A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  Lubashov’s legs still pointed skywards, but I’d draped my copy of Achyk Sayasat over what remained of Vasily’s head. His blood was soaking through a report of the killing of a plain clothes down in Osh. Poetic justice of some sort, I suppose.

  The Chief was overjoyed, of course. Two pieces of shit scooped off the pavement, and a brutal crime with major political implications solved in just a couple of days. Better than his birthday.

  ‘I’ll contact the Minister right away and give him the good news.’

  I was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘What good news?’

  ‘You’ve found the killers of his daughter, and they’ve been brought to summary justice,’ the Chief said, defying me to contradict him. ‘Of course, Tynaliev may not be too pleased that he didn’t get to . . . question them himself. But it’s clear you shot in self-defence. This piss-drinker pulled a gun on you,’ he added, giving Vasily’s newspaper-clad face a kick, ‘and that shit-eater tried to shoot you, missed, hit his boss, and you cleared him away. Simple.’

  ‘Vasily didn’t have a gun,’ I objected.

  The Chief looked around, reached into his coat pocket and dropped an automatic next to the body.

  ‘What’s that, a pencil sharpener?’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘Motive?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe Vasily thought State Security were on to him, wanted to get his retaliation in first.’

  ‘Chief, Vasily Tyulev was a second-rate, no, a third-rate pimp, who couldn’t get State Security interested in him if he chained himself naked to the gates of the White House and claimed he was Stalin come back to life.’

  ‘Still waters,’ the Chief said, and tapped the side of his nose. ‘State secrets. Not for an Inspector, Murder Squad, to be party to.’

  He looked around, and caught the eye of the waitress.

  ‘Darling girl!’ he beckoned, and she came over cautiously, looking worried. Another example of the healthy relationship ordinary Kyrgyz citizens have with their police force.

  ‘You’ll be wanted as a witness, of course, but it’s just a formality. You’ve seen a hero of the Republic in action, and you can tell everyone how the police force is here to guard every law-abiding citizen, day or night.’

  The waitress looked at me; hero wasn’t exactly how she’d describe me right then, bloodstained, sweating and stinking of my own vomit. The Chief shook my hand again, and headed down the steps to his waiting car.

  ‘He’s a hero, mark my words,’ he called out, ‘bring him another hundred grams, shit, make it a bottle!’ And then he was gone, the car doing a screeching U-turn against traffic and speeding back to Sverdlovsky.

  I shook my head at the waitress, and sat back to wait for the clean-up crew. The Chief’s theory had a lot of appeal. An end to the case, no irate boss or minister giving me grief. A neat solution. Or it would have been, if it had added up. Why those two women, separated by class and an entire country? Why the mutilations? And why the business with the foetus, assuming it’s the same dead child transferred from one corpse to another. I would have loved to say ‘case solved’ and gone home. But I kept seeing Yekaterina’s eyes staring up at the sky, the dead child inside her. And a terrified woman up on the border, begging her killers to spare her baby, as they close in with butcher’s knives. And however hard I shut my eyes, those images weren’t going away.

  ‘Inspector?’

  I opened my eyes, reluctantly. The waitress was standing in front of me, holding a piece of paper. For one ridiculous moment, I thought she was going to ask me for my autograph.

  ‘The chyoht?’

  She was right, of course; there’s always a bill, and somebody always has to pay. I fumbled for a handful of som, which I handed over, waving away my change.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and daintily stepped over Vasily.

  I started laughing then, and I was still laughing when the morgue waggon arrived to take Usupov’s next two guests away.

  *

  A few hours later, I was showered and changed and thinking about going into the station when Kursan called me. The grapevine had been working overtime, and he wanted to know if the stories he’d heard were true. I told him that as shoot-outs went, it wasn’t much to write home about; a total of five shots fired, rather than the eight dead and ninety wounded in the story going around town.

  ‘They won’t be missed. Low life, both of them,’ he told me, before adding that someone would step up to take their place straight away.

