A Killing Winter (4 page)

‘Let
me put my fucking trousers on!’

This from the fat pig; Gulbara didn’t care who checked out her goods as long as there was a cash purchase. He reached for his clothes, and I shook my head, waved the Yarygin, and he sat back up. I’m not an admirer of the male nude, especially when it’s fat, furry and about thirty kilos overweight. But you never know what people have in their pockets; a four-centimetre scar down my right forearm taught me that the difficult way. Besides, being naked with a gun pointing at you loosens the tongue. Not to mention the bowels.

‘Name?’

‘Who the fuck are you? Don’t you know who I am?’

‘If I did, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’ I said in my most reasonable voice. He was recovering now, and wondering what the play was. I could see him reasoning he’d already be dead, if this was a hit. Maybe he believed he was important enough not to get robbed by some street hood. And I wasn’t working the irate husband badger game with the girls. So just who the fuck was I?

I decided to confuse him a little further.

‘You’re a good citizen, right? Helping this unfortunate young woman back on to the straight and narrow, right?’

He answered by leaning over Gulbara and spitting on to the floor.

I leant forward and gave his kneecap a little tap with the Yarygin. His reflexes were OK, I had to give him that.

‘Dumb arsehole!’

I shook my head and looked disappointed.

‘I’m not dumb, I’m the one with the gun. And as for being an arsehole, well, we’ve all seen yours. So I’ll ask again. Name?’

He remained silent, and my patience was shrinking faster than his prick. We could have gone on playing tough guys all night, but I’d better things to do.

‘Relax, I’m law. Murder Squad. I don’t give a fuck if you get her to give you a blow in the centre of Ala-Too Square. I want to talk to her, not you. Your name, then you can fuck off.’

Pride meant he didn’t want to tell me. The Yarygin and being bollock-naked meant he would.

‘Gasparian. Khatchig.’

Armenian. That accounted for the furry back. And the attitude. We Kyrgyz don’t hate the Armenians as much as we hate the Uzbeks or the Uighurs or the Kazakhs or the Tatars or the Russians, or, to be honest, anyone who isn’t Kyrgyz and most people who are. But there are a couple of gangs from Yerevan working the heroin routes from Afghanistan into the American military airbase, and our home-grown bad guys don’t care for foreign competition.

‘So what is this? You’re looking for a sweetener?’

He mimed cash with thumb and forefinger, and reached down for his trousers.

‘Empty your pockets. Slowly. Finger and thumb. The other hand. And if anything naughty comes out, you’ve just had your last come.’

He nodded understanding. A wallet thick with
som
. Car keys: he drove a BMW, judging by the fob. A fancy mobile. And a switchblade with a pale horn handle. His ID said he was telling the truth, at least about his name.

‘Kick the knife over here.’

He did so, and I looked around for something to pick it up with, to avoid smearing any fingerprints. The only cloth near to hand seemed to be Gulbara’s panties. I’m not a fastidious man, but sometimes this job makes impossible demands. I dropped the panty-wrapped knife into my pocket, smiled, and then tapped Gasparian on the knee again. This time, not gently.

He roared, the bellow I’d come to associate with his sex life, and clutched at his knee. He tried to stand, but had to grab at the wall for support. Gulbara sniggered, the sort of laugh you’d expect from a naked woman with a tattoo of a monkey climbing into her pubic hair.

‘You’ll need to go to a hospital with that knee,’ I told him. ‘Should keep you out of trouble for a few hours.’

‘Cunt,’ he muttered, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

I picked up his clothes, walked out into the hallway, and flung them through the open door. He took the hint and limped past me, his knee already starting to swell. He tried the dead-eye stare, which impressed me about as much as his dick did, and waited until he was in the safety of the hallway before he snarled, ‘This isn’t over.’

I smiled politely, shut the doors and bolted the inner one. Someone back in Sverdlovsky would have his record; it wouldn’t be hard to find him if I needed to.

I turned back to Gulbara, who still lay sprawled in the wreckage of the bed.

‘Get dressed.’

‘You’ve got my panties. Going to sniff them when you get home?’ She spoke with a thick country accent; Osh, or maybe Naryn. Come to the big city to make her fortune.

