A Killing Winter Read online

  Most wounds I see are haphazard, tentative, a prod here, a nick there, taking several terrified attempts before they finally kill. Or they’re driven by ferocity, a hatred boiled up out of cheap vodka, kids who never stop crying, a wife who long ago stopped caring. The cuts are random, ripping and slicing, the blade or bottle or axe hacking away, the work of amateurs, of people who woke up that morning never expecting to change their life or steal another’s. This one was different. Determined, accurate, precise.

  Usupov once told me that the most practical way to wield a scalpel in an autopsy is to imagine you’re drawing a razor blade through soft balsa wood. The skin peels back slightly, opening up so you can slice through the meat, the fat and the muscle, down to the bone beneath.

  ‘You’ll notice, of course, that the initial wound was inflicted with a single cut. No hesitation. Someone knew what they were doing, before they got stuck in and started hacking about.’

  ‘So I should consider you a suspect, Kenesh?’

  Usupov looked affronted at my tone. I’ve never known whether he thinks death is no laughing matter or he just doesn’t have a sense of humour.

  ‘I’d have made a better job of removing the uterus,’ he said, parting the two raw slices of her pudendum with his thumbs as if peeling an orange for dessert. ‘Not bad, you understand, but you need practice for this sort of thing. Medical school, I would imagine, a gynaecologist perhaps; you wouldn’t get the skills needed to perform a hysterectomy on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse.’

  I wondered what sort of world Usupov thinks we live in, a place where carving a woman open and taking home the trimmings is considered good work experience.

  ‘So you can’t tell if she was sexually assaulted?’

  ‘Well, if he did, he took the scene of the crime away with him, so to speak.’

  Usupov gave one of his rare chuckles, a phlegmy snort that rattled in his chest.

  ‘That’s not what’s interesting; every sex killer from here to the Urals can carve up a woman’s pizda. But look at the way he’s sliced a transverse cut above the edge of the bladder. Beautifully done, he’s laid her open perfectly, with the minimum amount of damage. If your wife was having a baby, this is the man you’d want to do her Caesarean.’

  He peered into the gaping wound like a bridegroom watching his wife undress.

  ‘Beautiful, perfect work of its kind. Although she’d never survive the blood loss from the other wounds, of course,’ he added. ‘You’ll notice that he opened up all of her womb to view, like using a can-opener, so he could peel back the lid and peek inside.’

  I tried not to look into the raw mass of gristle, veins and arteries that was once a young woman. I could see the curled foetus lying on its side was that of a boy, knees drawn up to the chest, paper-thin fingers clenched into fists.

  ‘How long had she been pregnant? How old was the child?’

  Usupov looked at me, the lights flashing off his glasses once more.

  ‘I don’t think you quite understand.’

  He waved a latex-gloved hand at the body in the cabinet. I looked away from the wound, from the butchered girl, from the child murdered before being born.

  ‘Maybe the father of the child did this. Or her husband, if someone else had got her pregnant. We can trace him, once we identify her. Clinics will have records, or a doctor might recognise her.’

  ‘You’ll be wasting your time.’

  ‘Mine to waste, Usupov. The White House still pays.’

  Usupov merely grunted: everyone knows what he thinks of the government. It was Usupov who had to autopsy the bodies of the protesters gunned down by the riot police in Ala-Too Square during the last revolution. Waving placards and demanding the President’s resignation, the demonstrators stormed the parliament building. It was then that the shooting by both sides started.

  I’d been investigating the sudden death of a young man in Tokmok, a few miles east of Bishkek, when I got the call to head back to the city and go to the morgue. I pushed my way through the crowd, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, surrounding the building, weeping, demanding the return of their loved ones, the arrest of the president who’d given the order to open fire. In the lobby, dozens of the dead lay stacked in the random pattern that death brings, bodies ripped apart and shredded by heavy-calibre bullets, the floor slick with puddles of blood. The stink of cordite and dead flesh was sour in my nostrils.

