The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Locked in Death by Mary Reed & Eric Mayer

Those of you who have seen my anthologies of historical whodunits will know that Mary Reed and Eric Mayer are the authors of the stories featuring John the Eunuch, set in 6th-century Constantinople. One or two of those stories have been locked-room mysteries. John the Eunuch also features in a series of novels that began with One for Sorrow (1999). Besides John, they also have another continuing character, Inspector Dorj of the Mongolian Police, who first appeared in “Death on the Trans-Mongolian Railway” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (March 2000). The following is a brand new Inspector Dorj story involving a travelling circus and a puzzling corpse.

During his years with the Mongolian police Inspector Dorj had witnessed crimes in sufficient variety to inspire several Shakespearean tragedies, but until the crowbar-wielding midget sent the locked door of the circus caravan flying open the inspector had never seen a man murdered by a corpse.

Hercules the lion-tamer was, it is true, an exceptionally large and powerful corpse, but a corpse nevertheless. He lay wedged between the bed on which Dorj had last seen him and the blood-smeared door of the ancient caravan’s lavatory cubicle. His enormous hands were still reaching for his victim. Nikolai Zubov, sprawled partly under the table near the door, was now beyond Hercules’ reach, but the ugly welt ringing the circus owner’s neck made it clear what must have happened. Dorj said so.

“Clear?” muttered Dima, the midget, peering around Dorj into the disordered caravan. Dima’s bone white clown makeup ran with sweat from his efforts with the crowbar, turning his face almost as ghastly as Zubov’s. “How can you say it is clear when it seems Zubov was strangled by a dead man?”

“Of course the lion-tamer was dead,” said Batu, Dorj’s assistant. “The lion went berserk and practically disembowelled him. No one could have survived a gaping wound like that. You’re lucky you got bored and left the performance before the lion-taming act started.”

Dorj now regretted dragging the young man to the circus, which had turned out to be a sorry affair even before the accident. “You kept an eye on the caravan while I returned to town to make arrangements?”

“I would have seen anyone approaching.”

“So only Zubov and Hercules were inside?”

A cloud-like frown passed over Batu’s round, flat moon of a face, a typical Mongolian face in contrast to Dorj’s sharper-angled features. “The names of those deceased should not be spoken so soon after death. Souls linger. So many people, saying their names – they may call the dead back from the lower world.”

Dorj had long since abandoned trying to talk Batu out of his native beliefs and instead had taken to occasionally exposing the young man to some culture – unfortunately, as it turned out, in the case of the circus. So now he simply instructed his assistant to begin the tedious collection of evidence and then, to be alone to consider the conundrum, walked away from the caravan and the abandoned Russian airplane hangar the circus had borrowed for its performances.

A rutted track led into the desert where a cold September wind rolled small bits of gravel against his carefully polished shoes. Unlike Batu, who had grown up in a ger, the traditional movable tent of the Mongolian nomads, Dorj was city bred. Until the great earthquake that some called freedom had driven him to a posting in the Gobi, he had rarely strayed far from the relatively cosmopolitan world of Ulaanbaatar.

He was not comfortable in his own country. He hated the Gobi, a featureless immensity beside which men and the culture Dorj valued so highly seemed small and insignificant. Out here Batu’s half-civilized ideas about returning souls seemed almost plausible. Or at least as good as any explanation the inspector had for a murderous corpse.

Staring out to the far off horizon where mountains sat like clouds, Dorj tried to recall what he had witnessed earlier. It was possible those events might have something to tell him about Zubov’s mysterious death. But since the lion-tamer’s death had been a grisly accident, Dorj had not examined the scene as carefully as he would have if a crime had been committed, and he regretted it now.

The inspector had arrived at the hangar door just as the lion-tamer’s corpse was being laid beside it, beneath a line of carelessly slapped on posters advertising that those who visited the circus would, among other delights, view a recreation of:

“The First Labour of Hercules. See The Mighty Hercules Slay the Nemean Lion.”

Dorj had been struck by the irony of Hercules’s death because, while some survived the vagaries and misfortunes of life by seeing dark humour in it all, he survived by noting the irony.

And thinking back now, what else had he noticed, aside from distressed circus-goers edging past the corpse?

Zubov was standing outside the hangar, still wearing his ringmaster’s top hat, speaking to a muscular young man decked out in spangled tights.

“Perhaps if I go back and perform my act, it will distract the crowd,” the young man suggested.

“Conceited fool!” the older man snapped back. “Go help direct them out the exits and make sure they don’t panic. Do you think anyone wants to see you preening and swinging like a monkey, with a man lying dead right outside?”

Zubov was soft featured, chubby around the middle, but his voice was harsh. His magic tricks involving a red ball and three boxes with obviously false bottoms had driven Dorj outside.

