Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

But the body wasn’t Shairkul.

It was Chinara.

I stared, uncomprehending, unable to work out how my dead wife’s body had been exhumed from her grave up in the mountains and brought there. A lock of her hair had fallen over her face, and I lifted it back and tucked it behind her ear. Her skin was smooth, unblemished; I could have almost believed she was asleep, if I hadn’t helped carry her to the waiting hole in the ground. I put my forefinger on her cheek, stroked her face with the lightest of touches.

The final days in the hospital, Chinara was barely conscious for most of it, with ever stronger doses of morphine to dull the pain. I slept on a chair by her bed, in a room on our own because the Chief had pulled some strings. Sometimes working for a powerful man has its advantages. I would doze for an hour or two until her whimpering in pain, from the operation, from the tumours, would wake me. And finally, after eight days, as I sat watching her, she opened her eyes, half smiled, and drifted back into a final sleep. Too many memories, and all the good ones overlaid with the sorrow of what was to follow.

Then, as I looked down at my dead wife, she opened her eyes.

She stared up at me, her gaze unflinching, the way she’d always looked at me. For a moment, I realised with perfect clarity that her illness, her death, all of it was a dream, a hoax. And then with just as much knowledge, I worked out that I was dreaming. Even our loved ones never return from where we bury them. Except in dreams.

But I can’t wake myself, return to the world where I live alone, surrounded by crooks and hookers, the warped, the stunted, the desperate amongst us. With Chinara is where I want to be. Even if that means in the grave.

She gazed at me, and I moved to one side, to face her properly. There was a question in her eyes, it seemed to me, or perhaps a warning. I wondered what she was thinking, even as the absurdity of imagining she could think at all hit me. Dead, decaying, buried under a harsh winter sky; that’s my wife.

She used to interrogate me with each new case, forcing me to use logic, to think through the facts, lies, deceptions. Time after time, she offered directions, insights that helped me solve my cases. Nothing surprised her about human nature, but none of it soiled her.

I looked down at Chinara, her voice clear enough in my head; start finding the missing woman, start turning over rocks. Go back to being a detective again; I’m dead and that’s not going to change. Go back to being the man I loved.

I shut her eyes with my fingertips and slid the drawer back into place, gently, not to wake her. Then I walked out of the room, and into the corridor, towards the morning light and the end of my dream.

I woke up, eyes raw from the light streaming through the window. It must have snowed during the night, because the air had that crystal clarity that presses like thumbs on your eyelids. I couldn’t shake off the idea that Chinara had somehow been resurrected, even though common sense told me it was a case of wishful thinking. During the weeks after she died, I would hear her calling out from the next room, never anything intelligible, just sounds and notes that evoked her voice, summoned it from the dark of her grave. But the advice that she gave me, or rather, the advice my subconscious put into her mouth, held good.

I made coffee, lit and then stubbed out a cigarette, resolved to quit for the hundredth time, stared out of the window, wondered about my next steps.

I could have wandered down to the morgue to see what Usupov had dredged up about Shairkul’s terrible last moments. But a nagging concern about my dream being all too real made the idea unappealing. I decided I could always call him later, no need to face the stink of antiseptic yet again.

First priority had to be finding Gulbara. Either she was dead, on the run as a murderer, or hiding from her flatmate’s killer. She wouldn’t be holed up with a wealthy client somewhere: she was strictly a fuck me and fuck off kind of girl.

It made sense to find Khatchig Gasparian, the Armenian last seen trying to whack Gulbara’s monkey with his stick. Neither of them would be the other’s dream date, but love can be blind, or at least blindfolded with banknotes.

I called Sverdlovsky to have archives pull his file, if there was one; the last revolution saw the Public Prosecutor’s office burnt down, together with most of the files held on our career criminals. If all Gasparian had ever done was give a ment breakfast money to overlook his speeding, then I wouldn’t be interested. But the odds were he was involved in something else. There’s no big Armenian community here, no reason for him to be in Kyrgyzstan. Of course, he could have worked as Gulbara’s minder, pimping her out to pay for his cognac and cigars and mobile, and keeping the punters docile in return with the promise of a slap or two. There was only one way to find out.

I was halfway down the stairs, fresh cigarette in hand, when I remembered that I’d decided to quit. Tomorrow, I promised myself, and pushed open the heavy steel communal door, emerging blinking into pitiless sunlight.

‘You’re fucking my brain with all your questions!’

‘Khatchig, why not try answering them? Or one of us will get tired of the dance, and you’d better hope it’s not me. I might have to go out, have a little vodka, a smoke, something to eat. Of course, I can’t leave you alone; got you booked in as a suicide risk. So one of my colleagues will step in, keep you company. Urmat Sariev, perhaps you know him?’

We were in the basement at Sverdlovsky. A morning of asking around had given me a lot of answers about Khatchig Gasparian, and I didn’t like any of them.

He’d left the Armenian capital, Yerevan, in a hurry a few years ago, leaving behind a couple of dead small-time criminals, and headed down to Dubai, where he locked into a couple of property scams, selling apartments that weren’t his to sell. When the Emirates got too hot for him, he headed north and east, ending up in Almaty. Marrying a Kyrgyz girl got him the right to live in Bishkek. She divorced him after refusing to go on the game and getting a smacking that put her in hospital for two months. She wouldn’t testify, though; swore she’d walked into a door. About fifty-three times, according to the photographs.

He’d got a lot of money in the bank, thanks to gullible Indians in Dubai wanting to climb the property ladder there, so he didn’t seem to need a job. Maybe a bit of pimping, a little drug-running, or shipping a few weapons that fell out of either the Russian or the American military bases into the hands of our Islamist friends down south. But there was no hard proof, and he was small fry, too insignificant to interest Tynaliev’s people.

Right then, I was having as much success at breaking him down as I would climbing Mount Lenina.

Gasparian pulled out his cigarettes, which I promptly confiscated.

‘Fire hazard; don’t want to burn the building down by accident.’ I smiled, and lit one of my own.

‘ Pizda! ’

‘Cunt I may be,’ I said, ‘but I’m the one enjoying my smoke. Of course,’ and here I looked solicitous, ‘if the smoke is bothering you, I can always go outside.’ I pushed my chair back and stood up. ‘I’ll just get Sariev,’ I said, ‘and he can show you what a real pizda is like.’

Gasparian just grunted, but I could smell the fear on him, like garlic on an Uzbek’s breath.

I pushed his cigarettes over to his side of the table. It wasn’t easy for him to light one, being handcuffed to a chain bolted into the floor, but he managed.

‘Let’s start again, about how you killed Shairkul.’