A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  He nodded. He’d probably been in Chechnya, almost certainly in Afghanistan. He knew what people were capable of.

  ‘She was pregnant,’ he said, ‘but I’m certain that this wasn’t the act of a married boyfriend afraid of the consequences.’

  Saltanat spoke, for the first time, and I suddenly wondered why the Colonel hadn’t asked who she was, or what she was doing there.

  ‘And what makes you so sure, Colonel?’

  ‘Because I am . . . was . . . the father.’

  Chapter 29

  As a Murder Squad, you learn pretty quickly which cases require priority solving. But I’d never been involved in the murder of a pregnant Russian army officer before; my first and probably best idea was to head to the Kazakh border and hole up for a couple of decades.

  But Marina Gurchenko’s murder put me firmly in between two of the country’s most powerful men: the Minister for State Security, and a Russian Colonel with enough firepower at his disposal to drive us back to being nomads.

  Both men wanted their respective victims avenged. Mikhail Tynaliev was expecting to see banner headlines about dedicated security forces hunting down a ruthless killer; Barabanov wanted the whole mess shipped quietly back to Mother Russia, and the case file accidentally shredded. Both men expected me to solve the crime. And failure wasn’t going to be an option.

  For a moment, I wondered if the Colonel could have organised the whole thing, had a few useless women slaughtered, so that when it was Gurchenko’s turn, it would look like we had a serial killer prowling the land with a set of butcher’s knives. But it would have been much easier for Barabanov to just arrange an accident; a lorry backing up without due care and attention, or an overdose and the shocking discovery that a member of the medical team abused drugs.

  I walked over and crouched beside the body. Sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re standing over someone who only hours ago was laughing, making plans, wondering what to call her baby.

  All of that had been taken away from her, stealing even her dignity as well as her hopes and beauty. Murder is the ultimate theft, leaving only a ransacked house, unfit for human habitation, ready to be razed back into the ground.

  I reached out to turn the body over, but Barabanov pulled my arm back.

  ‘We’ll see to that,’ he ordered.

  ‘I can hardly help investigate this murder if I can’t examine the body,’ I said.

  It was a battle of wills and, if I’d been in his regiment, I’d have already been doing punishment drill. But I wasn’t, and he needed my knowledge more than I needed his. He reluctantly nodded, and I rolled the body over, away from me.

  Marina Gurchenko slithered over, drying blood dark and flaking on her skin. The first traces of lividity had begun, but there were no signs yet of rigor mortis. I’m no Usupov, but I guessed that she’d been dead less than three hours.

  ‘How often is this hangar used?’

  Barabanov looked thrown by the question.

  ‘When the gunships are operational, or during regular servicing. The last time anyone would have had any reason to be in here was when the flight you came in on left here.’

  ‘And the hangar isn’t guarded?’

  ‘This is a military base. No one gets past the wire, or the guards.’

  ‘So your security was breached?’

  Barabanov shook his head.

  ‘I ordered a full search as soon as the body was found. Nothing, no gaps in the wire, no tracks in the snow, no vehicles came or left.’

  It was time to ask some dangerous questions, the sort that you normally ask with a weapon in your hand.

  ‘If you didn’t discover the body until after the krokodil had left for Osh, why did it come for us?’

  ‘I had orders.’

  I waited. I’m very good at waiting. Sometimes that’s all it takes. And he hesitated.

  ‘I was told to give every assistance to a security agent of a friendly foreign nation.’

  That would be Saltanat, then. Kursan and I had just managed to hitch a ride. I still hadn’t figured out Saltanat’s involvement in all of this. An Uzbek Security officer? A double agent for the Russians? On the side of the victims, or hunting with the killers? All I knew, from the way she’d executed Illya, was that she was quick-thinking, efficient and ruthless.

  I turned back to Marina’s body. The similarities with Yekaterina Tynalieva’s corpse were unmistakable: massive damage to tissue and organs. But there were puzzling discrepancies as well. Where Yekaterina was precisely, almost surgically opened and her flesh peeled back, Marina’s pelvis had been smashed apart by a powerful blow with an axe. Marina was naked and slaughtered indoors; Yekaterina was fully clothed and died in the open air. It seemed pretty certain that I was hunting more than one murderer.