Dorj also remembered a woman standing beside the door, head bent. She was a tall, striking blonde, perhaps nearing middle age but it was difficult to be certain, given her heavy make-up. She was dressed in layers of diaphanous sequined material that billowed in the bitter wind, but she stood motionless, a great glittering icicle.

Because he was a government official at the scene, Dorj introduced himself to Zubov. There were arrangements to be made.

“We’ll put the fat man in my caravan where I can keep on eye on him for now,” the circus owner said brusquely. “Dima! Get the wheelbarrow!” He looked around for the clown.

“Where’s that idiot runt?” Turning back to Dorj, he continued, “You can’t rely on anybody these days. But you must know how it is, Inspector. I suppose you deal with enough underlings yourself – and all of them slackers and idiots.”

Dorj followed as the dead man was taken to the ringmaster’s caravan and laid on the bed. A few moments later, the blonde woman appeared at the caravan door. She resembled a ghost, icily composed, arms folded around herself as if she were trying to hold in a terrible storm of emotions. At last she was overwhelmed.

“Ah, Cheslav! My poor husband, I am so sorry! So sorry!” Weeping, she threw herself onto the corpse.

“Stop it, Ivana,” barked Zubov. “It’s too late to be sorry.”

But Ivana continued to sob hysterically, embracing her dead husband, smoothing his hair and rearranging his blood-soaked clothing as if to somehow repair the damage the lion had inflicted.

Dorj had hesitated, uncertain whether to intervene. He preferred the theatre where tumultuous emotions could be safely observed, caged upon the stage. He had been thankful when some of the other performers finally escorted Ivana away. The chilly wind no longer billowed out her robes; they had been soaked with her husband’s blood.

And those few impressions seemed to tell Dorj nothing at all about how the dead man had committed a murder. Perhaps there was something in Batu’s theory of returning souls after all.

“Watch out!”

As he approached the back of the caravan, returning from his solitary walk, Dorj felt a hand on his shoulder and paused in midstep. There was a loud metallic snap. Glancing down, he saw a trap, rusty jaws now locked shut, sitting on the gravel a centimetre or two from his foot. Turning around, he saw he had been warned by a woman. It was difficult to tell her age because of her beard.

“We catch marmots to feed to the animals,” she explained in Russian. Seeing Dorj understood, she added, “You’re lucky you didn’t step in one of these traps before. I saw you wandering around out here during the show, didn’t I? I’m sorry our performance drove you out into the cold.”

Dorj tried to think of something polite to say while at the same time trying not to stare too obviously at the woman’s somewhat sparse but unmistakable dark beard.

He had a soft spot for circuses. They had a certain magic, an otherworldly air, reminding him of Prospero’s island. Lights, sequins and distance transformed even the plainest of performers into fabulous creatures. But in truth, the Circus Chinggis had immediately struck him as the sort of seedy undertaking where the owners would be more likely than not to toss the main tent into the back of a 25-year-old Russian military lorry, herd the trained fleas onto a dusty lion and slip out of town under cover of darkness. Except, in a nation where thousands of people actually lived in tent-like gers, this forlorn circus apparently had no tents to call its own.

“You sold a programme to my colleague earlier, didn’t you?” was all Dorj could think to say.

“I suppose you’re one of those who never forgets a face! My name is Larisa Sergeyevna.”

Her voice was soft, her skin fair. To his chagrin Dorj found his gaze, leaving her beard, caught by her eyes, as blue as the sky over the Gobi.

Embarrassed, the inspector introduced himself. “I regret I will have to ask you some questions. For instance, I gather you haven’t been the Circus Chinggis for long.” He indicated the fresh and badly painted lettering on the side of the caravan.

Larisa glanced quickly at the caravan and then looked away, perhaps mindful of the two dead men inside. “You’re right. A few weeks ago Zubov decided he would have a better chance of meeting expenses by charging tugriks rather than rubles, not that any of us have actually seen either since we crossed the Mongolian border.

“But,” she continued, “Since you asked, let’s see, we were the Comrades’ Circus at one time, not to mention the Paris Troika. I even recall a time when we were just plain Buturlin’s. But I expect we’ll have to remain Mongolian for a while since we’re nearly out of paint, as well as running low on food. Perhaps you’ll give us another chance, and not want your admission money back?”

“I’m sure you put on a fine show. Perhaps it is just that I am out of humour. Or more in the mood for Shakespeare. Not that a circus doesn’t have more than a touch of Shakespeare.”

“You have a silver tongue, Inspector Dorj! I’ve never heard a circus compared to Shakespeare before. He wrote mostly about boring old kings killing each other, didn’t he?”

“But even his historical plays have a lot of magic in them, really. All manner of ghosts and portents, witchcraft and unnatural creatures…” Realizing his gaffe, his voice trailed off, but the bearded lady just smiled quietly at him. Then, to his distress, her blue eyes pooled with tears.

“Poor Cheslav,” she said. “He was always so afraid of the lion.”

