William Ryan - The Twelfth Department

“Anything for me, old friend?” Korolev said, entering the study with reluctance. The truth was, having to deal with dead bodies was the thing he enjoyed least about the job. If murders could be committed without producing corpses then he’d be a happier detective.

The burly, silver-haired Ushakov looked up from his examination of the windowsill and nodded toward the corpse.

“A bullet to the back of the head—a big caliber, by the look of it. Possibly a nervous shooter.”

“Why do you say that?” Korolev said, forcing himself to step closer to the body. The dead man was slumped forward onto the papers that covered the desk, white hair spilling over his bent arms, his forehead pushed up against his right hand—the fingers of which still held a pen.

“Well they missed him once. There’s a spare bullet hole in the desktop.”

Korolev walked around the table to look at the professor’s face—bearded, a high forehead, a long nose, and a square jaw. Someone had thought to close Azarov’s eyes but there was a silky fineness to the hair that wasn’t stiff with blood that suggested to him the professor had been blond in his youth—so they’d probably be blue or gray. It looked as if he’d been working on a document of some sort when he’d been shot, but now its pages were caked with blood. A photographer’s lamp had been raised above the corpse and a camera and tripod stood beside it—artificial white light making the motionless body look as though it existed in a different time to the rest of the room, which was true in some ways. He found the gouge in the desk just beside the large black telephone. Another sign of Azarov’s importance—very few people had their own telephone.

“You’re sure it was a miss?” Korolev said, knowing that bullets could take strange meandering routes through a body.

“Seems so.”

“And we’re sure a bullet was the cause of death?” he asked—questions with obvious answers being something Korolev had never shied away from.

“Well, I don’t think it was poison,” Ushakov said, “but Chestnova will tell you for sure.”

“Yes, she’s on her way I’m told.”

Korolev looked at the hole in the back of the professor’s head and cursed under his breath. If it wasn’t the wife or the maid, and Belinsky thought it wasn’t, then this could be a long investigation. And important people getting themselves murdered in important places was never good news for detectives. He’d be working and sleeping and not doing much else until this matter was tidied up. Poor Yuri.

“Captain Korolev?”

He turned to see Belinsky standing in the doorway.

“The maid, Matkina, is waiting in the kitchen.”

“Thanks, Comrade Sergeant. I’ll talk to her straightaway—but if you see Sergeant Slivka, send her up please.”

Galina Matkina, the Azarovs’ maid, was wide-shouldered and round-waisted, and might have spent the morning driving a tractor on a kolkhoz farm, if her sun-reddened face and the white kerchief over her blond hair were anything to go by. She sat on a chair in the kitchen while Korolev leaned against a small table. He was tempted to turn on the light—the moody sky was darkening by the minute—but secrets were sometimes easier told in the shadows.

“Are you the policeman?” she asked in a quiet voice, before he could open his mouth. She seemed to be struggling to regulate her breathing. More nervous than he would have expected.

“I am.”

“I should wait until Comrade Madame Azarova is here. She won’t like that I’m speaking to you without her.”

“Comrade Madame?”

A strange combination of the bourgeois and the Bolshevik. Bourgevik , perhaps.

“It’s what she likes to be called. By me, anyway. She’ll be unhappy if I talk to you when she isn’t here.”

Korolev didn’t have time to argue.

“Let’s start by having a look at your papers, Citizeness Matkina—and your residency permit, while we’re at it. You know residency permits can be revoked by the Militia. Just like that.”

Korolev clicked his fingers. It wasn’t a threat he’d ever carry out, of course, and Korolev felt guilt as the girl’s face lost all its color. He was about to reassure her, when the kopeck dropped and he realized she probably didn’t have a residency permit to be revoked. Not that this was unusual—although he’d have thought the Azarovs would have been able to fix the problem if they’d wanted to.

“Residency permit?” the girl said eventually, and Korolev held up his hand.

“Provided you’re straight with me, we can forget I asked that question. I don’t have time to be chasing round after pretty young girls who don’t have their Moscow papers. Not today anyway.”

Matkina nodded, attempting to smile. Korolev’s hopes for a quick resolution were receding however. A girl like this, with no residency permit, wouldn’t want trouble with the law.

“We’d best start at the beginning—surname, name, patronymic.”

“Matkina, Galina Andreyevna, Comrade Captain.”

She straightened herself as she spoke, as if making an oath.

“There’s no need to be too formal, Galina Andreyevna. You certainly don’t have to stand to attention—next thing you’ll be saluting me or something. That wouldn’t do at all.”

She smiled, a little bit more confident now—there was a flash of white teeth in the gloom.

“Where do you sleep?”

“In here—I’ve a mattress I roll out. It’s comfortable enough.”

“Good for you. How long have you worked here?”

“Here? Since last summer, Comrade Captain. They only moved in then, before that they were in a smaller apartment upstairs—I was with them there as well, but not for long.”

“When did you come to Moscow?”

“November of thirty-five, Comrade Captain. There wasn’t much of a choice, where I was.”

The worst of the famines in the countryside had been in thirty-two and thirty-three, when the push toward collectivization had been at its height, but everyone knew that peasants were still heading for the cities if they could—it was one of the reasons you had to have a residency permit to live in Moscow these days.

“Enough of the ‘Comrade Captain,’” Korolev said. “You can call me Alexei Dmitriyevich; it’s less of a mouthful. Do you smoke?” He took one for himself and extended the packet to the girl, who looked at the door with a hunted expression.

“Have one—my sergeant tells me your mistress is sleeping. Some doctor gave her a sedative. And don’t worry about her smelling anything—there’ll be half a dozen of us puffing away in here by the time we’re done—one more won’t make any difference.”

With a nod of gratitude, the girl helped herself.

“Good girl. So tell me everything that happened in this apartment from, say, six o’clock last night. I mean everything. How many spoons you washed, what you served for supper, how many glasses of tea were drunk and by who. Everything.”

And she did. The professor, it turned out, didn’t like tea—but then Korolev already knew that. He liked coffee himself, but he’d need a few promotions before he could afford to drink as much as the professor had. By the time Matkina had finished, Korolev had a pretty good insight into the domestic life of the Azarovs. The professor, it would seem, worked, ate, slept, and did nothing much else. And his wife wasn’t much different. She was also a doctor, it seemed, but not a surgical one. More of a psychiatrist. Not bad people, it seemed, they treated the maid well enough and better than many others would. They got on well, the Azarovs, in her opinion, although they’d had few social friends—not enough time, it seemed. Interestingly she thought the professor wasn’t much liked in the building.