Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

A grim sense of humor may not be essential if you’re a forensic pathologist, but it’s not a handicap either, if you don’t want death to overwhelm you.

“This is where they were found? In the same position, I mean?”

I nodded.

“We uncovered them one at a time,” and I pointed out the order in which the bodies came out of the ground. “All buried at the same time, do you think?”

Usupov got to his feet, and I heard his knee joints crack. Like me, he was getting too old to expose other people’s cruelties and betrayals.

“Hard for me to say here, better to get them back home and on the slab, but I don’t think so. See for yourself.”

He pointed at the smallest package, prodded it with a gloved finger. A viscous squelch made my stomach turn.

“They all seem to be at different stages of decay. But that could be due to having previously been buried in different locations, in soils with different levels of acidity. Tightly wrapped until the bags split, so we won’t get a straightforward timeline from insect and predator activity. But if they weren’t transported here all at once, I’d guess they’ve been buried here one by one, over time.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Seven bodies suggested intent, determination, maybe some ritualistic choice behind the location. It also pointed the finger at a local, and village people are infamously closemouthed. “ Mne do lampochki ,” they say. “I don’t care.”

“Murdered?” I asked, knowing what his answer would be.

“Can’t say. Crib deaths? Stillborn? Who knows, the way infant mortality is around here? But certainly disposed of in suspicious circumstances.”

Usupov turned to the nearest ment , beckoned him over. A burly man, with the brown face and hands of a local farm boy, he didn’t seem keen to approach until Usupov frowned.

“I want plastic sheeting and tent poles to cover the site, a guard here overnight, and the use of a room in your station, understand?”

The ment looked puzzled, as if Usupov had asked for a magic carpet and a dozen Kazakh dancing girls.

“You’re leaving them here overnight?”

Usupov sighed; like me, he’d spent a career explaining himself.

“They’ve been here for quite some time, officer, another night won’t hurt if we cover them carefully, and we can examine the scene when there’s enough light to do the job properly. Uproot them fully now and we might destroy vital evidence. And it’s almost dark.”

The last of the light reflected on the snow was dissolving into darkness, as wind whipped the branches above our heads. It wasn’t a spot where I’d like to spend a long moonless night, alone but for the company of seven dead children.

We left one unhappy ment to his overnight vigil and trudged back down to the farm courtyard. I was staying at the Amir Hotel in the center of Karakol, and I’d booked Usupov in there as well. It wasn’t the Hyatt, but there was hot water most of the time. Right now, washing off the stink of the dead was the least of my concerns.

I needed to find out who was powerful enough to send a helicopter, what they knew, and why they weren’t telling me.

We excavated the site at dawn, to deter the curious. Usupov troweled away the damp earth, a few grams at a time, while I stood behind him, taking photographs, using a collapsible ruler to indicate scale. I tried to ignore the smell, a sour confusion of rotting leaves and decaying meat, until I finally stumbled to the canal and vomited into its sluggish brown water, wondering once more what drove me to places like these, to such endings.

The sky was cloudless, the air fresh and clear with the promise of an untroubled future. A couple of red kites circled above us, riding the thermals, scouring the ground for prey. I could hear Usupov behind me, the scratch and scrape of his trowel unsettling and relentless, the echo of a grave being dug.

You never get used to the nearness of death. It taps you on your shoulder when you’re least expecting it, breathes a sickening whisper in your ear. “Could have been you,” it whispers. “And one day it will be.” You taste the familiar fear in your stomach as you examine the gaping knife wounds, the intestines draped like ropes across the unmade bed, the spatter from gunshots dripping from cheap wallpaper in dismal rooms. Nothing could make you more certain that we’re all just bags of guts and bones, whistling in the night to comfort ourselves as the wind mutters threats and the curtains flap like shrouds.

“Inspector, we can take the bodies down now.”

There was no way we could get the ambulance up here, so we had to move the bundles by hand. Unearthed, they looked forlorn, reminders that cruelty is easily forgotten and time erases almost everything.

I picked up the largest bag, trying not to picture the body inside. Chinara was buried just a few miles away, and I pictured her wrapped in the simple shroud in which we Kyrgyz bury our dead, earth and stones gradually settling through her as roots weaved around her bones and mice colonized her skull.

I told the ment to take one of the bodies, but he simply folded his arms and stood motionless. I repeated the order, and he simply said, “Pashol na khui.” If I’d been in his place, perhaps I’d have told me to fuck off as well.

It took the two of us the best part of an hour to load the ambulance, and by the end I was convinced the reek of rot and slime would never leave me. I wanted to go back to the Amir, hand over my clothes to be burned, then shower until I’d stripped myself down to raw flesh. It’s easy enough to clean your body, harder to scrub images of dead children from your mind.

Usupov had turned the meeting room in the local police station into a makeshift morgue, long tables covered in plastic sheeting against one wall, and—a rarity in any Kyrgyz government building—working lightbulbs in every socket, to give him the light he needed. I reflected there was something wrong when a pathologist had more clout than a Murder Squad inspector, then realized why. The local officers were afraid of the death that had entered their lives. A wife-beating, a fight over the last drops in the bottle, or a brawl over a stolen sheep, that was in the nature of things. But dead children, gathered together and hidden where no one could mourn them, revealed an evil outside their experience. I would have liked to say the same.

“I want you to take notes and photographs, Inspector,” Usupov said, his sense of protocol undiminished by being away from his regular slab. “I’ll record my observations, naturally, but it may take some time to get them transcribed. And I’m sure you’ll want to press on with your investigation.”

We both knew this case would be mine and mine alone: no one back at Sverdlovsky station in Bishkek would be keen to drag this one along behind them. Dead children, no obvious suspects, all the makings of a career-breaker, one of those failures that outweighs any past triumphs. The chief had many friends before his fall, and they’d all be happy to see me stumble and break my neck over this case. I’ve learned over the years that every good deed earns you enemies.

The seven bags lay in a row, with the least decayed near the door.

“Why not in the order we dug them up?” I asked. “Or by size?”

Usupov polished his glasses, snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and moved toward the table.

“The freshest ones will contain the most information; what I learn from them might shed some light on the others, where the evidence is less clear.”

He paused, gave me his death’s-head smile, thin lips forming a vivid scar, turned, and set to work.