A Killing Winter

Chapter 34

Saltanat looked as if she was considering the option. I wondered what my chances were of getting a Kalash off one of the guards, giving the room and everyone in it a severe chastisement, then getting out and through the gates alive. I didn’t rate them. I didn’t like the long silence from Saltanat either. I’m not stupid enough to think that a night passed out drunk next to someone constitutes romance, but she and I were at least supposed to be on the side of the men with the white hats.

‘Not good enough, Maksat,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t help me get what I want to know. Who’s killing these people, and why? You walking out of here with your mouth shut isn’t going to happen. You think your shitty little gang can get to me? I had no trouble getting to you, did I?’

She cracked her knuckles and I realised I was involved with a truly dangerous woman.

‘Give me your hand.’

He stretched out his right arm, and she took his hand in hers, almost tenderly.

‘You know, us Uzbeks, we’re pretty straightforward people, not like you shaman-following Kyrgyz. To us, a storm is just a storm, a mountain just a hill grown too big for its own good. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look into the future.’

She turned his hand over and ran her forefinger over the scars on his palm, inspecting the twisted and ripped flesh where his fingernails had once been. When she spoke, it was with sadness.

‘You suffered a great deal at the hands of the Inspector’s predecessors. Your hands are testament to that. But I can read more than your past here, Maksat. I can see your future, see you opening your heart to me. Because you’ve finally arrived at the place where we bury strangers. You’ve been brought here by the voices of the dead.’

She nodded at the two guards, who took the pakhan by his arms. His face was a mask of resigned defiance, as if he’d always known that this is how it would end. For a moment I was reminded of my mother, the same absolute refusal to submit, the identical unwillingness to accept that anything can exist greater than your own strength of will.

‘I had seventy years. A lot more than you will have.’

Saltanat remained unmoved, then one corner of her mouth twitched upwards, and I realised that I’d never seen her smile.

‘Perhaps you’d like to look around the house. Not very interesting architecturally, and the decor leaves a little to be desired.’

She reached for a corner of the paper peeling away from the wall and tugged at it. The paper was damp and ripped with no resistance, revealing spots and blisters of mould and damp seeping through the plaster. I thought of the nails torn out of the pakhan’s fingers, and felt sick.

‘I thought we might start with the cellar.’

We were at the top of the stairs when Aydaraliev made his move. The stairs wound down around a central post, and there was no handrail on the inner edge. So it wasn’t difficult for the old man to elbow one guard off-balance, then smash his fist into the guard’s shocked and open mouth. The Kalash skittered and tumbled down the stairs, and came to rest on the half-landing. The pakhan moved fast, hands reaching out for the barrel.

But the other guard was just as fast, and launched a savage kick at Aydaraliev’s ankle. The old man grunted in pain, and lurched back towards the wall. And by then the first guard had recovered, jumping down on to the landing and sweeping his gun back into his arms.

‘Surely you don’t want to leave already, Maksat? The tour’s only just begun.’

And then we were at the bottom of the stairs, pushing through a doorway, along a narrow unpainted hallway, and towards the furnace room at the back. Smudges and smears of coal streaked the floor, while the walls were black with coal dust. The furnace was made from rough cast iron, with a small glass window where coals would normally glow and burn. But that night, the furnace, like the house, was cold and empty.

A coal hammer, a pair of pincers with which to feed the furnace, and a heavy spade leant against one wall. Aydaraliev’s eyes widened as he spotted them. He’d been in cellars like this before, used tools in ways for which they were never meant.

It takes very little to hurt a man to the point where he talks, wants nothing more in the world than to say the words that make the agony go away. Small, innocent things: a sliver of wood, a pair of nail scissors, a needle. That’s all you need to make a man weep and scream and piss himself.

Small things, like the rogue cells that feasted on Chinara’s breast, devouring it like a child turned cannibal, dragging her down into the earth.

I could taste raw meat in my mouth at the thought of what was to come.

‘If I’d known we were having guests, I’d have had the furnace lit, Maksat. Keep you warm; at your age you don’t want a chill.’

Her use of his first name belittled him, stripped him of the prestige and dignity he’d taken as his due for so long. She spoke patiently, as if talking to a retarded child, someone who needs everything explained from start to finish using single-syllable words.

‘Saltanat, this isn’t going to help.’

She turned to look at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aydaraliev set his jaw.

‘No?’ she said.

‘Look at him. He’s tough, he won’t talk easily. But he’s old. Probably a bad heart, vodka, a papirosh in his mouth for the last sixty years.’

