The Outcast

by Michael Walters

  “Have you found out who ordered it?”

  “I’ve not really had an opportunity to check properly. But there are records of all the orders placed—I can get the details for you. And there are itemised records of all deliveries down in the loading area.”

  “I’ll be surprised if we find anything. What about the group downstairs? Did any of them see how the carpet was delivered?”

  “Well, you’re no doubt interviewing them all yourselves,” she said, pointedly, “but nobody seemed very clear. There’d been several deliveries and everyone assumed it had arrived with one of them, but nobody knew which. I don’t think anyone noticed it for a while. It’s even possible it came the day before.”

  “I think if the body had been there for more than a few hours, it would have been hard not to notice it,” Doripalam said. “Especially in this heat.”

  “I bow to your expertise,” she said. “As always.”

  Doripalam smiled faintly, but ignored the bait. “Anyway, we’ll check the records properly, and we’ll contact the transport companies who’ve delivered in the last couple of days. I take it there’s no CCTV in the loading area?”

  “No. There probably ought to be. We’ve done some improvements to the security—the insurance companies insisted for some of the pieces in the exhibition—but it’s not exactly state of the art.”

  “What about the body itself? Did anything strike you about that?”

  “Other than it being dead, you mean? That was quite enough for me.” She paused, as though wrestling with some idea. “No, not really. I mean, it was wrapped in the carpet—though ‘wrapped’ is probably an exaggeration. It was positioned just inside the carpet, barely covered over.”

  “So somebody wanted it to be found?”

  “Rather than waiting for the summer heat to do its work? Yes, I assume so. It was bound to be discovered as soon as anyone touched the carpet.”

  “And what about the body itself?” He knew Solongo well enough to recognise that there was something on her mind.

  “I don’t know. Nothing really. I didn’t really look that closely. I—well, I guess I panicked a little bit.” She closed her eyes, as if conjuring the scene up in her mind. “Anything else? Well, I don’t think he was Mongolian, but you probably know that.”

  Doripalam shrugged, reluctant to give out any more information than he had to, even to Solongo. “We’re still waiting for the pathologist for a definitive view,” he said. “But he doesn’t look Mongolian.”

  “And there was bruising on the face,” she said. “A lot of bruising. As though he’d been beaten or kicked.” She paused. “That’s what—” she stopped again, as if unsure how to continue.

  “What?” Doripalam could hear the scratch of the uniformed officer’s pen across his pad.

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s what comes of being overwhelmed by the Mongol empire twenty-four hours a day.”

  “What is?”

  “Well,” she paused again, and then plunged on, “It’s just that the carpet, the bruising, it reminded me of a story about Hulagu.”

  “Hulagu?” Doripalam struggled to recall his schoolboy history. “Genghis Khan’s grandson?”

  She smiled. “Well done. Yes, Genghis’s grandson. He led the siege of Baghdad in 1258. They eventually captured and killed the caliph of the city.”

  The story had begun to come back to Doripalam—one of those memorable historical tales that, in his school days, he had never quite managed to position in its authentic context. He knew it had supposedly happened but he had never been quite clear when or why. “But they knew that it was against Mongolian ethics to spill a king’s blood on the ground,” he interrupted.

  She nodded, smiling, as if her husband were a slow student who had managed, against the odds, to come up with the correct answer. “Exactly,” she said. “So they wrapped him in a carpet and trampled him to death.”

  Doripalam stared at her. “You’re not suggesting that—”

  She shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything. It’s probably just the first symptom of my own impending nervous breakdown. I’m living with this stuff day and night at the moment, so these stories just pop into my head. But even so.”

  “Go on,” Doripalam said. It sounded pretty bizarre to him, but the positioning of the body in the carpet was strange enough. And he knew that it never paid to underestimate Solongo’s judgement.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just that the capture of Baghdad was one of the final stages in our war against the Muslims. Our genocide of the Muslims, some have called it. Ethnic cleansing. A clash of civilisations. Anyway, it just seemed to me that—well, it all has a certain contemporary resonance, don’t you think?”

  An hour later, Doripalam met with Batzorig to compare notes. He had arranged for one of the uniformed team to drive Solongo home, saying that he would follow her as soon as he could. She had given him a look that suggested that the promise sounded as hollow to her as it did to him.

  The two men worked painstakingly through the interview transcripts, but the information remained unhelpfully thin. Most of the volunteers had visited the loading area during the earlier part of the day, but no one could remember who had delivered the carpet. One of the young women interviewed by Batzorig had been sure that she had seen the carpet being off-loaded from a delivery truck during the early part of the morning.

  “Which truck?” he had asked. “Do you remember which company?”

  She had shrugged. No, she hadn’t registered the name of the company. Was it one of the usual companies, or an unfamiliar name? She didn’t know. So perhaps that meant it was an un-familiar name. Or perhaps it had just been too familiar.

  “Could you describe the men who unloaded it?” Batzorig’s hopes were fading now.

  Not really. They had been Mongolian, she thought. Or Asian. At least, one of them had been. Probably average height. Normal build. Dark hair. Dressed in overalls. Or, at any rate, she was sure they were wearing the kind of clothes that the delivery drivers usually wore.

