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talking at all, will you?’
    I smiled with my mouth and not my eyes, and gently tapped her cheek.
    ‘Gulbara found her,’ Shairkul gabbled, face white under the caked
prosti
make-up. ‘She thought she might find some drunk up for a short time in their car, on the way home from the Blonder.’
    ‘Go on,’ I said, and tapped her cheek again to refresh her memory.
    ‘She saw the girl’s handbag. Good quality, designer. She figured there’d be money, a mobile, maybe even car keys.’
    ‘She didn’t think to be a good citizen and call us?’
    Even terrified, Shairkul smiled. We both knew that nobody does anything to help the police in this town, unless there’s something in it for them.
    ‘So Gulbara’s got a fancy new handbag. What about it?’
    ‘It’s what’s in the bag that’s important.’
    ‘And now you’ll take me to Gulbara, as long as you get your piece?’
    Shairkul nodded.
    ‘You want to get the bag sooner rather than later,
da
?’
    I couldn’t fault her logic.
    ‘We’ll go see Gulbara, and discuss it all later, OK? One hand washes the other.’
    I used my mobile to call a patrol car. When we got in, Shairkul gave an address on the far side of Osh bazaar. The patrol car’s flashing lights bounced off the hard-packed snow, the colour of blood, the colour of death.
    ‘Stop here,’ Shairkul said, ‘I don’t want police shaming me in front of my neighbours.’
    Which just about sums up how most Kyrgyz, decent or otherwise, feel about us.
    ‘You didn’t say you lived with Gulbara.’
    Now it was Shairkul’s turn to shrug.
    ‘You didn’t ask.’
    Having an idea what was in store, I borrowed a torch from the reluctant uniform, who grumbled about its return, and then we walked round the corner, towards a dilapidated
khrushchyovk
apartment block.
    The city is full of these relics of our Soviet days, solid, durable, ugly and practical, named after the former Soviet premier who’d had them installed across the Union. You‘d never describe them as stylish, but they’re an improvement on the shacks or yurts that we lived in before, especially when the winter sets in and the snow descends from the Tien Shan.
    The building’s five-storey cement prefabricated panels were stained and cracked, and some wit had spray-painted HILTON above the entrance. The metal door hung open, and we pushed through into the dark. You never find a
khrushchyovka
where the communal lights work, so I switched on the torch and we walked up the litter-covered stairs towards the lift. By some miracle, it wheezed into life and we rode in silence up to the fifth floor.
    Outside the apartment, Shairkul started to speak, but I held my finger up for silence. I didn’t want any surprises on the other side of the door, and that meant not alerting whoever was inside. She unlocked the heavy-duty steel door, and then the ornamental wooden door inside, and I gripped the Yarygin.
    We went inside.
    Someone had been smoking
travka
; the thick sweet smell was everywhere. But the apartment was clean and neat, cheaply furnished. Whatever failings Shairkul and Gulbara might have had, slovenliness wasn’t one of them.
    The bedroom door was ajar and, from the sounds inside, Gulbara was obviously hard at work. Reluctant to interrupt anyone’s pleasure, I peeked round the door. Plain walls, a couple of worn rugs on the bare concrete floor, a couple of half-drunk beer bottles on a bedside table. The ideal setting for an erotic tempest. The bed was creaking like an old ship in a storm, and Gulbara was moaning and groaning as if about to be shipwrecked.
    ‘
Da, maloletka, da!
’
    Gulbara might or might not have been a little slut, but the man thrusting between her legs was certainly a fat pig. Coarse black hair spread like a rug across his shoulders and down his back and on to the top of his arse. He was doing his best to push the bottle-blonde beneath him through the thin mattress, his head buried in her hair, nuzzling her neck.
    Gulbara’s