hated even the woodland around Oxford, with its poetic shafts of dusty bloody sunlight, and its mossy vegetation, and the way things suddenly flew up at you or rustled away! And branches slapping back into your face.. . Sorry, so~... Oh yes, give him a wide open space any day. Give him a hill. Give him a cliff-top. Give him the sparkling sea!