The Adversary

by Michael Walters

  “Anything in the other gers?” Doripalam said.

  “Nothing like this. More or less like the first ones. Deserted. Cleared out. All the cabinets empty.”

  Doripalam moved the flashlight around the interior. He realized that his initial impression had not been entirely accurate. Although this ger was tidy and sparsely furnished, it had not been cleared like the others. There was some crockery neatly stacked on a cabinet on the far side of the room, and one of the larger cupboards stood half open to reveal some clothes inside. In front of the cupboard there was a large metal chest, its lid thrown back, with a further pile of clothes and other household items—a kettle, some saucepans, a few cheap-looking ornaments—stacked inside.

  “It looks as if Mrs. Tuya was preparing to leave as well,” Doripalam said. Luvsan nodded, his mouth clamped firmly shut. His face was pale, and it looked as if he might be sick at any moment.

  Doripalam nodded and then turned to lead the younger man back out into the daylight and fresh air. Once outside, he took a deep breath, relishing the cool of the morning breeze, the clean air smelling only of the broad empty grassland and the mountains. Luvsan followed close behind, and then slumped down on to the bare earth, breathing heavily.

  “And it looks,” Doripalam said at last, completing his earlier observation, “as if someone was very keen that she shouldn’t go.”

  CHAPTER 3

  For a moment he thought there was someone in the outer office. He froze, his hands still deep in the drawer of the filing cabinet, mentally rehearsing the excuses he had prepared. All the good reasons why he should be here, searching through the records at this time of night.

  He looked cautiously behind him and realized that the sound was nothing more than his cell phone vibrating on the wooden desk. He had been half-expecting the call, of course. That was why he had left the phone out there. He hadn’t dared to switch on the ringtone, in case there should be someone else left in the building. But he couldn’t risk missing the call when it came. There was no room for sloppiness. He knew only too well the price that others had paid for missing their cues.

  He picked up the phone and glanced at the screen. No calling number. He had no doubt that the call would be untraceable, if anyone should be inclined to try.

  He thumbed the phone on. “Yes?”

  As always, there was no preamble. “Everything is under control.” It was a statement, not a question.

  He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. “Yes. I’ve got it all in hand. Don’t worry.” He immediately regretted the unnecessary reassurance. The phone was silent, and he thought for a second that the caller had hung up. “I’ve got it all in hand,” he repeated, his voice cracking slightly.

  Finally, the caller spoke again. “There’s one loose end.”

  “Not here,” he said. He was aware that his voice was sounding over-eager, but he could do nothing to prevent it. “I’ve checked and double-checked everything—”

  The caller gave no acknowledgment of his words. “You need to finish tidying up.”

  “Everything—” He stopped, understanding what the caller was saying. “He’s no threat now,” he said. “He’s been suspended. His career’s finished—”

  “I want you to tidy everything up.”

  “But wouldn’t it be riskier—?” He was about to bite back the words, knowing how dangerous it would be even to ask the question. Then he realized that, in any case, there was no point in continuing. The phone was dead. The caller had already hung up.

  He straightened up, suddenly realizing how tense his body had been during the call, how tightly his hand had clutched the phone.

  That was it, then. Tidy everything up.

  He bent over and finished running through the files in the cabinet, though his mind was no longer focused on the task. He dropped the last of the folders back into the drawer, careful to ensure that his gloved fingers left no marks, that there was no trace that anything had been disturbed.

  Tidy everything up.

  It was not a surprise. But he had hoped that the task would be allocated elsewhere. This was all too close to home.

  Which, of course, was precisely why he had been chosen. He knew well enough by now how this all worked. How quickly he had become implicated. How few options had been left for him.

  He carefully slid the drawer of the cabinet shut, and then twisted the combination lock back to where it had been when he had entered the room forty minutes earlier.

  He stood for a moment and looked around him, satisfying himself that he had left no sign that anyone had been in here. Then he quickly stepped across the room, gently pulled open the door, and left Doripalam’s office.

  “Have you been avoiding me?”

  Doripalam looked up from the mass of files spread out across his desktop. Nergui was standing in the doorway, his shoulder resting casually against the framework. From somewhere behind him, the sun was shining and his heavily built body was visible only in silhouette.

  “Why should you think that? I’ve been busy.” Doripalam gestured toward the papers in front of him.

  “So I hear. Especially after yesterday.”

  “Especially after yesterday,” Doripalam agreed. “All we needed at the moment.”

  “Killers rarely exercise any consideration,” Nergui said. “What’s the story?”

  Doripalam hesitated. He had found himself increasingly reluctant to discuss current cases with Nergui. He was aware how quickly in these informal discussions they tended to revert to their former roles—Nergui the experienced chief, himself as the eager deputy lapping up the older man’s wisdom and advice. It wasn’t deliberate on Nergui’s part, he thought, and Doripalam always tried hard to resist the tendency, but their old relationship was too deeply ingrained. And, whatever his motives, it was clear that Nergui still couldn’t fully tear himself away from this place.

