Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

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.