  There was no sign of drug use, no needle tracks, no bruising. I could sense Barabanov was anxious for me to be gone, so he could parcel his ex-lover up like joints on a butcher’s slab, send her back to Mother Russia for burial without an autopsy. It was only at the last minute, as I heard the door to the hangar slide open, and a medical team arrived, that I spotted what might be a clue.

  The Greek letter ‘alpha’, tattooed on her shoulder, was so small as to be barely noticeable. I didn’t draw attention to it, just stored the information in my head, stood back as the medical team manhandled Marina into a black body bag, placed it on a collapsible gurney and wheeled her towards the exit.

  The door clanged behind them, and all that remained of a life was a pool of blood. Barabanov jerked his head at one of the mechanics, who returned with a hose. Within ten minutes, Marina Gurchenko was rinsed away into the gutter, along with any forensic evidence.

  Barabanov gestured us towards the door.

  ‘My aide will escort you to the camp gates. One of your police cars is waiting to take you all back into Bishkek.’

  He held the door open for us, but I wasn’t quite finished yet.

  ‘You spotted nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary happened this afternoon?’

  My gut told me he’d got information he didn’t want to pass on. So I held my ground, willing to outstare him, to wait as long as it took, while snow billowed in from the storm outside.

  ‘The sentries stopped one car on the camp outskirts. A police car. The driver produced his police ID, said it was just a routine inspection, drove away.’

  ‘And?’

  Barabanov stared back at me, cold blue eyes giving nothing away.

  ‘I was surprised when I saw your name on the gunship manifest, Inspector,’ he said, ‘although your reputation as a hunter of men precedes you.’

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  ‘You see, Inspector, the man my sentries stopped produced genuine police ID, no question of that. The odd thing is, the name on the card was yours.’

  Chapter 30

  As the Colonel said, a uniform was waiting for us at the main gate. Kursan climbed into the front, as if by right. He’d been in a police car before, but this was almost certainly the first time he’d not been handcuffed and chained to the D-ring on the floor. Saltanat and I sat on the back seat, as the driver turned the heat down to merely stifling, then headed towards Bishkek.

  For the rest of the journey, I tried to work out how a police ID card with my name on it had ended up in someone else’s hands. For a few thousand som, paid under the counter, it’s easy enough to get false documents, birth and even death certificates, but no one would run the risk of producing fake police papers unless there was big money or a lot of influence behind it. And, of course, it would be all too easy to set me up if I got too close to something – or someone – I wasn’t supposed to suspect. My ID found under another body, carelessly lost in a rage of lust, for example.

  I decided that there was nothing I could do apart from report it, and switched on my phone for the first time in hours. For the next ten minutes, I endured a string of messages from the Chief, each one more hysterical than the last. They started off q
uite mildly with ‘arsehole’ and progressed to ‘stinking fuckhead’ over the course of a few minutes. It didn’t seem like much of a promotion, but at least it showed he cared. I switched off the phone, and decided to surprise him. That way, we were less likely to have a reception committee waiting.

  We were only twenty kilometres outside Bishkek, so I didn’t bother trying to sleep. We bounced around quite a lot, what with the potholed road and the ice on what little tarmac there was. I made sure some of my bouncing included colliding with Saltanat. I was wondering if she’d want to retry the experiment of sleeping with me, but she wasn’t giving off any encouraging signs. Then I pictured the hacked and mutilated woman back in the air force base, and felt ashamed of myself. I’d always sworn I’d never get desensitised to death, and I knew the pain of losing Chinara would never leave me. But the others? It was all too easy to see them as evidence of a crime, part of a puzzle to be solved, rather than ordinary people turned into victims against their will. None of us want to die.

  I realised that I had no idea where Saltanat lived. Or, indeed, even her patronymic and family name.

  ‘Where do you want us to drop you?’ I asked, perhaps too casually.

