Филип Керр - Dead Meat

‘You’ll make a friend for life if you take my advice and say something nice about the place. Derzhavin’s very proud of it. So proud he even had a time capsule installed in one of the walls telling the story of him and all his staff.’

We parked the car and were ushered into Professor Derzhavin’s office. While we waited for him to finish his telephone call I studied his collection of silver roubles that was displayed in several glass cases on the walls.

‘Thallium,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s what I said. Thallium 203.’ He waved at us to be seated. ‘Oh, highly poisonous. They used to use the sulphate as a rodenticide. Well, she’s a Professor of Chemistry, isn’t she, Lieutenant? It wouldn’t be too difficult for her to get hold of some. All right then. No problem. Yes, you’ll have the written report in the morning. Goodbye.’

He replaced the receiver, stood up, and shook hands all round. Grey-haired with a light suntan, he wore a white coat and an easy-going sort of expression.

‘How about that?’ he said, to nobody in particular. ‘Some bitch has been poisoning the people she shared her flat with. With thallium. Just to get hold of an extra couple of rooms.’

‘Is that a good way of doing it?’ asked Grushko. ‘Only my neighbour has this piano. The kid practises all the time, and it’s not even in tune.’

I thought of my own wife and her music-teacher lover. Thallium. I never thought of that.

The professor grinned, collected his cigarettes off the desk-top and buttoned his coat.

‘Get my secretary to order some for you,’ he said.

We followed him out through his secretary’s office. She looked up from behind a smart new IBM typewriter and smiled sweetly.

‘Colonel Shelaeva’s waiting for you in Detective-Room Number five,’ she announced and carried on with her typing.

The professor led the way out of the office and turned down a long, sloping corridor.

‘I sectioned this fellow myself,’ he explained. ‘We left him on the slab for you, just in case you were thinking of having lunch.’

‘Very thoughtful of you,’ said Grushko.

‘The militia found him early this morning. Not far from where Mikhail Milyukin was murdered. Unfortunately, due to someone’s incompetence, the body was removed and brought here before it was realised that these homicides might be connected. Lenya’s pretty mad about it.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Grushko.

‘He’s been outside for about a week I’d say, and you know how warm it’s been. Also I think some small animal has been feeding on him. One side of his face is more or less eaten away, so I’m warning you, gentlemen, he’s no icon.’

We went through a set of swing doors and were met with a strong smell of formaldehyde and a traffic jam of trolleys, each of them bearing a naked body for autopsy. Even in death, most of them through old age or accident, Russians were still obliged to wait in line.

The professor stopped by a door and opened it. Colonel Shelaeva stood up, collected her papers and joined us in that dreadful corridor.

‘What took you so long?’ she said to Grushko.

‘We were at Mikhail Milyukin’s funeral,’ he said.

‘All of you?’ she said frowning. ‘For that troublemaker?’

Grushko nodded.

Shelaeva shook her head, offended by this waste of manpower. Professor Derzhavin spoke quickly as if to defuse a potential disagreement.

‘We’re in the blue section-room,’ he said. ‘If you’ll come this way?’

We proceeded down the corridor, through a gauntlet of dead bodies.

‘And what mood is blue?’ said Grushko.

‘Efficient and businesslike.’

Grushko explained to me that Professor Derzhavin had ordered the morgue’s builders to tile each section-room in a different colour, so that the staff working there might be spared any further lowering of their spirits that could have been occasioned by something more homogeneous.

There were two section tables. On one of them a beautiful young woman was being cut open, her body a yellow coat half-stripped off the meaty skeleton that had worn it. Derzhavin’s staff worked loudly, like workers in a meat-processing factory, habituated to what they were doing, wielding knives and handling viscera, with rubberised bloody fingers staining the butts of their blasé cigarettes.

At the other table, the table that we gathered round like a group of black priests performing a service of communion, lay a naked man of about forty-five years old, his upper torso still positioned on the dissecting block, his arms outstretched as if he had fallen from the ceiling. That which was never meant to be seen — intestines, lights and brain — had been bundled back inside his stomach, and the body crudely stitched up like a piece of Red Indian buckskin.

Derzhavin had not exaggerated the man’s facial injuries. One of his ears was missing while the cheek and the underside of his chin were cratered with coin-sized wounds.

‘He’s not yet been identified,’ said Colonel Shelaeva. ‘There was nothing but air in his pockets.’ She opened a file and handed Grushko a photograph. ‘But I think we can agree that it’s not Sultan Khadziyev.’

Grushko nodded silently.

‘Still, I asked you to come here because it seems that your hygiene-conscious smoker was on the scene.’ She shot Nikolai a meaningful look and then showed us a plastic bag containing another soft-pack of Winston that had been opened upside down.

‘They found this near the body,’ she said.

I lit a cigarette that helped to keep my nose, my mind and most importantly my stomach off the smell.

‘Cause of death?’

‘He was shot once through the head,’ said Professor Derzhavin. ‘At first I thought it was another animal bite. But if you look at the centre of his forehead you can see the bullet hole. Whoever shot him pressed the gun right up against the skull. The muzzle has pinned the force of discharge on to the scalp, splitting the entry wound. An executioner’s shot.’

‘It’s too early to say that it’s the same gun,’ said Shelaeva, ‘but I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it was.’

‘Any idea when he died?’

‘About a week ago,’ said the professor. ‘Perhaps a little longer. It’s difficult to be more precise than that. Not with all the sunbathing he’s been doing.’

‘A week or a little longer,’ Grushko said ruminatively. ‘Then he could have been dead before Milyukin?’

‘Yes, I’d say so.’

‘What about those triangular marks on the chest and the stomach?’

‘Burn marks, inflicted before death,’ said Derzhavin.

‘Inflicted with an electric iron,’ Shelaeva added.

‘The Mafia meat-tenderiser,’ murmured Nikolai.

‘Just so,’ said Grushko. ‘I wonder what they wanted to know?’ He lifted the dead man’s hand. ‘What’s this, under his fingernails?’

‘Diesel oil,’ said Shelaeva. ‘There’s more on his clothes and his boots.’

She drew a cardboard box across the floor and pointed inside. Grushko bent forward and picked out one of the dead man’s boots. He looked into the boot and frowned as he tried to make out the name of the manufacturer.

‘Lenwest,’ he said finally.

‘Perhaps he was a mechanic, sir,’ suggested Nikolai.

Grushko nodded silently, turning the boot over in his hands as if it were some fossil recovered from a palaeontologist’s dig.

‘Or a driver, maybe,’ he said. ‘Take a look at the wear on this boot. It’s heavily worn on the right heel. That could be from repeatedly pressing an accelerator.’

‘A bus-driver?’

‘Could be. Or a truck-driver.’

‘I’ll have a better idea for you when we’ve had a chance to analyse that oil,’ said Shelaeva.