A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  Most of the victims I see are strangers to me, but the few minutes I’d spent in Shairkul’s company turned her death into something more personal. Remembering the threats I made, the bullying to get her to talk, a wave of shame smacked into me.

  And then it was time, the moment I’d been dreading. Shairkul was wearing her coat, unbuttoned but covering her belly. The material was slashed and torn, blood around the edges of the cuts. I had a good idea what was underneath, from the size of the bloody puddle on the floor. I used the muzzle of my gun to flip the coat open.

  The smell of her death rose up to me, as I looked down at the grey coils and turmoil of her intestines, the diagonal cut through her stomach, her guts spilling out as if trying to escape the knife.

  It’s then that I saw why Shairkul was on her back, legs apart, knees raised. She wasn’t lying in the position with which she greeted her customers, as I’d first thought. Instead, she’d been carefully arranged into a crude approximation of a woman giving birth.

  Which perhaps explained the foetus nestling between her bloody thighs.

  Chapter 19

  I walked down the broken-tiled steps of the morgue and along the dimly lit corridor towards the racks of the waiting dead. Beyond the metal doors, the stink of chemicals and raw meat lingered in the air. The place was deserted, and the neon strip light above the dissection slab flickered with an intermittent high-pitched buzz, like a dentist’s drill.

  At the wall of storage drawers, I looked for Shairkul’s name, but the label holders were all empty. I pulled out the nearest drawer, the runners giving their usual shriek of protest. The corpse inside was the krokodil junkie I’d watched Usupov dissect, what now seemed like months ago. The smell of iodine made my eyes water and I slammed the drawer shut. The next two drawers were empty. But the fourth drawer was occupied.

  A woman, by the shape of the sheet covering the body. I pulled back the rough cloth, expecting to find Shairkul staring up at me, her mouth open in protest at the indignity of her penultimate home.

  But the body wasn’t Shairkul.

  It was Chinara.

  I stared, uncomprehending, unable to work out how my dead wife’s body had been exhumed from her grave up in the mountains and brought there. A lock of her hair had fallen over her face, and I lifted it back and tucked it behind her ear. Her skin was smooth, unblemished; I could have almost believed she was asleep, if I hadn’t helped carry her to the waiting hole in the ground. I put my forefinger on her cheek, stroked her face with the lightest of touches.

  The final days in the hospital, Chinara was barely conscious for most of it, with ever stronger doses of morphine to dull the pain. I slept on a chair by her bed, in a room on our own because the Chief had pulled some strings. Sometimes working for a powerful man has its advantages. I would doze for an hour or two until her whimpering in pain, from the operation, from the tumours, would wake me. And finally, after eight days, as I sat watching her, she opened her eyes, half smiled, and drifted back into a final sleep. Too many memories, and all the good ones overlaid with the sorrow of what was to follow.

  Then, as I looked down at my dead wife, she opened her eyes.

  She stared up at me, her gaze unflinching, the way she’d always looked at me. For a moment, I realised with perfect clarity that her illness, her death, all of it was a dream, a hoax. And then with just as much knowledge, I worked out that I was dreaming. Even our loved ones never return from where we bury them. Except in dreams.

  But I can’t wake myself, return to the world where I live alone, surrounded by crooks and hookers, the warped, the stunted, the desperate amongst us. With Chinara is where I want to be. Even if that means in the grave.

  She gazed at me, and I moved to one side, to face her properly. There was a question in her eyes, it seemed to me, or perhaps a warning. I wondered what she was thinking, even as the absurdity of imagining she could think at all hit me. Dead, decaying, buried under a harsh winter sky; that’s my wife.

  She used to interrogate me with each new case, forcing me to use logic, to think through the facts, lies, deceptions. Time after time, she offered directions, insights that helped me solve my cases. Nothing surprised her about human nature, but none of it soiled her.

  I looked down at Chinara, her voice clear enough in my head; start finding the missing woman, start turning over rocks. Go back to being a detective again; I’m dead and that’s not going to change. Go back to being the man I loved.