Dorj gave her a questioning look.

“Cheslav – Hercules – was no lion-tamer. He was our strong man,” she explained. “Alexi, our real lion-tamer, he left us in Erdenet a few weeks ago. He thought he could find work in the copper mines. So Zubov ordered Cheslav to take over. Just like Zubov, that was!”

She turned away and pitched forward suddenly. Dorj caught her arm to keep her from falling. In the instant her warm weight was on him, his breath caught in his chest.

“My weak ankle,” she said. There was anger in her voice. “I used to be an acrobat. Imagine that. Then I got injured, but Zubov insisted I keep performing. He even forced me to keep training on the trapeze. My back is bad now, too. So I’m reduced to hawking programmes.” A tear ran down Larisa’s pale cheek and into her beard. “He was a hateful man. I could almost believe a corpse would rise up to kill one like him!”

When Larisa had gone Dorj remained aware, uncomfortably so, of the pleasurable sensation of her warmth near to him. It occurred to him that she was not so much ugly as she was… exotic… magical.

He checked around the caravan again. The murder had occurred, it seemed, just before Dorj returned from Dalandzadgad, where he had gone to arrange for an ambulance to take the dead man away. It would have been much easier to have been able to call one with the aid of a portable telephone, but nothing of the sort had been made available to him out here in the desert. Batu, whom he had left at the circus as an official guard, had heard strange noises from the caravan. When there was no reply to the young policeman’s shouted inquiry, he had finally tried the door. It had been securely locked from the inside.

The small caravan was of vintage nineteen fifties design; no doubt it was towed behind one of the circus’s old lorries as the troupe moved from place to place. But now it stood alone, surrounded by flat, empty ground, some distance from both the hangar and the other circus vehicles. Dorj’s footsteps crunched on the gravel as he circled it. Batu would probably have heard, and surely seen, anyone trying to approach by stealth.

The caravan was as decrepit as the rest of the circus, Dorj thought as he noted a couple of badly patched holes in its rusted walls, half hidden by the freshly applied paint. There was a tiny window in each side wall and a vent in the curved roof. Dorj paced back a short distance, to get a better look at the vent. The opening was far too small for anyone to squeeze through. Dorj, thin as he was, wouldn’t have got more than an arm through it. For a moment he wondered about Dima, the small clown, but decided that even Dima could never have managed to squeeze through the vent. As for the windows, he noticed on closer inspection that they were sealed shut by carelessly applied and obviously undisturbed paint.

Glancing through the window, he saw the two dead men, Zubov now on the bed and his apparent murderer on the floor near him, were decently covered by a couple of pieces of canvas, perhaps the remains of the Circus Chinggis’s missing Big Top.

“Ah, Cheslav, I wish you could speak,” muttered Dorj. Then he recalled what Batu had said about calling back the souls of the dead, and hurried away from the caravan.

“Everyone hated Zubov,” Dima stated, confirming what Larisa had told Dorj. The midget, wiping dry, cracked make-up from his chin, was seated on a crate near the hangar door.

The inspector inquired why Zubov had been so hated.

“You saw the way he treated me! Do you doubt it?”

“He treated everyone the same, then?”

“Of course he did. Isn’t that always the way with people like him?” Dima climbed off the crate. He barely came up to Dorj’s waist. “He used to constantly criticize me for not being short enough,” he continued. “Can you imagine that? He’d laugh and shout at me that I couldn’t even manage to be small enough to be a proper midget.”

“He kept you on, though,” the inspector reminded him.

“He had no choice.”

Dorj asked him what he thought would happen to the little circus once the investigation was closed.

“I won’t be running it, that’s for certain!” Dima replied. “But as to that, Zubov didn’t confide in anyone. Who knows what his arrangements were?”

As patches of Dima’s make-up were removed, wrinkles were revealed at the corners of his mouth. Dorj realized that the man was middle-aged. It was difficult not to think of him as a child.

“Why was it that the others hated him?”

“You mentioned Larisa’s story, how the beast turned her into a cripple, but all the women had reason to hate him, the old lecher.”

“What about Ivana, Cheslav’s wife?”

Dima nodded. “They all did, as I said. And then there’s Fabayan Viktorovich, our aerial artist. He was angry that Zubov refused to take the circus to Moscow to perform. And he – Fabayan, that is – thought he should be the headline act. Zubov did not agree. Now, if you don’t mind, there’s work to be done, whatever our future might be. If I were you, Inspector, I would look no further. A corpse can’t be punished and Zubov’s murderer deserves no punishment. So perhaps there’s justice for the downtrodden, after all.”

“I’m glad you found me, Inspector,” Ivana said as she opened the door to let Dorj into the trailer. “For I have a confession to make. I’m afraid I am a murderer.”

Dorj had had opportunity to keep his Russian polished, but still he was not certain he had understood her words correctly.

