Tom Callaghan - A Killing Winter

Pride meant he didn’t want to tell me. The Yarygin and being bollock-naked meant he would.

‘Gasparian. Khatchig.’

Armenian. That accounted for the furry back. And the attitude. We Kyrgyz don’t hate the Armenians as much as we hate the Uzbeks or the Uighurs or the Kazakhs or the Tatars or the Russians, or, to be honest, anyone who isn’t Kyrgyz and most people who are. But there are a couple of gangs from Yerevan working the heroin routes from Afghanistan into the American military airbase, and our home-grown bad guys don’t care for foreign competition.

‘So what is this? You’re looking for a sweetener?’

He mimed cash with thumb and forefinger, and reached down for his trousers.

‘Empty your pockets. Slowly. Finger and thumb. The other hand. And if anything naughty comes out, you’ve just had your last come.’

He nodded understanding. A wallet thick with som . Car keys: he drove a BMW, judging by the fob. A fancy mobile. And a switchblade with a pale horn handle. His ID said he was telling the truth, at least about his name.

‘Kick the knife over here.’

He did so, and I looked around for something to pick it up with, to avoid smearing any fingerprints. The only cloth near to hand seemed to be Gulbara’s panties. I’m not a fastidious man, but sometimes this job makes impossible demands. I dropped the panty-wrapped knife into my pocket, smiled, and then tapped Gasparian on the knee again. This time, not gently.

He roared, the bellow I’d come to associate with his sex life, and clutched at his knee. He tried to stand, but had to grab at the wall for support. Gulbara sniggered, the sort of laugh you’d expect from a naked woman with a tattoo of a monkey climbing into her pubic hair.

‘You’ll need to go to a hospital with that knee,’ I told him. ‘Should keep you out of trouble for a few hours.’

‘Cunt,’ he muttered, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

I picked up his clothes, walked out into the hallway, and flung them through the open door. He took the hint and limped past me, his knee already starting to swell. He tried the dead-eye stare, which impressed me about as much as his dick did, and waited until he was in the safety of the hallway before he snarled, ‘This isn’t over.’

I smiled politely, shut the doors and bolted the inner one. Someone back in Sverdlovsky would have his record; it wouldn’t be hard to find him if I needed to.

I turned back to Gulbara, who still lay sprawled in the wreckage of the bed.

‘Get dressed.’

‘You’ve got my panties. Going to sniff them when you get home?’ She spoke with a thick country accent; Osh, or maybe Naryn. Come to the big city to make her fortune.

‘I’m sure you’ve got another pair for best. Get dressed so we can talk, or you can come down to the station as you are. It’s cold enough out there to freeze the nipples off a whore. Given your job, I wouldn’t run the risk.’

Once Gulbara had slithered into a red dress short enough to delight a gynaecologist, we went into the sitting room. Shairkul reached into a wall cupboard and brought out a bottle of Kyrgyz brandy and three small mismatched glasses. I nodded and watched her pour three shots. I waited until the two women had downed theirs before I sniffed at mine. Rough, raw, perfect for weather like this, for a case like this. I raised the glass to my lips, pretended to join them, then put it down, untasted.

‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ I began, ‘especially not with the monkey that lives there. Its bite might be poisonous.’

Neither woman smiled. Judging by a couple of track marks in the crook of Gulbara’s left arm, that wasn’t the only monkey she was carrying around with her.

‘You found a dead woman last night. Found her handbag as well. And that’s what I’m here for. Anything else you do outside of that, I’m not interested. Understand?’

Gulbara nodded, and Shairkul refilled the glasses. They drank again. Companionable silence.

‘I had nothing to do with her dying, you understand?’

I waited for her to continue, my eyes never leaving her face.

‘She was dead when I came past. I was heading for the bridge over Ibraimova, looking for a taxi. No business, too cold. And then I saw her.’

Gulbara gave a theatrical shudder at the memory, and held out her glass for another drink. I shook my head at Shairkul; I didn’t want Gulbara pissed before I’d had a chance to hear her story.

‘You saw her.’

Not a question. I nodded my head.

‘I thought at first it might be one of the regular girls. An occupational hazard. But not the way she was dressed. Too smart for a tart. And too pretty.’

Suddenly Gulbara looked like the frightened, vulnerable woman just out of her teens that she was behind the harsh make-up and the cheap nylon dress. She knew there was a killer out there in the dark, maybe waiting for another woman, maybe looking for a prostitute to slice and hurt and scar and maim, looking to turn her into so much cooling meat. Death comes to all of us, and the best we can hope for is that it’s painless and quick. All too often, it’s neither.

‘I could see there was nothing I could do. And too many trees there, too much cover, no one around. He could have been hiding, waiting for the next one. Maybe five minutes earlier and it could have been me.’

She waved her glass again at Shairkul, and this time I let her drink, a single long swallow that left her breathless.

‘So you took the handbag and legged it?’

‘What would you have done?’

‘You didn’t touch the body?’

‘You are joking. I just grabbed the handbag and I was away on my toes. Didn’t even look inside until I was in a taxi.’

‘Any money?’

Gulbara looked at me as if I was a myrki peasant straight up from the village. I sighed.

‘I need to know if she was robbed as well. If it was about money or about something else. So I want to know, right?’

Gulbara muttered something I didn’t catch.

‘How much?’

‘A thousand dollars. New notes. Hundreds.’

‘And where is it?’

She looked away.

‘You fed the krokodil ?’

She said nothing, but glanced down at the tracks on her arm. My only witness a junkie, any hint at motive snug in a dealer’s back pocket, and snow starting to fall again. Christ.

I snapped my fingers.

‘Bag. Now.’

Shairkul reached into the wall cupboard and pulled out a smart shoulder bag, the sort a woman might wear to an exclusive party, drinks in the 191 Bar, a job interview at one of the embassies. To my eyes, it looked expensive, but I’m a man, what do I know?

Chinara would have been able to tell me the label, the date, the price from across the room. Her handbags, her jewellery, even her shoes, still in the wardrobe, waiting for me to find the courage to get rid of them, dispose of her presence. For a second, I could have sworn I could smell the perfume she wore, as if she’d entered the room, was standing behind me. And then I remembered she’d gone.

For ever.

I took the bag from Shairkul and gently put it down on the red rug that was the concrete floor’s only covering. Rich, soft cream leather. Ornate gold metal clasp. A logo saying ‘Prada’. If it had said Pravda , I might have been better informed.

‘A good-quality bag? Expensive?’

The two girls looked aghast at my ignorance.

‘Maybe fifteen hundred dollars. And the real thing too. Not bought here, but abroad, maybe GUM.’

I couldn’t help sighing. GUM is the ornate building that sits on Red Square facing the Kremlin, probably the most expensive cluster of boutiques in the world. Anyone who could afford to buy there was bound to have influence, people who would demand quick results and a head on a platter. And if I couldn’t find a killer, I knew whose head it would be.