  “I’ve no idea,” Doripalam said at last. “There’s not much to go on yet. We’re waiting for the full pathologist’s report. But she was clearly murdered—her throat was cut. Probably been dead for at least twenty-four hours. Maybe more. The body had been tied up—the wrists were still tied and there were rope marks around the ankles. And she had been subjected to—well, torture seems the most accurate word. The body was covered in bruises and burns—probably from a cigarette. At the moment, that’s about all we have.”

  “It sounds plenty. What about the rest of the family?”

  “We’re trying to track them down,” Doripalam said, finding himself drawn into the conversation despite his best intentions. “It looks as if some of them must have moved on after we first interviewed Mrs. Tuya, but we don’t know where they are or why they abandoned some of the gers.”

  “But some gers seemed to have moved on?”

  “Apparently. The officer I was with, Luvsan, had been up there to conduct the original interview. Reckons there were eight or nine tents then—probably more than twenty people in the camp. When we went back, there were just five tents.”

  “And all deserted?”

  “All deserted and cleared out, apart from the one where we found the body. Mrs. Tuya was clearly in the process of leaving—there was a half-packed case. We found one or two other personal items in the other tents, but only the kind of thing that might have been left behind accidentally.”

  “So why not pack up the gers as well?”

  Doripalam shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they left in a hurry, if one of them was responsible for Mrs. Tuya’s death. Or, if they weren’t responsible, maybe they were afraid of whoever was.”

  “Doesn’t take long to dismantle a ger, though, if you know what you’re doing.”

  “Maybe long enough, if you’re really afraid.”

  As they had talked, Nergui had sat himself down in front of Doripalam’s desk. He was, Doripalam noted, carrying a box file labeled “SCT Inquiry” which he placed unselfconsciously down on the corner of the desk. Doripalam wondered if he was supposed to ask about the file, but he dec
ided to delay that for a while. All things considered, at the moment he felt more comfortable discussing the murder case.

  Nergui leaned back in the chair, lifting the front legs off the ground. He looked the same as ever, Doripalam thought, and it was difficult to gauge whether he was going native in the Ministry. Doripalam had not honestly expected him to stay in that role for very long. Particularly after the incidents with the Englishman. And yet here he was, more than a year on, apparently settled into his role as the Minister’s bagman, supposedly dealing with issues of national concern but—as far as Doripalam could judge—spending most of his time processing files in his small but well-appointed office on the third floor of the Ministry. Except, of course, that he wasn’t there at the moment. At the moment, he was sitting in Doripalam’s office, once again sticking his nose into the business of the Serious Crime Team and engaged in—well, who knew what?

  As always, Nergui’s dark-skinned face gave nothing away. He gazed impassively at Doripalam as though he had been following every twist of the younger man’s train of thought. “Do you think it’s connected with the son?” he said, after the silence had become uncomfortably prolonged.

  “Again, who knows?” Doripalam said. “Until now, I hadn’t been taking the son’s disappearance particularly seriously.”

  “But you thought it was worth going up to talk to her yourself?”

  Doripalam shrugged, still uneasily aware that he had, for whatever motive, timed the visit to Mrs. Tuya to coincide with Nergui’s return. He had no doubt that Nergui had noted the fact. “That was a PR thing, mainly,” he said. “You saw the kind of coverage she’d received in the press. Another example of precisely what we didn’t need at the moment.”

  “She had a relative on Ardiin Erkh, I understand?” This was one of the privately-owned national daily newspapers that had appeared with the arrival of democracy in the country.

  Doripalam nodded. “A cousin. Assistant editor or some such. That was how she got the original coverage. Then all the others jumped on the bandwagon.”

  “Widow of military hero loses son. Police have no leads. That kind of thing.”

  “Precisely that kind of thing. Except that the implication was ‘police can’t be bothered.’”

  “Because you didn’t take it seriously?”

  “Well, we didn’t particularly, to be honest. The boy, Gavaa, was nineteen. He’d moved to the city to take up a clerical job in one of the state departments. A large well-built boy who apparently took after his soldier father. Bright and self-sufficient. And, by all accounts, not on particularly good terms with his mother. Nothing there that made you think of him as a natural victim.”

  “You thought he’d just taken the opportunity to leave home properly?”

  “Pretty much so. All the signs were that he’d settled into the city pretty quickly and pretty successfully. He had a good circle of friends. For a young man without commitments, he was fairly well-paid. He was renting an apartment near the center, just a few hundred meters from Sukh Bataar Square. All in all, a fairly cozy lifestyle.”

  “But you couldn’t track him down?”

  “Well, no, that was the mystery. That and the circumstances of his disappearance, such as they were.”

  Doripalam was becoming aware that, once again, the two of them had indeed slipped back into their old familiar pattern of dialogue—Nergui asking questions, prompting Doripalam to think harder, underpinned by the same old desire to please and impress the older man. This was not, he thought, appropriate behavior for the chief of the Serious Crimes Team. On the other hand, he was forced to acknowledge that, on the basis of previous experience, it might enable him to come up with some answers, or at least some new questions.

