Alex Dryden - Death in Siberia

But Petrov still crouched by the corpse. He began to run his hand across and around the other areas of the coat and jacket, lapels first. In doing so, he noticed the jacket had been apparently expertly slit to reveal the lining. After checking the lapels, he then traced the sleeves of the jacket, then the shoulders, the front and around the lower edges. All were slit with something very sharp, a razor most likely. He turned his attention to the man’s trousers and ran his hand up and down the legs until he was clutching the man’s genitals through the material. The trousers, too, had been expertly slit, he noted. They were lined with something like silk. All of this was odd too.

Petrov pursed his lips and summed up what he had before him: a foreigner who had arrived the previous afternoon from Norilsk on a return ticket to Krasnoyarsk: whose passport had not been stolen, but whose money and credit cards had been; a bullet hole at point-blank range in the back of the neck, execution-style; and the mysterious slits in the man’s clothing. Whoever had killed Bachman was, it seemed, looking for something expertly concealed, something far more valuable or important than a passport. Had the killer or killers found what they were looking for? Or had they missed whatever it was? Petrov’s second diagnosis, of an opportunistic killing by an addict and a thief, began to fade like the first mafiya one had.

He paused, looked behind him again. Still no one was watching him.

He now noted the professor’s shoes were unlaced. They were very expensive shoes, he guessed. He slipped them off, checking the inside of the socks first, feeling around with his hand. Finding nothing inside the socks, he looked the shoes over carefully, turning them one by one in his hands, scraping off the dirt. They were covered with the street filth, muddied almost beyond recognition as a once fine pair of shoes, in fact. But something caught his eye, nevertheless – and only when he scraped the filth away from the soles with his fingers. One shoe, the left one, had clearly been re-soled. And despite the wear and tear it had undergone on the vile night before – the night of Bachman’s death – the stitching work on the left shoe looked like it was very recent and not particularly expert. A cheap Russian job, by the look of it, not one done by a professional German shoemaker.

Petrov checked down the alley behind him again and, finding the coast clear, slid a knife from the pocket of his uniform and began to cut the tight, thick thread that bound the sole to the inner leather and the shoe itself. It was a difficult task even though the re-soling stitches weren’t particularly good. By the time he’d prised the sole away, from the toe down to the instep, he was sweating, but more from anxiety that he’d be caught interfering with the evidence than from the effort. For this was no longer a job for a humble militsiya operativnik . It was a job for the higher-ups, the spook departments of the law. The MVD. The victim was a foreigner.

Between the two pieces of leather, the sole of which he’d bent back as far as he could, and tightly wrapped in thin, transparent plastic, he found a closely folded wad of paper. Maybe it had been folded six or eight times, he guessed, into a wedge – as many times as it could have been folded, anyway. The wedge would have made it uncomfortable for the man to walk perhaps. But the packet was invisible, even when looking directly at the shoe’s sole, until he had prised the sole away.

Something made Petrov still pause, now in the kneeling position again. Finally his mind cleared. He clutched the folded papers in their plastic protection into the ball of his large fist, unbuttoned his jacket with the other hand, and slipped the wedge of papers into the pocket of his immaculate militsiya jacket, now stained by the dirt on his hand, before buttoning it up again.

He didn’t think about what he was doing. Indeed he had never done such a thing before, tamper with evidence. Perhaps it was some thought of an imminent cover-up that flickered across his mind; he didn’t know, later, and he couldn’t explain it to himself now.

And perhaps the cover-up that followed his wife’s death from a radiation leak had something to do with that. Never again, he thought. If there was one thing you could rely on in Russia’s law enforcement bodies, it was a corrupt disregard for the truth. And if he’d failed with his wife, he wasn’t going to fail Bachman. No cover-ups. Never again.

Now at last he stood, still alone in the alley. He was back to being Lieutenant Petrov again. One last thing he mentally noted; Bachman had no suitcase with him, neither an overnight bag nor a briefcase. Stolen, presumably, like the cash and credit cards. He filed away that fact for later.

Finally he looked down at the victim and thought about his early morning musings at his apartment, about the dead, whose bones littered Siberia. Against the millions – the tens of millions – of unnatural deaths meted out in this vast empty land over the previous decades, what was significant about this one? For, to Alexei Petrov, every death was significant, indeed important and individual. As well as his imperviousness to bribery, that was one other thing that distinguished him from his masters. Everyone was someone. A death in Siberia might, to them, be as insignificant as a snowflake in Siberia – lost, surplus, irrelevant. But not to Petrov.

But now he knew he had to act quickly like militsiya Lieutenant Petrov should do.

That the victim was a foreigner changed everything, he’d known that from the moment he’d seen the man’s foreign passport. This was now a job for others, not for him, not for the ordinary militsiya . He would have to report it immediately to other state organs, the high-ups. The MVD people must be informed without delay or it would be his neck on the block. It was they who would deal with such a murder. And these Ministry of Interior police wouldn’t conscience a wait of any time at all before they were handed the job of dealing with it.

ANNA RESNIKOV STOOD in the shuffling line of the unemployed that snaked along the quays of Krasnoyarsk’s riverside docks. It was 2 June, three days after her arrival in the city. In the cold air at six in the morning she waited – sullenly, in imitation of the others – to be at the head of the line where the hiring office was taking on workers for the lumber mills downriver in Igarka.

But in her mind she was troubled, unusually, uncharacteristically so. And it wasn’t the prospect of going through the next stage of her mission – the hiring for Igarka’s lumber mills – that was worrying her. It was her own conduct at the border four nights before. She went back in her mind over the previous three days – and that particular moment at the border – with a mixture of surprise, almost shock, but most of all with a fiercely analytical self-criticism.

She’d made it to the city on schedule and so the mission was on track – that much was true, certainly. But her own reactions as she’d crossed the border and had heard the arming of the automatic weapon were deeply out of character, way outside her normal, instinctive ruthlessness in the face of impending danger. That was what was bothering her now as she stood in the dejected line, as it had done ever since the incident itself. It was a needling anxiety that hadn’t gone away.

When she’d heard the gun and the sound of the ammunition clip ratcheting into place, she’d frozen. Exactly as she should have done, her training inch perfect. Then she’d rolled away from any risk of immediate gunfire in her direction and had ducked down further behind the rock she was using as cover. So far so good. It was then that she’d heard the voice.