An Autumn Hunting

by Tom Callaghan

  ‘You handled that moderately well, and you’ve kept your mouth shut,’ he said. ‘No, this is something else entirely.’

  His smile did nothing to reassure me. Neither did his next words.

  ‘Of course, you may end up being put up against a wall and shot, but not before enjoying a little torture and mutilation first.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘I take it you don’t approve of heroin smuggling, Inspector? Or, in the light of imminent events, should I say Mr Borubaev?’

  Tynaliev’s face wore an expression of genuine enquiry and concern. I wondered how long he’d practised in the mirror. I guessed it was a trick question, decided to play it safe.

  ‘It’s against the law for a start, Minister, and the destruction and misery it causes is a real threat to the stability of society, as well as funding criminal elements,’ I said, choosing my words with forensic care, as if reading from a departmental manual.

  ‘I thought you would say something pompous like that,’ Tynaliev said. ‘Maybe you should be teaching at the American University, telling the world how backward Central Asia is, how we’re nothing but ignorant shitheads who only know how to sell heroin to rich foreigners.’

  I said nothing, but wondered if some of the nine million dollars I’d recovered from Natasha Sulonbekova had grown in Afghanistan’s poppy fields. Being even an unwitting accomplice is a burden on the soul.

  ‘It’s never been a business interest of mine,’ Tynaliev said, as if reading my mind. ‘Too much attention, too much pressure from the Kremlin, the White House and everywhere in between. And too many open beaks all looking to be fed with a constant supply of juicy morsels.’

  He shook his head, as if dismissing a far-fetched business proposal.

  ‘Caution and cover work better in the long run, wouldn’t you agree?’ he said.

  ‘In my line of work, you don’t survive long without them,’ I agreed, wondering if Tynaliev’s caution extended to giving me an unmarked grave somewhere between Bishkek and Lake Issyk-Kul.

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve survived at all,’ Tynaliev said. ‘Particularly since the Circle of Brothers still think you put two bullets into Maksat Aydaraliev.’

  A shockwave of nausea rose up into my throat, and I wondered if I was about to vomit.

  Aydaraliev had been the pakhan, local boss of the gangsters who feed on Russia and Central Asia like starving wolves in the depths of winter. Investigating the murder of Yekaterina Tynalieva, I’d found myself working with an Uzbek agent, Saltanat Umarova. It was Saltanat who had arranged the bullets for the pakhan, one in the back of the head to show he’d been executed, one in the mouth to show he’d talked. My problem? He was shot immediately after meeting me, so I knew where the finger of suspicion pointed. It didn’t help that the finger was almost certainly tensed against a trigger.

  I didn’t know if Tynaliev believed I’d executed the old man, or if he knew Saltanat and I had become lovers in a semi-detached sort of way, but silence was still my most likely escape route.

  ‘The world will know you’ve been kicked out of the force in disgrace. You’ll probably need to get out of the country before the prison bars slam behind you, and the people you put there welcome you with open arms,’ Tynaliev said.

  ‘You won’t have the protection of a badge any more, but that doesn’t mean you won’t still be useful to certain people,’ he added.

  ‘Which certain people in particular?’ I asked, increasingly worried this was leading to a deep hole in a cemetery and a marble headstone with an engraving of my face.

  ‘You never wondered why the Circle didn’t avenge the pakhan’s death?’ Tynaliev asked. ‘Why you’ve survived with fingers, toes and brains relatively intact?’

  ‘Presumably the new leader is very happy someone cleared the path and helped him step up to the throne?’

  Tynaliev nodded.

  ‘Still a detective, I see, if not in name any more.’

  I ignored the sarcasm. Did Tynaliev really believe I’d think he was going to all this trouble simply for the benefit of the country and his fellow citizens?