  “But it was definitely early this morning that you saw them?”

  Definitely. Unless it had been yesterday afternoon. But then they’d have noticed the carpet earlier, wouldn’t they? So it must have been this morning. Assuming, that is, that it really was the carpet that she’d seen being off-loaded. Now she thought about it, she couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  It was always like this. It was one of the standard grumbles within the team—just how hopeless most witnesses turned out to be. Even when an incident had occurred right in front of their noses, they generally managed to misremember or misinterpret it. In circumstances like this, with witnesses struggling to remember apparently mundane events, the chances of extracting any reliable data were minimal.

  Resorting to more definitive sources of information, Batzorig had checked the formal documents relating to the ordering and delivery of the museum’s goods. There was no record of the carpet being ordered, and none of the specialist curators had any knowledge of how or why it might have been requested. There had been five recorded deliveries that day, but none of the delivery notes mentioned the carpet. They were in the process of checking with the relevant delivery companies, but Doripalam held out few hopes of any success. It was quite possible that there had been a further unrecorded delivery.

  All in all, they were little further forward. They sat in the relatively luxurious office belonging to the absent director, and leafed morosely through the pages of notes. Artefacts of the Mongolian empire surrounded them on all sides, and an enormous print of the familiar face of Genghis stared down from behind Doripalam’s head.

  “An awful lot of nothing,” Doripalam said, tossing the wedge of papers on to the desk. “So do you have any theories?”

  “Nothing,” Batozrig said. “We don’t know who the victim is, and I can’t begin to imagine why the body would have been dumped here of all places. It’s not likely to be internecine warfare between a
rchaeologists, I imagine.”

  Doripalam smiled indulgently at the half-hearted attempt at a joke. “Maybe it’s just random; the body had to be dumped somewhere, so why not here?”

  “Because it would have been risky,” Batzorig pointed out. “I mean, much more risky than just dumping it in some waste ground, or outside the city somewhere.”

  Doripalam nodded. “So why here? What significance could this place have?”

  Batzorig looked up. “What do you think about your wife’s idea? About Hulagu, I mean.” He had noted the comment in the transcript of the interview, though Doripalam had not drawn attention to it.

  Doripalam shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounds pretty far-fetched to me. But I suppose that it would explain the carpet. And it would begin to explain why the body was brought here. If you’re going to re-stage an episode from the glory days of the Mongol empire, you’d want to do it where someone will pick up on the reference.”

  “And where it would have most resonance.”

  “Exactly.” Doripalam shook his head. “But it’s all speculation. We don’t know who the victim is. We don’t know where he was killed. We don’t even know for certain how he died, until the pathologist’s finished.” He paused. “Even so …”

  “Sir?”

  Doripalam looked up at the young man. “If Solongo’s right—I mean, if there’s anything at all in what she’s suggesting.” He stopped again, as if unsure how to articulate the ideas running through his mind. “If she is right,” he said, finally, “it suggests that we might be facing something very nasty indeed.”

  WINTER 1988

  At first, he was sure he was being followed.

  He shivered, pulling his padded coat more thickly around him, making a point of not looking back. Bloody cold. It was sometimes cold at home, but nothing like this bone-freezing chill. This close to the central square, the streetlights cast an eerie glow across the ice-lined road. Just a few blocks back, the lights ended, throwing the far end of the road into blackness.

  He set off walking again. There were few people about, even though it was not late. Most people, he assumed, had more sense than to expose themselves to these cold temperatures for longer than necessary.

  He felt more comfortable once he emerged from the narrow street that led from the apartment block into the main thoroughfare. Here the lights were brighter and more frequent, a pale pink chain stretching down towards the central square. There were more passers-by now, mainly young people, huddled in their thickly quilted clothing, rushing past in their eagerness to find warmth. Occasionally a vehicle passed, its driver cautiously navigating the potentially lethal road surface.

  In some respects, the fierce cold was a blessing. Although he felt isolated and exposed, there were few around to observe his passing. Even if he was being watched, the brutality of these midwinter temperatures might dissuade any observer from pursuing the task too assiduously.

  Had he been right to come here, right to pursue this? It was a major risk, even though it had been officially sanctioned. The authorities would always grant approval if they thought there was anything to be gained. But he had no illusions about how much that would be worth if anything went wrong. Then he would be on his own.

  Finally, he steeled himself to look back. The street was empty. The only footsteps he could hear were his own. It was all under control. He was ready for his next meeting with the contact. Soon they would be able to talk properly.

  It was all under control.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUMMER

  “So you are here,” Tunjin said. “I thought I was still dreaming.”

  “You must have very disturbed dreams.” Nergui was sitting with his legs stretched out, looking as relaxed as the straight-backed hospital chair would allow.

  “You couldn’t begin to imagine,” Tunjin agreed. He tried to raise his hefty body, but the effort was too much. He was beginning to hope for some change of view, something other than the cracked whitewash of the ceiling, the partial glimpse of Nergui’s face if he craned his head sufficiently. “How long am I supposed to stay here?” he asked.