‘I’m sure you’ve got another pair for best. Get dressed so
we can talk, or you can come down to the station as you are. It’s cold enough out there to freeze the nipples off a whore. Given your job, I wouldn’t run the risk.’

Once Gulbara had slithered into a red dress short enough to delight a gynaecologist, we went into the sitting room. Shairkul reached into a wall cupboard and brought out a bottle of Kyrgyz brandy and three small mismatched glasses. I nodded and watched her pour three shots. I waited until the two women had downed theirs before I sniffed at mine. Rough, raw, perfect for weather like this, for a case like this. I raised the glass to my lips, pretended to join them, then put it down, untasted.

‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ I began, ‘especially not with the monkey that lives there. Its bite might be poisonous.’

Neither woman smiled. Judging by a couple of track marks in the crook of Gulbara’s left arm, that wasn’t the only monkey she was carrying around with her.

‘You found a dead woman last night. Found her handbag as well. And that’s what I’m here for. Anything else you do outside of that, I’m not interested. Understand?’

Gulbara nodded, and Shairkul refilled the glasses. They drank again. Companionable silence.

‘I had nothing to do with her dying, you understand?’

I waited for her to continue, my eyes never leaving her face.

‘She was dead when I came past. I was heading for the bridge over Ibraimova, looking for a taxi. No business, too cold. And then I saw her.’

Gulbara gave a theatrical shudder at the memory, and held out her glass for another drink. I shook my head at Shairkul; I didn’t want Gulbara pissed before I’d had a chance to hear her story.

‘You saw her.’

Not a question. I nodded my head.

‘I thought at first it might be one of the regular girls. An occupational hazard. But not the way she was dressed. Too smart for a tart. And too pretty.’

Suddenly Gulbara looked like the frightened, vulnerable woman just out of her teens that she was behind the harsh make-up and the cheap nylon dress. She knew there was a killer out there in the dark, maybe waiting for another woman, maybe looking for a prostitute to slice and hurt and scar and maim, looking to turn her into so much cooling meat. Death comes to all of us, and the best we can hope for is that it’s painless and quick. All too often, it’s neither.

‘I could see there was nothing I could do. And too many trees there, too much cover, no one around. He could have been hiding, waiting for the next one. Maybe five minutes earlier and it could have been me.’

She waved her glass again at Shairkul, and this time I let her drink, a single long swallow that left her breathless.

‘So you took the handbag and legged it?’

‘What would you have done?’

‘You didn’t touch the body?’

‘You are joking. I just grabbed the handbag and I was away on my toes. Didn’t even look inside until I was in a taxi.’

‘Any money?’

Gulbara looked at me as if I was a
myrki
peasant straight up from the village. I sighed.

‘I need to know if she was robbed as well. If it was about money or about something else. So I want to know, right?’

Gulbara muttered something I didn’t catch.

‘How much?’

‘A thousand dollars. New notes. Hundreds.’

‘And where is it?’

She looked away.

‘You fed the
krokodil
?’

She said nothing, but glanced down at the tracks on her arm. My only witness a junkie, any hint at motive snug in a dealer’s back pocket, and snow starting to fall again. Christ.

I snapped my fingers.

‘Bag. Now.’

Shairkul reached into the wall cupboard and pulled out a smart shoulder bag, the sort a woman might wear to an exclusive party, drinks in the 191 Bar, a job interview at one of the embassies. To my eyes, it looked expensive, but I’m a man, what do I know?

Chinara would have been able to tell me the label, the date, the price from across the room. Her handbags, her jewellery, even her shoes, still in the wardrobe, waiting for me to find the courage to get rid of them, dispose of her presence. For a second, I could have sworn I could smell the perfume she wore, as if she’d entered the room, was standing behind me. And then I remembered she’d gone.

For ever.

I took the bag from Shairkul and gently put it down on the red rug that was the concrete floor’s only covering. Rich, soft cream leather. Ornate gold metal clasp. A logo saying ‘Prada’. If it had said
Pravda
, I might have been better informed.

‘A good-quality bag? Expensive?’

The two girls looked aghast at my ignorance.

‘Maybe fifteen hundred dollars. And the real thing too. Not bought here, but abroad, maybe GUM.’

