William Ryan - The Bloody Meadow

‘Comrade Mushkin?’ It was Belakovsky’s voice. ‘Are you here to meet us?’

The major turned and looked at Belakovsky for a long moment. ‘No,’ he said eventually.

Belakovsky’s eyes swivelled towards Korolev, remembering him, before turning back to Mushkin with an apologetic smile.

‘Of course, I’m sorry – when I saw you standing here…’

‘Yes, you jumped to a conclusion.’ Mushkin spoke the words like a threat.

‘Excuse me, Comrade, my mistake. Please forgive me.’ Belakovsky turned away and, nodding to Lomatkin, walked quickly round the corner of the building in the journalist’s company. Mushkin looked at Korolev for a reaction, which Korolev was careful not to provide.

‘Well, now you’ve met Belakovsky. You’ll see more of him. Lomatkin his sidekick as well, no doubt.’

The car rattled along a road so straight it could have been laid out with a ruler, although after months of freezing temperatures the surface had nothing of the same regularity. Not that Mushkin allowed that to affect his speed, manoeuvring round only the bigger pot-holes and leaving the car’s suspension to deal with the rest – a task that Korolev’s bruised body told him was beyond it. It was a good fifteen years since he’d travelled through the Ukraine, but he remembered the steppe all too well and the flat landscape extended unremittingly to the horizon. Rodinov had told him it would be warmer than Moscow, which it was, but only by a couple of degrees and ice still clogged the streams and lakes and scatterings of snow marked each variation in the relentless flatness.

‘We found her hanging from a wall bracket in the dining room,’ Mushkin said, his voice rising to compete with the car’s engine.

‘So I understand. Anything suspicious?’

‘No,’ Mushkin replied flatly.

Korolev looked out of the window at the passing landscape but after a while of staring at the endless road ahead, the temptation to ask another question got the better of him.

‘Where is this dining room?’

Mushkin sighed and, for a moment, Korolev thought his question wouldn’t be answered.

‘The dining room is in an old manor house where the cast and crew are staying – it was a nobleman’s country residence before the Revolution, now it’s part of an agricultural college. They call it the Orlov House locally. The College has plenty of room, is secure and it’s near the village where they’re filming. The students and teachers who would be there otherwise have been sent to nearby kolkhoz s to help them prepare for the new season’s planting, so it’s convenient for everyone.’

Korolev was surprised at such a thorough answer, so surprised that he decided to push his luck.

‘What time did she die?’

Mushkin’s lips tightened into a scowl, and when he answered his voice had acquired an undercurrent of irritation.

‘She was found at just past ten last night. The last time she was seen alive was after the evening meal at around seven-thirty. The caretaker passed through the room where the body was found at eight o’clock and saw nothing. So between eight and ten is what I would deduce.’

‘What about the other people staying in the house?’

‘A night shoot down at the village. It was a crowd scene, so everyone was involved except for the girl. It seems she was alone in the house after the caretaker left.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘The caretaker – at least he was the one who opened the door when they found her. But he was with Shymko, the chief production coordinator. They’d been down at the shoot – the caretaker was in the crowd for the scene they were filming.’

‘What’s a production coordinator?’

‘A fixer. He makes sure everything runs smoothly. He’s the adjutant to Savchenko’s colonel.’

‘And this caretaker?’

‘He’s nearly sixty – he’s taken it badly. To me it looks open and shut, no one else involved except for her, but I understand you have orders as to how to proceed.’ Again that note of irritability.

‘I’d like to see the body first.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Did you know the girl?’ Korolev ventured.

Mushkin nodded, and for the first time Korolev thought he detected a glimmer of sympathy.

‘Yes, I knew her – it was a surprise to me.’ He sighed, and his face took on a gentler, more thoughtful expression. ‘She didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. On the contrary – an able worker, a committed Party activist, well respected by her comrades. Popular. And I’m not aware of any reason why she’d have wanted to kill herself. As I said, I was surprised – but then these things happen.’

Mushkin shrugged his shoulders; death obviously didn’t impress him any more. And when it came to suicide he had a point. They didn’t publish figures, but everyone knew someone who’d ended their own life. It was the nature of the transition they were going through, Korolev supposed: the march from a feudal society to modern socialism exerted pressures on the individual – and not all individuals were made of steel. Sometimes he wished the Party would just give them a few months off. A holiday from change.

‘How about personal relationships? A lover perhaps? There’s nothing in the file, but young women…’ Korolev left the sentence hanging.

Mushkin shook his head.

‘I’m not in the locality in a professional capacity, Captain, as you’ve probably been informed. I’m here for a period of rest.’ The major glanced at him and Korolev felt his reaction to the statement was being assessed. It made him wonder whether the period of rest was voluntary.

‘I haven’t been monitoring things closely,’ Mushkin continued, ‘at least not up until now. It’s possible, however. Very possible. She was a popular girl.’

By now they’d left Odessa far behind. The villages they were passing through were further and further apart, and the landscape was made up almost entirely of enormous fields divided from each other by thin lines of bare-branched trees.

Korolev had heard rumours of what had happened in the Ukraine in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three – dangerous words heard late at night from soldiers who’d had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar. How the Red Army and the NKVD had forced the peasants to give up every scrap of food and how, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the soldiers and the Chekists had shot them down. The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings. Korolev couldn’t help but notice that the few hunched peasants he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground. They turned their heads to look at the passing car with no interest whatsoever and Korolev had seen that look before, during the war, on the faces of men who’d been fighting too long and had seen too much. On his own face caught in a mirror, not far from here, the day after cavalry had caught his company in the open and he’d hidden underneath his friend Pavel’s dead body as the horsemen had searched for the living amongst the dead, the pop of revolver shots marking each discovery. It had taken three days for his hands to stop shaking enough for him to shave. But by the time that had happened he’d been tired, so tired – seven years of fighting and so many dead friends and dead enemies filling his dreams. It wasn’t surprising he’d nearly broken. He didn’t know where he’d found the strength, perhaps the Lord had answered his prayers, but somehow he’d pulled himself together, shaved, washed his friend’s blood from his tunic and marched on with a different group of comrades, thanking the Virgin he still breathed.