Kolymsky Heights (40 page)

But there had been an attachment.

Medical Officer Komarova was now sick of the Kolymsky region.

From the Chief of Militia she heard that the villain was likely dead. Not certain – Irkutsk hadn’t yet deigned to tell him – but there were rumours, and it was
likely
.

Through the winter she had observed her mother failing. And from the Evenks she knew that Tcherny Vodi’s Director (so a grieving Stepanka said)
had
failed; her beloved Misha-Bisha. Soon only unhappy memories would remain in this place, and she thought it well to look for another.

In June, barely spring at Tchersky, she flew west and found summer. The Karelskaya region needed a medical officer, district of Lake Ladoga; interview St Petersburg. She had trained in Petersburg, knew the remote area where services were required. It had many attractions, chief among them distance – 6000 kilometres of distance – from the Kolymsky region.

A room had been booked for her, and in it she took out her ring. She hadn’t worn it in Tchersky, and now she examined it again.

As our love the circle has no end
…

She tried it on her third finger but it was too small and she slipped it on the little one and slept with it.

In the morning she was out early, before seven, restless in the big city. Her interview wasn’t until eleven, and she walked for hours.

In the Nevsky Prospekt, still only a quarter past ten, she looked, into a bookshop and wandered round it and was in the foreign section; and suddenly, almost fainting, she saw him. Saw his face. On the back of a book. She picked it up.

J-B PORTER.
The Inuit: Life & Legend
.

The book was new, there were three copies, face down, somewhat dusty from unpacking, and an irritable assistant snatched the one from her hand, and pencilled a price inside, and in the other two, and wiped them, and left them right way up.

There was nowhere to sit and she could hardly stand. She leaned against a wall and looked at the book again. The flyleaf said it was the author’s latest and most significant contribution to a field already illuminated by his powerful …

The English words blurred before her eyes but she read on.

In his completion of earlier studies Dr Porter had provided the definitive account … his text supplying in particular all known versions of the reverse-narrative technique of this supposedly unsophisticated people …

And not only the text, she saw, turning a page. There was a one-line dedication: To ahsib ahsim & aynap aynat.

She stopped twisting her ring and wiped her eyes, and tried it again. Right to left. Yes. Yes. But the price of the book, rouble-pencilled, was astronomically beyond her and she left, stumbling out into daylight.

And three months later, her mother at last laid to rest in the small cemetery at Panarovka, she left the Kolymsky region for good; her new posting noted by all relevant medical authorities; and also by Langley.

Three months more, settled but melancholy in the Karelskaya region, she returned one day from a trip, and looked briefly through the mail that lay open on her desk. One envelope was not opened, and she paused over it. A long business envelope, the address handwritten. And unopened, evidently, because it was marked Private. The postmark read St Petersburg. She knew few people in Petersburg, and didn’t
recognise this hand at all. She opened the envelope, and at first could make no sense of the contents. A slim sheaf, bearing the logo
Aeroflot
. A flight ticket. She had booked no flight ticket. A mistake, obviously. But stapled to the cover of the ticket, an immigration department slip; and on the slip her name and passport number, all correct. Inside, the ticket was undated, an open flight: the destination, Montreal. No note came with the ticket, no explanation at all. She opened the envelope wider, and at the bottom saw it, a tiny slip of cigarette paper. A single line of writing was on it, somewhat irregular, but the Russian quite legible:
As our love the circle has no end
.

All year, with its many losses, she had remained on the whole dry-eyed. But now, the slip of paper shaking in her hand, she stared about her and found her face in a wall mirror, and saw it begin to disintegrate there. For now they came. In the end, tears. In such streams, such floods, that it was hard to tell, in the distorted image, if the face was laughing or crying; and to the assistant who hurried into the room, alarmed at the noise, it seemed, weirdly, that the medical officer was doing both.

Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull, Yorkshire. He left school early and worked as a reporter before serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His first novel,
The Night of Wenceslas
, was published in 1960 to great critical acclaim and drew comparisons to Graham Greene and John le Carré. It was followed by
The Rose of Tibet
(1962),
A Long Way to Shiloh
(1966) and
The Chelsea Murders
(1978). He has thrice been the recipient of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and, in 2001, was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger lifetime achievement award.

This ebook edition first published in 2009
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA

All rights reserved
Copyright © Lionel Davidson, 1994

The right of Lionel Davidson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–25301–2 [epub edition]