Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

As we dragged the body into the cover of the bushes, it was the face that interested me, beyond the staring eyes and the rictus of pain.

No doubt about it: I wasn’t looking at a Russian or Kyrgyz hitman. The body at my feet was unmistakably Han Chinese.

We didn’t have time to work out what this new surprise meant. No telling if he was alone, or if one of his colleagues would come in search of him, suspicious of his silence. But I had no idea how we could get away; the last thing we needed was to blunder into a group of armed men hunting us down.

‘With any luck, they’ll think he stumbled when he found the tunnel, fell forward, brained himself. No proof we were here,’ Aliyev said, rising to his feet, holding out a hand to help me up. My knees protested but I knew we had to get moving.

I didn’t mention the patches of crushed grass, the open tunnel, the two deep gashes on the man’s forehead. A crime scene officer would piece the whole thing together in a couple of minutes. There are advantages to being a detective, but I couldn’t see how they would help me right then.

‘You’ve got a car stashed somewhere?’ I asked as we pushed through the bushes.

‘Only one road near here; a simple roadblock would snare us,’ Aliyev answered, and snapped his open hand shut into a fist, to press the point home.

‘So we walk back to Bishkek?’

‘If you haven’t already realised, I always have a backup plan to the backup plan. But no talking until we’re clear. Tread as if you’re not a flatfooted policeman. And keep your gun ready.’

We walked in silence, single file, Aliyev leading the way. He didn’t bother holding the branches back for me so I kept my head down to avoid being lashed across the face. After about twenty minutes pushing our way through the wood, I could hear the sound of running water, getting louder as we approached, until we stood on the banks of a narrow and rapid river, gurgling and dancing past water-smoothed rocks. Dim starlight gave them the look of sleeping creatures, bodies half-submerged in the constant flow.

‘I suppose you’ve got a motorboat moored nearby,’ I said.

‘Too noisy, too easily tracked and that means too easily ambushed,’ Aliyev replied, casting round to get his bearings before scrambling down to the riverbank. ‘And you look like you could use a little exercise.’

He reached beneath a low-lying tree whose branches hung out over the water. A rope trailed from the lowest branch and I watched as Aliyev hauled on the line. After a moment, a package broke the surface of the water, and I helped pull it out. Aliyev stripped off the waterproof cover and laid the contents by the edge of the river.

‘A dinghy,’ he said. ‘I assume you know how to paddle.’

I shrugged. Living in the world’s most landlocked country hasn’t made my countrymen keen mariners, and I was no exception. But I could see the dinghy’s advantages: silent, disposable and untraceable.

‘I’ll learn,’ I said.

Aliyev gave me a dubious look, but he had no option but to take me along. Leave me there and who knew who would find me, kill me and end his chances of finding out what Tynaliev had planned for his takeover.

‘We’ll be here all night inflating that,’ I said.

Aliyev gave me another look, this time of despair at my stupidity.

‘Self-inflating,’ was all he said, tugging at a cord. I watched as the dull synthetic rubber blob transformed into a craft big enough for both of us. We pushed it into the water, and I scrambled into the front as ordered. Aliyev wouldn’t want an ex-cop with a loaded Makarov sitting behind him.

We used the small paddles to push ourselves out into the current; the water was running fast enough to make the paddles necessary only for steering.

‘Is this the Chui?’ I asked, genuinely curious, turning round to stare at the pakhan . In reply, Aliyev put his finger to his lips.

‘Sound carries a long way over water,’ he muttered, and I lapsed back into silence.

For the next three hours, we floated down the river, not using the paddles for fear of attracting attention, unless we had to steer clear of rocks or overhanging trees. The adrenalin which had fired me throughout our escape had been spent, and I ached in every muscle and joint. The soft-throated murmur of the river almost had me drifting away into sleep.

I remembered my first professional encounter with the Ala-Archa, the river that rises in the mountains, fed by glacier and snow melt, then ploughs its way through Bishkek in a wild spring tumult that becomes a dry rocky bed in late summer. A woman’s body had been spotted, wedged between two boulders down where the water was channelled between concrete culverts. As the junior officer, I was the one elected to wade in and tie a recovery rope around her body. I waded in quickly up to my thighs, spring water brutally cold against my skin. My colleagues yelled crude jokes as I took the woman’s naked body in my arms, slipped the rope over her head, past her breasts and around her waist. It was the first corpse I’d ever recovered from a river, and her unthinking embrace filled me with a kind of sorrow I’ve never quite been able to lay aside.

Once she was on dry land, I could inspect the damage caused by her passage down the river. Large slices of skin and flesh filleted and torn away by sharp rocks, bruising from the constant punches of the water as it cascaded down towards its final drowning in the Chui river. Her left eye was missing, gouged out, but her other eye stared up at the sky with a look of faint surprise.

It’s almost impossible to tell how someone has died, or been murdered, if they’ve spent enough time in the water, unless the marks are evident. But the stab wounds in her stomach told their own story. I knew we’d question her husband, her brother, her father, maybe a lover. We’d observe the shock, hear the denials, finally bear witness to a confession. Murder is rarely glamorous or mysterious; usually it’s as mundane as the lives of the people it devours. And to someone like Aliyev, it’s merely part of business. As I suppose it is to me.

The first signs of dawn were beginning to dance upon the water, a smudge of faint light here and here, and it was staring into these that I saw the face below me, submerged and indistinct, deep in the water.

At first I thought it was simply a trick of the reflections on the water’s surface, a false portrait created by the swirling and weaving of the current. But the face grew nearer, a swimmer rising up through the water towards the air, body half-distinct. As I watched, the features grew clearer, sharper, and I was staring at the face of my dead wife, Chinara.

Her hair wove and swam around her face, as if it were alive, as if she were alive, rising to break the surface, the way she used to when we would dive into Lake Issyk-Kul, over and over, until we would clamber out onto the shore, and drink water-chilled vodka, eat fruit, share kisses.

I wanted to stretch out my hand, grasp her wrist, help her scramble into the dinghy, brush the tendrils of wet hair back from her face. But Chinara remained tantalisingly just out of reach, her eyes staring up at me, a smile on her face, the smile that broke my heart every time I remembered it. And just as my delight at seeing her was overwhelmed by the knowledge I was dreaming, her expression changed to one of anger.

She pointed to the back of the dinghy, to where Aliyev sat. Then she pointed her finger at me, mimicking a gun, pretended to fire. A warning or an instruction, I didn’t know which.

Her final smile showed her sorrow at leaving me, her eyes never straying from my face. I watched, helpless, as she sank back and was lost into the dark. And it was then I woke back into a world that no longer held the woman I once loved.