Reginald Hill - There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

It had been very short.

In it he said that it appeared that the lifts in the Gorodok Building had been manufactured in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1914 for the Hotel Imperial in St Petersburg. This building had been damaged in 1943 and the site had been cleared in 1945 under the supervision of M.R.S. Osjanin.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Natasha.

‘You would if you could see the photostat documents accompanying the other report. The full history of the Gorodok Building’s there. Plans, costing; material and machines; purchase, delivery; everything. All authorized and authenticated by the project director, who has since risen to the rank of Controller of Public Works, one Mikhail Osjanin.’

Natasha digested this.

‘You mean Osjanin was on the fiddle?’

‘Possibly,’ said Chislenko.

‘But a couple of lifts … how much would they cost, by the way?’

‘I forget the exact costing, but a lot of roubles,’ said Chislenko. ‘The point is, of course, how much else was there?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How much other material cannibalized from demolition sites and officially written off did Osjanin and his accomplices recycle into the reconstruction programme? And what else has he been up to? A fiddler rarely sticks to one fiddle!’

Natasha studied him earnestly.

‘This is dangerous, isn’t it?’ she said softly.

‘Could be. That’s why I’ve put these reports in separately. By itself the second one is pretty meaningless. I even left the old names in – Chemnitz, St Petersburg, the Hotel Imperial. You could drop it in a filing cabinet and no one would look at it for a hundred years. But set it beside the documents on the Gorodok Building attached to the other …’

‘I see. You make no accusations, draw no conclusions. That’s for someone else.’

She sounded accusing.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘And will conclusions he drawn?’

‘Osjanin’s a youngish man, mid-fifties. Rumour has it he feels ready for even higher things. It all depends whether Oscar Bunin, my MVD Minister, sees him as an ally or a threat. If he’s a threat, then Bunin will almost certainly set Serebrianikov on him.’

‘Otherwise he’ll get away scot-free?’ said Natasha indignantly.

‘Certainly,’ smiled Chislenko. ‘But, at least, giving the Comrade Secretary that has put me in credit enough to dare recommend that poor old Josif Muntjan gets let down lightly.’

She thought about this for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed him.

‘You’re a nice man, Lev Chislenko,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m a policeman.’

‘Yes, you’re that too. I’ve been wondering about that. You shouldn’t be telling me all this, should you? Why are you doing it?’

He took a deep breath.

‘Because I’m in love with you,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve nothing to give except what I am, (which I’m not ashamed of, by the way) and that means telling you things you shouldn’t hear, telling you things you won’t want to hear. It’s called trust, I believe.’

She sat very still, then said, ‘You’re taking a hell of a risk, you know that?’

His face lit up with a kind of delight.

‘Yes. I know that.’

‘Suppose I can’t love you?’

‘I could persecute you.’

‘I could blackmail you.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She leaned forward and kissed him again. He tried to take her in his arms but she drew back.

‘You’re not related to the Chislenko who used to play for Dynamo, are you?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said.

‘Good. I hate football,’ she said leaning towards him once more.

The wireless was still blaring when he woke up in the middle of the night. It was dark and Natasha was warm beside him under the coarse linen sheet. She was awake.

‘Lev,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘Yes.’

‘All that stuff about there being no one for that man to be a ghost of. Because no one had died in the Gorodok Building since it was erected.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s not true now, is it? I mean, if the lift was made as far back as 1914, anything could have happened in it, couldn’t it? And those old-fashioned clothes he was wearing, they would make sense now. Have you thought of that?’

He didn’t tell her, yes, of course I’ve thought of all that , because no one loves a know-it-all policeman, and he desperately wanted this girl to love him. Instead he turned towards her and began kissing her breasts and after a while had the satisfaction of knowing he’d put all thoughts of the strange events in the south lift of the Gorodok Building out of her mind.

Putting it out of his own mind in any permanent sense proved much more difficult.

Every instinct told him that his wisest policy was now to shun the whole affair completely. If Serebrianikov and Bunin decided that nothing should be done about Osjanin, then it would be very silly to let himself be discovered apparently still paddling in these muddied waters. Particularly as his only excuse could be that he was still hunting for a ghost!

What he wanted to do was contact Leningrad again, or better still to go there, but there was no way he could hope to conceal even a simple telephone call, let alone a journey. So he compromised by paying yet another visit to the Records Office.

‘Hello, Comrade Inspector,’ said Karamzin, the clerk, with a simpering smile of welcome. ‘Do we want to rifle my records again?’

Good Lord! thought Chislenko. Can it be that the vain little bastard’s beginning to imagine my frequent visits have got something to do with him !

He said, ‘Is this really a Central records office? I mean, do you have records of other buildings – in Leningrad, say?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the clerk confidently, then modified his certainty to, ‘At least, some of them. As long as it’s post-war, that is.’

‘This would be pre-war,’ said Chislenko.

‘A public building?’

‘A hotel that was taken over by the State, more or less,’ said Chislenko. ‘So in a sense it was a public building.’

‘What year?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Chislenko. ‘It’s the Hotel Imperial, to start with. Then it becomes the L.D. Trotsky Building, and it ends up as the May Day Centre.’

The clerk left the room rolling his eyes as if to say, if all he wants is my conversation, why does he have to invent such bloody inconvenient excuses? He was away for thirty dusty minutes, but his face was triumphant beneath the smudges when he returned.

‘Here’s something,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but at least it shows we’re willing.’

He simpered again.

Chislenko ignored him and studied the musty file. Basically it was a record of maintenance expenses. Once the Imperial became the property of the State, it was State money that was required to replace broken windows, make good storm damage, renovate the heating system. Once again, he blessed the bureaucrats. His practised eye quickly scanned the sheets. There was nothing of interest till he reached 1934.

And there it was, July 1934, a sum of money, and typed alongside it, repair to lift .

‘Thanks,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘My pleasure,’ said the clerk to the policeman’s rapidly retreating back. ‘Entirely, it seems.’

Now one thing remained to do. Again, a telephone call to his MVD colleagues in Leningrad would probably have been the quickest way, but the same objection remained as before. So instead he took a calculated risk and drove down Leningradsky Prospekt till he reached Pravda Street, where the offices of the great newspaper of the same name were situated.