A Killing Winter

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Quercus

This edition first published in 2015 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2015 by Tom Callaghan

The moral right of Tom Callaghan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook ISBN 978 1 78429 018 4
Print ISBN 978 1 84866 975 8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Born in the North of England, Tom Callaghan was educated at the University of York and Vassar College, New York. An inveterate traveller, he divides his time between London, Prague, Dubai and Bishkek.

A Killing Winter
is the first novel in a series featuring Inspector Akyl Borubaev. It will be followed by
A Spring Betrayal
.

To find out more, visit
www.tomcallaghanwriter.com
or
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
.

For Sara

Fresh
blood is especially vivid against snow. Even on a moonless, starless night like tonight, when it spills thick and dark, like oil leaking from the rusting sump of an abandoned Moskvitch. But oil doesn’t steam. Oil doesn’t spatter red against white, until it trails back to a body half hidden under silver birches. And oil doesn’t dribble from the lips of a wound already turning stiff and blue with cold.

The threat of dawn snow hangs in the sky like ash. A few stray flakes already shroud the woman’s upturned face, a scattering of lace like a bride’s veil across her forehead. Unless a drunk stumbling home from a bar stops for an urgent piss and spots her, a few hours will transform her into yet another snow drift, unnoticed, skirted around, anonymous until the spring thaw. Only when a single boot-clad foot or a mottled hand signposts itself out of grimy snow will people wonder why no one heard anything . . .

*

‘
Privyet
, Inspector Borubaev, how are you?’

‘Cold, what do you think?’

I waved away the proffered pack, noting the swathe of butts at the uniform’s feet, the stink of cheap tobacco rancid on the raw night air. Typical uniform, high-peaked green cap and no brains inside. I watched as he lit a fresh Classic from the stub of his last one, debated tearing him a new arsehole for contaminating the crime scene. But this is Kyrgyzstan. The forensic lab of the Sverdlovsky District Police is a
cupboard with an assortment of cracked test tubes, some pre-independence medical textbooks and a box of out-of-date litmus paper. We’re still waiting for the electron microscope.

I’d put it off long enough. Time to justify the fistful of
som
they pay me each month. A battered ambulance would turn up sooner or later, to ferry the body down to the morgue. No hurry; it would be a damn sight warmer there than outside.

We were up on Ibraimova Street, just down from the Blonder Pub, on the unlit birch-lined path above the carriageway, where the
moorzilki
, the cheapest railway-station whores, hang out in the summer, by the footbridge. Dumpy, surly women, big-bellied and chain-smoking, swigging cans of Baltika beer, dressed to depress in shapeless T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms, easy down for instant access, easy up for a quick escape. No business ladies here now, though, not at twenty below and more snow coming.

Not a good place to die, if there is such a thing.

I told the uniform to keep behind me and followed the droplets and smears of blood towards the body. They reminded me of the black cherry juice you get on ice-cream cones in Panfilov Park, rich and appetising. I turned up my collar against the wind, but nothing keeps a Kyrgyz winter out. My feet felt like they belonged to someone else, but I consoled myself that at least the body wouldn’t stink. Not until Usupov sliced her up on the table. Or rather, sliced her up some more.

‘It’s a homicide, Inspector, right? It’s murder?’

The uniform seemed almost eager; maybe this is what he joined up for, not for pocketing on-the-spot traffic fines to pay for his breakfast. Whether he would want breakfast after this was another matter.

‘Could be a nasty shaving cut. Maybe running with scissors.’

‘You think?’

He nodded, impressed at the wisdom of the big-city detective. Typical southern peasant, what we call a
myrki
, who should never have been let out of his village, a danger to himself.

A couple of steps further and the cherry juice started to join up into bigger puddles and splashes until it became a frozen river that welled up out of a small white hillock. The body.

‘Keep back,’ I said, unnecessarily. He’d already seen the body and, by the smell, left last night’s mutton stew at the scene of the crime.

‘This your spew?’

Better not to assume. Maybe we’ve got a weak-stomached murderer on our hands. Maybe he’d wiped his mouth using a piece of paper with his phone number scribbled on it. Maybe the lab could get a blood group. Maybe.

‘
Da
. I’m sorry.’

‘Your first? Don’t worry, we all do, our first time. You’ll get used to it.’

But you don’t.

I pushed back the memory of the old man, his one-room apartment turned into a slaughterhouse, gutted by his nephew in a vodka-fuelled row over God knows what, and focused on the present, on the ice-blue eyes glazed over with snow, staring up at the final mystery.