  ‘Anywhere you see a taxi,’ was her reply, frosty as usual.

  ‘No problem to take you home,’ I said.

  She simply threw me the hard stare, and I gave up. I decided to organise a plain-clothes guy to follow her, the next time we met.

  Even though the storm had stopped, with just a few flecks of snow turning up late like drunks at a party, Chui Prospekt was deserted. The lights were still on at the Metro Bar, with a couple of hopeful taxis loitering with intent, hoping to overcharge a foreigner. She tapped our driver on the shoulder, and we pulled to a halt.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother following me.’

  So we followed her taxi down Chui as far as Tynystanov, where it did an abrupt right, in the direction of the Uzbek Embassy. As the tail lights disappeared, I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

  ‘Some woman, that,’ said Kursan. ‘If I was twenty years younger –’

  ‘And washed more than once a year, and didn’t hang out with every crook in Bishkek, I’m sure she’d look at you with love in her eyes,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t have to be love,’ Kursan said. ‘More than one way to get a pizda wet,’ and he spat out a throaty laugh.

  ‘You want to come and see the Chief with me?’ I asked, changing the subject and knowing that Sverdlovsky Station was the last place on earth that Kursan would want to be.

  ‘Drop me at Ibraimova; I’ll stay at your place,’ he said.

  I started to tell him I didn’t have a spare key, then remembered Kursan’s lock-picking skills. I sighed and nodded.

  As we pulled up outside my apartment block, Kursan jerked his head as a sign for me to get out with him.

  ‘I didn’t want to ask when she was with us,’ he said, and his face was serious, his voice almost a whisper, ‘but what was it you noticed about the body?’

  I debated about telling him, then decided he knew so much already, a little more wouldn’t be a problem. We walked a few paces so the uniform couldn’t hear us.

  ‘A tattoo, very small, professionally done. A Greek letter A.’

  Kursan sucked air between his teeth.

  ‘Spetsnaz. Russian Special Forces.’

  I nodded. Spetsnaz are the toughest, fiercest bastards in the whole Russian armed forces. If Marina had been one of them, whoever killed her must have been a stone-cold butcher. Every way I turned, this case got murkier and more dangerous. At the rate things were going, it wouldn’t be long before I was lying next to Chinara up in the mountains. Right then, that didn’t seem like a bad idea.

  I got back in the car and yanked the door shut against the cold.

  ‘I’ll see you when I get back from the station,’ I said.

  ‘If you get back,’ he said, and laughed again, this time with no warmth in his voice.

  *

  ‘Just who the fuck are you working for? Is it that Uzbek bitch? Gave you the starry eyes, and a flash of tit? You’re a fucked-up pussy-head!’

  The Chief was closer to the truth than he knew, but that didn’t endear him to me. I stood before his fancy landing-strip-size desk, and wondered how much the eagle statue had cost. He was pissed off with me for not declaring Yekaterina’s death sorted, for getting the Russians mixed up in everything, for following a trail of death all over the country. But most of all, he was pissed off at the grief he was getting from the nomenklatura who held his career in their palms.

  I waited until his rage subsided enough for him to pour a generous one and give me the nod to sit down.

  ‘Have you actually found out anything while you’ve been on your winter holiday? I know you’re an idiot, but you’ve never let a sniff of pizda hang you up before.’

  I didn’t know where he’d got the notion that I was a womaniser, but I supposed I ought to be flattered.

  ‘What’s interesting, Chief, is what I don’t know.’

  He tipped the bottle, nodded at me to continue.

  ‘I know it’s not a serial killer. Too many deaths, too many locations, too little time to get from one to another, especially this time of year. The murders are connected, but the pattern changes. These women have nothing in common, no social links, no friendships, not even the same nationalities. According to Usupov, Yekaterina Tynalieva’s murderer had some sort of surgical training, but Marina Gurchenko’s corpse looks as if a drunk had swung an axe in the dark. So not the same murderer; not the same psychologically driven modus operandi behind the killings.’

