Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

He nodded at my raised eyebrow.

‘Yes, she was a virgin. I’ve not had one of those on my table for a long while,’ and Usupov even smiled at his own joke.

The news instantly threw my speculations into the same tray where clumps and gobbets of discarded flesh were piling up. Not a working girl, either on the street or in a massage parlour. Not married, probably not even dating. That surprised me; she was pretty enough to have been bride-stolen, spotted by some randy pimply young bastard, grabbed off the street and taken to his mother’s house for approval and an enforced marriage. That suggested a certain social status. Not every father can be with the apple of his eye twenty-four hours a day, or employ a bodyguard to keep her safe. The case was starting to look ominous, with possible headlines and consequences, none of them good. And my continued involvement wasn’t going to make Tynaliev any more of a fan.

I let the thought fester at the back of my brain, tried another tack.

‘Any clues to her identity?’ I asked, the way they do in all the TV cop shows.

‘Apart from the unique ten-carat diamond earrings and the black pearl tongue stud, no,’ Usupov said, and I even stared at the body for a few seconds, then looked at Usupov. Humour has never been Usupov’s thing, and I wondered if he’d acquired a lookalike comedian from somewhere, sent him along in his place.

‘A couple of things might interest you though,’ he said. ‘For a start, the blood stains on her clothing.’

Usupov might have been discovering humour late in life, but he was still too prim to utter the word ‘pants’.

‘Her blood group and the stains are not the same,’ he said. ‘She was blood type O, and the droplets are A Rhesus positive. No way they could match.’

At least I now knew the girl probably hadn’t been alone at the time of her death. But A Rhesus positive blood isn’t rare, and I didn’t know how her pants became soiled.

‘It’s not much of a start,’ I grunted.

‘A couple of other things,’ Usupov said. ‘One of them I’ve never encountered before.’

‘Go on.’

‘She didn’t die from the usual heroin, cut to hell and back with baby laxative and brick dust.’

‘Pure?’

‘Pure all right, but it wasn’t heroin or krokodil .’

I looked at Usupov. I didn’t have time to play cat and mouse, and my face told him not to delay his surprise information.

‘Ever heard of carfentanil, Inspector?’

I shook my head. Obviously a pharmaceutical of some sort, and not the sort that relieves headaches or toothache.

‘It’s a synthetic opioid, maybe ten thousand times stronger than commercial morphine. Originally created as a general anaesthetic for elephants.’

‘And people take something that strong?’

Usupov looked down at the butcher’s slab between us.

‘As you can see.’

I shook my head, as ever amazed at the things people will do to themselves.

‘I take it you don’t need a lot of this carfentanil to win a place on your table.’

‘A dose roughly the size of a grain of salt, that’s all. Not something I’ve seen before; our addicts tend to be traditionalists.’

Usupov paused, reached into the pocket of his white coat, pulled out a small, crumpled piece of paper, handed it to me.

‘Hidden in the lining of her bra,’ he said. ‘The left cup, if that makes any difference. I wouldn’t know, you’re the detective.’

I smoothed out the paper, began to read.

I’ve read a few suicide notes in my time, most of them written by men, to justify their final irrevocable departure. I guess most women lead such a barren, dismal existence they don’t need to spell out the life-ending reasons obvious to everyone. As with most things in life, women just get on with it.

In the same way that suicide is the most personal act one can ever take, so each note is different, in tone, in style, in length. Bleak despairing accounts of a life that’s finally run out of hope. Page upon page of hastily scrawled accusations. Explanations of the conscious decision to end the pain of terminal illness. Acts of sorrow, of revenge, carried out in moments of anger, drunkenness, heartbreak. But I’d never read a poem written by a suicide before. The handwriting was elegant, calm, not the desperate end-of-life scribble I’d seen so many times before. All the desperation was locked into the words.

‘What do you think? A suicide note?’ Usupov asked, behind his imperturbable manner as bewildered by this unexpected poem as I was.

‘Well, I’m no critic, but she’s not the next Anna Akhmatova,’ I said, trying to collect my thoughts and wondering quite what a ‘reckless might-have-been’ was. ‘Maybe she got one rejection slip too many.’

I read the poem again; it made as little sense the second time. When my wife Chinara was alive, she devoured book after book of poetry: Blok, Esenin, Pasternak, even Yevtushenko. She would have decoded the dead woman’s poem, stripped it of its hidden meanings in seconds, the way I could field-strip my Yarygin in the dark. But Chinara was in a hilltop grave overlooking a valley and the mountains beyond that defend us from China, and I was alone, left with my memories of kisses still sweet but fading, fading.

‘Maybe our victim didn’t write this. We’ll look very stupid if it turns out to be a famous poem in all the anthologies.’

‘You think that’s likely?’

I considered, shook my head. Perhaps because the poem was handwritten, but I sensed it had some significance for the dead woman lying in pieces in front of me, that it provided a clue to her life and death. Sometimes you let your instincts guide you in the absence of any evidence.

I was about to fold the paper and put it away in my wallet, decided to photograph it first. The poem might have been why the woman ended up with her skin being kissed by Usupov’s scalpel. And if that was the case, perhaps there would be others for whom the poem was more of a threat than a memorial. My wallet would be the first place a heavy with fists like smoked hams would look; what were the odds he’d also check my phone?

‘I’ll send you my report,’ Usupov said.

I shook my head, gave a lopsided grin.

‘Hadn’t you heard? The grapevine must be getting slow in its old age. I’ve been taken off the case, suspended, and in all likelihood about to go on trial.’

Usupov stared at me: we’d worked together a lot over the years. Though he knew I would sometimes cut corners when it suited me or the case I was working, he knew I was relatively straight. I gave a rueful nod, headed towards the door and the clean air outside. I planned on polluting it with a couple of cigarettes while I worked out exactly what I was going to do next.

‘Someone from Unexplained Deaths will be in touch. Murder Squad aren’t going to touch this, not without more evidence.’

I pushed the door, the metal cold in my hand.

‘One more thing, Kenesh – the heartfelt verse? No need to put it in the report, eh? We don’t want to start a wave of copycat lyric suicidal poems, do we?’

With that, I left the stink of blood, bowels and brains behind me, along with the tatters and scraps of a once-pretty girl who’d slipped away from life sixty years too soon.

It’s a long walk back from the morgue to my apartment on Ibraimova over on the east side of the city, even longer with the route I chose. But the day was still cool before the last of the summer’s heat swept over us, and I needed the exercise. I do some of my least misguided thinking when I’m plodding along broken pavements, avoiding potholes, wondering why my feet hurt so much.