  ‘Spend time in the Kulturny, make contacts you can use in your new career,’ Tynaliev said, and my heart sank like a rock towards my boots. The Kulturny is probably the roughest bar in Bishkek; they don’t let people in unless they have a portfolio of prison tattoos or at least one concealed weapon. Even the name is a joke; the place is as anti-kulturny as it’s possible to get. No welcoming signs, no neon lights, just a battered steel door scarred and scuffed from attacks with boots, pickaxes and, on one memorable evening, a Molotov cocktail. The door has no handle, and behind the spyhole that gets you admittance the bouncer is probably drunk or stoned, certainly armed. But I’d been there in the past; to pick up dirt on your shoes, walk where the mud is.

  I was with Saltanat the last time I’d visited the Kulturny. There had been gunplay, with a couple of bodies to dispose of when the shooting stopped, so I’d decided I’d drink my orange juice somewhere else. If Tynaliev wanted me there, he’d have a good reason. Good for him, that is; probably bad for me.

  ‘New career?’ I asked, not looking forward to the answer.

  Tynaliev jerked his head towards the exit, turned to his paperwork, dismissing me. As I reached the door, he looked up, hit me with his hardest stare.

  ‘You’re going to become a drug baron,’ he said, and his smile didn’t even try to reach his eyes.

  Chapter 4

  I’ve never been particularly good at obeying orders, even when they come from as exalted and dangerous a person as the minister. So I walked into Sverdlovsky District Morgue just after dawn the next morning, to watch Usupov hone his scalpels and his skills on yet another corpse. Of course, I wasn’t investigating the case I’d just been fired from, merely popping by to see my old friend, the chief forensic pathologist, maybe enjoy a breakfast glass of chai. How could the minister possibly object to that?

  The temporary occupants of the morgue don’t seem to mind the stained concrete walls, the flickering lighting, the ever-present scent of freshly butchered meat. Even the living in Bishkek can’t be too choosy about where they call home, and the dead never bother to complain. No rent or bills to pay either.

  At first glance, you might think you were at the entrance to an underground car park beneath some dismal shopping mall, until you spot the small weather-beaten sign. The morgue doesn’t advertise its presence; not many people visit, and those who do usually arrive on their back rather than on their feet.

  I walked down the broken-tiled steps and along the corridor, where the emerald-green stain of mould grows bigger every winter when the snows break in, looking for shelter. As always, every other light fitting was missing a bulb, but I could still see the metal doors at the far end, smell the stink of raw flesh.

  Usupov was already hard at work, transforming the young woman I’d seen the day before into the leavings of a butcher’s shop. Spatterings of blood stained the steel slab, along with other juices I preferred not to think about. It’s a truth of my job that beauty often hides ugliness inside, and a truth of Usupov’s profession that he sees beauty and order in the internal coilings and twistings of the body.

  I didn’t ask for an overall; I wasn’t intending getting close to the corpse, and I wasn’t wearing anything a decent second-hand shop would put in the window in pride of place.

  ‘Nothing unusual in the manner of death. Drug overdose,’ Usupov said, before I’d even asked the question. ‘Her blood pressure crashed, and she suffered the heart attack that killed her.’

  He held up a hand for my inspection.

  ‘Bluish nails, all pretty standard, Inspector, exactly what I’d expect.’

  Usupov inspects bodies for effects that he then uses to deduce their cause; I examine them for hints, clues, secrets. The girl’s nails were coated in expensive clear varnish, although the edges were chipped and torn. She’d still had enough pride in herself to make an effort to look good, which put her at
least one level above the street prostis that loiter around Panfilov Park at night.

  ‘No tattoos?’

  Usupov shook his head. ‘The only things that have ever been stuck in her are the needles that killed her.’

  He nodded at my raised eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, she was a virgin. I’ve not had one of those on my table for a long while,’ and Usupov even smiled at his own joke.

  The news instantly threw my speculations into the same tray where clumps and gobbets of discarded flesh were piling up. Not a working girl, either on the street or in a massage parlour. Not married, probably not even dating. That surprised me; she was pretty enough to have been bride-stolen, spotted by some randy pimply young bastard, grabbed off the street and taken to his mother’s house for approval and an enforced marriage. That suggested a certain social status. Not every father can be with the apple of his eye twenty-four hours a day, or employ a bodyguard to keep her safe. The case was starting to look ominous, with possible headlines and consequences, none of them good. And my continued involvement wasn’t going to make Tynaliev any more of a fan.

