A Killing Winter

Chapter 16

One of my shots had travelled through Lubashov and lodged itself in the shoulder of an irate Tajik carpet seller in town to visit his first cousin, so there was a lot of yelling and abuse going on when the Chief arrived. The Fatboys waitress, with admirable sangfroid, had cleared away the vodka and teeth cocktail I’d invented, and offered me a hundred grams on the house.

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, Inspector.’

And then silence as she broke the connection.