  I shut her eyes with my fingertips and slid the drawer back into place, gently, not to wake her. Then I walked out of the room, and into the corridor, towards the morning light and the end of my dream.

  *

  I woke up, eyes raw from the light streaming through the window. It must have snowed during the night, because the air had that crystal clarity that presses like thumbs on your eyelids. I couldn’t shake off the idea that Chinara had somehow been resurrected, even though common sense told me it was a case of wishful thinking. During the weeks after she died, I would hear her calling out from the next room, never anything intelligible, just sounds and notes that evoked her voice, summoned it from the dark of her grave. But the advice that she gave me, or rather, the advice my subconscious put into her mouth, held good.

  I made coffee, lit and then stubbed out a cigarette, resolved to quit for the hundredth time, stared out of the window, wondered about my next steps.

  I could have wandered down to the morgue to see what Usupov had dredged up about Shairkul’s terrible last moments. But a nagging concern about my dream being all too real made the idea unappealing. I decided I could always call him later, no need to face the stink of antiseptic yet again.

  First priority had to be finding Gulbara. Either she was dead, on the run as a murderer, or hiding from her flatmate’s killer. She wouldn’t be holed up with a wealthy client somewhere: she was strictly a fuck me and fuck off kind of girl.

  It made sense to find Khatchig Gasparian, the Armenian last seen trying to whack Gulbara’s monkey with his stick. Neither of them would be the other’s dream date, but love can be blind, or at least blindfolded with banknotes.

  I called Sverdlovsky to have archives pull his file, if there was one; the last revolution saw the Public Prosecutor’s office burnt down, together with most of the files held on our career criminals. If all Gasparian had ever done was give a ment breakfast money to overlook his speeding, then I wouldn’t be interested. But the odds were he was involved in something else. There’s no big Armenian community here, no reason for him to be in Kyrgyzstan. Of course, he could have worked as Gulbara’s minder, pimping her out to pay for his cognac and cigars and mobile, and keeping the punters docile in return with the promise of a slap or two. There was only one way to find out.

  I was halfway down the stairs, fresh cigarette in hand, when I remembered that I’d decided to quit. Tomorrow, I promised myself, and pushed open the heavy steel communal door, emerging blinking into pitiless sunlight.

  Chapter 20

  ‘You’re fucking my brain with all your questions!’

  ‘Khatchig, why not try answering them? Or one of us will get tired of the dance, and you’d better hope it’s not me. I might have to go out, have a little vodka, a smoke, something to eat. Of course, I can’t leave you alone; got you booked in as a suicide risk. So one of my colleagues will step in, keep you company. Urmat Sariev, perhaps you know him?’

  We were in the basement at Sverdlovsky. A morning of asking around had given me a lot of answers about Khatchig Gasparian, and I didn’t like any of them.

  He’d left the Armenian capital, Yerevan, in a hurry a few years ago, leaving behind a couple of dead small-time criminals, and headed down to Dubai, where he locked into a couple of property scams, selling apartments that weren’t his to sell. When the Emirates got too hot for him, he headed north and east, ending up in Almaty. Marrying a Kyrgyz girl got him the right to live in Bishkek. She divorced him after refusing to go on the game and getting a smacking that pu
t her in hospital for two months. She wouldn’t testify, though; swore she’d walked into a door. About fifty-three times, according to the photographs.

  He’d got a lot of money in the bank, thanks to gullible Indians in Dubai wanting to climb the property ladder there, so he didn’t seem to need a job. Maybe a bit of pimping, a little drug-running, or shipping a few weapons that fell out of either the Russian or the American military bases into the hands of our Islamist friends down south. But there was no hard proof, and he was small fry, too insignificant to interest Tynaliev’s people.

  Right then, I was having as much success at breaking him down as I would climbing Mount Lenina.

  Gasparian pulled out his cigarettes, which I promptly confiscated.

  ‘Fire hazard; don’t want to burn the building down by accident.’ I smiled, and lit one of my own.

  ‘Pizda!’

