Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

There was no point in having the bullet checked for prints; in weather like ours, you wear gloves all the time, and the people I was dealing with weren’t amateurs.

I walked towards the wall unit, to drop the bullet into a drawer, then paused. Something was wrong, out of place, missing. For a few seconds, I couldn’t tell what, then I saw the gap on the shelf, the thin dust-free mark. Chinara’s photo, the one taken on the Ferris wheel, laughing, carefree, wind in her hair.

Gone.

Someone had obviously managed to pick both locks without me noticing anything out of the ordinary. As I said, not amateurs.

I stood the bullet upright in the place where the photo had been, and stared at the glint of light shining off the brass. Whatever was going on, one thing was now very clear.

Someone, somewhere down the line, was going to pay.

I woke up to find two messages on my mobile. One from the Chief, one from Tynaliev. Both asking the same thing: where the fuck have you been, and what the fuck have you found out? Hard to know who to call first, so I decided to ring neither of them. Instead, I hunted down a contact in Motor Vehicle Registration and, for the promise of a couple of bottles of the good stuff, he agreed to check on the BMW. He got a bit twitchy when I told him about the diplomatic plates, but he finally agreed to get back to me in a couple of hours. I decided to pass the time by wandering over to the Uzbek Embassy on Tynystanov Street, just round the corner from Fatboys. If nothing else, I could get a decent breakfast, and then loiter outside the embassy to see what that stirred up.

An hour later, I was stamping my feet outside the embassy and thinking about getting fed and watered. I’d had a less than discreet word with the uniforms we keep parked outside, and made sure the security cameras on the gate got a long look at me. For good measure, I went and peered through the railings a couple of times. After half an hour or so, I got called over to the police car; there’d been an official complaint from the embassy. I waved my arms about a bit, in case I hadn’t attracted enough attention, then sauntered back towards Chui Prospekt. I didn’t know if the BMW would come by, but the Yarygin was in my coat pocket, nice and tight in my hand. I tried to look casual, but I listened hard for the sound of a car engine behind me.

I turned into Chui Prospekt and took a seat on the decking outside Fatboys. It was too cold to sit out there for long, but I was interested to see who might come round the corner after me. I pulled a copy of today’s Achyk Sayasat out of my pocket, and pretended to be engrossed in the lead article. A close observer might have noticed that the newspaper didn’t quite lie flush with the table top, might have speculated about what the bulky metal object underneath could be, wondered why my hand was out of sight.

Coffee and a full horse sausage and egg breakfast arrived, together with a complimentary hundred-gram shot of vodka, which I pushed to one side. I was keeping an eye on the corner, sipping my coffee with my left hand, so I was caught off guard when I heard a familiar and unwelcome voice behind me.

‘Inspector. The vodka’s on me, please, I insist.’

I sighed and twisted round in my seat.

‘Vasily, I hope for your sake that this is a coincidence. You’re my least favourite whoreson.’

Vasily Tyulev smiled, my insult of no consequence to him. Anything that didn’t cost him pain or money, it was merely snow melt slipping into a raging mountain stream.

‘Inspector, there’s no such thing as coincidence. Not in your line of work or mine.’

‘Vasily, the only time our paths ever cross is when you’re up to some shitty little scam, or selling some underage pussy, and I find out about it and come after you. If you’re fucking me around, we’ll go for a little dance in the basement at Sverdlovsky. I catch you giving me grief? We’ll waltz the evening away, my little bitch.’

‘I may be your bitch, Inspector, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be useful.’

‘Talk.’

‘About money? Sure, I help you, you help me, a few som changes hands, maybe, or a file gets mislaid. Lots of ways for mutual help, right?’

I sighed. Vasily’s roundabout tango always took time, but he’d delivered in the past. I needed to keep him balanced between knowing who was the boss and making sure he talked to me before anyone else.

‘No mislaid files, Vasily. You know I don’t work that way.’

He held his hands up in surrender.

‘The folding stuff is always good.’

The waitress looked out of the door to see if the two madmen sitting outside in the cold needed anything else. Vasily jerked his thumb towards his mouth, and she nodded and disappeared back inside.

Once the glasses were in front of us, Vasily raised his as a toast, and knocked it back. I left mine where it was.

‘I’ll come to the point, Inspector. I sort things out for a lot of people around town, a middleman, you might say. I do them a favour, I do you a favour, easier to get someone else to scratch your back, then you do the same in return, right? I got a call this morning from someone asking me to have a quiet word with you.’

‘That someone being?’

‘Well, right now, that’s a confidential matter,’ he smiled, rubbing thumb and forefinger together, ‘but it doesn’t have to remain that way.’

‘No name, no green.’

‘Hear me out,’ Vasily said, looking hard at his empty glass. I pushed my untouched drink towards him and made a point of looking at my watch.

‘I have a friend who works for a neighbouring country –’

‘Uzbek,’ I said, cutting him short, showing him he wasn’t the only one with a clue or two.

‘I couldn’t say,’ Vasily countered, taking a gulp at his vodka, ‘but they know you’ve got a strong interest in the case of Tynaliev’s daughter. They feel there may be certain international implications that it might be better to keep in perspective, to avoid unnecessary tensions.’

I gave Vasily my hardest stare, the one I wear in Sverdlovsky basement.

‘You’re saying an Uzbek murdered two Kyrgyz women, carved the foetus out of one of them, and dumped it in the belly of the daughter of our Minister for State Security? And you want me to keep quiet about it?’

Vasily paled; this wasn’t going to plan.

‘Not at all, Inspector. No one knows who did this terrible crime, right? You just shouldn’t leap to any hasty conclusions that might spark trouble in the wider community. That’s all my friend is saying, da ?’

The next bit was easy.

‘What’s in it for me?’

Vasily recovered himself, touched the thickest of the gold chains around his neck.

‘My friend believes that good… no, great police work should always be rewarded. Where else would we honest citizens be without your finest endeavours? In shit creek, that’s where.’

‘Vasily, you know what I want? More than anything else?’

He smiled; he thought he had me, the hook firmly through my lips.

‘I’m sure any sum within reason –’

He grunted as I threw a punch. Without much force, because I was sitting down, but enough to smack him in the belly and wind him.

‘What I want, whoreson, is the name of whoever sent you. And of whoever they think killed those women. And why.’

Vasily opened his mouth, first to get his breath back, then to speak. But he didn’t manage either, because his right cheekbone disappeared into a spray of thick crimson gobbets that splashed across the table. He gave a thin, high-pitched squeal as fragments of his teeth danced and chattered through the air, and the pressure from the bullet burst his left eyeball. A thin red drizzle hung behind his head.