Ignoring the cold, I peeled off my gloves, and brushed away the snow covering her cheeks and nose. Gently, the way I used to brush Chinara’s hair away from her sleeping face, towards the end, once the morphine took away the worst of
the pain. Tenderness is the least we owe the dead; we give them so little beforehand.

Not a girl, a woman, maybe late twenties, thirty at a pinch. Dyed blonde hair, professional, not a home job, a thin line of black roots showing. Slavic high cheekbones, good teeth, no gold. A long coat, wool, well cut, a cashmere scarf around her shoulders. No handbag, but that didn’t surprise me. Kyrgyzstan’s a poor country; no one’s going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And it wasn’t as if she’d need her mobile where she’d gone, right? So not a
moorzilka
, then. If she was a business lady, she was a long way from the 191 Bar in the Hyatt Regency when she died.

There were no marks on her face, no look of terror or surprise, just that frozen stare gazing up at the sky. Snow spilt away to the ground as I pulled back the wings of her coat.

A white, high-necked blouse, ripped open. A delicate lace bra, sliced apart at the front, revealing small breasts, nipples shrunken and indigo with cold. Still no wound, but that only made it worse. It was like undressing a shop-window dummy, except you can’t mistake the feel of flesh, even when it’s dead.

Slim waist, leather belt with a metal designer buckle. And the skirt, pulled up to her thighs. Dark-grey material, from what little I could see of the original colour. But otherwise a swamp of crusted crimson turning to black. White pants, shredded and coiled around one leg. And finally, the wound.

I looked down and wondered what lies and treasons lured her here, before I tugged my gloves back on and stood up. My knees cracked in the cold like ice splintering on a distant lake. My world is a hopeless, brutal place, a land peopled only by regrets and lost love. I fumbled for my cigarettes, waved away the offer of a light, sucked down the cancer.

‘Tell the blood waggon I’ll see them down the morgue. Oh, and don’t forget to mention we’re dealing with a double homicide.’

The uniform looked, if possible, even more puzzled. The fur earflaps on his hat gave him the appearance of a cartoon rabbit. He looked around, even peered behind the slender birches.

‘There’s only one body, Inspector.’

I exhaled, watching the smoke and my breath plume out together into the night, life and death weaving together. The first flakes of the threatened dawn snow kissed my face. I wanted a vodka. Badly.

‘You haven’t looked inside her womb.’

It
was late afternoon when one of the uniforms at the end of his shift dropped me round the corner from the morgue. It’s always seemed disrespectful to park next to an ambulance unloading the evening’s bag of bones and guts. And it gave me time to collect my thoughts, and get some cold clean air into my lungs before inhaling the sour stink of a newly opened stomach.

The Sverdlovsky District Morgue is a unprepossessing, shabby building, with the ever popular stained-concrete look; suitable accommodation for the dead in a country where it’s difficult for even the living to find a home. Only a small weather-beaten sign reveals its purpose; it’s not a place many people visit, and those who do usually enter feet first.

I’ve spent too many evenings there, under the light bulbs that flicker whenever there’s a drop in power, every sound bouncing off the tiled walls, trying not to think of the heavy scents of a butcher’s shop.

As the
ment
drove away, the flare of his tail lights spilling over snow reminded me how blood spurted from the throat of the sheep we sacrificed for Chinara’s
toi
, the commemoration we hold for someone forty days after their death. The imam muttered a few prayers, the sheep shat itself in the yard and, five minutes later, found itself hacked up into chunks.

I’m a city boy, Bishkek born and bred: I think killing an animal is a hell of a way to commemorate the dead, but that’s the way it’s always been done in the villages.

I put thoughts of butcher’s knives to one side, and pushed through the swing doors. The business end of the morgue is actually underground, down a flight of broken-tiled steps. There’s a long emerald-green stain against one wall, where last winter’s snows broke in, probably looking for warmth. Every other light fitting lacks a bulb, but there’s still enough light to reflect off the metal doors at the corridor’s end.

I kicked the worst of the snow off my boots, grateful that there was no
babushka
to scold me for making a mess on her floor, and took my last deep breath.

‘Inspector,’ Kenesh Usupov muttered, not looking up from the shapeless mass on the steel table in front of him, strip lights glinting off his rimless glasses, ‘I suppose you’ve come about the woman? Five minutes, I’m afraid, I’m just finishing off this
krokodil
.’

I winced, noticing the smell of iodine in the air, overwhelming the usual odours of blood, raw meat and shit. I’ve seen some horrible things, from babies whose parents broke every bone in their body to grannies raped and kicked to death for their two hundred
som
pension. But a
krokodil
is a vision from hell.