  I let the thought fester at the back of my brain, tried another tack.

  ‘Any clues to her identity?’ I asked, the way they do in all the TV cop shows.

  ‘Apart from the unique ten-carat diamond earrings and the black pearl tongue stud, no,’ Usupov said, and I even stared at the body for a few seconds, then looked at Usupov. Humour has never been Usupov’s thing, and I wondered if he’d acquired a lookalike comedian from somewhere, sent him along in his place.

  ‘A couple of things might interest you though,’ he said. ‘For a start, the blood stains on her clothing.’

  Usupov might have been discovering humour late in life, but he was still too prim to utter the word ‘pants’.

  ‘Her blood group and the stains are not the same,’ he said. ‘She was blood type O, and the droplets are A Rhesus positive. No way they could match.’

  At least I now knew the girl probably hadn’t been alone at the time of her death. But A Rhesus positive blood isn’t rare, and I didn’t know how her pants became soiled.

  ‘It’s not much of a start,’ I grunted.

  ‘A couple of other things,’ Usupov said. ‘One of them I’ve never encountered before.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She didn’t die from the usual heroin, cut to hell and back with baby laxative and brick dust.’

  ‘Pure?’

  ‘Pure all right, but it wasn’t heroin or krokodil.’

  I looked at Usupov. I didn’t have time to play cat and mouse, and my face told him not to delay his surprise information.

  ‘Ever heard of carfentanil, Inspector?’

  I shook my head. Obviously a pharmaceutical of some sort, and not the sort that relieves headaches or toothache.

  ‘It’s a synthetic opioid, maybe ten thousand times stronger than commercial morphine. Originally created as a general anaesthetic for elephants.’

  ‘And people take something that strong?’

  Usupov looked down at the butcher’s slab between us.

  ‘As you can see.’

  I shook my head, as ever amazed at the things people will do to themselves.

  ‘I take it you don’t need a lot of this carfentanil to win a place on your table.’

  ‘A dose roughly the size of a grain of salt, that’s all. Not something I’ve seen before; our addicts tend to be traditionalists.’

  Usupov paused, reached into the pocket of his white coat, pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper, handed it to me.

  ‘Hidden in the lining of her bra,’ he said. ‘The left cup, if that makes any difference. I wouldn’t know, you’re the detective.’

  I smoothed out the paper, began to read.

  Chapter 5

  I’ve read a few suicide notes in my time, most of them written by men, to justify their final irrevocable departure. I guess most women lead such a barren, dismal existence they don’t need to spell out the life-ending reasons obvious to everyone. As with most things in life, women just get on with it.

  In the same way that suicide is the most personal act one can ever take, so each note is different, in tone, in style, in length. Bleak despairing accounts of a life that’s finally run out of hope. Page upon page of hastily scrawled accusations. Explanations of the conscious decision to end the pain of terminal illness. Acts of sorrow, of revenge, carried out in moments of anger, drunkenness, heartbreak. But I’d never read a poem written by a suicide before. The handwriting was elegant, calm, not the desperate end-of-life scribble I’d seen so many times before. All the desperation was locked into the words.

  Let me tell you how this works; the heart,

  Drunk on reckless might-have-beens,

  Tiptoes past kisses still sweet but fading.

  Dawn scrambles through the window,

  Hunting for home.

  ‘What do you think? A suicide note?’ Usupov asked, behind his imperturbable manner as bewildered by this unexpected poem as I was.

  ‘Well, I’m no critic, but she’s not the next Anna Akhmatova,’ I said, trying to collect my thoughts and wondering quite what a ‘reckless might-have-been’ was. ‘Maybe she got one rejection slip too many.’

  I read the poem again; it made as little sense the second time. When my wife Chinara was alive, she devoured book after book of poetry: Blok, Esenin, Pasternak, even Yevtushenko. She would have decoded the dead woman’s poem, stripped it of its hidden meanings in seconds, the way I could field-strip my Yarygin in the dark. But Chinara was in a hilltop grave overlooking a valley and the mountains beyond that defend us from China, and I was alone, left with my memories of kisses still sweet but fading, fading.

