The Outcast (6 page)

“Who fetched you?”

“Batdorj. He's one of the volunteers. A bit more experienced than some of them.”

“Did he actually find the body?” Batdorj was being interviewed by Batzorig, and was not one of the two young men who had so far laid claim to this distinction.

“He didn't say so. There was a group of them down there. Once one of them opened the carpet, they'd have all seen it pretty much simultaneously, I imagine.” She paused. “I can't say I reacted very calmly myself, even though I'd already been told that something was wrong.”

Doripalam glanced up at her. That was part of it, he thought, part of the reason she was reacting like this. She was disappointed with—ashamed of—her own reaction to finding the body, as if she had exposed some unacceptable weakness.

“Anyone would have been shocked,” he said. “Even in this job, it never gets any easier.” He hesitated. “Can you tell me what you saw? I mean, we can wait till later—”

“It's not difficult now,” she said briskly, “but I can't imagine I can add anything to what others have told you.”

He shrugged. “You never know. You might have seen something that the others didn't.”

“I know. You've told me often enough: the need to be rigorous. Attention to detail.”

He smiled. “I'm glad you were paying attention.”

She glanced across at the uniformed officer, her smile unwavering. “I hang on your every word, darling. So let me think it through. Batdorj came to find me.”

“You were upstairs?”

She nodded, and he thought he detected an unfamiliar flush of embarrassment. “I was outside. Having a cigarette, actually.” For a second, she had the air of a schoolgirl caught out by a stern teacher. Then she laughed and the image was instantly dispelled. “Bloody typical, really. First time in the day I grab five minutes off, and they find a dead body.”

“Did he tell you what they'd found?”

“No. I think they were all a bit shocked. Didn't quite believe it. Batdorj just told me I needed to come. I assumed it was another breakage.”

Doripalam had heard plenty about breakages over the past few weeks, along with Solongo's broader litany of complaints about the incompetence of those charged with transporting, delivering and displaying the exhibits. He still couldn't quite understand why she had allowed herself to get caught up in all this: the anniversary exhibition—the centerpiece of the summer's celebrations of the founding of the Mongol empire. A pretty big deal, and somehow Solongo, with undeniable ability but limited experience, had found herself in charge of it after the museum director, a world-renowned expert in Mongolian history, had suffered some kind of minor nervous breakdown and had departed on indefinite sick leave, only weeks before the exhibition was due to open. “And, knowing what I know now,” she had added, “I can't say I'm surprised he did.”

There had been no time to spare so they couldn't re-advertise the job or take any formal steps to find a replacement so they'd turned to Solongo. Or, more accurately, Doripalam thought, she
had realised how desperate they were and had offered her services. She was a trustee of the museum, and had been involved in various exhibitions. She had some experience in organising public events after leaving university. But she had never been involved in anything remotely like this.

As soon as she'd taken over, she realised that her predecessor had had no capacity for organising or managing an event of this magnitude. Solongo's challenge, in the absence of any other willing volunteers, was simply to ensure that the exhibition actually happened. Which, when she'd taken over, had been far from a foregone conclusion.

Doripalam knew that it was the challenge that had attracted her. She was an extremely capable woman, who had felt wasted hobnobbing with the great and the good, and she had desperately wanted to prove that she could do something more than that.

“There are exhibits coming in from all over the world?” Doripalam said, mainly for the benefit of the note-taker. He had heard all about this too many times already. “How are the materials delivered?”

“There are specialist transport companies—people who are supposedly expert in dealing with this kind of material, though you wouldn't always believe it when you see what they do. Most of the specialist stuff is transported like that—a complete nightmare in terms of insurance and so on.”

“And this carpet—that would just have been a standard delivery?”

“I presume so. A whole stack of background stuff turned up this morning: two or three deliveries. As always, it wasn't clear who'd actually ordered what. I have an overview, but there are specialist curators who are looking after specific aspects of the exhibition. They have their own budgets to hire any background materials they need—stands, specific lighting—”

“So you wouldn't be involved in those kinds of ordering?”

“Not usually. So long as they were in budget and weren't ordering anything out of the ordinary.”

“And that might include carpets?”

She frowned. “I wouldn't see a carpet as part of the standard requirements. I suppose I can envisage how it might be used but I'd expect it to be cleared with me first. I'm not even sure where it would come from—most of our stuff is organised through a small number of specialist suppliers.”

“Have you found out who ordered it?”

“I've not really had an opportunity to check properly. But there are records of all the orders placed—I can get the details for you. And there are itemised records of all deliveries down in the loading area.”

“I'll be surprised if we find anything. What about the group downstairs? Did any of them see how the carpet was delivered?”

“Well, you're no doubt interviewing them all yourselves,” she said, pointedly, “but nobody seemed very clear. There'd been several deliveries and everyone assumed it had arrived with one of them, but nobody knew which. I don't think anyone noticed it for a while. It's even possible it came the day before.”

“I think if the body had been there for more than a few hours, it would have been hard not to notice it,” Doripalam said. “Especially in this heat.”

“I bow to your expertise,” she said. “As always.”

Doripalam smiled faintly, but ignored the bait. “Anyway, we'll check the records properly, and we'll contact the transport companies who've delivered in the last couple of days. I take it there's no CCTV in the loading area?”

“No. There probably ought to be. We've done some improvements to the security—the insurance companies insisted for some of the pieces in the exhibition—but it's not exactly state of the art.”

“What about the body itself? Did anything strike you about that?”

“Other than it being dead, you mean? That was quite enough for me.” She paused, as though wrestling with some idea. “No, not really. I mean, it was wrapped in the carpet—though ‘wrapped' is probably an exaggeration. It was positioned just inside the carpet, barely covered over.”

“So somebody wanted it to be found?”

