Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Aydaraliev smiled; he knew he’d played his Get Out of Jail card.

Saltanat nodded at the guards, and they started to lead the old man out of the room. At the door, he paused and turned.

‘Tell me, Inspector, have you ever taken a woman? I mean, really taken her?’

My face must have reflected my disgust, but he carried on.

‘I don’t mean rape her,’ he said, ‘that’s for low life. But to pound into a woman, give it to her like she’s never had it before, over and over, however you want it, until you’ve broken her spirit, until you just have to snap your fingers and she’ll roll over and face the pillow and present herself. The way you tame a dog, or a horse. By breaking the core inside of them to your will. Until they surrender themselves because there’s nothing left of them that isn’t subservient to you.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘Perhaps that’s how it was with… what was your wife’s name? Chinara?’

‘No.’

My answer was flat, deliberately emotionless, but I wanted to kick the brains out of the back of his head. I wanted to see the walls spattered with the filth that lay between his ears, and then I’d stamp on his foul carcass until I’d shattered every bone in that wrinkled old flesh, ripped every sinew apart.

‘Well, if you ever took a woman like that, you’d know what power feels like. Like the best orgasm you could ever have. But better than sex, controlling destiny, the little people, all under your sway.’

I said nothing.

‘You’ve held a gun on a man, Inspector, decided if his life is worth the squeeze of a trigger or not. You’ve sent men to hell with the twitch of a muscle. Maybe that’s how you see power, how you achieve it. Are we so very different?’

I remained silent. The trouble is, I know the feeling of invulnerability that a gun gives, knowing you can make people do what you want simply by being the one with the power to kill. Some detectives never fire their weapon in their entire careers; others, like me, only shoot when they have to. But there are one or two just waiting for the wrong move to unholster and start blasting. They’re the ones you don’t want minding your back.

‘The more power you have, and then you lose it, the more you’ll do to restore it, the more you need terror and confusion.’

Another word and I’d slaughter him with my hands, fuck the consequences.

‘I hope we don’t meet again, devochka , for your sake,’ he said to Saltanat, and then turned his gaze on me.

It was like staring into the heavy-lidded eyes of a crocodile, unblinking, hungry and totally amoral.

‘And you, Inspector? That I look forward to.’

And with that, he adjusted the hang of his jacket, straightened his shoulders, and walked out of the door, his sneer announcing that, once again, he’d won.

We sat without speaking until the front door closed. Silence hung over us like an axe poised to descend.

‘You know he won’t rest until he comes after you?’ I said. ‘And if he doesn’t manage to find you, then the Circle in Tashkent will track you down.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Saltanat replied.

‘He’s going to take you threatening his family and just shrug it off?’

‘Of course not. I know he’s not a man to leave a threat or an insult unavenged. He’d have cut my head off right now, if he’d had the chance.’

‘So why won’t he set his team on you?’

Saltanat consulted her watch.

‘Because in about twenty minutes, he’ll be lying face down in a snowdrift outside the Kulturny. Two taps, one in the back of the head to show he was executed, one in the mouth to say he’d talked.’

She raised an eyebrow, the scar curled like a question mark.

‘No one saw me take him, no one knows I had anything to do with his disappearance.’ She pointed an elegant finger. ‘But his gang will remember he had a meeting this evening. At the specific demand of a Bishkek Murder Squad inspector. Think there’ll be any prizes for guessing who they’ll come looking for?’

She was right; a bullet or a blade or a simple hit and run would be just a matter of time. But there’s one thing she didn’t know. I really didn’t care. I stared at the bare room, the peeling wallpaper, the stained chairs, and I couldn’t imagine a more accurate portrait of my life.

Chinara wasn’t the only one who died that day; I just didn’t stop walking. The weight of death is too great a burden. It had only taken the deaths of five more women for me to discover that.

Yekaterina, Umida, Shairkul, Gulbara, Marina; they were all watching me, just outside my vision, waiting, wondering if I would avenge them. We have an obligation to the dead, a chance at redemption, the price for continuing to live. Six bullets in the Yarygin, one to avenge each of them, and one to spare. And I knew who it was for.

Saltanat surprised me by placing her hand over mine, her touch shockingly warm in the chill of that desolate room.

‘I owe you an apology, Inspector,’ she said, and her voice was, for the first time, hesitant. ‘You understand that I couldn’t know whose side you were on. Everyone can be turned, you know that. For revenge, fear, greed. And for love.’

‘It’s a corrupt world,’ I agreed. ‘Why should I be any different?’

‘I sent Tyulev to find out what you knew, to send you in the wrong direction if I thought you were getting too close to us. I told Lubashov to keep an eye on things. I shouldn’t have relied on a fuckhead like that. He saw Tyulev all secretive and confidential with you, jumped to conclusions, started shooting.’

One mystery solved; I’d thought that I’d been set up by Yekaterina’s murderer, that it might even have been Lubashov, acting under Tyulev’s orders. That still didn’t make me feel any better about killing him.

‘That’s not all,’ Saltanat added. ‘The bullet left in your coat; a warning to dump the case and leave it to us. We didn’t know where you stood in all this, what you’d been ordered to do.’

I felt a quick wave of anger smash down on me, as if a snow-laden branch had suddenly spilt its burden.

‘And my wife’s photo?’

Saltanat winced at the venom in my voice.

‘Safe. Look on the top of your fridge when you get home. It never even left your apartment. I’m not that much of a bitch. But I had to warn you off, to be sure.’

I reached for my phone, and she took hold of my hand.

‘Who are you calling?’

I smiled, but she could see that it didn’t reach my eyes.

‘I’m Murder Squad, remember? If your boys haven’t already killed him, it’s my job to stop them. Face down? If he’s already dead, I want him facing Usupov on the slab.’

‘He killed a lot of people, Inspector, some of them your own. Isn’t Bishkek a better place with him gone?’

‘I’m not an executioner, Saltanat. It’s not for me to say whether he dies or not.’

‘I don’t think the two dead women he had butchered would think that way,’ she replied, pulling her hand away.

Silence flooded the room again.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, getting up and heading for the door.

‘How exactly? With Aydaraliev in the car, getting ready for his trip to the morgue?’

She laughed.

‘What sort of safe house would this be, if there wasn’t more than one escape route? We’ll go to your apartment.’

As she reached the door, she turned.

‘You can make sure your wife’s photograph is still there.’

From a decrepit shed behind the safe house, Saltanat hauled out an elderly Ural motorcycle that looked like a relic of the Great Patriotic War, and probably hadn’t been used since then. Maybe not the quickest getaway vehicle, but I supposed the Uzbek Security Service had as little money as its Kyrgyz equivalent.