  ‘One thing people will always barter: pussy,’ he said. ‘It’s the way of the world. Men want to buy it, women want to sell it. What can you do?’

  ‘Make sure nobody’s forced to sell it, for a start.’

  ‘Kids to feed, no husband, no money, what if it’s all you’ve got to sell?’

  Suddenly, I felt very tired. The aftermath of the shock, of course, but I was tired to my heart of all the crap, the politics, the unrelenting grime, the endless seeing people at their worst.

  ‘Kursan, I really don’t feel like a moral debate on hooking right now.’

  ‘You want to meet up, have a few beers? You shouldn’t be on your own tonight.’

  Solitude was exactly what I did want, but there was no use trying to persuade Kursan, and we agreed to meet up later at the Kulturny. It was a good way of showing the regulars who the hardest bastard on the block was, that anyone who fucked with me would get what Tyulev and Lubashov got. I suspected Kursan was also pretty keen on the idea of a terrified barman supplying drinks on the house all night.

  I saw I’d got a call coming in, a number I didn’t recognise. The voice, however, I did. Honey drizzled over ice cream.

  ‘I see I underestimated you,’ she said, and her tone sent a shudder through me. The kind of shudder you get when a beautiful woman takes your hand and runs a slender finger across your wrist, a crimson nail raking your palm.

  ‘Your boss must be pleased with you. Solving a brutal sex murder, making sure the villains can’t do it again. You’ll probably get promoted. Or asked to join the Ministry of State Security.’

  Her voice was mocking, playing with me. And the idea wasn’t entirely displeasing.

  ‘I’d be delighted to. If I had solved it, that is. But we both know differently.’

  She paused for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was edged with caution.

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Those two couldn’t organise anything other than selling third-grade whores and the odd shot of krokodil. Slaughtering a pregnant woman the other side of the country, getting the foetus over to Bishkek in the middle of winter, luring a senior minister’s daughter to somewhere where they could kill her, and then dumping the body? No way. And even if they could have done all that, what’s their motive?’

  I listened hard for any clue to her whereabouts. But wherever she was calling from, it was as quiet as the grave.

  ‘If your boss is happy that the case is solved, if Tynaliev is pleased that his daughter’s killers are in a drawer next to her, you should be pleased.’

  ‘I’m not happy that I killed a man today. Even if he was trying to kill me.’

  ‘Are you sure it was you he was aiming for?’

  I stopped. It hadn’t occurred to me that Tyulev might have been the target, not me. But it made a sort of sense. Vasily was known to be happy to whisper in anyone’s ear, if the folding was right. Meeting a Murder Squad inspector about a case that someone wants to quietly file away, what else could he be doing but selling information?

  ‘You told Lubashov to take Vasily down?’

  Her only answer was to laugh. Husky, seductive.

  ‘You’ll give yourself a terrible headache, thinking about things like that.’

  I remembered the bullet on the other side of the room. The last of the daylight was shining off the brass.

  ‘And you’ve already sent me the cure for that, right?’

  Silence. And then a simple, cold warning.

  ‘It’s time for you to move on, Ins
pector.’

  And then silence as she broke the connection.

  Chapter 17

  It was 1 a.m. in the Kulturny. Lubashov had been replaced on the door by some identikit tattooed thug, just as ugly, just as burly and just as stupid. The only difference was that this one had a pulse and eight pints of krov in his veins. Kursan was ready to give him the Saturday-night stare, but my new reputation preceded me because the zalupa let us in without a word. Down the stairs still stinking of fear and piss, and into the half-lit bar.

  The barman narrowed his eyes when he saw me, but he put an unopened bottle of Vivat on the counter. A memory like that, he should be over in the Hyatt, pouring overpriced cocktails and fiddling the change of foreign businessmen. I pointed at a bottle of mineral water, and that arrived just as promptly.

  Vasily’s normal seat was empty, perhaps as a mark of mourning, so I went over and parked myself. The usual faces were still there; in fact, a couple of them probably hadn’t stirred since I was last in. No Shairkul, though; maybe she’d got lucky and was being pounded into the mattress by some drunk with little money and less hygiene. I made a mental note to go and see her in the morning, then focused on watching Kursan concentrate on draining the bottle.

