A Killing Winter

by Tom Callaghan

  Kursan tried to pull himself upright but the damage to his arm was too great to support his weight. He thrashed on the floor, cursing me, trying to reach his gun. I took three steps towards him, waited until his fingers had almost reached the grip, and then stamped down hard on his hand. I wanted to hear the bones grind into powder. I could tell from the smell that I’d punctured his gut, and he’d pissed himself.

  I looked over at the Chief, and wagged a finger at him, telling him not to do anything stupid. But he sat in shock, unable to make a move. Too many years behind a desk will do that to you.

  Kursan spat at me, the gobbets of spittle falling before they reached me. I took my foot off his hand, and watched him scrabble for the gun. I remembered how firmly his hand had gripped mine in congratulation when Chinara told him of our engagement, had raised a toast at my wedding, had squeezed my shoulder at the graveside.

  And as his fingers touched the gun, I pressed the barrel of my Yarygin to his forehead and blew his life out on to the floor.

  Chapter 52

  The Chief recovered his composure with remarkable speed.

  ‘This won’t be a problem for you,’ he assured me. ‘A notorious criminal attempts to kill two senior police officers, pays the price, thanks to your speed and vigilance.’

  I looked down at the corpse, saw the blowback from my final shot covering my hand, the sleeve and chest of my shirt, lukewarm and sticky on my bare skin, and I wanted to scrape and scour until no trace remained.

  ‘No need for an investigation,’ the Chief continued, ‘not with me as a witness. As long as we have our deal. Self-defence or a brutal killing, it’s your call.’

  I nodded, as the adrenaline started to ebb, and the nausea kicked in. The room went dizzy for a few seconds, and I wondered if I was going to faint.

  ‘And the drugs?’ I asked.

  ‘A two-way split is better than a three-way, wouldn’t you say? Yours if you want, no problem. And plenty more in the future. It’s a repeat business.’

  I started to wipe the worst of Kursan’s blood, brains and skull fragments off my hand, then gave it up as a bad job.

  ‘Not like dying, then,’ I said.

  I put the Yarygin down on the desk. The Chief reached over, very slowly, and with one finger turned the barrel so that it was no longer pointing at his heart. I made a grab at the desk, before my legs decided they no longer belonged to me, and sat down.

  ‘Even if your scheme works, and the old crew come back, the Circle have you by the balls, don’t they?’

  The Chief looked amused.

  ‘Not with a hard man at the top; we can wipe them out for good.’

  I shook my head, my ears still ringing. The smell of Kursan’s guts and brains filled the room.

  ‘They’ve got too much on you, and once the krokodil starts biting, you’ll have no control. This won’t be a country any more, just somewhere to be robbed and raped and screwed for everything it has. And if it gets bad enough, maybe the Russians will come back. Then you and your bosses will be first up against the wall. Or maybe the Chinese will come over the Tien Shan Mountains, and you’ll find yourself kneeling in some sports stadium in Urumchi, screwing your face up against cold steel kissing the back of your neck.’

  ‘You’re too pessimistic, Inspector,’ the Chief said. ‘I can put you in touch with a very reliable and discreet company in the Middle East. Everything laundered better than your mother used to do your shirts. Five years from now, sunshine, a penthouse, a yacht, all the girls you can fuck, and no six-month winter. Works for me.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing?’ I asked. ‘Saltanat?’

  ‘So there’s only one girl you want to fuck, well, I admire true love. Give me the tape, and I’ll give you the address.’

  I shook my head, and took the tape out of my pocket again.

  ‘Call Sariev and call him off. I’m not giving this up for a dead woman.’

  He took his mobile off his desk and dialled a number. He spoke for a couple of minutes, and then broke the connection.

  ‘I’ve told him to do nothing, to wait for us. She’s all right, a little bruised maybe from a couple of taps, but nothing that a few million dollars can’t cure.’

  He reached out for the tape, and I handed it to him.

  ‘The address?’

  ‘First things first, we’re partners and that means we have to trust each other, da?’

  I watched as he slid the unlabelled cassette from its case, broke the plastic shell open. He spooled the tape into the ashtray, and set fire to it. The shiny brown tape twisted and coiled and melted, the plastic stink overlaying the scent of blood.

  ‘Truth? Lies? A confession? Look where it all ends up, Inspector,’ he said, prodding at the charred remains, ‘Smoke on the air, uncatchable, untraceable.’

  He sat back, reached for the bottle, saw that it was empty, and smiled.

  ‘I would have liked to make a toast to our new friendship,’ he said. ‘Maybe tonight, once that piece of shit on the floor has been scooped up and dealt with.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ve made an interesting choice, Inspector,’ he continued, ‘the country you love or the girl you love. And you know, I don’t even think the money played a part in your decision. Maybe you’re a romantic, after all.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but Murder Squad isn’t just about solving killings. It’s about preventing them in the future. You had Yekaterina Tynalieva turned into something from an abattoir. I didn’t want Saltanat to join her on one of Usupov’s trays.’