Now there was an amused look on her face.

‘Don’t tell me Murder Squad’s finest is worried about his civil liberties. I’m surprised you’re not insisting on the first punch. Or maybe you’ve forgotten about the headless cops?’

‘I’m just saying killing him throws more shit at the fan. How many more enemies do we need while we try to solve this?’

She raised her eyebrow, and the scar that furrowed it gleamed bone-white.

‘We, Inspector? I don’t recall us partnering up.’

She looked over at Aydaraliev, then back at me.

‘What makes you think you’re not in for more of the same? Remember, I told you I was sent to deal with you, da?’

I hadn’t forgotten, but I had hoped she might have.

She took down the pincers from the wall, tested them by snapping the jaws together. The snick of the blades meeting was thin, unremarkable. You wouldn’t hear it above a scream or a curse.

She ran her thumb along one edge.

‘The trouble with these is they get blunt so easily. So it’s much harder to cut through something, takes longer too.’

‘Just get on with it,’ Aydaraliev snarled. ‘If this is meant to terrify me, try harder.’

Saltanat flashed a brilliant smile, and I could have sworn that her eyes sparkled.

‘I wouldn’t waste my energies, pakhan. Everyone in the stans knows how tough you are. So I thought we’d just chat, and I could persuade you to do the right thing.’

Aydaraliev gave a sharp bark of a laugh and spat on the floor, his phlegm quickly absorbed by coal dust.

Saltanat’s smile never faltered as she reached into her pocket and took out her phone.

‘I’m a long way from home, pakhan, you know how it is, you miss your family and friends. But these new phones, you can even get real-time video on them now.’

She held the phone in front of Aydaraliev, angling it so that we could both see the screen.

‘Of course, I’m not old enough to have a grandchild. But you are.’

It was hard to see from where I stood, but I could see that an image of a young girl filled the screen. Aydaraliev said nothing, but his lips narrowed.

‘Ayana, isn’t it? Such a pretty name. A real charmer. Nearly twelve, she’ll be a woman soon.’

The girl on the screen waved and was suddenly pulled away off-screen. Her image was replaced by that of a burly man, who grinned, revealing a row of gold teeth. He was unshaven and thuggish, and neither I nor her grandfather were in any doubt about the implied threat, or what would happen if he didn’t talk.

Saltanat switched off the phone, and stood in front of the pakhan. He stared back at her, his eyes black with hate, but there was a tremor in one corner of his mouth. She pulled the hammer off the wall; one face was flat and blunt, the other tapered to a point.

‘It’s your own fault really, Maksat. I know that we could give your spine the xylophone treatment, play dentist’s visit, even smash your balls into pancakes with this hammer, and you wouldn’t sing to us. You’d bite your own tongue out and spit it at me first, right?’

Aydaraliev said nothing, but from the slump in his shoulders I could see Saltanat had won.

‘So here’s the deal. You tell us what you know – everything you know – and she’ll go home tonight. And still be a virgin, to be bride-stolen by some idiot with more balls than sense. Otherwise,’ and she pounded one fist on another, the Russian gesture for fucking, ‘well, my guys have cameras, and all the other equipment to make a very special film, the sort that’s very popular on the internet. Nipples scissored off, tits hacked off, I believe you said. They’re small of course, her still being just a girl, but they’ll be sensitive enough. What would your gang say about that? Must be hard to owe allegiance to a pakhan who can’t protect his own family.’

Aydaraliev nodded.

I felt vomit rise in my gut and burn my throat, imagining a devochka screaming, begging, her parents being held down and forced to watch as their world was stripped bare of everything decent and innocent. I wondered if Saltanat was human, or merely a psychopath. If she was a torpedo who kills to order, you’d have to be on her hit list, money in the bank. If she was a psycho, then no one would be safe until she’d been put down without mercy.

Aydaraliev looked round at us, stopping at me.

‘What do you think of this, Inspector? This is how you do your business? This makes you better than me? Maybe even worse?’

‘I don’t have any more to say than you do,’ I answered, knowing that it was a cheap answer; weak, the way that I seemed to be around Saltanat. I stumbled over my words, shut my mouth. I could have made an argument for this being the quickest way to solve the case. But silence is one, or both, of two things: consent and the desire to survive.

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ Aydaraliev said, holding his hands wide. ‘If I’m going to talk, let’s not do it in a fucking coal cellar. If you’re going to plant lead in my skull, treat me like a man.’