  “I read that he got himself a new job?” Nergui said. Doripalam wondered precisely where Nergui had read this. Admittedly, the story had been well covered in the press, thanks to Mrs. Tuya’s cousin. But Doripalam was also aware that Nergui could gain access to pretty much any internal police information if he chose.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Doripalam said. “He phoned his mother a couple of weeks before the time we think he vanished—though we don’t have an exact date for that, or even know for sure that he really has disappeared. He told her he was leaving the Ministry, that he had a new opportunity in front of him which was too good to refuse.”

  “But he didn’t tell her what it was?”

  “No, in fact, she said that he seemed very secretive. Kept hinting that there was more he could tell her but that he had to keep it confidential. That kind of thing.”

  “Not a Government job,” Nergui said. It was not a question.

  Doripalam smiled faintly. “Well, I imagine you would know. But, yes, we did check that, because we couldn’t think what kind of role might have any requirement for confidentiality.”

  “If not a Government role, that suggests something more dubious,” Nergui said.

  “Maybe. That is, if we take what the mother said at face value. By that time, she seemed keen to stir up as much trouble as possible. I wasn’t directly involved, but I read all the transcripts of the interviews and I couldn’t decide whether or not she was exaggerating what Gavaa had said. Making it sound more mysterious than maybe it was.”

  “But he still vanished?” Nergui ran his fingers slowly through his thick black hair.

  “Well, in the sense that we don’t know where he is, yes. But his disappearance doesn’t seem to have been particularly sudden. He’d given his landlord a month’s notice on the apartment, so was clearly expecting to move. He’d also given notice in his job, telling them that he’d found something that paid better, though he didn’t say what. But he left both the job and the apartment a couple of weeks earlier than expected. The landlord came to drop in some mail one day and found the place deserted.”

  “Like the gers?” Nergui said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. It was a furnished apartment, and, from what the landlord said, I don’t think Gavaa had many personal belongings in any case. Just some clothes, a few books and pictures. They’d all been stripped away, but I imagine they would have fitted into a small suitcase. The landlord was surprised he hadn’t said goodbye, as they’d gotten along fairly well, but just assumed Gavaa had decided to move early for some reason. When we spoke to him, he seemed to think the whole thing was just a fuss about nothing.”

  “What about the friends? If Gavaa had just moved to a new apartment or a new job, surely they’d know where he was?” Nergui crossed his legs and rested one ankle delicately across his other knee. His socks, Doripalam noted, were pale blue today, matching the shirt and tie beneath his standard dark gray suit. Doripalam wondered vaguely how many color combinations Nergui had in his wardrobe.

  “You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?” Doripalam said. “That’s the only bit of the story that doesn’t hang together, where the mother’s concerns were understandable. He’d been out drinking with a group of the friends the night before he vanished—pleasant evening, no indication of anything unusual, no sign that he wasn’t intending to go to work in his civil service role the next day. But he never turned up at work. Like the landlord, his employers just assumed that he’d decided or been required to take up his new job earlier than expected. They were a bit annoyed, but people often don’t work out their notice, so they weren’t surprised.”

  “And the friends?” Nergui prompted.

  Doripalam shook his head. “We’ve spoken to all of those who were with him the night before he vanished, plus a few others who were known to be acquainted with him. They all claim they’ve not seen him since. I don’t know whether they’re telling the truth. Again, I wasn’t directly involved, but I get the impression from the interview transcripts that maybe some of them were a little surprised to find themselves on the end of a police investigation.”

  “You think they might have been lying?”

  “Well, not all them. It’s hard to imagine that they’d all have managed to stick t
o a consistent story. But I suppose it’s possible that some of them are not telling us everything.”

  Nergui frowned. “But why would they bother keeping it quiet if they knew where he was? You don’t think they’re responsible for his disappearance?”

  “I think it’s more likely that, if he has just decided to make himself scarce for some reason, one or two of them might know where he’s gone to.”

  “Presumably we put some pressure on them in the interviews?”

  Doripalam nodded, noting the “we.” “Of course. All the usual stuff. We told them that withholding information from the police is potentially a very serious offense—impeding the course of justice and all that. We also told them that this had the potential to become a murder investigation—which is certainly the direction that his mother was pushing us, even without a body. But looking at the transcripts, I don’t think they were all that impressed.”

  “That’s the trouble with the youth of today,” Nergui said. “No respect.”

  Doripalam smiled. “I think the trouble with the youth of today is that they’re generally a bit too smart for their own good. And for ours. If any of them did have any information, they didn’t see any reason to share it with us, and nothing we could say was going to influence that.”

  “In my day,” Nergui said, “you could have thrown them in jail until they decided to co-operate.”

  “In your day, Nergui, I’m sure you could have done much worse than that if you’d chosen to,” Doripalam said. “But things have changed.”

  “Oh, I know,” Nergui said. “But don’t expect me to like it.”

  “Anyway, that’s where we are with it. Until now, I’d assumed that Mrs. Tuya was over-reacting, that Gavaa had simply taken this as an opportunity to leave home properly, cut all the ties, that kind of thing. I thought he’d pop up again in his own time.”

  “And maybe he will,” Nergui said, though with an ominous note in his voice. “What about the relationship with the mother? What do we know about that?”