  ‘I did what was necessary. Perhaps one day, you’ll come to believe that too. Especially when you look at your bank statement.’

  I took my mobile out of my pocket and laid it on the table, next to the Yarygin.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be rich, Chief,’ I said, ‘and somehow, I don’t think you will be either.’

  And that’s when three armed men came into the room, followed by the Minister for State Security, Mikhail Tynaliev.

  Chapter 53

  ‘It’s amazing what you can hear when one of these is left on,’ I said, tapping my mobile, ‘and you never know who might be listening.’

  The Chief’s face was as grey as the start of the dawn outside.

  ‘Minister, this is obviously some kind of misunderstanding, a plot, a conspiracy. If you’ll allow me to explain?’

  Tynaliev said nothing, but watched, impassive, as the three bodyguards hauled the Chief up by his arms.

  ‘Everything you heard, it was just speculation. The Inspector, he lost his wife just a few weeks ago, he isn’t well. I told him to take some leave, sort himself out, clear his head of all these delusions, just ask him yourself.’

  His voice rose in pitch as he was bustled round towards the door. Saliva dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘There’s no evidence to back up these claims, Minister, maybe I’ve been foolish in giving the Inspector his head, nothing more than that, nothing any court would convict me for in a trial.’

  We all looked down at the tape still smouldering in the ashtray.

  ‘You’d have enjoyed hearing that,’ I said, ‘if you like traditional Kyrgyz folk music, that is. By the Bishkek Manas Ensemble. Very good, I’m told, by those who know.’

  The Chief’s eyes closed for a moment. He struggled to break free, but only half-heartedly, as if resigning himself to what was to come.

  ‘This is all circumstantial. No court’s going to convict me,’ he said.

  When Tynaliev spoke, his voice was calm, measured, final.

  ‘You really think there’s going to be a trial?’

  He reached into his jacket and took out a photograph. A girl in her late teens, taken in summer, sprawled out on the grass outside a dacha, her face turned up to revel in sunshine and the joy of being young and alive.

  Yekaterina.

  Tynaliev nodded at the bodyguards, and they dragged the Chief out of his office. His shoes trailed toes down, le
aving faint scuff marks on the wooden floor. I listened to them go along the corridor, and down to a painful, lingering and solitary death, in a snow-white field or some soundproofed basement.

  The Minister began to follow them, turned and, after a second, held out his hand.

  I stood there, looking into his eyes, my arms by my side.

  He frowned, before a kind of understanding crossed his face. Even if this was the only justice the men behind his daughter’s murder would ever face, I was still Murder Squad.

  Finally, he nodded, left the room, never looking back.

  *

  I was in the passenger seat of one of the station’s few decent cars, an enthusiastic ment at the wheel, ignoring red lights, pedestrians and anyone else foolish enough to be out of bed at this hour.

  Tynaliev’s team had tracked the Chief’s call, and we were heading out past the giant water purifiers to the east of the city. I’d no reason to think that Sariev would disobey his orders, but I still kept my foot pressed hard against the floor of the car, as if I was doing the driving myself.

  We pulled up outside a villa on the outskirts, a high wall guarding its privacy, a good place where neighbours wouldn’t be disturbed by the occasional scream of agony or a single shot. My burnt hand gnawed at me under makeshift bandages. I checked the load in the Yarygin, and opened the car door. I’d already unscrewed the overhead light. Sariev was expecting the Chief and a big bonus, but I’d seen enough consequences of over-confidence not to put money on his compliance.

  The uniform started to speak, but I put my fingers to my lips, walked towards the gates. They were the usual cheap metal affair, spray-painted green with gold detailing, already starting to streak with rust after all the Kyrgyz winter had thrown at them.

  I tugged at the left-hand side and, to my surprise, the gate swung open for a couple of feet, before being stopped by a drift of snow. I don’t like surprises at any time, particularly when someone might be holding a gun. So I kept still and listened for a couple of moments, hoping anyone inside would think that the wind had blown the gate open.

  The yard appeared empty, so I squeezed through the gap, and inched up the steps. Another surprise; the door was ajar. I stepped into the hallway and took stock.

  Someone had commissioned an avant-garde mural on one wall, a seemingly random outburst of paint. Except this wasn’t paint. And the body that lay at the foot of the stairs wasn’t a statue either.

  I could only tell it was Sariev by the uniform. His head was a watermelon that had been thrown down several flights of stairs. There was only one eye left that I could see, lolling on his cheek like a drunken afterthought. The other must have been under the mass of bone splinters and split flesh on the other side of his head.