  ‘Cunt I may be,’ I said, ‘but I’m the one enjoying my smoke. Of course,’ and here I looked solicitous, ‘if the smoke is bothering you, I can always go outside.’ I pushed my chair back and stood up. ‘I’ll just get Sariev,’ I said, ‘and he can show you what a real pizda is like.’

  Gasparian just grunted, but I could smell the fear on him, like garlic on an Uzbek’s breath.

  I pushed his cigarettes over to his side of the table. It wasn’t easy for him to light one, being handcuffed to a chain bolted into the floor, but he managed.

  ‘Let’s start again, about how you killed Shairkul.’

  He sighed; we both knew he didn’t do it.

  ‘Why would I kill her?’

  ‘Maybe you couldn’t get it up? Maybe she started laughing? Maybe you lost your temper?’

  He looked at me as if I was a peasant straight out of the village.

  ‘You got money in the bank, Inspector?’

  ‘I hope that’s not an attempt to bribe an officer of the court, Gasparian.’

  He looked alarmed, held up his hands.

  ‘No, no. Just, you keep your money there so it’s safe, so it earns you more money, right?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Shairkul made me money. Why would I empty my bank account?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Here’s how it was. I was out with Gulbara. She was giving an American soldier a blow round the back of Panfilov Park, near the statue of Lenin. She gets a call on her mobile, answers it, which pisses the Yank off, what with her being paid to use her mouth for other things besides gossip. She gets up off her knees, comes over, says Shairkul’s in trouble, we need to get over there. We leave the Yank swearing and pulling his pants up, and I drive over.’

  He paused, and pursed his lips, remembering the scene in the apartment.

  ‘Well, you saw her. You know what state she was in. We never touched anything, I swear. I wouldn’t even let Gulbara see the body. That sort of thing, it can put a girl off her work for ever.’

  ‘You’re all heart, Khatchig,’ I said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and stamping it out on the concrete.

  He didn’t recognise the anger in my voice, and nodded agreement.

  ‘Someone has to look after these girls,’ he said, a defensive note in his voice.

  ‘Well, you did a fucking bad job with Shairkul, didn’t you?’

  ‘You’re the law, you’re supposed to keep the maniacs off the streets.’

  I didn’t have an answer to that, so I tugged on the chain, forcing his head down on to the table.

  ‘So where’s Gulbara?’

  ‘Don’t have a fucking clue. That slut was down the stairs faster than piss down a drunk’s leg.’

  ‘What were you just saying about keeping your money in a bank?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Gulbara and her performing monkey keep you in the good life. You’re going to let her disappear?’

  He shrugged, the timeless Levantine answer to any difficult question.

  ‘She’s gone back to Osh? Or you’ve stashed her away, ready to get back on her knees when this all blows over?’

  No answer, just an insolent stare. Both made me decide it was time for more forceful measures.

  ‘I think you could be more helpful than this, Khatchig,’ I said, and tugged on the chain again.

  ‘I told you all I know. I’m just an ordinary citizen.’

  I heaved a deep sigh, to show Gasparian how disappointed I was.

  ‘That law you punched when we tried to bring you in?’

  ‘Plain clothes, how am I supposed to know he’s one of yours? Self-defence, plain and simple.’

  ‘Well, you bounced his head off the wall, and now he’s in the hospital, in a coma.’

  ‘And that’s my fault?’

  ‘Well, his uncle thinks so.’

  Gasparian sneered.

  ‘So get his uncle to sue me.’

  I smiled, mirthless, stood up, put my cigarettes back in my pocket, crushed his pack in my fist.

  ‘He might want to be more direct than that. I’ll be upstairs if you suddenly remember where Gulbara’s hiding out. You talk things over with his uncle.’

  I paused, my hand on the door, turned back to face Gasparian.

  ‘The officer you hit is called Kairat Sariev.’

  I opened the door. Urmat Sariev was standing there, smiling at the prospect of a brief encounter with the man who put his nephew in hospital. Usually he uses a bag of apples; leaves lots of spectacular bruises, and you can rupture a spleen with one swing. But nobody would be too worried about Gasparian having a bruise or two. Not in his line of work.

