The Bloody Meadow

Chapter Ten

The dawn light was flat across the even flatter steppe as Slivka manoeuvred the car, doing her best to avoid the various ridges and trenches that criss-crossed what passed for the road. She didn’t drive as fast as Mushkin, or with such disregard for the car’s suspension, but she maintained a constant speed and drove with a good deal of skill. Spring might well be on its way, but it was still cold enough to have Korolev burrowing inside his winter coat.

‘Have you been to Odessa before?’ Slivka asked, her voice rising to compete with the engine.

‘Apart from the airport yesterday, no.’

‘Did the plane fly in over the town?’

‘I think so. I wasn’t looking.’

‘Of course,’ Slivka said, nodding. ‘You were reading the case material. Admirable.’

‘There was a lot of it to read,’ Korolev said, even if what he’d actually been doing was keeping his eyes tight shut and praying to the Virgin.

‘A shame, you would have been impressed. From the air you can see what a well-planned city Odessa is.’

‘Our Soviet planners are the envy of the world,’ Korolev said automatically.

‘They are, although in this case the planning was done long before the Revolution.’

‘Tsarist planners?’

‘A Frenchman.’ She shrugged. ‘Wait till you see it – it looks like Paris, they say. Maybe the Frenchman was homesick.’

Slivka’s smile faded.

‘Of course,’ she added, her words coming out faster than previously, ‘Soviet Power has transformed the city for the better. In every way.’

‘I knew what you meant, Slivka,’ Korolev said. ‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’

It was the first time he’d seen her confidence slip, and it saddened him that she should be concerned about such an innocuous comment. Even if, of course, she was right to be.

Maybe Odessa did look like Paris – Korolev had never been there. He’d seen pictures of the place in newspapers, of course, and it seemed to him that, despite the peeling paint, Odessa had a certain fin de siecle elegance which might well be similar to that of the French capital. The cold sun twinkled on tram tracks and polished the cobblestones golden as the car roared happily along wide boulevards, scattering the odd pigeon and drawing the occasional glance from pedestrians huddled against the frosty morning chill. Maybe it was also a bit like Petersburg, it occurred to him, before he reminded himself that it had been Leningrad since Lenin’s death in 1924 and it was about time he remembered.

‘It’s a fine town,’ Korolev said, in response to Slivka’s enquiring glance and wondered if he was the only person who regretted Petersburg’s change of name. He was as keen on the Soviet State’s forward development as anyone, but Petersburg still conjured up images from before the Revolution, and not all were negative. The old imperial capital might have been built on the bones of serfs, but still it was a city to make a man proud to be Russian. And that was something, even now – when imperial Russia had become the Soviet Union, and was ruled by workers rather than tsars.

‘This is Pasteur Street,’ Slivka said, interrupting Korolev’s thoughts. ‘Just before eight, not bad.’

She brought the car to a halt and nodded towards a large building in front of which students in white laboratory coats and round cotton surgical caps stood smoking. This, Korolev presumed, was the university. Like all students the smokers looked hungry, and like all Soviet citizens they looked away when a Black Crow, as police vehicles were known, pulled up beside them.

‘This is it? The university?’ Korolev asked Slivka as they stepped out of the car.

‘Founded in 1865.’

Korolev leant backwards to look up at the building.

‘In 1865, you say.’

‘1865,’ she confirmed, making no effort to keep the pride out of her voice.

Korolev nodded with what he hoped was suitably impressed gravity, then began to walk towards the entrance. Before he’d taken two steps, the nervous white coats had hurriedly stubbed cigarettes against their heels, slipped the butts into their pockets and scurried in through the massive wooden doors like a flock of startled geese pursued by a fox.

‘You should visit more often,’ said Dr Peskov, appearing at Korolev’s shoulder. ‘I can’t remember the last time the lecture hall was full at the start of the eight o’clock lecture.’

Korolev shook the man’s outstretched hand – it wasn’t as if he’d meant to frighten the students.

‘Good morning, Doctor.’

‘Good morning to you – although I haven’t had much of a night. We finished your autopsy, though. Follow me, the School of Anatomy is around the corner.’

They followed Peskov further along the street and then, when he turned down some steps, into a wide courtyard where Korolev began to realize that the university was made up of a large number of buildings, and not only the one in front of which they’d parked. Peskov indicated an L-shaped edifice built from grey stone with large windows, which looked very academically inclined.

‘The School of Anatomy,’ the doctor said, and led them to a door at the side. In the corridor beyond it an elderly man, with the straight back and curled moustache of a former soldier, rose from a chair he’d placed in front of a set of double doors. Seeing Peskov, he unlocked the doors and stood to the side, inclining his head to the pathologist.

‘Please,’ Peskov said, waving them through. ‘Wait in here and I’ll be with you in a moment. As you can see, your instructions as to confidentiality have been followed to the letter.’

The room Korolev entered was longer than it was wide with a ceiling that must have been a good twenty feet high. The gaps between the drawn curtains on three tall windows provided streams of light that broke apart the prevailing darkness, and underneath the smell of formaldehyde and the Lord knew what other chemicals, Korolev detected the scent of corruption – of death itself. It was strange: Korolev had the clear sensation that the room was full of people, or their spirits at least. As his vision adjusted to the half light, he had the feeling that eyes were watching him from the glass-fronted cabinet that ran along one entire wall. Confused, he walked closer.

