Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Usupov once told me that the most practical way to wield a scalpel in an autopsy is to imagine you’re drawing a razor blade through soft balsa wood. The skin peels back slightly, opening up so you can slice through the meat, the fat and the muscle, down to the bone beneath.

‘You’ll notice, of course, that the initial wound was inflicted with a single cut. No hesitation. Someone knew what they were doing, before they got stuck in and started hacking about.’

‘So I should consider you a suspect, Kenesh?’

Usupov looked affronted at my tone. I’ve never known whether he thinks death is no laughing matter or he just doesn’t have a sense of humour.

‘I’d have made a better job of removing the uterus,’ he said, parting the two raw slices of her pudendum with his thumbs as if peeling an orange for dessert. ‘Not bad, you understand, but you need practice for this sort of thing. Medical school, I would imagine, a gynaecologist perhaps; you wouldn’t get the skills needed to perform a hysterectomy on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.’

I wondered what sort of world Usupov thinks we live in, a place where carving a woman open and taking home the trimmings is considered good work experience.

‘So you can’t tell if she was sexually assaulted?’

‘Well, if he did, he took the scene of the crime away with him, so to speak.’

Usupov gave one of his rare chuckles, a phlegmy snort that rattled in his chest.

‘That’s not what’s interesting; every sex killer from here to the Urals can carve up a woman’s pizda . But look at the way he’s sliced a transverse cut above the edge of the bladder. Beautifully done, he’s laid her open perfectly, with the minimum amount of damage. If your wife was having a baby, this is the man you’d want to do her Caesarean.’

He peered into the gaping wound like a bridegroom watching his wife undress.

‘Beautiful, perfect work of its kind. Although she’d never survive the blood loss from the other wounds, of course,’ he added. ‘You’ll notice that he opened up all of her womb to view, like using a can-opener, so he could peel back the lid and peek inside.’

I tried not to look into the raw mass of gristle, veins and arteries that was once a young woman. I could see the curled foetus lying on its side was that of a boy, knees drawn up to the chest, paper-thin fingers clenched into fists.

‘How long had she been pregnant? How old was the child?’

Usupov looked at me, the lights flashing off his glasses once more.

‘I don’t think you quite understand.’

He waved a latex-gloved hand at the body in the cabinet. I looked away from the wound, from the butchered girl, from the child murdered before being born.

‘Maybe the father of the child did this. Or her husband, if someone else had got her pregnant. We can trace him, once we identify her. Clinics will have records, or a doctor might recognise her.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time.’

‘Mine to waste, Usupov. The White House still pays.’

Usupov merely grunted: everyone knows what he thinks of the government. It was Usupov who had to autopsy the bodies of the protesters gunned down by the riot police in Ala-Too Square during the last revolution. Waving placards and demanding the President’s resignation, the demonstrators stormed the parliament building. It was then that the shooting by both sides started.

I’d been investigating the sudden death of a young man in Tokmok, a few miles east of Bishkek, when I got the call to head back to the city and go to the morgue. I pushed my way through the crowd, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, surrounding the building, weeping, demanding the return of their loved ones, the arrest of the president who’d given the order to open fire. In the lobby, dozens of the dead lay stacked in the random pattern that death brings, bodies ripped apart and shredded by heavy-calibre bullets, the floor slick with puddles of blood. The stink of cordite and dead flesh was sour in my nostrils.

Bent over the body of an elderly man whose shirt was a flowering splash of crimson, Usupov didn’t look up at my arrival.

‘I don’t suppose you’ll be arresting anyone in connection with this, Inspector?’

I said nothing, and my silence hung in the air like an admission of failure.

‘These people didn’t want much,’ he added, and his voice was thick with grief, ‘just a decent meal every once in a while, schools for their children, hospitals for the sick, decent roads. A government that would help them, not rob them of every last som . Too much to hope for, when there are foreign villas to buy, luxury cars to drive and international bank accounts to fill.’

Usupov had the old man’s shirt open by now, and was probing into the fist-sized hole in his chest.

‘Cause of death?’ he said. ‘Hoping for a better tomorrow, don’t you think?’

He didn’t look up as I left the room, unable to disagree with him…

‘A waste of time,’ Usupov repeated, his fingers tapping on the side of the drawer.

I was intrigued. He might not be a man I’d want to share a half-litre and a few zakuski snacks with, but Usupov knows what he’s doing, and he rarely says anything without the science to back it up.

‘If you look closer, you’ll see that there’s no sign of a placenta, no widening of the pelvis, a narrow canal where her uterus was. It all adds up to something most unusual.’

I peered in, as instructed. But all I saw was a swamp and turmoil of butchery and, in the middle of it all, the dead child. I turned away and raised an eyebrow at Usupov.

‘This woman’s never been pregnant,’ he declared. And Usupov is never, ever wrong when he uses that tone of voice.

I stared, as if he’d lined up the pieces of a puzzle and I still couldn’t make them fit. Usupov peeled off his gloves, and meticulously polished his glasses on the hem of his lab coat. There was a splash of dried blood by one of the pockets.

‘This child isn’t hers, Inspector. She wasn’t pregnant. Someone killed her, sliced her open, hollowed her out, and then placed another woman’s foetus there.’

The light was fading, or at least the grey sludge that passes for light in a Bishkek winter, and it was starting to snow again by the time I unlocked the steel outer door to my apartment, and then the wooden inner door behind that. Most apartments here have the same system; when you don’t have much to steal, you guard what you do have with a passion. Anyone who breaks in here is welcome to the old TV with rabbit ears or the Chinese microwave. I couldn’t care less, as long as they leave the box of photos. I put my gun in the small lockbox by the front door, turned the key and retreated into the kitchenette.

I pulled the window open and checked that the half-litre I had left out on the sill was still there. I could have kept it in the freezer of my fridge but there’s something pleasing about the thought of vodka chilled by the elements rather than electricity. Not that I drink any more, not since Chinara died. I fished out a tumbler from the chaos of the sink, rinsed it, poured a good-sized shot. I stared at the glass for a long time, remembering the days when I drank, the reason why I stopped. A sort of penance, I suppose. Then I tipped it down the sink, rinsed the glass once more, took three steps to the bedroom and lay down.

Years of turning up at crime scenes hadn’t made me stamp on the bottle cap; I’d wrestled with the odd nightmare, sure, the occasional double take as someone walked past me on Chui Prospekt who I could swear I’d stood over the week before, shot, stabbed, kicked to death. And there were nights drinking beer in some bar with other detectives, telling war stories, and hazy memories of getting back home. Putting the dead at arm’s length. But I told myself I had to do that to keep my edge, to stay on the side of the angels, one of the good guys, an avenger.