Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

The days seemed to hurtle by; no sooner was it light outside than the sun was falling out of the sky. But the nights, they seemed endless, as if the same implacable force that had sown the tumours deep in her breast was determined to drag out the agony for as long as she could still gasp and scream when the morphine wore off.

Her hair had started to grow back, in some sick fucking parody of recovery, but the flesh was drawing back from the bones of her face, morphing into a shrunken head wearing a wig, eyes still glittering against skin worn sallow and smooth with exhaustion.

All I could do was hold her hand, smile when she surfaced from wherever the drugs had taken her, whisper to her over and over again that I loved her, that I’d never forget her, that I wished that it was me instead of her sliding towards the dark. The words became a tattoo on my tongue and I knew that, once she was gone, ‘love’ was a word I would never use again.

I would think of her on the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, beyond the holiday towns like Bosteri, where we’d find some rocky spot, and clamber down to the shore to swim in its glass-clear water. In the darkest parts of the night, I would picture her, slipping away from my embrace, down deep under the surface, hair spread out around her, astonished eyes fixed on mine as she sank out of sight.

In one of her rare moments of lucidity, just a couple of days before she died, she repeated something she’d said to me over and over as we got past the initial diagnosis, the operations, the drugs, always hopeful of success.

‘Only two things matter; the way you live your life, and the manner in which you leave it.’

I kept telling myself about her bravery, her stoicism, the way she never complained, even when the pain bit deep or when she saw the scar where her breast had been. And that just reminded me of my own self-pity, my own concerns about my future. She lived her life well, if for too short a time. And death stood in the corner of the room, ready to devour her.

She died just after sunrise, ten days after going into hospital for the last time. There were no final words, no parting glance, just the winding down of a machine worn beyond repair. I don’t believe she knew I was there.

I drew the sheet over her face, found the duty nurse to tell her that it was finished, then walked home through the bright sunlight that burnt off the snow, finally facing the terror of being alone.

I was woken up by a toe digging into my ribs. Somehow I’d managed to sleep through most of the flight and, judging by the look on Kursan’s face, it hadn’t been something I’d regret missing. I grunted and then snarled as another kick jabbed at me. The vividness of dreaming about Chinara was still with me, and I was reluctant to let go of anything that brought her back to me, however temporarily.

‘We’re fifteen minutes from Bishkek. The Russian airbase,’ Saltanat told me.

‘Why are we landing there?’ I said, struggling to sit up.

From the look on her face, it was another stupid question.

‘Who knows what sort of landing committee is waiting at the international airport?’ she said. ‘Who they might want to arrest?’

I nodded, although I still had no idea who had killed Gulbara or, indeed, any of the other women. In fact, my only murder suspect was crouched down facing me, checking her speed loader was prepared.

‘There’s one more reason,’ she added, replacing her gun and buttoning up her coat.

My ears were ready to snap off with the cold, and I reached for my ushanka .

‘There’s been another murder, a bad one, over at Kant. The airbase there is the obvious place to land.’

I considered this for a moment. That explained the earlier call en route to the airport. Saltanat clearly had the sort of connections that reached right to the top. Yet another reason to be wary of her.

‘We’re still in Kyrgyzstan,’ I said. ‘You have no jurisdiction here. Shit, I don’t even know if I have any more. You’ll have to drop me off at the crime scene, and then you and Kursan disappear.’

‘That won’t be necessary. We’re not going to Kyrgyzstan.’

I looked at her, puzzled, then over at Kursan, who simply shrugged his shoulders.

‘The victim is Russian. And she was killed on the base. Russian diplomatic territory. So you’ve got no more right to investigate a murder there than I have.’

The krokodil gave a final lurch and bounced as we touched down. I fastened up my coat, checked the Yarygin was secure on my hip, and wondered – again – in what shit I’d found myself. Then the doors were flung open, and the full blast of a Kyrgyz winter descended upon us.

It wasn’t snowing, but a bone-shattering wind hurtled down off the mountains and along the flat expanse of the runway. An open-topped military jeep was waiting for us, silhouetted against the landing lights. As we stumbled out of the gunship, headlights flared and the jeep raced towards us. A stony-faced driver in military garb sat behind the wheel and, in the front passenger seat, a Spetsnaz Special Forces soldier, dressed in black and with a woollen balaclava concealing his face, cradled a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle lying ready across his lap. Once we were aboard, the jeep zigzagged across the tarmac and screeched to a halt outside a low-slung, drab and windowless building. As we clambered down, we looked like prisoners under guard. And perhaps we were.

The Spetsnaz pointed with his rifle towards a metal entrance door, and the three of us headed towards it to get out of the wind’s howl. Inside, the noise dropped to a slightly more bearable shriek. We were inside a hangar, with half a dozen assault helicopters lined up. There was a stink of aviation fuel and machine oil in the air, a sharp smell that made my eyes water and burnt the back of my throat. But I wasn’t surprised to find that a richer, familiar odour lay like an unsubtle perfume beneath that. My old friends: blood, raw meat and shit.

The woman’s body lay face down in front of the sliding hangar door, as if she’d been trying to burrow underneath it in an attempt to escape. The corpse had been carefully arranged after death; I could tell that much, even as we walked over towards it. Her knees had been tucked under her stomach, pushing her buttocks up into the air. She was naked from the waist down, and I saw that she’d been sliced open from vagina to anus, as if her killer swung an axe with the kind of power that splits wood for a winter fire. One quick blow, blade raised high, from someone who knows what they’re doing. A pool of blood mixed with cement dust from the concrete floor spewed out of her and down past her feet.

I reached for my cigarettes, remembered how much inflammable stuff there was all around me, and put them back in my pocket. The memory of the sheep we had slaughtered at Chinara’s commemoration flashed through my mind.

We stood around the body, like medical students watching a difficult birth, until the door slammed open and a Russian officer marched in. I knew he was a colonel, from the triple stars on each shoulder, and the look on his face told me he was a tough bastard as well. Kyrgyzstan may be a better posting than Chechnya, but the Russians know we have long memories for decades of humiliation, and there are plenty of Kyrgyz who welcome any opportunity for a little retrospective discussion in a dark alleyway.

He walked over to us, his polished shoes echoing off the concrete floor.

‘Barabanov,’ he stated. ‘Which one of you is the Kyrgyz investigator?’

From his accent, he was from the Urals, maybe Ufa, far enough from Moscow to know we did things very differently here. Saltanat jerked her head towards me. Barabanov extended his hand. After a second’s hesitation, I took it.