Brian Freemantle: Red Star Rising

Charlie Muffin decided it was a toss-up between the British embassy’s third secretary or the Russian Foreign Ministry official who’d be the first to throw up or simply faint. Or messily do both, not necessarily in any order. Charlie didn’t feel that good himself. It had been a busy, largely sleepless forty-eight hours since his emergency London assigning, and he’d never liked mortuaries anyway. The unease wasn’t helped by a mortuary assistant four autopsy tables away, munching a meat-overflowing sandwich. The grayness of the sandwich filling matched the color of the surrounding corpses, including that of the man around whom they were grouped.

From the size of the entry wound in the base of the skull, Charlie calculated the bullet was from a Russian-manufactured 9mm Makarov, its tip cut into a dum-dum cross to flatten on initial impact in order to take away on exit the entire face, including both jawbones. The fingertips on the right hand had individually been burned away, either by acid or heat. The pathologist, a fat, dough-faced man who hadn’t been introduced by name, declared the amputation of the left arm to have been a surgical operation, carried out several years earlier. “But not particularly well,” he added, professionally critical. “A hurried job.”

“It’s obviously a gangland execution,” announced the only Russian whose name Charlie knew so far. Sergei Romanovich Pavel had been identified as a senior investigator from Moscow’s Organized Crime Bureau.

Charlie looked around the group, waiting for the question. When no one asked he said, “Why’s it obvious?”

“It’s a trademark killing, the way they always do it. Bullet in the back of the head, after the torture punishment for whatever he did wrong,” lectured Pavel. “You are. . ?”

“London-based embassy security,” said Charlie, wondering which of the men facing him across the metal slab was from the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or FSB, which replaced the internal directorate of the former KGB. The presence of the internal intelligence agency was inevitable after the finding of a murdered man in the garden of the British embassy; Charlie guessed it to be the thin, balding man holding back from any part in the stilted discussion.

The bespectacled, sparse-haired Pavel smiled, patronizingly. “There is, regrettably, a lot of organized crime in the city. We’ve come to recognize their methodology.”

“He was very obviously tortured,” endorsed the pudgy pathologist, pointing toward the murdered man’s clothes bundled into a see-through plastic sack. “The jacket and shirt are clotted with blood. The bullet would have smashed most of the teeth, making an identification difficult from dental records. But I’d guess most of the teeth were pulled out while he was still alive, to cause that degree of blood loss. Probably a lot more was done to him, as well. They usually take the eyes out. .” He went back to the body. “See the ligature bruising on the wrist, as well as his ankles and across the chest? That’s where he would have thrashed in agony against whatever they restrained him with. .”

It was the Russian Foreign Ministry man whose stomach erupted. The man managed to reach a deep-basined sink before being violently and repeatedly sick, groaning as he retched. Jeremy Dawkins, the embassy diplomat, looked determinedly away, his lips tightly clamped.

Charlie said: “Didn’t you tell us at the beginning that all the labels and makers’ marks have been removed from the clothes?”

“That’s why they’re bagged up. They’re clearly Russian and I thought they’d be needed for forensic examination.”

Turning back to Pavel, Charlie said, “Is that another gangland trademark? Removing all manufacturers’ details from the clothing, as well as taking away the face and burning off the finger ends to prevent any identification?”

“They don’t usually do that,” conceded the Russian detective.

Going back to the medical examiner, Charlie said, “How do you think the fingertips were destroyed?”

“Forced over a flame or a hot plate,” suggested the man. “Acid, possibly.”

“Are any of the fingers broken?” persisted Charlie.

The pathologist frowned, needing to go back to his notes. “No, they weren’t.”

“So, we’ve got a body bruised by his binding from the thrashing agony of what was being done to him, but without the fingers being broken where he tried to keep his hand away from a flame or hot plate?” said Charlie. “Which would, by the way, have burned the torturers trying to hold the fingers over the heat.”

“Yes,” allowed the doctor.

“I don’t think his fingers were held over anything hot,” argued Charlie. “I think the tips were burned off by an acidlike agent; that’s why the wrist is so marked, more deeply than anywhere else.”

“Are you going to tell us the point of this cross-examination?” demanded Pavel.

“Looks to me as if a very determined effort was made to conceal who the man was,” said Charlie.

“Which we will do our utmost to discover,” promised the man whom Charlie guessed to be from the FSB.

“The body was found in the grounds of the British embassy,” reminded Charlie. “Technically, the embassy and the grounds in which it is built is British, not Russian territory. This is a murder committed on British soil.”

“I don’t think we need to become distracted by diplomatic technicalities,” broke in Dawkins.

“But if we are being technical, I am not entirely satisfied that the murder was committed on British soil,” challenged the pathologist. “From my preliminary examination at the murder scene, I’d say the body was dumped in the grounds after the man was shot: there wasn’t sufficient blood or physical debris around him. And if he were killed elsewhere it is a Russian investigation.”

“Surely, until it actually becomes an investigation, it should be a joint operation?” pressed Charlie.

The ashen-faced ministry official came back into the group. He said, “I’m sorry. . I’ve never been in a place like this before.” To Charlie he said, “Every cooperation will be extended. It’s a very unpleasant business. Your country’s need to be involved is most regrettable.”