Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

There was no sign of drug use, no needle tracks, no bruising. I could sense Barabanov was anxious for me to be gone, so he could parcel his ex-lover up like joints on a butcher’s slab, send her back to Mother Russia for burial without an autopsy. It was only at the last minute, as I heard the door to the hangar slide open, and a medical team arrived, that I spotted what might be a clue.

The Greek letter ‘alpha’, tattooed on her shoulder, was so small as to be barely noticeable. I didn’t draw attention to it, just stored the information in my head, stood back as the medical team manhandled Marina into a black body bag, placed it on a collapsible gurney and wheeled her towards the exit.

The door clanged behind them, and all that remained of a life was a pool of blood. Barabanov jerked his head at one of the mechanics, who returned with a hose. Within ten minutes, Marina Gurchenko was rinsed away into the gutter, along with any forensic evidence.

Barabanov gestured us towards the door.

‘My aide will escort you to the camp gates. One of your police cars is waiting to take you all back into Bishkek.’

He held the door open for us, but I wasn’t quite finished yet.

‘You spotted nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary happened this afternoon?’

My gut told me he’d got information he didn’t want to pass on. So I held my ground, willing to outstare him, to wait as long as it took, while snow billowed in from the storm outside.

‘The sentries stopped one car on the camp outskirts. A police car. The driver produced his police ID, said it was just a routine inspection, drove away.’

‘And?’

Barabanov stared back at me, cold blue eyes giving nothing away.

‘I was surprised when I saw your name on the gunship manifest, Inspector,’ he said, ‘although your reputation as a hunter of men precedes you.’

He paused for dramatic effect.

‘You see, Inspector, the man my sentries stopped produced genuine police ID, no question of that. The odd thing is, the name on the card was yours.’

As the Colonel said, a uniform was waiting for us at the main gate. Kursan climbed into the front, as if by right. He’d been in a police car before, but this was almost certainly the first time he’d not been handcuffed and chained to the D-ring on the floor. Saltanat and I sat on the back seat, as the driver turned the heat down to merely stifling, then headed towards Bishkek.

For the rest of the journey, I tried to work out how a police ID card with my name on it had ended up in someone else’s hands. For a few thousand som , paid under the counter, it’s easy enough to get false documents, birth and even death certificates, but no one would run the risk of producing fake police papers unless there was big money or a lot of influence behind it. And, of course, it would be all too easy to set me up if I got too close to something – or someone – I wasn’t supposed to suspect. My ID found under another body, carelessly lost in a rage of lust, for example.

I decided that there was nothing I could do apart from report it, and switched on my phone for the first time in hours. For the next ten minutes, I endured a string of messages from the Chief, each one more hysterical than the last. They started off quite mildly with ‘arsehole’ and progressed to ‘stinking fuckhead’ over the course of a few minutes. It didn’t seem like much of a promotion, but at least it showed he cared. I switched off the phone, and decided to surprise him. That way, we were less likely to have a reception committee waiting.

We were only twenty kilometres outside Bishkek, so I didn’t bother trying to sleep. We bounced around quite a lot, what with the potholed road and the ice on what little tarmac there was. I made sure some of my bouncing included colliding with Saltanat. I was wondering if she’d want to retry the experiment of sleeping with me, but she wasn’t giving off any encouraging signs. Then I pictured the hacked and mutilated woman back in the air force base, and felt ashamed of myself. I’d always sworn I’d never get desensitised to death, and I knew the pain of losing Chinara would never leave me. But the others? It was all too easy to see them as evidence of a crime, part of a puzzle to be solved, rather than ordinary people turned into victims against their will. None of us want to die.

I realised that I had no idea where Saltanat lived. Or, indeed, even her patronymic and family name.

‘Where do you want us to drop you?’ I asked, perhaps too casually.

‘Anywhere you see a taxi,’ was her reply, frosty as usual.

‘No problem to take you home,’ I said.

She simply threw me the hard stare, and I gave up. I decided to organise a plain-clothes guy to follow her, the next time we met.

Even though the storm had stopped, with just a few flecks of snow turning up late like drunks at a party, Chui Prospekt was deserted. The lights were still on at the Metro Bar, with a couple of hopeful taxis loitering with intent, hoping to overcharge a foreigner. She tapped our driver on the shoulder, and we pulled to a halt.

‘I’ll call you,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother following me.’

So we followed her taxi down Chui as far as Tynystanov, where it did an abrupt right, in the direction of the Uzbek Embassy. As the tail lights disappeared, I wondered if I’d ever see her again.

‘Some woman, that,’ said Kursan. ‘If I was twenty years younger –’

‘And washed more than once a year, and didn’t hang out with every crook in Bishkek, I’m sure she’d look at you with love in her eyes,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t have to be love,’ Kursan said. ‘More than one way to get a pizda wet,’ and he spat out a throaty laugh.

‘You want to come and see the Chief with me?’ I asked, changing the subject and knowing that Sverdlovsky Station was the last place on earth that Kursan would want to be.

‘Drop me at Ibraimova; I’ll stay at your place,’ he said.

I started to tell him I didn’t have a spare key, then remembered Kursan’s lock-picking skills. I sighed and nodded.

As we pulled up outside my apartment block, Kursan jerked his head as a sign for me to get out with him.

‘I didn’t want to ask when she was with us,’ he said, and his face was serious, his voice almost a whisper, ‘but what was it you noticed about the body?’

I debated about telling him, then decided he knew so much already, a little more wouldn’t be a problem. We walked a few paces so the uniform couldn’t hear us.

‘A tattoo, very small, professionally done. A Greek letter A.’

Kursan sucked air between his teeth.

‘ Spetsnaz . Russian Special Forces.’

I nodded. Spetsnaz are the toughest, fiercest bastards in the whole Russian armed forces. If Marina had been one of them, whoever killed her must have been a stone-cold butcher. Every way I turned, this case got murkier and more dangerous. At the rate things were going, it wouldn’t be long before I was lying next to Chinara up in the mountains. Right then, that didn’t seem like a bad idea.

I got back in the car and yanked the door shut against the cold.

‘I’ll see you when I get back from the station,’ I said.

‘If you get back,’ he said, and laughed again, this time with no warmth in his voice.

‘Just who the fuck are you working for? Is it that Uzbek bitch? Gave you the starry eyes, and a flash of tit? You’re a fucked-up pussy-head!’

The Chief was closer to the truth than he knew, but that didn’t endear him to me. I stood before his fancy landing-strip-size desk, and wondered how much the eagle statue had cost. He was pissed off with me for not declaring Yekaterina’s death sorted, for getting the Russians mixed up in everything, for following a trail of death all over the country. But most of all, he was pissed off at the grief he was getting from the nomenklatura who held his career in their palms.