  As I trudged upstairs, I heard the flat thud of the first blow.

  That’s usually all it takes.

  Chapter 21

  The winding mountain road to Osh climbs to almost 4,000 metres between Bishkek and Jalalabad. I’ve done the journey countless times; I don’t trust the flights between the two cities, and the driving relaxes me, lets my mind dig around for answers while being half distracted. The uncoiling road is a kind of hypnosis, using all my concentration while the pieces in my head form patterns of their own accord. But doing that journey in the heart of winter would be suicide, quick or slow, depending on whether you skid over the first bend or spend the next three months snug and immovable in a snowdrift, getting further buried with each snowfall.

  So I flew, using all my energy to concentrate on keeping the plane aloft, which was more than I suspected the flight engineers had done.

  Finally, I thought I might be getting somewhere on the case, thanks to Urmat Sariev and his fruit persuaders. I hadn’t even stubbed out my first cigarette before they called me down to the basement. Gasparian was sitting on the floor, manacled hands shielding his head, back to the wall to protect his kidneys. He’d been crying, and there was a thin river of blood dribbling from one nostril. Sariev wasn’t even breathing heavily.

  ‘This bitch won’t last five minutes in Number One before some cell boss splits his arse with a big yelda,’ Sariev said, and gave Gasparian shoe leather to reinforce the insult.

  Gasparian started to mutter something, but Sariev has only ever been interested in coaxing a confession, not in actually listening to it.

  ‘Zakroy svoy peesavati rot, sooka!’ he screamed, spit landing on Gasparian’s head.

  ‘No, let the bitch keep his fucking mouth open,’ I said. ‘He knows what I want from him. Don’t you?’ And I gave a gentle toe-prod to Gasparian’s ribs. It’s a bad cop, worse cop thing.

  Sariev shrugged, reached into the bag, selected an apple and took a massive bite. As an afterthought, or maybe as thanks for giving him the opportunity to dance in the basement, he offered one to me. I shook my head, and squatted down next to the prisoner.

  ‘Khatchig,’ I said, in my mildest tone, ‘this could all have been avoided. We can stop it right now, or the sergeant can treat you to some more fruit. All I need is where you’ve stashed Gulbara. Just an address, that’s all. For her own good, you know. We can protect her.’

  Gasparian muttered something indistinct abo
ut us not having helped Shairkul, and Sariev gave him another piece of fruit. Still in the bag.

  Gasparian spat out a tooth, and looked up at me.

  ‘You know you’ve got a squealer here in the station, don’t you? Shit, you’ve probably got a dozen little birds all singing sweetly, the pay you get.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I’m not saying anything with anyone else in the room but you. Word gets round that I sing and I’ll end up in the drawer next to Shairkul.’

  I thought it over, and gave Sariev the nod to leave. He wasn’t too happy about the idea, but headed for the door. He swung the bag at Gasparian’s head one last time, pulling back at the last minute, so that the apples whistled harmlessly an inch from Gasparian’s face, and grinned as Gasparian flinched.

  ‘Just off down the bazaar, Inspector, pick up some apples. Nothing like a healthy diet, eh?’ and he was gone.

  I helped Gasparian to his feet and steered him towards the chair. He sat down, and blew a long string of bloody snot on to the floor. His wrists were raw and bleeding from where the chain had cut into him. I didn’t feel proud of what I’d done, but there were three dead women who deserved answers, even if they weren’t around to hear them.

  ‘You know this is nothing, don’t you, Khatchig?’ I said, in my most soothing voice. ‘If I let him loose, there’s no way he won’t put you in intensive care, ruptured spleen, crushed testicles, burst eardrums, just for starters. Or he’ll just dump you in the morgue, next to your two-legged bank account. You’ve hurt one of ours; you think anyone gives a shit what happens to you?’

  He nodded, facing up to reality. Down in the basement, with flecks of dried blood sprinkled on the tiled walls, you have to be a bigger man than Khatchig to hold out. I offered him a wad of tissues, to wipe his face.

  ‘So if I tell you where Gulbara is, I walk out of here?’