Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

‘Where are we going?’

I pushed him up the stairs, past the thug and into the night air.

‘We’re going to pay a call on a hooker.’

He turned to me and grinned, gold tooth glinting, for all the world like a nineteenth-century bandit.

‘ Da ? Now you’re talking.’

And with that, he lurched off towards the pavement, to bully a taksi into stopping for us.

The taksi stopped on the far side of Osh bazaar, outside Shairkul’s khrushchyovk block, Kursan loudly debating the cost of the ride, the driver’s parentage and the prices his mother would charge her customers. The last thing I needed was for the world to know we were there, so I handed some notes through the window and told Kursan to shut the fuck up. Amazingly, he did so without an argument. Without a torch, it was a slow job getting up the stairs, but we managed without making too much noise.

Once we reached the top floor, there was enough light to show me that both the ornamental wooden door and the heavy-duty metal door were ajar. I began to think that something very bad was about to come my way, and I gestured at Kursan to move down to the next landing. I listened at the doors, Yarygin in my hand. Not a sound. But while I was there, I recognised the sweet metallic smell coming from inside the apartment.

Usupov and I have argued about this one before. He claims that blood is blood, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a sheep or a yak, a horse or a whore. But I believe there’s something distinctive, unique, about the scent of human blood, catching at the back of the throat, electric, like silver foil on dental fillings. Of course, never having found a dead yak in a fifth-storey apartment, I don’t have a really scientific comparison.

But I’d found enough dead people to have a pretty good idea what was waiting for me inside.

Shairkul was sprawled on the floor of the sitting room, legs apart, her knees raised, as if waiting for her next customer. Or perhaps that was how she’d been left by her last one. The red rug beneath her had changed shape, its edges irregular, as if the dye had run, smeared over the bare concrete. But it wasn’t dye.

Like Yekaterina, Shairkul stared sightlessly upwards. But her face wasn’t placid, calm, accepting of her fate. Her lips were drawn back in a scream that was half snarl, her gold teeth glinting under the harsh electric light.

I ignored the body for the moment and searched the apartment. I knew a ment who didn’t check the scene of a murder; they feed him through a tube now, and his children stopped visiting the hospital a long time ago. So I checked the bedroom where I’d seen Gulbara hard at work, then the kitchen, the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain, expecting to find Gulbara’s body in the bathtub, but the apartment was empty. I decided it was safe enough to holster my gun, and walked back into the sitting room. I was ready to call the scene-of-crime forensic boys, but first I wanted to get my own take on the butchery in front of me.

Shairkul had died hard, fingernails broken and shredded fighting off her murderer, jaw shattered by a punch. Her hands were covered in defensive cuts. Or maybe she’d fought back. The air was full of the stink of blood and sweat and shit and fear. I wanted to open a window, but didn’t, at least until I got the say-so from Usupov’s people.

I heard a noise behind me, a footstep, and I grabbed for my gun, ready to fire as I turned. A touch more pressure on the trigger and I’d have sent Kursan to wherever smugglers go when they die.

‘ Ahueyet? ’ he said, seeing Shairkul’s broken corpse.

‘Never mind “what the fuck?” – you almost joined her on the floor,’ I said, tasting adrenaline and sour bile rising in my throat. ‘You need to fuck off out of here, right now. I can’t explain you away. And if the uniforms decide to arrest you, it won’t be me dancing with you down in Sverdlovsky basement.’

Kursan took the hint; he’s waltzed with Urmat Sariev before, and he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

‘Call me,’ he said over his shoulder, already down the first flight of stairs.

Too late to tell him not to touch anything, but at least he was out of my hair.

‘And don’t say anything to anyone,’ I shouted down the stairwell.

He was probably halfway to the Kulturny to spread the word. But I had more important things to worry about than Kursan’s gossiping. I’d got a second – or should that be a third? – dead woman on my hands.

I used my mobile to take a few photos; forensics would take decent shots, but I couldn’t wait the week or so that it would take to get a set into my hands. I could have used a cigarette, but I remembered the uniform up on Ibraimova littering the scene with butts, and decided to wait until I was outside.

I was deliberately avoiding looking at her stomach. That’s where the killing blows would be. With a knife, they almost always are. Forget fancy knife play: if you know what you’re doing, a thrust, a twist of the wrist, then pull back and you can disembowel someone faster than a gun will dim their eyes. So first I photographed her hands, the remaining nails scarlet with cheap polish, the other fingers scarlet where the roots had been wrenched out.

Then I photographed her face, trying to avoid the awful accusation in her stare. As always, I wondered if there could be any truth to the old story that you can see a murderer’s face retained on the victim’s eyes. Right then, if I’d caught sight of myself in a mirror, I’d look like her murderer. Or the man who didn’t manage to prevent it.

Most of the victims I see are strangers to me, but the few minutes I’d spent in Shairkul’s company turned her death into something more personal. Remembering the threats I made, the bullying to get her to talk, a wave of shame smacked into me.

And then it was time, the moment I’d been dreading. Shairkul was wearing her coat, unbuttoned but covering her belly. The material was slashed and torn, blood around the edges of the cuts. I had a good idea what was underneath, from the size of the bloody puddle on the floor. I used the muzzle of my gun to flip the coat open.

The smell of her death rose up to me, as I looked down at the grey coils and turmoil of her intestines, the diagonal cut through her stomach, her guts spilling out as if trying to escape the knife.

It’s then that I saw why Shairkul was on her back, legs apart, knees raised. She wasn’t lying in the position with which she greeted her customers, as I’d first thought. Instead, she’d been carefully arranged into a crude approximation of a woman giving birth.

Which perhaps explained the foetus nestling between her bloody thighs.

I walked down the broken-tiled steps of the morgue and along the dimly lit corridor towards the racks of the waiting dead. Beyond the metal doors, the stink of chemicals and raw meat lingered in the air. The place was deserted, and the neon strip light above the dissection slab flickered with an intermittent high-pitched buzz, like a dentist’s drill.

At the wall of storage drawers, I looked for Shairkul’s name, but the label holders were all empty. I pulled out the nearest drawer, the runners giving their usual shriek of protest. The corpse inside was the krokodil junkie I’d watched Usupov dissect, what now seemed like months ago. The smell of iodine made my eyes water and I slammed the drawer shut. The next two drawers were empty. But the fourth drawer was occupied.

A woman, by the shape of the sheet covering the body. I pulled back the rough cloth, expecting to find Shairkul staring up at me, her mouth open in protest at the indignity of her penultimate home.