A Killing Winter

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.’