Red Moth

Kirov paced back and forth

Kirov paced back and forth along the street outside the Cafe Tilsit. He stared into the gutters and out across the crooked cobbled street, his gaze snagging on every cigarette butt, bus ticket stub and crumpled cough-drop wrapper.

Passersby regarded him suspiciously, sidestepping out of his way.

After several passes along the entire length of the block, Kirov gave up looking at the pavement and switched to the walls and shop fronts. He knew that Kovalevsky had been shot in the throat at close range, in which case it was likely that the bullet had passed through his neck and struck against one of these walls. Since Kirov already had the spent cartridge from the round that had killed Kovalevsky, he knew that the bullet itself would add little to his knowledge. What he wanted to find out was the angle at which the bullet struck and, from that, to extrapolate where the killer had been standing at the time.

A few minutes later, he discovered what he thought must be the mark of the bullet. Something had struck one of the bricks outside a cobbler’s repair shop. The brick had been gouged by a projectile, and several cracks radiated out from the centre of the impact point. With the use of a pencil fitted into the conical indent made by the bullet, Kirov was able to trace the path of the bullet to a place roughly halfway across the road. The shot had been made from a greater distance than he had first supposed, which made him wonder if the shooter was a trained marksman. From his own days in NKVD training, Kirov recalled being told that the average recruit, even on completion of his or her training with a hand gun, could hit the centre mass of a stationary man-sized target only once in every five shots at a distance of thirty paces. This shot had been made in the dark and at a moving target. It had brought a man down with one bullet on a part of the body so difficult to hit that NKVD range instructors discouraged even aiming for it, in spite of the fact that to be hit in the neck was almost always fatal. The fact that the shooter had been confident enough of his aim to cease firing after the first round convinced Kirov they were dealing with a professional.

Continuing on down the street, Kirov realised that there was likely to be nothing more that he could learn from the crime scene, especially since it had not been cordoned off immediately after the event.

Passing a narrow alley which separated a bakery and a laundry, Kirov caught sight of two boys, almost hidden in the shadows, tussling amongst the garbage cans and clouds of steam from hot soapy water pouring out of a pipe in the wall directly into the sewers. One boy had an armful of stale bread rolls and was pelting the other, who had a toy pistol which, judging from the sound effects this boy was making, he had mistaken for a machine gun.

Kirov walked on a couple of paces, wondering just where inside his head to store the image of that boy acting in a game so close to the place where its deadly reality had played out only a day before.

Then he froze.

A tiny woman in a headscarf and dress that nearly dragged along the ground, who had been walking towards him, carrying a bundle of clothes for the laundry, came to an astonished halt, as if the two of them had just been turned to stone.

Kirov spun about and dashed into the alley.

Seeing Kirov descending upon them, the boys cried out, ditched the bread rolls and were just about to vanish, one into the bakery and the other into the laundry, when Kirov grabbed them both by the collars of their coats.

‘We didn’t do anything!’ shouted the boy who had been throwing bread rolls. He had on a short-brimmed cap whose sides flopped down over his ears, making him look like a rabbit.

The other boy tried desperately to stuff the gun into his pocket but it wouldn’t fit.

‘Where did you get that?’ demanded Kirov, having realised that the gun was not, in fact, a toy.

‘I found it!’ shouted the boy. ‘It’s mine!’

‘Just show it to me,’ said Kirov.

‘Let me go.’

‘First show me that gun.’

As the boy held it out, muttering under his breath, Kirov saw that it was only part of a gun, specifically the barrel section of a revolver, including the cylinder. It was from a type of gun which, when reloading, would be opened on a hinge that allowed the front section to swing forward like a shotgun. Other revolvers had cylinders that opened out to the sides. There were markings on the cylinder, but they were very small and he could not make out what they meant. The hinge which joined the two parts of the gun had been wrenched violently away. The gun had not been well cared for. The bluing on the barrel was stained and faded and there were flecks of rust inside the cylinder.

Although Kirov had seen revolvers like this before — in fact Pekkala’s Webley operated on the same principle — he had never come across one exactly like it.

‘Where did you find this?’ Kirov asked the boys.

‘Over there,’ the boy pointed towards where the laundry water pipe emptied into the sewer. ‘It was lying right next to the hole.’

‘Was there another piece with it?’

‘No. Maybe the rest of it fell down the drain.’

‘When did you find it?’

‘This morning,’ said the boy with the rabbit-ear hat.

‘Was there anything else lying around?’

‘No. Can I have it back?’

Kirov lowered himself down on one knee. ‘I can’t do that‚’ he said‚ ‘but I can make you a detective in a murder investigation.’

The boy’s eyes grew big and round.

‘What about me?’ shouted the other boy. ‘I saw it first.’

‘But I picked it up. That’s what counts!’

‘You can both be part of the investigation‚’ he assured them. Ten minutes later, with the remains of the revolver bound up in a handkerchief, Kirov set off for NKVD headquarters, leaving the two boys, each now bearing the rank of honorary commissar, lying beside the drain, up to their armpits as they reached down into soapy water, searching for the rest of the gun.