Krokodil
is the latest drug craze from Mother Russia, cheaper and much stronger than heroin. You make it yourself at home, using over-the-counter medicines like codeine, mixed and cooked up with iodine, red phosphorus from the striking edge of matchboxes, a dash of gasoline, and whatever else you can lay your hands on. Poison, simple as that.

Krokodil
gets its name from the way your skin turns green and scaly where you inject, as infection and gangrene set in. Your flesh starts to die and rot almost at once, peeling away and leaving deep, unhealing sores that gnaw through tissue and muscle down to the bone.

I’ve seen addicts with no flesh on their arms, the ulna and radius bones exposed and grey-white, women with holes in their legs you could put your fist in, men whose cheeks have split apart as their gums turn to a bloody mash. The reek of iodine saturates clothes, skin, hair, even the walls of the shitty apartments and shooting galleries where the addicts cook up non-stop for days on end. Swim with the
krokodil
and you’ve probably got six months to live, if you can call it that.

With Kyrgyzstan being so close to Afghanistan and a ready supply of cheap heroin,
krokodil
hasn’t eaten us the way it’s devoured addicts from Moscow to Vladivostok, but it’s only a matter of time.

‘A bad one?’ I asked, taking care not to look.

‘As opposed to?’

‘You know what I mean. Bad.’

‘Not really. Heart attack took this one. Hardly any necrosis at all. Except for his fingers. They’re all gone, just raw stumps with the bones jutting out. Oh, and his penis. Couldn’t take a piss, even if he’d had any fingers left to hold his cock. Of course, couldn’t work a syringe either in that state, someone else must have spiked him, got the dose wrong.’

‘Or right, maybe. One less vein to feed, all the more for me.’

‘It’s possible, Inspector. But impossible to tell.’

The iodine made me gag, knowing I was sucking rotting tissue into my lungs, but I’d never hear the end of it from my colleagues if I started wearing a mask at autopsies.

‘I could come back. When you’re ready. For the woman.’

‘Don’t worry, Inspector, this one’s going nowhere, his career’s reached a dead end.’

That makes two of us, I thought, as Usupov threw a threadbare cotton sheet over the remains in front of him. I tried not to notice how the material immediately started to
soak up some horrible fluid, and followed Bishkek’s Chief Forensic Pathologist to the autopsy table at the far end of the room.

‘Your girlfriend. Too good-looking for you, way out of your league. Or she was,’ Usupov announced, pulling open one of those oversized filing cabinets where he keeps the new and not so newly dead. The metal runners screeched like a razor scraping rust, and a gust of cold air wafted out. As always, the thought flashed through my head that the corpse wasn’t really dead, and had just breathed out.

There are nights when I can’t sleep, when my eyes feel blistered and cracked from the things I’ve witnessed, when the dead parade past me like fashion models on a macabre catwalk. I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, to counter the worst of any smell, and intruded once more upon the girl’s death.

One of Usupov’s assistants had stripped her bare, to pass on her clothes to forensics or, more likely, to sell in the bazaar. Since we declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, we’ve endured the corruption and greed of various governments who’ve filled their pockets. Everyone looks out for themselves, making a few
som
where they can. And if that means selling the clothes of the dead, well, we’re a poor country.

The girl’s face was uncovered, ice-white, peaceful. The purple bruises of lividity – the smearing under the skin where any blood left in a body slowly settles, dragged down by gravity – were already beginning to show around her hips and back. I could see the wear and tear of daily life on her body; an appendix scar slipping down towards her groin, old nicks and cuts on her hands, a childhood graze stencilling one knee.

Naked, she looked younger, more vulnerable, one of life’s natural victims, born to end up here, unaware of my gaze or Usupov’s instruments. The sort of woman who continually walks into doors, especially when the doors have been drinking, until one hits her too hard and shuts her out of life.

But she looked more at rest than Chinara had, when her sisters wrapped her in a burial cloth and placed her on the right side of the yurt, the woman’s side, for her last night on earth before the men carried her down to the graveyard overlooking the valley.

I could smell her guts, the reek and iron taste of her as if I’d had my head between her legs, lapping at her during her period, and I had to swallow hard. Then, reluctantly, I looked at the wound.

‘My God,’ I muttered.

But if there is a God, I was pretty sure he was off duty when this had been done.

‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ Usupov said, as calmly as if he was admiring the bouquet of a fine wine, or appreciating the craftsmanship of a hand-blown glass vase. ‘I honestly can’t say I’ve ever come across anything quite like this before.’

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.