  Bent over the body of an elderly man whose shirt was a flowering splash of crimson, Usupov didn’t look up at my arrival.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be arresting anyone in connection with this, Inspector?’

  I said nothing, and my silence hung in the air like an admission of failure.

  ‘These people didn’t want much,’ he added, and his voice was thick with grief, ‘just a decent meal every once in a while, schools for their children, hospitals for the sick, decent roads. A government that would help them, not rob them of every last som. Too much to hope for, when there are foreign villas to buy, luxury cars to drive and international bank accounts to fill.’

  Usupov had the old man’s shirt open by now, and was probing into the fist-sized hole in his chest.

  ‘Cause of death?’ he said. ‘Hoping for a better tomorrow, don’t you think?’

  He didn’t look up as I left the room, unable to disagree with him . . .

  *

  ‘A waste of time,’ Usupov repeated, his fingers tapping on the side of the drawer.

  I was intrigued. He might not be a man I’d want to share a half-litre and a few zakuski snacks with, but Usupov knows what he’s doing, and he rarely says anything without the science to back it up.

  ‘If you look closer, you’ll see that there’s no sign of a placenta, no widening of the pelvis, a narrow canal where her uterus was. It all adds up to something most unusual.’

  I peered in, as instructed. But all I saw was a swamp and turmoil of butchery and, in the middle of it all, the dead child. I turned away and raised an eyebrow at Usupov.

  ‘This woman’s never been pregnant,’ he declared. And Usupov is never, ever wrong when he uses that tone of voice.

  I stared, as if he’d lined up the pieces of a puzzle and I still couldn’t make them fit. Usupov peeled off his gloves, and meticulously polished his glasses on the hem of his lab coat. There was a splash of dried blood by one of the pockets.

  ‘This child isn’t hers, Inspector. She wasn’t pregnant. Someone killed her, sliced her open, hollowed her out, and then placed another woman’s foetus there.’

  Chapter 3

  The light was fading, or at least the grey sludge that passes for light in a Bishkek winter, and it was starting to snow again by the time I unlocked the steel outer door to my apartment, and then the wooden inner door behind that. Most apartments here have the same system; when you don’t have much to steal, you guard what you do have with a passion. Anyone who breaks in here is welcome to the old TV with rabbit ears or the Chinese microwave. I couldn’t care less, as long as they leave the box of photos. I put my gun in the small lockbox by the front door, turned the key and retreated into the kitchenette.

  I pulled the window open and checked that the half-litre I had left out on the sill was still there. I could have kept it in the freezer of my fridge but there’s something pleasing about the thought of vodka chilled by the elements rather than electricity. Not that I drink any more, not since Chinara died. I fished out a tumbler from the chaos of the sink, rinsed it, poured a good-sized shot. I stared at the glass for a long time, remembering the days when I drank, the reason why I stopped. A sort of penance, I suppose. Then I tipped it down the sink, rinsed the glass once more, took three steps to the bedroom and lay down.

  Years of turning up at crime scenes hadn’t made me stamp on the bottle cap; I’d wrestled with the odd nightmare, sure, the occasional double take as someone walked past me on Chui Prospekt who I could swear I’d stood over the week before, shot, stabbed, kicked to death. And there
were nights drinking beer in some bar with other detectives, telling war stories, and hazy memories of getting back home. Putting the dead at arm’s length. But I told myself I had to do that to keep my edge, to stay on the side of the angels, one of the good guys, an avenger.

  Until the day Chinara came back from the hospital.

  I knew it was bad from the way she thrust a glass of vodka into my hand before I could sit down, wouldn’t look at me, stared out of the window at the play area below. The rusted slide and climbing frames had been embedded in concrete, but any metal parts that could be stripped had long since disappeared. It looked like some ancient skeleton half unearthed and left to bleach. But the children still found a way to play there – tag or hide and seek – living in the moment, not worrying about crime or where their next meal would come from.

  When she finally spoke, it was almost a whisper, so I had to strain to hear.

  ‘They say it’s a growth. In my right breast. Cancer.’