  ‘“Modus operandi”,’ the Chief repeated, mock-impressed. ‘You’re a hunter of killers, not a university don. Spare me the fancy stuff.’

  I ignored him, and carried on.

  ‘There are the other deaths to consider. Gulbara, the girl in Osh; she wasn’t pregnant. And Tyulev and Lubashov in the shoot-out outside Fatboys: what triggered that? And what made Gasparian take a header into traffic?’

  Secretly, I was sure Gasparian’s suicide had been one of those assisted ones, where two burly policemen throw you off a bridge, but I kept that thought to myself.

  ‘The biggest puzzle? Find a motive and you usually find your killer, but no one’s claimed responsibility, no one’s stood up and blamed the ills of modern society, or the Russians, or the full moon for why they did it. So that tells me it’s about business, putting the frighteners on people; showing they can get away with anything, so get out of their way.’

  The Chief nodded. He may well have thought all this through himself, but he was shrewd enough to know when a pat on the head would get him further than a kick up the arse.

  ‘The Circle of Brothers?’

  It was my turn to nod.

  ‘Hard to see who else. The question is: why choose this way of sending out messages?’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘That’s where the serious money is.’

  An officer in the Anti-Drug Trafficking Department told me there are a couple of dozen drug cartels across Kyrgyzstan, mostly based on ethnic origins: Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kurd, Gipsy, Chechen, Turkish, Armenian, Uighur and Tajik. Everybody wants a slice of our only growth industry.

  ‘But they’ve already got their territories agreed upon and divided up,’ the Chief said. ‘So why kick up all this shit storm now?’

  I sat back and watched him sip his vodka.

  ‘Uzbek Security have a theory that it’s political. Someone stirring up trouble between our two countries. You know how Uzbeks always think that Osh should be theirs.’

  The Chief pulled a sour face, as if his vodka was too warm, and pursed his lips. Osh is an enclave, housed on a narrow strip of land that lies next to Uzbek territory like a bridegroom’s yelda. Half the population are ethnic Uzbek and resent being Kyrgyz; the other half are Kyrgyz and resent Uzbeks getting above themselves.

  ‘Your girlfriend says there have been Uzbek wome
n killed in the same way?’ the Chief asked.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend, but yes.’

  ‘Deliberate misinformation, my guess,’ the Chief pronounced, stumbling a bit over the words.

  I figured he’d had enough vodka, and wearily poured the heeltaps of the bottle into his glass.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘If those Uzbek fuckers want a fight, they should come out into the open.’

  ‘So you think it’s about land, not drugs.’

  ‘That’s what I pay you to find out, fool.’

  I stood up. The Chief stayed slumped where he was, eyes looking like boiled eggs.

  ‘I’ll ask around about any new alliances, fresh fallouts in the drugs trade, see if that gets us anywhere. But war with another country? I think you’d better talk to the Minister for State Security about that.’

  I might as well have been talking to the eagle on the desk. The Chief’s eyes were closed, and he was starting to whistle through his nose.

  I put on my ushanka, buttoned up my coat and headed out of the building back towards Ibraimova, at a loss about what to do next.

  Chapter 31

  I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories. I believe the Americans did walk on the moon, there was nobody on the grassy knoll, and the shots fired outside the Kremlin at Brezhnev’s motorcade came from an army deserter, not a deep-cover CIA operative. But this case was a line of distorting mirrors, each reflecting the truth away from me. There was a reason behind the killings; I just had to work out what it was.

  I spent the next two days criss-crossing the city, putting the arm on pharmaceutical drug smugglers in Osh bazaar, giving a little muscle to a couple of Uzbek pimps working the parks, treating Alamedin’s biggest heroin dealer to the sight of my Yarygin.

  Kursan put me back in touch with Abdurehim Otkur; I told him what I needed and who I wanted to meet. At first he was reluctant to help, but I pointed out the benefits of peace and quiet for everyone on both sides of the border. Then I reminded him that Tynaliev could send a battalion of soldiers to make his life miserable; all it needed was a word from me in the Minister’s ear. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of hints here, a whisper in the right guy’s ear.