“Yes, that’s right, Inspector. I’m a murderer,” she repeated calmly. She had changed from her bloodied clothing into a tight pink leotard. It did not conceal her body as had the diaphanous robes; it was hardly mourning apparel, Dorj thought.

Dima had told Dorj that he would find the others in what he called “the back yard”, the area where the rest of the circus lorries, animal trailers and caravans were parked. Their age and condition caused the back yard to resemble a junk yard.

Dorj had noticed a light on in a long trailer, and knocked on its door. Ivana had answered his summons.

Illuminated by a single bare bulb, the trailer was a dim confusion of shadows. It had an exotic smell, a mixture of animal dung and something worse. Evidently it was used to haul circus animals around from place to place.

“Take care you don’t step in that pile of marmots,” Ivana warned him after her astonishing confession. “They’ve been dead for quite some time.” Then she began to sob.

Dorj had never cared much for Russian literature of the more melodramatic kind, and was beginning to think that it perhaps reflected national characteristics more accurately than he had hitherto imagined.

Amid the stark shadows striping the trailer, he could distinguish a few empty cages and pens. The faded paintings on the trailer’s outside walls depicted lions and tigers, trained poodles, alligators and snakes and a trumpeting elephant. A quick look around the interior showed a ragged cockatoo perched sleepily in a bird cage. One of several aquariums held an iguana. A rumble from the darkness at the back of the trailer reminded him that there was, at least, a lion.

“You’re understandably upset,” Dorj assured the woman softly.

Under normal circumstances he would have dismissed Ivana as a suspect, simply because a normal woman could not have inflicted with her bare hands the damage he’d seen on Zubov’s neck. But, he had to keep reminding himself, circus people could not necessarily be judged by what some might call normal standards. After all, so far he had spoken to a man the size of a child and a woman with a beard. Nevertheless, it still seemed impossible that anyone except Cheslav and Zubov could had been locked inside the caravan.

Ivana, who appeared to be unusually normal by circus standards, retreated toward the back of the trailer and Dorj followed her. In the deeper shadows at the far end, the lion’s holding cage was bolted securely to the floor. The lion, which looked scrawny and mangy when viewed at close hand, was asleep. Dorj hoped it would not have to be euthanized.

“We don’t suspect you of anything. You surely could not have strangled Zubov,” Dorj reassured Ivana.

“I’m not speaking of Zubov. It was my husband I murdered.” She quickly shoved something small between the bars of the lion’s cage – a marmot – and wiped her hands on her pink leotards before rummaging in a small cabinet near the cage. “Look here.”

Dorj glanced over her shoulder and saw several glass bottles and a frighteningly large hypodermic on the shelf above them. He began to point out that in fact a dreadful injury had caused her husband’s death. Then another thought occurred to him.

“Are you saying you drugged your husband before he went in the ring with his lion taming act?”

“Not Cheslav. No, I drugged Raisa – the lion. Cheslav could never be a real lion-tamer. A timid man, he was. Raisa is not that fierce, but we always drugged her, for safety reasons, you know? We even drugged her for Alexi, to make her more manageable, or rather Alexi did that himself.

“Since he left, I’ve taken over looking after the animals. Not that I can do much for them. We’re beginning to run out of tranquilizer, as well as their food. It is so sad. Perhaps hunger is what made Raisa so fierce.”

She slammed the cabinet door shut and Raisa, disturbed by the noise, rumbled in her sleep. Dorj felt the raw power of the deep sound vibrating in his chest and through the thin soles of his shoes.

“So Zubov ordered me to cut down on the dosage to make what we had last longer,” the woman continued. “I should have known better. But I was afraid of him, so I did what he said. And now my poor husband is dead. So you see, as I said, I’m guilty.”

“If what you say is true, it was not murder, it was a terrible accident. But in any event, it is Zubov’s murderer I’m interested in finding.” He did not add that the more he found out about the man the less interested he was in the task. Yet, one did one’s duty.

Ivana’s eyes glinted as they reflected the light of the bare bulb. “But the evidence is clear. Surely it shows that my husband got up off his death bed to take his revenge on the man who turned me into a murderer?”

As he walked away from the trailer Dorj found himself looking for Larisa. There were things he had forgotten to ask her about, he told himself. Instead he ran into the young man in spangled tights whom he had seen earlier talking to Zubov.

“I’m Fabayan Viktorovich, the aerialist,” the young man said, after Dorj had introduced himself. “In fact, I’m the Fabulous Flying Fabayan, as the posters say. Or would have said, if Zubov had ever got them printed.”

Dorj, shivering in his thin coat as the wind picked up, suggested they talk somewhere more sheltered. Fabayan led the way back to the hangar, where the fluttering circus posters Zubov had handprinted in bold red letters, and that long ago from the crumpled looks of them, still promised a brave show with jugglers and clowns, fortune-tellers and snake-charmers, acrobats and contortionists, and of course, the mighty lion-taming Hercules.

