‘They are learning English,’ the mother explained. She brought out what I thought might be an exercise book but was a pamphlet from Saracen Oil and Gas Exploration in English, Russian and Kazakh. Investing in Communities. There were pictures of Kazakh engineers in protective eyewear, fields spewing fire, the management school in Astana.

The girls read some words out loud, then looked up at me smiling.

‘Who gave you this?’ I asked.

She passed a hand through one of her daughters’ hair, mimed cutting it. ‘The men who came.’

‘People who cut her hair?’

‘Just a little.’

‘A sample?’

‘Yes.’

What were Saracen doing passing through here, running tests? Light was fading. I finished my tea, checked the map again. I tried to give them some money as I left. The woman refused, then shyly took it.

‘You are crazy. You should not go further.’

The girls cleared the cups away without taking their eyes off me. I said goodbye, they waved and I saw that both had an extra finger on each hand. It jutted out, slender and perfectly formed, like a second stalk beside the little finger.

They giggled again. I smiled. I walked past the rusting scrap and the old sodium chlorate barrels.

Half a mile outside the village, signs appeared on either side: Agriculture banned.

Desert secrets. Sodium chlorate was used in the mining of uranium. North-eastern Kazakhstan was used for an atomic-bomb programme for forty years. They were still testing bombs as the Berlin Wall came down. Moscow men would make a trip to watch the mushroom clouds. Locals had been exposed deliberately as guinea pigs. The steppe was a laboratory, riddled with unfissioned plutonium.

Trees appeared ahead: a dark canopy of Scots pine on emaciated-looking trunks. But just inside the woodland, the road had been blocked. Square slabs of wood lay across it, painted white with signs nailed into them: Danger. No entry.

The signs looked new. I got out of the car, listened, checked for footprints, empty bottles, cigarettes. Then I checked for sensors, cameras, landmines.

The blocks were heavy, but I managed to work a solid branch beneath them and use it as a lever to roll each one a couple of times. That was enough to squeeze the car through. I stopped on the other side, got out and rolled them back, flattened the snow where they’d been moved.

Trees closed in, the spectral white trunks of aspen and birch among the pine. Then they opened out and I glimpsed a small dead lake. A decrepit jetty reached into mud. I checked the map: nothing for 120 miles. Then I cleared the trees and saw the outskirts of a small town.

FORTY-THREE