  ‘Maybe our victim didn’t write this. We’ll look very stupid if it turns out to be a famous poem in all the anthologies.’

  ‘You think that’s likely?’

  I considered, shook my head. Perhaps because the poem was handwritten, but I sensed it had some significance for the dead woman lying in pieces in front of me, that it provided a clue to her life and death. Sometimes you let your instincts guide you in the absence of any evidence.

  I was about to fold the paper and put it away in my wallet, decided to photograph it first. The poem might have been why the woman ended up with her skin being kissed by Usupov’s scalpel. And if that was the case, perhaps there would be others for whom the poem was more of a threat than a memorial. My wallet would be the first place a heavy with fists like smoked hams would look; what were the odds he’d also check my phone?

  ‘I’ll send you my report,’ Usupov said.

  I shook my head, gave a lopsided grin.

  ‘Hadn’t you heard? The grapevine must be getting slow in its old age. I’ve been taken off the case, suspended, and in all likelihood about to go on trial.’

  Usupov stared at me: we’d worked together a lot over the years. Though he knew I would sometimes cut corners when it suited me or the case I was working, he knew I was relatively straight. I gave a rueful nod, headed towards the door and the clean air outside. I planned on polluting it with a couple of cigarettes while I worked out exactly what I was going to do next.

  ‘Someone from Unexplained Deaths will be in touch. Murder Squad aren’t going to touch this, not without more evidence.’

  I pushed the door, the metal cold in my hand.

  ‘One more thing, Kenesh – the heartfelt verse? No need to put it in the report, eh? We don’t want to start a wave of copycat lyric suicidal poems, do we?’

  With that, I left the stink of blood, bowels and brains behind me, along with the tatters and scraps of a once-pretty girl who’d slipped away from life sixty years too soon.

  Chapter 6

  It’s a long walk back from the morgue to my apartment on Ibraimova over on the east side of the city, even longer with the route I chose. But the day was still cool before the last of the summer’s heat swept over us, and I needed the exercise. I do some of my least misguid
ed thinking when I’m plodding along broken pavements, avoiding potholes, wondering why my feet hurt so much.

  Sovetskaya was already busy, cars, trolleybuses and marshrutki minibuses battling it out for space on the roads. The pavements were beginning to fill with young women taking advantage of the last of the summer to show off their figures in short dresses and knee-length boots. But the bright summer days were turning to the muted shades of autumn, and the air would soon be as cold and heartless as the corpses in Usupov’s morgue.

  There was something off about the woman’s death, a hint that didn’t tally with the average overdose. It nagged at me, something glimpsed in the corner of my eye for a split second. But it wasn’t my case any more, and I had other problems to obsess over, namely my career translation into drug dealer, mafia hood and common criminal.

  Maybe this was Tynaliev’s way of dealing with the troublesome problem called Akyl Borubaev. No one would investigate if a corrupt police inspector didn’t survive a prison sentence locked up with the people he’d put there.

  I had no illusions about how long I’d last in Penitentiary One. If I made it until the gruel and stale bread they call dinner, I’d be very surprised. Even if some all-powerful pakhan boss inside was looking out for me and providing protection, a torpedo, a killer looking to make a name for themselves, would have been paid enough to melt a toothbrush handle, embed a razorblade into the plastic. A single slash across my neck and I’d bleed out before help could arrive.

  I walked virtually the length of Sovetskaya, turned right onto Toktogul. This close to the city centre, the shops were smarter, a lot more expensive. Many of them even wore English names to show their sophistication and elegance of style. I didn’t bother window-shopping; there was nothing I wanted to buy, even if I could have afforded it.

  Finally I reached Ibraimova, known as Pravda during Soviet times. It had always amused Chinara that a Murder Squad inspector had found himself living on a street named Truth. She’d claimed it was wishful thinking on my part. Privately, I’d always hoped it was true.