“I just want to check on my rigging, though I doubt we’ll be putting on another performance tonight. Accidents happen in threes, we always say. I’m sure you will have many questions.”

As they entered the ill-lit, empty hangar, Dorj asked the muscular young man about the lion tamer.

“Cheslav was a roustabout, not a performer,” replied Fabayan, contempt evident in his tone. “He was an out-of-work stonemason. Zubov spotted him leaving after a show in Chelyabinsk. We needed some muscle to set things up, to help move cages, to haul up the rigging.” He indicated the complicated arrangement of ropes, nets and trapezes half hidden above them. “I couldn’t trust him with the knots or getting the nets in the right places, or any of that. Eventually Zubov gave him the lion-taming act.”

Nothing at the circus was what it seemed, thought Dorj. Its amazing and glittering wonders were nothing more than tawdry deceits. Yet what about a murderous corpse? What sort of deceit was that? Or was that real?

Dim light outlined the web of ropes high up in the cavernous hangar. Certainly the distance between Fabayan’s trapeze, up near the ceiling, and the hard concrete floor far below was real enough.

“It takes true skill to perform up there,” boasted Fabayan, following Dorj’s gaze. “Buturlin recognized talent. He was born to the circus. He was the one who engaged me. If he were still alive, it would be different.”

“Buturlin was the former owner?”

“Yes, and then Zubov and he became partners. Buturlin died a year or two ago. But Zubov, he was originally just the accountant; he knows nothing about talent or the circus.”

“Zubov did perform some magic,” Dorj pointed out.

“Anyone can buy a trick box. The only thing Zubov made disappear was our pay cheques. If he had headlined my aerial act rather than a fat, unemployed labourer and a drugged big cat, we would be the toast of Moscow by now.”

Fabayan’s voice echoed around the empty hangar as he walked about, testing several thick ropes dangling from above. Dorj followed a few steps behind.

“Why did Zubov imagine you would do better business in Mongolia?” he finally asked.

“Because we would have no competition, or so he said. But, more importantly, as it turned out, he did not realize that you Mongolians don’t have enough tugriks to keep the traffic lights working, let alone pay for art.”

Not put diplomatically, but true enough, reflected Dorj. It struck him that the deaths of both the owner and his favoured lion tamer had at once removed two impediments to Fabayan’s career. He wondered who else might have been angered by Zubov’s refusal to headline aerialists. “Do you perform alone?”

“At the moment, yes. However, I have been training Ivana. Naturally, the audience wants thrills and artistry such as I provide, but I also needed a vision of beauty on the wires, to complement my performance.”

The young man stared up into the shadows, a bird with its wings clipped.

“Isn’t it dangerous, trying to learn something like that at her age?” Dorj ventured delicately.

The other dismissed the suggestion. “Ivana is closer to my age than Cheslav’s,” he said, somewhat heatedly it seemed to Dorj. “Besides, she is an accomplished acrobat. She took over for Larisa when she could no longer continue her act. Her acrobatic act, at least. We no longer have a contortionist. Larisa was the only one of us with that talent.”

Larisa had mentioned only her acrobatic skill. For a moment Dorj said nothing. He was thinking about her remarkable blue eyes. It was hard to imagine those blue eyes belonged to a woman who was, or had been, a contortionist, as well as… Dorj forced his thoughts back to more important matters.

“Is it true that the women had reason to hate Zubov?” he asked, recalling Dima’s comment.

“You mean because he was constantly propositioning them? Actually, the way he was always looking at Ivana, I am surprised poor Cheslav waited until he was dead to kill the old lecher. If I had been her husband, I would have strangled him long ago!”

Dorj immediately recognized the possessive jealousy in Fabayan’s voice. How often had he encountered that fierce tone while investigating a crime? Perhaps that was why he so distrusted his own emotions. So often strong emotions led to disaster.

He might have felt compelled to ask whether the young man had been having an affair with Cheslav’s wife, but the aerialist grabbed one of the hanging ropes and hauled himself up into the shadows. A few seconds later, Dorj heard the creak of the swinging trapeze.

Dorj climbed into Zubov’s caravan. Having spoken to the last two or three members of the small troupe, he had discovered that, predictably, they all claimed that everyone else but themselves had good reason to hate the circus owner.

It was hard to remember he had driven out here hoping that for a few hours the circus’s dazzling lights, nimble performers and sideshows would free him from the dreariness of the vast grey desert and cramped grey offices of his official life. In Ulaanbaatar he had had the consolation of the State Theatre. Out here in Dalandzadgad culture was a traveling circus.

Dorj removed his wire-framed eyeglasses and carefully wiped their round lenses with his handkerchief. But when he put the spectacles back on, the scene remained unchanged and just as murky.