  “They said twenty-four hours. I asked for less.”

  “You wouldn’t have had any complaints from me.” Tunjin paused. “I’m under arrest, then?”

  Nergui expression revealed nothing. “I wasn’t sure if you’d understood. I was waiting till you woke properly. But, no, not arrest.”

  “I’m helping you with your enquiries?”

  Nergui nodded. “Something like that.”

  “In my experience, that’s usually just a euphemism.” Tunjin’s eyes moved towards the door. “You’re not alone, I notice.”

  Nergui smiled. “Observant as ever. I’m just taking precautions, that’s all.”

  Tunjin dropped his head back on the pillow, letting out his breath suddenly. “Should I ask against what?” He twisted his head and stared at Nergui. “What’s this all about? Not just you turning up here and throwing Doripalam out, I assume you have your reasons for that, though forgive me if I don’t quite follow them at the moment. But all of it. What happened yesterday?” He frowned, as if the question had only just occurred to him. “What did happen yesterday, anyway?”

  “Several questions,” Nergui said. “All of them good ones.”

  “Thank you. Not much chance of a satisfactory answer, then, I take it.” Tunjin stared up at the ceiling. The place looked less pristine up there. A spider had taken up residence in one corner, ignored by the assiduous cleaners who took care of the lower parts of the room. “About as much chance as there is of me getting a drink in this place.”

  “Abstinence will do you good,” Nergui pointed out. “You’ve been ill, after all.”

  Tunjin twisted his head again. “That’s another thing,” he said. “I thought I was dying. At one point, I thought I was probably dead already. Now I feel, well, not healthy exactly, but a long way from dead. I’m sure this place is good, but I didn’t know they were miracle workers.”

  “You’d be surprised what they can do,” Nergui said.

  Tunjin opened his mouth to speak, then decided there was little point in asking more. He stared up at the dense tapestry of the web in the high corner of the room, trying to make out the spider presumably lurking somewhere in the middle of it. “I’ve known you for too long,” he said finally. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  “I’ll tell you when I’m ready,” Nergui agreed. “Some of it I can tell you now. So long as you tell me some things in return.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll tell you everything I know. That shouldn’t detain you long.”

  Nergui nodded, as if taking the proposition seriously. “Okay, so tell me what you remember about yesterday.”

  Tunjin frowned. “Yesterday? Easy. I remember it as if it was—” He stopped. It was, after all, a good question. What did he remember about yesterday?

  Nergui leaned back, rocking on the two rear legs of his chair like a restless child at school. “Start at the beginning,” he said. “If you can. First thing in the morning.”

  Tunjin thought hard. Had yesterday been any different from most of the days that preceded it? There was no reason to think so—except that somehow he had ended up here. But all he had were images, pale half-memories that had flooded his head on waking but were now dissolving like last night’s dream. Those drifting memories of gunshots and crowds and screams.

  He closed his eyes and saw again, as though imprinted on his retina, the searing brilliance of the muzzle flash. Somewhere behind that, crowding in, a string of other thoughts, ideas, memories. Yesterday.

  “I remember waking up,” he said at last. “It was just another day. I was on the afternoon shift. So I woke up late. A bit hung over, but better than a lot of days. Just a few vodkas. I’d been on late shift the previous day, too, so didn’t go mad.” He looked at Nergui. “Is this what you want? Is this any good?”

  “Keep going,” Nergui said.

  “I got up,
got dressed. The apartment was a mess, so I thought I’d grab a coffee on the way in.” He paused, trying to concentrate. “It was another hot day. I had plenty of time. I decided to walk into work.”

  “You hadn’t any other plans?”

  “No, just walk in, grab a coffee, maybe a shot of vodka. Just one. Set me up for the day.”

  “Hair of the dog,” Nergui agreed.

  “I left the apartment—I’m still in the same place, you know. Thought I might want to move after all that happened. But I feel at home there, despite everything. Anyway, I left there, walked up the street towards the centre.”

  “What time would this have been?” Nergui asked.

  “Not sure. Twelve? Twelve thirty, maybe? I had to be at HQ for two, so something like that. Wanted time for the coffee.”

  “Go on.”

  “I got near the square, and I heard a lot of noise. Shouting. Crowds of people, it sounded like. I didn’t know what was happening.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I was still a few blocks away. I could just hear the noise. Not the kind of noise you expect to hear at twelve thirty on a …” He stopped. “What day was it?”

  “Wednesday,” Nergui said. “Today’s Thursday.”

  “That’s right,” Tunjin said, as though confirming Nergui’s lucky guess. “Not the kind of noise you expect to hear at that time on a Wednesday.”

  “But then you saw the crowd?”

  “Eventually, yes. It was a smaller crowd than it sounded, actually, the shouting was echoing around the buildings so it sounded as if there were more of them. But still a lot for that time on a Wednesday.”

  “What happened then?”

  Tunjin paused. The memories had been coming back clearly, but suddenly they were fading again, like a film unexpectedly going out of focus. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Let me think. I had to go through the square to get to work, so I carried on walking forward.”