Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

I spat to flush the bar’s rancid stink out of my mouth, and started trudging through the snow towards home. But I’d only walked a couple of blocks from the club when I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me, not quite a run, coming up fast.

The Yarygin was already in my hand, safety catch off, as I swung round to face my future.

I was a split second away from aiming and pulling the trigger when I saw that it wasn’t Lubashov or one of his droogs about to deliver a coup de grâce.

‘For fuck’s sake!’

The kind of squeaky voice you hear when a grim middle-aged slag tries to convince you that she’s young and desirable, despite the overwhelming evidence. At least this one was young, but you’d have needed a lot of vodka on board to find her desirable. Skirt just about covering her moneymaker, thick legs turning blue with cold, trowelled make-up and a cleavage of plucked chicken skin. She started to walk towards me, reaching into her handbag.

‘Staying right where you are will do just fine,’ I said, all too aware that I’d been about to blow a teenage prostitute out of her fake leather boots. I holstered the Yarygin and put my hand in my pocket, where she couldn’t see it shake.

‘And you can take your hand out slowly,’ I added. Most of these girls carry razors, and more scars are something I don’t need. Her face revealed annoyance and fear as she took out her cigarettes, tapped one from the pack and waved it at me for a light. I ignored it so, with a melodramatic sigh, she rummaged in her bag for her lighter. Smoke mingled with her breath on the air, making her head disappear into a thick blue fog for a brief second.

‘You don’t remember me?’

As she drew deeply on her cigarette and plumed the smoke upwards, I looked at her. Something about her was familiar, but she could have been a thousand working girls I’ve seen over the years, defiant outside, broken and cowed inside. The same lacklustre hopes beaten out of her by poverty, drugs and the fists of a hundred men.

Her eyes stared back at me, black and unreadable, marbles in the pallor of her face.

‘Shairkul? You remember? You helped me a couple of years back?’

I shrugged.

‘Outside Fire and Ice at closing time? Some bitch tried to stab me, when her punter decided I’d be the better ride. I punched the cow out, and you stopped me doing worse.’

A memory surfaced. I vaguely remembered taking a knife out of some girl’s hand, throwing it in the gutter and telling her to piss off before I took her down the station. I’d given her a few som and bullied a reluctant taxi driver into taking her home. Maybe this was her, but maybe not. Shairkul, meaning ‘joyful’, but there was nothing very joyful about her.

‘You could have arrested me, but you didn’t. So I owe you.’

I stayed silent. Gratitude isn’t something you generally expect from a working girl. Life throws enough shit at them without them having to drop to their knees at the memory of a good deed, or do any favours once they’re there. She might have had something to tell, but I didn’t expect her to volunteer the information.

‘I saw you talking to Vasily. In the bar.’

Now I placed her. One of the two hookers in the corner, getting a punter to rise to the bait.

‘You were asking about the murder up on Ibraimova, weren’t you?’

‘And if I was?’

‘I might be able to help you.’

‘You know who she was?’

‘No.’

‘You know who killed her?’

‘No.’

Shairkul smiled, revealing a wide-gapped row of golden teeth. Business had obviously been good, once upon a time. She knew she had my interest now, and I was waiting for the squeeze.

‘I left that pisshead back there to come and talk to you. That’s got to be worth something.’

I nodded, and her smile got wider. A mistake; a couple of her teeth were missing, and it didn’t add to her charms. She stepped forward and put her hand on my sleeve.

‘It’s fucking cold. Maybe we can go somewhere?’

I removed her hand, and nodded again.

‘I’ve got a spare bed you can have. Down the station. You might have to share with some ninety-kilo bulldyke dreaming of breaking in a sweet little slut like you, but hey, it’s all girls together, right? And in the morning, when you’ve rinsed out the blood, we can have our little chat.’

Her face hardened, and she turned to spit.

‘You’re a bastard, Inspector, I bet you have to pay to fuck your wife. Everyone else does.’

She took a step back at the look on my face, and held up her hands in apology.

‘OK, sorry, start again? I can help you. With the killing? There’s a reward going, maybe? For information? And Vasily doesn’t have to know, right?’

Suddenly I felt old, washed up, as if I’d been listening to the same lies, self-justifications and greed all my life. I nodded my head towards a doorway, to get us off the street. She took a final drag of her cigarette, flicked it away and stumbled after me.

Out of the wind, her cheap perfume burnt my eyes. The top must have come off the bottle.

‘She was cut up, right? I mean, badly cut up? And someone shoved a baby inside her belly?’

‘You’ve got big ears, and someone’s got a big mouth.’

She pouted. This wasn’t going the way she’d planned; grateful cop gives her a handful of notes and a Get Out of Jail card. She fumbled through her bag for another cigarette, found only an empty pack, crumpled it up, dumped it. I offered her one of mine, and she leant forward as I lit hers and mine. True romance. I could almost hear the violins.

‘My friend Gulbara told me a girl had been killed.’

‘And she knew, how?’

I didn’t expect that she’d tell me. Gulbara, if she even existed, wouldn’t be likely to share her informant at the station with anyone. But you have to ask, make sure they don’t think they can get away with anything.

‘I wasn’t sure if I should believe her or not. But then Vasily told us as well. Said not to worry, that we could keep on working, that this guy wasn’t interested in working girls.’

Typical Vasily. As long as the som came in, he wouldn’t give a fuck if his whole stable got slaughtered. Plenty more where they came from.

As if she read my mind, Shairkul took a final, lung-bursting drag from her cigarette, threw it away.

‘He would say that, right?’

I nodded.

‘So what should we do?’

I shrugged again.

‘What did Gulbara say?’

She took a step back, took a fresh look at me.

‘You don’t give a fuck either, do you?’

‘What do you want me to do? Give you money to catch the bus back to your village? Call out the army to give you twenty-four-hour protection? You know how it works.’ I threw her the tough-but-honest-cop stare. ‘You tell me what you know, I find the dickhead, book him in at the no-star hotel, and we all go back to work as normal.’

Shairkul seemed less than reassured by this, and gestured for another cigarette. At this rate, it would be lung cancer that laid her out on Usupov’s slab, long before any crazies got to her.

‘She wasn’t one of us, not a regular working girl. But you already know that, right?’

‘I know what we know. What I want is what you know.’

Even though the street was deserted, Shairkul looked over her shoulder before speaking.

‘She wouldn’t have lasted three hours without a pimp, you know how this town’s carved up.’

I winced at the word, remembering the frozen stare gazing out past the trees towards uncaring stars, the uncoiled tangle of guts, the half-clenched fingers of the foetus.

‘So she was an amateur, that’s what you’re telling me?’