An Autumn Hunting

Chapter 4

I’ve never been particularly good at obeying orders, even when they come from as exalted and dangerous a person as the minister. So I walked into Sverdlovsky District Morgue just after dawn the next morning, to watch Usupov hone his scalpels and his skills on yet another corpse. Of course, I wasn’t investigating the case I’d just been fired from, merely popping by to see my old friend, the chief forensic pathologist, maybe enjoy a breakfast glass of chai. How could the minister possibly object to that?

The temporary occupants of the morgue don’t seem to mind the stained concrete walls, the flickering lighting, the ever-present scent of freshly butchered meat. Even the living in Bishkek can’t be too choosy about where they call home, and the dead never bother to complain. No rent or bills to pay either.

At first glance, you might think you were at the entrance to an underground car park beneath some dismal shopping mall, until you spot the small weather-beaten sign. The morgue doesn’t advertise its presence; not many people visit, and those who do usually arrive on their back rather than on their feet.

I walked down the broken-tiled steps and along the corridor, where the emerald-green stain of mould grows bigger every winter when the snows break in, looking for shelter. As always, every other light fitting was missing a bulb, but I could still see the metal doors at the far end, smell the stink of raw flesh.

Usupov was already hard at work, transforming the young woman I’d seen the day before into the leavings of a butcher’s shop. Spatterings of blood stained the steel slab, along with other juices I preferred not to think about. It’s a truth of my job that beauty often hides ugliness inside, and a truth of Usupov’s profession that he sees beauty and order in the internal coilings and twistings of the body.

I didn’t ask for an overall; I wasn’t intending getting close to the corpse, and I wasn’t wearing anything a decent second-hand shop would put in the window in pride of place.

‘Nothing unusual in the manner of death. Drug overdose,’ Usupov said, before I’d even asked the question. ‘Her blood pressure crashed, and she suffered the heart attack that killed her.’

He held up a hand for my inspection.

‘Bluish nails, all pretty standard, Inspector, exactly what I’d expect.’

Usupov inspects bodies for effects that he then uses to deduce their cause; I examine them for hints, clues, secrets. The girl’s nails were coated in expensive clear varnish, although the edges were chipped and torn. She’d still had enough pride in herself to make an effort to look good, which put her at least one level above the street prostis that loiter around Panfilov Park at night.

‘No tattoos?’

Usupov shook his head. ‘The only things that have ever been stuck in her are the needles that killed her.’

He nodded at my raised eyebrow.

‘Yes, she was a virgin. I’ve not had one of those on my table for a long while,’ and Usupov even smiled at his own joke.

The news instantly threw my speculations into the same tray where clumps and gobbets of discarded flesh were piling up. Not a working girl, either on the street or in a massage parlour. Not married, probably not even dating. That surprised me; she was pretty enough to have been bride-stolen, spotted by some randy pimply young bastard, grabbed off the street and taken to his mother’s house for approval and an enforced marriage. That suggested a certain social status. Not every father can be with the apple of his eye twenty-four hours a day, or employ a bodyguard to keep her safe. The case was starting to look ominous, with possible headlines and consequences, none of them good. And my continued involvement wasn’t going to make Tynaliev any more of a fan.

I let the thought fester at the back of my brain, tried another tack.

‘Any clues to her identity?’ I asked, the way they do in all the TV cop shows.

‘Apart from the unique ten-carat diamond earrings and the black pearl tongue stud, no,’ Usupov said, and I even stared at the body for a few seconds, then looked at Usupov. Humour has never been Usupov’s thing, and I wondered if he’d acquired a lookalike comedian from somewhere, sent him along in his place.

‘A couple of things might interest you though,’ he said. ‘For a start, the blood stains on her clothing.’

Usupov might have been discovering humour late in life, but he was still too prim to utter the word ‘pants’.

‘Her blood group and the stains are not the same,’ he said. ‘She was blood type O, and the droplets are A Rhesus positive. No way they could match.’

At least I now knew the girl probably hadn’t been alone at the time of her death. But A Rhesus positive blood isn’t rare, and I didn’t know how her pants became soiled.

‘It’s not much of a start,’ I grunted.

‘A couple of other things,’ Usupov said. ‘One of them I’ve never encountered before.’

‘Go on.’

‘She didn’t die from the usual heroin, cut to hell and back with baby laxative and brick dust.’

‘Pure?’

‘Pure all right, but it wasn’t heroin or krokodil.’

I looked at Usupov. I didn’t have time to play cat and mouse, and my face told him not to delay his surprise information.

‘Ever heard of carfentanil, Inspector?’

I shook my head. Obviously a pharmaceutical of some sort, and not the sort that relieves headaches or toothache.

‘It’s a synthetic opioid, maybe ten thousand times stronger than commercial morphine. Originally created as a general anaesthetic for elephants.’

‘And people take something that strong?’

Usupov looked down at the butcher’s slab between us.

‘As you can see.’

I shook my head, as ever amazed at the things people will do to themselves.

‘I take it you don’t need a lot of this carfentanil to win a place on your table.’

‘A dose roughly the size of a grain of salt, that’s all. Not something I’ve seen before; our addicts tend to be traditionalists.’

Usupov paused, reached into the pocket of his white coat, pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper, handed it to me.

‘Hidden in the lining of her bra,’ he said. ‘The left cup, if that makes any difference. I wouldn’t know, you’re the detective.’

I smoothed out the paper, began to read.