He examined the interior of the caravan. It held no revelations. Its few cupboards contained only household necessaries, and in any event they were too small for purposes of concealment. Nor had anyone been hiding in the lavatory cubicle, waiting to escape in the general excitement. He would surely have been noticed.

The blood smears on the floor and the imprint of a bloody hand on the lavatory door mutely reproached his lack of understanding.

Dorj positioned himself beneath the closed roof vent and reached up to touch it. When he had noticed it earlier, while examining the outside of the caravan, he’d guessed it was too small to serve as an entrance. Now he was certain. His shoulders were much wider than the opening and Dima, although short, was at least as broad. Not a proper midget, as Zubov had said. In addition, the vent gave no evidence of having been opened recently. Indeed, a ropy bit of cobweb hung down from it.

The cobweb made him think about Fabayan’s rigging. Didn’t aerialists fly through the air, in a manner of speaking? He would have had a motive, certainly, unless Dorj were mistaken about the aerialist’s relationship with Ivana. For that matter, Ivana was an acrobat. Dorj tried to imagine some way aerial or acrobatic skills might breach a locked caravan.

After a moment’s thought, Dorj replaced Zubov’s wooden chair to the spot he had seen it while assisting Dima to lay Hercules’ body on the bed. He sat down where Zubov had sat. Why had the circus owner locked the door until the ambulance came? As a precaution, no doubt. People who were hated had reason to lock their doors.

He glanced around again. By the disordered bed an empty vodka bottle had rolled into a corner.

So, he reasoned, perhaps Zubov had felt the need for a drink, sitting in his cold caravan with the corpse of his headline act. It was not surprising. Dorj tried to imagine how it would have been, sitting there with the dead man, drinking, perhaps eventually dozing.

And suddenly the dead man is rising from the bed. Impossible. It must be the vodka, or the tail end of a nightmare. Half awake, he is confused. He jumps to his feet. The chair topples over as the dead man advances. Convulsed with panic, the ringmaster backs away, but there is no escape. The corpse staggers against the lavatory door, steadies itself with a bloody hand. Then those huge hands fasten on Zubov’s throat. Trying to push the nightmare away, the ringmaster finds only a barrel chest gashed by a hideous wound.

Dorj shuddered. Trying to imagine the scene he had felt himself being drawn into it, almost like the shaman he had once seen performing for some tourists. Certainly the masked man, beating a drum and dancing about, had known as well as his spectators that he was not descending into the lower world. But as his gyrations became wilder it seemed to Dorj that the man was convincing himself that he was actually taking the impossible journey and in so doing was also persuading the spectators – most of them, at least – of the fact.

But what Dorj had imagined – a murderous corpse – was simply not possible.

And yet, the lion-tamer had been dead. The wound had been so terrible, he must have gone into shock instantly and died within minutes.

Dorj’s thoughtful gaze was drawn again to the bloody handprint on the door. Nor could he forget the welt around the strangled man’s neck.

Again he tried to picture the performers, and how their skills might have contributed to Zubov’s death. All the exercise did was remind him of a snippet of his limited knowledge of native Mongolian culture. Along with masks, shamans-religious magicians, scoffers called them – wore mirrors on their clothing. Weren’t the sequins sewn into circus performers’ outfits tiny mirrors? Perhaps it was just as Batu said, the soul being called back, simple magic. Was it so dreadful to believe there might be magic in the world?

Dorj finally found Larisa standing outside the cookhouse among the vehicles in the back yard.

“Do you have a few spare moments?” he asked.

The bearded lady shrugged. “We won’t be leaving until tomorrow.”

“You’ll continue to tour?”

“What else can we do? Eventually some legal person will let us know who owns the circus. Meanwhile we have to make a living.”

Dorj paused, gauging the light. It would be more than an hour before it was completely dark. “I need to ask you a few more questions. And there’s something you might like to see. A local landmark.”

“How mysterious. It’s been a long time since I’ve been asked out walking by a gentleman! I’d be pleased to accept.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly, that is to say – there are questions…”

“What? You aren’t shy about being seen with a girl who looks like me, are you?”

As they followed faint tyre ruts up a small hill that rose almost imperceptibly several minutes’ walk from the abandoned hangar, Dorj had to admit to himself that although he might indeed be shy about being seen with a bearded woman, it was nevertheless a marked, almost welcome, change from his grey official life.

“Here’s something you might want to know,” Larisa said, when they were well away from the back yard. “Dima is Buturlin’s son. Illegitimate. I understand when Buturlin made Zubov a partner, their agreement required the circus to keep Dima on, even in the event sole ownership passed to Zubov. The agreement apparently didn’t specify that Zubov had to treat him like a human being.”

Dorj nodded, wondering why Larisa was offering the information. Perhaps it was just to be helpful. People did not always need ulterior motives, he reminded himself. “Perhaps Zubov hoped to force him to leave?”

