Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

‘I’ll do the cut tomorrow morning,’ Usupov said, making for the door, ‘ten o’clock.’

I nodded, waited until I heard his boots on the landing, began to look for clues. Murder confessions, crumpled notes with dealers’ addresses, mysterious telephone numbers written in cheap lipstick. I’ll grab at any straw, I’m not proud. I was hunting through the pathetic remnants of a life when my phone beeped.

A text: ‘Meet soonest.’ Sent by Mikhail Tynaliev. Minister of State Security. Every meeting I’d ever endured with him had been the start of grief and the very real possibility I’d end up dead.

So I knew I was going to find myself up to my chin in shit.

An hour later, I was in Tynaliev’s house, in the ornate drawing room he uses as his private office when he doesn’t want the ministry grapevine spreading the news. I’d been there before; it got no more enjoyable each time, the ritual always the same.

Waved through a high-tech scanner by sullen guards whose fingers stray worryingly close to the triggers of their Kalashnikovs, and whose eyes beg for the chance to use them.

Sitting for an hour in an overheated antechamber on an ornate gold-painted chair that manages to be both ugly and uncomfortable, before being ushered into the presence.

Then face to face with the most dangerous man in Kyrgyzstan.

Mikhail Tynaliev and I have a history together and it doesn’t make for comforting reading.

I’d found out who murdered his daughter Yekaterina Tynalieva, then stood by and said nothing while Tynaliev had the man butchered like a hog.

I’d tracked down a vicious paedophile killer with high connections, then ignored Tynaliev’s order to let the matter drop ‘in the interests of the state’. Instead, I’d attached a bomb to the killer’s car, blown him to hell.

And most recently, I’d tracked down Tynaliev’s mistress in Dubai, after she’d ‘liberated’ ten million dollars from his secret bank accounts. I recovered most of his money, but not without a lot of blood and death along the way.

All of which meant Tynaliev used me for his dirty work, but didn’t trust me. I knew too many of his secrets. Not a reassuring position to be in.

Tynaliev stared at me, eyes unblinking, intense. A bear of a man, shorter than official photographs suggested, jacket drawn tight over massive shoulders, muscles stretching the cloth out of shape. His hands slept on the desk in front of him, knuckles scarred and brutal. Easy to imagine him interrogating some poor soul in the soundproof basement at Sverdlovsky station; a slap, a punch, a kick, blood lashing across the tiled walls, a broken tooth lying on the stained floor.

The long silence grew more uncomfortable as the seconds dragged by. Just as I was ready to confess to whatever Tynaliev thought I’d done, he jerked a thumb in my direction.

‘Sit.’

I did as I was told. The minister picked up a sheet of paper, read it in silence. My price for having recovered his money from his former mistress had been a demand for reinstatement into the Murder Squad. I wondered if this was confirmation. Of course, Tynaliev being who he was, it might just as easily have been a sentence in Penitentiary One in the hope I’d catch TB or HIV from one of the other prisoners. If I didn’t catch a home-made shiv first.

‘You were at a suspicious death earlier,’ he said, not looking up at me.

‘A young woman. OD. Probably heroin,’ I said, adding ‘Sir,’ to be on the safe side.

‘Suspicious?’ he asked.

I shrugged. I wondered at his interest, but there was nothing concrete to suggest anything more, and with Tynaliev, it’s always better to say as little as possible.

Tynaliev shook his head, dismissing her death as unimportant, just another statistic, and at best a one-paragraph entry on an inner page of Achyk Sayasat . That’s one of the differences between the two of us, and it maybe explains why I never became a politician. As far as the dead are concerned, I believe either they all count or none of them do.

‘You’re off that case,’ Tynaliev announced, putting the sheet of paper down staring at me.

‘So I’m back in Murder Squad?’ I asked. ‘As inspector?’

Tynaliev pursed his lips, stabbing a meaty forefinger onto the paper in front of him. The room was very warm, airless. I could sense panic rising in my stomach, did my best to look expressionless.

‘Not exactly,’ he said.

He pushed the paper towards me, gesturing for me to read it.

The paper was headed ‘PRESS RELEASE’. It went downhill very rapidly after that.

A prominent member of the Bishkek Murder Squad is under investigation, accused of crimes against the state, including murder, corruption, extortion and blackmail. The serious nature of these allegations means the officer has been relieved of all duties and is suspended with immediate effect, without pay. If the allegations are proven to have substance, the officer will be named, brought to trial, and faces severe punishment.

I read the statement, my face a mask to hide the shock and anger boiling up inside me. I didn’t need to ask who the unnamed officer was. I screwed the paper up, tossed it back onto Tynaliev’s desk.

‘This is just bullshit. Sir,’ I said, failing to keep the rage out of my voice. Now it was Tynaliev’s turn to shrug. He smoothed out the sheet of paper, read through it once more, locked it away in a desk drawer, together with my career.

‘Just be glad I didn’t name you,’ Tynaliev said. ‘Yet.’

Tynaliev’s security team were wise to confiscate my Makarov at the scanner, or I’d have been tempted to press the barrel hard against his head, maybe even pull the trigger. But I was already wondering why Tynaliev had decided to break the news to a lowly inspector, rather than hand the task over to a police station chief. As always with the minister, the cards you saw in his hand were never part of the real game.

‘Personally, I know you’re too honest – or too stupid – to get up to this sort of nonsense,’ he continued, a gesture of dismissal underscoring his words. ‘And believe me, I’m not your enemy. Which doesn’t mean you don’t have any.’

I understood the logic behind his words; only a very confident or foolish person would take on the whole state apparatus that stood behind Tynaliev.

‘I’m afraid it gets worse for you, Borubaev,’ he added, pouring a shot of vodka, not offering me one, throwing it back in a single practised move.

‘In a few days, during our investigations, we’ll uncover positive proof you’ve been involved in smuggling heroin, and you took on the case of today’s tragic OD of an innocent young girl to cover up your tracks. And hers, of course.’

Tynaliev smiled at his witticism, poured another shot.

‘You may even have administered the fatal dose yourself, to shut her up,’ he added.

‘So put me up against a wall and shoot me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Is this to do with Natasha Sulonbekova?’

Tynaliev winced at the mention of his former mistress and his disappearing fortune, shook his head.

‘You handled that moderately well, and you’ve kept your mouth shut,’ he said. ‘No, this is something else entirely.’

His smile did nothing to reassure me. Neither did his next words.

‘Of course, you may end up being put up against a wall and shot, but not before enjoying a little torture and mutilation first.’

‘I take it you don’t approve of heroin smuggling, Inspector? Or, in the light of imminent events, should I say Mr Borubaev?’

Tynaliev’s face wore an expression of genuine enquiry and concern. I wondered how long he’d practised in the mirror. I guessed it was a trick question, decided to play it safe.