Tom Callaghan - An Autumn Hunting

She hadn’t managed to pull the syringe out of her inner thigh before the heroin slammed into her nervous system with the mindless ferocity of the snowstorms that race down from the Tien Shan mountains. Her body sprawled across a chaos of unwashed clothes, grease-stained pizza boxes, crushed Baltika beer cans; all the garbage junkies accumulate when nothing else in life matters but cooking up the next shot. Her cheap unbranded jeans were baggy and bunched around her knees, so I could follow the progress of her addiction by the track marks riding up and down her left leg like cigarette burns.

She might have been a pretty girl once, dreaming of true love and the next party, but that was all history now. Not for her the first kiss, summer evenings with friends by Lake Issyk-Kul, the rich scent of cut lilies, the crunch of fresh snow underfoot. Now a different kind of snow had consumed her, buried her under a blizzard that blasted death across Central Asia and on into Russia.

The raw stink of iodine told me at least one person in the squat had been brewing up krokodil . Easy enough to make at home; all you need is codeine, mixed with iodine, red phosphorus from matches, a subtle hint of gasoline, and whatever other poisons you can lay your hands on.

Inject krokodil and your skin is transformed into something green and scaly as infection and gangrene bite. Hence the name. Your flesh dies and rots away, leaving unhealing sores that chew through tissue and muscle down to the bone.

The tracks on the girl’s leg were too distinct to be the toothmarks of the crocodile. More likely to be from smack; perhaps she was an old-fashioned sort of girl, kept her knees together except for the thrust of a hypodermic. I knew Kenesh Usupov would have the answer; Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist has seen it all, sliced it up as well.

In my career as inspector with the Murder Squad, I’ve found enough OD bodies to know ‘victim’ is the wrong word. As far as I’m concerned, injecting poison into yourself is an act of folly at best, and perhaps in the coiled and hidden recesses of the mind, a desire for suicide, a final ending. I prefer to save the ‘victim’ word for people who don’t bring their death upon themselves, people whose unfortunate paths collide and end with someone else’s greed or cruelty or lust. Harsh? Maybe, but you’re not the one clearing up the consequences. I haven’t lost my compassion for the dead, but it’s not a blanket coverage any more.

‘Inspector.’

I turned round as Kenesh Usupov joined me to stare down at the shipwreck of what had once been a human being. I wouldn’t call Usupov a friend – he’s too humourless and dour to imagine going for a drink or a meal with him – but we’ve worked together for a long time, and we respect each other’s skills. I could never spend my days opening up skulls, weighing parcels of meat. On the other hand, the people he encounters at work don’t try to kill him. To each his own.

‘The apartment’s empty, I suppose?’

I nodded. Standard procedure is to have a uniformed ment go through the scene, gun in hand, checking there’s no crazy guy with a hypo brimming with HIV and looking to share. Hygiene and tidiness aren’t the only things an addict gives up on; they don’t hang around to face difficult questions from some disapproving police officer. Compassion for the body in the room leaves by the door and runs down the stairs.

We were in Alamedin, near the railroad tracks, in one of the old Khrushchyovka apartments, the prefabricated concrete blocks that sprang up throughout the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War against Hitler.

Every morning in the summer, you can hear a train trundle dispiritedly on a five-hour trek through Alamedin and the Boom Gorge towards Balykchy on the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, only to make the return trip the same evening. Further east, the lake is beautiful, clear calm water ringed by snow-topped mountains, but Balykchy is a festering shithole you wouldn’t want to visit twice. I sometimes think if you’re Kyrgyz, you can travel – after all, we’ve traditionally been nomads – but you always end up coming back to where you started. I’ve never known if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Kenesh and I crouched down, squatting by the body, my knees protesting as I did so. Just one more sign I’d been doing this too long. This close, I could smell the acrid urine from when her bladder had betrayed her. I felt a sudden wave of pity, guessing how ashamed and humiliated she would have felt with the emptying of her body displayed for the relentless, impersonal gaze of strangers.

Long streaks of damp stained the rough plaster walls, torn linoleum scuffed and scarred, dirt ground into it until any original pattern had become a faint ghost of a memory, the faded photograph of someone long-forgotten. A cheap wooden kitchen chair lay on its side; I guessed the girl had been sitting there when she took the hot shot and dived head first into death.

Usupov tapped my arm, pointed at the girl’s groin. A few dark flecks of dried blood had sprayed across white pants.

‘Significant?’ I asked.

Usupov shrugged.

‘Hard to say. Maybe her period. Not from the syringe; that’s still in place. I’ll know once she’s on the table.’

‘Think this is a suspicious death?’

Usupov turned to me, shrugged. Pale autumn sunlight through the window flared off his glasses, hid his eyes.

‘Unusual, is the word I’d use. Something not quite right.’

I looked back down at the corpse, couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The dark blue stain of lividity where gravity had pulled her blood back towards earth, the swelling and puffiness of pallid skin where old scars and blemishes traced the map of her life. I’d seen it all too many times.

‘Look at the injection sites on her leg,’ Usupov said. ‘All fairly recent. It’s my guess she was right-handed, since the tracks are all in her left leg. Easier to shoot up.’

He reached over, pulled at her arm.

‘This is what’s unusual. No tracks on either arm, not even skin-popping. Most people only start hunting for fresh veins on the legs when the arms give out.’

It was my turn to shrug.

‘So she didn’t want people to know she was using, maybe Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t approve. Maybe she was vain, proud of her soft skin and smooth forearms. It all seems a little thin to me.’

‘I’ll know better at the autopsy,’ Usupov said. ‘You’re welcome to watch. If you can be bothered, that is.’

I stood aside to let the stretcher men go about their work. Below the belt, Chief Forensic Pathologist, I thought. But maybe some truth in it.

The horrible brokenness of death revealed itself in dangling limbs and a head thrown back. As the body was lifted up, I saw the dark smudge of a bruise on the left of her forehead.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Usupov, pointing at the mark.

‘Perhaps when she hit the floor? Her heart needn’t have stopped beating straight away, which would explain why she could have a bruise. But again, I’ll know more when she’s under the knife.’

The body hauled away, I could smell something else in the room; fear and despair, bitter and raw on the tongue, making the eyes water but not with tears. I knew better than to say anything to Usupov; he would have looked at me as if I’d gone mad and started spouting allegiance to Comrade Stalin. Instead, I filed the thought away in the dark recess where I store impressions, hints and dreams.