“It would be his way,” agreed Larisa.

“Does Dima have any interest in the circus, now that his father’s partner is gone?”

“I don’t know. You don’t suspect Dima, do you? Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.”

The wind was still cold, but walking made Dorj feel warmer. Perhaps it was his slight build that made him mind the chill. It was not a good trait for a Mongolian, even a city dweller as he had been, since in Ulaanbaatar in the winter it was not unknown for the temperature to reach 40 below.

He asked his companion about Ivana and Fabayan. Larisa confirmed his suspicion. “She married Cheslav in a fit of pique shortly after Zubov hired him, because she’d just had a big quarrel with Fabayan. Ivana is impetuous and emotional, always has been. She and Fabayan quickly made it up. Poor Cheslav. I often wondered how he could not have known.”

They had reached the windswept brow of the hill. From this vantage point, they could see the black bulk of the hangar. Beyond it lay a litter of abandoned Russian military equipment, left there to rust into oblivion in the Gobi’s vast emptiness.

Here at the top of the hill was the much older landmark Dorj had wanted to show Larisa. It was a pile of rocks standing higher than his head, a sacred obo, built stone by stone by passing travellers over the span of hundreds of years. Up here, looking at such a thing, it was easy to believe the impossible.

“So Cheslav avenged himself on the wrong man,” mused Dorj.

“You don’t really believe a dead man got up and strangled someone, do you? You’re thinking like Shakespeare, with all those ghosts stamping about calling for bloody vengeance!”

“You know Shakespeare?”

“Circus people know everything.”

“I really can’t make anything of it,” Dorj admitted. He related his conversation with the dead man’s wife.

Larisa pondered for a few moments. “What if she somehow gave the tranquilizer to Cheslav?” she finally suggested. “Not to kill him outright. Just to make him slow, perhaps affect his reactions. Give the lion its chance, you know? He was frightened of the lion, and I think they can sense it. Well, she was too, especially having to feed it. Though she disliked the reptiles even more.”

Dorj nodded. It almost seemed a reasonable theory, given the character of the widow. A tawdry triangle and a more than melodramatic way to get rid of an unwanted husband.

Larisa continued. “But here is another idea. About that terrible wound Cheslav had – perhaps it didn’t kill him immediately because of the tranquilizer in him? And he came to in the caravan? He probably thought that Zubov had plotted with Ivana, and that would be enough. He would want revenge before he died.” She sighed and continued, “But it is all too fantastic, even for a circus, don’t you think?”

Dorj shrugged without comment. Her theories made as much, or as little, sense as anything he had been able to think of up to that point.

Sunset was a purpling bruise on the horizon. In its soft light, they stood looking at the pile of stones that formed the obo. It was not the sort of thing to which Dorj was usually drawn. But it was the only magic he could think to offer this strange woman.

“This is an ancient place of power,” he explained.

“A good spot to solve your mystery, then.”

Dorj listened to the wind sighing around the obo. He thought of the unknown number of ancient hands, belonging to forgotten people all now turned to dust, this single action of their lost lives, the placing of a stone, now all that was left of them.

“It is a good place to make one believe the dead might return,” he said, quietly. “We should go back before it gets dark.”

He picked up a pebble and added it to the obo. As Larisa bent to do the same, she stumbled and, as he had earlier, Dorj caught her arm. This time he was not so quick to let go.

“You would never guess I was an acrobat once,” she said.

“And, so I am told, a contortionist. You didn’t mention that.”

Larisa’s blue eyes widened slightly. “You don’t suspect me, do you? Do you suppose I managed to wriggle into the caravan somehow?” She looked away from him. “I’m sorry, Inspector. But in fact, I have indeed misled you about something else. You didn’t think this was real?”

She grabbed the edge of her beard and pulled. Dorj stared for a second at the suddenly smooth face. “Now there is a magical transformation which the Bard himself would have been proud to preserve in his work,” he finally said.

To his distress he saw that the unveiled face was set in a frown.

“I have never suspected you, Larisa,” he quickly assured her. “In fact, right now I need your assistance.” He grabbed her hand – he could hardly believe he had done so – and hurried her back down the hill.

“There may be another trap around here,” Larisa worried. “Be careful. Dima might have put some more out. I wish you’d tell me what you’re looking for.”

So far she and the inspector, searching around the back of the hangar with the aid of a fading torch, had located perhaps a dozen traps, finding only one sprung, and that holding an unfortunate rat. Dorj merely insisted they continue looking. She swung the feeble yellow light across the ground until it lit upon a metal stake. The flickering beam slid down the stake’s attached chain to reveal another trap, and beside it a semi-comatose snake.

“It belongs to the circus, doesn’t it?” said Dorj.

“Yes. It’s Nikita. How do you know?”

“I grew up in the city, but I don’t think boa constrictors are native to the Gobi. Not even ones as small as this.”