I couldn’t help sighing. GUM is the ornate building that sits on Red Square facing the Kremlin, probably the most expensive cluster of boutiques in the world. Anyone who
could afford to buy there was bound to have influence, people who would demand quick results and a head on a platter. And if I couldn’t find a killer, I knew whose head it would be.

‘You take anything else besides the money?’

Gulbara shook her head and watched me open the bag. BlackBerry, keys, lipstick, a pair of gold hoop earrings and, tucked into a zipped pocket, the thing I’d hoped to find. An ID card.

The face I found under the trees stared back at me. The same calm, the same detachment. The face lying in a drawer waiting to be claimed.

I read the name.

And realised that I was in a world of shit.

I
was in a patrol car, on my way back to Sverdlovsky Station, the windscreen wipers struggling against the snow with a dull, relentless screech. Pretty much what I expected to hear once I saw the Chief. I’d put in the call before I organised a ride, knowing that he’d been overjoyed at being woken up and asked to meet me at the station. No one could ever mistake a Tatar for a sunny day, but my boss lived in an almost permanent state of rage.

The cop at the wheel swore almost constantly as the car slithered and slid through the snow: at the weather, at the authorities for failing to clear the roads and, under his breath, at me for hauling him halfway across the city. As we passed the memorial to the dead killed in the last revolution, the floral tributes were almost invisible under fresh snowdrifts, just as Chinara’s grave up in the mountains – and the grave someone would dig for the girl under the birch trees – would be hidden. I considered asking the
ment
to stop so I could get a hundred grams of vodka to warm me up. But then we were pulling into the forecourt, waved in by the officer on guard, stamping his feet for warmth, gun slung over his shoulder.

It was no warmer inside the building than it was outside, one more thing that wasn’t going to endear me to the Chief. I made my way up the chipped and cracked concrete steps and along the corridor to his office. I passed Urmat Sariev, one of the old guard, famous for being the clumsiest cop in Bishkek: at least, more prisoners had accidents while in his
care than anyone else’s. We’d never been openly hostile to each other, but Sariev knew I thought he was a shit-sucker. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was pouring it on the heads of everyone else. Being better at politics than policing gave him the inside track on what was going on.

He gave me a gold-toothed grin.

‘It’s the Clever Wolf, come to teach us all how to catch the bad guys!’

I should explain: my given name is Akyl, which means ‘clever’, and my family name contains the word ‘boru’, Kyrgyz for a wolf. So Clever Wolf is the joking name I’ve carried around with me ever since rookie days at the academy. Pretty much a job description, I suppose, if you’re planning to survive in a job where even the people on your side might be enemies.

Sariev smiled again and drew a finger across his throat, so I knew it wasn’t good news. I gave him a wink of confidence that I was far from feeling, and rapped on the wooden door.

The rest of the station may have been a shithole, but no one could have accused my boss of lacking civic pride. He knew that he had the spotless reputation of the police to uphold. That explained the colourful
shyrdak
felt rug on the wall, the polished wooden floor, the car-sized desk with a bronze half-size hunting eagle perched on one edge. Of course, it helped that it was all paid for out of the police budget, probably with a little extra commission in place for him.

As I walked in, the Chief was pouring himself a drink. I noticed that there was only one glass. He threw it back, poured another one.

‘
Zatknis’ na hui!
’

Told to shut the fuck up, before I’d even opened my mouth. Not a good sign. The Chief sat back in his chair and looked
at me disapprovingly with red-rimmed eyes. A big man, a champion wrestler once, running slightly to fat after too much
plov
stew and Kyrgyz-brewed
pivo
. The round moon face of a Tatar, black eyes impassive, unwilling to give anything away. But he was shrewd, a tough bastard and a good cop. He wasn’t a political appointment either, so his tongue wasn’t lodged up any politico’s arse.

He’d seen out both revolutions since independence, even managed to get promotion after the second one. He knew where the bodies were buried, had probably put a few there himself. He was a survivor. But I didn’t know whether I would be, once I told him what I knew.

‘Two o’ fucking clock in the fucking morning, this had better be important. Otherwise, they’re looking for traffic cops up on the Torugart Pass.’