“Rather than waiting for the summer heat to do its work? Yes, I assume so. It was bound to be discovered as soon as anyone touched the carpet.”

“And what about the body itself?” He knew Solongo well enough to recognise that there was something on her mind.

“I don't know. Nothing really. I didn't really look that closely. I—well, I guess I panicked a little bit.” She closed her eyes, as if conjuring the scene up in her mind. “Anything else? Well, I don't think he was Mongolian, but you probably know that.”

Doripalam shrugged, reluctant to give out any more information than he had to, even to Solongo. “We're still waiting for the pathologist for a definitive view,” he said. “But he doesn't look Mongolian.”

“And there was bruising on the face,” she said. “A lot of bruising. As though he'd been beaten or kicked.” She paused. “That's what—” she stopped again, as if unsure how to continue.

“What?” Doripalam could hear the scratch of the uniformed officer's pen across his pad.

“It's probably nothing,” she said. “It's what comes of being overwhelmed by the Mongol empire twenty-four hours a day.”

“What is?”

“Well,” she paused again, and then plunged on, “It's just that the carpet, the bruising, it reminded me of a story about Hulagu.”

“Hulagu?” Doripalam struggled to recall his schoolboy history. “Genghis Khan's grandson?”

She smiled. “Well done. Yes, Genghis's grandson. He led the siege of Baghdad in 1258. They eventually captured and killed the caliph of the city.”

The story had begun to come back to Doripalam—one of those memorable historical tales that, in his school days, he had never quite managed to position in its authentic context. He knew it had supposedly happened but he had never been quite clear when or why. “But they knew that it was against Mongolian ethics to spill a king's blood on the ground,” he interrupted.

She nodded, smiling, as if her husband were a slow student who had managed, against the odds, to come up with the correct answer. “Exactly,” she said. “So they wrapped him in a carpet and trampled him to death.”

Doripalam stared at her. “You're not suggesting that—”

She shrugged. “I'm not suggesting anything. It's probably just the first symptom of my own impending nervous breakdown. I'm living with this stuff day and night at the moment, so these stories just pop into my head. But even so.”

“Go on,” Doripalam said. It sounded pretty bizarre to him, but the positioning of the body in the carpet was strange enough. And he knew that it never paid to underestimate Solongo's judgement.

She shook her head. “I don't know. It's just that the capture of Baghdad was one of the final stages in our war against the Muslims. Our genocide of the Muslims, some have called it. Ethnic cleansing. A clash of civilisations. Anyway, it just seemed to me that—well, it all has a certain contemporary resonance, don't you think?”

An hour later, Doripalam met with Batzorig to compare notes. He had arranged for one of the uniformed team to drive Solongo home, saying that he would follow her as soon as he could. She had given him a look that suggested that the promise sounded as hollow to her as it did to him.

The two men worked painstakingly through the interview transcripts, but the information remained unhelpfully thin. Most of the volunteers had visited the loading area during the earlier part of the day, but no one could remember who had delivered the carpet. One of the young women interviewed by Batzorig had been sure that she had seen the carpet being off-loaded from a delivery truck during the early part of the morning.

“Which truck?” he had asked. “Do you remember which company?”

She had shrugged. No, she hadn't registered the name of the company. Was it one of the usual companies, or an unfamiliar name? She didn't know. So perhaps that meant it was an un-familiar name. Or perhaps it had just been too familiar.

“Could you describe the men who unloaded it?” Batzorig's hopes were fading now.

Not really. They had been Mongolian, she thought. Or Asian. At least, one of them had been. Probably average height. Normal build. Dark hair. Dressed in overalls. Or, at any rate, she was sure they were wearing the kind of clothes that the delivery drivers usually wore.

“But it was definitely early this morning that you saw them?”

Definitely. Unless it had been yesterday afternoon. But then they'd have noticed the carpet earlier, wouldn't they? So it must have been this morning. Assuming, that is, that it really was the carpet that she'd seen being off-loaded. Now she thought about it, she couldn't be absolutely sure.

It was always like this. It was one of the standard grumbles within the team—just how hopeless most witnesses turned out to be. Even when an incident had occurred right in front of their noses, they generally managed to misremember or misinterpret it. In circumstances like this, with witnesses struggling to remember apparently mundane events, the chances of extracting any reliable data were minimal.

Resorting to more definitive sources of information, Batzorig had checked the formal documents relating to the ordering and delivery of the museum's goods. There was no record of the carpet being ordered, and none of the specialist curators had any knowledge of how or why it might have been requested. There had been five recorded deliveries that day, but none of the delivery notes mentioned the carpet. They were in the process of checking with the relevant delivery companies, but Doripalam held out few hopes of any success. It was quite possible that there had been a further unrecorded delivery.

All in all, they were little further forward. They sat in the relatively luxurious office belonging to the absent director, and leafed morosely through the pages of notes. Artefacts of the Mongolian empire surrounded them on all sides, and an enormous print of the familiar face of Genghis stared down from behind Doripalam's head.

“An awful lot of nothing,” Doripalam said, tossing the wedge of papers on to the desk. “So do you have any theories?”

“Nothing,” Batozrig said. “We don't know who the victim is, and I can't begin to imagine why the body would have been dumped here of all places. It's not likely to be internecine warfare between archaeologists, I imagine.”

Doripalam smiled indulgently at the half-hearted attempt at a joke. “Maybe it's just random; the body had to be dumped somewhere, so why not here?”

“Because it would have been risky,” Batzorig pointed out. “I mean, much more risky than just dumping it in some waste ground, or outside the city somewhere.”

Doripalam nodded. “So why here? What significance could this place have?”

Batzorig looked up. “What do you think about your wife's idea? About Hulagu, I mean.” He had noted the comment in the transcript of the interview, though Doripalam had not drawn attention to it.