‘The Virgin preserve us,’ he whispered as the contents became apparent.

‘What was that?’ Slivka said from the window through which she was peering, the sliver of weak sunshine turning her hair golden in the gloom.

‘Nothing,’ Korolev said. ‘No, not nothing. Have you seen these? It’s barbaric. Look what they’ve done to them, these doctors.’

It was true – the cabinet was full of scraps of human beings, skin and muscle stripped back to the bone, fixed forever in some kind of preserving liquid. Here there was a hand, the tendons dyed bright green and numbered, there a foot paused in mid-step, the skin pulled back to display the bones and muscles. There were hearts, and stomachs, arms, legs, heads, jaws, ribcages, spines and parts of the body that Korolev had never seen before, and hoped he’d never see again. It was as if half a dozen men and women had been torn to shreds by some infernal machine, and then the pieces picked up and carefully placed in clear glass jars for reasons that no ordinary man could begin to imagine.

Korolev’s attention was caught by a pale face, bleached white as though drowned, with sightless eyes that seemed to be focused forever on the moment of death. It was curious how white the dead man’s hair was, and how frail he seemed – although he must have been a young man when he died. And then his lips – they were strange as well, unnaturally thick, as though they’d been stuck on after death like a comic moustache. Korolev had seen corpses before, more than his fair share, but this poor fellow’s suffering hadn’t ended with his death. Instead his head now floated in a thick round jar, snarling in despair, half of his face peeled back to display its inner workings, his jaw, his teeth and a naked eyeball.

‘These doctors are worse than wolves, Slivka, I swear it to you.’

Slivka said nothing, just shook her head sadly. There was one thing that interested Korolev about the body parts, though – a large number of them had the tattoos that marked them out as belonging to the tribe of Thieves. He pointed to a blue-inked monastery that graced a deformed knuckle.

‘A few blue fingers, I see.’

Slivka shrugged. ‘They have a habit of dying unexpectedly and unclaimed.’

‘True,’ Korolev said, looking at the floating head again and wondering who had decided this fellow’s life had gone on long enough. He turned back to the room. Eight stainless-steel dissecting tables, in two rows of four, were visible and on one of them a sheet covered most of a human body, except for the blanched feet pointing up at the ceiling.

Despite the weak light, he could see Slivka’s cheeks rounding in amusement, and was that a flash of teeth? Was she laughing at him, the scamp? It was all well and good for the likes of her – she probably ticked off the days till the next autopsy she could attend, ghoul that she was. He, on the other hand, hated every aspect of the clinical process that the examination of the dead called for. And he could smell the dead girl, that unforgettable undercurrent of decay in the still air of the room. A place like this was too close to the next world for Korolev. He knew that if he listened hard enough he’d hear voices from the cabinet, begging him to rescue the poor unfortunates imprisoned there and bury them, deep beneath the ground, the way a human being should be buried, in the shadow of an Orthodox cross to mark their passing.

‘You may laugh, Sergeant Slivka,’ he said, ‘but by the time you get to my age you’ll have seen enough death to know it should be treated with respect. It’s a precious thing, a life.’

If the truth were told half the reason he’d become a homicide detective, and a good one, was to try to make some sense of death.

The door swung open, and Peskov came in, his midriff swathed in a leather apron and his bald head invisible under a surgical cap. He flicked a switch and the room was flooded with a burst of electric light. Korolev turned, his eyes squinting against the glare, and saw that the doctor had been followed into the room by a younger female assistant carrying an enamelled tray, on which a number of glass jars were arranged.

‘Waiting in the dark? Did no one turn on the lights for you?’ Peskov seemed determinedly cheerful, even though his face looked hollow with fatigue.

‘No,’ Korolev snapped, feeling an irrational anger towards the pathologist and his dismembering ways.

‘I see,’ Peskov said quietly, his eyes dropping to the sheeted body of the girl. ‘Well, we were right. She didn’t die from hanging. Strangled first, hung afterwards. That’s it in a nutshell. From behind. No signs of a struggle, but that’s not that unusual as you know.’

‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Korolev said and, remembering they were on the same side, nodded his thanks. ‘No surprise, but good to have it confirmed.’

‘We did make one new discovery for you, Comrade Captain, that I think will be of interest. Anna?’

The young assistant, at Peskov’s nod, stepped forward and placed the tray on the stainless-steel table beside the girl’s body.

She seemed to be shy of speaking at first, but when Peskov nodded once again, she began to describe in a low voice the processes that had been undertaken to analyse the girl’s blood, the contents of her stomach, her skin, her hair and God alone knew what else.

‘While most of the tests were inconclusive or negative – at least so far – it’s clear from the analysis of the citizen’s blood and her stomach contents that she ingested morphine shortly before her death. The percentage present in her blood could conceivably have been fatal, if another cause had not apparently intervened.’

‘There,’ Peskov said, turning unnaturally bright eyes towards them. ‘What do you make of that?’