  His jaw rested almost under one ear, dislocated and then shattered. Fragments of teeth gleamed upwards, like yellow sweetcorn tipped out from a jar. Both hands had suffered multiple fractures, and his left leg lay at an angle that would defeat geometry. I didn’t need a doctor to confirm that Sariev wouldn’t be brutalising any more prisoners.

  Searching the house confirmed what I already knew; Saltanat wasn’t there. Maybe her backup team followed her and waited for the right moment. Or perhaps she killed Sariev all by herself. Impossible to say and, right now, the effort of knowing hardly seemed worth it.

  I sensed movement behind me, swung round and came within a tenth of a second of adding to the Department’s death toll for the evening. My young driver looked white, whether at the spatter of blood and brains everywhere, or at the realisation that his own might have added a fresh impasto to the scene.

  I put the Yarygin away, told him to call it in. Outside, away from the body, I lit a cigarette, watched the smoke trail out of my mouth. I wished I could think of a reason to quit, but none came to mind. What’s one more death, after all?

  I told the uniform I was taking the car back to the station, and eased myself into the driver’s seat. After a couple of complaints and grumbles, the engine turned over and I headed back towards Chui, taking it slowly, breathing deeply, wondering if this was finally the end.

  I thought of the Chief, probably naked by now, cut, burnt, gouged, as Tynaliev watched, the expression on his face one of polite interest. No one would find him face down in a snowdrift, or floating down the Naryn in the spring. There wouldn’t be any forty-day toi, no gathering of friends and relatives to weep and reminisce.

  Just a sheep dragged towards the waiting knife, the last sound it heard its own helpless bleat.

  Chapter 54

  It was an hour or so after dawn when I left the station, my throat raw from too many cigarettes, too many explanations.

  The threat of snow still hung over the city, but a thin smudge of blue over the mountains held a promise that winter might be drawing, at long last, to a close.

  I walked back to my apartment, leaving fresh prints in the overnight snow. It crunched under my feet, the echo of fingers being broken in a basement room.

  As I reached home, the morning was starting to emerge, with new hopes and as many fresh betrayals.

  I paused and looked around. Just a few hundred yards up the road was where Yekaterina Tynalieva was butchered, nothing there now to serve as her memorial but tatters of crime-scene tape fluttering in the wind.

  I thought of Chinara in the moments before her death, breath rasping in her throat, one thin hand gripping the sheet that would soon become her shroud.

  And I remembered how tears stung my eyes as I pressed her grandmother’s wedding cushion down upon Chinara’s face, to take her away from a hard dying, to a place free from her pain and my sorrow. Her hands rose like startled doves from her sides, settled themselves upon mine, adding what strength she had left. I stared at the thin blue veins beneath the parchment of her fingers, willing them to fade and be still. And after her last breath had fled, I lifted the cushion from her face, wiped a few flecks of saliva from the lace, settled it gently beneath her head.

  The end of a marriage, of a life – or rather, two lives.

  Perhaps fragments are all that remain of us, fragments and the memories of those we loved and who loved us in their turn.

  I wondered if Saltanat would be waiting for me upstairs, if she was already over the border, if I was now only a memory, or not even that.

  I can’t say if we can create a life for ourselves, if desire can remain and grow into something else.

  How long might we have together? Who knows?

  *

  I unlocked the door and stepped into darkness.

  Acknowledgements

  All the characters and events in this book are entirely fictitious, and any errors are mine: what is real is the kindness and generosity of the Kyrgyz people and the beauty of their country.

  *

  I owe much to many people.

  In China: Zhou Min .

  In the Kyrgyz Republic: Akyl Callaghan, Kairat Jumabaev, Aizat Jumabaeva, Elmira Kalmakova and Mike Atsoparthis MBE.

  In Qatar: Charlotte and Richard Forbes-Robertson, Mirna Naccash, Natalie and Tim Styles.

  In the UAE: Nick Adams, Valentina and Lyndon Ashmore, Chris Atkins, Scott Feasey, Brad Henderson, Liesl Maughan and Ryan Reed, David Myers, Roger Payling, Craig Yeoman.

  In the UK: Stefanie Bierwerth and her team at Quercus, Morag Brennan and Steve Harrison, Helen Brindley and Chris Callaghan, Richard Callaghan, Carol Hannay and Marcus Wilson-Smith, Trevor Hoyle, Shân Morley Jones, Thomas Stofer.

  In the USA: Jay Butterman, Andrew Cannon, Nathaniel Marunas, Peter Spiegelman.

  The opening line was given by Mark Billingham.

  Special thanks are due to Tanja Howarth, agent extraordinaire, and Simon Peters, for constant support and encouragement.

  Finally, and most importantly, love and thanks to my late parents, Vera and John Callaghan.

  *

  Anyone visiting Kyrgyzstan will find a warm welcome at the Umai Hotel in Bishkek (www.umai-hotel-kg.com), while Ecotours (www.ecotour.kg) offers
unrivalled opportunities to explore the country’s natural heritage.