  I waved some som at the barman, and he shook his head. On the house, after all. I wondered if they’d run to a second bottle, in about fifteen minutes’ time, the way Kursan was upending his glass.

  ‘Save some for later,’ I said, as he poured his fourth or fifth in as many minutes.

  He grinned and nodded sideways at the room.

  ‘This lot have probably been paying those two shitheads protection money for years. You want, they’ll club together and buy us champagne.’

  I shuddered. Russian champagne is a taste you don’t ever want to acquire. As I finished my second glass of water, I saw out of the corner of my eye that one of the regulars was hovering nearby. Kursan half rose, fists ready, but I restrained him and swung round on my stool to face the newcomer.

  He’d got his hand in his jacket pocket, and I didn’t like that. I pointed at his arm and he took his hand out. Slowly. Once I could see he’d got nothing more lethal in his hand than filthy fingernails, I nodded, giving him permission to speak.

  ‘We all heard about this morning, Inspector,’ he stammered, his eyes flicking between me and a very belligerent-looking Kursan. ‘They were pricks, and no one will miss them.’

  ‘You’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit what you losers think.’

  He nodded agreement; a man of importance had given judgement. In his tiny vodka-sodden world, I was someone of consequence, while the Chief or Tynaliev could walk in and no one would have a clue about the shit storm they could cause.

  ‘Of course, Inspector. But you ought to know,’ and here he leant forward and lowered his voice, ‘one person here was delighted to hear about those two.’

  He paused for effect, saw I was less than impressed.

  ‘You know the working girl that comes in here? The beautiful one?’

  Genuinely puzzled, I shook my head. He made an hourglass shape with his hands, and then, just in case I hadn’t got the picture, cupped his hands in front of his chest.

  ‘Shairkul. You know Shairkul?’

  I wondered just how much vodka you’d need to consume over one lifetime to see Shairkul as a Kyrgyz Venus.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She couldn’t stop talking about how pleased she was.’

  ‘You’re surprised? Vasily probably kept ninety per cent of everything her pussy earned.’

  ‘No, she said she was going to make a lot of money off what she knew.’

  Now I was interested.

  ‘Did she say what that was?’

  The man looked abashed.

  ‘Well, she was going to tell me, she said you’d pay her a lot, but then the bottle ran out, and I didn’t have enough for another, so she went and sat with someone else.’

  True love spurned; I was amazed we weren’t both in tears. He looked longingly at the couple of inches that still remained in our bottle, so I prised it out of Kursan’s paw, and held it out to him.

  ‘How long ago did she leave?’

  He reached for the bottle, but I kept it just outside his grasp.

  ‘Maybe two hours ago?’

  He looked so melancholy, I figured she must have left with company. I gave him the bottle, he smiled and scuttled away, pathetically grateful.

  ‘We hadn’t finished that,’ Kursan complained.

  He started to gesture for another bottle, but I shook my head, grabbed his arm, and started to haul him up.

  ‘You want to go to another bar? What’s wrong with this one?’

  ‘What’s right with it?’ I wanted to ask, but just aimed him at the door.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  I pushed him up the stairs, past the thug and into the night air.

  ‘We’re going to pay a call on a hooker.’

  He turned to me and grinned, gold tooth glinting, for all the world like a nineteenth-century bandit.

  ‘Da? Now you’re talking.’

  And with that, he lurched off towards the pavement, to bully a taksi into stopping for us.

  Chapter 18

  The taksi stopped on the far side of Osh bazaar, outside Shairkul’s khrushchyovk block, Kursan loudly debating the cost of the ride, the driver’s parentage and the prices his mother would charge her customers. The last thing I needed was for the world to know we were there, so I handed some notes through the window and told Kursan to shut the fuck up. Amazingly, he did so without an argument. Without a torch, it was a slow job getting up the stairs, but we managed without making too much noise.