  The vodka seared the back of my throat; I felt anger, confusion and finally fear. Years of visiting apartments at all hours, saying the facts that no one wanted to hear, watching the reactions of others to unexpected death: none of it had prepared me for when death picked the locks and tiptoed into my home.

  ‘They must be wrong. We’ll get a second opinion. The X-rays must have been mislabelled, it happens all the time . . . they must be wrong.’

  Chinara shook her head, and the curtain of long black hair folded back on itself like a crow’s wing. She still didn’t look at me, but continued to stare out over the ravaged playground. I wanted to hug her, shake her, anything to make this all go away.

  ‘But what if they’re not?’

  Her tone was almost resigned, even worried that I might blame her for being sick.

  ‘They’re wrong, I’m sure. You’ve never even smoked. We ought to go to Moscow, see specialists. I’ll ask about emergency leave tomorrow.’

  ‘And how would we pay them? On what you earn? With what we’ve saved?’

  I didn’t speak. I couldn’t catch my breath; my heart jerked and kicked in my chest like a terrified animal. I could call in favours from all over town, from other cops, from politicians I’d helped out of a jam, even mafia I’d dealt with. But there was no negotiating with the third person who had just joined us in the room.

  ‘I saw the X-rays. The tumours. A lot of them. The doctor said he’d stopped counting.’

  The sunlight in the room was very bright, so strong my eyes watered. I could hear the children in the park calling out to each other, shrieking with laughter, and I wanted to open the window and yell at them to be quiet. Because my world was collapsing in on itself, because I was afraid, because it seemed so unfair that anyone in the world should be happy.

  ‘They want to operate this week. Remove what they can.’

  I sat down beside her, my arm around her shoulders. I tried to turn her face towards me, but she stiffened, and looked away.

  ‘You’re going to be OK, it happens to a lot of women . . .’

  I heard my voice tail away. Somehow, I couldn’t conjure up the same air of reassurance that I’d used so many times before scared, shocked, devastated faces.

  ‘He’ll turn up safe and sound when he’s hungry.’

  ‘He’s in the operating theatre now.’

  ‘We’ll find whoever did this.’

  And sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn’t.

  I set my glass down carefully, as if the slightest noise might set off some terrible explosion, and hugged Chinara from behind. Her hands came up at once to cover her breasts, as if to protect them from my grasp, or to prevent me catching some awful contagion. Strange what goes through the mind at such a time. All I could think of was that, a week from now, there would be nothing there for me to hold and caress.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know, it’s all right. It’ll be fine.’

  The words we use to reassure ourselves that it’s not yet time to join the long procession, not our turn to fall off the conveyor belt and into the darkness.

  I moved my hands up to her shoulders. I could tell by the way they trembled that she was silently crying.

  The rest of the evening was a blur, and then a blank. Glass after glass, tears, self-hatred, empty reassurances. Passing out, the half-full glass spilling out on to the rug. A role model for being supportive, there when Chinara most needed me . . .

  *

  I locked the memories back into their cupboard, shut my eyes and focused on the dead woman lying in the snow under the trees. And on the dead child stowed away inside her. I’m not overly sentimental about children. Chinara had had an abortion not long after we got married, when we were still living out at Alamedin, in a decaying cement slab of an apartment block, the kind of place where I’d spent most of my career kicking in doors, gun in hand. We’re not ready for this, she’d said, career first, then family, there’ll be time later. But there wasn’t.

  I don’t bang a drum about a foetus having a soul, but I don’t believe in contraception by abortion either, the way a lot of people do. If my job is about anything, it’s about protecting the vulnerable from the predators, the ones who circle around the herd, waiting for a stray to be separated before they pounce. And I can’t imagine anything more vulnerable than an unborn child.

  Maybe I’m a fool to take on responsibility for people I never knew in life, and who reveal their secrets only in death: the wardrobe full of shoplifted clothes; the hidden stash of porn, straight or gay; the empty vodka bottles stashed under the bed. I’ve found them all. Sometimes I tell the relatives, more often I take their weaknesses away with me, burying them in files that gather dust in the Sverdlovsky basement. That’s if the death isn’t suspicious, of course; any hint that it is, and all bets are off. You can’t shame the dead with their past, but you can make damn sure that the living don’t join them.

