Page 41 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Yes.’

‘I see,’ Shenkov said quietly. He didn’t elaborate, and only closed the diary. He was silent for a little while, but he hadn’t finished, Valery could see that; he was holding his voice like a shard of glass, looking for a way to lift it without cutting himself. ‘Moscow knows exactly what’s going on. Like you said.’

Valery nodded. It was painful to keep leaning against the chair, so he perched on the edge of the desk instead, careful to avoid the papers there. He switched the kettle on, but didn’t raise his voice above a whisper. ‘At least they send us real chocolate and real grapes and real coffee. I reckon I’m okay with being a bit irradiated if I’m allowed to stay happy while it happens.’

Shenkov half-laughed. The small lines around his eyes looked more like scars then. ‘What’s the fine print? How much does living here cut someone’s life expectancy?’

‘Depends what you do. People working in offices are much safer than people who work outside.’ Valery paused. ‘Most of the science doesn’t exist yet. We don’t know what the long-term effects are. Which is … why this place is here. I would think someone in a locked room in Moscow gets the medical notes. Someone will be doing a study on population health in City 40.’

Shenkov was turning the school-field photograph over and over between his fingertips. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything stupid. No calling the Kremlin, no calling journalists. If I get an order through to shoot you, I will be …’ his hands flickered and he dropped the photograph, which landed with a tap on the desk ‘ … annoyed.’

‘I promise,’ Valery said. ‘What happens about Sasha? The hospital quota thing might explain why he had to leave, but I still don’t understand how he ended up dead in a pond. He had to get in and out, and if he was here, inside a hospital, he wasn’t sitting out there getting this bad a dose.’

‘The coroner has the body now. We’ll have to see what she says.’ The water in the kettle had reached the loudest point of its seething. The switch clicked off. Shenkov had to stop, tip some water out, and put more cold in to start it again before he carried on. Even so, they had to lean so close together that their hair touched. Shenkov smelled of the brightest parts of winter, spices and pine and something else that made Valery think of bonfires in the forest. ‘If she says he died of six hundred roentgen then at least that’s an excuse to find out where the six hundred came from, but if she doesn’t – I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything else we would be allowed to do. It will go down as an accidental death.’ He looked up. ‘Thank you, by the way. For doing the dosimetry tests.’

Valery shrugged, because he would have done them whether Shenkov had asked him or not. ‘Well. I didn’t expect to live out the year before I came here. I know this is very concerning for you, but it’s kind of great for me.’

Shenkov smiled, not much. ‘If I start asking for the school field to be concreted over, someone will report me to Moscow, it—I was just ordered to kill two people over an alien hoax, never mind actually …’ He had been holding himself poised all along, but something in him cracked then and Valery realised he was close to tears. He was staring hard at the framed pictures on the shelf opposite; four children, all young enough to be at that school. ‘We can’t do anything.’

Valery had to look away, because it hurt a lot more to see Shenkov breaking than it had when his arm broke. He didn’t dare touch him. The door was open, like it always was. If any other officer walked past to see the boss being openly comforted by the resident lunatic then it would filter outward and there would be mocking murmurs, and for weeks Shenkov would struggle to make anyone do as they were told. That was only if there was no one here who wanted Shenkov’s job. If they did, it would turn, by the officious alchemical process of formal reports, into fraternisation with a known enemy of the people. The necessity of Valery’s being here to get the prisoner book signed would only stretch so far.

‘What if I put these photographs in an official-looking envelope,’ Valery whispered, ‘and sent them anonymously to the head teacher with a recommendation about concrete? It’s in her remit to decide how to spend her own budget. Maybe on six brand-new basketball courts.’

Shenkov laughed, or sort of, and gave him an envelope.

13

The Missing Boy

Valery was wheeling a crate of deer carcasses out to the incinerator two days later when someone appeared from behind the biomass waste bins. It made him jump, but it was only one of the men from the forest village. Looking urgent, the man pressed one finger to his lips and jerked his head. Valery hurried over.

‘Meet me on the edge of the woods as soon as you can.’

‘Okay,’ said Valery, and watched as the man vanished behind the bins again, in the direction of the facility fence. It was a brand-new fence; he couldn’t see how the man had got in, but then, perhaps it was safer not to know that. So he told Dr Resovskaya he was moving onto foxes if he could find any, got a fresh permit from the KGB office, bought three bags of groceries from town without being asked even once why he wanted enough coffee and chocolate to feed an army – people must have standardly hoarded it in case Moscow changed its mind about nice things – and drove out to the woodland border, where the man from the village was smoking restlessly.

‘Are you all right?’ Valery asked.

‘What took you so long? Nanya said to bring you. Get in.’ He opened the door of the battered old farm truck and held out the blindfold.

‘One second,’ Valery said. ‘I’ve got some things for you, help me carry the bags.’

‘If you’ve bugged—’

‘It’s chocolate, you dingbat, not everyone is KGB.’

The man grew a good few centimetres, but then deflated when he noticed just how much smaller Valery was, and the cast, and that he must have meant it as a joke. ‘Did you just call me a dingbat?’

‘I stand by it,’ Valery confirmed.

The man helped him move the bags.

Despite the blindfold, the man took him a different way to last time. Last time had been almost a path; now, the truck eased around tight corners among the trees and tracks so deliberately hidden that sometimes the man had to stop and move aside a veil of branches.

When they arrived at the village, Nanya came out from her cottage and patted the door of the truck to say hello, then clipped across to Valery. She must have been twenty years older than him, but she had a brisk walk. She opened the door for him.

‘How are you today, doctor?’

‘Well, thank you. We’ve brought you some things,’ he said, before he could forget. ‘Coffee and chocolate mainly, and some proper fruit from town. It’s in the back, I sort of smuggled it in on a trolley but I can’t carry it, if someone could …’