“He’s just a baby,” Larisa pointed out. “Zubov traded our big python for it. He eats less. Ivana didn’t say anything about him being missing.”

“There were pictures of snakes on the animal trailer, but I didn’t notice any inside. At least one aquarium was empty, though. When you wondered whether I suspected you’d managed to wriggle into the trailer caravan, it reminded me.”

Sluggish from ingesting whatever it had found in the trap, the snake was quickly popped into the empty feed sack Dorj had brought with him. “We’ll need this for evidence,” he commented.

“You’re saying the snake killed Zubov?”

Dorj hefted the sack, hoping the snake would not emerge too quickly from its post-prandial lethargy.

“I should have realized that manual strangulation would leave finger marks on Zubov’s neck, not a continuous welt all around it,” he explained. “If nothing else, the bloody handprint in the caravan should have reminded me.

“It got there during the struggle. What I surmise happened is that Zubov, having drunk heavily, fell asleep.” Dorj continued quickly, wanting to finish without distressing the woman too much. “The snake, having escaped, got into the caravan. Snakes are attracted to warmth and the only warm thing in the cold caravan was the slumbering Zubov.”

“The first and last time anything was attracted by Zubov’s warmth,” the woman said wryly.

“Then he was suddenly woken up by the boa tightening around his neck. He couldn’t call for aid. Trying to get it off him, he crashed around, and in doing so knocked the corpse off the bed.”

He paused momentarily. “That would explain the blood on the floor and the lavatory door.”

Larisa shuddered. “It must be true. Boas that feel threatened instinctively tighten their coils, so I hear.”

“Once Zubov was dead,” Dorj continued, “he was too big to ingest. Or perhaps the snake was scared away by Batu’s pounding on the door. It crawled off through one of those badly patched holes in the caravan wall, in search of other prey. It was probably hungry. In fact, I don’t doubt hunger also contributed to the lion attacking Cheslav.”

“You don’t think it’s what Ivana said – not enough tranquilizer?”

They had arrived at the unlocked animal trailer. Dorj looked around for the empty aquarium. The bag he was holding shifted alarmingly.

“I’m not certain about the lion. Perhaps it was just as Ivana said, an accident with the tranquilizer. Or possibly she saw her chance.”

“So both deaths were nothing more than accidents. How very strange.”

“Yes. Strange indeed. Too strange. Unless…” Dorj frowned. He stared into the dimness. “What if Nikita didn’t escape? In the confusion, after her husband was killed, Ivana could have returned to this trailer and tranquilized the boa. It isn’t a large boa and easily concealed under that billowy outfit she was wearing. Under the circumstances we would never have noticed. And when she threw herself so dramatically onto the corpse-well, he was a big man and there was plenty of room inside that wound for a smallish boa. It would have awakened in a cooling corpse, in a cold caravan, and gone for Zubov.”

Larisa blanched.

The sack Dorj had all but forgotten jerked suddenly open. The head of the snake whipped into view. Another convulsive twist of its body and it had knocked the sack from Dorj’s hands. The freed boa slithered across the floor. But in the wrong direction. A leonine paw flashed out from between cage bars, and then Raisa was rumbling contentedly as she ate the unfortunate killer.

So accidents did come in threes, as Fabayan had said, Dorj thought.

Larisa and Dorj left the trailer and stood gazing up at the impossibly enormous moon sitting on the edge of the horizon. Its bright light, flooding down from the dark sky, painted the world silver. Ebony shadows pooled here and there. Inside the trailer the lion was devouring the only credible evidence for Dorj’s unlikely story.

The strange bearded creature he had met only hours earlier, now transformed into a beautiful woman, leaned nearer to brush a magical kiss onto his cheek. Dorj felt certain he must have fallen into some Shakespearean enchantment.

“I am sorry,” whispered Larisa. “But in a way I am not. We circus people stick together. And only Ivana knows what really happened. There is no proof of anything, really.”

Dorj wondered what his superiors would say about the report he would be submitting in due course. His reputation would certainly suffer, and he suspected that over the next few months he would be finding rubber snakes hidden in his office desk with monotonous regularity.

But at least he could state the murderer’s identity with certainty. How the boa had got into the caravan would be difficult to ascertain, and indeed he was beginning to doubt the fantastic tale he had spun. Perhaps the snake had arrived in the caravan by its own efforts, without anyone’s assistance. That part he would leave to his superior’s imagination.

“Larisa,” he said softly, “Did you know Shakespeare mentions a snake around someone’s neck? A beautiful gold and green snake. And there’s a lioness in the same scene. In fact, now I think about it, the original Hercules strangled the Nemean lion. What happened here almost makes some sort of sense.”

The woman smiled. “Though it is the wrong season, do you mean it almost makes sense in a dream-like midsummer night’s sort of way, Inspector Dorj?”