  *

  I opened my eyes, stared up at the ceiling. No chance of sleep, and I’d work to do. I pulled myself to my feet, looked at myself in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe door. A face as rumpled and creased as my clothes. One that’s won a few fights in its time, but started none of them. Stocky, not tall, black hair cut close to my scalp, black eyes staring out from under thick eyebrows. You can see a hint of my mother’s Tatar genes in my cheekbones, higher and more slanted than the average moon-faced Kyrgyz. My grandfather, her father, was Uighur, and I’ve inherited my flat, impassive stare from him.

  ‘Don’t show your character,’ my mother used to say, whenever I got cross or unhappy. ‘Don’t reveal any emotion or weakness, keep it to yourself, lock everyone else out. What they don’t know can’t hurt you.’

  She’d watched, not a hint of any feeling on her face, as they carried her father’s body and, years later, that of my father, out of the three-room apartment we called home. Not a tear, not a clue that she was feeling anything. None of my colleagues, even the ones who prided themselves on their powers of ‘interrogation’, could have got my mother to talk if she’d decided to stay silent.

  For weeks after Chinara died, I could smell her perfume, her shampoo, her neck, on the pillow next to mine. I’d lie there telling myself she’d just gone to the bathroom, that she was away for the weekend visiting her brother, making one of her endless cups of chai. And sometimes it would work and I’d drop off to sleep, my arm reaching over in the night to seek a warmth that wasn’t there.

  But then, in the morning, a split second of happiness before it hit me like a speeding, out-of-control car. Dead.

  Dead.

  I stared out of the window. The rusted climbing frame was invisible in the darkness, but I knew it was there. Just as I knew Chinara lay under a mound of earth, in the grave her brothers laboured over for hours, smashing the frozen soil to make her bed.

  Chapter 4

  Unable to sleep, I decided that anything was preferable to a night of memories and silence. My work doesn’t keep office hours, so I locked the
door and headed out into the dark.

  The far end of Chui Prospekt was deserted as I crossed the road and headed towards the Kulturny Bar. It was after midnight, no one around, my boots crunching on newly fallen snow. That part of town, snow’s pretty much the only virginal thing you’ll find. All the trees on the side of Panfilov Park have had their trunks whitewashed, so they seemed to float in mid-air, as if being lowered into place by an invisible crane. A Ferris wheel flickered through the mist, like the memory of a long-past spring.

  I’d stopped off at the Metro Bar and watched some drab local girls playing pool, their arses stuck up in the air in case an off-duty Marine from the US base happened to wander in. That got old fast, so I decided to walk back to Ibraimova by way of the Kulturny.

  The name, in case you don’t know, is Russian for ‘culture’. But kulturny has a much wider significance than art, music and literature, important though they are. It’s a way of behaving, an attitude to life and other people, of graciousness and appreciation of the finer things in life. If you can quote Pushkin, hum Rachmaninoff and drink your chai from delicate porcelain cups, then you probably count yourself as kulturny.

  Of course, Russians love a paradox, particularly the cosmic sort, which reassures them that they alone are the butt of some universal joke. How else could they have convinced themselves for eighty years that they were privileged and superior to the West, as they stood in line for hours to buy bread or milk or shoes, or whatever was at the sharp end of the queue? Which is why they also recognise – and appreciate – antikulturny, low life at its most uncompromising.

  The Kulturny Bar is one of Bishkek’s best jokes, and one of its best-kept secrets. No sign, no welcoming neon, just a battered steel door, scarred and scuffed from years of being attacked with boots, spade handles and, on one memorable occasion, a petrol bomb. Nothing as elaborate as CCTV to screen would-be drinkers, just a Judas hole and the knowledge that the bouncer inside is probably drunk, violent and armed.