Torugart. Four thousand metres up in the Tien Shan Mountains down in the south, the border pass into China, impassible in the winter, through snow or avalanches or both. The arse end of nowhere, with nothing to do but watch lorries crawl past, laden down with cheap Chinese furniture. With the Chief, it wasn’t an empty threat. It never was with him. He always made sure to get his retaliation in first; it was what made him a force to be reckoned with.

‘Illya Sergeyevich,’ I began, hoping to appease him by using his patronymic, ‘we’ve had some major developments in the Ibraimova case and, since you’re the most senior and experienced officer we have here, I considered it best to keep you informed at all times.’

He grunted, and took a sip of vodka.

‘I have some good news: we’ve managed to make a tentative identification, and I’ll go to the morgue in the morning for further confirmation.’

I poured some water into a glass and raised it in a toast.

‘
Na zdrovia
.’

I wondered how healthy I’d be once the Chief heard what I had to say.

We emptied our glasses and set them down.

‘And the bad news?’

‘As I said, we’ve managed a tentative identification.’

He nodded, impatient. But I wasn’t about to rush into some indiscretion that could land me up in the mountains. And for all I knew, the Chief’s office might be bugged, either with or without his knowledge.

‘After extensive inquiries among various sources, I managed to recover the deceased’s handbag.’

The Chief gestured, impatient, but I picked my words carefully, all too aware of their potential to come back and kick my arse later on. I didn’t want any misunderstandings, misinterpretations. A shit-sucker like Sariev would be all too ready to pour poison in people’s ears, and there are always people ready to listen. I explained about meeting with Vasily, about encountering Shairkul and Gulbara, about retrieving the bag.

‘You want the slapper brought in? A couple of minutes in a cell with Sariev and she’ll be begging to talk. Maybe a turf war between working girls?’

The Chief looked hopeful; low-life deaths don’t make headlines or waves.

‘I think our victim was in a different league. And she wasn’t a hooker – at least, not as far as I know.’

‘And this Gulbara ending up with the bag? That doesn’t set alarm bells ringing?’

I braced myself; now was the time to come clean.

‘I have no reason to think that the handbag was anything
other than an opportunistic theft on her part, unconnected to the murder.’

The Chief looked up, picking up on my words.

‘You’ve established a motive? Inspector.’

Reminding me just how thin was the ice on which I stood. I shook my head and quickly added, ‘But we do know who she is. Was.’

‘Will you for fuck’s sake just tell me?’

‘Yekaterina Mikhailovna Tynalieva.’

I paused, and waited for the news to sink in.

The Chief reached for the bottle and poured another shot, a big one, and without waiting, threw it back. His face was serious, worried.

‘Whore! Why couldn’t the bitch get herself sliced in someone else’s district?’ he snarled.

‘Wouldn’t make any difference. We’re Murder Squad. Ends up on our desk one way or another.’

‘Your desk.’

I shrugged.

‘Get one of the uniforms to drive you. And be discreet. No flashing lights, sirens, any of that crap.’

He looked at me, at the crumpled suit, the wrinkled shirt, the snow-sodden boots.

‘Could you look any less like a cop?’

Personally, I thought that’s exactly what I did look like, but it wasn’t the time to say so.

‘You want me to go home and change?’

My one good suit, unworn since I threw a handful of dirt on to Chinara’s shroud. Appropriate, maybe, for another grieving family, another woman dead before her time.

‘No. Better get it done with. He won’t appreciate you putting on a tie to bring him this shit.’

‘If he wants to know the details? Do I tell him about the cutting, the mutilation? The foetus?’

‘If you had any discretion, I’d say use it. But we’ll get more shit pissing him off by hiding stuff. If he doesn’t ask, he doesn’t need to know. We don’t need to make this
pizdets
any fucking worse.’

I nodded.

The Chief looked slightly more relaxed, knowing the burden was sitting good and square on me. I knew he was already working out how to minimise his exposure to the shit storm.

‘He’s not going to want to wait until morning. Get Usupov to open the morgue.’

He poured another drink, then looked surprised to see me still standing there.

‘Now fuck off. And for fuck’s sake, tread softly.’

I shut the door behind me, and walked back towards the entrance, wondering just how exactly I was going to break the news that his daughter had been murdered to the Minister for State Security.