  Once we reached the top floor, there was enough light to show me that both the ornamental wooden door and the heavy-duty metal door were ajar. I began to think that something very bad was about to come my way, and I gestured at Kursan to move down to the next landing. I listened at the doors, Yarygin in my hand. Not a sound. But while I was there, I recognised the sweet metallic smell coming from inside the apartment.

  Usupov and I have argued about this one before. He claims that blood is blood, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a sheep or a yak, a horse or a whore. But I believe there’s something distinctive, unique, about the scent of human blood, catching at the back of the throat, electric, like silver foil on dental fillings. Of course, never having found a dead yak in a fifth-storey apartment, I don’t have a really scientific comparison.

  But I’d found enough dead people to have a pretty good idea what was waiting for me inside.

  Shairkul was sprawled on the floor of the sitting room, legs apart, her knees raised, as if waiting for her next customer. Or perhaps that was how she’d been left by her last one. The red rug beneath her had changed shape, its edges irregular, as if the dye had run, smeared over the bare concrete. But it wasn’t dye.

  Like Yekaterina, Shairkul stared sightlessly upwards. But her face wasn’t placid, calm, accepting of her fate. Her lips were drawn back in a scream that was half snarl, her gold teeth glinting under the harsh electric light.

  I ignored the body for the moment and searched the apartment. I knew a ment who didn’t check the scene of a murder; they feed him through a tube now, and his children stopped visiting the hospital a long time ago. So I checked the bedroom where I’d seen Gulbara hard at work, then the kitchen, the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain, expecting to find Gulbara’s body in the bathtub, but the apartment was empty. I decided it was safe enough to holster my gun, and walked back into the sitting room. I was ready to call the scene-of-crime forensic boys, but first I wanted to get my own take on the butchery in front of me.

  Shairkul had died hard, fingernails broken and shredded fighting off her murderer, jaw shattered by a punch. Her hands were covered in defensive cuts. Or maybe she’d fought back. The air was full of the stink of blood and sweat and shit and fear. I wanted to open a window, but didn’t, at leas
t until I got the say-so from Usupov’s people.

  I heard a noise behind me, a footstep, and I grabbed for my gun, ready to fire as I turned. A touch more pressure on the trigger and I’d have sent Kursan to wherever smugglers go when they die.

  ‘Ahueyet?’ he said, seeing Shairkul’s broken corpse.

  ‘Never mind “what the fuck?” – you almost joined her on the floor,’ I said, tasting adrenaline and sour bile rising in my throat. ‘You need to fuck off out of here, right now. I can’t explain you away. And if the uniforms decide to arrest you, it won’t be me dancing with you down in Sverdlovsky basement.’

  Kursan took the hint; he’s waltzed with Urmat Sariev before, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

  ‘Call me,’ he said over his shoulder, already down the first flight of stairs.

  Too late to tell him not to touch anything, but at least he was out of my hair.

  ‘And don’t say anything to anyone,’ I shouted down the stairwell.

  He was probably halfway to the Kulturny to spread the word. But I had more important things to worry about than Kursan’s gossiping. I’d got a second – or should that be a third? – dead woman on my hands.

  I used my mobile to take a few photos; forensics would take decent shots, but I couldn’t wait the week or so that it would take to get a set into my hands. I could have used a cigarette, but I remembered the uniform up on Ibraimova littering the scene with butts, and decided to wait until I was outside.

  I was deliberately avoiding looking at her stomach. That’s where the killing blows would be. With a knife, they almost always are. Forget fancy knife play: if you know what you’re doing, a thrust, a twist of the wrist, then pull back and you can disembowel someone faster than a gun will dim their eyes. So first I photographed her hands, the remaining nails scarlet with cheap polish, the other fingers scarlet where the roots had been wrenched out.

  Then I photographed her face, trying to avoid the awful accusation in her stare. As always, I wondered if there could be any truth to the old story that you can see a murderer’s face retained on the victim’s eyes. Right then, if I’d caught sight of myself in a mirror, I’d look like her murderer. Or the man who didn’t manage to prevent it.